Fabulous Friday with a side of random

Oh hey there. Glad you are still reading. It's been quiet over here, and I'm okay with that. I've lost some readers though, as a quick glance at the good old stats noticed a drop of page views per post. 

Good thing I'm not on the prowl for high reader numbers. :)

Why so quiet, you ask? I'm having a hard time being motivated to sit down and write. Picture editing has been bumped up a notch now that we have a third kid photographed that isn't supposed to be posted online. Honestly, it's kind of exhausting to take pictures trying to keep him out of them (I think he can tell when I'm doing that so it's not ideal at all) or taking pictures with him right in the middle and then editing him out later. It's a lot more work than I'm interested in.

I have posted a lot more one-kid pictures on Instagram (follow me @livingwithintention if you'd like) but other than that, don't expect much from me in that regard.

Life has finally slowed down. We're all breathing again, and the kids are behaving a little bit better than a couple of weeks ago. I'm trying so very hard to be creative and intentional with our time. I don't want us to just sit around bored, driving each other crazy. We go outside when we can which is huge for attitudes and energy levels. Unfortunately, it's been ridiculously, unseasonably, cold this late fall/early winter and we've been trapped inside more than usual. It's going to be a long winter if all of the days have highs of 0 or less. I just can't even think about it without getting depressed.

I think the biggest thing freaking me out is that I can't go very many places with all three kids. When our lfb (little foster boy) isn't at school, I'm stuck at home for the most part. I (we) so desperately want to be out and about but it's so stressful and overwhelming. I just can't keep track of all of them and the older two aren't great listeners yet so I can't trust them at all.

So we sit at home, trying to keep sane and happy.

We've been doing advent calendar activities. We've skipped days here and there when life got busy or it just didn't fit in to the day, and I have no guilt about that. We do what we can. Some we have done to date: sang Christmas carols, made Christmas cookies (from the box, nothing fancy), called someone and sang "jingle bells" (we called auntie, grammy, and papa and they all loved it), watched a children's Christmas movie, and colored a picture in just green and red. I've noticed that the arts and crafts projects haven't really happened as much since the kids can't all sit still very long but again, I'm okay with it. It still give us something to do when the days get long.

The other advent calendar we are doing is the Storybook Bible story-a-day calendar. We are only two days behind, which is kind of amazing for me. Right away when we started doing it, lfb was not interested at all with sitting down and reading a story before bed time. I mean, hello, it's a lead-in to bed time. The kids aren't stupid, they know that. But now, he (they) has accepted that it's just what we do, and with a lot of animation in our voices, they listen happily and enjoy the story. It totally warms my heart to read to them about Jesus and have them get excited about it. I'm so glad we are doing it.

Today we will be making reindeer pictures and maybe snowflakes. We might make cookies and we'll hopefully take good long naps. 

Here are my very few and totally random pictures to share with you. Happy weekend!

Totally happy hanging out under the coffee table.

Proof! We did in fact play outside and the baby wasn't even screaming the whole time. Victory.