Kimber's Navy Family

Well, baby #5 has decided that I apparently do not need sleep and she isn't even born yet. I thought I would put these wee hours of the morning to use and write a blog post while I sipped my lemon ginger tea in a quiet, still sleeping house. With 4 children and another on the way, I am not always eager to drag all the children to the store for small errands. Throw in having a husband on submarines, 2 asthmatic children, twin preschoolers, and the roughest pregnancy yet and you can bet running errands is my least favorite thing to do (well, changing pee sheets is probably actually my least favorite thing to do). When our twins were newborns, I really started utilizing the convenience of online shopping. Now I have honed that skill to level expert. Here are my tips on making online shopping work for you and avoiding small errands: 1. Buy in bulk The first step to successful online shopping: go to Costco. We plan our Costco trips every 1-2 weeks. Our twins are in prescho...

"We are pulling up one more chair to the table... Baby #5 due June 2016!" The last time I wrote a blog post was on November 1st, 2015.... so Happy New Year! What's been going on over here with me?! Well, first of all, we are expecting again! Baby #5 is due June 2016. We are thrilled. Of course we are hoping that this one is a girl. A friend of mine with four boys recently gave birth to her fifth and it was a girl. I feel like there is *hope* but I also feel that after delivering 4 boys, it is a bit of a long shot. Who knows. Fingers crossed, right? I'm 16 weeks right now so we should find out in the next 2-4 weeks what the gender is of baby #5. I think the biggest reason I haven't blogged in so long is that this pregnancy was off to a really rocky start and it sent me into a bit of a depression. Initially the pregnancy didn't look viable. The ultrasounds didn't look good and we weren't given much hope. In fact, they ran bloodwork to rule out ...

You know what's hard? Life. Marriage. Being a parent. All of that. I've been feeling like a failure lately in my endeavors. People say things to me like, "I don't know how you do it!" and "You are a supermom" and "4 boys? You are amazing." Most of it is lip service from strangers, the go-to things that people say to moms (and moms for 4 boys). It goes in one ear and out the other most of the time, but lately those comments have been giving me stress. This was a crazy move for us, a big change returning to boat life and living across country from my family. I feel like I'm barely holding on and that I'm frequently dropping the ball with our kids. We wrestled with our decision to send our oldest to public school instead of continuing homeschooling him. We wrestled with the decision to homeschool our 4-year old twins instead of re-configuring the budget to send them to preschool. We've been wrestling with the decision on whethe...

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 ...

I may be a mom, but I still like to party. And by party, I mean spending my Friday night Googling natural ways to boost your immune system through your diet. I've posted before about our son's reactive airways. Because he is so young, his reactive airways are constantly changing. There is the hope that he will grow out of having such a hard time. However, due to family history, his pediatricians proceed as if he has an asthma diagnosis. Each year, we try to wean him off of his daily regulator, Pulmicort. Last year, he was doing great through the first half of the cold and flu season so we started weaning him off of Pulmicort, from twice a day to once a day. Then--bam!-- he caught a cold and he ended up on Orapred twice in a row. He stayed on Pulmicort until May/June, when we had weaned him down again to one dose before stopping all together. He spent most of June, all of July, and all of August off Pulmicort. Then this past week he caught his first cold of the season an...