Samantha: 93 Months, Week 4
Aedan: 59 Months, Week 2
Owen: 17 Months, Week 4
As I ended the last blog post, this weekend was a little crazy with the news of Ben's job offer at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Ben's parents lovingly agreed to come back up to Sault Ste. Marie after his mom was done with classes on Wednesday afternoon, so that way Ben and I could head out on Thursday morning. Even though it's a 12 hour drive from Sault Ste. Marie to Wilkes-Barre, the flights were just too expensive to justify, and it would have been a similar amount of travel time with driving to an airport and connecting flights. Our plan was to spend all day Friday there looking around and then leave to drive back home on Saturday, getting home on Saturday evening so that Ben's parents could leave on Sunday to drive back home. We felt bad asking them to change their plans so they could come help us again, especially after they had just been up, but they agreed that it was important for us to make the trip. We had until the following Monday to make a decision, so we didn't have too much time to think things over. There are definitely many benefits to the job offer, and the location would be much better in many ways. The weather would be more what we like, still having four seasons, but not having winter for 6 months of the year like we do up here, and only 30 inches of snow a year on average instead of 120 inches of snow a year. Wilkes-Barre is in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, making it about 2 hours away from Philadelphia, 2 1/2 hours from New York, and 4 hours from D.C. Being in that location would give us a lot of options for things to do as day trips or weekend trips. Plus, the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton are bigger cities and have more to do just in themselves. There are more stores, restaurants, cultural activities, and all the activities the kids are involved in right now can be found in Wilkes-Barre, plus more. The biggest negative in my mind, when looking at it at that point, was that it is farther away from family. We always wanted to try to get closer to family if/when we ever moved again. It would be 3 hours longer to see my family in the Chicago area, and about 2 1/2 hours longer to Upland. I am afraid that we won't see people as much because we already have had family visiting us a lot less since we've moved up to the U.P. I wish it were closer, so I was interested to see what I would think once I got there and saw what the city was like.
Owen has really been enjoying having books read to him before bed lately. His favorite ones are usually about animals, and even though he doesn't say too many actual words, he knows a lot of animal sounds. I figured I'd try to take a video of him saying animal sounds that night as I put him to bed. I turned the camera around so he could see himself, and he got a little bashful looking at himself on the video. You can hear his rooster noise, his sheep noise, his cow noise, his snake noise, along with the snorting sound he makes in the back of his throat when he is being silly and shy. Then, at the end of the second video, he got too distracted by trying to turn off the video on my phone. I just think he's the cutest little boy. He makes me smile and warms my heart every day. I love these moments I get to spend with him as I put him to bed at night.
Overnight from Sunday into Monday, we had another snowstorm, and even though they have already had 9 snow days, school was cancelled again on Monday, March 11th due to bad weather and dangerous driving conditions. Samantha and Aedan were glad to have a free day off school to play together, and it allowed me to get some things done around the house. My first order of the day was to call Dr. Newhouse because her daughter-in-law, who I know through MOPS, mentioned that it may be a good idea to try and get Samantha in for an MRI sooner rather than waiting for the appointment with the ophthalmologist. Dr. Newhouse was very responsive, even though she wasn't coming in to the office until lunchtime due to the weather. She called the eye doctor and spoke with him about what he saw, and then she called me back to tell me that she thought we were okay to wait for the appointment for the ophthalmologist because we would have to take Samantha all the way downstate to get an MRI done. She didn't see it as an emergency situation, and she encouraged me to try not to worry in the meantime. I felt better after talking to Dr. Newhouse and seeing her do her due diligence in making sure we were taking care of Samantha as best as we can. So, now we wait for her appointment the following Tuesday.
Even though it was technically a snow day, I still had to go grocery shopping and the roads weren't that bad, so I took all three kids shopping with me. I didn't feel very good from the bad cold, congestion, sinus pressure, and sore throat I was experiencing. However, our list wasn't too long, so it didn't take very long to get what we needed. It was kind of fun having all the kids with me. I like when I get unexpected days with Samantha home from school. She is such a kind and helpful big sister, and Monday was one of those days. She did everything she could to help me, especially knowing that I wasn't feeling well. She is such a sweetheart.
When we got back home, the plow truck had gone down our street, pushing so much snow at the end of our driveway that I couldn't even pull in, so I had to carry the groceries from the car parked on the street into the house. I am so over the snow and ready for it to go away for good. Later that afternoon I noticed that our neighbor, Joe, came over and cleared the end of our driveway with his snow blower, even though we didn't even ask him to. It was definitely very thoughtful of him, and I was very appreciative.
That afternoon Samantha had an appointment to have her top canine baby teeth removed so that way she will have space for her top lateral incisors to descend. She lost those baby teeth a long time ago, but her teeth are so crowded that there hasn't been any space for them to come in. Both orthodontists that we saw recommended that these baby teeth be removed so that hopefully those teeth will come in where they are supposed to. Samantha was very, very nervous about this appointment. I took her there while Ben stayed home with the boys. They put some happy gas on her to relax her and then the doctor numbed her top gums and let that kick in for a few minutes. Waiting for her mouth to be numb was the part that took the longest. The actual pulling of the teeth went pretty quickly. It seemed like he didn't have to wiggle the instrument back and forth very much before the tooth came out. Samantha was very brave, and I was so proud of how well she did. She had some gauze in her mouth on the way home to make sure the bleeding would stop. When we got home, Calla was home with the boys because Ben had to leave for a meeting. Samantha went back to talk to Aedan and show him her teeth, but as soon as she saw Calla she turned back around toward me and started crying. She just buried her face in my chest for awhile, and I felt so bad for my little girl. It had been a hard, emotional day for her, and she felt embarrassed of her mouth and her puffy, swollen lips and cheeks. This little girl certainly tugs at my heartstrings lately. She is getting so big and independent and brave and confident, but then at other times, I see the little girl who needs me and crumples into my arms, I see the little girl who lets her nerves get the best of her, and I see the little girl who needs the reassurance from Mommy (or Daddy) that everything is going to be okay. Samantha wanted me to take a picture of her mouth that night and send it to Ema and Papa so they could see her new holes in her mouth. You can tell that she is still pretty swollen and numb in this picture.
With how bad I felt, I wondered if I may have strep throat or something. My throat hurt every time I swallowed, and I had no appetite at all. I tried to go to the walk-in clinic on Monday night after getting Owen to bed, but they were too busy and weren't taking any more patients. So, I decided to go to the walk-in clinic on Tuesday morning while Ben stayed home with the boys so I could make sure I didn't have anything going on. Unfortunately, it was nothing, just a cold and drainage, so I just have to continue to treat the symptoms. I always feel dumb when I go to the doctor and have them tell me it's just a cold or virus because I feel like I wasted time and money, but I guess it was good to know for sure. My symptoms started on Saturday, and I had been taking Sudafed, but it didn't seem to be helping much, and I was just ready to start feeling better.
Even though it was a MOPS morning, and I had already missed about an hour of it, since what I had wasn't anything contagious, I decided to head to MOPS because then at least the boys would be taken care of by someone else and I could just sit and relax. I missed most of the substance of the meeting, but it was still good to sit and talk with other moms without kids crawling all over me.
The rest of Tuesday went fairly well. I had lunch with the boys, took Aedan to preschool, and then tried to spend the afternoon sitting down and resting. Ben and I had plans for a fun date night that night, and Ken and Linda were going to come over to our house to watch the kids so that we could go out to dinner and then to the Irish concert from the group Lunasa. They even brought pizza over for the kids, so we didn't have to worry about making dinner for them, which was very thoughtful of them. They have been such a blessing to us and to our kids over this past year or so. Ben and I got a gift card for Fuji through Aedan's raffle at school, so we decided to try that restaurant together. We got one California roll to split and then we both got steak hibachi. It was nice to go out together, even though I felt pretty out of it. I let Ben do the majority of the talking, and we shared our thoughts and feelings about Ben's job offer and our upcoming trip to Pennsylvania. It was fun to sit and talk and eat without having kids to interrupt our conversation and not having to cut up three plates of food before getting to eat our meal.
After dinner we went over to the Arts Center at LSSU to watch the group Lunasa perform. I found a couple of seats in the front section so that we could see them play their instruments better, and it was a really great concert. Since Ben and I met in Ireland, we enjoy listening to Irish music and thinking back to our time there, although now it's been 16 years since we've been there, so it's all kind of a blur at this point. Ben and I hope to get back to Ireland for a trip during the summer of 2021 for our 15th wedding anniversary, so we will see if we can pull that off. The guys in this this group were very talented. I especially enjoyed the personality of the guy that played the Irish whistles, and also the violinist who could also play the Irish whistle. I really enjoyed listening to their performance, and the concert lasted for about two hours, which was great. Here are some videos from the show.
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When we got back home, Ken and Linda had nothing but good things to say about how the evening went with the kids. It was so nice to be able to get out for a date together and to come back home with all the kids successfully asleep.
Wednesday morning Aedan had a big thing going on, as it was Kindergarten Round-up at JKL Bahweting. He was a little confused as we were going to school because he thought I was going to leave him there, or he thought that he would be starting school the next day. There was even one time where he asked if he would start Kindergarten as soon as he turned 5. I think he's excited to start school, what do you think? He loved seeing the library and all the books they had in there, and he went back with one of the teachers without a care in the world. I sat at a table and filled paperwork out while he went around to various stations where they tested different things like his knowledge of the alphabet, counting, cutting with scissors, writing, stacking blocks, making patterns, and hearing. It seemed like he was having fun, and I was glad that he wasn't nervous at all. It's amazing how much he has grown in the last year, and I'm so glad he has come out of his shell some. New experiences don't scare him as much, and I'm so glad. He will do just fine going to Kindergarten in the fall; I have no concerns. However, as I was sitting there watching him walk around the library, I was just struck with the fact that my little boy is ready for Kindergarten already. He just keeps getting older and taller, and sometimes Ben and I still think of him as a little bitty kid. It makes me sad to think of him going off to Kindergarten sometimes because it means my time with him at home has come to an end. Sometimes I have a hard time not wishing I would have done more or played with him more or took him to do more fun things or not done as much work so I could spend more time one on one with him. It will be so strange having him gone all day, and just like Samantha, I will miss him a lot when he's gone. Being a stay-at-home mom is tough some days because your attention is pulled in so many different directions, but I'm so glad I have been able to do it, that I have had this time with my kids, and even though they won't remember much about it, I certainly won't forget all these years I got to spend with them.
As Wednesday went on, I wasn't feeling much better. I just had such terrible congestion and then a sore throat because of all the drainage. It didn't even seem like taking Sudafed was making much of a difference, so I was just continuing to wait until I would start feeling better.
Aedan comes home from school with a lot of artwork that he makes. On this particular day, they were talking about rectangles, so this is his rectangle pictures. Miss Bonnie, his teacher, said, with a smirk, that he decided to alter a few of his rectangles. I love Aedan's little personality.
March is Reading Month around here, so in addition to the special activities Samantha's class was doing at school, Aedan's preschool was focusing a lot on Dr. Seuss. Here is the Cat in the Hat mask that he painted and designed at preschool.
Wednesday was an exciting night for Samantha as it was the AWANA Grand Prix. Papa brought some tools with him when they came to visit so he could help carve her car into the design she wanted. She painted it to look like a lion, and Mr. Ken helped her put the finishing touches on it on Tuesday night while Ben and I were gone. We borrowed some graphite to put on the axles, and we called it good. Our goal this year was to help the car at least cross the finish line because her car last year did not do that. Samantha was super excited for the race, and they did it a little differently so that things were more streamlined. Each car raced three times in a row and they calculated their speed somehow, and that's how they determined the ultimate winner.
Here is Samantha's first race where she got 3rd place. You can see her smile at the end of the video. She was so glad her car crossed the finish line (and so was I)!
Here is Samantha's second race where she got 2nd place. You can see her fist pump at the end of the video. :)
And here is her last race where she won the race by leaps and bounds! I don't think I've ever seen Samantha smile so big. Her whole face lit up, and she was so happy and so proud. I love it, and I'm so glad that her hard work paid off and that her car did so much better this year.
It was a good Grand Prix, and it went by much faster than last year. Once it was over, we went downstairs for a cookie before heading back home for bedtime. Ben and I still had to pack and get things ready for going out of town the next morning. Ema and Papa were on their way to our house and were going to get to our house pretty late. However, by the time we got the kids to bed and got things done that we needed to do, it wasn't long before they arrived. I was excited about our trip out to Pennsylvania, but I was nervous, too. I was nervous about leaving the kids, especially Owen. I had never left him like that before, not even overnight once, let alone for two nights. Plus, up until that point, I was still nursing him three times a day. Now granted, some days he wouldn't be interested that much, but I hoped that that transition wouldn't be too hard on him.
Thursday morning Ben and I planned to leave shortly after getting Samantha off to school, since we had a 12 hour drive ahead of us. However, I woke up a little before 6:00 feeling hot and my stomach was very unsettled. I hoped it was just nerves or being hungry, and I tried to go back to sleep until it was time to get up and take a shower. I did not feel good once I got out of bed and into the shower, but once again, I was denying/hoping that I wasn't getting sick. But as I took a shower, there was no denying it, and I got sick to my stomach. I felt awful. Every time I moved or sat up, I felt like I was going to get sick again, and I was very cold. After getting out of the shower and getting dressed again, I just went back to bed to rest and wait to see if my feelings of having an upset stomach would pass. Luckily, I no longer got sick that morning, but I still felt absolutely exhausted and miserable. However, Ben and I needed to get on the road, as we had a 12 hour drive ahead of us still. I brought a trash can in the car with me, as well as a pillow and a blanket, and I was super glad that we were doing the trip by ourselves. I was able to just recline the car seat and fade in and out of sleep for most of the day. I felt bad for Ben because I was in no condition to be able to drive with the way I was feeling. I wasn't very good company, but luckily Ben had quite a few podcasts to catch up on as we drove. We arrived at the hotel after 10:00 that night, got ourselves checked in, relaxed for a bit, and then tucked ourselves into bed. I hadn't eaten anything all day and still didn't feel like I was able to eat anything that night. I hoped that by the morning this stomach bug would be gone so I could enjoy our time looking around Wilkes-Barre.
Ben and I both slept pretty well in the hotel, and we slept in a little bit as we didn't have any plans until the realtor picked us up at 9:00 a.m. It's amazing how easy it is to get up and get ready in the morning when it's just Ben and me. I finally felt like I had my appetite back, and I took it easy at breakfast, but it seemed like my stomach was back to normal, for the most part.
It was nice that we were able to arrange to meet a realtor while we were in Wilkes-Barre. We had sent him a list of some of the houses we had looked at online, and he arranged showings of the houses, plus a couple others. We learned that living in Wilkes-Barre itself was not the greatest area, and the school district was not very good. So several different people recommended that we live in one of the surrounding cities like Mountain Top or the Back Mountain area. That's where most of the houses were located that we looked at, and it was good to get a sense of the area. Even though we probably would not live in Wilkes-Barre, most areas only take 15-20 minutes to get from there to the university or the shopping areas. It would be different than what we experience now where Ben can just walk across the street to work, and everything in town is very close by, but it still would be a reasonable commute. It would just mean we also have to look for a second car at some point.
I always find house searching to be disappointing because houses are not as they appear in pictures a lot of the time. Plus, our current house has really spoiled us as far as it's size and the price we paid for it. We have 5 bedrooms and 2 full bathrooms, as well as a full finished basement, and it seemed that it will be very difficult to find a similar house in a price range that works for us. Many of the houses were just very outdated, or they were just much smaller than what we have now, even meaning that Samantha and Aedan, or Aedan and Owen will have to share a room, which wouldn't be the end of the world, just different. This is just the beginning of it all, so if we do indeed move there, I'm sure more houses will come up once the market picks up more as Spring really comes into full swing.
Here are some pictures from the parking lot of our hotel, overlooking Wilkes-Barre. You can see the mountains in the distance, and they surround Wilkes-Barre, as Wilkes-Barre and Scranton are in the valley.
I took a whole bunch of pictures of the houses that we saw, but I am not going to include them here. After our house tour, we got a late lunch at Olive Garden (Just because we could. This city actually has restaurant choices!). Then, we drove into Wilkes-Barre to walk around some and walked through campus as well. Here are a couple pictures of campus.
The campus runs right along the Susquehanna River, so we took a look at that as well. It is definitely a bigger city, but it's pretty. And do you notice one of the greatest things? There's no snow on the ground, the sun was shining, and I did not have to wear a coat. This is what Spring is supposed to be in my mind. There are still cold days, but then you also get days with weather like this, and all the snow is long gone.
I thought this was a beautiful view with the river and the mountains in the background.
We met a faculty member and his family at a pizza restaurant for dinner that evening. They have two young kids, a girl a year older than Samantha and a boy a year older than Aedan. The kids were very quiet and respectful while the adults talked. (They were much more quiet than our kids would have been.) It was good to be able to talk to the faculty member and his wife, who is a high school teacher, about their experience in the area, school districts, and other things that have to do with raising a family there.
After dinner, Ben and I went back to the hotel to talk to the kids on FaceTime, and we had one of the saddest experiences. Owen was doing great for Ema and Papa, but when he saw us in the video on the phone, he was very confused. He was standing right in front of the phone, looking right at us, and his little lip began to quiver, his eyes filled with tears, and he just began to cry. It was like his missed us, and he saw us, but he didn't understand why he couldn't touch us or why we weren't there. Eventually, Ema had to take him away to calm him down because he was just so distraught. I have to admit that seeing him like that made my heart break a little. That was the saddest I had ever seen him, and it made me miss him even more and hope that he would calm down okay for them that night.
After getting off the phone, Ben and I decided to drive around a little more, through some of the neighborhoods in Mountain Top, and by the two main elementary schools.
Our trip out to Pennsylvania was a whirlwind, but I was so glad that we were able to go together, that my stomach flu was just a quick 24 hours, that Ben didn't get sick from me, and that we were able to enjoy our ride back home just talking, processing, and enjoying our road trip together. We were able to get back home about 8:00, so Ema and Papa kept the kids up so we could see them and put them to bed. It was a long three days away from home, but the kids did great for them. Owen went to bed and napped like a champ, sleeping through the night, which I was so relieved to hear. We were so grateful that they came back up to watch the kids for us so Ben and I could see Wilkes-Barre, get some information, and then better make our decision from there.
(Blog about March 10-16, 2019)
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