This has been a fun and exciting week! Sadie found a fun dog park, I’ve had a math test, and studying for my psych final and oh yeah – K started Gymnastics! Sadie has been – out of control on the eating stuff issue. E.g. shoes, barbies, pillows, furniture, anything that little bugger can get her teeth into – say goodbye! Unfortunately with my schedule I just haven’t had time to run or rollerblade with her like I had intended. I keep finding a faceless, handless, and footless Ken, a half eaten shoe, and torn underwear. (She has an underwear fetish- super weird I know). So – I took her to the Elm Creek dog park in Maple Grove where she happily played and romped all around for nearly two hours! Its almost 30 acres of pure bliss for the Sadie meister. If I could get her to heel when I called for her – all would be perfect, but all in all she did pretty good. She enjoyed running around with her friends, and found quite a few little pups to romp around with. She also went swimming for the first time. There are a few ponds there for the dogs to swim in, and she went chasing after a ball. At first she didn’t know she could swim, but then she soon realized, hey – I can do it. She wasn’t eager to go off and train for swimming the english channel, but she still liked wading in the shallows. I think it will be a new semi regular venture for us because she proceeded to sleep for the rest of the night, and ate zero barbies Wednesday night! Barbie:1, Sadie:0. I have two lovely weeks left of school and a mere three days left of Algebra! I am SO EXCITED to be done with that class, although my next regular class in the fall will be Chemistry which I think involves plenty o’math. I just hope its not factoring polynomials! My psych final is next Wednesday- so if you think of it please pray for me to close out these next two weeks with a bang! Finally, after watching my niece’s dance competition K was wanting to do gymnastics again. While she was highly intrigued watching the dancing she voiced her opinion several times she wants to do gymnastics again. Since I wasn’t overly impressed with the place that she started out I researched a few other gyms in my area and found one super close to my house that looks and feels like a real gymnastics gym rather than a yuppy gym trying to pass off as a gymnastics gym. I don’t need K to be the next Shawn Johnson (unless she wants to), but better teaching methods are appreciated. She had her trial class earlier in the week and we’ve already had our permenant class again this week! Such a lucky girl doing it twice in a row. The thing I really like about this gym is that they do not have sessions. (e.g. 10 week sessions) – its perpetually all year ’round with no breaks, and you’re just billed monthly, and automatically which I like. If you want to quit- you quit. If you want to join, you join whenever. You don’t have to wait for a “session” to start. K listens very well to her teacher, and is really liking it. I think she was just to young, and I didn’t like how the other class was set up – too distracting. This class – they spend the 1st 10 minutes in the big gym with the “big girls” and then the rest of their class is spent in their classroom with the typical preschool gymnastics equipment. There is a window in the classroom that the parents can see through in the waiting room, except its a mirror to the kids- so they don’t get distracted by looking at mom and dad. I absolutely LOVE this place! Well tomorrow we’ve got a birthday party, errands, and more – so I best hop off to bed! Toodles!

There comes a point in time when you fall off the wagon – I’ve fallen off the wagon. Both in blogging and working out. In my defense I’m a bit busy with going back to school for pre-nursing, manning the house, and watching Little Miss. Thursday evening turned out to be a bit – stressful. Our good friend Lisa who sits for K on Tuesdays & Thursday’s noticed a tick on her upper leg but was unable to get it off- so I got home, took the tick off without waking her, and I thought all was well. Until about 11:45 p.m. when she started crying about her ear hurting. I gave her some Tyelenol, and she promptly fell back asleep. I did some more homework, and headed to bed about 12:30 a.m. when she really started hooping it up! So I brought her in my room where she proceeded to cry, and thrash around until 6:00 a.m. [Friday] when she FINALLY let me put ear numbing drops in her ears. I got a total of 45 minutes of sleep, obviously took her to the pediatrician, and sure enough – ear infection. She prescribed K a new antibiotic and little miss let me know how much she didn’t like the taste of it by refusing to take another sip of the 6mls required! Saturday we went to Cub so I could bribe her with yogurt, pudding, and sherbet if she took her meds. It seemed to work for the morning dose. Later in the day we headed up north to watch my nieces dance in a competition. They both did extremely well, and K enjoyed watching them dance. (I did too). My younger niece danced one of her routines to this song, which made me cry pathetically. Not just a spare tear here or there- no. Full on water works baby! (oh expletive – i’m crying again!) Once we got home from the dance competition it was medicine time, where K blatantly refused to take anymore meds. Crying, tantrums the whole bit. So I figured on Monday I’d call her pediatrician to get new meds. Today, I met up with a co-worker for church, where EBC hit it out of the ballpark again with the message. I love my church and the relevant messages they do week after week. Today was about starting over. If you’ve made a mistake or a bad choice- just start over! I had plans of taking lil K to Chutes and Ladders down in Bloomington, which is the coolest outdoor park around, but the ground was still wet due to a rainstorm all day yesterday, so we went home and decided to do some yard work instead (still outside -so not sure on my logic). I knew I needed to do a little yard tidying up before it turned into the amazon rainforest it did last year. I mowed, dismantled the overgrown garden, and scooped poop! Fun times! Afterwards we came inside to give K a bath, because she was mud from head to toe! After she got out I had this great idea of going to to the gym, and K was so excited because there is an indoor playground which she loves. Well, we drove 9 miles to the gym and arrived at 4:30 where we learned the kids area closes at four. Well, now I’ve got a severely disappointed four year old on my hands to which she exclaims, “Let’s go to McDonald’s and play inside..”, so, reluctantly I agreed. Had chicken nuggets and a Dr. Peper, all of which tasted kind a gross. But…little miss had found two girlfriends to play with there so it was worth it. Tomorrow I’ll be attempting to go to the gym again (Since Kirra today pointed to my muffin top and exclaimed I was “fat”). Once we got home it was time to settle down, so I turned on a little Curious George for her, and then a thought occurred to me! Put her medicine in one of her smoothie bottles w/o her seeing! I did, and she is none the wiser exclaiming, “These smoothie drinks are delicious”. Score 1 for mommy!

This past month has been a season of growing for me. Jason has traveled for work before, but never for a whole month at a time. This left me with our four year old, our four pets, the house, and other obligations I’m a part of to manage solo. Tonight, after 30 long days and nights we are finally picking Jason up from the airport, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic. Jason and I were both in the Navy, stationed together, however two of our 4 combined deployments we spent away from each other. First – I was in Okinawa Japan, while he was on the remote tiny island of Diego Garcia, smack dab in the middle of the Indian ocean, and once more when he was sent to a city just north of Baghdad in harms way while I was safely in Guam. Both of these times we spent six months apart from each other, and I absolutely cannot imagine ever spending that much time apart again. One month was difficult enough. I can’t imagine if we were only 1/6 of the way through. One month was still a very big change for us. Usually when Jason has had to travel for work he would be gone during the week, and would come home on the weekends, or at most every other weekend, which before [this trip] I thought was excruciating! The first night after Jason left I just crumbled, and wept. I thought I’m never going to make this work, how can I do this? I reached out to God, and told Him [audibly] that I couldn’t do it on my own, and how much I needed Him. “From the depths of despair, O Lord, I call for your help.”Psalm 130:1 I’ve heard of people calling on the help of God, and I’ve called on Him before, but never like this. 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you”, and Proverbs 3:5 states, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.” I decided in that moment to fully surrender my life again to His command and trust that he would get us through. By obeying God in this way – to let him be in the drivers seat, He provided in ways I never could have imagined. Everything always seemed to work out. If I had things to do – that required concentration, Kirra seemed content to entertain herself (which is new). I had more patience with everyone, and amazingly everything seemed to get done. At times it was like God made time stand still so I could get everything done I needed to, because my evenings never flew by. I saw his Word fulfilled in my life this past month through Isaiah 26:12, “Lord, you will grant us peace. All we have accomplished is really from you” and from Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:5, “Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God.” God provided me with people as well. He provided me with friends and family members to watch Kirra when things came up, or when I needed a much needed break last weekend to go downhill skiing with my siblings. He provided the neighborhood girl to play with Kirra two weeks ago when I was trying to get a particular task complete. God provides! People ask me how I do it. How do I go for 14 days to a month without my husband. Without his support romantically, as a father, and as an extra set of hands to help, how do I do it? I was able to do this – because my Father was along side me the entire time. When asked that question in the past, I usually said, “I don’t know”, or “I just keep busy”, or “we’ve done it before”, or “I only have one child”, but those aren’t really what gets me through it. God gets me through it. I do it with Gods help. So tonight we’re picking up my best friend, my husband, and Kirra’s daddy whom we’ve both missed so incredibly much. I cannot wait to run into his arms at the airport. Instead of doing the “drive by”, I’m parking my car,and waiting at the end of the escalator inside, so I can run to him with Kirra and embrace each each other. My eyes are filling with tears at the prospect of our reunion in a hopefully fast 11-12 hours. I won’t cease needing Gods help, and my prayer is that I don’t become complacent about needing to rely on God even with Jason now home. “My lover has arrived and he’s speaking to me! Get up,my dear friend,fair and beautiful lover – come to me” Song of Solomon 2:10

This past January-February has been the month of illness with little miss. (well really all of us). Since January she has had an on again – off again fever with xyz other symptoms. She’s had pneumonia or RSV, and just yesterday I took her to the Target Clinic and she has an Ear Infection and Strep! Hopefully this will be it now for illness. I’m taking the liberty to bleach down, and Lysol down the house, and Norwex anything else. Top to bottom today. She is really liking school so far. Again she talks non-stop about Piper her friend at school, and we got to take home her folder on Friday to see what she’s been up to. They did lots of arts and crafts last week about Groundhog Day, and they’re learning about transportation and all the ways to go – (e.g.) plane, train, car, bike etc. I’m excited to see what she’s going to learn about this week. I have a pretty – lay low week. Tomorrow is Caucus which I’m excited about,but other than that not much is going on. Well.. I do have another event for work next weekend… and hopefully one of my best friends from High School will be coming over for movie night on Saturday evening. Anyhoo. Watch out germs…MB (Mommy Blogger) is coming to get you!