We've been home from our adventures for a few days now. Not quite a week yet. I'm rearranging and spring cleaning the house, catching up on laundry, unpacking. Cleaning and organizing my friend Kristin's house while she was on bed rest somehow motivated me to work on my own home too.
Jax is soooo close to crawling. He can sit up for thirty minutes or more. That's the trick he learned while we were gone. I realized he may have learned it because Kristin has carpet, so I was willing to sit him down on it with some toys, and leave him, without being worried he would come crashing down on a hard floor in a fit of tears. So I found an enormous navy blue rug on craigslist once we got home. It nearly covers my entire living room floor, so there's plenty of cushy space for Jax to sit and play and crash and try to crawl. I saw plenty of other rugs I preferred the colors and design, but this one was $35 and that was manageable on our limited funds. This one will do. It's plain, but not an eyesore.
Then my cousin shipped us two giant boxes of boy clothes for the next year. It felt like Christmas sorting through it all, washing it, sorting it by size, organizing it into sized boxes to be ready as he grows. That project is still under way.
And I exchanged a white slipcover for my couch, a year old but still in the package unopened, for a dark teal green one. The color should hold up better to babies and husbands than the previous ivory one did.
I made up a bottle of Kristin's household cleanser, and have been spraying and tidying up to its fresh citrusy smell.
And I started sorting through photos from the trip. I took over five hundred photos, and need to slowly whittle them down and sort them. I've made enough progress that I've started editing and posting some. I decided to take a break from blogging our daily outfits, to give me that time back to blog and edit our trip photos instead.
One afternoon when it was overcast but still soft and golden, I took Jax out for "real" six-month portraits. Upon arriving home and viewing the images, I discovered it's much harder to pick out just a few of the best images when it's your own kid, instead of someone else's kid. Narrowing down client images to a handful of the best of the best isn't usually too hard for me. But doing it with my son's portraits? So difficult. Every slight variation of his expression, I recognize and adore.
I decided to keep the ones I just can't bring myself to delete, but aren't sure I sure edit when there's some that are better, in a temporary folder. I've deleted a ton, but my indecision on the remaining images is killing me.
We're still trying to find our rhythm since being home. Jax was sleeping through the night before we left town. He would sleep eight hours straight, wake to nurse, then sleep another two or three hours before waking for the day. While we were out of town, I eventually stopped counting how many times he would wake in the night... four, five, seven, eight or more some nights. I was lucky if he slept four hours straight at any point in the night. Change of place, change of temperature, change of bed, everything was different. And we slept in the same room, which I loved. But it makes him wake up more...some how he knows I am there. He did it at home too. He didn't start sleeping through the night at home until we moved him to his own room.
Since being home, he's sleeping six hours straight, then waking one or four more times after that. And his naps have been unpredictable. Two thirty minute naps one day, then another day a 1.5 hr nap, a 45-minute nap, and another 1 hr nap. I'm just trying to go with the flow, keep my patience on the days he refuses to nap, and enjoy being here as much as I enjoyed being in Kentucky.
I feel full, in a good way. Full of life, full of love, full of new learning from being on the farm with my friends, full of thoughts about how to apply what I've learned to my life, full of the richness of my family and my beautiful, simple, lovely little life and tiny, cozy, lovely little house.
Looking at the photos of Jax makes me feel warm inside. What a lucky, blessed woman I am.
