I’m Blessed

I feel like I have so much to share this week, and will have to limit it to the highlights.

Last week I started hitting my “harvest wall.”  I normally hit it at some point during corn harvest when I just start climbing the walls.  A friend from church visited me, and that was a big help.  By the weekend, though, I had had enough.  I needed to get out of the house alone.  Friday night I called Knut saying I was losing my mind with the kids, and I needed to go grocery shopping, but the idea of taking all 4 of them to run multiple errands was more than I thought I could handle.  He told me to call in a babysitter, which I frantically did Saturday morning.

So Saturday I got a few hours break as I got some chicken feed and groceries, and may have stopped by the yarn store with some donuts.  I felt like celebrating “the big news.”

This last week, the digital preview for the magazine that my sweater pattern is to be published in came out.  To my great surprise, they put my sweater…on the cover.  I was so giddy about it, and poor Knut wanted to take me out to celebrate, but had to leave it at “when harvest is over…”

So I was out on my own to get a break.  It was good, but I sure had a ton to do when I got back.  I unpacked all the groceries, including a mega pack of 10lbs of ground beef I got at a super good price.  I was planning on using 3 of the lbs in a triple batch of chili that day, and freezing the rest.

We all had chili that night except Solveig and Elias didn’t touch it.  Kids that age are pretty temperamental when it comes to food, so that’s okay.

Well, about 3am on Sunday, David woke up saying his stomach hurt.  About 10 minutes later Silje started vomiting.  Then David.  Then they went in sync about every 20 minutes for awhile.  Knut was complaining that his stomach was not right at all, and promptly went downstairs to drink some of my Keifir as he says that makes his stomach feel better than anything these days.

My stomach felt fine, but I had a terrible migraine.  Handling the kids was terrible, and my head was pounding so much in between the episodes that I couldn’t sleep at all.

How does this tie into blessings?  Well…I’m getting there.

At least it wasn’t like last year when Knut and I and 3 of the 4 kids all had the stomach flu like last year.  Knut and I will always remember that as the worst day/night of both of our lives.  We agreed we’re never allowed to get sick at the same time like that again.  No, we’re pretty confident there was something about that new meat that wasn’t right.  Knut looked online, and saw that some people get food poisoning via migraine, and thinks that my migraine was via the meat as well.

At any rate, I didn’t get any sleep that night, and by 6am, I was in tears I was so tired, and the kids simply didn’t want Knut, so he was sleeping the night away.

Well, here’s the good part.  By morning, everyone was just fine.  Knut had the brilliant idea to ask his parents to pick up Solveig and Elias for church, since they were just fine and the rest of us needed to rest.  With his good sleep, he took care of the morning and let me sleep until 11am.  It was so wonderful.  I got so much sleep that morning!

When I woke up, there was coffee waiting for me, a warm fire in the fireplace, and some relaxing knitting next to Knut as he was reading some Chesterton.  Silje and David were watching t.v. because we knew they needed to rest and recover, and that seemed to be the best means.

So the house was quiet.

It was so quiet.  Knut and I just kept sighing with how wonderfully peaceful it was.  We got to talk for hours.  The fire was so cozy, and we got some much needed catch up “hanging out” after a week of passing in the night and snapping at each other during the day and being generally overwhelmed.

It was the best day ever.  I don’t know if we would have had that opportunity for so much time together had we not skipped church because of the long night of bad meat.

That evening, the greater family agreed with us that Silje and David’s sickness was due to food, and not some virus, and so we decided to move ahead with David’s big birthday party.  It was a lot of fun.  I love that all of Knut’s siblings live nearby now.  It makes it so much fun.  With a total of 11 cousins now (with the 12th in utero) it certainly is getting crazy, but I love these memories that my kids are making.

So, I’m blessed with an option of babysitters when I go crazy.
I’m blessed that I got to sleep for a long time Sunday morning.
I’m blessed I got some really, really great rest time with my husband.
I’m blessed with a fun extended family for my kids.
Oh, and I’m blessed to get my knitting on the cover of a magazine.  I totally didn’t see that one coming.

How has God blessed you this last week?