Cuteness Overload

I pretty much can't handle the cuteness.  I just want to play with her all day and I don't ever want her to grow up.  Six months is such a fun age! 

Dairy Fairy

The Dairy Fairy made a delivery recently.  

Have you ever wondered what to do with that extra breastmilk you pumped but never used?  Donate it!  

Milk donation can be an amazing thing.  While it's certainly not for everyone, casual milk sharing is becoming more and more common.  Casual milk sharing leaves the burden of health screening on the donor or recipient, but the process is still quite easy.  

I donated milk for the first time over 8 years ago when Joshua was a baby.  Over the years I have donated thousands and thousands of ounces of milk all across the country.  I have met some amazing families and my kids have some special "milk brothers" and "milk sisters."   Being able to donate milk pretty much makes the recurring mastitis from oversupply worth the pain.  Pretty much.

 Seven is checking out "her" milk.  

This donation was over 1,000 ounces of milk frozen into 6 or 7 ounce bags.  It was more than 8 gallons of milk!  I had to pull it all out of the freezer and pack into coolers, so I snapped a few pictures.  I know I'm not the only mama who has had a weird sort of attachment to her pumped milk.  Pumping the milk really is a labor of love.  When one of my kids knocked over a freshly pumped bottle of milk, I cried.  Yes, I really cried over spilled milk.

 Can you see the color difference between the bags of regular milk and the bags of colostrum?  The colostrum has such a wonderful, golden color.  This milk went to a newborn baby that had just been adopted, so the colostrum was especially useful.

Amelia thought the milk looked pretty tasty. 

If you have some stray bags of milk lurking in your freezer, you just might want to think about donating them to a baby in need.  You can connect with other milk donors and recipients at Human Milk 4 Human Babies or Eats on Feets.

We Miss Grass

We just got back from a wonderful couple of weeks in Denver.  We were not thrilled about returning home and we desperately miss my dad already.  There were lots of tears from my kids and we hadn't even made it to Colorado Springs on the day we left before my dad called to say the neighbor kids were knocking at his door.  My big boys made instant friends with the gang of neighborhood boys and my girls bonded over gymnastics with the little girls across the street from my dad.  My little boys made a buddy in the boy two houses up the street who was just the same age.  Even our lab mix, Delmar, made friends with the neighbors' dogs.

It's hard to leave the snow-capped mountains for the dry, dusty mountains down here.  And certainly trading temps in the 70s for temps in the 100s is not cool.  But if you asked my kids what they really dislike about desert life, they'd tell you that they just miss grass.  Yep, we are definitely not desert rats.  We need our green!

While we still don't know where we are headed next, we do know that the kids and I will be back in Georgia in just 6 months.  It may only be temporary, only time will tell.  Jason should be getting his next assignment in the next few months.

Rolls

Seven has rolls.  Lots of delicious rolls.

 She's got the deepest creases in her little arms and thighs and a delightfully dimply bum.

Being chunky never looked so good.

Catching Up

Well, I have clearly been slacking in the blogging department.  In fact, I have been neglecting the internet altogether.  Right now I'm actually in Denver and it feels like I've been away from home for so long.  (I haven't.)

Leila and Sarah turned seven a few weeks ago.  SEVEN.  How is this even possible?  I can't believe they are seven years old, even though it feels like ages ago that I became a mom to twins.

Sometime in April, Seven decided to start sitting.  And scooting.  And babbling.  She's growing up so quickly.  She'll be 6 months old this week.  Unbelievable.

My dad was exactly right when he told me the other day that he figured I'd have to have another baby or adopt.  He said that once Seven isn't a baby anymore I'll want another.  (Well, duh.)

The kiddos and I are at my dad's house right now while Jason drives back from Georgia and Virginia with our new van (finally!) and a trailer full of the last remaining furniture we'd stored in Virginia.  Expect to see a blog post full of van pictures soon.  I can't wait to start installing our million car seats!

I have so much to share that I don't even know where to start.  We have had my family visit us, taken a mini-vacation, been hiking every week, and Jason graduated from the University of Arizona.  Life just never slows down.  I wish I could blog from my phone because we are always out doing something crazy lately.  You wouldn't believe the situations I get myself into with seven kids!

Not enough hours in the day

I am pretty sure all moms feel like there are not enough hours in the day.  Am I right?  

We have schoolwork, laundry, and cleaning to be done.  And then there's all of the associated cooking that comes with having a house full of hungry children.  Not to mention the various appointments, classes, volunteer work, and keeping up with the yard.

But all I really want to do is snuggle with my baby.

Because this baby is growing up so quickly!

She's sitting up and trying to scoot already.  And I'm suddenly realizing that I need to babyproof.  Oh, do I need to babyproof.

I also need to stop my darling twin boys from destroying my house.  You would think that almost 5-year old boys would no longer feel the urge to color on the walls or pee in the dog's water bowl.  You'd be wrong.  I do believe that twin boys mature at about the same rate as a litter of labrador puppies.

We have been getting out of the house so much lately and taking the kids hiking every weekend before it gets too hot.  (According to Jason, it's already too hot.)  I have a ton of pictures and the best intentions of sharing them.  And just when I sit down to start blogging about our crazy adventures, I catch Nathan painting on himself.  With toothpaste.

Thank goodness these kids are still cute.

10 down, 10 to go

Yesterday marked exactly 10 years since Jason enlisted in the Army.  TEN years.  It hardly seems possible that he is halfway to retirement from the military.  I feel like we just graduated from high school!  Where did the time go?

Ten years ago I was working and Jason was a temporary stay-at-home dad.  We only had one baby.  The war in Iraq started and Jason was actually at MEPS signing his contract while I was in the break room at work watching the Iraq invasion on TV and wondering what in the world we were getting ourselves into now.

Jason's paperwork was delayed and he ended up leaving for basic training a few days later than expected.  During those few extra days at home, I got pregnant.  Matthew wasn't even a year old yet.

Jason came home for Christmas in 2003 and we had a few days together before he left for DLI in Monterey, CA.  My first taste of Army wife life was packing up and moving our household 3,000 miles across the country by myself while pregnant.  It felt impossible at the time.  If only I had known then what I know now...

We spent a year in California.  Jason became fluent in Farsi.  Joshua was born (my first homebirth-turned-cesarean) and then we moved to Texas just before Christmas 2004.

Jason attended school in Texas for a year and we thought we were headed to Germany when his orders suddenly changed to Georgia.  We moved halfway across the country and I got pregnant during the move.  (That's 3 moves in just under 2 years, for those keeping count.)

Bam!  Twins girls arrived on the scene and totally rocked our world.  They were born at home in Georgia in 2006.

We had a couple of pretty uneventful years as far as military life goes.  Jason did some language immersion classes and some military training but was never away for more than a couple of months at a time.  Life was good.

Then our lives were turned upside down again when I got pregnant on Christmas Day in 2007.  Jason got orders to go back to Texas and kept it a secret from me because he worried about how I'd take the news.  Shortly after that, he found out he had been accepted into Officer Candidate School and would be leaving for that instead.  No move back to Texas for us.

Nathan and Ryan were born in 2008 (my second homebirth-turned-cesarean) and we had six kids under the age of six.  Life was just crazy.  Good crazy, mostly.  Jason left a few months after the little guys were born.

Jason spent all of 2009 at schools in Georgia, Oklahoma, and Arizona.  We visited him a few times.  He was commissioned as an officer and received orders to go to Ft. Lewis, Washington.  His new unit was deploying.

We had a few surprise days together for Christmas in 2009 and then Jason was off to Iraq.

The kids and I lived in Virginia for a few months before returning to our (vacant) house in Georgia.  Then in the summer of 2010 we set off on our RV adventure across the country.  We stayed in 22 states before ending up in a campground in Washington.

There were days when I really hated military life.  There were days when I felt like I could tackle any challenge and could conquer the world.  It was a roller coaster, to say the least.

Jason finally came home from Iraq.  Nathan and Ryan had no idea who he was or why they were supposed to call him Daddy.  They were two years old but hadn't lived with Daddy since they were almost 4 months old.

We had a little over a year in Washington before it was time for Jason to go to school again.  Most of his career in the Army has been spent in some sort of school.  Just before Christmas in 2011, we moved to Arizona.  That marked move number eight in only eight years.  Matthew had just turned nine and had already lived in seven states.

Of course 2012 brought us another beautiful baby.  Life is good and relatively uneventful at the moment.  But 2013 will see us moving yet again.

10 years,
8 moves,
7 children,
7 states,
5 promotions...

And we are only halfway there!  I can't even begin to imagine what the next 10 years will hold for us.  Ten years ago, I couldn't have imagined our life today in my wildest dreams. This Army life stuff is a seriously wild adventure!