Ready for Bed

During all of the moving craziness (when I was apparently not paying enough attention to my children) Julia came home from school one day and said she wanted to get her pjs on. She then proceeded to jammify herself in record speed. When I mentioned that she had done it super-quick, she said, "Do you know how I did it so fast? I had my nightgown on under my clothes!"

 Yep, all dang day under the hot Phoenix sun, J wore two layers of clothes so she would already be in pajamas when she got home.

With all of the pajama wearing and blankie-sneaking 

that goes on with this girl, you would think she
would be more excited to go to bed at night...

Hot Lips

A little while before we moved, I was pulling warm clothes out of the dryer and a tube of Chapstick fell onto the floor. My smart cookie instincts told me to open that tube right up, and when I did, molten hot Chapstick dripped right down onto my tired little feet. I consider it a tender mercy that the tube didn't leak all over my newly cleaned load of laundry.

We were 4 days away from moving, and I would not have dealt well with ruined clothes in that moment.

Moving On and Standing Still

For quite a while, Craig and I have been considering the idea of moving closer to his parents so that we would be more available to help them. (Read: Craig thought it was a good idea and I wasn't ready.) Craig's sweet dad has Parkinson's Disease and his equally sweet mom is caring for him entirely on her own. We were already relatively close to them (about 35 minutes) but knew that we needed to be closer. Until really recently, though, the time just didn't seem right. Then, one day, something seemed to just click and we both knew that the time had come to move on. (Read: I was finally (mostly) ready.)

So began the whirlwind process of refinancing our house so we could afford to rent it out, asking the ginormous favor of my parents to let us move into their temporarily vacant house for the summer, hiring a property manager, looking for renters, renting a storage unit, packing up all of our belongings, rearranging someone else's house to accommodate our needs, and saying goodbye to a house and a ward that we love, all the while wondering how on earth everything was going to work out. Oh, and also trying to find a new house to move into before my parents come back in the fall. It has been a period of overwhelmingly nightmarish and hectic scrambling, the likes of which I have never experienced.

Now that we are semi-settled (as much as we can be while still looking for a permanent house and knowing that we will be moving yet again with in the next few months) I feel like I am in a weird sort of limbo. Not really in my old life, but not quite into my new life yet either. After such an acutely overwhelming experience, I somehow feel...underwhelmed. When so much was going on, I really didn't have time to think about how I was feeling (besides the un-ignorable sensation of constant stress) and now that the rush is over (but with so much still left undecided) it's hard not to feel blue. And knowing that this faith-stretching, prayer-saying, breath-holding time in my life is not yet complete doesn't exactly help the sunshiny rays of optimism shine through to my heart. One of these days I am going to run out of sighs completely.

Thank goodness all of the most vital parts of my life are still in tact: wonderful marriage, amazing kiddos, happy family life. And thank goodness we are living next to a pool for the summer. (Since it appears I have not yet had enough experience in the holding my breath department this year.)

P.S.

The girls are settling in just fine...

...as are their beloved stuffed animals.

Baby's First Car Wash

Alexa's first time in a car wash was not the exciting event that I thought it would be. In fact, she was pretty freaked out about the whole thing. But at least now I know that she is adorable even while grimacing.

On a side note, look how good her cousin's little 4-wheeler looks on her:

I think red might be her color.

Left to Their Own Devices

Apparently the girls know me well enough to know that when I say I will open their new gum for them "in a minute," I don't really mean that it will only be a minute. And when that minute expires, they are forced to take matters into their own tentacles.

Savanna sure is handy with a pair of scissors. She didn't want to be in the picture; she was too busy chewing her gum in a dark corner.