Happy Birthday, Noah!

My sweet Noah had a Birthday this past Sunday!  He is such a joy to our family!  He's like a little piece of calm amidst all the chaos.  He's always been more of an introvert although lately we've really seen him come out of his shell.  He still doesn't like to be in the spotlight, but he is getting so much braver about making new friends and doing his own thing apart from Ella.

We planned to have a little family party for him this year since my sister was in town.  We were going to just hang out and have cake and ice cream together, but as the day progressed more and more of Noah's neighborhood friends started dropping by to wish him a Happy Birthday and bring him little cards and gifts they had made.  It was so sweet and Noah wanted to invite them to have some cake, too.  So we ended up having a table full of half wet kids that had been in and out of the pool all day lol.  It was so much fun and absolutely perfect.  We love living in a neighborhood where our kids closest friends live right down the road.  It's the best! And I love that Noah is so easy going.  No decorations, a store bought cake, and when we realized that we didn't have any candles he insisted that I just write a "7" on the back of last years number 6 candle.  I'm not even kidding.  True story.  

Love this precious boy more then words can say...

Fully Present

One of my goals I set for myself in 2016 was to be fully present. I noticed some areas in my life where I was getting distracted from the life that was right in front of me.  That's what spurred me on to do the media fast with the kids.  You can read about that a couple posts back.  But now that we finished that fast and have finally made it past most of the sickness and drama, I am trying to figure out what "normal" will look like this Summer with screens and media.  I'm curious what some of my friends do?!

During the school year, we usually use a system with "Screen Tickets" that I found on Pinterest and was able to print for free. Check it out here.  On Mondays, they get 15 tickets in their envelope.  After they have finished school they can ask permission to turn in a ticket and they use a little timer or their iPods to keep track of the time.

This worked really well for us, but it still felt like a lot of time spent on screens.  Moving forward we are planning to cut the amount of tickets down drastically.  But for right now, I am not convinced that I even want the possibility of screens every day.  Since Owen had to spend a couple nights in the hospital, we got a little relaxed with the screens last week and already I could see where they could easily take back over.  (I know that sounds kind of dramatic. lol.) But seriously!!!!  It's like 30 minutes can easily turn into 2 hours if the parent is distracted and doesn't redirect the kid to find something better to do. I have been so happy with the quiet and peace that has come with having no screens that we are still trying to keep our days as screen free as possible.  I have let the older kids have a little time on them when the babies take their afternoon nap or sometimes the kids and I will watch a movie in the afternoons.  But for the most part we are just totally screen free.  I decided to keep Instagram because we are subscribed to Chatbooks and it's one of the easy ways that I can document our memories.  But I have really felt convicted to get rid of Facebook for awhile.  For me personally, it was just something that distracted me from life.  When I was in the hospital with Owen, I got bored watching Playhouse Disney all day and logged into my hubby's Facebook and I was surprised at how much I have gotten used to not having it.  The first week I definitely missed it.  I think because as a stay at home mom, it keeps you connected to all of your friends during the day.  But after a while you get used to not having it and now I actually don't miss it at all.  I'm sure I will reactivate it at some point so that I can stay in touch with my friends far away.  But for now I really felt like I needed to root it out completely so that I could give the people right in front of me my full presence.  It's already been such a blessing and made me SUCH a better mom to my kids.

I'm really praying that as a family we can grow closer together as a result of these changes!  Life is so short.  Let's not waste it just sitting and staring at our phones!!

I wrote these lyrics from a worship song we do a lot at our church into my journal last week and I'll link the song here, too.

"My soul devotion, my only focus, to worship You.  My life surrendered, my heart abandoned for more of You!  I want to be close to You, I want to be close to You!  There's nothing in this world that compares to all You are!!"

Sick and Tired.

Last week is a week I refer to as our week in the Twilight Zone.

For the last several months, we have been battling asthma in both of the babies. (Note:  Bigs = Ella and Noah, Babies = Owen and Jack.  I know they aren't really babies anymore, but they are forever the babies at our house)  So the babies both caught RSV over the Winter and have had a lot of trouble recovering since then. They were both using a preventative steroid in the nebulizer each night and also using Albuterol as needed during the day.  Well fast forward several months and they are both just constantly snotty, coughing, and wheezing.  They are like the kids in the nursery that always have snot running down their noses.  I know all of my mommy friends know how much we all love "those" kids.  So lovely.  Your welcome.

But we have been pressing on and following Doctor's orders and finally went back for a recheck and changed their inhalers all around.  So now they have actual inhalers with a spacer that I can take on the go which is something we were really hoping for.  Sometimes we get so busy that it felt like we couldn't keep up with the timing of all the treatments they wanted them on.  So last Friday I picked up a huge grocery sack full of medicine for the babies.  New inhalers, oral steroids, antibiotics (because they both had ear infections), and more Zyrtec for seasonal allergies.  We get home and get started on all the new stuff for the weekend and that night, Jack throws up.  He was running around fine so we just think it's a fluke.  Well, Saturday we notice that Owen doesn't seem to be acting himself, but he's still eating and going about like normal so again, we are thinking that it is just all the new medicine that's making him feel off.  Well, we were very wrong lol.  Sunday afternoon we were at church for both services since I was singing on the worship team and after the second worship set I saw a text on my phone saying that Jack had two really icky diapers that morning already as if his tummy was upset.  I figured it was just from the amoxicillin since it always gives our kids really upset tummies.  He was really tired and cranky so I told Randy I was going to go ahead and take both of the littles home and he could just bring the big kids later when he was done. He brings Owen out to me and he is acting really crabby and cranky, too.  At this point we are still thinking that they just feel crummy because of having ear infections and all the new medicine on their tummies.  Well, here's when things start turning South...Owen goes down for a nap and ends up waking up and throwing up all of his lunch.  He continues to puke for the rest of the day and all night long.  Just miserable.  So Jack is pooping water, Owen can't even keep a sip of water down, and that evening around 9:30 at night we hear a really loud scream come from our bathroom where Ella had just taken a shower.  Apparently the steam from the hot water had moistened the tile pretty badly and when she went to leave the bathroom she slipped and busted her chin right on the floor. So I leave Randy with the puker and I take Ella up to the ER for stitches.  She was absolutely TERRIFIED  but she was so brave.  I couldn't believe how well she managed to calm herself down even though she wanted to freak and run right out of there.  She laid right there and got stitched up without any trouble at all.  I was so proud! I'm going to share her before and after pictures so if you are squeamish then scroll down now really fast.....

Finally got her all squared away and climb into bed only to have Owen wake up later around one in the morning because he had thrown up.  When Randy went to clean him up, he noticed that Owen was covered in hives!  We still aren't 100% sure what that was about, but for now they are treating it as if he has a penicillin allergy.  They are kind of hard to see in the pictures, but I'll share anyways..

Thankfully the hives went down with an antihistamine and we got him all settled back into bed.  The next morning he was still unable to keep anything down and was becoming more and more lethargic so Randy took him up to the Urgent Care down the street to see if we could get some Zofran for him.  They felt like he needed to go in for fluids so we decided to take him out to the children's hospital in Tulsa.  After being there three days with continuous fluids, he finally started perking up and getting back to himself.  We have been following up weekly with our pediatrician just to be sure he is getting back to normal okay.  Still working to get the wheezing under control so hopefully this week we will see big improvements with that.  If not, we are going to see a pulmonologist to get his asthma meds straightened out.  But hopefully what we have set up now will do the trick.  

Not going to lie.  It's been a very trying few weeks.  Owen's tummy is super swollen and distended and he is super cranky and almost impossible to reason with.  It makes me scared that his kidney isn't draining correctly because it's exactly how it usually shows itself.  But the only way to know for sure is to see the Urologist and we aren't scheduled to go back until September.  At our last check up, the Doctor said he thought it may be a good idea to get scanned just to be sure.  So I am going to set that appointment up tomorrow.  Until then, I just need prayers for loads and loads of patience.  There are a million things that I don't do well in life, but usually being a good mom is something that comes very easily to me.  It's like it's exactly what God designed me for.  But these last couple of weeks have really been hard.  It's been an emotional roller coaster having the kids all sick and then having to deal with a preschooler who screams and freaks out about everything.  I know he is just feeling yucky and trying to get back to normal so I am trying to give him lots of love and grace.  But it's been exhausting and overwhelming.  I'm so thankful that my hubby has tried to pick up the slack around the house and help give me breaks.  We are just praying that we can get some answers for Owen and get him feeling back to himself.  

Hello from the other side...

Greetings from the land of no Facebook.  I don't know if anyone will even see this since I have no way to share it with you haha!  But my family and I enjoy going back and reading these posts, so I'm going to ramble on and if you want to know what's up with the Stricklands this Summer, you can pop in and read along, too.


For the last six months or so, I started to become more and more frustrated with my family's dependence on all of our electronic devices.  My husband and I carry smart phones, our daughter uses and old iPhone like an iPod, we have a desk top computer, two tvs, and an iPad.  Compared to a lot of families we know, that's actually pretty mild.  But we were in many ways a very tech dependent family.  When our three year old woke up, he would come get the iPad and watch kids videos until we were all up, too.  And my older two kids were always asking to be on their various devices as soon as they were up and moving in the morning.  I found that I would check my phone almost constantly throughout the day to sit and stare at things I had already seen or really could care less about.  If I needed to give one of my babies a breathing treatment, I would grab my phone to stare at to entertain me until they were done.  My husband and I would lay in bed at night to watch some of our shows that we watch together, but we would both have our phones out messing with them the whole time we were "watching" the show!!!  Seriously, please tell me we are not alone in this?!  Is there anyone else out there who is just totally fed up with it?!

That's what happened to me.  I talked to the kids and told them that we were going to have a week long media fast to kick off Summer and then we were going to drastically change the amount of screens we used after we finished and remain pretty close to screen free for the rest of Summer.  That was the initial plan.  Things haven't gone as smoothly as I hoped lol, but I'll get to that later.

So for a whole week, the kids and I went totally screen free.  My hubby hasn't jumped on the screen free bandwagon...he uses screens all day for work so that would be impossible, but we are still bugging him to give them up at home and he has definitely cut back a ton.  The week we went totally screen free was so hard.  My kids had to learn how to entertain themselves and I had to learn how to break the habit of staring at my phone.  Ella and Noah were such good sports.  I couldn't believe how gracious and mature they were about the whole thing.  Most kids would have been so mad, but they were so understanding and even proud of all the fun things they came up with to do instead.  I told them that this life is so precious and that I didn't want us to waste any of it.  It's such a short time that they are in our home to raise.  I just want to be present!!!  I don't want to miss it because I'm looking at something on my phone that can wait.  When one of us would get really desperate wishing we could get online or watch a movie, we would just pray.  We prayed that we would want to know more of Jesus as badly as we wanted some technology in our life.  That we would have that same kind of hunger for Him instead and that we would grow closer as a family.

I took these pictures on the last day that we could have media and although they're ridiculously adorable...I think you will see that the pictures without screens have so much more connection between the kids.  They have been having so much together!!

I was really worried that we would have all sorts of breakdowns and tears, but the crazy thing is that I don't think a single tear has been shed?!  Even Owen just found other things to do.  I think that has been something that's made me so passionate about keeping life less cluttered with media.  If you tell your kids to go play...guess what...THEY GO AND PLAY!  And they find so many fun things to do.  I have had so much joy in watching them play together and actually having time to play myself since I'm not as stressed and overwhelmed because my stuff gets done when I'm not distracted by my phone all day.  It's so great!! 

I'm going to do another post about our struggle after we finished our week long fast to balance allowing screens back in.  So be sure to read that one and comment because I'm really curious to learn how other families balance this in their home..

Thirsty?

I spent the weekend at a conference for homeschool mom's called the Winter Summit.  It was so so good.  It's always refreshing to go away with good friends and get pumped full of wisdom for two days straight!  We laughed until we cried and stayed up late into the night like middle school girls. Ha.  And in doing that we remembered how old we are and how much we really do need our sleep each night!! It was fun.  I wanted to do a blog post when I got home about all of the great things I learned, but I took in such a crazy amount of info that it was too overwhelming to make a post to share....sorry friends....

This morning I was getting ready and thinking about what I would write if I did a post (that's when I got overwhelmed and realized it was too much haha), but the one thing that did stand out to me that I thought I would share is really simple.  Through all of the lectures about hiding God's word in your kid's hearts, musts for motherhood, sibling rivalry, turning your days around and on and on there was one thing every talk had in common.  It's that we are simply incapable of doing anything well apart from Christ and His direction.  They can give us a bunch of "how-to's" to help.  And they do.  But really and truly I just learned this weekend that #1 Things aren't as bad as they seem sometimes #2 It's worth it and #3 All day, every day I HAVE to continually lean on Jesus or I will never make it.  I can't be an awesome wife, raise great kids, and keep up with our home, church, and activities with out relying fully on Jesus every single day.  For most of us, this is like, "duh!" But sometimes you just have to be reminded.  I don't want to run myself ragged trying to keep up with whatever I *think* my homeschool needs to look like or whatever the pressures of the world tell me my family life needs to be like.  Just give me Jesus everyday and maybe a huge cup of coffee and I will be just fine.  And so will my kiddos...

Matthew 11:28-30
28  “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.29Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.30For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Counting...

I'm working through the study "1,000 Gifts" by Ann Voskamp and making a list of all the ways that God has blessed me.  We are only one week in and already it is changing the way I look at things like a couch full of laundry or my kids outside playing.  It's a must read if you haven't already!

#18 School at the kitchen table

 #21 Blankies and Pacis..

#19 Toddler legs in skinny jeans

#20 Watching the kids through the window

#1 Warm, sunny, Winter days

#4 tiny baby butts sticking up at nap time

#24 markers.  so my kids can color on paper (or their face....)

#23 a washer and dryer so I can clean my family's clothes from the warmth of my home

comfy dog bed "chairs"....not on my list...but maybe Owen's?!

and endless supply of baskets and cabinets to empty?....again not on my list ;)

but #25 baby blue eyes #26 toothy baby grins...those I'll add....