We decided to take advantage of the heat here in northern California and head to the coast. Hot days on the coast up here are far and few in between, so we packed up and headed over the mountains. It was a perfect day on the beach and I plan on coming back more often! Check out our day….
Category: mother
At 6:46 am 5 years ago today Lennox made his way into the world. My labor started gentle around noon the day before. We walked around most of the day and ended up checked into the hospital around 6pm. It was slow going and we joke that Lennox just wasn’t ready, but at 14 days past my due date his eviction notice was signed and sealed. I was given every sort of artificial what not to get things moving and my body fought the whole way. To this day I still think they severely miss calculated my due date. Eventually modern medicine won out and Lennox greeted us angrily with clinched fist and swollen eyes. He looked very much the 10 rounds he had just gone through to get into the world. Our little boxer. He was so beautiful and we were(still are) so proud of him. He’s very much the eldest child, a pleaser and eager helper. He is the most compassionate and loving 5 year old I know. So aware of love and kindness and how important it is to share those things. He is a good friend, considerate and will give you everything he has if it will make you happy. Just this weekend he happily shared all his birthday presents with his little brother. He is an amazing person and I am truly blessed to be his mother.
Happy Birthday Bub, I love you so much!!
I’ve rediscovered a lost love…bike riding. Oh how I love riding my bike. It makes me feel like a kid again. It’s so calming, cool air rushing by as I peddle faster and faster. I haven’t gotten on a bike since the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college. I used to ride daily; using a bike to get back and forth to work; then I got hit by a car. That ended my love of riding until just recently when Evan suggested we start riding and get a trailer for the kids. I was so nervous, thinking maybe I’d forgotten how to ride and then there was the pretty enormous fear of cars. I got going the wind in my hair and it came rushing back. Oh I love it. I took the boys out in the trailer for the first time tonight, it was awesome. They weren’t hard to pull at all. We’re hoping when the girls are big enough they’ll ride in the trailer and boys will ride they’re own bikes. I am so looking forward to family bike rides. Everyone has fun, and it’s a wonderful release for me. Speaking of release I’ve started the Shape magazine bikini body count down.
I have no hopes of wearing a bikini at the end of the 5 month program but I am hoping to tighten up, maybe even shed the rest of this baby weight. I’ve done two days of exercises, they’re hard and my body is feeling the burn. I am so out of shape. I so need to stick with it. I’m tired of being fat. So tired I even bought some of those 100 calorie snacks in hopes it will fill my need for sweets. I have one every night after the boys go to bed, my treat. I look forward to it all day. Eating has become a way I deal with stress. Things get hairy (daily) around here I run for the panty. Not really helpful with the whole tired of being fat thing. Maybe all the exercising and many bike rides will help with my stress level and that will help me to stop stress eating on top of stopping my body from stress storing. Lower stress=happy kids that sleep well (wishful)=sleep for me (wishful)=weight loss=happy mama! Eh we’ll see.
Oh and I’ve started walking again too. I love walking almost as much as bike riding. I throw one of the ladies in the Ergo and everyone else in the triple jogger and off we go for an hour. We usually end up at the playground. Things are starting to look up. Exercising makes me feel normal, I need it.
Hope all you mamas out there have an awesome day! Sit down, put your feet up and take a look around at what you’ve created!
Categories
Teethy tooth
Cora cut her first tooth…front bottom right. She’s going to look so cute all snaggletoothed. It’s both exciting and scary, because I still have to put some very sensitive areas of my body in her mouth. We’re still working on sleep and it’s still going not well. I think their tummies just aren’t big enough to sleep as long as their brains are mature enough to. Our time will come.
The Eckards are going green. We’ve ramped up our efforts to recycle, I mean we pay for it whether we do it or not. It’s also pretty nice not over filling the trash bin and getting fun notes from the trash man about how he hates us and thinks we suck eggs. Ecological and thrifty. We are also slowly eliminating plastic products from the kitchen. They’re just not good us. Plastic =Cancer and all kinds of bad stuff. It’s insane how many plastic things we use. All the kids dishware and cups and utensils, all food storage, cutting boards, ect. It’s going to take a while to replace all these things so we started with the things that come in contact with food and heat and things that food or beverages would sit in for longer periods of time. 
In the place of our plastic water bottles and sippy cups we now use SIGG Bottles. Swiss made aluminum water bottles. They have 0% leaching-so absolutely no migration of either the liner or the container into the beverage. They’re light weight and not bad to look at. Ecological and non-cancer causing, win/win.
Here are the girls…aren’t they precious!
The plastic toys are next on the list to go…