Posted 16 July 2010 - 02:23 PM
My name is Rose Cassandra Weatherholt, and I am an 18-year old student. I just graduated high school and I am now preparing for college, where I will study English and Education. My dream is to become a teacher one day.
I have curly, red hair and bright green eyes. I have Irish heritage, but I was born and raised in Hickory, North Carolina, where I met the guy I'm now casually dating, Clark.
---
It's already been four years since I last saw you!
I am now 22, and I've been working as a first grade teacher for the past year. Being a teacher has always been my biggest dream, and I feel so lucky to have that opportunity.
I am also incredibly lucky to have met the most important person of my life.
Clark and I had broken up for about nine months, when I crashed into a young man just after getting out of the mall. I was full of shopping bags and trying to find my car keys in the purse, so I really wasn't paying much attention to where I was going. He was very engrossed in a phone call, so we inevitably ran into each other, and I dropped all my bags in the process. He was very polite and chatty, though, so he helped me pick up my shopping and asked to offer me drinks to apologize.
There wasn't much he had to apologize for, but I think it was merely an excuse. I will never be thankful enough to have accepted.
Henry Atticus Schneider is now my incredible husband. He is 26 and an handsome architect. He is tall, with wavy dark blond hair, that almost lean towards brown, and deep hazel eyes.
After being together for almost two years, and living together for ten months, he proposed while we were visiting my parents for Easter.
He hid the ring in one of the plastic eggs, and wrote my name on it so that when the little ones found it, they would bring it to me.
I was stunned when I opened the egg, but I was quick to recover and say "yes" with tears in my eyes.
We had a very intimate ceremony in the small church of my neighborhood, with just our families and close friends. Immediately after we flew to Spain, where we spent two weeks in Barcelona and other ten days touring around the coast.
It wasn't long after Henry was promoted at the firm he has been working at for three years. The promotion was a blessing to our family, but it also meant taking over the offices in New York. We were a little sad to leave our families behind, but we also took it as an opportunity to start fresh together.
---
We've been living in New York for four years now. I am 26, and I'm working at a local elementary school for four days a week-- I really love the job.
Henry's new job has finally settled down at the new offices, and he also has a more defined role, with enough freedom and a stable income.
He is thirty, and we decided it is finally time that we try to expand out little family.
It didn't take long for us to get pregnant, and we were so excited that we could not wait until the birth to find out the gender.
On July 8th, under the blazing sun, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. His full name is Thomas Maximilian Schneider, after my father and Henry's Dutch descent, but we just call him Max.
He already has my red curls and freckles, but his sweet eyes are all daddy.
---
When Max was two, we thought it was a good time gap to start trying for another child.
What we were shocked to hear at our second ultrasound, was that we were not carrying one baby, but three!
Thinking about it, it shouldn't have been a huge shock, since multiples run in Henry's family, but we could not help it.
How would we be able to cope with one energetic toddler and three babies?
This time, we decided to keep the genders a surprise.
The babies were due in late January, but we already knew we'd be welcoming them much earlier. A scheduled c-section brought three bundles of joy into this world on November 30th, all three of them little boys.
We named them Alexander Matthew, Luke Joseph and William Frederick; all three of them were spitting images of Henry, with light brown hair and hazel eyes.
We couldn't have been more delighted.
A year after the triplets were born, law required that I go back to work.
I've always loved being a teacher, but being a mommy to three babies under two had been an awfully tiring task.
Rewarding, yes, but tiring. I realized that I dreaded going back to work. It was not that I didn't like my job anymore, because I still did.
I just couldn't imagine spending half of my days teaching young children, then coming home to three screaming babies and a toddler.
Too much stress would be adding up, and I would feel overwhelmed. After discussing it thoroughly with Henry, we decided that leaving the job at school would be the best decision for our family. Henry still worked at the company that brought him to New York, but he was blessed with yet another promotion.
He was made head of the New York Affiliate Office, and his position allowed me to stay at home for the first months after I quit my job. During this time, I started to discover and fall in love with photography, which I started with my own children and then for friends. After I was sure I had acquired enough skills to become a professional, I applied for a job as the assistant of a wedding photographer.
A week later I found out I'd been accepted-- what a wonderful adventure to embark on!
Just a year has passed. Things have been going well, I have adjusted to having a four year old boy and two year old triplets. In the meantime, I opened up my own photography business, which has been flexible enough for our family dynamic.
But shocking news were waiting for me.
In september, I receive the news that I am yet again pregnant. It was definitely not planned, and with four small children still to tend to, I admit I was scared when I found out.
Fear soon turned to utter happiness, though, to be sharing our love with another little one.
On May 3rd I gave birth to a wonderful baby, who we were delighted to find out was a girl.
We gave her two first names, one for Henry's mother Greta and one to honour my Irish heritage, and a middle name after my sister Caroline.
Our first daughter, Grace Niamh Carolina Schneider, sported bright red hair and green eyes.
Finally, a daughter who looks exactly like her mommy!
---
Three years after Gracie's birth, my business was still going well & Henry's job as the head of the office gave us the stability we needed.
We had a higher income than when we started our family, and we decided to treat the six of us to something we could all enjoy... a new home!
After debating it for a few days, we decided to stay put in New York. We bought a beautiful, modern family home in the suburbs, with six bedrooms and four bathrooms.
It was comfortable enough for the whole family: Max had his own room to play and read in, the triplets shared another room where they could ran havoc & play together, and Grace had her own girly room, while Henry and I treated ourselves to a spacious bedroom.
Since we now had a bigger home, my lonely mom, Beatrice Sophia Weatherholt, started visiting more and more often. We were happy to have her, but we also knew she was getting very old, and it was not safe for her to travel alone so often.
We decided to invite her to stay with us, since we had two guest bedrooms that were currently unused. She was very happy to accept and spend time with her nephews and niece.
Soon after my mom moved in, Henry and I found out we were expecting our sixth child. Sadly, my mother passed away very shortly before the baby arrived, and we decided the best way to remember her was to name our little one after her.
We had a girl, just like I thought we would, and we named her Sofia Eleanor Beatrix Schneider.
Both her first & middle name are after her amazing grandmother; we added Eleanor, a strong name we loved, to keep the girls in our family with two first names.
Little Sofia was the most beautiful baby girl I'd ever seen. She had my red hair, just like her sister Grace, but they were as wavy as her dad's.
She also had identical eyes as her brothers, deep hazel like Henry's. She joined our family on February 13th, just a day before the day that celebrates love.