An attitude of gratitude day 22: A Picture is Worth a thousand words

When I was in the NICU with Jessa I was blessed with nurses who popped in just to chat a couple minutes before they had to check on Jessa.  One nurse encouraged me to do the 365 day picture challenge where you take a picture each day of your baby.  It was amazing to see now how much Jessa has grown, changed, and matured.  My phone is constantly full because I have so many pictures and they mean the world to me!  As I was loading pictures tonight I realized how grateful I was to have a camera and to capture all those precious moments.  I regret not continuing on into Jessa's second year because I thought too many pictures this is ridiculous but now I realize those pictures mean the world to me and I want to have them forever.

Jessa the day she was born

2 months old

1 month old

Jessa my acrobat

An Attitude of Gratitude Day 21: I stand All Amazed

I stand all amazed at the love Jesus offers me,
Confused at the grace that so fully He proffers me;
I tremble to know that for me He was crucified,
That for me, a sinner, He suffered, He bled and died.

• O it is wonderful that He should care for me
    Enough to die for me!
    O it is wonderful, wonderful to me!

This week I was asked to present on a craft that I made for Christmas for our Relief Society super saturday.  I chose to make a Christ Christmas Advent Calendar where each day you flip over the numbers revealing a picture of Christ.  As I was searching and looking for pictures of the Savior I had moments where I choked back tears that were threatening to fall.  The Saviour gave us so much and did so much for this world and it is so sad to see Him and Heavenly Father forgotten by so many, or to be upstaged by Santa who now no longer brings humble gifts but things that leave families in debt.  I am so grateful for this Christmas season and to teach Jessa the real meaning of Christmas; but today more than ever I am grateful for someone who loved me enough to die for me to give me a better life.  It reminds me of the saying there is no man greater than this who lieth down his life for his friends.  Oh what awe I am in for what Jesus Christ has done for me.  

An Attitude of Gratitude Day 20: Memories

Today I decided to spend some time looking back over my blog.  I really love writing in my blog it is my everything even though sometimes I fail for months to do it on end.  But as I was looking back I loved seeing the pictures I had posted of the proud momma moments.  I loved today while I was working out thinking of when I lived at home and would be working out in the spare bedroom to have my brother walk by and say he was proud of me.  It was thinking of funny mommy moments like yesterday when Jessa crawled directly into the bathroom.  Crawled onto the scale and stood up weighted a while and got off.  It was thinking of the times I had as a teenager spending with friends.  I am grateful for the good memories.  I love that this is not something anyone can ever take away from you and memories that your heart makes are just for you <3.

An attitude of gratitude: Day 19 Motherhood

After this short and sweet paragraph the words are not my own.  However they were posted on a dear friend's blog. So today I am grateful that other momma's speak out about parenting and motherhood.  I struggled to get through this entry today because it is how I feel.  In so many ways I feel inadequate as a mother.  Many times I would pray and ask Heavenly Father why he couldn't give so many special women the opportunity to raise Jessa who can't have babies when I am so inadequate...

The Things Unwritten and Unsaid

September 28, 2013 by Allison Slater Tate 2 Comments

People criticize moms who write about their kids. We overshare, they say. We exploit, they cry. We’re narcissistic navel-gazers, spewing treacly, precious cliches all over the interwebz.

Perhaps. Sometimes. Maybe.

But I write about my experiences, parenting and otherwise, in an effort to connect. There were so many days early in my motherhood when I sat on the floor in my underwear and cried right along with my colicky, unhappy first baby, leaking from every orifice and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into by having a baby. I felt completely alone, because my friends were not really having babies yet, and I was completely blindsided by the reality of motherhood. I likened it to being hit by a bus: the Bus of Motherhood. I could not have written anything precious or treacly about those first few months. They were brutal, not poetic. What got me through that first year was connecting to other mothers — in support groups and playgroups, online, and through words. Words spoken and written carried me when I could not walk.

I could probably write a book listing the many, many hard moments of parenting, like those first days, that I never saw coming. While I find being a mother infinitely awesome, I also find it infinitely difficult. Being someone’s mother is hard, yo. It’s hard for all the reasons we talk about: the Groundhog Day-type frustrations of trying to feed, clothe, and nurture volatile little people every day who would really rather we leave them to their all-beige, carb-heavy diets, infinite amounts of screen time, and the ability to beat each other, Hunger Games-style.

I’ll be honest and say that yes, the sleep deprivation that came with my newborns was devastating. Nursing a baby was worth it, but left me worn and touched out by the ends of my days. I have shed bitter, frustrated tears more than once over a meal I made that was instantly rejected. I have asked myself when I might have a day that doesn’t include cleaning up someone else’s body fluids. I have cried over my children growing up, cried after losing my temper with my kids, and cried because I am just so tired and this is just so grindingly hardsometimes.

But the hardest things about parenthood, I have found, are things I actually can’t and won’t share — precisely because I do want to protect my children’s privacy. They are the things that go unwritten, the moments that go untold. They are the days that I feel like I have messed up so much or I am not sure what to do, when I feel paralyzed and frozen and like I just want to go be anonymous in a coffee shop somewhere for a few hours and not be anyone’s mother for a while. I want to hide, not because I don’t love my children, but because I don’t know how to be a mother to them in that moment. I don’t know what they need. I don’t know what I need to be for them to make things okay. They can’t be fixed with band-aids or diaper changes or a snack full of protein or an earlier bedtime.

There is a quote widely attributed to Plato but argued to have originated with Ian MacLaren that goes, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” That could never be more true than when it applies to parents. From my experiences and from what I know of my friends’ experiences, we really only see the tips of the icebergs when we encounter other parents at school pick-up, on the sidelines of athletic events, and in the aisles of Target. We might see other parents tussling with a tantruming toddler or clutching the hand of a new Kindergartner or tending to a child who had the wind knocked out of her when she collided on a soccer field. But we don’t often witness the kinds of moments that knock the wind out of theparents and bring them to their knees — the hesitant steps into the child psychiatrist’s office, the millionth confusing parent-teacher conference, the discouraging test results, or when the child who tells his mother, “My brain doesn’t work the way other people’s brains work.” We don’t see the mother who wraps herself around her child when she is putting him to bed, tears falling into his hair beneath her face, because she’s not sure how to make the world work for him. We don’t see the dad pausing outside the door and taking a deep breath because it’s hard to leave for a day of work knowing his child is struggling.

I write about parenthood, but sometimes, the very stories that rip my heart apart are the ones I can’t write. My darkest days are the ones I have to keep to myself, precisely because they are not about the 800th wet bed I just changed or the epic meltdown the toddler had in the Gap or the failed playdate. They are so much bigger: they are yawning chasms with tiny, swinging rope bridges that I am attempting to cross every day without allowing myself — or more importantly to me, my children — to fall. Sometimes, I have to remind myself that there are tiny, swinging rope bridges surrounding me, stretching across those same chasms and ones I cannot see, and other mothers and fathers are stumbling across them, knuckles white, teeth gritted, while they lead their children on their own paths. They are all fighting their own battles, and all of them are hard. Hard, and worth it. But the battles you don’t see are far bloodier than the ones you do.

I learned in those first dark months with my first baby that motherhood would make me cry. That promise has held true, in both good moments and bad. I had no way of knowing then that the things that crushed me then — the never-ending cluster feeds, the inexplicable public crying jags, the long nights of shushing and swaying — would not even compare to the things that crush me now. That terrifying feeling of not knowing what to do, of looking around for the real grown-up to swoop in and save us all, has never gone away. It just grew.

So I want to tell you out there — you, the one fighting your own hard battle today that no one around you can see and you feel you cannot and must not reveal to protect your child — that I know. I know what it feels like to fill out the forms, to receive the emails from the teachers, to wait in the doctors’ offices, to walk out of a child’s bedroom and want to crumble to the ground with the weight of the not-knowing-what-to-do. I might not see your battles, but I know they are there, and I am battling too.

Even if I don’t tell you about it.

An attitude of gratitude days 12- 14

Woah... so this writting in my blog every day hasn't been going so well.  Thank goodness I am only a week behind!  Lol!  So last week was a busy week for many reasons.  Have you ever started a week just waiting for the week to be over?  That was my last week.  I received a letter in my courier package from work that I was required to spend 2 full 9 to 10 hour days at a work conference to help my residence go crime free.  Two days away from Jessa!  You had to be kidding me.  I cried a lot.  I prayed a lot.  I begged the office to let Jonathan go in my place but they wouldn't budge.  So from the day I found out about the conference until the day I went I talked with Jessa about what was going to happen.  We talked about how daddy would stay with her and how I would go but come home after my course was done.  I think this is one of the few times where I felt extremely grateful for my education in early learning.  We were taught to ease separation anxiety by allowing the child to watch the parent leave either through the door or window.  So I told J to do just that.  He did and Jessa didn't cry the entire time I was gone.  I was sad and cried to leave her for the two days.  But as I was sitting through my course I received a confirmation that this is what I needed to do to provide a safer home for my baby.

Growing up with the many family struggles we faced I had a really bad association with police.  So being trained by police really changed things... I realized in a very long time that I felt safe and an assurance that nothing bad could happen.  There are bad cops out there don't get me wrong but I am grateful to live in a country where there are good men who protect our streets so we can live in safety and peace.    Thursday was a lot easier for me to face the challenge of leaving Jessa.  Now being back at home it made me appreciate being a stay at home mom even more.  My days may not be glorious, they may seem tedious, hard with little reward, but at the end of the day as I snuggle my baby to sleep I am grateful for the choice I made to stay at home with her.  I love my baby Jessa.

An attitude of gratitude Day 11: I Remember

This morning I wanted to create a tradition where we honor those who have kept our country free and for those who continue to do so.  We put on a live broadcast that was here in Edmonton and Jessa didn't know if we were praying or what we were doing but she was reverent none the less.  After Jonathan's Canadian citizenship ceremony I have come to have a greater sense of gratitude and awe for the country we live in.  I bawled through the moment of silence so grateful for the freedom God has given us.  We are free not only in the country we live in so today I am grateful for living in Canada, raising my family here and being able to live ina land that Heavenly Father has blessed to be prosperous.

So today iremember those who fought so we can continue to always be free.

An attitude of gratitude Days 5 to 10

I have to be honest of why my attitude of gratitude day by day blog entries took a leaping halt for the past week.  I am ready to take off my gloves and be honest.  Lately I have been struggling with keeping it all together; since thursday I have had a melt down day after day.  The stress of my job has gotten to me and the lack of support that it has left me in a panic.  To top it all off I was sent a paper last week telling me that I would have to leave my baby Jessa to go to an all day 2 day course.  I still am struggling with that and have had panic attacks regularly since.  I can't wait to have wednesday and thursday done with becaue then the pressure, stress, and confusion about leaving my baby will be over. I am struggling so much so instead of doing individual journal entries for each day I will give my list for the past week.
Day 5: Tuesday, I was just grateful to get through the day and to be able to realize that I don't have to be strong every day.  I am grateful for prayer and the knowledge that Heavenly Father hears our prayers.
Day 6:
Day 7: Thursday I am ever grateful for off branches of medicine.  I love Jessa and I wouldn't trade her for the world but I have been struggling lately as Jessa has struggled with walking because she always wants to be held.  Recently I had been praying about Jessa and what to do with her medically and got the answer to turn towards homeopathy.  I will save my controversy for another day where I will put my thoughts out there but in talking with my homeopath I learned of different medicines that I could give Jessa.  The prompting came to me thursday morning to give Jessa pulsatilla and in doing so Jessa spent the day playing and I was able to get a lot done.  So today I am grateful that there isn't a one way street that Heavenly Father has provided for our bodies in terms of medicine.  Jessa has been so so so good about playing by herself on the floor now and I am happy about that.
Day 8: Friday I spent almost the entire day doing laundry.  To be honest I had a bad mommy moment that night when Jessa was fighting about going to sleep.  I lost my temper and scolded Jessa for not sleeping.  So I laid in bed with her as she tossed and turned.  It was moments like this that made me question if I was making the wrong choice not to let her cry it out.  But as I was trying a new method of transitioning Jessa into her own bed from co-sleeping, Heavenly Father gave me the answer I was so desperately seeking.  About 2:30 am I woke to hearing Jessa choking, thankful that I was co-sleeping with her, I flipped her to her side where she proceeded to be sick everywhere...  The rest of the night until 7 am in the morning.  Jessa would fall asleep start to choke cough and be sick everywhere.  Before that started Jessa was busy flip flopping all over the bed and I had scolded her for not laying still and sleeping.  I questioned if I should just let her cry it out but I was grateful that I stayed in tune with what I had previously prayed about.  Instead of begrudging the fact that I spent the entire night changing sheets, chaning outfits, and switching towels out from underneath Jessa.  I cherished the moments where Jessa needed me to nurse her back to health.  I realized then that life is so so so precious.  There may be a day that Jessa no longer wants to cuddle me or be with me so I'll cherish the moments I do have.  Babies don't last forever <3 Also I am grateful for a washing machine!
Day 9: Saturday was a day where I was grateful for Jonathan, who really stepped up in cleaning house and who took all the soiled laundry and washed it.  Jonathan was so great he even let me have a nap while he kept the house running smoothily.  I love my hubbins <3

And finally today I am grateful for the holy ghost.  Today was the primary presentation and one of the teachers went home sick which meant that I was asked to sit with that class.  As I stood up to sing the primary songs a wave of the spirit hit me and I felt happy inside and I knrew that everything I had been taught was true and I was in the right place at the right time.  How grateful I am to be a member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

An attitude of gratitude Day 4: Baby cuddles

I like trying to find the positive things to focus on rather than the negative.  Today is been a bit of a trying day with Jessa.  Sleep is a constant struggle in our house and I am trying to make the best of a rough situation.  I don't believer in ferber's cry it out method and Jessa believes in not sleeping! Hah! So although it is sometimes rough the trials of mommyhood I am grateful to be home to take care of Jessa.  She is my pride and joy but she also needs to be taught and so whole she struggles in bedtime battles I am so so glad that it is me rocking her to sleep and not a babysitter who believes in the cry it out method.So today I am grateful for the relationship that Jessa and I have.  I am grateful that she loves to cuddle and sleep with me because one day I KNOW I will miss this.  I love being a momma and baby cuddles

An attitude of gratitude day 3: My momma

I would be ungrateful if I didn't say that I am so so so happy to have a momma that I have a close relationship with.  I love how she understands me and how I was told in a blessing that much of what I will experience in this life, she has already gone through.  Heavenly Father is so smart and all knowing.  I don't think it was chance I was given a momma who really is my best friend and my everything.  I love that we have inside jokes, how she knows everything about me and accepts me for who I am.  I love that she calls me when she has had a bad day and I love the example she sets for me.  My momma is such an example to me for her strength, testimony and the love she has for the Lord.  I hope that one day I will be able to set the same example for Jessa.

An Attitude of Gratitude Day 2: Jessa

J- Just adorable

E- mommy's everything

S- daddy's sunshine

S- super cute

A- amazing

I think my title sums up what I am grateful for.  I love Jessa she is definitely my everything, my sunshine, my teacher, and my example.  Jessa is a wonderful little girl and Heavenly Father has blessed me beyond anything I could ever imagine with Jessa.  or as Jessa likes to say her name "Dessa".  Halloween was a fun day with Jessa and she taught me to remember to view the excitement of holidays through a child's eyes.  Mr. hubbins decided that he really wanted to be the McDonald's combo meal for Halloween and I liked the uniqueness of it and so I thought that it was a great idea even though I wasn't excited to be dressed up as a hamburger.  After Jonathan's citizenship celebration with mom and Terry in tow we headed over to Walmart's portrait studio where we took our yearly family photo.  Have you been to our house?  If not in our dining room you will find 3 photos on the wall all from last year's halloween when we were Pirates of the Caribbean.  Soon these photos will be replaced with our combo meal costumes.  When we first arrived at the studio Jessa was asleep and was flopped over for most of the pictures she isn't smiling in any of the photos but after as the workers played music for her and we danced in the portrait studio we had a lot of fun as she rocked out to the spice girls, a teens and a bunch of other music they had.  We headed over to McDonald's in our costumes and took lots of pictures with workers and customers.

One reason that makes me love Jessa is her acceptance of others... one day we will have to teach her stranger danger... but on this day she willingly was passed around so we could be in pictures for the people around.  I love that she allowed us to put her in her costume and had fun in doing so.  I love Jessa's squeal and laughter as she tromped around holding hands with daddy and "ama" as they walked throughout the store having so much fun.  We came home and Jessa jumped in her jolly jumper.  I love seeing the light in her eyes through her laughter and happiness I am really grateful to be her mom.

But as I didn't want to dress up as a hamburger again (it was embarrassing lol) so


I put Jessa in a zebra costume for trick or treating. I grabbed her a little bucket we had gotten on one of our mommy adventures and she was such a pro at trick or treating.  I love that she so easily caught on to ring the door bell and hold out her bucket for the candy.  It made the night so special to remember the excitement a child feels as you experience the joy through their eyes.

So today I am grateful that Heavenly Father gave me the gift to have Jessa as my daughter.  I love you my baby forever and always.

An Attitude of Gratitude Day 1: My Home and Native Land

I feel like I am trying to hard to make this post interesting.  I feel like there is this giant pressure on me from myself to miraculously produce an award winning post to make up for my lack of posting in months.  I find that when disappointments come instead of sharing them I close down and wallow for a long time.  So when Malauney invited others to join her November month of gratitude I gladly took her up on the offer.  Too much of my time I fail to recognize the beauty and the blessings of what I do have.

So for my first day of gratitude I am grateful for being Canadian.  Jonathan received in the mail a letter from the government inviting him to attend his Oath of Ceremonies to become an official Canadian around the first week of October.  The ceremony was for Halloween day.  A day that we try to always have a lot of fun as a family. Becoming an official Canadian is not an easy feat and takes years to complete so when Jonathan took his test in May and we waited and waited, fretted, silently pleaded, and finally accepted that he might have to wait a year or more to become Canadian the letter itself was something to celebrate.  My mom and Terry asked when Jonathan and I were dating if they could come to his celebration so it was wonderful to be able to have them join our little family for Jonathan's big day.  It was an interesting day where Jonathan had to be there for 9:00 am with all his papers to go over that he had all the proper documentation to become Canadian.  At 10:00 the ceremony started, I can't remember the name of the judge who performed the ceremony but it reminded me a lot of an elementary school assembly.  The judge talked about how both her parents were immigrants to Canada and how they were told that Canada was literally a country of gold; they were disappointed to realize that it actually was a country of snow.  However, the gold of Canada comes from the freedom that we have to be ourselves, to be free to worship who and what we may, to be able to have a say in how our government is run through democracy, and to be able to be equal to work and gain an education.

As a child I couldn't understand why my mom would have tears pouring from her eyes as the national anthem was sung but on Halloween day at a Canadian citizenship ceremony I finally understood as the tears poured from my eyes.  How grateful I am to live in Canada.  I have never had to face the fears of living in danger or on the run, I have always been treated as an equal to others, I have obtained an education, I can vote, I can drive and I am safe.  My daughter is safe and has a promised future.  So today as Jessa and I supported Hubbins as he became a Canadian citizen my heart swelled not with pride but with gratitude for  a loving heavenly father who allowed me to live in a free land with amazing blessings and opportunities.