My chill baby

So, Jacob is turning into my climber. Today he was climbing on the playground equipment. He tries to climb on the fireplace. He even climbed underneath his changing table.

And then Lillian had to give it a go.

He is 10 months now and one smart little boy. When something rolls under the couch and he wants to get it he lays down flat on his tummy and stretches both arms above his head. The two oldest never did this. They just would run into the couch with their heads and start crying.

 He has seven teeth and one more that just broke through. He is pretty content with crawling right now but likes to pull himself up. He also does this funny bear-crawl on the laminate floor because he doesn't like the feel of it on his legs.

Oh - and eyelashes that won't quit. Did I mention those?

He has to be where everyone else is - especially Samuel and Lillian. They are pretty much his heroes. He gets super excited when Daddy comes home from work, squealing and crawling as fast as he can to Daddy's feet.

But mostly he's just chill. He'll sit there and quietly play with toys while I cook. He smiles at everyone even when he's sick or tired. In fact he gets a bit giddy when he's tired. He even fell asleep yesterday at church. During nursery (and the kids were a bit hyper so it wasn't quiet in there). I put him on the floor in the corner with Carlin's suit jacket on top of him and he slept through the last hour of church. Crazy, huh?

My Life

Hi, my name is Aubrey and I have Fibromyalgia. At least that's what the doctors think. You can't really test for fibromyalgia, you just have to rule out everything else. Which they've done, with a ton of blood work, an MRI, chiropractors, neurologists, and rheumatologists.

What is fibromyalgia? Good question. Basically it seems to be something with the nervous system misfiring.  You pretty much feel like you have the flu. All the time. I've been experiencing it for a few years now although we haven't figured it out until rather recently. This means I had it while pregnant with Jacob - and let me tell you, it was a painful pregnancy.

I try to fight it. To just work through the pain and fatigue, because motherhood never takes a break. Because my house won't clean itself. Because I hate feeling like this so I try to live in denial.

But then I have days like today where I wake-up in pain. Everything hurts. The fabric against my skin hurts. I know what is causing this particular flare-up, we've had illness in our family for the past three weeks. Stomach virus twice and now head colds which have turned into conjunctivitis, double ear infections and a sinus infection. So I'm exhausted. Staying up with sick kids and wiping gunk out of eyes and administering medication and cleaning up vomit and waking up with a kid coughing in your face...

Sorry, I had to vent a bit. Back to the main topic of this post. When a flare-up happens I barely function and that just frustrates me. My plans are ruined for the day and my kids start to beg for attention. Which just makes me feel awful.

I don't post this to ask for sympathy. I don't want pity or offers for help. I'm just trying to explain the bags under my eyes. The reason why I might agree to something and then back-out at the last minute. Or why I might say no to begin with. It also explains a bit of my orneriness, because when you're already hurting and then you've had three kids hanging on you all day and that causes more pain you don't have a lot of patience for others.

It also explains my lack of posting. Because the computer chair hurts me on my really bad days. Okay, so I have that off my chest now. I promise that the next few posts will be happier in nature because I have a lot to talk about, mainly how absolutely adorable and crazy my three beautiful children are to me. And pictures, lots of pictures of baby Jacob who might look back at this one day and say "where are all the pictures of me?" Until then, here's a picture to hold you over.

And a random fact: Did you know you are not supposed to double-space between sentences? Apparently this is an ancient practice from the days of type-writers that was taught to generations as young as me on regular keyboards. That would explain why Microsoft Word is always correcting my spacing.