Kate is 9 months old!

Here is what happens when your fourth baby turns nine months old and you are trying not to let the month-by-month-birthday-cake-tradition die.  You find that after a busy day of work(mom and dad), school(for the girls), Auntie Nicki's (Thomas and Kate), and dance class (the girls again) that you are frantically stopping at Copp's on the way home to buy some birthday fun.  One blueberry pie and long drive home later, you find that your nine month old is fast asleep.  You ignore the baffled father that worked so hard to get her to sleep and you wake the baby up.  You sing to the half awake baby and then, since she is your fourth baby and most if not all rules have gone out the window, you feed the once sleeping baby pie and ice cream.  You then take lots of pictures to document the event so someday everyone's baby book with be even (the fact that the baby books pretty much tell only of the day of their births so far is another story all together).  Of course Kate loves it, and because baby #4 has learned to go with the flow, she goes right back to sleep.   Whew!  Only a few more months to go....

dimes from heaven

You may or may not have heard of a phenomenon in which money appears seemingly out of nowhere, often in the forms of dimes.  These dimes are thought to be a message from a loved one or an angel.  There have been cases where people have actually seen the money drop from the sky. Many of my dime experiences have happened in times of difficulty and stress...a dime will "appear" before me where I just KNOW there was none a moment ago.  I had my most mysterious dime experience yesterday.  All 4 kids were home, so I was running around in servant mode, attempting to get laundry done while tending to everyone's needs.  Eventually the oldest 3 kids headed for the basement to play.  I came down to check on them and low and behold I found some water in our basement (we are saturated here!).  I told the kids...."it is a blessing you were playing down here, mommy found this water and can fix it before anything gets wrecked!".  I dealt with the soggy toys, threw away some wet paper and dried off the markers that were laying in the puddle.  THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT ON THE FLOOR.  I went to the laundry basket and grabbed a towel, shaking out any crumbs that may be trapped (it was in the dirty laundry).  THERE WAS NOTHING ON THE TOWEL.    I used the towel to dry the floor.  When I was almost done wiping things up, I heard a scratch.  I lifted up the towel and there on the floor WAS A SHINY NEW DIME.  And it gets stranger....I picked the dime off of the damp, cold, concrete floor and IT WAS HOT TO THE TOUCH AND TOTALLY DRY.  That is when I knew that this was an out of the ordinary experience.