Are you kidding me?

Random cuteness - Jackson helping Daddy replace the cover to the air duct. Abigail smiling pretty. I can't believe she's almost five!

Taken during a recent marshmallow roast on the back porch. We grilled steaks for dinner, and Adah loved them!
Taken at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences; the kids had a blast!

The last time I wrote was January 9th? What happened? When did I enter the time warp? Weird.

Things have just been humming along here in their normal, somewhat chaotic way. Okay, not really chaotic - have you met my husband? :) We've been managing to get schooling done, which is some sort of miracle, I believe. AND the laundry, which is definitely a miracle. However, I still have my husband home from work. I mentioned the other day that I would like him to find a job that requires him to be home all day. Maybe there's some money he doesn't know about on his side of the family? Oh, I kid. ( That's Boomama's line. Have you ever read Boomama? You simply must stop by her blog, because she's hilarious. If you appreciate the South, you'll appreciate Boomama. http://www.boomama.net/)

ANYWAY, Daniel does eventually have to return to work sometime. I realize that. I am just really enjoying having him home for this amount of time. I have no doubt that it has contributed GREATLY to the success of the transition for Adah and Nathaniel. I just can't believe how well it's gone up to this point. It really is like they've always been here. We've passed the month mark, so I think we're out of the honeymoon phase, and still things are going well. They're doing normal kid naughtiness. Adah can still pout like nobody's business, and she thinks it's funny to laugh at people, so those are things we're working on. She REALLY doesn't like being corrected; she tries to laugh it off at first, and then when we have her look us in the eyes she gets that we're not happy with her behavior. All of a sudden she's not laughing anymore. She is coming out of her funks MUCH faster than at the beginning, and the girls are all now telling on each other when they're irritated with one another. Aw - sweet sibling love. It means the three homegrown girls are no longer treating her with kid gloves, so that's a good thing. The TATTLING is not a good thing, however. :) Adah also now knows to go to the pantry door, open it, and show me the sign that says, "No Whining" when she's been sulking. :) I heard her admonishing Nathaniel today saying, "No whinin' Nah-taniel." Nathaniel is actually having a harder time with eye contact than Adah. I cuddle with him after family worship to get him to relax in my arms, and he tries to roll his eyes back in his head instead of looking at me. Yeah, that's freaky. He will try to pull my fingers away from his cheeks when he's had enough. It's so interesting, because he is ALL ABOUT cuddling on my shoulder, playing with my hair, patting my back, and giving me kisses. But asking for eye contact is too personal, I guess. He is showing improvement when we cuddle, and I just whisper sweetly, "I will wear you down, son. I will love you no matter what. I will show you that you can trust me, and even more importantly, I will teach you about the Parent who will NEVER let you down." :) He laughs at me. I think he learned that from his daddy.

Well, after all of Daniel's time off, maybe Nathaniel needs to see that his daddy is not a bum and actually has a job. :) Right after next week, or maybe the week after... Nathaniel is scheduled for his hernia surgery on Monday, and we'll play it by ear as to whether Daniel returns to work next week or takes off to help with Nathaniel. We don't know what his recovery is going to look like. We're praying for the three-week recovery that they said is normal.

Oh, and did I mention we're putting the house on the market on January 25th? What? I haven't mentioned the fact that we're moving to San Antonio? Yeah, we like things to happen all at once and get ALL the stress for the WHOLE year over at one time. Again, I kid. Moving is the very LAST thing we want to do right now, but it's actually the lesser of two evils. Daniel's unit moved to a four month out/four month back deployment schedule for an indefinite period of time. That's definitely not what we signed up for when we accepted this job. Because the kids just came home, we didn't think that Daddy deploying was a good idea. We would LOVE to stay here, but nothing is opening up that is non-deployable. It seems that the people who don't deploy actually like their jobs. Huh. He applied for a bunch of jobs and it looked like one at Ft. Campbell was going to be a possibility, but he didn't get an interview. The job at Ft. Campbell would have allowed us to build on the 15 acres we have near Daniel's parents. This job at Ft. Sam Houston puts Daniel in a better position to apply for jobs at Ft. Campbell in the future. So...either we said goodbye to Daniel for four months, or we moved to San Antonio together. We opted for the latter. I'm still praying for a last minute amazing thing to happen to allow us to stay here, but I'm thinking that's probably not going to happen. :) It looks like we'll be going down to Texas the first week in April. Yep, that means we have two months to sell the house. Anybody want a lovely four bedroom home???? :) This is the suburban version of living life on the edge, people. We can HANDLE THE STRESS, really. :) Daniel is busy right now re-caulking the bathroom, and I'm helping by...what am I doing, exactly? Oh, right. I'm overseeing the kids having a snack. :)

So that's life in the Houseworth household...get pregnant, move; get pregnant, Daniel deploys for six months; get pregnant, Daniel deploys several times; get pregnant, move, have baby after evacuating from a hurricane; start adoption, move; bring kids home, move. I think we set the wrong precedent, don't you? :)

Okay, I really better go oversee the kids a little better, which means I need to get away from the computer. :) I think I just heard someone go outside. Our house is wired for an alarm system, and it used to beep when someone went out the door, which was really quite handy. Until the time that the alarm decided to beep erratically for forty-eight hours and we had to call the alarm company who said that even though they installed the alarm system they couldn't turn off the crazy beeping and I was going crazy so Daniel had to hunt down the sound and pull out the sound box from the wall because the! beeping! was driving me crazy. Did I mention that? Anyway, the door doesn't beep anymore so I have to have better ears to listen for children attempting to escape. Don't worry - the backyard is fenced. And it's really large...anyone want a house with a large backyard??

Till Next Time-

Casey