Chronicles of a Stay at Home Momma

This summer has been one of the hardest summers. It's been exhausting and exhilarating with a whole lot of tears in between. Let me start off with this:

We're moving and we've got a baby on the way!! SURPRISE!

It was QUITE the surprise to us too.

May: I get the opportunity of a lifetime to interview for a geometry and precalc (the exact same things I taught at Hillcrest) postition at a private christian school.

Class sizes between 10 and 18 with no extra duties?

James can come with me?

I get to leave at 3 every day?

It's a 10-15 minute commute from where we live?

I get to lead devotions every day with kids?

SIGN. ME. UP.

Middle of May: I start feeling quite queasy and I've lost my appetite. At this point, absolute panic sets in but I don't say anything to Grey.

Memorial Day: I bite the bullet and take a pregnancy test early. Grey and I said we wanted at least 2 1/2 years apart between kids and we wanted to be in a new house before we attempted to get pregnant again. As I'm laying the test down on the counter top to start the 2 minutes it takes, it lights up positive. I'm crushed.

2 hours later: The principal from the christian school calls to offer me the job. ( I ended up turning it down)

I'd like to say that I was excited at this new life. I'd like to say that I rejoiced with joy and praised the Lord for providing a new baby. I'd like to say I reacted differently then I did. But truthfully, I was angry and bitter. I didn't want a baby now. I wanted to go back to work. We hadn't sold the house. Where was a baby going to go? A bathroom? I had just got done nursing James 3 months prior. I wanted my life back. I had just lost a little bit of weight and could officially fit back into EVERY SINGLE ITEM OF CLOTHING I wore before James. I did not want this child and I felt like the worst mother in the world.

It took me until about 10 weeks along before I stopped crying on a daily basis. During that time, I felt so much guilt at how I was reacting. I knew people that had struggled with infertility. I had a friend about 2 weeks behind me get pregnant and want that baby so badly and then she ended up losing it in an ectopic pregnancy. And here I was, mad at the world that I was pregnant.

But you know what? There's grace for that. And thankfully, the Lord has (mostly) changed my heart. I'm still nervous about having two kids 2 years apart and I still get sad over that lost job opportunity. But I know I'll look back at this in a year (or maybe longer) and be so thankful over His timing of everything.

This was me at 13 weeks with James

Me at 13 weeks with Baby #2.

Around the 8 week mark, I went to go have my first ultrasound and the doctor wanted to do a regular womanly checkup since I hadn't had one in a few years. He was checking things out and found a lump in my right breast. He told me he thought it was just a cyst but added the thoughtful touch of, "well ya never know, 1 in 8 women..."
Geez. Thanks man.
They scheduled me for a breast ultrasound at the cancer center the next week.
I wasn't worried. Mom had told me what specifically to feel for if it was just a cyst and I felt like everything was good to go.

At the ultrasound, it turned out to be irregularly shaped and huge. And it wasn't a cyst. It was a mass.
When you send a picture of the mass to your mother who was a nurse for 30+ years and she gets worried and cries, that's great, right? The doctor was still unsure of what it was and had me schedule a needle biopsy. That was the longest week of my life.
I had just witnessed 2 different women go through their pregnancy having chemo treatments and wondering if cancer would kill themselves or their babies and I was terrified that I was going to have make the same decision. Every time James smiled at me or ran to me, I lost it. No one ever wants to have to think about what would happen if something like that happened and I was having to.
Thankfully, everything ended up coming back normal - it was just a benign tumor but I have never felt so much anxiety as I did over those few weeks.

At 10 weeks (beginning of July), our real estate agent informed us that he had a cash buyer that was interested in our house. Currently listed at 122,500 (we bought it for 125,500), the guy wanted to give us 110k for the house. He intended to buy it, redo the upstairs, and then flip it for a profit. Knowing that we had a baby on the way, Grey and I were at complete odds about what to do. I was desperate enough to take the cut. (Once real estate fees etc would have been paid, we would have come out at about 104k, losing 20k of the 25k we originally put into the house.) Grey couldn't stand losing all that money. He instead wanted to take the house off the market, put 15-20k into refinishing the upstairs, and stay there for 10ish more years.
No. No. No. Why put more money into a house when you're never going to get back all the money that we've already put into it? Our compromise ended up being that we would turn the investor down, but not redo the upstairs. We'd just keep chugging along at this place and hope and pray that the Lord provided a decent offer soon.
HA! "Soon" turned out to be a week later. We got a full price offer and the buyer is paying all their closing costs! PRAISE THE LORD! 1 1/2 years in the making and it's finally over!
We ended up looking at houses the next day and we put in an offer on one. It's 4 bedroom with an extra hang out room and it sits on 2.35 acres. It was a flipped house so thankfully that means it has a new roof, new windows, new paint, new HVAC, and new floors. SCORE!
We'll be moving at the end of August! YEAH!!!

And last but not least, I broke my toe yesterday. (I had two nurses confirm at church today.) Grey had a metal tool box sticking out in our garage and I split/stubbed my toe. It hurts like the dickens.

That's us. That's where we've been. Sorry I haven't blogged much but I've been too emotional and anxious to have a lot to say. Pray for us please! The next couple of months are going to be crazy!

OH! And. I've already failed my glucose test for this baby. Since I failed with James, they wanted to check me at 12 weeks and sure thing, my sugar was too high. Curse it.

Such is life. It's out of my control.

-B

Hate, Like, Love
I hate this hot weather.
I like having shade in our backyard in the evening.
I LOVE our plastic pool that we bought for under 5 bucks (on sale!) for James.

I hate it when mothers come up to me and comment on how small James is.
I'd like to, in return, comment on how fat their kid is. (But I don't)
I LOVE the size that James is - tiny but mighty. :)

I Wonder:
*How weird would it be if we had two dishwashers in our next house?
*When the heck will we sell our house?
*All those popsicles that James ate, did it really help him move from the 5th percentile in weight to the 10th? (Go James!!)
*Should we buy stock in a popsicle company?
*That box of 150 pizza rolls that my momma bought me, will it last a whole week?
*How much will our water bill increase due to filling up the pool daily?
*I had to tell James to stop licking a rock today. I wonder what he was thinking?
*I made buffalo chicken dip for small group tomorrow night. Do you think they'll notice that half of it is missing?