Kimber's Navy Family

When I have sat down to think about my blog and the direction I want it to go in, the first thing I think about is, "Why did I start blogging in the first place?" The question is closely tied to my life. I started blogging because I like writing. I like writing and felt that I couldn't do a lot of it with a toddler and infant twins. I felt like we had a busy life that was somewhat different than the civilian friends I know because my husband is in the military. I felt like we are a military family trying to put a lot of emphasis on family , because we do know that my husband is going to be career military, staying in until he retires. I felt like in the community of military families, it is good for us to talk about our search for "normalcy" and to stick together with our unique set of challenges. I felt like talking about these challenges in a public way-- on my blog-- would help shed light on our community and to overlap the similarities as a military family w...

  Sitting down to write a post on feeding newborns, I was surprised at how raw some of those feelings were for me, even years later. Having attempted to breastfeed each of our five children, my experience has taught me that each child is different and that each breastfeeding journey is different. Discovering what worked best for me  as the parent and for each of our newborns in regards to feeding-- breastfeeding, bottle feeding, or a combination-- was not always an easy or simple solution and it often was laden with guilt that I wasn't living up to certain standards, worry that I wasn't making the right choice, and frustration when things didn't live up to expectations I had put on myself. We welcomed our fifth baby to our family this past summer so you could say that I am well-versed in the newborn days. With our first son, I was so nervous about if I was "doing it right." I worried about when I should be nursing him and for how long the sessions should b...

School is starting up for the 2016-2017 school year and everyone is starting to post back to school pictures. This year we will have a 2nd grader and twin kindergartners. While I am (nervously) excited to have three children in school, I cannot believe how quickly time has passed. And I feel like I'm not the only one who feels that way. So many of the back to school posts say, "Where has time gone?" There is an expression that always pops up in the mom circles: "The days are long but the years are short." When I think about our twins, this is how old I think of them in my mind:   And instead, they are big bad upcoming kindergartners now. And our oldest... I still think of him as a preschooler. Instead, he's now the oldest of FIVE children and our towering upcoming 2nd grader, at 4'8": The first days of preschool were shocking to me as well, disbelief that we now were at an age where our children were off to school on their own. ...

We have 4 children-- a 1st grader, twin preschoolers, and a toddler. I'm 28+ weeks pregnant and my husband is active duty Navy on submarines. When putting our children to bed, there are three different ways that it happens. The first is when I'm not pregnant and somewhat helpful in the evenings; this would be the two adults approach. The second happens either when I'm pregnant, exhausted, or my husband has been working really long hours and trying to squeeze in all the time he can with the kids. This is when Daddy puts the kids to bed. The third pretty much only happens when my husband works super late, has duty, or is underway. (For all you non-Navy folk, duty is when my husband stays the night on the submarine and underway-- or deployed-- is when the submarine is out to sea.) Bedtime has always been a "Daddy thing" at our house, so if he's home, he is in charge at bedtime and I just assist. With his Navy schedule, a lot of times he is coming home right wh...

I always dreamed about having a daughter. After two miscarriages (one of them being a molar pregnancy ), 4 boys (including a set of identical twin boys), and a rough start to our 6th pregnancy , I felt that our chances of having a girl were pretty low. I've heard throughout this pregnancy: "Oh, my old neighbor growing up had seven boys! Then they had their girl." "My mom's best friend has five girls." "Our cousin is pregnant with her fourth boy. They are stopping after this one! No more boys for them!" And then myself. I have two friends with four boys: one just had her 5th and it was a girl, the other just had her 5th and it was a boy. Ahh! So I scheduled my 20 week anatomy scan at my last OB appointment. The earliest they could get me in was 4 weeks away, when I would be 22+ weeks. I really thought I could wait that long. It would be torture, but I figured I just needed to hunker down and wait. I called my mom and told her to mark her calen...

For our boys' birthdays, I love baking them a cake... or ordering a cake from Coldstone. Our 4-year olds lucked out and each got a Coldstone cake this year. Our baby lucked out since we were living in the Navy Lodge during a military move (a friend actually baked him a cake though, which was super sweet). Our oldest on the other hand managed to have his birthday fall right in that rush of "so glad we are FINALLY in our OWN house with our OWN things" and there was no way in Hades I wasn't going to bake his cake. On top of that, our other 3 wanted to help (the baby did not actually say he wanted to help, but he is a new walker and in that "requires constant supervision" phase). Since our 4-year olds wanted to actually make the cake, I measured out all the ingredients beforehand. This made it much easier when actually mixing because their attention spans fall in the category of, "Oh! Look! Shiny!" We also had a lot of discussion over taking ...

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...

What has changed for us now that we have 4 kids? 1. My mom is always right. Don't tell my mom that. And maybe not always , but... yeah, my mom is always right . While I'm close to my mom anyways, I find myself calling her more and more to find out exactly what I should do, not get her advice and consider it, but, "Hey, Momma, what would you do? Tell me everything." My hubby isn't home for everything and I love having my mom by my side {even from a distance}. 2. Always looks on the bright side of life. Life is busy and messy and, well, sometimes not fun at all. While every week is pretty much one thing after another, this week was one of those weeks where it was one.thing.after.another. I psyched the kids up for a day and a half to go to the pumpkin patch with our homeschool group...and then our van broke down and was out of commission for 2 days. Because  I was sick last week , I had rescheduled everything to this week; I had to then re-reschedule ...