Kids

In N Out

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While on our trip down to Fallbrook for the night, to visit our family that will doing the 5k with us tomorrow morning (PurpleStride), we of course had to make several pit stops.

Bathroom breaks, food breaks, filling up the superheromobile with gas breaks, breastfeeding our youngest breaks.

We do have 3 kids, an almost two year old girl, who is not ready to give up the boob yet, an almost 4 year old boy, who is mostly potty trained, but still has accidents here and there and is wearing a pull up for this 5 hour car trip that will actually take us 9 hours (he said he pooped a rattlesnake 2 bathroom stops ago🐍), and a 5.5 year old girl, who just said she has to go potty again… we’ve been back on the road maybe 15 minutes since our last bathroom break 🤷‍♀️ and once we pulled over for her… she admitted she didn’t really have to go, she just wanted to get out of her seat 🤦‍♀️

While the older two kids used the bathroom at In N Out in Arcadia, I changed our youngest diaper and nursed her.

Did you know I love In N Out? When I was pregnant with each of the kids, I could easily eat a Double Double Animal style with medium well fries and a large Dr Pepper every single week… and my first meal after each of my 3 c-sections was…In N Out 🍔🍟thanks to my hubby’s good friend Zahur who always came through… and brought a hat too!

The In N Out in Arcadia is one of those that’s a drive through, or eat outside only type. And… true story, my hubby used to work at the In N Out in Camarillo prior to it being reconstructed to have indoor seating.

In N Out will always be a special place for The Superhero Family! And even though we have one in our new hometown of Visalia (which is actually where I grew up), we actually haven’t been to one, to eat, since we moved back in February because the line in Visalia is soooo long… and we don’t eat out nearly as much as we used to.

If you’ve never been to an In N Out and you ever see one… I highly recommend you give it a try! 😉

The Greatest Mom in the World

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I just threw together some protein balls for the kids that just earned myself the title of “The Greatest Mom in the World” from Bobby… Complete 180 from when he told me I should go live with another family a few weeks ago… and when I walked out the front door, he was not a happy boy.

I’ll be making these more often.

I was making my protein shake for lunch and I like to throw in some peanut butter powder, shredded coconut, and some cinnamon powder. Alexandria asked for some of the coconut, so I put some in her mouth, she loved it. Bobby wanted some too, so I gave him some. Then they wanted more…

So I put some in a bowl and was feeding them with a spoon. Then Alexandria took the bowl over so she could feed herself. I decided to make it a little less messy, so I added some creamy peanut butter, so it would all stick together. Then, after she finished that and wanted more, I decided to just make some protein balls so that they could pick them up and make less of a mess.

I just threw this together without measuring. Oats, Peanut Butter, Honey, Protein Shake, and Shredded Coconut (this is the one we use), and rolled them into balls, and Alexandria and Bobby loved it!

Coloring Pages

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Did you know that you can search for coloring pages online? After failing at an attempt to draw The Hulk for my son to color I decided to search for one and did you know… you can search for almost any character followed by “coloring page” and you’ll get back tons of pages that you can print from your computer to your own printer.

My son likes to color some of the same characters over and over. and he’s really good at staying in the lines for being only 3 years old. So glad I discovered this little hack, especially since I’m not that great of an artist and he could tell that my drawings didn’t look exactly like the character.

Almond Poppy seed Pancakes

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While were at Costco this weekend, Victoria wanted me to buy some poppy seed muffins. I had a great idea to find our own recipe and make them at home. I always prefer to make it myself (if it isn’t too many steps), plus it also allows me to know exactly what I am putting into my and my families bodies. So… being the smart person that I am, I found a recipe on Pinterest, then rather than making the pancakes from scratch, I started with a pancake mix I already had, then added the additional ingredients to it. But… I didn’t bother to read the recipe for the pancakes because I thought I had it memorized… however, I quickly found out that adding 2 cups of water to one cup of pancake mix didn’t make the right consistency… so I read the instructions at that point… they really called for 3/4 cup of water for 1 cup of pancake mix… so I had to add a lot more pancake mix…

 

So we had plenty of batter for our Air Fryer muffins… regular pancakes… and a poppy seed cake. Needless to say… I’ll be reading the instructions in the future. They were pretty good though. I love adding Almond Extract to recipes now when they call for Vanilla Extract because I found the BEST sugar cookie recipe and it has Almond Extract, I think that’s the ingredient that makes them taste amazing!

Saving money 💵

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We are all about saving money…

Especially when we can just do something simple like link up our credit cards, or take a picture of our receipt or just open an app to get to a website we were already planning to go to and we get money back by clicking the link through the app.

This week we found this new website where we can get money for saving energy!

Tonight is our first time “powering down” for an hour, and since it’s pretty warm inside without any electricity, we came outside to play.

I think this is going to be fun!
https://ohm.co/ryanedwardjennings

We played Red Light, Green Light in the trampoline, it was a short game…

Then we played Simon Says. Victoria was pretty good and only did a couple if the things I said without saying Simon Says, but poor Bobby… he did every thing I said… even when I didn’t say Simon Says… Oops! He just learned the game today, so I’m sure he’ll catch on soon.

Alexandria had fun unloading dirt from the sand bucket and getting nice and dirty… especially since today was bath day.

I accidentally turned on the light when I went to the restroom (we don’t have windows in the bathroom downstairs) and Victoria did the same a few minutes later, until I came in and turned on the flashlight on my phone so she could still see. She questioned why it was ok for me to use my phone when we were trying to save power, so I shared that my phone was powered by a battery.

Now that we can use power again, we are enjoying some Sophia the First with the lights turned off… let’s see if we can get our power bill back down. It went up pretty steeply between our last two bills.

Also, I don’t even know if we’ll get paid for tonight, but it was good exercise anyway. I think we have to wait for our power bill to approve our submission, but we got our Nest Thermostats connected and I think we have some points or tokens in our account. If you don’t have Nest… I highly recommend both their thermostats as well as their cameras! Our home isn’t completely “smart” but it’s partially smart. 🙂

House update…

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House update… The ceilings are painted and the walls have our new colors now too! ❤️

Hoping to have the downstairs back to normal before bunco next Friday!

And with a fresh coat of paint… And Alexandria dripping milk on the carpet… ? I decided to try out a little something… I had this bottle of Thieves spray I had made at an essential oils party I attended years ago… It sat under the sink because I didn’t know what to use it for ?‍♀️ until… I attend an online essential oils party last week (I think) and learned (maybe again, I had a couple kids since the in person party, so I could have known and forgot) that you can use it to clean anything ? and we’ve had these little stains on the carpet for a while, they may have been here since we moved in, but we hadn’t called out a carpet cleaner yet. So… I cleaned up the new milk with a baby wipe (what else… we use those for everything) and then decided to try my ancient Thieves spray on the old stains.

And… It worked! ?

Rinzler helped me too… ?

So I proceeded to clean all the spots all the way down the stairs….

Then I got into the kitchen to prep dinner and saw the bottles that usually sit on top of the cupboards were pulled down for the painters to get up there. So… I pulled out my Norwex envirocloth to go to work on those ? and they were so easy to clean… With just water?.

I almost feel compelled to climb up on the counters to scrub the 15 years of dust that has collected up on top of the cupboards… But I’ve got an office calling my name to be put back together.

Magnesium…

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So… I waited a little too long to order our favorite supplements and… We ran out of our magnesium ?

I had been taking half my dosage to leave more for my hubby (I’ll share my magnesium, but if we are low on pink drink… He is going to have to wait for our next order to arrive ?). But… We completely ran out of our magnesium last night. ?‍♀️

So… I went with the old magnesium I used to use ?

My acupuncturist recommended this years ago to help my body relax and I was honestly not looking forward to trying it because my only experience with Magnesium up until that point was when they hooked me up to an IV of it while in the hospital waiting to see if my induction would work to get Victoria out 4 weeks early to stop my HELLP Syndrome symptoms. It did not feel good… But I started drinking this anyway to see if it would help. Then I stopped and let it sit in the cupboard…

Until…

Bobby was born and I had come home from the hospital and had not gone ? for 5 days and was miserable! ? And it was Christmas Eve and we were having company over. While sitting on the toilet for 3 hours, taking breaks to take a bath, and a shower to try to relax my body enough to let it “pass”, I even had to nurse on the toilet because it hurt too much to try to sit down, I read that the painkillers they sent me home with could cause constipation… Why didn’t they warn me?

I’ve had all c-sections but didn’t remember this with my first, but then again they had pumped me up with magnesium, maybe that’s why I didn’t have this issue before. So… I had my hubby make me a big cup of Natural Calm and got that ? out. It felt like it was the size of a football and I weighed myself after and had lost 5 pounds ?.

So I decided I would stop the painkillers and just take Tylenol for the rest of the c-section recovery…

Then I had my third… The ? was probably the thing I most was not looking forward to, it’s major surgery right, but I was worried about the poop ? This time I took my own magnesium with me, they are capsules, so you don’t have to mix it with water to get it down, and I am happy to report that I ? before leaving the hospital and took low dose painkillers and stopped them as soon as possible.

I’ve also learned, since then, so much more about magnesium and how much our bodies need it to function well…. Who knew?

Check out the below list, if you have any of these symptoms you may want to get in to your doctor to have them check your magnesium levels.

Potty training a boy…

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I thought potty training our oldest daughter was a challenge… She regressed a couple times ?‍♀️ but she was pretty much potty trained at 3.5 years old.

Our son, however is already 3.5 and he’s had a couple great days, but it seems like he’s just not interested in being potty trained. He tries, but… Then he has an accident. ? And lately I think he’s been sneaking a new pull up to act like he’s kept his pull up clean all day. ?

I walked in on him today climbing on the toilet to get a clean pull up out of the cupboard and he assured me he was OK and that I could go out and close the door behind me.

I wanted to see if he was planning to lie to me so we could have a lesson in lying. We bought him this crane several months ago and leave it out for him to see to remind him to go to the potty, but… It still sits there. ? So I was sure he was going to tell me he was still clean.

He came out of the bathroom and this was our convo.

Bobby: Mommy I went pee pee in the potty

Me: That’s great! Is your pull up clean?

Bobby: Yes it is

Me: Did you get a new one?

Bobby: Yes I did

Me: Were you going to try to hide it from me that you got a new one?

Bobby: No

Me: OK good, we don’t lie to mommy and daddy ok?

Bobby: ok

He had a clean diaper on at like 4 pm the other day after I was sure he had changed into a clean pull up, but….the painters had taken the trash out of the bathroom so he had nowhere to toss it (I totally went into the bathroom right after he came to tell me his pull up was still dry).

I know he can do it… He’s just taking a little longer than big sis. I’m hoping his little sis will catch on soon after him so we can stop buying diapers and pull ups, that will be some cost savings!

For now, I’m just happy knowing that my baby boy knows he can be honest with me, even if it’s not what I want I hear (he has pooped in his pull up lately too, but he told me the truth, he’s been going on the potty for almost 2 years now).

It’s funny how 3 kids from the same parents can each be so different. ❤️

Update… My hubby looked under the sink to look for more wipes… And discovered used pull ups ? Bobby said they weren’t his and he doesn’t know how they got there. But he thinks they just walked there because they don’t have ?. We had a talk about lying and he apologized. ❤️ Let’s see when we have to have this conversation again. (P.S. The reason they were under the sink was because he couldn’t find the trash can ???)

The big move…

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It all began on our way home from Thanksgiving. We were almost to our house in Camarillo when Victoria was asking why grandma and papa lived so far away. I told her it wasn’t them that lived far away, it was us that lived far away from the rest of the family. Ryan was trying to explain that we “can’t afford” to move from Camarillo, as in, that’s where his job had been established and where we had our house and our condo. But, we had no family in the area and being a math minded person I heard “can’t afford” as we literally can’t afford to live anywhere else. And in my mind, the cost is living in Camarillo is almost twice as much as living where my family all lived. So… It was an emotional night when we got home.

But, Ryan was finally at least somewhat open to the idea of moving closer to my family, because he knew how important family was to me, and saw me go through three pregnancies with family being hours away, and mom having to drive three hours for each unexpected early deliver. So… I started looking at real estate closer to Visalia, but not necessarily in town, until we finally decided we would just move into town with everyone else. He was thinking we would move before the school year started, and I was just excited that we may get to be closer to family, even if it was 6 or more months out.

Well, God had different plans. Ryan happened to start looking online for jobs in Visalia and found two that were the same position he had in Camarillo. He reached out to a friend that was working at the local branch of one the banks, and he got him in touch with the Visalia branch. It all happened so quickly from them seeing his resume, to a phone interview, to another phone interview, to an in person interview, to a job offer.

And also in that same amount of time, we decided to list our house, so we were packing like mad people to get it show ready, having open houses left and right, and looking at houses online in Visalia. We came out one weekend to look at several houses in person. The night we were driving here, God answered a prayer I had prayed earlier in the week. I had asked Him to please send us our house on Friday, and Friday evening a new listing came up! My awesome friend, who is also our real estate agent, got us a showing the next day and we saw the house that would become our home. It was the last house of the day, and it was two story, and we really wanted a single story, but when I saw the back yard, I was sold. Then I saw the loft upstairs and knew it would be a perfect playroom. So, we put it an offer, and were praying that our buyers would accept our counter offer to their counter offer. They did. It was definitely an adventure getting our house closed there and here simultaneously, but thanks to both of our amazing agents (and friends), and the big man upstairs, it all happened in the right amount of time. We literally got the keys on Friday and Ryan started his job on Monday… after 3 trips in a 26 foot Uhaul truck (plus a blown tire, a broken engine, and 2 vomits ? all in the same day but across 3 vehicles).

So we are here in our new home, Ryan is enjoying his new job, I’m still working for the same company that originally was the reason I moved down south for, and the kids are loving having a playground of their own.

And, of course, we love love love seeing family all the time! ❤️

A Christmas ? Miracle ? 

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Usually the drive from Camarillo to Visalia or the other way around is a three hour drive. Once we got pregnant and started having kids, the drive time got longer and longer.

Between bathroom breaks, nursing breaks, vomit breaks, food breaks, drink breaks, constipation breaks, uncontrollable crying breaks, holiday traffic breaks, and any other type of breaks, we easily add two to three extra hours onto our trips.

Today… We made it from Visalia to Camarillo in three hours! All three kids napped for at least half of the trip, and all three woke up happy.

Alexandria is asking for Nah nah (night night) so she will be nursing very soon.

Thank you, Jesus for clear traffic, no accidents, sleeping babies with happy tummies, and most of all, for my hubby who gets us from here to there safely.

Going out of 2017 with a bang!