2 kids are harder than 1

I have honestly struggled to even know what to blog about this week.  Mainly because I have been swimming in throw up and poop all week (TMI?) on top of a very emotional toddler and a baby I'm starting to suspect might have colic.  It was my first week as a "single mom"- meaning Ben finally had to go back to work and all of my visitors are gone.  Flint and I both got sick with whatever is going around (thankfully it was only a 24 hour bug for both of us) and Dorothy is just figuring out life I suppose.

Dorothy cried for 6 straight hours 2 nights ago until 3 AM.  And I will admit that my emotions got the best of me.  "Why did I have another kid?" "This is definitely my last child" "Flint wasn't like this" "I hate being a mom" are all thoughts that crossed my mind... multiple times.  On top of feeling extreme guilt for breaking down, causing my sleep deprived husband to have to wake up and take the baby, even though he had to wake up in 2 hours and had just gone to bed a few hours earlier.  Did I mention this was also the night I was throwing up? Let's just say it wasn't a fun night for anyone involved.

But Ben somehow got her to sleep at 3 AM and then she slept for 5 hours, woke up to eat and then continued sleeping.  And somehow when she woke up, and I felt (kind of) rested, her sweet little face melted my heart and all was forgiven.  She had a much better night last night just in case you were wondering :) But I was so thankful because friends somehow knew I needed help. I had a friend come and drop by unexpected.  I'm sure she took one look at me and insisted on taking Flint for the afternoon.  But I was so grateful.  And another friend took him for a few hours today.  Once again grateful.

And it just reminded me of a talk given quite a few years ago (2006 to be exact) by Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin called "Sunday will Come." I just looked it up and re read it and one quote that stuck out to me this time around was "But the doom of that day did not endure...no matter our desperation, no matter our grief, Sunday will come." The Sunday he is referring to is Easter Sunday- the day the Lord was resurrected.  On Friday, the Lord was crucified and darkness consumed the world, but Sunday did come and hope and joy came again when he was resurrected.  Sunday always comes after any darkness and grief we may experience in this life.  

All trials suck.  But the one wonderful thing about them is that they do not endure.  They don't last forever.  As I woke up the next morning, the 6 hours of screaming had stopped and somehow we had all survived. I guess simply put, "this too shall pass." And it always does! And for that I'm grateful once again.  And being grateful in the midst of the trials, clinging on to the hope that it really will pass is what allows me to pull through, and even feel joy during them.  I'm beyond grateful for a husband who is willing to sacrifice sleep to take care of our baby.  Without complaining and without me asking him to.  I'm grateful for my Danville community of women who come to my aid like a family would.  And I'm grateful that screaming babies fall asleep eventually, even if it's not as quickly as I would like :)

Most of all I'm grateful for the perspective that the gospel brings to me.  Having an eternal perspective allows me to cope with hard things.  Remembering talks from conferences, scriptures I read, prayers I've said, etc. bring me peace when things get rough.  And it makes me grateful that I've stuck with my faith all of these years.  Makes me grateful that I listened to those talks, read those scriptures, and said those prayers because doing those things years ago helps me today. And doing them today will help me years from now.  That's why those little daily things are so important.  You never know what you'll need to pull out of your reserves years later.  Or days or minutes later.

So today, I choose to be grateful, even though having 2 kids is challenging.  And being sleep deprived is challenging.  And lots of other things going on in my life are challenging.  But being grateful and remembering that Sunday always comes keeps me going.  I've had many "Fridays" in my life, and the Sundays have always, always come.  Sometimes years later, but they came.  God has promised that and I'm going to choose to trust him.

My vision for 2018

I recently was introduced to the idea of a vision board.  Perhaps others of you have heard of this idea, or even done one yourself.  The basic concept is that you have a board of some sort with pictures that represent your goals/things you want/vision for your life.  And I definitely loved the idea and decided to do one for the year 2018.

My main reason for doing this is because I want to be more proactive with setting my mind on goals and letting the Lord know what I want.  I strongly believe in the power of prayer and after studying a lot on the idea of prayer in general, I have felt like I need to be more specific in my prayers and in asking for what I really desire.  And of course still be submissive to His will and accept that He knows better than I do.  More thoughts on prayer will perhaps be forthcoming in another blog post.  For now, I wanted to show you a digital representation of our family vision board for the year.

First and foremost, I want our home to be a Christ centered home.  Having this be our number one priority will set everything else in place.  Ben got me a big framed picture of the art shown below of Christ walking on water for Christmas.  I have loved this picture for a while now (which he didn't even know) and I have also been wanting a more non traditional picture of Christ to hang up in my home for a while.  So it was the perfect gift! It reminds me that even when the waves and storms of life surround us, Christ is a constant.  He can calm the waves at his command and walks the waters by faith in God.

I also want to make the temple a much bigger priority for our family in 2018.  Unfortunately we live 3 hours away from the closest temple, which definitely makes it a lot more difficult.  On top of my nursing a baby and Ben's surgery schedule.  But if we make it a priority, I know we will be blessed.  Our temple is the Philadelphia temple, which is one of the newer temples.  And it is so beautiful.  We love Philly so definitely need to make it down there more often.  Once it warms up a bit, and it is safe for Dorothy to be out, I would like to try and go once a quarter.  Once that becomes more manageable, perhaps we can up that to once every other month.  

Matching into surgery!! Obviously this is a big one.  We want nothing more than for Ben to finally have a solid residency spot and hopefully that spot will be in general surgery.  I know Ben will make a great surgeon.  And I hope to one day look back at this time in life with the ability to say that waiting to become a surgeon was worth it.  Even though it's hard to wait, and being a surgery resident is hard on everyone in our family.  But hard is good! What doesn't kill us makes us stronger right?

After we get our job lined up in March, our big goal for this year is to buy a house.  The idea of buying a house is a little scary to me (hello adulthood), but overall it's really exciting and I'm dying to be a homeowner.  A general surgery residency is 5 years long, so that's a good amount of time in one place.  The longest in our marriage so far!  I despise moving, so that idea of being in once place for 5 years is also super appealing.  And having a say in my wall colors :) 

With that being said, I also want to be better at keeping a cleaner home this year.  A clean home really is a happy home.  And if I keep on top of it, it's so much easier.  Ben has had this week off so we've been purging our home and it has felt awesome.  Hopefully we can keep up the pace.  I also want to make sure I'm spending more time working on my home and keeping it clean than on social media- as this meme suggests :)

And finally, the resolution that keeps persisting every year- being healthy! I'm not making a weight loss goal though or anything like that.  I just want our family to be more conscious of eating fruits and vegetables and to be more active in general.  Going on hikes, bike rides, etc.  The only specifics I have set for myself is not eating fast food (and if I do eat at a fast food restaurant, to get a salad).  I even ate a salad at McDonald's today.  Because honestly, the indoor playground at McDonald's is a godsend when it's freezing outside and your toddler really needs to get out some energy.

So that's my board for now.  I might add things as the year goes on- especially since two of the things will be done by March, and that's only a quarter of the year!  I also have some personal goals that I am working on- like blogging more, but this is for the Fisher family as a whole.  What are some goals you all are working on?

2018: The year of TRUST

OK first of all- what do you all say? Twenty-Eighteen? or Two thousand-eighteen? I have found myself saying both lately and can't decide which I prefer.  Fortunately this isn't a podcast so I don't really have to decide. :)

I've been asked by a few people how I come up with the word that I choose for each year. In general, I take a look at what my year is going to look like and decide what word will benefit me the most to get me through whatever it may be that happens.  For example, in 2016, my word was embrace because I knew that we were going to be moving and I would be in a new place with new people and basically new everything.  I knew that I would need to embrace the large amount of changes that were coming up to survive the year with any kind of happiness.  And it worked! In 2017, I chose the word faith for a few reasons.  First, I felt that my faith had been broken due to not matching in the year 2016 and that I wanted it to be restored.  And second, I knew I would need a deeper understanding of faith to face what happened with the match in 2017.  You can read my post from March of last year to catch you up on that situation.  I also liked the idea of picking a gospel centered word to help guide my study and prayer throughout the year.

So that brings me to 2018. I wasn't quite ready to give up focusing on the word faith, so wanted a word similar.  Especially since we are heading into yet another match season with a lot of unknown ahead of us.  As I read my patriarchal blessing, general conference talks, and the scriptures, I noticed a strong link between the words faith and trust.  So I started down the trust path, but not fully committing to it yet.  Two seemingly small and insignificant things happened to me at the end of the year that solidified my choice, however.

Ben was working the overnight shifts over Christmas, which left Flint and I by ourselves for Christmas Day while Ben slept.  I decided that I would take Flint to his first movie theater movie as a special treat and so we could get out of the house.  We went and saw Coco- highly recommend by the way! One of the previews before the movie began was for "A Wrinkle in Time." And there is this scene where two of the characters are in the midst of a crazy storm, unsure of what to do.  And the girl yells to the boy, "Do you trust me?!" And she is obviously about to do something crazy to survive this storm (not sure what- I will have to go see this movie I suppose...) and the boy says "I trust you!" And I immediately got teary (I was also 39 weeks pregnant) and thought about how this little scene could so easily represent God and myself.  The fear of the unknown and the stress of not knowing what is going to happen next can easily feel like a storm.  And we can often feel like we are going to get swallowed up in the waves of worry.  But God always has His hand reached out to us.  And He is always there, ready to ask, "Do you trust me?" And it's up to me to decide how to answer that question.  I've had times in my life where I've lost my focus and convince myself that I'm alone out there, drowning.  But when I've taken the time to recenter my life on Christ, I always find Him, and His hand is always there.  I just need to say "Yes! I trust you!" And I want 2018 to be the year where I am fully centered on Christ, ready to do whatever He has planned for me, as crazy as it may seem beforehand.

The second experience, which actually happened before the one I just described, happened on Christmas Eve.  Not sure why I'm going out of order here.  But hey- my blog, my rules! We had our Christmas Day celebration on Christmas Eve, due to Ben's work schedule.  And my mother in law wrote both Ben and I letters to read on Christmas Day.  In her letter, she described her experience with praying for Ben before he got into medical school.  She wanted him to get accepted into the University of Utah so that he could be close to home and have more options to find a wife.  And she really really wanted that and continued to pray for it fervently.  One day, however, she had the thought "If he doesn't get into the U, will you still trust me?" And she said out loud, "Yes! I will!" (This is me paraphrasing). And as many of you know, he didn't get into the U, but went to St. Louis instead.  Where he met his lovely wife (me) :) , started a family, etc.  So things worked out just the way they were supposed to. And it made me ask myself- will I still trust God if Ben doesn't match into a surgery spot? And the answer is yes! I will.  God has never led me astray and I have to trust and have faith that He never will. For God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

So Trust.  That is the word that will guide me through this year.  All things will work together for my good.  God has promised that. And I am going to trust Him.

Introducing Dorothy Grace Fisher

New year, new blog post! For one of my 2018 resolutions, I decided that I want to blog once a week.  I like getting my thoughts out there and sharing with all of you so hopefully you will enjoy reading as much as I do writing.  One of my goals with my blog is to find God more in my life and gain a richer, more personal understanding of my relationship with Him in my every day life. So this will be a very spiritual and religious blogging year - not that that's any different from what I normally post :)

2018 truly started with a bang! (warning birth story ahead) I woke up around 7am on New Year's Day with some contractions and immediately figured they were once again a false alarm that I wasn't going into labor.  Sigh.  I had been having contractions on other days and then nothing so figured this was the same, even though my due date was on the 3rd of January.  So I took a bath, walked around, stayed in bed, etc.  But the pain was becoming worse and I decided to start timing them. They were 10 minutes apart for an hour and then quickly changed to 5 minutes apart.  At that point, my mom was driving to our house from Ohio so I told Ben to call a friend and go drop Flint off.  (Thanks Melissa!!) In the time it took to drop Flint off, the contractions became SUPER painful and I was officially convinced that I was in labor.  We went into the hospital around 10:30am and I got admitted.  

Since I was induced with Flint, this whole labor thing was new to me and I was NOT a fan. I got an epidural as soon as they got me to my room and that relieved the pain for a bit.  Unfortunately, the epidural wore off in a couple of hours and the contractions were back.  This same thing happened with Flint- and I originally thought it was due to incompetence of the guy that put my epidural in, but now am thinking I have a resistance to epidurals? Who knows. Fortunately my anesthesiologist was super awesome and nice and put stronger medication in which helped.  For about an hour.  Sigh.  The medicine wore off a few more times and he finally gave me the strongest stuff they have (the stuff they use for c sections according to him) and that finally worked.  Such relief! Side note- shout out to all of you moms who choose to go natural. I don't know how you do it! But I salute you. At this point it was around 7:30 or 8pm and the doctor came in to break my water.  He warned me that I would probably go pretty fast once my water broke.  He broke it at 8:30 officially and said it would take about 2 hours.  Well about half an hour later, it was apparently time to push! And I was not mentally prepared. Her birth just felt so different from my birth with Flint that I thought I had more time.  But I didn't! With Flint, I was very calm and serene as I pushed and he came.  With this little lady.... not so much. Fortunately I only had to push for about 20 minutes and then she was here! I will say though- during that 20 minutes I may have screamed "GET HER OUT OF ME!!!" a few times.  Ben and the doctors laughed at me.  And looking back, I laugh too.  Mainly because it's so out of character.  haha. 

The moment she came out though, it was instant relief and everything felt right. Which also differed from my first birth.  With your first child, I feel like you are still unsure about it all and even like "wait is this thing mine now?" but with your second (at least for me) there was an instant feeling of overwhelming love and a severe attachment.  I wish I could explain that better but that's all I've got.  My recovery with this birth has been much much better too.  I was up and walking around immediately and haven't been as sore, which has been nice.  I'm not the best at posting pictures on here- but I figured with the birth of a baby- you'd want to see some :) 

So her name is Dorothy Grace Fisher. Yes, I do feel a little weird about naming her after myself.  Just know that Ben chose her middle name since I chose her first name and didn't give him much of a choice in the matter. :) But her name suits her and she is beautiful.  No, Dorothy is not a family name.  I have loved that name since I was a little girl (huge Wizard of Oz fan here) and named all of my dolls and stuffed animals "Dorothy Beautiful" growing up.  Hence the name Dorothy.  And yes, I do love the nicknames Dottie and Dot for those who have asked.  I don't know if they will stick, but I am definitely open to them.  I'm just going to see what happens organically. Also stats! 8 lbs 11 oz 21 inches long.  A whole pound heavier than Flint! And it's all in her cheeks I'm pretty sure :)

Everything just seemed to work out perfectly for the welcoming of our little Dorothy.  Ben had Dec 27-Jan 1 off for his holiday break.  And then Geisinger allows for 3 days of paternity leave.  So I begged and pleaded with the Lord that she would come while he was off so that he would basically get an extra week off with his paternity leave and already having this weekend off.  I was so convinced that she was going to come in December.  Or at least I really wanted her to because I wanted Ben to have those extra 3 days off.  As each day in December passed, I became more and more weepy and sad, thinking that things once again were not going to work out.  As New Year's Eve came, I told myself I had to accept that I couldn't control when she was going to come, and for all I knew, she would come a week late and be born on January 10!

As I reflect on her birth, and the fact that she was born on January 1, the last day that she needed to be born in order for Ben to get the time off that I felt I needed, I realize that sometimes everything really does work out the way I want it to.  Sometimes the Lord allows for tender mercies and gives you exactly what you want.  And I needed that reminder. I will admit that I am normally wrong when it comes to knowing what is best for me.  And that is totally ok.  But I truly felt the Lord's love as I realized that he sent me exactly what I wanted when I wanted it because that doesn't always happen.  And I'm ok with that.  If she had decided to come on January 10, we would have figured things out and it would have all been ok.  But boy was it nice that she didn't decide to wait that long! And I definitely felt his presence as she came into the world.  What a special baby he has sent me.  And all of the sorrow and sadness as described in my last post completely dissipated.  This baby really did come to heal my heart, and what a blessing and joy she has been in her short 5 days of life.  I know she will only continue to heal me and bring joy into my life. Birth is a beautiful, beautiful experience.  Even though it's painful, I consider myself lucky to get to be able to go through it. 

So that's how my year started.  The best way possible :) And having a January 1 baby is pretty fun too- and will be fun to celebrate in the years to come.