Requiem for the Focus Leadership Institute

I was over it.

I've been gone from there for a year and a half. And I was fine. Until I saw the comments on the FLI Facebook page under the announcement that the program is closing today. So now I'm grieving again.

Twenty years. More than 3000 students. Lives transformed. I was one of them.

400 Years of Silence. Or Something Like That.

It's been ... um ... a little while since I've written.

Like, a year. 

My friend Abby—whose oldest 3 children are a boy and twin girls, 21 months apart—once told me that when the twins were born, she just lost a whole year of her life. Not like her life expectancy was shortened by a year, but like a whole year went by and she didn't know what had happened. 

I relate. 

Being a family of five still feels like a new thing...so crazy!

Elijah (kid #3) turned one this month. I have no idea where that year went.

The Newest Newborn

Here's an Elijah photo that has been 4.5 years in the making:

Welcome to the Family

Lorien and Josiah love listening to Kids Praise (Psalty) music these days. Oh, what a throwback to my childhood!

One song that's struck me as particularly appropriate as we get to know Elijah is this one:

Welcome To the Family

Welcome to the family

We're glad that you have come

To share your life with us

As you grow in love and 

Elijah is born!

Elijah Young Keffer was born on February 12!

To tell the story of Elijah's birth, I have to go back and recap Lorien's and Josiah's, because both of those had a lot of bearing on how this little guy came into the world.

January Recap

We're just getting it out of our system...

All the things we don't want to deal with after baby is born next month, we're just doing them now: surgery, sickness, teething, travel. Suffice it to say that January has been a little difficult.

After SIX different courses of antibiotics for Josiah's ear infections between June and November, mama had enough of the antibiotics. It made me sick to think of what we were doing to his little digestive system with all that. It was time for tubes.

On January 9, we headed up to Denver EARLY in the morning. Like 4:30 early. The surgery itself took about 10 minutes, and Josiah did great. We also had a great experience with both Dr. Sheri Poznanovic and the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children. I'd recommend them for anyone needing a pediatric ENT.

December Recap

Well, the third trimester got the best of me, and I stopped blogging. Gonna fill in with some month-end recaps so that I don't lose these memories...

In December:

Josh and I took and early and abbreviated 10th anniversary trip to Estes Park. Our long-time plan had been to escape for a week on the beach sometime in the spring (our actual anniversary is January 3, 2014), but this impending baby changed those plans.

We decided to take a shorter, closer trip before I got miserably large, so we booked two nights at the Della Terra Mountain Chateau in Estes Park at the beginning of December. Unfortunately, I was pretty uncomfortable already, but it was a nice getaway nonetheless. (Except for the wind. The wind was insane!)

The trip included yummy food, no schedule to follow, our first ever couples' massage, and a lot of relaxing and enjoying each other's company.

When we got to the Della Terra, we were greeted by these guys.