Refinement

The last 8 months the Lord has definitely been building by character and working on my refinement. I'm thinking I prayed for patience, you know that prayer you are never suppose to pray unless you want things to get CRAZY. Well I think I prayed it in a moment of desperation when I was first home from the hospital with a newborn and a crazy two year old. I can probably even pinpoint the day. The first morning my husband kissed me goodbye after I'd had three hours of sleep and left for work with me home now with TWO kids to keep alive. Yeah, it was probably that day. That was back when I thought, give it a month or so and we will have this kid sleeping all night just like his big sister. HA!! We are now at 8 months old and Miles has slept through the night twice in his entire life!!! On a good night I get a three hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep but most nights its in the one or two hour range. I'm also pretty sure this is my fault. Clara was an amazing sleeper, still is, and slept through the night really early on. I would hear people talk about how their kids didn't sleep and I definitely had those thoughts, "well clearly they aren't being consistent in their scheduling" or "they aren't letting them cry it out"or "have they even read Baby Wise because really its quite simple." Also known as judgement. I've had quite the lesson in being critical or judgmental of others and although its been a rough sleep deprived road, I'm thankful. I'm thankful that now when I hear about another mom struggling I can sympathize and offer encouragement rather than pass judgement.

Stage two of building my character has involved almost everything in our entire house breaking. This little adventure began when Miles was one month old and my husband was sent to Germany for a week with work. This was also the week before my daughter's second birthday. Clara is a daddy's girl and does not do well when daddy has to work late, much less when he leaves for an entire week. She was also still adjusting to not being the center of attention anymore with a newborn around and it snowed on and off that entire month so we weren't getting outside to play much. All this added together made for a very very difficult two year old, a newborn which brought the usual challenges and a mother who was trying desperately to pull off a birthday party for said two year old (not wanting her to loose out just because mommy had a baby (yeah what was I thinking)). Side note, I put most of the blame here on Pintrest and their stupid cute birthday stuff for kids which makes us mothers feel like we must be trash if we don't have an amazing birthday planned and executed for our kids. Poor Miles is getting cupcakes from Harris Teeter and maybe I'll gift wrap a few of Clara's old toys (poor second child)). Anyway, as if this craziness wasn't enough (my mother-in-law was there which is the only reason we all survived) our plumbing started acting up. I call a plumber, he comes out and says its some vent thing in the spare bath, replaces a piece and leaves. Everything seems better so problem solved. Two days later my parents come up for the party the next day and my dad takes the dog out in the backyard to play (don't get me started on how neglected the poor dog is). He quickly comes back in and tells me I need to come take a look. We haven't been outside the house in 3 or 4 days because of the snow so I have no idea what he's talking about. Well I get back there and the vent has blown off the sewer pipe in the backyard and apparently when the plumbing "seemed better" it was in fact because all the sewage was just dumping into our backyard!! FOR TWO DAYS!! This is probably when I almost had a nervous break down. I'm so thankful for parents and in-laws who aren't afraid to take charge and are willing to do just about anything to help me. To make this very very long story a little shorter it took 3 plumbers and two visits from the City of Cary to get the problem solved. At one point they told us that they were probably going to have to dig the line up and since our house hadn't been build with a sewer clean-out the correct distance from the main line (because there is a creek in our backyard) we would have to pay for it to the tune of $6,000. Praise the Lord the city was finally able to get the line clear. It turns out when they were remodeling the house, apparently the contractors were throwing leftover pieces of wood down the plumbing rather than the trash!! So there were three pieces of two by four in our sewer line!!