BakerBits

May is still not over, but it seems like it should be. I guess because we have been going many places and doing many things.  It’s been fun. But I owe ya’ll some pictures!

So here it goes…

Walking with all three kids right before naptime: not for the weak of heart.

My mom came and visited. Big old drive from California. By the way, that is magic marker on Todd’s face, he is not diseased or injured.

While she was here we went to the zoo. We hadn’t been since Todd was a year and a half. He got a lot more out of it this time. We were accompanied by both of my sisters and Stacy. And the poor fool I was, I forgot my dumb camera (kicks self repeatedly). Thankfully, everyone else had a camera, so photos compliments of my mother:

I got a new haircut. This is the shortest it’s been since I’ve been married. And Mollie gave me her flat iron so it looks straight like this pretty frequenty. Holy cow, it takes a looonnnggg time to flatiron very thick and curly hair. But I just love it. She put some red and blond highlights in it too. I love this woman and I will go back to her again.

I also turned a quarter of a century old, but I already blogged about that. So here is a ‘oldest daughter’ picture of three generations:

Stacy got me a fabulous apron for my birthday. But it’s much more fun when Todd models it. He’s also on the ‘phone’.  I have aprons as a hobby now. If you are a woman and don’t have a cute apron to do housework on, go buy one. It puts a new fun spin on cleaning.

East Linn had a Walk A Thon fundraiser, and I brought a kite so Todd and Peter could have their first kite flying experience. Worked out great, until the kite broke. When you spend $1 on a Buzz Lightyear kite at Walmart, you get what you pay for.  Oh well, it was way fun for the kiddos. Anybody more experienced with kites wanna tell me where the good ones come from?

Wow, May is getting so tiring already, Vivienne fell asleep in her high chair watching Bob the Builder. The first time any of our kids have ever fallen asleep in a high chair. Can we fix it? YES WE CAN!

With the warm weather we have been going outside at every opportunity. When you have toddler boys and live in the depressingly rainy Willamette Valley, you will too.

Here is a nice picnic on the bench out front:

Little Won-Won is now very close to turning a year old. She is cruising on the furniture, standing up unassisted for up to 20 seconds, and walking around holding our hands. My little baby just isn’t little anymore. *cry*

Happy tricycle days:

Hey Look! It’s a little Baker!

We have been to Avery Park in Corvallis twice this month, once with Heather and once with Kyle. They have an old engine that kids can climb all over, and some cool dinosaur bones structures. The kids loved it!

Peter Parker rather than Baker? Stopping a train with brute force is not something just any two-year-old can do!

Vivienne loves loves loves swings. She makes the cute baby giggly noises that I swear are audible happiness at peak perfection.

Dem bones dem bones gonna jump around…

Viv and I have been trying and loving a new ring sling. It’s the ultimate in adjustable easy to use gorgeous babywearing.

And the first tie dye day of spring!

In order to dig to China, we need a bigger shovel.

Umm, and I have no picture of this, but currently Todd is wearing one of Vivienne’s crochet headbands, and pretending a ball popper pushy toy is a guitar and rocking around the kitchen singing/yelling “Blessed to the name of the Lord!” Peter is joining him with the pushy toy that jungles. Vivienne is chewing on Tow Mater. Life continues to be good and busy.  Thanks for looking at all of this. This is why I haven’t blogged in awhile.

Housing can be a pain. Buying a house is a pain, building your own on site is the biggest pain, and putting a manufactured home on a property you buy is in-between somewhere. By painful I mean, it takes much longer than you would expect, it’s slow, there’s a lot of people to communicate with that have better things to do than communicate with you, and then it’s even slower, and every once in a while something really exciting happens, but it’s dampened by the fact that it will take much longer than you thought.

But bottom line is, it’s still awesome. We are still buying a house, which we never thought would happen anytime before we were thirty.  And it will be a really nice home. We just gotta jump through a few hoops, and acquire patience.

So update: we found out in order to get a varience on the property setbacks, we have to get septic approval. To get septic approval, we have to get the land surveyed. To do any of the above, we have to get permission from the owner of the property, which is not us yet, it is a gal who lives in Alaska. This gal inconvienently had a bush fire near her home which knocked out power and made it take a full two weeks for her to even download the permission page so she could print it out, fax it, and send it back to us. So, with that now done, we are doing a septic approval. Not sure when surveying is taking place? Oh well. Doesn’t this all sound boring? It is.

However, the septic guy brought some heavy machinery down to the lot and whacked the bushes down and dug some big holes. So we drove by and were able to walk around it with ease for the first time. Kyle and the septic dude figured out where the property boundaries were so we got a really good idea just how big 1/5 of an acre is, which helps a lot. We got to visualize our kids playing by the big  beautiful trees, and approximate what the veiw would be from our potential living room window, and generally get excited again about this whole process. And I took a lot of pictures. I uploaded them here, so you can check them out. We have a few oak trees and pine trees and an English Ivy infestation. Not the biggest property, but as soon as we wade through a few months of paperwork and smack a Palm Harbor home on it, it will be home sweet home.

My birthday is sneaking up on me very very quickly. I turn 25 on the 7th. I am having a mid-life age crisis at the age of twenty-five. I suddenly am finding myself with three children and living the life of a dowdy housewife at the age of twenty-five. My body doesn’t work the way it used to, and it sure as spit don’t look the way it used to either. I guess I feel twenty-five is the death of youth age. I will never be able to consider myself a completely young person, just mostly young.

I’ve been through the range of emotions and am starting to see distinct differences in the ‘young people’ of today and myself. Maturity is showing its mark on my body, soul, and mind. Not all of it is bad, mind you, most of it I appreciate. But it’s there and it makes me feel older. America glorifies youth and beauty, while I didn’t have much of the second I did have the first going for me.

Seeing my kids grow up (and gee golly I never thought I’d have three kids by now! I don’t know anybody as young as I am with three they gave birth to themselves!) I guess I am wondering why time is passing so swiftly. Much swifter than a few years ago. I have realized that this is the beginning of seeing time go by swifter and swifter, and “before you know it Todd will be graduating!” Which I’ve heard older generations say many times before, but the scary thing is actually seeing it come true. Todd is suddenly three, and I swear it was a very very short time ago he was crawling.

Kyle and I celebrate our fifth anniversary this summer and it honestly didn’t feel like that long of a time. But oh, how very different we are than the day we spoke our vows. Much has happened and it all seems quite normal living the married life. It gives me pause to think it was very shortly ago that being married with children seemed to be a wonderful mystery. At twenty-five, I can see the years stretching out before me and they don’t seem so surprising. I can see my kids learning to ride bikes and having sleepovers and eventually taking the SAT’s and getting married themselves. And I can honestly see it’s not going to take that long.

So I’m getting over my shock at actually turning 25. It’s just that life is so very very short!