Spring will bring...

The past few days (weather wise) have been blissful. I have the blinds open this morning to blue skies and, before the girls began blaring a Taylor Swift song on their CD player, I could hear what seemed like a thousand different birds chirping outside the window. If I strain, I can still hear a few tweets make their way through and if I close my eyes I can wish away those ugly brown speckled snow mounds....they are slowly disappearing and that makes me very happy!

It means that spring is on the way and we've got a lot planned for this spring. First things first, and that's getting our house ready for the market. I'm not a spring cleaner, I'm a company's coming cleaner...but I kind of want to spring clean. It could be the nesting instinct kicking in. We have some big projects to tackle before we are ready to go. We need to finish our hardwood project that we started before the holidays--we need a nice solid weekend of mild weather and nothing else to do, to get it done (I mean that's what my husband needs...I'll be packing up the kids and dog and heading somewhere else for a couple of days!)

We also need to fix our front steps...scratch that, tear OUT the front steps and replace them. We've been "fixing them" for the last 3 years and the fix never lasts through the winter. We also need to paint the girls' room and the playroom a pleasing, buyer friendly neutral. Clean up the basement a little. I also need to organize...get rid of junk drawers and go through closets etc.

It's going to be a lot of work but hopefully this time the timing is right and we can move on from this home that was supposed to be our starter. We had a five year plan when we moved in ...it's going on 7. I'm fine with that. I like my house, but there's a few things that I will look for in the next house that we don't have now.

The end of spring will also bring our new baby. I feel like she is already here...of course I'm still getting a full night's sleep so I know that isn't the truth. Her movements are so much stronger now. I'm beginning to actually distinguish hands and feet wiggling around in there. I'm better able to predict periods of restfulness and awake time. The girls are constantly feeling my belly, "giving the baby kisses" and we all refer to her by her name, pray for her before bed and at meal times and just talk about her an awful lot...I guess that's why it seems like she is here! I'm getting into my uncomfortable 3rd trimester, more doctor's appointments and more preparations for her arrival. It's exciting! We are all placing bets on what she will look like! My guess is she will look like my oldest daughter and husband. I'm hoping for it actually...

The younger two have more of my facial features and they are cute as buttons if I do say so...but they both were born with cleft palates (I had one too!) and it makes the new born stage very worrisome. Now it is no big deal, but at birth Ava had some troubles and had to be in the NICU for the first 2 1/2 months. She had a bunch of procedures and it was very tiresome and awful to be away from her as much as we were. Livi's cleft palate issues weren't as severe, we could bring her home right away, but with both girls I couldn't nurse (I pumped like crazy) and it took Olivia a long while to plump up the way a baby should. They both were on monitors at night--Ava had a feeding tube, and I remember at times feeling less like a mom and more like a doctor or nurse fiddling with gadgets. Plus there was the corrective surgery for both of them around 1-1 1/2 years that was not fun AT ALL! We made it through though.

Selfishly, I'm hoping that this baby won't have a cleft. The sonograms look promising (but they all did, so that doesn't mean anything). I just want to be able to nurse my baby and not worry if she is getting enough to eat, or going to choke, or wrap herself up in monitor wires at night. I don't want her to have to have surgery. It would be absolutely wonderful to just have a normal mommy/newborn experience this last time around.

I wouldn't change anything--I bet Ava wouldn't be the spitfire that she is if she didn't go through that, and Olivia's easy going take it as it comes attitude would be different too. That new born experience helped to shape them into the sweet little things they are now...but this time around...well there's no telling what spring will bring, but we can hope!