Wordless Wednesday

Life as We Know It

Almost 6 weeks after Caleb's birth and we're finding a routine.
Ahhhh, Normalcy. Schedule. It's nice to see you again.

We've been back in the Big Chicken for about 3 weeks now. We've never been so happy to say goodbye to PadThai and hello to Dumplings.
I was quickly reminded of our welcoming back home when my texts started looking like this...



Normalcy and Schedule include a lot of time with this dude:


The Asian dude, not Caleb. Well, Caleb too.
But every morning our tutor comes and hangs out with us all morning, joins us for lunch, and occasionally stays through the afternoon if we're feeling the desire for more inundation of Chinese.
The kids knew we were back to normal when he started showing up at our door again every morning.

A normal day at our place includes plenty of brother time.


Salem so happened to get some of Caleb's first smiles.


The normal days also include this tall, gorgeous, almost-4-year-old, who is back in preschool again and truly doing great with it.


A normal day for Salem now includes sleeping on a big boy bed below his sister on their bunk bed.


I'll admit that Caleb is a fairly easy baby and his normal days include plenty of sleep.


While the other two enjoy living room forts...


Caleb also does his fair share of this...


But even through the screams. The scary fevers at 2 a.m. The baby barf on every.single.one.of.my.shirts. He's worth it. And I'm so glad my days include some alone time with this dude every 3 hours!


Normalcy. Schedule. Routine.
Stick around for awhile, won't you?

What should have taken 15 minutes...

In case it hasn't been noticed, I'll state it out loud.

Apparently adding a third child to the family seriously takes away from blogging time.

Thankfully though, the only thing that is suffering from the changes of adding a 5th family member is the blog. Us? We're thriving. We're loving this mini-man and what he adds to our family.

Sure, we're occasionally sleep deprived, covered in baby vomit or urine (learning the hard way yet again about baby boys!), and entertaining our older children by non-stop movies...but we're thriving! :)

My parents went home on thursday, which means we lost our entertainment for Eden and Salem, our cook, our dish washer, our extra set of diaper-changing hands, and extra shoulders for burping on.

We're truly grateful they were able to be here and to stay for so long!!

I wish someone would have told me with my first baby to throw the books out the window and to just stare at my baby, hold her, and enjoy her. We didn't do a good job of enjoying Eden's newborn stage like I think we should have. We were far too concerned with schedules, making sure she got her 15 minutes of allotted wake time before naptime, and making sure we didn't "spoil" her by holding her too much.

I feel like, finally, with our third, we're enjoying our baby. We're treasuring his newborn phase. Sleepless nights and all, we're holding him just a bit longer, laughing at him while he does the weird REM newborn eye thing, and doing our best to not be swept up in the scheduling that a newborn needs.

Meanwhile, Brandon has been taking care of business. Applying for a passport for my newborn and getting his Thai birth certificate translated are things that make me breathe heavily and want to pass out and never wake up. We're up a creek if I ever have to start acting like a responsible human being.

My one baby that wasn't born in Thailand sure is handsome in his Thai clothes...

And my two Thai babies...

Maybe the reason I'm enjoying Caleb more is because he's our third and we realize how fleeting this time is. Maybe its because we're "seasoned" parents and are more used to the grunts and growls and squeaks of newborns. (me thinks not)
Maybe it's because he's most likely our last newborn to have around.
Whatever it is, we're soaking up time with our sleepy head.

And now that it's taken me about 3.5 hours to publish this one simple blog, maybe I'll take that as a cue to take a blog hiatus!
over and out... for awhile.  :)