Divide and Conquer

Good morning everyone! For whatever reason I feel like I haven't slept in seven years, but that's okay because it's almost Saturday! This week has seriously flown by and I'm so glad Jason was able to help out so much with it, because I would have died if I attempted this alone. Our new routine of getting our kids to all of their activities(and school) is working better than we could have planned and I'm so thankful for that. It has given me some much needed one on one time, or two on one depending on who I have. Jason has begun taking Brooke to gymnastics every morning and takes a kid with him so he can spend some time with them while she is practicing. I honestly have no idea what he does with them, I know yesterday he took Savannah to Target for a banana and juice, but seriously don't know what they do besides that. However, the kids left with me get to pick out their own breakfast and we will play whatever they want while we wait for dad and kids to get back. It seems to be working thus far, this is the first week of our new "date day" idea. Honestly I'm just enjoying this while I can, one day our kids won't want us taking them to their activities or participating with them. Jason's new role as "taxi driver" has freed up a lot of time for me, cause you know I have a really demanding social calendar and it requires a lot of free time. It has allowed me to get some chores done, bond with the kids who don't run errands with him, and sleep in-I deserve that I work full time! Though this may not be the ideal way we raise our family, I'm glad that we are being put through this test. I think if we make it through this-you know raising nine kids on one income and fighting alcoholism-we can beat anything we get put up against.

Cutting Down Spending

It's crazy to think a year ago I quit my job for a better one. We were so excited to get out of debt, getting a bigger house, and getting me a car that doesn't require being jumped every ten seconds. Life was looking great, it was seeming like pretty soon we would have everything we dreamed of and then more. Flash forward to now, we're an one income family and living in that larger house we wanted for so long. We realized if we wanted to keep this house, which we very much do, we had to make some major changes with our spending. I'm not going to lie, I LOVE shopping. Seriously I would go to the mall "just to look" and end up buying the kids new toys and clothes-every time without fail. Not only was our bank account dying with this habit, but our children began to expect something every time I left the house. That was very easily the first thing we stopped doing, after that we looked at our spending again. Our bill was made up of buying a lot of equipment for sporting events our children were involved in. Now, if your children play sports you know there's almost no way to avoid spending money on these things. However, there are ways to save money on them and for whatever reason we weren't doing those things. For example, Brooke's leotard for gymnastics was probably the most pricey thing in the world. So pricey that I don't even keep it in her closet with her regular clothing, it's pretty sad. What I didn't realize was, we could have bought it new or even asked one of the higher level girls for hand me downs-it was like a slap in the face when I realized how much money was wasted on this. This little method can also be applied for pretty much every sport, Tyson's baseball equipment was almost all second hand this year and it saved us so much. I think for us, the hardest thing to stop buying was extra things at the grocery store. It sounds stupid, but when you buy cookies that you really don't need every other week it really adds up. We pretty much stopped buying all sweets all together and as much as our kids(and my mom) may hate it, it has helped us save so much money and forces me to bake when we want something sweet. I think, in some way this has been a blessing in disguise. It has seriously forced us to spend time at home, spend time together. Instead of going out on my days off I find myself wanting to stay in and play board games and watch movies. Our money situation has brought us a lot closer and I love it, as much as I miss being able to pull out our card without any doubt of having money. I wouldn't trade the family time for all the money in the world.

Being Pregnant and Anorexic

Happy Sunday everyone! It's crazy to think that you guys have literally read my children's life stories I hope they can look back on all of these one day and be like "wow mom was awesome!" or you know, something cool like that. Besides supporting our kids you guys have also supported Jason and I, I don't think we would be where we are now without you. So, as an award for being awesome people who always support us I'm letting you inside our lives a little more. Today I want to talk about the hardest part of being pregnant for me, gaining weight. You may need a little back story here, when I was a teenager I was diagnosed with Gastroparesis- a disease where your digestive system is partially paralyzed. This disease forced me to focus on numbers on the scale more than I should have. I credit it for being the reason I developed an eating disorder. My mom will fight tooth and nail that I don't have one, but the eating disorder clinic says otherwise. By the time I was 16, I was fully focusing on the numbers. If I was under 100 pounds I would binge eat, the moment I got to 100 pounds however I would force myself to vomit and it would be a vicious cycle. This really hasn't changed much six years later, the only difference is until finding out I was pregnant I avoided scales all together. When I got pregnant they needed a starting weight because they were aware I was anorexic, I was 97 pounds. 97 pounds at 22, they sat me down and told me I had to gain weight for a healthy pregnancy-obviously. Even though I am well aware I have to gain weight for this pregnancy, I still find myself freaking out when my stomach grows. It sucks when people point out how tiny I am for being pregnant, it's like a stomach punch because despite trying I know I'm failing. I know that no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to just gain weight. It will always be a battle. I don't even know how to explain the struggle I'm facing right now and I hope you guys don't judge me for any of this. My main hope is that someone reading this has gone through a similar experience and can maybe offer some kind of support, because the worst kind of battle is the battle you have to fight alone.

We Killed the Easter Bunny!

Yup, you read the title right. We killed the Easter Bunny! Although, most of our kids didn't actually believe in him so it wasn't like that bad of a murder. But what does this mean for our Easter? It simply means our kids won't be getting huge over flowing baskets with tons of toys, this year it'll be more meaningful. Part of the reason we're doing this is because of the overflowing toy boxes our kids already have. They have more than enough toys, in fact we get asked sometimes if we run a daycare because we have so many toys. We wanted to make sure our kids didn't feel like we just got rid of Easter all together, but we also just couldn't imagine bringing another toy into this house. We found a good little compromise, that will only work if your kids actually enjoy leaving the house so for our one son this probably isn't the most ideal gift. We decided to do little "coupons" for them, they can be cashed in for various different activities. These range from getting a later bedtime, to going out to the arcade-it seemed like a simple yet fun way to get our kids excited about something other than toys. Another awesome benefit of this, we don't have to spend much money. With money being super tight we truly thought about just skipping Easter all together, but then I realized I'm insane and don't know how to do that. I just feel like our kids are way too young to miss out on something like this. I know, it wouldn't be the end of the world if they had to miss out, but Easter is very important in our family. Last year I drove with my mom for about three hours to see my grandma for Easter and that was the last time I ever got to see her. Jason pointed out that it was an awesome holiday to be our "last holiday" seeing as it is the reason we are able to reunite with our loved ones one day. With that being said, I really hope my kids are okay with our ideas of how we're celebrating this year.

What's in a Name?

I think one of the hardest parts of being a parent is picking out a name and the more kids you have, the harder it is. Before you get pregnant you think you have all the name stuff figured out and know EXACTLY what you want to name your child. For example, I said my first son would be named "Nicholas Anthony", which was apparently a lie because my first son, who I miscarried, was named "Nolan Anthony". My second son was also not named Nicholas and now Nicholas isn't even on the list of possible names we want to use. So here is the problem we're having, we want a name that means something to us. When we named Ryker it was a combination of a lot of stuff, it was simply a name I saw on Etsy at first. Then Jason pointed out it was from "Star Trek" a show we love watching as a family. It became very clear to us that we needed to use this name and it went well with what I wanted the middle name to be, Lucas. Lucas was after a man who was like a second father to me so this name meant a lot to me. I want the same feeling for our next two children(in case you didn't know we're having twins!). We thought we had all the name stuff figured out and we were fine, until Jason's sister announced she was having a little boy due before us, naming him Killian Donovan-the exact name we had picked out for our son. I was extremely upset seeing as this name meant A LOT to me- Killian after my favorite Once Upon a Time character and Donovan for my mom's side of the family. It was perfect! Once she took it, we decided to be mature(ish) about it and just pick out all new names. So back to the drawing board. We were up until about one am picking out names-because you know I'm due in September and don't even know the genders yet so why not?! I am very proud to say though, we have two names for boys and two for girls. We aren't picky about them being matchy so it made it a little easier, but we did want them to be easy to say together. Once all was said and done we were pleased with our name selection, even if our family and friends end up hating these names the names we picked mean something to us and at the end of the day that's all that matters. I can't wait until we find out the genders and we can tell you guys the names and the stories behind them because it's going to be quiet the story for them!

Starting From Scratch

I've come to the conclusion if you ever want to have a baby, get rid of all your baby stuff. Seriously it works almost 100% of the time and is the best IVF treatment I've ever used. With that being said, about two months before finding out we were pregnant we gave away every single baby item we ever purchased(minus the bathtub our girls use for their dolls) and now we're starting over. It's kind of refreshing though, when Skyler was born we kind of went overboard and bought a lot of things we never even used but swore we were going to need. For instance, we bought a Bumbo seat and she was way too large for it and it became a seat for baby dolls until we gave it to someone else. So it's kind of a blessing in disguise for us to get to start over and focus on what we actually need instead of buying the whole baby section of Target. I'm not entirely sure what we consider a "necessity", but I know that Brooke turned out perfectly fine with just the handful of items I was able to afford. With that being said, for the next few months I feel like I'll be researching so many items and figuring out what we need for these babies. If you have any favorite baby items, let us know I'm always open to suggestions and know a lot has changed in the last two years. I can't wait to share this journey with you all.

Becoming a One Income Family

Ever since Jason lost his job our family has been adjusting to so many different things, including the obvious one-our incomes changed dramatically. We went from an "upper middle class" family to probably the lower part of that. It honestly seems like our bills have gotten hirer and our incomes have died completely. We've had to adjust a lot, we had to break it to our kids that some of their activities can't be done anymore and that our holidays will be scaled back A LOT. To our extremely spoiled(sorry grandma I mean well loved!), this came as a bit of a shock, but we promised them they will be okay. Seeing as they're so young we figured this would be a good time to scale back on somethings anyway so this may be a blessing in disguise. So far for us we have figured out how to make due with very little, I'm convinced we will be able to make a cook book on how to cook with five ingredients in your fridge. It's funny to me, we cut out a lot of our spending and we seem to be happier. Our kids fight less, they seem to be happier in general and always want to play with each other. It's so refreshing to see this, a few months ago they just wanted the latest and greatest of everything**cough cough TROLLS MOVIE!**, now they just want to draw with chalk, play baseball, and explore our neighborhood. Becoming a one income family when you have nine kids and two more on the way isn't what we would have planned, but I know that God has bigger and better plans for us. He knows we need something and will give it to us in due time, I can't wait to see what it is. For now, we will focus on what we have instead of what we want and just take it one day at a time.

Our Chore Rewards System

What I mentioned in our last blog post seemed to spark some interest, I received some text messages about how we get kids to do chores if there is no money involved. Like I mentioned in our previous post, we reward them with food or other experiences besides toys and money. I'm not in anyway shape or form against giving your kids money and toys to get them to do their chores, but for our family it doesn't work. Our chores are broken down into a point system- 7 points, 14 points, 21 points, and so on. At seven points our kids are allowed a special snack of their choosing, I should mention this only works if you don't already buy snacks we only get healthy snacks so our kids are pretty pumped when I say they can have their very own bag of chips. At fourteen points they move up a bracket and can get something from their favorite restaurant, normally Chick-Fil-A, again this only works if you don't go there every other day. Twenty one points and up is a bigger deal, we go to a Chuck E Cheese like place(it's local so I can't say what it is) and they can cash in their points there. Most of our kids have decided to save their points for that and I'm extremely happy about it because honestly it's one of my favorite places to go. As they build up their points they'll have more "money" for games and food at this place and it excites them to know they get to go play arcade games-yea we're that old school family! A lot of people have asked why we just don't pay them and honestly it's because we don't have time to get cash out to give them and they don't really have a safe place to keep their money. It just makes it so much easier for us to do the point system and keep it all organized, this way we know how many points everyone has and what they want to use it towards. With that being said, if one of our kids came to us and said they wanted some crazy expensive toy we would allow them to use their points towards it. The only issue with that is they get jealous when their siblings are using their points at the arcade, it's a learning situation and we're happy to deal with it as it comes up. I'm just glad we found a chore system that works for our family, hopefully it'll work for a few years and I won't have to revisit it for awhile.

Deep Cleaning With Kids!

On Saturday I decided to finally just start full force cleaning our house top to bottom(actually it's more like bottom to top). We started with our living room since it is the first room you see when you walk into our house and really is the only room we use all the time. It started with my dumping everything onto the floor, I wish I was kidding, and literally going through items one by one until we had a huge bag of trash filled and a huge bag of donations filled. It's crazy how once you get rid of almost everything in your living room how much space you end up with. We try very hard to ignore the fact we shoved all the "non living room" items into the dining room for the time being-that's this Saturdays project. My biggest tip for cleaning with kids, take it one room at a time, there's no reason(for us at least) to tackle all the rooms at the same time it's just going to overwhelm everyone involved. Another tip that helped us is bribery, yes we bribe our kids to clean they do not get paid nor do they get a new toy-so what's their reward?! Normally a special snack we wouldn't buy, in our family we don't really buy individual snacks anyway so for us it's pretty easy to make this a special surprise. However, there are times we do something a little bigger and take them out to eat or to go bowling depending on the chore(when we do the basement that will be the reward for sure!). Those two little things have helped us a lot, though our kids are still not nearly as excited as I am about cleaning they at least have some kind of interest. They should just look at it this way, once we clean every room we're good for awhile! There's always a bright spot to look forward to and that is it. Wish my poor kids luck on dealing with me and whatever cleaning bug I seem to have gotten bit by.

Fighting a Demon

What's up guys it's Jason. I'm taking over the blog for the day to talk about something that I've been dealing with silently for about a month now. As you all know my sister passed away along with her husband and it kind of hit me harder than I was expecting. Obviously when you lose someone you love you're shaken up quite a bit and just end up thinking of life and everything to do with it. Point is, I wasn't sure how to handle the depression that I had from this whole situation. Right after the funeral my dad, my other sister's boyfriend, and I all went out to get drinks-I know bad little Mormon boy, but it happens. They were both good and able to handle how much they were drinking, but for whatever reason I wasn't feeling any kind of buzz I guess from it and just kept drinking until I felt something. I was searching for relief and just not getting any. What started as just an one night thing quickly escalated into a month of drinking every single day from pretty much the moment I woke up until I hit the pillow. It resulted in fights with my wife and of course the loss of my job. This is obviously something I'm not proud of and totally embarrassed by, but because I love my wife and want to make everything right again I told her I would share my story. I'm not sharing it for sympathy in the slightest, I don't want people feeling bad for me. I'm sharing it to end the stigma of alcoholics being dead beat idiots who don't spend time with their family. You never know what someone is going through and it is a lot harder to stop drinking than people think. For example, my way of avoiding the bar right now at 12 am is writing this post several hours before it needs to be posted. I have to keep myself busy or drinking is all I think about. Luckily, I have nine kids and a pregnant wife who are all more than willing to give me something to do. This is something I will be struggling with for the rest of my life and I am more than prepared to deal with it even if it did take me awhile to get around to it. So I guess this is where I end this thing, I hope that this doesn't change how any of you guys feel about us because it would honestly kill me to know that. Life happens, just remember that-YOU ARE WORTH IT.

No Toys?!

The more I read about becoming a minimalist the more I love it. However, when it comes to toys I've found it hard to pin point how to control the chaos. The main thing we've found is a lot of people living this life style have no toys or almost no toys. One lady we follow has ten kids and no toys for them-which is great for her. However, from the sounds of things they live in an area where it is always nice enough to go outside and play in our area though the weather is so unpredictable that I don't even know what clothes to wear most days. Playing outside for our kids is one of their favorite things, but it's also something they can't do all the time it's just not possible here. So with that being said, I do want to scale down on their toys but I don't think we're to the point of getting rid of all the toys yet. One suggestion people had was not buying "single purpose toys" so in other words, toys that play with themselves basically. We don't have that issue as it is so it was pretty easy getting rid of those toys. The hard part was getting rid of repeat toys, we have five girls so we have several sets of the same Barbies and I think I'm a little more attached to them than they are. I have some weird attachment to toys and I seem to always think "what if another one of the kids wants it?". I had to force myself to realize that they will get over it if they don't have all the toys they want. So, that is the big project we have this weekend-cleaning out the toys! Not all the kids are fully on board, which is part of the reason I'm doing it on the weekend, but like I said they will get over it. Obviously, I will not be getting rid of toys they use often but the toys that sit at the bottom of the toy box can go! When we're done I'll let you guys know how it went and what we decided to keep and how it went over in the end.