Hello everyone! I feel up for writing a blog post today, so I'm going to attempt some form of catch-up. Post partum depression has been huge for the last few months, and even if that wasn't a problem, having five kids, two of them still little, has nearly killed me. And Steve. We're so worn out. Physically, mentally, emotionally. We've kinda just been making through the day and then shutting off with TV or scrolling social media (me) or video games (Steve) after the kids go to bed. On Sundays, when I usually write my blog posts, it seems like every minute of the day is taken up by something. And when it isn't, I read clean romance novels to escape.
I'm sure it will get easier as Harrison gets older. It's already getting a little better. He naps for at least an hour every day now. It's better when he naps longer than that, but I can count on at least one decent nap a day, which is more than I could say a few months ago.
So on we go.
This was a post I started in July and never finished.
I am really bad at taking pictures these days. We did a ton of stuff the last two weeks, but I took pictures of none of it.
Two Mondays ago was the 5th, which Steve had off of work. We purchased a new board game to play as a family and played it in the afternoon after Jules went down for a nap. We didn't love it. It's called Wingspan and it was okay, but there are tons of other similar games that we like better.
We also bought a fire pit and roasted hotdogs and marshmallows for dinner and dessert. The kids loved that part of the day. After marshmallows the fireworks started again and most of the kids went inside. Harrison surprisingly wasn't bothered by them at all. Jules loves them from inside the house. They're too loud when she's outside. She still asks to see fireworks as a way to get out of going to bed. :)
I just looked through previous blog posts and I think I forgot to mention that Steve's been interviewing with Adobe. He is not unhappy with his current job, but he was contacted by a recruiter through Linkedin, and Adobe is such a good employer and the potential salary was so good, he couldn't decline the interview. He had 4 interviews over the course of about 6 weeks and two weeks ago on Thursday, they offered him the job! It's going to be 100% remote, with some travel. They offered the higher end of the salary range which was even more than we were hoping for.
^^^ Harrison in the bathtub^^^
^^^ a duplo tree either me or Cecily made ^^^
^^^ We played outside on a nice Sunday morning while everyone else went to church. I don't remember why I stayed home. ^^^
^^^ Harrison playing with his favorite toy at the time ^^^
I have no idea what the other things we did were. Sorry! :D
Here is a post Emilia did for me back in December that accidentally got posted to Steve's blog that no one ever looks at.
Hello! It's Emilia.
My mom hasn't been able to write blog posts since the first week of July. I guess that's what comes with having five kids, a book cover business and a tendency to go to sleep late.
Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) for you the people,
I've come to take her place. I have a lot to catch y'all up on, so
buckle in. You get see things from my point of view. *Attempts to do an evil laugh and fails*
I'll start with the random pictures that don't really have a specific date.
My
mom has way more pictures of Harrison than she could ever need, but
apparently people love babies, so here you are. I'll leave some pictures
of Jules here for you as well, she's pretty cute too.
Jules likes to put on deoderant like Mom, but she puts in on both sides of her neck.
Here
are some cute pictures Mira and Cecily took of themselves too. In my
opinion you guys don't get nearly enough pictures of us older girls on
the blog.
The first big event that I remember happening in July was my birthday :D. I turned 13, which means I'm officially a teenager now. No more getting called a preteen hermit. Thanks Mom.
Here are some pictures of me the day of my party. Mom did my hair in some cool braids.
I didn't actually end up having the party until the first week of August because there were only a few people I wanted to come and they weren't available until that week. Said people were Lizzy, Alice and Brayden, AKA some of the nicest people I've ever met. The three of them still live in the Springville-Spanish Fork area, but I haven't grown any less close with them since I moved here. I'm still secretly hoping I can move back.
I didn't have any particular theme in mind, so I just had them come over and play games and get hyper on popcorn and candy with me. I think that day was the most I've smiled in a while :).
My sisters and I started school on the 18th of August. I'm in 8th grade, Mira's in 5th and Cecily is in 3rd. It's crazy to see my sisters get older--I met Lizzy in 3rd grade and Alice & Brayden in 5th. One could say those years were pretty life-changing for me. I guess my parents and family members could say the same about me getting older, though I'm the one writing this blog post so I guess we'll just have to see.
My sisters both seem to like their teachers fine. They have some pretty nice friends in their classes, they've come over to our house a couple times. Cecily especially seems fond of her friend Maren.
I'm taking eight classes total this year: Girls' PE, History, Math, Tech & Digital Design, English, Science, Drama, and Choir.
I love a lot of my classes this year. I've always been an English nerd, so no surprise there, but I also love Drama, Choir, and Digital Design.
Sometime after starting school, Mom found a new place to get our haircut, since we can't get it cut at Sister Follette's anymore. I decided to cut my hair really short, like up to my chin. It was a little bit drastic, but I've been wanting to do it for a while. I guess becoming a teenager has made me want to experiment with myself more. I really like how it turned out, I think I look really cute :].
Since I liked my haircut so much, my mom decided to get her hair cut and colored by the same guy. I guess I was her lab rat of sorts. Lol. The guy who cut my hair was super chill, so I think we'll all be returning there when we want our hair cut.
Here
are some pictures Mom took while getting her hair colored. These are the before pictures, but I don't know where the after ones are. Haha.
After that, we didn't do much up until Halloween. Mira dressed up as a dragon named Cricket from the Wings of Fire book series she's been absolutely in love with. Cecily dressed up as Marcy Wu from Amphibia, a show on Disney+. Cecily's been watching it pretty much non-stop, so that wasn't a surprise either. Jules just went in a cute fluffy little tiger onesie.
I dressed up as Ranboo from the Dream SMP. I could go on and on about the Dream SMP and how much I love Ranboo, but I'll spare you the details. As complicated as his storyline is, he essentially comes down to a Minecraft character.
I took most of my pictures with my
friends--we all dressed up as characters from the Dream SMP and it was
quite fun. Featured in the pictures below are: TommyInnit, (another)
Ranboo, Dream, Karl Jacobs, and Technoblade.
After that was Fall Break and the entire family went to Florida. We stayed at a really pretty condo and another nice airbnb while we were there and went to the beach plenty of times. We also visited Grandma and Grandpa Watts, since they're on their mission down there. It was, of course, pretty hot and humid, but the water was nice and we found lots of cool shells and sand dollars, including a huge half complete conch shell Cecily found way out in the water.
We also tried ice cream from two different places. The first I believe was just called "Sanibel's Best" and had huuuge scoops we all loved. We also went to LoveBoat Ice Cream. It was clearly a town favorite, since the place was PACKED and they had tons of flavors and chill employees. I got a delicious S'mores Sunday with chocolate ice cream and It was amazing. I loved the small town vibes, perhaps if it wasn't so hot and humid I'd live there in the future.
We also went on two different
boat rides. The first one was out over the ocean and we saw tons of
Mangrove trees being nested in by a variety of cool bird species. as
well as a couple glimpses of a dolphin's fin. The second boat ride was
in a river surrounded by Mangrove trees. I loved the thrill of riding at
high speeds and we saw a couple of Alligators. One was almost 12 feet
long. It's hard to believe that chomper was twice the size of my dad.
That vacation was also my first time flying on a plane. The view above the clouds is gorgeous, and the take off didn't scare me as much as I expected, the real challenge was not getting airsick or dizzy. Jules and Harrison didn't enjoy it nearly as much, unfortunately. There was a lot of crying.
When we got back, I had a Cluster Concert in choir class. I missed the official concert with all the parents because we were in Florida, but I did get a chance to go to the one with the Elementary Schoolers and the High Schoolers. Here's me in the pretty blue dress the Women's Choir AKA the Bellazona's get to wear.
I can't remember anything noteworthy happening the first couple weeks of November, except for maybe the fact that me and my siblings got sick a lot. On the days that I stayed home I decided to really improve my cosplays and dress up as some of my favorite characters.
Here's
me in my improved Ranboo cosplay next to his Minecraft skin. I think I
finally managed to do his character some justice, I love the hair, the
ears and the pixelated effect on the black half.
The 25th was Thanksgiving, obviously. We ate dinner with my mom's side of the family (excluding the Staleys, sadly) and it was a lot of fun. We had all the usual things, turkey, delicious dinner rolls that I would eat forever, jello, Dad's peas, etc.
December 2nd was my Mom's birthday. Dad took her out to dinner that week and we had some yummy dinner & dessert at home that night. It wasn't the best of birthdays, but hopefully she still enjoyed herself.
I had a choir concert on Tuesday--a proper one, not just a cluster concert. I didn't take any pictures there, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The Women's choir sang a funny parody of the 12 Days of Christmas, my mom and Mira enjoyed that one. My personal favorite to sing was a peaceful winter song called Winter With You.
Since Thanksgiving we've mostly just been surviving school (and my baby
siblings) and waiting for Christmas to come around. We've almost
completely finished our Christmas shopping and decorating. My parents
also volunteered to buy gifts for a family a charity was sponsoring. We
try to do this every year, as a kind thing to give the world during this
season.
I think that's all we have for now :). To end take this cute picture of my cat sleeping on a pile of books. She's an underrated part of my life... and these blog posts.
From here, I think I'll just post the pictures and comment on them until I get to the last few weeks.
These are all from the Florida trip Emilia talked about. The first day with Grandma and Grandpa, we went on a Nature walk.
If you look closely at the picture below, you can see the air plants growing on all the trees. I thought it was pretty cool.
Harrison was tired and unamused for most of the walk.
We saw a number of turtles.
Instead of bark as a ground covering, they used tiny shells.
On our first day in Florida, we went to the beach at sunset for a walk. I could tell something was biting me, but I didn't know those bites would result in a week of nearly constant, terrible itching. I now know about sand flies and will try to avoid them for the rest of my life! You can't see the ones on the backs of my legs or above my knees or on my arms. They were terrible.
Our only photo of grandma and grandpa from the trip (on my phone). I think Steve took more on his phone. This is the place we stayed second. I saw my first cochroaches (not in cages) in my life here. Two in the kitchen. One crawling up the wall one night.
This was the first boat ride we took. It was by far my favorite. Peaceful, informative. Didn't scare anyone.
Grandma and Grandpa are hiding behind Steve here.
This is from the second boat ride. The boats were the kind that have the huge fan on the back that propels you through the water. This is the giant gator Emilia told you about. She was in a different boat than me.
Harrison and Jules both were on my boat with Grandpa and Cecily. Emilia, Mira, Steve, and Grandma went on the other boat. Harrison fell asleep in my arms. Jules screamed in terror the entire time.
There is a beach I learned about from a friend that we went to twice while we were there. It's on the ocean side of the island (as opposed to the side that faces the peninsula. There are oodles of shells there. My friend told us to wait until just before low tide and wade out to the break point. Then you stick your head underwater and look at the sand until you see something you like. We found hundreds of cool shells. So many we had to throw over half of them back because we couldn't fit that many shells into our carry-ons. (Besides, what do you do with that many shells?) Steve and I and Harrison went the first time. Everybody but Emilia and Jules went the second time. Emilia stayed home so Jules could nap (and she said she was worn out from going out earlier that day).
Emilia, Mira, and I tried to do Inktober again this year (where you draw something every day based on a prompt). I only made it a few days. Emilia did more, but didn't make it all the way to the end. Mira though, was amazing and did one for every day! Since we took a vacation for a week, she had some catching up to do, and did a bunch of small drawings on one page. I kind of love them. There are a couple more bigger ones, too.
Emilia talked about Halloween already. This is a close up of the wings we made for Mira. Her dragon was supposed to have dragonfly wings. This is the dragon:
A close up of the headpiece. It's made out of posterboard that I spray painted after I cut it out and glued it all together. We got the template from this website. I'd never seen anything like it before. It's pretty cool. https://wintercroft.com/
Harrison interjecting with his cuteness.
Cecily and Mira at the school costume parade.
Aww. I just want to squeeze him.
Mira and Jules went to the park with me.
Mira loves wearing all of her panda stuff at the same time. She got more for Christmas, so she's since added them to this outfit.
Emilia and her kitty.
I love this picture. His face. His foot on the table. Haha.
Mira decided to do cosplay one day. I think she called herself a mushroom elf (like a red mushroom).
The adults' Thanksgiving tablescape:
The kids' Thanksgiving tablescape:
After Thanksgiving I started making the crocheted gifts for the kids. I finished Jules' first. I love how it turned out.
Harrison started pulling himself up to standing just after Thanksgiving.
Steve looking handsome. This was at my family birthday dinner.
This is from Emilia's Christmas concert.
This is one of Jules' favorite things to do.
Me and the kids went to watch the light display in Highland one day in December.
Harrison often sleeps like this and it cracks me up. He's always been a stomach sleeper. He would roll over in the middle of the night even when he was a lot smaller.
He splashes so much when he takes a bath. He would play in water all day if I let him.
This is the results of our annual Christmas ornament painting. It goes from Jules on the left to Steve on the right in age order. I love that Emilia did a Ranboo themed one. It's cute and perfectly encapsulates what she's all about right now.
This is the extent of the snow we got this year. The rest of Utah valley got way more, but we don't get a lot of snow here.
This is part-way through crocheting Cecily's item. It's Sprig Plantar from the same show as Cecily's Halloween costume.
Mira is always so fashionable.
Jules got balloons for her birthday. They became a balloon forest on our ceiling for way too long.
The following are all pictures Jules took. They are of some of her favorite things.
Her sisters.
Pizza. (these were from the day of her birthday)
See that container of fake eggs? She plays with them almost every day. And that was 3 months ago.
PJ Masks is one of her current favorite shows.
Her bed. We have her mattress on the floor right now.
Inside the crib is her car. She is very protective of her car.
Books. She loves reading books. (Like all our kids.)
Her "avocado plant." This is not an avocado plant, but in the book "Ladybug Girl," the main character waters her avocado plant. So Jules has adopted this as her avocado plant and she waters it regularly.
Her brother.
Her blankie. (She has several of the same material.)
These are the only two pictures I took of Christmas day. We put our Christmas tree up downstairs this year because we figured Harrison would attempt to destroy it if he was allowed near it and it would be easier to keep him upstairs for most of December than keep him downstairs or try to put up a blockade around it. On Christmas day, we put him in a laundry basket to try to keep him contained. You can see how long that lasted.
This was one of my gifts from Steve. It's a nice puzzle made of real wood. It was challenging, but fun to put together.
For New Years, we were able to spend the evening with the Childresses. It was a fun night of games.
More pictures of Mystery. She really is a cute cat.
Love this face. :D
Don't love so much that she got into the food coloring and destroyed one of my kitchen chairs. One of her Christmas gifts was a "potion" set. It was a plastic science kit with a beaker, a measuring cup, four test tubes with a holder, four kid-sized droppers, some funnels, safety goggles, and a white scientist coat. She loves it. But Nana showed her that you can put food coloring in the test tubes and then mix the colors to make new ones. She wouldn't play with it any other way after that, and I wasn't willing to do it all the time, so she figured out how to do it herself. She is one determined kid.
Harrison loves emptying containers, as kids do. This one is often available to empty.
Mira bought this Build-a-Bear frog with her own money in January. They had overalls at Build-a-bear that looked super cute on him, but they were 11 dollars. (The frog was only $22, so that seemed steep.) I told her I would look for baby overalls at DI (the thrift store). I miraculously found some the next time I went. They were too big though, so they needed to be altered. One evening after dinner, Mira asked if I could please alter them before school the next day because it was a pajama day and she could take Herman (her frog) with her. I was so tired, but I managed to alter them in a little over an hour. I was so proud of myself.
That same night, I made these lovely waffle-shaped pieces of charcoal. I was on a roll!
Another cosplay outfit Mira came up with.
Mira got this drum for Christmas. It's got a beautiful sound and it's easy to learn. She really likes it. So do her younger siblings.
"Do you like my hat?"
I didn't get Emilia's crocheted gift done before Christmas. It was SO time consuming probably 40 - 50 hours of work. (I don't make enough at this job! :)) But she loved it. This is her cosplaying as Tubbo with her Tubbo doll. This is from the Dream SMP that she was telling you about in her post.
I didn't feel like trying to keep Harrison from drowning himself while Jules was taking a bath, so I just let him play with the water from the outside. At one point, he managed to dive head-first into the water, so then I took his diaper off and watched him a lot more closely. He's stable enough now that I can put him in the bathtub without the baby bathtub in there, but I still have to watch him like a hawk. Boys are little dare-devils!
This sign at Smiths made me crack up.
They are starting to play together (for very short periods of time). It's priceless.
More pictures by Jules:
Every day when I wake up, I have to take the cat water and food off the floor or Harrison will spill the water all over himself, dump all the cat food out and try to eat it. I have to shut all the bathroom doors completely (because he has figured out how to open them if they're not latched) and splash in the toilet, take apart the kids toilet that Jules still uses, unroll all the toilet paper, or play with the toilet scrubber or the plunger. I have to make sure there is a basket in between our washer and dryer, or he will go play in the cat litter and try to eat the poop. I have to listen for whether he's digging in the trash can, or he will find food in there and try to eat it (like banana or orange peels or toast his sisters didn't finish, etc.). He's also tried to take an old Drano bottle out of the recycle bin and he took an empty soda can out and cut open both of his index finger knuckles trying to stick things in it. In this image, I left the dishwasher slightly ajar and he managed to pull the door down, climb on and grab the cat water from the counter. Luckily I saw him before he dumped it on his head.
Cassie came and stayed over night one weekend and that night, we all made flower fairy crowns. The next morning, they all decided to cosplay. Cecily is a rainbow unicorn, Mira is a forest fairy, Cassie is a forest goblin (I think), and Emilia ignored the theme and dressed up as a character named Spamton from a video game she likes called Deltarune.
Jules discovered that you can take the droppers from her science kit apart and put the pieces on her fingers. She calls them her "cutes and pokies."
She's also named these two figurines "Bat Guy" and "Punch."
Jules made a picture with a pegboard that we have. She said it was a birthday cake.
Another mess Harrison figured out he could make. This is like 100 garbage bags that he pulled apart one night. I now have to rubberband the cupboard doors together.
When Cassie came over, she made a "rocket ship" for Jules. They took trips to the moon and fought the bad guys from PJ Masks. She was in heaven.
I love that Harrison is looking up at Mira in this picture. He adores his sisters.
For Christmas, we got a book called "The Adventure Challenge: Family Edition." This was the first challenge we tried. That was two Sundays ago. It was actually a really fun evening activity that got us all doing the same thing together.
She's such a little performer. I love it.
This was from our second "The Adventure Challenge" challenge. This one was not as fun because we found it hard to accomplish.
This is the result of our efforts. Everybody has a weird rubber duck.
Harrison really enjoyed lasagna.
Last Monday, I helped at Cecily's Valentine's Day part. I read love-themed books. It was loud. But I love how Cecily's box turned out. It's Sprig from Amphibia.
Harrison eating toast his sister threw in the trash. He was making "om-nom-nom" noises when i found him.
Nana and Grandpa moved from Spanish Fork to Colorado to live with the Staleys in mid-January. Alison and James are living in their house and paying them rent, so it's helping both of them. Since Nana wasn't around to give them Valentines, she sent them in the mail. The kids all loved them.
Emilia tried out for the school musical a few weeks ago and found out that she made it into the cast as part of the ensemble (so she'll play an extra basically). She was happy as she didn't necessarily want a lead role. She had a hair cut appointment set up, but ended up having play practice that day, so I went to the appointment instead and set up a new one for her. I got bangs. *gasp*
I think we're caught up! Wahoo! I don't know if I'll be posting every week again. But I hope I can do it more than once a year. Love you all!
