My one word

I'm sure a lot of you are big fans of Shawni Eyre Pothier and her blog 71toes. She is seriously awesome. I love reading her blog for its beautiful pictures and inspirational mothering insights. One thing she does is choose one word to be her goal for the new year, and I really like that. I've been trying to decide what my one word would be for a while. I loved President Monson's article "Living the Abundant Life" in the Ensign this month and I wanted to somehow incorporate that into my word. So, as simple as it is, I've decided my word is going to be "enjoy." If I enjoy my life, it will be abundant (which is part of the principles he encourages in his article). Especially with adding a newborn, it can sometimes be hard to enjoy everyday moments, and my kids will be grown way too fast. They're still pretty little, in fact part of the reason I wanted to focus on this is because I don't want to get overwhelmed with having 3 kids 4 and under (since Easton turns 4 this week!). I feel like when I had one it was super easy to enjoy every moment, then we had little Caden, who is such a ray of sunshine now(most of the time) but for the first 18 months of his life was more on the fussy, crabby side and after 3 straight months of colic and a year and a half of not sleeping through the night, I am sad to say I probably didn't enjoy that time as much as I could have. The past year has been great, I feel like I've enjoyed my boys so much and loved the simple happiness every day brought, even though there are always bad days, but with a new little personality joining our family I want to make sure I continue to enjoy the boys I have as well as soak up the sweet bundle of joy we'll be adding. Because let's face it, the newborn days and here and gone SO fast and they never, ever come back. And if something not really important is getting in the way of me enjoying my boys, it will be eliminated. Life's too short to be wasted on the stuff that interferes with the "best stuff."  So to start off, I'm going to list some things I've enjoyed about bedrest, now that I've had 11 weeks to fully experience it :).

- Politics. There's always something interesting to read about the presidential race and I've never really followed politics before so it's been fun to have the time to learn about the candidates and how things work.
- Brushing teeth and combing hair. These monotonous every day things I cram in when I'm in a hurry to rush out the door are now some of the limited things I can do for my family so I actually like doing it! (I also get to sort and fold the laundry from the couch! And... that's about it :) )
- Knowing what's going on with people. Before Halloween, I had no idea. I rarely checked people's blogs, all I did on facebook was post something one of the boys said and then maybe I'd glance through the feed, but not too often. Now I'm not going "What? She had a baby? I didn't even know she was pregnant?" Not that I think this is super important and I'll probably go back to rarely getting on once I can actually get up and do things, but for the time it was kind of fun. Although I do have a goal to update the blog a little more, at least more than once a year :)
- Not being sick. It's winter, cold and flu season, and I've been sick twice in the past few months and not even that sick. That's a definite perk about not leaving your house. Also, that I don't have morning sickness. One of my friend's husbands brought dinner over the other day and we were talking about his wife who has morning sickness and he was saying that it was obviously not as bad as what I'm going through and I thought, "Are you kidding me? I would take this over that any day!" I had it for the first 18 weeks with this pregnancy and that was awful. Morning sickness is like bedrest except you can't eat anything and what's worse than that? Lying on the couch with an upset stomach..... no thank you. I'll take contractions.
- Being the nest. One thing I didn't realize, if you're home on the couch all day, your kids will be too. I usually have one or both of them on the couch with me, and when I'm on my side so that my knees make a triangle against the couch, a little boy will undoubtedly hop in and cry, "Oh thank you for making my nest!" and I become a nest until I need to change positions. It's also been fun to be able to read, play Trouble, and work on learning stuff with them.
- Time. Speaking of that, I have loved having all this time with them. I really miss not doing things like going to the park, library, walks, playing hide and seek, but it's fun to have time to do lots of other things with them. In fact, since I knew I would probably be on bedrest (but never thought it would be for this long) I had a huge list of things I would accomplish. You know, really productive things, like writing a book, learning how to use photoshop, finishing my 1/2 a class that stands between me and graduating (it's only been like 2 years that I've been trying to get around to finishing it. don't judge.) learning how to use my camera better, reading the entire standard works as well as all conference talks since conference started, yada yada yada.... but I didn't take into account the fact that I'm still a mom, and even though Jonathan has been here most of the time and is doing an amazing job taking care of all of us, my boys still want mom-time.. a lot! I also didn't factor in stress, lack of sleep from waking up every 2 hours to take meds, side effects from said meds that make accomplishing anything impossible, and just the fact that when you're extremely worried about the well-being of one of your children it's difficult to focus on anything at all, especially anything serious that requires focus to understand. So while some goals were still accomplished (don't be looking for a novel by Linsi Peck to appear in your local bookstore anytime soon), the thing I did most was spend time with my family and a big chunk of my reading centered on how to improve as a mother. Both beneficial in my book. And I will still finish that darn class soon.... I hope.

Well, that's good for now. Basically bedrest isn't all that bad. I think Jonathan has really enjoyed taking on the role of full-time parent, and boy he does a good job at it. He's done the whole she-bang, including deep cleaning, organizing, putting up and putting away Christmas, library, park days, grocery shopping, haircuts, well-checks at the doctor, taking Caden for shots, and doing it all after waking up at night with kids who had bad dreams or are still having one and crying in their sleep and then wake up early because their tummy says, "rumble grumble." He's loved spending so much time with our boys, but now understands much better the "trenches" of everyday parenthood and how much your attitude affects your children's behavior (and he is good. I have so much to learn from him).  He said he's decided he will be getting up at night with the new baby because he can see now how hard it is to do all the normal "mom" stuff and get no sleep. He said it will be much easier for him to be tired and go to law school than for me to be tired and have to do it all, all day. I'll let him be the undisputed winner on this point :)
PS- One thing he hasn't had to worry about is dinner, thanks to our amazing ward and friends down here! They've been bringing us dinners this whole time and Jonathan has only had to cook twice because someone always seems to have made an extra lasagna or drop a pizza by or something like that. It has been sooooo nice for him to not have to worry about it, especially as he was trying to finish a paper for the law journal. You never realize how much time meal planning, shopping, preparing, and cleaning up take until you don't have to do it, and it has been such a blessing to not have any more added stress on his plate! Thank you all soooo much!