More than Half Way!

As my baby kicks me from inside I thought it might be a good idea to update this on my lunch hour (instead of studying my accounting book). :)
The Flannery Clan had a good week. Alisabeth is doing well, so far as I can tell, in her schoolwork. She comes home with a spelling list each week and we went through them all without issues. She's also had some homework that she and Jason have done. We did have our first casualty though, apparently she checked out a book and can't remember what she did with it so she has to pay for it before they'll let her check out another one. :( She was very upset or 'scared' as she says. She's 'scared' about everything that she's unsure about.
Kryton is doing well. His "STOP" is very clear. :) He loves to be tickled, so he comes and we have tickle fights at least once a night. The problem is that he bites whenever he gets riled up. He's better most of the time and gives raspberries now instead of biting, but he still takes a good chunk out of the flesh whenever he gets too excited to control himself. He continues his love of reading and is doing a little better in the mornings. (The kids wakes up between 4 and 5. . . needless to say there's no one to respond to him at that time, so after screaming for about ten minutes he goes back to sleep until it's the real time to get up. We've reduced his naps down to 1 and sometimes he doesn't even get that one, but he still gets up that early no matter what :( This morning at 5:30 I handed him a bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and turned on Baby Einstein in the downstairs living room. Terrible, I know, but that's the way we roll sometimes.)
Tiny creature, as mentioned in the opening line, is growing on schedule so far. Kicking up a storm inside my belly and overall enjoying life. I lent out my maternity clothes to a friend a while back and still haven't retrieved them, so he's been getting a little squished as my belly begins to expand beyond the normal size of my pants, but she puts up with it well. We find out the sex in 2 more weeks (on V-day), so that will be exciting.
Jason has continued to apply to new jobs. His Houston interviewers never called back so eventually he called them to see if they had made a decision, but apparently they went on a hiring freeze. :( His interview with Galusha's IT went well, we guess, but they're not in a hurry to make a decision, so in a few more weeks they'll weed the list of applicants down and decide who to call for a second round of interviews. . . I haven't heard anything on my end.
He also found plans online to make a cat tree (since our little vermin snatchers are staring to scratch everything) and built that this last week. It's rough because we only had remnants of carpet to use on it, but we'll look into prices and probably replace that sometime to make it look a bit nicer. He's considering building one more with a few modifications to see if he can sell them. They don't cost nearly as much as CostCo/Petsmart would have you believe :) And ours is heavy, which is important to me since my bruiser cats always seemed to knock it over if it isn't. He did a great job and got a new tool out of the deal, so he was happy.
As for me, we're starting to ramp up into the busy season and that is a mixed blessing :) I've been getting through my work, although there's a lot to keep track of. Gotta start making my lists again. It feels good to crank out the work though rather than just sit on my hands and try not to waste time. I did my taxes too, and was disappointed to note that we owed for the first time. It was at the state level, and I didn't take into account the fact that Jason's earnings were in UT rather than ID, so that's a bit of a shame, but I learned my lesson. :)
I don't think I ever mentioned it, but our office moved into a new building. They built it specifically for us, and this last week we had a community open house to celebrate. Jeeze there were a lot of people here. I had to make appearances, couldn't handle just staying out there the whole time, so I disappeared into my office and wrote my paper for my class intermittently throughout the night. It was awesome though, several of our clients from Blackfoot (about 45 minutes away) came to see us. In addition the CEO came over from Helena to be there for the ribbon cutting. We had awesome catering by another of our clients, and got to gloat about how awesome our new offices are. I saw about 1/3 of the clients I work on for audits, and a lot of others I have met within the business community.
In addition I decided to make the leap. My goal was to publish a book before my birthday. My mom agreed to help me edit my book and get it ready. We passed that sucker back and forth dozens of times. She made edits, I made changes, then she edited again and changed it back to the way I'd had it :) (okay that didn't happen often, but when it did it made me laugh). The end result was much closer to a romance (it started as action), but I liked it. Then a bit ago I made the leap and published it through Amazon's self publishing methods. They'll let anyone put anything up there, so it's not as though this is 'breaking into the industry' but for me it was just a goal and something I've always wanted to do. Staring at my kindle-edition book is very cool. Now I just need to convince her to retire so she can be my full-time editor :) There's two more in the published book's series, and I have an entire series (just finished writing book 5) of sci-fi that I really like. . . ah, dreams.

Life is good. I've forced myself into a schedule requiring me to be in bed earlier, and I'm liking the results. I feel less exhausted (for obvious reasons), and even though I'm not getting everything on my goal/schedule list done every night I feel like I'm regaining a little stability and control over myself. Could also be that the sickness is gone and I have a little of my energy back, whatever the reason, I'll take it. :)
Jason joined me in my goal, so we've both been going to bed earlier and it's so much easier to deal with a 4am Kryton than when I've only had 3 hours of sleep. Now when it takes me an hour to get to sleep it's not that big a deal.

That's us. Healthy again (everyone had something within the last two weeks), happy again, and moving forward with faith.

Tides of Change OR The Ides of March :O

Well, dearest readers (mostly myself while I ponder on my own amazingness I'm sure). It's that time again, the time when my guilt requires that I act, and my tiredness gives me the gumption to do so.
So, what changes have the Flannery Clan had in the last however many months it's been since I last posted? PLENTY!
You know about the miracle pregnancy. Well, with a few more minor bumps in the sickness road, we're apparently over the hump and doing well. At my last appointment the heartbeat was strong, and I can feel the little parasite flipping and flopping occasionally. (Causes me strange heat flashes too, just like Kryton did).
The next member up? Kryton is doing well. He's chattering up a storm but we've got about five recognizeable words so far. (By five I mean those moments where he stops talking and is actively doing something routine and says it twice in a slightly slurred clear voice that all toddlers have when they're first learning to speak. I think I've heard thank you. I think I've heard heart (he loves to read and that's one of the shapes in his book). I think I've heard more. I know I've heard "uh-oh" (the old favorite), and "no" (aimed at the kitties mostly when they circle him at meal times like little sharks).
Did I mention he loves to read? This little dude will sit through a whole book (well, a whole kids book) and look at pictures and flip through pages. When we take a shower in the mornings that is our routine. I wash everyone down and then (when I was still feeling icky sicky) I would sit on my shower chair and hold him in my lap and read his shower book for a moment or two while I regained enough strength to dry us both off and keep going. It's a good thing he has a strong bladder cuz at that point it would take me a good twenty minutes to get enough strength to put a diaper on that kid. :)
He also solved the riddle of the stairs a few weeks back. Prior to that moment he would stand at the top (after climibing all the way up and then realizing no one was up there with him), and scream and scream until I came and carried him back down. Then one day he finally got bored with that I guess because he turned right around and scooted legs first down the stairs. Hasn't had a problem since. He loves the stairs now. :)
He also loves soft things. He got a new blanket for Christmas from Nana and when he's even slightly tired and can find it he will cuddle with it and lay all over it trying to soak up it's softness. He does the same thing to the kittens if they're not smart enough to run. We hear their squeels of discomfort as he literally lays on top of them and have to come running to the rescue. . . and yet they still haven't learned. Apparently we didn't pick the brightest in the bunch.
Next up is Alisabeth. Wow has she had some fun changes recently. Knowing that we were having a fifth, and wanting to pay this one off before it was born rather than a year later, we took a look at our finances and made some hard choices. One of those was to take her out of her private kindergarten and put her into public school. Since we were going to throw her through the loop anyway we decided to do it right. We contacted her new school and asked them to perform an assessment to move her up to the first grade starting in January. The process was a little stressful for me, I'll tell you. First they had to test her, and though I wasn't worried about her ability to do well on the tests, I was quite worried about her willingness to participate. She pendulums all the time from excitement at things to utter boredom and I knew she would do that during this testing process. I did what I could to gently remind her that this was a serious thing and she needed to focus, but let's be honest, she had two solid hours of testing three different times. Any six year old would be dying. She was valiant though.
At the end Jason and I met with a panel from the school including the psychologist who had performed the tests, the school councilor, and all three of the teachers involved (1 kinder and 2 first grade). We went over her scores which put her smack dab average with other first graders, and then discussed her emotional readiness for first grade. It helps that she was already attending all day school. After a very lengthy discussion everyone weighed in with the concerns being mostly theoretical and related to later on in her education career. Only one teacher worried that she might struggle now because of her energy. Then it was the principal's turn and she made a great suggestion that instantly relieved both my reservations and my concerns. She suggested that we make this a trial period for her. That Alisabeth finish out first grade and then we re-look at how she did and whether we still feel like she was progressing at the rate she needed to and filling in the holes in her education. If not she would repeat first grade, if so then she would continue in the new grade level. I loved that idea because I am confident that she CAN do it, but not so confident that she WILL. The emotional part was the part that worried me. So if she chooses not to push herself and excel, then we'll know within the next few months and we'll drop her back with her age group and call it good. She won't have lost anything, and we'll have gained something from the experience. We discussed how she would feel if she does have to be held back and to be honest I don't think she'd know or care really, unless it's pointed out to her by others of course, but no one in her class would even be aware so I don't really see an issue there. I'll keep you updated :)
So far her first day was "terrible." She "cried all day" and "didn't like her teacher."
We discussed why the other children were staring at her (because they were interested in her, she was new and they were excited to know about who she was).
The next day was "fun." She "loves her teacher" and "got in trouble." All within the same two sentences :)
By the end of the week she was excited at the work they were doing and what she was learning. Although I almost gagged when I saw her phonics worksheets :)
Next on the list is Jason Lee. That boy has also been though quite a transition. He finished up working for the LDS church (his second internship) in late December. They actually let him stop working a week early which meant he got to be home for Christmas and New Years, both of which he was scheduled to miss. We were delighted except when the paychecks didn't arrive :)
Now he's taken back his role as stay at home dad for a while. During the testing period for Alisabeth we kept her out of school until we could decide which class she would end up in (I thought one major change was enough), so he did homeschooling with her. Now he does at least one activity with her each day when she gets home from school in the afternoon. We also instituted a new punishment since nothing else is working, so when she's really struggling with whatever it is she gets to write twenty-five lines. It may sound a little mean, but both Jason and I went through it, so we know what it's like, and she absolutely hates it, so maybe it'll get the point across. Plus it's better than screaming, and it helps her handwriting skills. :)
He also applies for at least 4 jobs a week. We've branched out across the nation in search of work. Recently he's finally getting calls back. The two top runners right now are my own company, Galusha, Higgins, and Galusha, and a company in Houston TX. Jason has two major (and different) parts of CIT that he enjoys. One is the hands on network administration where he watches over and takes care of a network or company. The other is security analysis where he watches for external attacks and would eventually begin to learn to fight them and track them back to their source. He did the second one with the LDS church and really enjoyed it. That's what the Houston company does too, so he's excited about their call and the second interview he had last week. Galusha, on the other hand, is offering him the position of Network Administrator where he would be in charge of our entire firm's networks (software and hardware). He has that interview this coming Tuesday.
There are a few other fish on the line as well, but so far none seem really interested. . . he'll keep applying though, until he hears for sure from someone. :) Four months and counting to get that figured out or he gets to go apply at Lowes.
Which brings us to me. I think I already mentioned this in the last post, but just in case, I'll become a full-time stay at home mother in June or July or whenever this kid pops out. I gave my notice. Three is too expensive to keep in day-care, and it's just time. I'm done trying to fight my own internal conflicts of wanting to advance my career and knowing that doing so will require me to sacrifice even more of my time with my family than I already do. (in the short term at least). I also have a lot of dreams and goals that have been pushed to the back burner for quite a while that I'd like to start making a reality. Some of those will still be on the back burner since I'll have two kids under two to take care of, but there are other areas (such as living the very basic principles of my religion) that have slipped a lot in the last few years and this will reduce my available excuses. I have goals set for once I'm home and I have plans. We'll see how many make it to fruition :) I'm excited and terrified at the same time. The corporate world is much easier in a lot of ways. I only have to take crap while I'm there. Once I leave I can let it drop off my shoulders and worry about picking it back up the next day. As a stay-at-home mom I'll have to find better ways to manage that stress so that it doesn't get a chance to overwhelm. I'll have to learn what it means to be a full-time mom again. I did it once, and struggled a lot, but not with two, and that's the part that terrifies me. A needy baby, and a jealous toddler . . . I'll be fine though :)
Other changes for me, well things I haven't mentioned here at least, is that I sit on two boards now. I currently sit on them as a representative of my firm, but at least one of them has mentioned that they don't want to see me go regardless of whether I'm employed or not. It's nice to feel wanted. :)
I'm also starting up some water arobics classes for mothers-to-be that are put on by the hospital where I will be giving birth. They have yoga or water arobics for free to all mothers-to-be, but I didn't take advantage of it last time because I was too busy.
This time I've slowed way down. I told my bosses that I won't be working more than 40 during tax season, and while that fills me with guilt, I know it's necessary. I'm trying to hurry and get in the class I needed so that the state will grant me my CPA, trying to be a mom, trying to be pregnant, and trying to be more of a part of my community. That with a full load tax season isn't possible. Plus if Jason does get a job then I'll probably be a single parent for a while until tax season ends and Alisabeth finishes the school year before we move to join him wherever he may be, so we figured we'd plan ahead on that one too.

All in all, we're trying to get our lives in order as much as possible to be prepared for what we know/think is coming and though we can't ever be 100% we learn a little from every experience we've had in the past and use it to get a jump on the future if we can.
In the interim we've got a couple of really good friends and we continue to invite couples and families over for dinner as often as we can to get to know more. Every Friday and Saturday night we have game nights. Friday is D&D 4.0 with a REALLY fun couple who are a lot like us. Jason and the husband have a lot in common and every time we talk we find more and more. They've brought a few of their friends to join in so we often have some fairly rousing games and just enjoy living in a fantasy world where you can jump off cliffs and use your magic ring so you won't get hurt, or can take a chance and charge your carts into a known trap and if everyone dies it'll be okay because it's all paper and pencils anyway.
Then Saturday night we do something similar with a different couple who we've known most of our married lives. They are also great and the intelligent conversation and inane, often arcane and unnecessary, information that we share with each other keeps everyone entertained for hours. In between we find time to kill whatever evil creatures are trying to destroy the innocent and subvert our goals. Again we get to live in fantasy for a few hours and just release constraints to make up whatever comes to mind and go with it.
The relaxation I get from this is probably akin to yoga for others. :)

God has been incredibly good to us. He's surrounded us with a beautiful, loving community that almost makes me feel uncomfortable with the level of concern and caring they have for us personally. He's given us a home that couldn't be more perfect for us. Quirky, yet stable enough to depend upon. He's given us a congregation of people who care, and show that they care by being more than willing to step up and help when we need it (hopefully we're doing the same). He's given us schools, and experiences, and people that fill our lives with joy and learning. Although I dread the uncertainty of knowing where we'll be in six months, I can't complain about where we are, or where we've been. I also can't complain too loudly about what's coming because we know that His hand will lead us, and that wherever we end up, we'll be able to be a part of His Plan, which is really all that matters anyway.

Thanks for sharing a few moments. Hope it was worth your time.