Join us or sponsor us and be part of the fun! Our goal is $1000…you can donate online at our  FundEasy site. Just look at all the fun we had last year!

She was exactly a week late, but 10 hours early enough to save us from being induced at the hospital. She is a very accommodating little girl as she allowed us to celebrate all of Holy Week and Easter Sunday before making her debut into the world. We went into labor at 11:38 pm Easter Sunday when my water broke. We called our wonderful doctor and he was already on the way to the hospital.

Unfortunately when we arrived at the hospital around 12:30 am my contractions had stopped. There was talk about starting petocin, which I wasn’t thrilled about. By the time all the monitors were hooked up and working, it was 1:45 and still nothing. I finally started moving around to get them going again. Dr. Kalamarides called the doula to come to the hospital. Christine M. is amazing! She works at the Vitae Clinic with Dr. K. She had come to our house on Saturday to give me a pressure point foot massage to help start labor. She said 14 of the last 16 women she did this to started labor on their own within 48 hours. It worked for us!

Christine arrived around 2:30 and my contractions FINALLY started going. This is the 4th labor that has been all back labor. I am still waiting to know what a front contraction feels like! The ironic thing was that as I was working through the contractions I would lean forward into Adam and the monitor was not reading the contractions! I was not getting credit for those hard contractions!!

Thankfully Christine and Adam were there and really became a rock for my emotional support. I am not a night person and I had only 2 hours of sleep before we went in to the hospital. Well 2-1/2 hours goes by fast. And I went from 5 cm to pushing our baby out!

We called the kids a few hours later. The girls were excited. Fulton wouldn’t speak to us. He was really banking on a little brother and has wanted to share his room with someone for so long. When I finally was able to talk to him, he was in tears. BUT after chatting with him about his great responsibility as protector of all these girls, he came around and when the kids visited later that afternoon, he was thrilled with his baby sister!

The second day at the hospital was not so great. The nurses noticed Brigid was having rapid breathing. This led to our pediatrician ordering a chest x-ray to make sure there was not fluid in her lungs. We did not want to do this and thought it a little excessive, but conceded. Not coincidentally, our pediatrician called with the good news that she was fine at the same time that our good friend Norma brought me communion! I suppose that Jesus wanted to be present and console me that all was well. He’s so good that way! Brigid also had some jaundice, but thankfully it worked itself out without having to do any blood draws on day 5 when it usually peaks.

I also have a similar milk supply issue as I did with Gianna and Cecilia. Thankfully we started supplementing and pumping before we left the hospital. I was keeping an eye on it and Brigid didn’t lose any more weight by the 5 day check. I am taking some herbs that help with lactation and beefing up on my foods that support a good milk supply.

Stressing out with how much milk I am making is not optimal with 4 other children to love and educate. So our pediatrician and I came up with a reasonable supplementing plan that has given me a lot of peace and allowed me to enjoy Brigid in a way that I missed with Cecilia when we were going through this with her.

The other kids have been great since we’ve been home. It has taken some adjusting, but they are really trying hard.

Special thanks to Aunt Mary who came to watch the kids when we went to the hospital and to the Shearer family who took the kids another night. We have been so blessed with all the friends and family who have been praying unceasingly for us and little Brigid! Thanks to all the wonderful friends who are bringing us meals threes days a week until the second week of May. God Bless you all!

A homeschooling mama friend of ours created a Care Calendar for Meal support if you would like to help us with meals. At this point with baby #5, meals would tend to be the most helpful. Here’s the info you need to sign up.

Thanks in advance for your generosity to our family!

===================================
HELPER LOGON
===================================
The HELPER logon is used by family and friends
that would like to sign-up to help a loved one.

To access Sharon Gretencord’s personal CareCalendar site,
visit http://www.carecalendar.org/logon/106941 and enter
the following information in the appropriate spaces:

CALENDAR ID : 106941
SECURITY CODE : 5652

===================================.

For our spiritual reading, the kids and I are doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. For my grown-up version, I am re-reading Consoling the Heart of Jesus by Fr. Michael Gaitley. It is a “Do-It-Yourself Retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.” I read it last summer when I was have a difficult time  spiritually. Within just a few pages of reading it, my soul was fill with such peace. With the coming of a new baby and all the changes that will happen in our lives, I am in need of that peace again. This book speaks to me so loudly and in it, I hear the words that I need to allow Jesus to be my savior and let His mercy into our lives.

With the children, I am reading My Path to Heaven: A Young Person’s Guide to the Faith by Fr. Geoffrey Bliss and Illustrated by Caryll Houselander. Caryll Houselander is an author that our friend Fr. Tim would often quote on his blog. Then I bought one of her children’s books called Catholic Tales for Boys and Girls. It is a lovely book and most of the stories make me cry because they are so beautiful. My Path to Heaven is equally as lovely and the children enjoy the illustrations and taking some time to talk about our relationship with God and everything that he has given us to get to Him.

Adam and I celebrated our 9th anniversary last month. We ended up having dinner at Bucca di Bepo’s. That was where we had our wedding rehearsal dinner and honestly the last time we’d been there together. Ironically enough, we were seated in the same room that we had our rehearsal dinner in. Brought back a lot of good memories not only of our wedding but our honeymoon in Italy.

Therese also celebrated her 8th birthday in January. She is a marvelous child of God. We’re still working on honing down the sharp edges but she is an incredible little girl. She chose a tea party for her birthday theme this year and we invited 10 of her friends. She had a lot of fun and it was funny to see all the girls react to tea! A few actually drink tea at their house but most do not. I had a medley of fruit teas for their enjoyment and most liked them. I found a set of tea party cookie cutter and Adam helped me decorate them. Instead of cake, Therese chose ‘fun cones,’ which are cake  baked in ice cream cones. We had a short game, craft, lunch and cone decorating.

With January being a big pro-life month, our parish pro-life group put up the cemetery of the innocence again. It is a great catalyst to speak with our kids about abortion. Every time we pray the rosary or even our night prayers they are keenly aware of this terrible time in our country where babies are being killed my their own mothers. We also went to the Texas Rally for Life, but forgot our camera so we are without a picture of that!

Before the baby comes, I’ve been trying to make all my little helpers a little more independent. The first step has been teaching them to get breakfast on their own. Cereal is pretty easy, but I have spoiled my children with nice hot breakfasts like omelets, migas, breakfast tacos, waffles, and pancakes. Last week Fulton attempted to make his own omelet and did a pretty good job. We have a new waffle iron whose recipes make around 48 waffles per recipe. It’s great to freeze the left overs and that gives us another 3 days of breakfast that the kids can just pop in the toaster. Then they just spread some homemade apple butter or honey on them.

We also got the girls a new bunk bed for their room. Therese and Gianna had been sharing a full size. Fulton was still in a toddler bed and he got the full size. They are very much enjoying their new sleeping arrangements. Perhaps Cecilia is the only troublesome sleeper of late. She will wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning and come down to our room, climb in our bed, and start to cuddle with me. She’s SO cute and it breaks my heart to send her upstairs, so I usually let Adam play bad cop and do that! But inevitably she’ll be back down between 6 and 7 a.m.

Speaking of Cecilia…she is continuing her speech therapy. Although she is talking a ton more, her clarity is not quite where we want it. So we’ll continue a little longer until she can speak more clearly. The therapist did say that at her next evaluation, she probably won’t qualify for services anymore because after 3 years old, ‘clarity’ in speech is not a reason to keep a child in the program. I’m am totally fine with that. And probably after the baby is born, we’ll stop.

Earlier this month, my kindred spirit, Mrs. Cey, came for a visit. It was just what my soul needed! We enjoyed a lot of carefree timelessness. Cecilia warmed up very quickly to her God mother probably because our kids love her almost as much as I do! We had a great weekend and she helped us so much getting the bunkbeds and taking up the cemetery of the innocence.

That same weekend, Adam and Fulton went to help the Sisters of Mary with their yard clean up day. Now if I can only get my husband to pull the weeds in MY yard!

Botany has been keeping us on our toes with several projects. We learned about pollination, fruits, roots, and stems. Last week we planted our spring garden. Hopefully we’ll see a nice yield. We already have some spinach, lettuce, swiss chard, beets and carrots growing from when I planted a couple of months ago. The rain has been nice in making most of that come up.

In our study of roots, we had to dig up weeds to see the difference between tap roots and fibrous roots. We did not have a shortage of weeds!

The kids’ favorite project was with our pollination chapter. They had to eat a powdered donut (with hands behind their back) then bite into a plain donut. The powder from the first donut would get on the plain donut –and voila! you see how bees and other pollinators transfer pollen from flower to flower.

Our last field trip was a couple of weeks ago and we went to the Houston Museum of Fine arts and the Natural Science Museum. In Fulton’s study of Ancient History this year, he studied Egypt and the some of the pharaohs including King Tut. HMFA had an exhibit of some of treasures found in his tomb. It was a special treat for me because 17 years ago, I went with my parents to Egypt and saw many of these and more in Cairo at the Egyptian Museum of Antiquity and in the Valley of the Kings at his tomb. The Natural Science Museum had an exhibit of the Civil War. Although we are not there in our history study with Therese, at least Adam and I enjoyed it. It is supposed to be something you could get through in an hour and a half, but the avid readers that we are only made it through a third of the exhibit in an hour and a half. We had to high tail it at the end. BUT we did get to see the original Emancipation Proclamation and the original hand written 13th Amendment. One of the museum guides said that those will probably not be displayed again in our lifetime.

Fulton started a monthly chess club. He’s so excited about it. He started in the intermediate level because he picked it up so quickly here at home. In April, we have registered him in t-ball. This will be our first go at sports. The girls are not interested. So I’ll be looking for something wonderful for them too.

Fulton also just finished studying Ancient Greece. So just tonight Adam helped the kids make a Greek war ship out of ice cream! I think this has been the most  popular project so far. The best part of it of course is eating it!

In the next few weeks we are going to start a home economics curriculum for the kids–one for boys and one for girls. I’m looking forward to it as something fun that will give the kids a little more responsibility.

We had a great end to last year and a very blessed beginning to 2012.

After about 3 weeks of being sick, I finally was back up to health the week before Christmas. It was just in time to find out that I had failed my first glucose test for gestational diabetes. Not to be beat by it, I put myself on a gestational diabetes diet the week before and after Christmas. I made sure to exercise almost every day and by the time I took my second test, I passed with flying colors. But I cheated on my diet last weekend and I definitely felt a difference, so I put myself back on it.

Christmas was wonderful. We went to Mass on Christmas Eve and drove to my parents’ house on Christmas Day. After 25 years they are closing down their video store. It’s been part of our lives since I was in the 5th grade. They truly deserve to retire and enjoy their 60s. This will also give them an opportunity to visit us and my other siblings more often. They had to move out of their building by the 31st. So they told us to take all and any movies we wanted. To that end, we came home with a box of movies to add to our collection. Of course since the quality of movies has gone down in the last decade, it was a small box!

It is certainly a blessing to spend time as a family and Adam was off  last week. I find it sad when parents don’t know how to spend time with their kids and “can’t wait until school starts again.” I don’t know how to be without my kids. We’ve kept busy playing with their Christmas toys (Legos and Calico Critters were a big hit this year) and games, watching movies, having afternoon tea parties, going on walks on the neighborhood bike trail and playing Pooh Sticks on the bridges. They haven’t complained about being bored and we’re enjoying our second week off until we start school again next week.

Adam finished out the year meeting his 2011 goal of making chocolate bean to bar. I am so proud of him. He’s worked so hard this last year reading and taking an online course. When I am fast asleep in our warm cozy bed, he’s up reading another book, looking up new information, learning how to do this and that. He amazes me. And the chocolate came out great! It is a 70% Dominican Republic. I love that all it has is cacao beans and sugar!!–no palm oils, soy lecithin, no extra anything!

We spent New Years Eve with our friends the Shearers who will be moving back to Austin sometime in February. Elizabeth was my confirmation sponsor some 13 years ago and they are Fulton’s God parents. We are also God parents to their oldest son. After 10 years living in different cities, it’s going to be fun getting to know them again while living only 15 minutes from each other!

And to start off our New Year, I received great news that Cecilia may soon be done with her speech and developmental therapy. Her developmental therapist said yesterday, “You know, I don’t think I really need to see her again.” I like the sound of that! She is as delightful as ever and even more so with all her new words and phrases.

The next three months will be busy and go very fast. Between all the schooling and field trips, we will look forward to our 9th anniversary next week. Then Therese will turn 8 (wow!) the week after and we’ll celebrate her and Fulton’s baptism anniversaries. One of my best friends will be visiting from California in early February and the Shearers will be moving down. We’ll also be helping plan a marriage retreat at our parish that will take place in late March. Oh yeah and we have Baby G’s arrival right around the corner in late March or early April.

Yesterday the kids made their O Antiphon houses. This year I also included a new tradition of O Antiphon coins. Each night the kids peek in the window of the day and find out what the O Antiphon is, then  we read the O Antiphon and they can enjoy one coin. 

But all in all, the party was great and the kids and Adam did a great job on their first play!

And since the next day, December 7, was the feast of St. Ambrose, we used the leftover cookies to make St. Ambrose and I also made some yummy beehive rolls!