QuaranTEENAGER

In the midst of this nationwide shutdown and sheltering in place, a very sweet girlie officially became a TEENager! 

As hard as it is to believe, this sweet little cherub turned 13 yesterday.

I know, I know - a legit teenager now! Man, does time fly.

And this kid was such a trooper. She was so sad to leave her friends in LA, and took the longest of us to settle down here in San Diego. And once she really started to, and was making friends, Coronavirus happened. So she really got a double whammy in a very short period of time, along with a much anticipated 13th birthday party without any friends. :-(

But we made the most of it, with Bodie and I creating a really fun scavenger hunt with clues she had to decipher that led to a lunch at Sonic (social distancing style):

 A quick trip inside our local Rite Aid (the first time she's seen the inside of a store in almost 6 weeks):

 Visiting with dear friends from outside their fence (it was a birthday surprise for Sierra, but I think it really was balm for all of our weary souls):

 Probably her favorite clue, courtesy of Bodie - having to dive to the bottom of the pool to find a (water proof) bag of M&Ms: 

She had been planning a fun masquerade ball for her birthday. Even though her friends weren't here, she dressed up anyway - because you only turn 13 once, right???

I cannot believe how grown up our sweet girl is (both literally and figuratively - this kiddo is already 5'71/2"!)

She received so many wonderful messages and gifts, but I think it's fair to say her favorite came in the form of a sweet surprise last weekend. On Sunday night, Dusk and I were watching a movie in our living room at around 10pm and he went outside to get something from his studio. He came back in saying "Uhhhh - there was something growling at me outside!!!" So he went to get his paintball gun and went back outside, with me in tow (don't ask why he took the paintball gun, but given that he was facing the growling animal, I wasn't really in a position to argue!).

He sprayed into the bushes (well, the paintball gun malfunctioned, so he just shot C02 into the bushes, but it was loud enough to scare off whatever had been growling). But we heard some sweet little mewing - and found this little angel hiding in the middle of a bush. 

 

We brought her inside and realized very quickly that while she may have been wild, she definitely wasn't feral. She ate from us, let us hold her and was purring by bedtime. 

Some asking around to make sure she didn't belong to anyone and a vet visit the next day cemented her as ours. 

This sweet little 6 week old kitten has been officially named Mitsey because of her big ole paws. Once she and our other kitten, Bootsie, figured out the pecking order (i.e. Bootsie runs the show around here), she fit right into our brood. We could not love her more, and she definitely is Sierra's kitty. 

She sleeps snuggled as close as possible to Sierra at night, and alternates between running around like a total spaz with Bootsie and  falling asleep in the most precarious positions. 

She was the perfect early birthday gift for our teenager! 

We are so proud of the incredibly fun and creative young woman Sierra is turning out to be! I cannot wait to see what God is going to do with her life - it's going to be big, of that much, I am certain. We're so grateful we get to parent our beautiful Joynado! 

10 years in the making

This sweet, tender hearted kiddo turned 10 yesterday.

TEN.

Double digits.

I just can't even.

When I think of where we were 10 years ago. 

When we weren't even sure we'd get 10 minutes with him, let alone 10 days, week, months, years....

When he was so fragile, already struggling to breathe and they were whisking him away to stabilize him. 

When I think of all the scary moments in the 10 years since then. 

The multiple codes, the health scares, the surgeries, the setbacks, the sudden onset of heart failure, the nights in the hospital.

So many moments where 10 years old seemed like too much to hope for, too much to expect to be blessed with. So many dear heart friends who didn't get 10 years. 

And yet here we are, celebrating a whole decade with this little fireball of a human being we're blessed to call ours. 

I don't know how we got so lucky.

When I started to tell him how, if you had told me 10 years ago, we'd be sitting here, I'd have cried tears of happiness, he just rolled his eyes and said "Moooooommmm, can we not talk about that please???" 

So we won't. We'll just tell you that this kid is kinda awesome. 

Our beloved neighbor Denise made the trek all the way down from LA to surprise Bodie! 

I seriously don't have enough words to thank Denise for everything she has been to our family, and everything she has done for us! We love her so much and the kids were over the moon to see her. 

Bodie is currently obsessed with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series (and I'm obsessed with anything that will get this kid reading). 

So we decided to celebrate Wimpy Kid style, with a few friends over. 

The kids helped decorate "Cheese Touch" cupcakes. 

Wonder of wonders, Bodie has already been blessed with some very sweet connections in the form of some incredible boys who were happy to celebrate with him... 

And indulge his desire to "read" his Wimpy Kid books for the picture 

Last night, I asked Bodie whether Dusk and I had been right in predicting that he'd meet nicer boys to befriend down in San Diego than he had in LA. His response? "No, I haven't met nicer friends. I've met the nicest friends." He'll tell you that his favorite birthday gifts were the crossbow he received, or the Harry Potter Lego set. But if you ask me, I think his new friends have been the best gift by far. 

You know, one of the most universal truths about having a medically fragile kiddo is that every milestone is huge. Even the ones that wouldn't normally be.

But this one? 

Hitting double digits. 

That's a big milestone in anyone's book. 

Just maybe a bit more epic in this kiddo's case. 

Old Man Bennett had a farm...

Hi! Remember us? 

I can't believe it's been almost a year since I last blogged!

SO much has changed in our neck of the woods...most notably, our neck of the woods!

We moved from our very urban home a stone's through from Los Angeles International Airport to a very rural town in North San Diego County. 

More space, less people, slower pace of life, room.to.breathe? 

YES PLEASE!!!

We moved on December 23rd. 

Yes, 2 days before Christmas.

Because where's the fun in going through a hellish experience like moving if you can't do it during an already ridiculously stressful and busy time of the year? 

As I always say, if there's a hard way to do something, the Bennetts will find it. 

But I digress. The important thing is that we did it - and even got a Christmas tree! Grabbed it from Lowe's at 6pm on Christmas Eve!

You now when you're out on Christmas Eve and you see some poor dude driving around with a Christmas tree on his roof and get all judgy and think to yourself "seriously, dude? It's Christmas Eve. I mean, why even bother at this point?" Oh wait, right. Me neither.

So we moved. 

And we've been settling in, working toward our dream of a slower pace of life. 

Allie, our resident 10 year old sweet rescue kitty caught a mouse less than a week after we moved in.

In our living room.

So we set out to get a barn kitty, to help with rodent control.

Except that we got a really adorable 4 week old kitten.

One who was supposed to stay in the cardboard box for a bit.

But ended up in our bed night 1. 

And almost every night since.

I mean, how cute is she??? Her name is Bootsie and she is adorable, and ornery, and just SO.LOVABLE. 

So clearly we need to get ourselves another barn kitty. Because this one's obviously an inside cat. Or maybe we need to get a mean feral cat who won't let us touch it? We're discussing it.

Next, we added 4 little week and a half old chicks. 

I can't ever remember their names. The kids named them and they're all some variation of Stars Wars characters with chicken themes. Like "Luke SunWalker" and "Obi-chick-nobe." That kind of thing. 

So they pretty much chirp and poop. And spill their food and water everywhere. 

And try to escape the box they're in. All.day.long.

The two most egregious escape artists. And they have no shame about it.

Maxi and Bootsie don't understand why we don't let them be in the room with the chickens. Maxi just wants to be their friends. Bootsie just wants to eat them for dinner (and isn't even pretending she's not thinking that.)

 

Can't wait to have a coop built and them to be old enough to be outside! And laying eggs. Or maybe just strutting around. Because we might have ended up with 5 roosters. Or 5 hens. It's anybody's guess. We won't know until they start laying eggs...or starting fights. We're really hoping for the former? 

Goats are coming at some point. 

In the meantime, Allie and Maxi are adjusting. They LOVE Bootsie. Maxi just wants to play with her all day - and Allie wants to clean her. And they all play together really well. We're super lucky!

Maxi is loving being a country dog and just adores running wherever we let him on our 2 acre property. He gleefully realized yesterday that not only is he allowed to dig now, but we want him to go get those gophers! He is having the time of his life digging and running. 

Kiddos are doing well with the adjustment. We were still going up to LA weekly to finish their classes up there, but that ended last week. So now, they're down in San Diego fulltime. 

Sierra is growing LIKE A WEED. I mean, seriously, this kid. Won't be 13 until April, and is already 5'7.5"!!! She's grown an inch and a half in the last month alone! I'm still holding out for the last few inches I have on her (I'm, 5'10") - but she's getting dangerously close for my comfort! She had a hard time with the move at first (she had so many friends she was sad to leave behind), but seems to be hitting her stride now and starting to really like it down here.  We're so proud of how she's branching out to meet other kiddos here. 

And Bodie is growing and holding his own, cardiac wise. We saw his heart failure team in December and his electrophysiologist last week. He continues to have a low BNP (measure of heart inflammation) and his function continues to improve, even if only slightly. He's doing so much better than we ever could have hoped 3 years into heart failure, and for that we are so very blessed! At his last appointment, he was riding his pacemaker 85% of the time, which is fantastic. He continues to have his care managed by his team at CHLA, with appointments every 6 months (and followups with the Stanford transplant and heart failure team annually). He loves San Diego and is already making friends. 

We're still homeschooling and enjoying watching the kids learn and grow. 

(Bodie has decided multiplication and division are pretty cool when you can use poker chips!)

(Yes, Bodie's protective eye glasses are helpfully sitting ON TOP of his head as Sierra prepares to light carbon bubbles on fire inches from his (now completely unprotected) eyes. At least his hair won't catch fire?). 

If you find yourself in North San Diego County, come visit us! We're about an hour or so south of Temecula, have wineries close by and have lots of space for guests! 

At some point I'll post pics of our new digs, but for now, I'll leave you with this. This is the view out our master bedroom window. Almost every night. 

We love our home. We love our town. Many times since the move I have stop to looked around and think to myself "How did we get so lucky to get to move here???" 

We are feeling so very, very blessed.