Lately in Windom (April 2019)

I SO enjoyed this guy's spring concert at school!

This little lady is a little hard to please come the end of the night. She knows when she's supposed to be in her bed, and this was definitely the time for that!

Love these guys!

Two concerts in the same week! Kendrick did AWESOME, and little brother Ryan picked up a couple favorite songs from the mix!

Entertaining these three in the meanwhile...not for the faint of heart.

They made it back up for this concert as well! So good to be together!

If that isn't just the face of pure joy and surprise!

Froggy boots are still in style, no matter the outfit!

Baby girl is getting way too big way too fast!

Sometimes I feel a little down about things, but then this little lady flashes this little sweet smile and it makes things feel like they're going to be okay. That there is going to be joy. That maybe there even is just in this moment.

Prepping for the Easter Eggstravaganza at BARC.

♥

Cashel finally lost his first tooth! He was SO EXCITED!

It's hard to believe how big these two are these days. It's also hard for me to see this look on Cashel's face. He's a pretty emotional kid overall, very, very tender hearted. But when he gets upset or sad or confused or overwhelmed, he tends to snap back. But here...you can see the toll it takes on him to visit Daddy, and how hard it is. This is the stuff I see, even though a lot of times I'm posting happy, smiling kids. They still hurt.

Trying to embrace what time we have left without being crushed. I feel overwhelmed with sadness a lot when we do visit. It sometimes feels like he's slipping away before our eyes.

Easter 2019. I love my kids, but hot mess express, people! Our first Easter without Mark at home.


We left on Thursday evening with a floor 1/3 of the way done, and came home to it finished! A HUGE thank you to our sweet neighbor Randy Loewen for coming over and finishing the job! It looks fantastic, and we are thrilled to have regained our living space again!

Godfather's Cheesy Sticks are a huge hit in our neck of the woods!

This is about how our spring went. ::sigh::

My favorite paint supervisor retire(d) in May, and while we will desperately miss his salsa, we'll miss him even more!

It absolutely blows my mind to realize that we are on our very last baby in this stroller! I don't know where the time has gone, to be honest. The years just keep on flying by.

I wrote a whole post about this book (click here). These memories leave me so shaken. I don't know that it will ever stop.

Springtime back yard vibes. I'm planning to have a cement pad poured back here to eliminate all these pitiful pavers this summer sometime. No more piles of dirt from ants - I'm so excited!!

My very favorite part of being a parent is when I see my kids helping each other and loving each other.

Every once in a great while, she still crawls up in my lap and snuggles. I really hope that as she gets a little bit older, this becomes a more regular thing, because it melts my heart!

Mark doesn't even really care to see me much anymore: He just wants me to bring photo books and leave. In fairness, they ARE pretty fun to look through.

He just carries them all over the room and looks through them all day long. If he's not in his chair, you'll find him here.

Sometimes I can convince him to stay still long enough for a picture these days. This one is to commemorate a successful shave! I have had to start doing it, because he won't let anyone else at the facility.

So this is happening in a couple months!

I really, truly am looking forward to the days when my kids are old enough to actually pay attention throughout an entire game - board or otherwise. With the babies, I just don't have the time or attention to actually sit down to play, but even when the babies aren't around, the big kids get so worked up if they're losing that it doesn't last more than a few rolls of the die or rounds in a card game before the game pieces or cards are strewn about the house and attitudes are at their highest. ::sigh:: Sportsmanship is a tough lesson for a Johnson boy, especially with the genetics of their overly competitive father.

Something tells me this is going to be a FUN summer!

Having all 3 boys in church during the service makes for some pretty outlandish services. ::sigh:: But they're mine, and I'll still claim them.

If anyone was curious: I definitely get tapped out from time to time.

Goodness, I love this little boy :)

It isn't often, but every once in a very great while, I end up with half of the kids in my bed. I don't mind it on occasion ;)

Thus began the week of the stomach bug.

Thank goodness I have the ability to work from home on weeks like this!

Poor little lady was down for the count for two days with this thing, and didn't end up eating any actual food for about another 4 days.

This one was out for a couple days as well, but he certainly rebounded much more quickly.

WAH essentials with napping babies and a day too perfect to sit inside.

So, so, so, so many snuggles for this one. I can't say I hated it entirely, but I hated that she felt so crummy :(

Right before this one fell down for the count as well. How many times can you say loudly and repetitively "Do NOT go in the mud, Ryan!!" does it take? Apparently twelve.

About how our video chats go these days. We got one of those Facebook Portals, which are actually kinda nice, because not only do they follow him around as he walks around his apartment, he's also too lazy to get up and actually turn the video off, so we can just continue to at least attempt to chat for much longer than his attention span allows. Otherwise, if he's trying to answer it on his phone, we get a good 20 seconds on a good day.

Red Wagon

One of the things that is the most devastating to me in the midst of this season of life is when grief knocks me over unexpectedly. I don't really grieve for long these days, but these sudden waves still do come, and they still leave me shaken, and it takes a bit to recover from these ones because I wasn't prepared.

Before bed (and I'm pretty sure this may actually be one of those "mother of the year" things that actually may be deserving of the title), I have a routine down with all 4 of my kids that my therapist and I worked on about a year ago. It gives them 5-15 minutes (depending on the night) of just Mama time. The little ones always pick books, although the big ones sometimes just request snuggle and "talk time". We read (or talk), we sing, I put them in bed, and I pray over them. It has turned into one of my favorite parts of the day, as long as the whining from everyone who ISN'T being put to bed isn't a thing.

When Mark was well, he used to also participate in this bedtime routine overall, but we'd split the duties, and sometimes we'd do the big boys together and combine their bedtime.

Now, I just do it all myself, and make sure it's always separate.

There are some books that I just flat out KNOW I can't make it through without ending up in a puddle of tears. I remember often standing just outside the doorway listening to Mark use different booming voices as he'd read "Tea Party Rules" or "Little Loon and Papa". Those ones I know are off-limits. But one that I hadn't recalled was one called "Red Wagon" by Renata Liwska. Ryan picked that one last night.

It started off innocent enough - a cute little story about an adorable little fox named Lucy who was given a wagon for her birthday, but only could use it to go to the market to pick up vegetables for her family. It details the adventure along the way, and is honestly just the sweetest little book. What broke me down last night was the parts that I remember he added in that weren't in the book. Parts like when he read the page about how Lucy began pulling the wagon and lamented over how heavy it was, and he added "with these guys in it". So, so minor, but the tears began falling: My voice shaky and unsteady. Ryan began sucking his fingers even more aggressively and tugging at my hair harder, unsure of what was going on with Mama. Sometimes I'm capable of putting on a happy face and shoving away the tears, but this particular night, the flowed and flowed and flowed.

A couple pages, it was just always the way he said, "Oh bother" that got me.

And yet even just a couple pages later, the wagon hits a rock and the wagon turns into an imaginary rocket ship, and Mark always used to add another little tidbit to this page, saying "...and went flying!"

The last part, on the last page of the book, he would always add, "but she couldn't play with it because she fell fast asleep after all that hard work."

The tricky part about things like this is that they set me back. The drive me back into the depths of the grief, if only for a very short while, and make it feel like it's just beginning all over again.

While even just a few months ago, a small little encounter might have taken me a few weeks to recover from, this particular night, the tears were dry by the time we finished the next book and I left Ryan's room.

I told my therapist yesterday that while I feel like I'm never going to stop these cycles of grief, I feel like they don't overtake me like they used to: I don't stay in the midst of it for long. I absolutely adore my husband: I always will. But I really do feel like I'm progressing past the part where it consumes me thinking about him all day long every day. I think part of it is the experience he has been having at his new facility: They are honestly just so incredible in how they're approaching his care there, and I am thrilled. I no longer feel like his caregiver, which helps me personally. My therapist said she felt I seemed more settled in my demeanor than I had since she had been seeing me, and I think that's a fair representation of how I feel.

I will never stop loving him. I will never stop grieving his loss. I will never stop advocating for him or for a treatment and cure for this horrific disease. But I feel like I'm finally just slowly reaching the point of not letting it consume me anymore, and that's extremely freeing. The weight on my shoulders is lifting.