I got behind on pictures this year, so before we move into new baby mode, let's remember the last few months! We finally warmed up and spent time outside before hunkering down to get ready for Eddie's arrival. Here are lots of pictures of Annie's preschool graduation, Memorial Day at Gull Lake, Nellie's piano recital, outside play and hiking, Easter, soccer, the Michigan mile and some other miscellaneous events.
One warrants some explanation. Since she was three, Nellie has been, well, difficult to dress at times. You might have noticed, she likes to pick her own clothes. We keep her drawer stocked with things she'll wear, and that works well for us. But some days can be complicated. One day this spring, Nellie wanted to wear her tie-dye shirt from last summer's vacation. Alas, there were no clean and acceptable leggings. So she picked tights, and we had to tell her you can't just wear a t-shirt and tights. So she picked out the one skirt she had. The results are below...I actually took a picture because it was so colorful. Then Kevin took the girls to school and found out it was spring picture day. So Nellie brought home some colorful professional photos!
First soccer game! It was freezing. As in, 32 degrees.
(Most of) the cousins on the boat for the year's first ride. Nellie found an exciting spider!
Princess Annie helping Kevin in the garden
Hiking in the mud with Kevin
Annie's graduation
Annie's graduation; putting watermelon on the Very Hungry Caterpillar
Watching a bunny before school
Waiting for the egg hunt
Nellie and the Easter pinata
Annie and the Easter pinata
Giant backyard mud puddle
Nellie about to cross the finish line at the Michigan Mile
The family after the race...so pregnant
Matching tattoos at the Michigan Mile race
Postrace pancakes at Flap Jack
Nellie learned to tie her shoes!
We visited some baby lambs at Nellie's friends house over spring break.
Nellie's toad
Girls at the piano recital, where Nellie played the song "P-I-N-K"
Nellie and Caron Dvorak
The piano students
Practicing at home :)
The baby shower!
Nellie's outfit on spring picture day...before I knew it was spring picture day
The spring photo!
DJ trying to dip his feet, right before he fell in
Happy Father's Day to Kevin, who in the last week has: coached me through our fourth natural childbirth, welcomed a new baby to the world, helped three kids navigate the emotional and logistical waters of a newborn in the house, repaired and maintained everyone's bikes, taught a four-year-old to ride a two-wheeler, cooked meals, watched My Little Ponies, driven to softball practice, attended a piano recital, bunked with a lonely toddler, and performed countless other dad duties.
In the words of Annie, "Daddy does all the cool stuff!"
So, I have two general beliefs about pregnancy and childbirth. The first is that it is a natural, healthy, necessary part of human life. I've had many people tell me this. (Though, I might add, never a woman in late pregnancy or who just gave birth.) As in, "pregnancy is such a sacred and beautiful time of life!" Or, "women have been giving birth in the fields for thousands of years!" Or, "I know a woman who delivered a baby while driving/mountain climbing/checking her email!" Meaning, we should be able to naturally and fairly uneventfully carry and deliver our babies the good ol' fashioned way.
The second is that there are a lot of natural, healthy, and necessary parts of life that are pretty dramatic and destructive. Like lions mauling gazelles, praying mantises eating their mates, and wildfires. That's pretty much what I think about at the end of every day when I can barely move because there's no room for this baby anymore and none of my bodily functions seems to be functioning properly, and I lie awake in bed reliving every moment of my last three birth "experiences." And I wonder if I will ever feel normal again, or have the energy it seems everyone else has, or eat a full meal, or sleep on my stomach.
That's about where I am at the moment. Dwelling on #2 while trying to remember #1. But check back in a month or so, and I'm sure I'll have forgotten all about this and be advertising the glories of pregnancy and natural childbirth. Maybe.
The other night, Kevin was sauteing some mushrooms and onions. He has this technique where the food flies several inches in the air, and then he catches them again without dropping any. Nellie saw it and was very impressed. I remember being pretty impressed by it myself in our early days of marriage! I asked her, "didn't you know that Daddy used to be a chef?" Now, chef might not exactly be the right word. I mean, he was a prep and fry cook at TGI Fridays, and a grill cook at a pub in Kalamazoo. Anyway, you'd have thought I told her Kevin used to be the king of England. She yelled to Annie, "Daddy used to be a chef!" Then she asked, very excitedly but in complete seriousness, "did you talk like this? One mo-ment, zare eez a problem weeth zee moo-stosh. Okay, zee moo-stosh eez feexed [twirling imaginary mustache]"--or, "One moment, there is a problem with the mustache. Okay, the mustache is fixed." Basically, she wanted to know if he spoke in a French accent and had a long curled mustache.
She comes up with a lot of stuff, but that one had us laughing hard.
Finally, I am better able to understand DJ when he's talking to me. Which is all the time. Both of us are less frustrated with this arrangement, though he still needs to be patient with me sometimes, and repeat the same thing over and over again. I do have a few faves when it comes to his new words and phrases.
1. Gamma Loon-ah (i.e., Grandma Linda)
2. Tanks. Made mine self! (i.e., Thanks. I made it myself!) As in, we're riding in the car, and he's in the back blowing raspberries. Me: Wow DJ, those are some really loud tooting noises! DJ: Tanks! Made mine self!
It gets me every time!
3. Dam-mam-it! (i.e., Dagnabbit!) Okay, this one is our fault. We got a kick out of that Geiko commercial with Old MacDonald in a spelling bee (watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zebvFBNZ3Mg&feature=kp), and started saying "Dagnabbit!" all the time. Urban Dictionary defines it as, "Oldcootism used during great consternation or surprise. Used by 1890’s prospectors, cantankerous old farmers, and young people playing old people on TV in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s." But the way it comes out of DJ's mouth just sounds so wrong, and so funny. If you hear him say it, please don't be alarmed.
Oh, Nellie. She's getting too smart for her own good, and way too smart for ours. Creative and wild, sensitive and stubborn. And the things she says! Here are just a few Nellie-isms from the last couple of days:
"Hey mom, sometimes when I eat meat I try to get it stuck in my teeth. Then later, I get it out and it's like a little snack. That just happened."
"Deleting the part about about the snapping, I really like snapping turtles."
And caught on the whiteboard at Woldumar: "Penel-ville. President = Penelope Rose. Sidekick = Annie."
Nellie may not share Annie's quiet, sweet spirit (spirited, as it turns out, is something quite different), but I shouldn't underestimate her thoughtfulness and the encouragement she gives. For example, I've spent the last two months coding lessons for evidence of student engagement. I just finished the last lesson Friday morning. Every time I finish a lesson, I go back and tally the results for each student. By hand. Which is kind of embarrassing, because there are certainly way more sophisticated ways of doing that, including fancy qualitative research software that I was too cheap to invest in. Anyway, it means that there are little slips of paper all over the house with the students' pseudonyms and tally marks. I found one on my nightstand Friday afternoon with a note that read, "Good job Mom! Love - Guess Who?" Seriously, I want to frame it.
She's also planning a baby shower for me. It was completely Nellie's idea, and I wasn't quite sure what to do because although I explained that moms don't usually have showers for their fourth baby, she's really excited about it. She spent an hour after school planning it last week, then wrote the following Facebook message to my mom: "Hi grandma! Can I come over this Saturday to plan a baby shower with you? Here are some of my starts. Date: May 31, 2014. For: Jamie Wernet. Blue, green, yellow, and white jelly beans. Blue and white balloons and one should say it's a boy if you can find one. A cake that's blue and white, streamers of any color, party hats, punch, fruit like apples, oranges, pears, peaches, and a vegetable tray. Milk and napkins. I am inviting the Wacyks and some Wernets plus Pam Harrington. I U - Nellie and you can plan some things to We can say the other details in the invitations."
I'm looking forward to it--Nellie has LOTS of fun ideas about what people do at a baby shower.
It gave me a circle-of-life moment, because I remember Erin (11 at the time) planning a shower for my mom when she was pregnant with Emily, and I didn't think it was at all unusual. The only thing I can recall about the shower itself was that my great-grandma Nellie, Nellie's namesake, beat the pants off all of us in this game where you had to pick tiny safety pins out of a bowl of rice while blindfolded. She was about 95 years old.
So, 6-going-on-7 Nellie is a ball of energy and fun. She makes life interesting for everyone who knows her, undoubtedly. And of course, we wouldn't change a thing.
Okay, now that we've done that, I can write an update on what's been going on around here. The song sums it up pretty well, actually. We've spent the last month sloooowly waking up, stretching our limbs, and watching the snow melt after our long, harsh Michigan winter. But today--we had burgers on the grill! We sat in the sun without coats on! The kids played together in the backyard without fighting! I hesitate to actually say it "out loud," but spring is finally here.
Lately, I find myself thinking, "never a dull moment!" a lot. At the same time, there aren't a lot of really exciting moments, either. There's just always something new coming along!
Kevin spent a week with my dad near Las Vegas at what I liked to call "shooting camp." The kids and I survived a long week of solo parenting...seriously, high fives to all the single parents and military spouses out there. It was really hard, and I barely got any "real" work done that week. I had one lucky break--a snowstorm that cancelled school and every other obligation we had that Wednesday (March 12)! Here's the day, in pictures.
Playing "dog and cat." This wasn't exactly a mom-sanctioned activity.
Only Annie was brave enough to venture outside to get snow...
...for making snow ice cream!
It sounded gross, but it was actually pretty good--the kids ate a ton of it.
We assembled Genny's old Playmobil zoo set. I was actually pretty proud of this.
Kevin made it home, but with food poisoning. Like I said, never a dull moment! A week later, I got to spend a few days in Florida with my mom and grandparents. It was kind of a last-minute trip, and the warmth got me through the last few weeks of winter weather.
Dinner at Bahama Breeze after a Tigers spring training game--don't let the sunshine fool you too much, it was actually cool and windy most of the time we were there.
Those were the big events in March, but there's plenty more to report. I came home from Florida with real, live deadlines for early pieces of my dissertation. Crazy! I'm also trying to load up on assistantship hours and get a revised manuscript out before baby Wernet is due (in less than two months!), all while trying to figure out what next year might look like.
Last weekend, DJ pulled his elbow out of socket during a tickle fight, which was sad and warranted a trip to the new Grand Ledge urgent care. We got baby chicks, you know, because they're so cute. When we picked them up at TSC, the cashier sweetly asked Annie, "oh, you're getting some little chicks?" Annie replied, "yeah, and when they grow up, we're going to eat them!" I'm not sure that's true; when they grow out of their indoor pen they'll probably go to live on the farm with their cousin chickens, but it was funny.
Kevin tapped a maple tree in our yard and--amazingly--has been making delicious maple syrup. We're practically our own farm around here.
Let's see, what else. DJ is getting better at independent play, which is awesome. I found him playing king-pony-fire station the other day.
But he still likes playing with his big sisters the best--he pretty much does and says whatever they do!
Annie is crazy about dress-up and make-believe.
Cowgirl Annie
Powerpuff Girl Annie (with a homemade Mojo Jojo)
Nellie is learning about turkey hunting. Kevin needs a new hunting buddy this year, so Nellie's up!
And I think that's about everything! Isn't it about time to add another kid to this mix?
