Sprinkler

The Olde Town Arvada splash pad has hours that are great for the weekend goer, but not so great for moms and dads that work full time: 9 – 11 AM, 12 – 2 PM, 4 – 6 PM, and 8 – 10 PM.  Every day when we drive home from daycare, Julia sees the splash pad and starts screaming, “It’s on!  The water fountain!”

Thursday was a warm day and we knew it would be the last warm day until tomorrow (Monday) or Tuesday, and with the pending C-section, I wasn’t sure when we could get back to the splash pad.  So I called Adam and asked if he would please run to the store and buy a backyard sprinkler.  We don’t need it for the lawn – we have a sprinkler system that’s on a timer – but for $10, I thought it would be a good investment for the girls to have some backyard water fun in the event that we couldn’t get to the splash pad and since the pool doesn’t open for another 2 – 3 weeks, it quells their water need.  So, he brought it home, we served dinner, and you’ve never seen the girls eat so fast.

More Splash Pad Fun

I love pictures of the girls… they are so much fun to watch and experience!  I was thankful to plop my 38 week pregnant body down on a bench and let them run… except for the one time an older boy careened into Julia, sending her knees and face into the concrete, it was a good time for all three of us!

Anticipation

This kid loves socks so much…

… that she gets up in the middle of the night to put them on…

… her hands.

Splash Pad Fun

These are just two of the many pictures I took last weekend at the splash pad in Olde Town Arvada, but I had to share them, as soon as I saw them, because I love how full of joy the girls are to be running around in the water.  These were taken a week ago… the weather was in the mid-80s and as you can tell, the sun was strong that day.  Our pool doesn’t open until the end of May, but who needs to pay for a pool pass when you can have this much fun at the free splash pad?

Frei von Schmutz soap

For those not fluent in German, "Free from Dirt.". But I thought the name sounded more expensive. This is a follow up post to our soap making experience.

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Prost!
Adam

Full Moon

Type “full moon” into Google and you’ll come up with any number of stories about what a full moon does to people.  There are the stories about psychiatric ward patients becoming extra… psychiatric, increased accidents and visits to the emergency room, and then there are the stories about women going into labor more often – and even more to the point, a higher statistically significant number of women whose water breaks near a full moon if their due date is soon.

I looked back at the dates that Julia and Raven were born, and ironically enough, even though *I* was the cause of my water breaking with Julia, she actually was born on a full moon.  My water broke with Raven all on its very own, and she wasn’t born anywhere near a full moon.  So, no significance there…

… but, then we have the case I’m in now.  Tonight is the full moon.  Adam, at my urging… my insistence… is in San Diego at Craft Brewers’ Conference until tomorrow night.  I’m within two weeks of my due date – ten days out from my C-section date.  So I have to wonder, what are the chances that my water would break tonight while I’m home along with the girls? 

There is a lot of debate about whether a woman’s body can be in synch with lunar cycles.  Some think that maternity wards have extra nurses on hand near full moons because more women think they are in actual labor and head to the hospital and are instead experiencing Braxton Hicks.  On the other side of the coin, there are the believers that think that there are more nurses because more babies are born.

It’s hard to find a site that shows any scientific proof… there are published medical articles that suggest as such, and then as many that try to debunk the theory… this is left to one of those ‘old wives’ tales’ sort of things like “heartburn during pregnancy makes for a baby with a full head of hair” (true with my first two!!!) or “higher heartbeats means a girl instead of boy” (true with my first two!) – but you can always find something that speaks to the opposite.

My apologies for not posting links… but I wanted to post this blog post today in the event that there was a remote chance that Baby #3 was born in the next few days… I wanted to remember when the full moon was and whether or not it affected the birth of this child.

So I guess tonight we’ll just wait and see… you can bet I will not do anything stupid to invoke my water breaking or going into labor, but at the same time, it’s not as if I can hide from the moon.  And, considering that I live in Arvada now, I’m that much closer to it – being mile high and all.  Heh.

Look for the full moon tonight in your time zone – tonight is a “supermoon” in that it’s the largest and closest full moon this year – in the states, we’ll see it anywhere from 11:35:06 PM for Eastern (and counting backwards… 10:35:06 PM Central, 9:35:06 PM Mountain… etc.).  Considering that I should still be awake at that time tonight, I’m heading out to take pictures!  Enjoy the full moon tonight!

erin

One More Thought: A Clean Confession

I complete forgot to include this in my last blog post, but it deserves its own little piece to prove how Clean strange I’ve become…

One of my favorite places right now is my office building early on a Monday morning.  No, not because I’m eager to get to work for the week.  The reason is that after a weekend of being scrubbed to the hilt, our office building – the halls, the stairwells, the elevators – smell amazingly Industrial Clean.  Industrial Clean is even better than Clean.  I tell you what.

Clean

Maybe it’s because we cleaned the house every weekend growing up; maybe it’s that my nose is extra sensitive to scent.  I love the smell of Clean.  Yes – Clean has a smell.  I think that it’s different for everyone, but Clean is definitely a smell, and lately I cannot get enough of it.

Due to time constraints… priorities, really… I don’t clean as often as I’d like or as often as I used to.  That was until about 4 weeks ago, when I finally regained my sense of smell after a few months of colds and different things.  It wasn’t that my house smelled bad that pushed me back into cleaning hardcore and more often, it was that I wanted to smell Clean.

Occasionally I’ll spend 5 – 7 hours straight cleaning and scrubbing the house so that the whole thing is spotless and smells amazing.  Lately it’s been 10 – 15 minutes here and there of cleaning a tub, vacuuming a set of rooms, scrubbing a toilet, or wiping down every horizontal surface in my path.  It gives me a lot of joy to see the Clean… but even more so, I love the smell of Clean.

Take this morning, for instance.  I had a good night of sleep, was feeling fairly good, and I was suddenly struck to spray down and scrub the tub.  In between makeup and hair and getting dressed, I cleaned that shower good, and I was blessed with a fantastic smell afterwards.

It’s not just a Clean house that does it; part of the reason why I love doing laundry so much is that I love the smell of Clean laundry.  I do laundry frequently to keep the scent alive and to keep the funk away.  Throw a piece of laundry on the floor?  Watch out!  Even if it doesn’t belong to our family, if it lays there long enough, it’ll end up in the washer, guaranteed.

Today I set the washer to wash the towels and shower curtains while I was away.  As I pulled each piece from the washer to place it in the dryer, I sniffed it. After the laundry was dry, I pulled each piece from the dryer and buried my face in it.  Ah, Clean.  Maybe I’ll just sleep in there tonight.  Where’s the cot?

Call me weird.  It’s okay.  But, for now it’s the small things, things over which I have some little bit of control, even if it’s just producing Clean in my house.  Beyond excited to do four loads of laundry tonight, simply because of what smell I look forward to each time I walk into the laundry room.

And soon?  The smell of a new baby.  My life is about to get even better.

erin

Picture from Today