Kimber's Navy Family

When this homeschool year started, I was excited . Our first "real" year of homeschooling! I opened up my calendar and my feelings shifted slightly, "Oh no! There is nothing on our calendar!" So I started adding things to our calendar. I continued our piano lessons on Wednesdays. He is really interested in music and learning piano. I found a fun ASL co-op class on Thursdays. He likes sign language and I thought he would enjoy doing it with other kids-- just for fun. I found a storytime on Fridays. This is really our only "toddler-friendly" activity. Fall started. We enjoyed our schedule. Then we found a fun co-op class on Wednesdays after our piano lessons. We joined that. Then one of our toddlers needed speech therapy on Mondays. Plus we go to church on either Saturday night or Sunday morning. Plus we still had to go grocery shopping... ...and I joined a mommy meet-up group that I never had time for. ...and a homeschool field tri

There are a lot of things about having twins that are hard to put into words or hard for people without twins to understand. For some things, parenting twins is double the work. For other things, it is half the work. I absolutely love being a momma to identical twins. However, I read some of these articles about parenting twins or talk to some people with multiples and it feels like they are trying to make parenting twins far more unique or unusual than it is. Some of the things involved in parenting twins applies to parenting more than one child. Having twins in itself is special and unique. Why make it bigger than it is? Why say things in a way that puts down other moms, especially since most moms are moms of singletons? It feels like it is making a divide, when there is no need to create more mommy competition than there is already. I was reading this article and it seemed to cover all the bases for most of the "unique" twin things I hear a lot, "9 things on

If you follow my blog, you might have read my post, " Mom to all boys ." In it I say: Why does it bother me so much hearing "boys will be boys?" Because, in my experience, people do not use that expression in regards to positive behavior demonstrated by my children. To be honest, most of the time when I hear boys will be boys, parents are using it to justify their children's bad behavior. It really bothers me. I come back to that expression time after time and each time it just makes my skin crawl. Why are we teaching  a future generation of men that their behavior is okay or justified due to their sex? It makes me think back to various jobs I've held when men touched me inappropriately or said inappropriate things, once to a point that I had to report a guy. What if the manager had said, "Boys will be boys"? I am not under some illusion that males and females think/act/are exactly the same and we need to drop all gender references. As our

I woke up this morning after a long night with baby #4. Everyone seems to think he's teething, but I am not sure. I don't know why baby #4 is off, teething or a cold. So after that night I came out this morning to a kitchen laden with dishes. That isn't an exaggeration. I have dishes on my stove top, piled in the sink, sitting in front of the microwave. Last night we made cookies. And dinner. And applesauce. Dinner required every bowl and blade of our food processor, which is still on the counter. Our kitchen is a mess . Our children aren't eating. I make them food and they don't eat it. After making room in our kitchen to make breakfast, only one of them ate. I gave them whole grain bread with cinnamon and raisins, toasted with lots of butter on top. Eggs made to order. Yogurt with strawberries and a banana to boot. Water, as requested. Our oldest, of course, ate all his food, but left his dishes on the table. One of our toddlers ate his yogurt and played w

I've been a military wife for almost 8 years now. We've lived at 4 different duty stations and we are getting ready to move again. While the routine of moving has become {somewhat} familiar, saying good-bye has never become easier. Yesterday a good friend of mine moved away. While I plan on visiting her at their new duty station in the next couple months, I don't know when we will ever {if we will ever} be next door neighbors again. There were many things I loved about living next door to this friend. She always had what I needed, for one. This could range from butter to wine to baby-sitting. She also always had a plate of cookies for us, always was up for a Target run, always ready for a girls night-- planned or not. We shared laughs, bottles of wine {or champagne in one lovely evening}, and tears. She's not much of a hugger, but I managed to get several big hugs from her {yay!}. We had game nights. I could always pop over to her house for an hour or two after my

I keep reading all these posts about life with a newborn  {note: strong language in that link}, life with twins, life with triplets , life with a toddler... So here's a day in my life: a husband on rotating shiftwork {his shift changes each week}, homeschooling a kindergartner, 3-year old twins, an infant, and a dog and cat. 4:00 am Baby #4 wakes up for first feeding; feed laying down in bed 5:00 am Put baby #4 back in bassinet and go back to sleep 6:30 am Hear toddlers fighting in bathroom. Break up the fight over who gets to use the sink first and send them back to their room. Turn on Keurig. Clean the catbox, sweep the laundry room. 6:45 am Brush teeth, hair, make first cup of coffee, grab my laptop and start writing at the kitchen table. Send toddlers back to bed multiple times. "Is it 7:30 yet?" No, no, no... back to bed! 7:00 am Have all three boys sit on their beds until 7:30 {when they can come out of their room} due to wrestling. Give oldest a r

At the risk of sounding like a crazy Tula lady, I decided to write a blog post on Tulas. A friend of mine was asking me about Tulas the other day and when I started explaining the different kinds {canvas, wrap conversions} and about the stockings and buy/sell/trade pages, I realized there is a lot of information to take in and that I must, indeed, sound like a crazy Tula lady. So here it goes.... {In this blog post, I am only going to discuss the Tula buckle carriers , not the ring slings or woven wraps .} First of all, you are probably wondering what a Tula is. It is an ergonomical baby carrier, along the same lines as a Boba or an Ergo ; all three of these are also in the same price point. I really like this blog post by the Happy Hippie Homemaker that explains the differences between the three, " Ergo vs Boba vs Tula carrier comparison. " The blog post is biased towards Tulas, but it still does a good job showing the differences between each carrier. Why did I c

Having four children does not equate to being up four times as much in the night. I'm always telling my first time mom friends who are worried about ever sleeping again, "You will sleep again. The newborn phase is a phase ." When your sleep is interrupted it feels like it will last that way forever, which it doesn't. It can feel like children will forever wake you and so I try to reassure my friends that their kids will sleep, it won't last forever, and-- hey, see?-- my kids sleep great. Last night was not one of those nights. 6:30 pm Since my hubby has weird hours right now with the Navy, the kids and I went to a friend's house for dinner. Before we left, I had put the children in pajamas so I wouldn't have to wrestle them by myself into pajamas when they were tired and excited from doing something different. I felt very proud of my cleverness when we got home around 6:30 pm and let the boys watch The Croods while our asthmatic toddler did his

Our 2-year olds wrestling on a hotel room couch last PCS ;) I wrote a blog post before titled, " PCSing tips from a Navy wife and mother of three ." We have a PCS coming up in the next couple months and so I wanted to write another blog post about how we start preparing several months before an upcoming PCS. Move Notebook The most important aspect to a smooth PCS is organizing all your paperwork which is why the move notebook is so important. I wrote a blog post called " Write it all down " where I explain how I organize our move notebook. The other day I spent the morning getting our move notebook ready for our next move: throwing out and filing paperwork from our last PCS, printing off new note taking pages, adding sections for our new kitten and baby #4. Move notebook: ready. Donating HHG The next step {and one you can never start too early-- seriously} is going through your household goods (HHG). One of the difficult aspects of being a Navy fami