Small taste of mommyhood... warning: this is a long one.. keep scrolling down i have HUGE breaks in this blog by accident and am too lazy to fix :)

Ella and I hanging out

Dane me and the Kids in mine and Dane's soon to be new apartment!

Good Big sister Mia and Dane and Ella

The tired couple

Baby Ella with Aunt Jilly

Ella and I just chilling in the morning

Kaz and I slightly deranged on the ALL night drive

Kaz and I DEFINITELY deranged

Me trying to look kinda like myself

no attempt whatsoever to hide how I truly looked and felt

Keeping myself awake while the Uhaul fills up with gas.

pretty scary

giving up...going crazy

I'm back

Mia and Ella in the morning

Morning time

So.... about a week ago I went on a fun and crazy trip with my sister and her family. Kaz ( my sister) and her fam. were moving from Indiana to Spokane, Washington with 2 little girls plus a baby girl (Ella) that was born 6 weeks early, so Kaz and her husband decided to fly me out to help them with the move. The trip started out with a BANG. I flew in on a Thursday night at like 2 in the morning. I got back to Kaz's house and we went to check on Maddi (little girl #2) and she had thrown up (something red) in her bed... and was sleeping it. This was my first glimpse into mommy hood. Next day we packed and packed, cleaned and cleaned and ran a few errands. The next day we did the same thing, and then hopped in the car @ 5 pm. to begin our crazy road trip. The plan was to drive through the night (while all baby's are sleeping) about 10 or 12 hours From Indi to Nebraska. Things did not go as planned. Kaz and I decided to start out the trip by getting lost 2 hours in the wrong direction (Dear Google, fix your maps.... Dear Nebraska, post clear road signs). After finally realizing we were not in the right direction, talking to a cop and managing to separate from Lance ( Kaz's husband), we back tracked two hours, found Lance, and 4 hours later OFFICIALLY began our road trip. (Nice start huh?) By this time the little girls were not stoked about sleeping, and Ella needed to be fed.

Side Note about Ella: She was in the NICU for a month and pretty much as soon as she got out, the family was ready to move to Spokane... so seeing as how Ella is just so tiny she can not ride in a car seat. She has to ride in a car bed. (Looks kinda not safe, but is... and is very comfy I'm sure). She also is corded up to a bag 24/7 with a heart monitor that often likes to go off and sound an alarm because her leads would come off. Ella herself is not a high maintenance baby AT ALL, but it kinda takes alot to meet her basic needs given her situation. She has to be fed every 3 hours, if you pick her up, remember that she comes attached with a purse, and cords that dangle at your feet, and you have to not freak out when her alarm goes off, which it does. This does not make for the most efficient road trip in the world (poor little thing).

Anyways... for one reason or another we had to make lots of stops (Ella needing to be nursed, me having to go to the bathroom, kids getting restless, poopy diapers, Lance falling asleep at the wheel, me having to go to the bathroom again, etc... etc... ) We decided that since our trip was taking us all night we would stop at a Walmart and take a nap for a couple hours, then continue the drive. All of us slept ok (except Kaz who kept thinking her own reflection in the window was a man with a gun ready to kill us all), and we continued our drive. We ended up getting to our hotel in Nebraska at about 5 pm. the following day (somehow our trip got turned into a 24 hr. drive). The hotel we finally made it to had water slides, and we wanted to tire out the kids, so somehow we all worked up the energy to go swimming all night (with a break for dinner). Once we got in the pool though, we ALL had a BLAST. It was soooo much fun, I got some great play time in with my nieces and we laughed alot. That night we ALL crashed and because Kaz was running on NO sleep and Kaz was hauling around coolers full of breast milk in bottles, I did one of Ella's feedings for the night. We woke up in the middle of the night, and I hung out with her for about an hour while she drank her bottle, burped and all that fun stuff. Ella and I DEFINITLY bonded on this trip, and hanging out with her in the middle of the night, with her just staring at me, happy as a clam was definitely part of that bonding. Although waking up in the middle of the night EVERY night would not be my fav. thing in the world, this was a piece of mommy hood that made me all giddy to have my own one day. So next day our road trip ran much smoother... well, after the hotel found all of Kaz's breast milk that they had somehow lost in an abyss of locked hotel freezers., but this does not mean the day did not have it's hiccups. Lance drove the moving van the whole trip, so to keep in touch he kept one cell phone and I kept mine in our car. Our cell phones didn't always have service though, so we had walkie-talkies as a plan B. Well we should have had a plan C, because the walkie-talkies ran out of battery in like 5 minutes, and I somehow managed to drop my phone in a toilet, that I had just peed in. From that point forward the new name of my phone was "pee phone". So now we had no way of communicating with each other, except to pull up next to Lance (which is kinda frightening cause you never knew if he was falling asleep at that moment or not) and hold up a sign, or use our version of sign language trying to imitate things like Mia throwing up in the back seat, and pull over now. It was a little Archaic. We made it to the rest of our destinations in a fairly timely matter, (including a stop in Rexburg to see Daners, thanks guys :) ) and FINALLY ended up at Kaz's VERY cute house, on a gorgeous street, filled with HUGE trees, and many many welcoming neighbors from the church.

the road trip was alot of fun and definitely an adventure. This was the closest taste of mommy hood I have ever had, and although Kaz thought it should be a GREAT form of birth control... it actually had the opposite effect. I was TOTALLY baby hungry after the trip. It helps that all three of Kaz's girls are hilarious, fun, adorable, adventurous, and did i mention adorable? I can't WAIT till mine and Dane's family starts to grow and we wind our selves up on insane road trips that in the end are sooo much fun to look back on.

PS. A road trip is a great time to bond with your fam. Amongst the 24/7 hours spent together and many many (oh so fun) sister talks and other conversations I learned some new things about each of my family members.

Kaz HATES mountains ... with a passion. I think she actually just hates driving through them, or being in the front seat while I am driving through them, or hates watching Lance in the Uhaul drive through them... either way she was very clear about HATING the mountains. ha ha :)

Lance loves to tease me (nothing new here but the subject matter is new) about dropping my phone in the toilet, always having my phone on me, and my "flood myself with Veggies diet"

also (I already knew this but saw it firsthand) he is a MAJOR hands on husband and dad ... always helping, always doing something, right along side with Kaz. :)

Mia has sooo many things to say, and is sooo an oldest child in all the best ways. She is also sooo cute and sweet with her little sisters and LOVES to help.

Maddi is probably the funniest little girl I have ever met. Her and I would have hilarious scrunchy face staring contests that had us both bursting out in laughter. She also has the CUTEST way of running, (picture little old lady, elbows high, kinda shuffling). It's SO funny. Also, she is a girl after my own heart... this girl loves the candy, and if it's near she will find a way to get it...even if that means stealing, which she didn't get very far with. (sorry Maddi )

Ella isn't actually a baby, just a tiny angel with a purse. Never seen a baby (who is in fairly stressful circumstances for such a little thing) be sooo ... angelic... this is the only word that fits.

What did I learn about myself? I might not look so hott when I'm a mom... here are some pictures of what I looked like on this road trip... I was In SHOCK seeing these pictures... I had NEVER seen my face look so tired!

Kaz and Lance Thank you for an awesome time! I am so glad we had a chance to do that trip all together!

The End!