You Can Lead a Horse to Water...

One thing that I have learned very clearly over the past several years is that if you need to be humbled, become a parent. Oh, how parenting continues to humble me in every possible way. In the past, if anybody had told me that they were still sleep deprived when their baby was four months old, or that their baby didn’t sleep through the night until they were 6 months or 8 months or a year or whatever, I would have outwardly sympathized with them, and inwardly I probably would have thought something along the lines of, “Well, I know how you can fix that. Do a little sleep training.” Jake and Addi were both incredible sleepers very early on, and I chalked that up to the consistent schedules that we kept them and the great “sleep training” that Jay and I did with them. Well, fast forward to now, and I am eating those thoughts. Tate has very different plans when it comes to sleeping. My philosophy of, Be consistent with them and they will sleep, is proving to not be a universal truth. Tate has sleep plans of his own, with no regard for what my plans might be. I simply never know what I am going to get with him. One night he may only be up once (even that would have been unheard of with Jake and Addi at this point, but is a “Hallelujah” night with Tate), and I will think that we have turned a corner and he is finally starting to get it. And then the next night, he is up what seems like most of the night. Or, one day he’ll go down for naps with a smile on his face and actually nap for more than 40 minutes at a time, and the next day he decides that naps are not on his agenda for the day.

Thankfully, I am a much more relaxed parent at this point. This would have stressed me out before and I would have thought that I was doing things all wrong. This time though, I really am enjoying and relishing this baby stage so much more, and I am able to actually be thankful for the time that I have with Tate in my arms...even if it is the middle of the night and I continue to be sleep deprived (despite the fact that my baby is over 4 months old). I am coming to the conclusion that he might just be one of those babies that doesn’t sleep through the night until...whenever. And I’m okay with that (at least I say that now). I’m just going to continue to be grateful for this miraculous, amazing, happy little person, regardless of how much sleep he deprives us of. Because, like they say about horses and water, I can lead my little Taters to his crib, but I can’t make him sleep!

Jay is probably giving him a pep talk before putting him down for the night (And I say, "putting him down for the night" very loosely. It would probably be more accurate to say that he's giving him a pep talk before putting him down for a couple hours!)

But really, how can you be frustrated with this little guy? Just look at that angelic face! :)

Tate comes with us wherever we go around the house and hangs out in his little chair. Here he's keeping Addi company while she washes the dishes.

Valentine's Day

We don't usually do much around here for Valentine's Day. Last year, the only thing on my mind was hearing one miraculous little heartbeat. This year, I decided that I wanted to do something to make it special for the kids. That probably had something to do with all the cute ideas that my sister kept sending me from her newfound Pinterest obsession, making me feel like an inadequate mom for not doing something of the sort! (Just kidding.) I had some very grandiose ideas in mind that never came to fruition, but I did manage to do a couple of things that were a big hit with the kids. One thing that Jay and I did was to write lots of reasons that we love them on individual little paper hearts. Then we hid those all around the house for the kids to collect and put in their Valentine jar. The idea was originally for me to sew all kinds of little fabric hearts together and stuff them. Ha. That didn't happen. Then, I was going to sew together the paper hearts and stuff them. That turned into me stuffing them with tissue paper and stapling them together, and then partway through that project saying, "Why did I think that puffy hearts would be so much better?" At that point, they became just construction paper hearts with no stuffing. Regardless, the kids LOVED this.

I also made some Valentine treat bags for them with s'mores and heart shaped rice krispy treats...

And, of course, no holiday would be complete without the Herron children tradition of wrapping up items of theirs from around the house and giving them to us. This time, we each made out with some homemade cards and a dollar in pennies, and I also got some fancy jewelry and a little pink notebook...

The Great Outdoors

I often dream about what it would be like to live somewhere in the middle of nowhere on a big piece of land. Our kids could run free in the outdoors, we could have some chickens and a dairy cow (that the kids would have to milk), and I could avoid people to my heart's content. There is a country song that starts out, "Well, I grew up wild and free, walkin' these fields in my barefeet. There wasn't no place I couldn't go, with a .22 rifle and a fishin' pole." I hear that and I want it for my kids and I wish that they could grow up like that. Don't get me wrong, I know that I romanticize the "country lifestyle" in my mind, but I still often think about how great it would be.

Sometimes, in my dreaming about how great it would be to live in wide open spaces somewhere, I forget about how great it is right here. Granted, we can't have a cow and I can't send Jake out to shoot us a wild turkey for dinner (which would give him tremendous pleasure), but we do live in such an amazing place. We just have to share it with a lot of other people. One of my favorite perks about our particular location is that if we walk a few houses down to the end of our street, we get to a trail that leads us directly into a wilderness park. Jay and the kids love to ride their bikes through there, and I like to take the kids there to just explore and enjoy nature. I don't take advantage of it nearly as much I should though. And, I can't exactly let the kids run free there - you know, on account of the occasional mountain lion, and the fact that it is not our personal property and, therefore, crazy people might also be running free there. But, whenever we spend time there, I always promise that we will do it more often. The latest activity of choice "down in the dirt" (as the kids refer to the area at the end of our street) is shooting practice...

Hopefully, they'll get good enough that if we do ever end up in the country somewhere, I can send them out to shoot me a little something for dinner.