Biker Family

Update: Bikes are made by Taga. I LOVE them. But $1500 is crazy for a bike considering I haven't ridden   a bike since I was like 12.


I'm hoping that someone out there can help me out and tell me who makes these bikes that Tori Spelling and Dean McDermot are riding?


Shawn and I have been talking about getting bikes now for awhile and these are GREAT!

source

Octo-Mom vs Oprah

I've mentioned before how much I love watching Oprah. It's truly one of my favorite guilty pleasures of being a SAHM (along with All My Children {Totally want to see the JR/Annie thing pan out} and General Hospital {I loooooove Dante/Dominic}). 


So when I heard that Oprah was going to have the infamous Octo-Mom on her show I jumped at the chance to view her self-inflicted train wreck.


But I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised at how she handled dealing with 14 kids and even thrown back a little bit by Oprah's questions.

Yikes! Those stretch marks!!!!!

I guess on one hand I did see that she is was clearly delusional when it came to her decision reasoning to having more kids. I come from a big family. The oldest of 8 with the youngest being 8 so I have a soft spot in my heart for large families. I don't even completely knock her for wanting to have more kids when she was a single mother. But her reason of wanting to create this "village" as she put it made her sound like that 16 year old teen mom that wants a baby so she can have "someone to love her". 


Clearly Nadya has some emotional hurts from her parents that she needs to work on.

And despite all the negative criticism that seems to be hurled her way constantly she had a very clear view on how messed up she was, but how much she wanted to just be a good mother and provide for her kids.


But the thing I was most disappointed about was Oprah's questions.


1. Oprah asked Nadya if she had ever thought about giving any of the children up for adoption or turning them over to foster care.

-How are you supposed to decide which of your kids you want to give away? How can you even fathom that? How does that benefit your child? Doesn't it make that child's life even harder having to wrestle with the fact that he lived with his mom for 6 years and that at 6 she sent him and 4 other siblings to live with someone else....and kept 7 others. Can you imagine the amount of rejection he/she would feel? Someone on Twitter responded to me that only someone without kids could ask that question....


2. The second question and or statement made by both Oprah and Nadya was that with 14 kids (even with 2 parents) you can't possibly give them all of the love and attention that they need and that they would grow up lacking. I can't even begin to tell you how annoyed this statement makes me (I've also heard it said about the Duggars). Both my husband and I come from big families and I think its certainly fair to say that neither of us felt slighted by any love or attention from our parents.


1 Corinthians 10:13 says that God will not give you more then you can handle and if you believe children are from God why would he give my parents, Nadya Suleman, or even the Gosselins tribes of kids that they wouldn't be able to love properly?


Nadya was an only child and she expressed how she didn't get enough love from her parents. 


But I have a hard time believing that if you have more then 2.5 kids or even 4 kids that you won't be able to give them everything they needed. Maybe not financially, but look at celebrity kids who are completely messed up, yet have been handed everything on a silver platter.


And last but not least I'd like to address the fact that Nadya wouldn't do a porn if they offered her a $100 million. I would just like to say to that company....How dare you? Give me a call and I'll do it for 25 million.....and dinner at the Geisha house.

(Gosh and how jealous are you of Jenna Lyons- Executive Creative Designer at JCrew (Featured on Wednesday's Oprah? Ahhhhhhh I want her job! And those fantastic sequence pants she had on)

Definition of Irony

Did you read my post yesterday about wanting to have more kids?

I had my IUD put in place in April and my follow up was 6 weeks later. Well I forgot about my appointment and kept forgetting to reschedule. 

It wasn't until last week that I got my reminder card for my "yearly well woman's visit" that I remembered about having my follow up.

Today was that day. 

I go in and jokingly say to the nurse that I hope my IUD hasn't rusted up there. Of course that's the beauty of the Mirena. It won't do that.

So my nurse practitioner gets me to put my feet in the stirrups and gets me all uncomfortable and she says "Well, your IUD is hanging out"

Alarm bells are RINGING in my head!

"I'm not pregnant am I?!" I screech.

Of course she couldn't tell and she decided to take my IUD out and since the last time my husband and I "visited" with each other was Sunday she wanted to wait until next Wednesday to take blood and put the IUD back in on the 15th, If I was in fact not knocked up.
  
Question: Do I take this as my sign to get impregnated again?  

I'm leaning towards no, but unsure because since Penny's birth Shawn and I both have talked about doing this again.

And what better way for God to tell you what to do but make all your safety options null and void?!

Scratching the baby itch

My beautiful niece made her arrival on Thursday. Being in the delivery room, and helping my sister nurse, and hearing Penny's tiny little cries sent me back to 14 months ago when my own terror on two legs was just a tiny little boy.

Since I've had Phoenix I have had two minor pregnancy scares. Once I had Phoenix I have literally gone back and forth on the option of having another baby. 


I'm the oldest of 8 kids ranging in ages from 22 to 8. I've been around kids my whole life and when I was younger I resented being from an older family.


But when my family packed up and we moved to Maryland when I was 17 my family was all I had. When you've already graduated high school it's hard to find friends. So my sisters, brothers, and I developed a very close relationship.


Combine that with not enjoying being away from home when I was 15 at Bible College and my urge to have tons of kids started to hit me. A number somewhere between 4 & 6 sounded pretty good to me.

But then my lovable, snugly, cooperative infant turned into a spirited (this is Tracey Hogg's description of him) wild energetic, fiesty, spicy, toddler.

I can barely manage to make a 20 minute trip to the grocery store with Phoenix before he's throwing his paci because he's mad at me or trying to lick the tops of the cans!


So I knew that at least until Phoenix was calm or three which ever came first, and at this point it both seems so far off, that more babies are out of the question!


And at times I also feel like we are complete family. When I envision our future I'm not always sure I see other little ones running around.


But when I walked into the L&D room Thursday afternoon I was hit with that feeling of excitement I had when I was rolled into L&D exactly 14 months and a day before! And then when the stunning Ms. Penelope made her debut and I got to snuggle with her and smell that new baby smell! I was enthralled!


And I walked out of the hospital wanting to make the first appointment I could with my Gyno to have my safety friend removed and get knocked up STAT!


But then Phoenix screamed and hit me and I was jutted back into reality.

But still over the past few days I've been able to spend with Penny that desire keeps coming back.


So those of you with more then one, what made you decide it was time to try again?



And those of you who have only one what made you decide one was it and do you ever get the desire to have more?

Back to school blues UPDATED

Like a lot of the kids in America right now I was very sad to see the kids go back to school. I lost my nanny's! For the entire summer my little sisters have come over to hang out during the day AND to entertain Phoenix.

It was so easy to get stuff done, but now school has gone back and we are once again on our own.
To make matters worse two more teeth are coming in and unlike other times this has been HELL!!

Yesterday Phoenix was so cranky, whiny, and snotty that I accomplished ZILCH! All he wanted to do was cry all day long. He didn't want to eat, he didn't want to play. His butt was red and raw so he didn't want to be carried on my hip. It was pure exhaustion!

Finally after the second forced nap he woke up and was in a good mood playing with his ball popper toy and then I opened the front door and he started screaming because he wanted to go out! I just couldn't go out then because it was like a 100 degrees, so it took me a good 30 minutes to settle him down again. The only thing that would settle him was this (AND OF COURSE NOT IN PINK.LOL)

That was my Saturday,Sunday and Monday basically. Now he's sleeping and seems to be in a better mood, so we'll see how things go.

I also had to play nurse on Sunday to the other boy.

My parents live in this huge house up in the mountains and my brothers have finally gotten the dirt bikes they have always wanted. Of course every Sunday we are up on the mountain for dinner and Shawn, my brother-in-law, the brothers, and my Dad are out scouting for new trails and building ramps and all kinds of dangerous things!

This Sunday the guys were being all 007. Come to find out they had found some trail to go biking on that actually had a sign that said "Beware of Wilderness" (yeah did I mention there have been bear sightings near their house?!) and had been gone for awhile and when they came back my husband and thrown off of the bike and his back was all beat up! He says if he hadn't been wearing a helmet he surely would have cracked his skull open!

I had to pour peroxide all over his back and hands! I felt so bad for him because he was on the bathroom floor screaming into a towel!

And don't be fooled by these pictures. This was after bandages and peroxide! It was horrid!

And do you know that he got up and talked about how he couldn't wait to do it again?!

All I asked was if the life insurance policy was up to date.....

UPDATED: PICTURES WITH THE BANDAGES OFF