A baby in a camper you say…..

So at this stage in the game in looks like we are going to have a baby in the camper….no siree…I don’t mean literally give birth in the camper but this will be where she comes home to! We didn’t know if God would have lead us out of here by now but seems like we’ll be in here in 6 weeks so here we go!!! 

We’ve made a few little adjustments to make room! 

I rearranged/ organized/ built more storage above Merrick’s bed. I used to know where everything was but it was not pretty….in fact most of the time we had it hidden behind a curtain 🙈 In the updated picture, all the little tubs in front will be for baby items…blankets, wipes, diapers etc etc. 

There is a closet space that had Mac’s shirts and Merrick’s PJs…but we did a little rearranging and now all of Merrick’s clothes are under his bed or hanging by his bed. Mac now has two drawers with all his clothing items. That freed up the tiny closet for us to start putting itty bitty pink hand-me-downs in! Had to put some hooks on the door to hang up all the bows! 🎀

We have a little moveable bassinet type item that she’ll sleep in for the first few months!

I really wanted a rocker to be able to rock in….we were looking for tiny real ones and even thought about getting rid of the love seat to make room for the rocker we had with the boys….but it just wasn’t going to work. So we opted for a folding rocker, I’ve thrown a blanket it over and it’ll do the trick just fine!

We don’t plan going joining the minivan club…..so its three in the back seat for us. Mac in a booster, Merrick in the high back and baby in the infant rear facing one! We tested the seats all in the back and the boys were begging to go for a ride using their new seats… so hopefully that excitement lasts 😉 

Mac has sown a double sided quilt with tacked down basting and all! He also has made a little rag doll from fabric that he picked out for her himself! 

Its just been little small updates here and there but we feel pretty ready to add another little to our tiny spot!

Life in Numbers

two: number of pool passes we have to take the heat out of the hot days! 🏊‍♂️ 💦 ☀️ 

five: number of pea pods picked by the six year old 🌱

one hundred and fifty six: number of water balloons exploded by two little boys 🎈 💧 👦🏼 

eight hundred and seventy seven (give or take a thousand): number of cherries picked at Pome on the Range 🍒 

sixty seven: number of minutes it took to pit said number of cherries 👆🏼🍒

seven: the number of baseball games Mac played this summer ⚾️ 

one: the number of teeth lost 🦷 

twenty six: the number of letters Merrick is working on writing ✍️

five: the number of Merrick’s birthday caterpillars that turned into butteries 🐛 ➡️ 🦋

twenty-one: the number of cats we had at the campground at one point! 🐈‍⬛ 😬

thirteen: number of cats we have re-homed at this point….let us know if you need one 😉

twenty-five: number of weeks pregnant I ….was last week 🤰

two: number of wild seed packets I spread in front of our camper 🌸🌻🌷

thirty seven: the numbers of times I heard “mom” on our fishing adventure 🎣

Countless: the memories we’ve made! Trying to soak it all in and keep the days slow and as we go through this stage of our kiddos.

Merrick

How can it be?! FOUR years! You are 100% in all you do, fully animated when you talk, your facial expressions are for real. You can make me melt….and instead of cooking dinner at 5:30 sure let’s just make cookies…just because you stared at me with those eyes! You love big. For the last 1.5 weeks each morning you duck walk out of your room to go to the bathroom and return the same way. Our morning cuddles is one of my absolute favorite things. Books and stories….you are nuts about them, I think that might be why you have picked up on reading so early. You use your “cheetah powers to run fast” and your “snake powers to win games”! You love your brother. You pray for caterpillars, rain, for Jesus that died on the cross. You know “spice is flavor.” You ask for more pepper. You’ve eaten cottage cheese like a mad man since you were itty bitty. You once caught a pregnant catfish and told everyone you met about it for the next three months. You can take a piece of string and tangle it up like I’ve never seen before and then somehow mange to untangle it and do it all again. Right now you think it’s fun to drag an antler around that you tied up. You eat watermelon like no one else. You might have gills I haven’t found yet, you LOVE water. Your favorite color is red. You want to be a giant when you get big, so you can carry everyone on your back. 

Happy 4th Birthday my love! 

Merrick you are you and I love every second getting to see you be you!

A Bit on The Boys

I thought it would be fun to ask the boys some questions and capture their brains and hearts at this stage in their little lives. I set down with each of them by themselves and asked them both these questions:

MacQuestionsMerrick
“I don’t think I’ll have a dream”What do you think you’re going to dream about?“probably monster cookies”
“The barn book”What is your favorite book?“fishing in the bathtub”
“red”What is your favorite color?“red”
“Tennessee”Where are we?“Gatlinburg”
“tacos and hamburgers and pepperoni, mayonnaise cheese sands”What do you like to eat?“biscuit and gravy casserole”
“cookies”What do you like to cook?“cowboy cookies”
“rhyming words”What is the funniest thing that has ever happened to you?
“at night time I asked for some bubble wubble”
“five”How old are you?“three”
“Utah”What do you want to teach others about?“probably some baseball tricks”
“try to throw a spear”What do you like to do outside? “play baseball”
“Old Town Road”-kidzbop version ” 🙂 What song do you like?“Elmo home on the range”
“when ever I found my real baseball”What is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to you?“when Jesus didn’t die, He was still alive”

Its fun hearing them and seeing their minds work as they figure out their answers. My jaw about dropped when Merrick responded to the last question! Yes that is wonderful baby boy!

School time with them is pretty loose in terms of how structured it is. I have a reading book that Mac and I started in January called “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.” Right now we are on lesson 62, we do a lesson a couple of times a week. When he reads the story it’s slow going but its amazing to see him read and comprehend what he is reading.

With Chase he does a lot of number learning- counting by 2s, 5s, 10s, adding, subtracting etc. We have a couple of work books that they both like to do work on. Merrick is around and listening to all of this. We do more letter sounds with him. We’ve done smell and taste tests with them blind folded….Mac thought the onion was an apple…I still don’t understand that one!

Mac has helped mend a hole in his pillow. Merrick and I sew and then he has to identify the letter. Seeing Merrick’s fingers figure out how to push and pull and needle threw the felt has just been so sweet to watch. Mac can make us all a snack (plain yogurt, honey, strawberries) with zero help from an adult….all though it takes 25 minutes to prepare its still neat to see him doing it all on his own. And what a confidence booster that is, you can just see it on his face.

There’s no how to book on this parenting gig but we are trying and enjoying it most days! If you have any fun brain stretching ideas or activities please share them with us!

What’s it like to be with family ALL the time?!?

Honestly it is absolutely wonderful! Right now in this stage of parenting we give the discipline and then give hugs and cuddles afterward. We are still the hero and the people they want to be around more than anything and this is something I do not take lightly. I know there will be a day coming when friends will be cooler and they will want to be anywhere but near us and when we discipline, it is not going to be followed up with cuddles. So this mama is soaking up every minute of this life. 

We get to go to work together. Our kiddos know what it means to clock in and out. They see us meet strangers every single day and how to have conversations with them. They know how to introduce themselves and ask a person’s name and how they are. 

We are not sending them to school and practices and here and there and having to correct whatever they’ve seen or heard from the world. Right now we get to be the filter of what goes in. And again it will not be like this forever so this is a season and opportunity I’m not taking lightly. We see and hear everything that’s going on around them. So when we do see the kid at the playground being a terrible big brother we are able to chat about us and our actions and why we do what we do. We get to talk about being a Schneider and what that means and looks like.

Our kids are still kids so of course we have to parent. Right now there are a few things we say all the time, such as, “just because someone else makes a bad choice does not mean we have to” and to the little one it’s more about using your words and not just fussing and hitting. We go through this mantra….do dogs talk…. no….. do trees talk…. no….. can you talk….yes….God made so many things but you are the only one that can talk….so use your words.

We have not escaped being parents but we have escaped a lot of the other stressors that make parenting and balancing all the things so tough. This season of being together all the time has been a true blessing and one I am so so so thankful we have gotten to experience.

Diapers

When pregnant with our first, we mulled over the cloth vs disposable diapers option and decided to pull the trigger on cloth diapers (Chase was skeptical but came around pretty quick). You can get a more expensive cloth diapers for $20-$30 per diaper or you can get cheaper cloth diapers for $4-$5 per diaper. Since we didn’t know if we would actually “do” cloth diapering and we were just trying it out, we went the frugal way and man oh man was it amazing. The 25 diapers we bought for Big M are the same ones we used for Little M (that’s five years of the same diapers being used). $125 for five years of diapers….yes please! We were not a hard never use disposables ever type of cloth diaperer….we used them on occasion and used “normal” diapers at night. We bought roughly a pack of 30 disposable diapers a month during that time.

Per Google it costs $750 a year to diaper a child which is $3,750 for five years. Our pack of Aldi diapers was $10 a month, for easy math let’s say we spent $150 a year on disposable diapers which is $750 for five years. If you add the $750 we spent on disposable plus the $125 we spent on cloth that’s a total of $875 spent on five years with of diapers vs $3,750. For a little extra work, we saved almost $3,000 compared to the Google average plus that’s way less that are now resting in landfills!

We would make the same decision again in a heartbeat, but the other side of the story is you have to clean those bad boys. When you live in a house with a washer and dryer you simply put the poo in the toilet and the diaper in a laundry basket (with a lid). When said basket is full you put them in the washer (for two back to back cycles) and then put them out to dry in the sun or in the dryer depending on weather. Very easy very simple, its purely just another load of laundry. But when you don’t live in a house with a washer and dryer and you live in a camper… you go back in time to a bucket and plunger. Since August our cloth diapers have been cleaned via plunging and rinsing and plunging and rinsing. A lot more work but again its way cheaper and we do have time on our hands. In more exciting news…. we believe we are DONE WITH DIAPERS! When the first poo is at a gas station, when we had over a six hour drive with no accidents pulling over only two times to go to the bathroom we are feeling pretty good about the whole potty training thing! You know you are a travel family when he’s struggling a bit to master the poo-ing aspect of things and you ask him where he wants to do said #2 and he says “gas station” bahaha!

(Anyone who has questions about cloth diapering I’d be happy to chat. It did seem daunting at first but we figured it out and you can too!)

Stick Shapes

Grab your kiddos and head to the great outdoors! Walk and talk and enjoy your time and when you need something “to do” stick shape time! You guessed it….pick up sticks and make shapes. Once you’ve made shapes you can do some identification “put this rock in the triangle”–and if that needs a competitive edge turn it into a race! Make the shapes into things….the circle into a pizza–now you can play restaurant, turn the square into a house–now you can play house, turn the rectangle into a window–just imagine all the things you can see. Let me know what you and your crew come up with!!

PS- if you’re living on a beach with no trees, you can play this in the sand. That being said… people please enjoy your trees. It’s been a month since we’ve seen real trees. I miss them! If you want to share your fall trees I’d love to see those too!

The #1 item you NEED in your car

Cookie sheets! You heard me right, cookie sheets!

No, we are not a traveling, baking circus (even though sometimes it feels like we are) but seriously cookie sheets. While the boys were in their carseats as we traveled this was their table (and let’s not lie sometimes even their plate!), their crayon holder, their play dough tray and their flat coloring book surface. In emergencies it can also be deployed as their seat on the side of the road to watch a blown out tire being replaced (see previous post).

We have used them while being stationary as well. A dry erase marker plus magnets and the fun just keeps on coming. Big M making words and working on sounds, Little M working on matching and identification.

These cookie sheets can be used in more ways than we ever thought and we can’t recommend them enough! Thank you Sister and Dollar tree!

Now, your homework assignment. What do you have lying around that could be used for a completely new purpose?

Color Walk

We love easy, fun, educational and FREE!

Grab a bucket and go for a walk. Collect as many different colors as you can, or as many of the same color as you can, or how about the favorite color of everyone in your family, or…. as you can see the options are endless…. but grab a bucket go find some things (rocks, leaves, flowers, water balloon remnants, etc.) then glue them on paper. Categorize them however you want- color, size or even make a rainbow (again these options are endless.) Easy plus fun and makes a memory. Be with and talk to your kiddos, they are pretty cool.