Kimber's Five

I finished my first semester back in college taking a full load of classes-- five classes, actually. Last spring, I was nervous signing up for that class load. We were getting ready to make a cross country move. My husband was deployed. We were in the process of building our house at our new duty station. It felt like it would end being a lot of work transitioning our children and settling into our new home. I wasn't sure how that would workload would translate onto my schedule. Would I be able to support all of the needs of my family as well as support a full load in college? As a sort of compromise, I signed up for online classes. While I knew we would want childcare for our two toddlers, we would be able to take a flexible approach to how that childcare would look. We were able to find a less expensive preschool for them, giving our four-year old four full days at preschool and our two-year old two half days at preschool. Any extra hours I needed for our two-year old could ...

This is the second part to my "Mental health support" post. This one is about what I have done to create an environment for myself that prioritized my mental health. At some point when my mental health was at an all-time low, I thought about all of the things that were bothering me and adding to my depression. I put things in columns: one column was things I can change and the other was things I couldn't change. The list helped me realize that I cannot change all the bad things happening to our family and I can't change how people feel about me. However, I can change the support around me and I can change how I feel about all things that happened. I went home to be with my family and friends during my husband's deployment and to give myself a chance to process the past couple years. Getting myself out of the situation also gave me a chance to think about what I liked about being at home with support and all the ways life was less hard when I wasn't goin...

My husband is in the military and we have moved every 1-3 years for 11 years together. We are in the midst of our 6th military move now and we will live at our next duty station for 3 years. That means that I have had to make adult friends at 5 different duty stations already and I'm about to do it again at a 6th. I have found that my needs for friends has varied as our family has grown and as I have grown. When we first got married and didn't have kids, I wanted friends who were out doing things at night. I liked a fun party and going out. I wanted people to do things with-- dinner parties, outings, even day to day errands. It was just nice hanging out, texting, drinking, and talking about books and hobbies. At our second duty station with one child, I wanted people to meet up with. I kept a Pack'n'Play in my Jeep and I would go to dinner parties, put the baby down to nap in the master bedroom. I liked day trips, playdates, barbecues, farmer's markets on the we...

Having my house on the market with 5 kids has been nothing short of a cluster f*ck. I say that with all due respect. To have your house show ready, you need: The beds made. All 6 of them that we are sleeping in. Laundry put away. Laundry for 6 people. Meaning, the 1 adult adult, me-- who does the laundry-- and the 9, 7, 7, 3, and 1 year olds who create most of the laundry. The laundry situation is a nightmare. Can we please talk about the sheets? The kitchen towels? The bath towels? Did I mention the laundry? Neat and tidy. We are talking toys in the bedrooms. In the loft. In the halls. In the bathrooms {why are there toys in the bathroom?!}. On the stairs. In the family room. In the kitchen. In every single nook and cranny of our house. Horizontal surfaces cleared. This means the folders from school that get emptied x3 everyday have to be immediately taken care of. The bathroom counters in all 3.5 of our bathrooms have to be cleared. The kitchen counters. Nightstands. Bookcases...

We are finally done having children. I have had 6 pregnancies-- 7 if you count the chemical pregnancy. Two of them were multiple pregnancies-- a set of identical twins that are now 7 years old and a set of triplets that we lost in pregnancy {would be 5 years old now}. I also lost a singleton in pregnancy {would be almost 11 years old now now}. I have 5 living children and 4 in heaven-- 9 total. I had retained placenta and hemorrhaged 2 weeks after giving birth to baby #5. I spent most of my last pregnancy on bedrest or "taking it easy," from 27 weeks on to when I delivered her. After she was born I battled post-partum complications and spent a lot of time taking it easy then. My post-partum complications were surgically repaired 7 months after baby #5 was born and required a partial hysterectomy. I have birthed and breastfed {for various amounts of time} 5 children. I have had 3 D&Cs. My body might no longer be needed for growth, life, and sustenance of my children, ...

We are getting ready to move away from our current duty station. We sold our house and we've bought our next house. We have packers coming here, contractors scheduled there, hotels booked. All of the months and weeks of planning are all finally coming together to now: Go Time. It is always weird to me when I get ready to leave a place. I start looking at things that I took for granted-- and possibly even disliked-- differently. The other morning I was walking up to our house after getting the newspaper and my bare foot stepped on a pebble on our driveway. I bent down to brush it off and heard the birds chirping, the sound of a car starting up the street. I heard my kids screaming at each other inside the house-- probably over who's turn it was to pick a show. I was struck with nostalgia. Our house felt so alive in that moment. Our street radiated familiarity. I could almost smell home, the entire state of Washington, and spring itself. Standing there, I took a mental snapshot...

Feeding our 5 children Feeding our big family requires planning. We have 5 children: 9 years old, 6 year old twins, a 3 year old, and a 1 year old. I tried meal planning, but our schedule is constantly changing. If the baby doesn't nap and the toddlers get sick and our elementary kids come home with too much homework, how do I commit to a meal I planned 3 days before? I found that I would grocery shop for meals that didn't get made, which meant ingredients I had to re-purpose, which meant waste, because the ingredients would go bad before I used them. Well-stocked pantry and a Costco run every 2 weeks   Because I am a woman in America, I of course have a not-so-small girl crush on Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman. One of her concepts is having a well-stocked pantry. I will leave Ree Drummond to talk about what that means, so check out her post: "Stocking Up." With a well-stocked pantry, I have a lot of flexibility to make easy, on the fly meals for our...