One Special Day

What's better than having your tenth birthday?  Give up?  I'll tell you.  Having your tenth birthday fall on General Conference AND Easter! Can you imagine the magnitude of celebrating?!?!?  Well, that's exactly what happened for cute little Nicki Rae!

This cute girl woke up before the sun!  She showered and got all ready for the day before I could even see straight.  

The kids marveled over their Easter baskets for a while. Then, we read our scriptures (I love reading the story of Christ's resurrection on Easter morning!) .  Afterward, Nicole opened her birthday presents.  As you can see, all three boys helped.  

The most exciting gifts (for me) were a ripstik - which is kind of like a skate board, only WAY harder! and a book that I made specially for her.  She's reading it in this picture.
  

For breakfast, Nicole chose to eat pancakes.  Of course, we also had a lot of colored Easter Eggs to eat.   Then, we went to the basement and watched General conference together.  We still did our traditional "Candy Conference" but we toned it down a bit since they all had Easter baskets full of candy.  Most of the items in the bowls were crackers/nuts.  The conference was wonderful and I even got to cuddle with Bronson for about 45 minutes of it.  

Between conference sessions, we had the dinner that Nicki WOULD have chosen if she didn't have to share her birthday with a holiday.  David grilled the most delicious hamburgers, and we ate Cheetos and raspberries.  Yum!  It would have been even better if we weren't already stuffed.  

We watched the second session of conference upstairs so that I could fiddle around in the kitchen.  When it was over, we put together the last minute preparations, then we invited the family over for our Easter/Birthday party.   In attendance were:

The birthday girl

Alison Marie

Bronny Boy

Joshua James

Grandpa and Grandma Smith

Megan - this was a huge surprise!  We were so happy that she came!  

Kristin and Brian (somehow, Payton was able to avoid the photo shoot!)

McKenna Dear

Grandpa Holt (Brian's dad).

and Katie and Scott.

With David's ingenious ideas, we were able to fit two tables in the kitchen.  Almost all of us fit in there. We had two different kinds of ham (spiral sliced and shredded with mustard) and three different kinds of rolls to make ham sandwiches with, potato salad, a green garden salad, Thai quinoa salad, fruit salad, deviled eggs, chips, pickles and olives (Nicki LOVES pickles) and an ice chest filled with cans of soda pop (also Nicki's idea).  

I made a ridiculous amount of food.  WAY too much!  Plus, no body was hungry in the first place because of the Easter candy, etc.  We sent food home with everyone we could, and we still ate ham for four or five days afterwards.  I'm all hammed out!

This picture cannot really capture the grossness of this boy.  He was covered in multi-colored goo.  Nobody dared get too close for fear that he would touch them.  After a while, he started splashing blue slime all over the floor, so I had to hose him down and get him out.   

Instead of a cake (which Nicki doesn't love) we made several different cookie bars.  Her favorite are "Chess Bars", but we also had caramel brownies, lemon bars, and blue-frosted sugar cookie bars.  David was a little slow with the camera, so we're reenacting the candle blowing out ceremony in this photo.

After dinner, Nicki opened presents from her grandparents and cousins.  

She had such a great day and got so many cool things!  It was wonderful to spend it with family.

Through the dirty window, you can see Payton playing with my boys in the back yard.  He was so patient, fun, and responsible with them!  What a great older cousin!

It was a fun, loud, rowdy night.  My mom explained it to her neighbors like this the following day:  "The only thing we were missing was someone being shot out of a cannon."  Ha ha - I should have thought about renting a cannon!  I'm used to chaos, so it wasn't that far from normal to me, but I'm sure it was quite a change of pace for all of our guests.  From Bronson stealing  Grandpa Holt's cane, riding it like a horse, then wielding it like a weapon to Josh needing an emergency shower right in the middle of the party (involving poop - don't ask), we really put on quite a show.  Later, after everyone had left, David asked, "Now, why was Bronson stripping in front of everyone?"  and I was like, "Oh my heck!  I forgot he even DID that!  It just got lost in the shuffle of all the other crazy things he did."  I'm just going to chalk it up to the sugar high and the excitement of having people to show off for.  One thing's for sure:  Nicole's 10th birthday was definitely memorable!

Love/Hate Relationship

Oh how I love my kids!  All of them.  So much, it literally hurts.  But I had to laugh out loud when a friend of mine posted this on facebook this morning:

Ha ha!  Not true....or is it?

I've said before, parenting is really hard for me.  I've never wanted anything more desperately in my life than to be a good parent.  And I've never felt so inadequate, incompetent and hopeless about anything either.   My kids are HARD!!!  They are ALL energetic, strong-willed, high-maintenance kids.  I don't have a single quiet or mellow one in the bunch.  Most of the time, I'm cool with that.  Our home is loud and crazy, but also happy.  But about two or three days per month, it all becomes too much for me.  Today is definitely one of those days.  In fact - I've been depressed, overwhelmed, and semi-hostile for a few days now.  I'm pretty sure that part of it has something to do with my surgery.  I was told that with one ovary still healthy, I shouldn't have any hormonal side effects.   Maybe my body is just adjusting because I can mentally see that my life is fine, but I still go around crying all day long and wishing I could just check-out for a while.

It seems that each of my kids takes a turn being the one that I worry over the most.  Right now, Josh and Bronson are kind of tied (I have a feeling these two are going to dominate my worry-wars for a few years to come).  I know that part of this is hormonal, but part of it is just that it's really hard!  Josh and Bron are tough.  We're talking anger, violence, and disrespect of biblical proportions (and I should know - I'm reading the Old Testament right now).

 ***UPDATE*** It's now three days after I wrote this post originally.  First of all, I HEAVILY edited it.  I took out all the really hopeless, ugly stuff (and now it's about 1/3 its original length).  Second of all, I'm feeling much better.  The kids are still crazy and my life is still overwhelming at times, but I'm not so miserable about it anymore.  It's beautiful chaos.  I just needed a lot of prayer, a lot of council and support from David, and a little time to pass.  I guess I like my kids after all (but I STILL dream of getting away with JUST David for a few days...someday...).

As Promised...

Here are some pictures of our new floors in the front room.  They are gorgeous!  Thank heaven for tax returns so we can do little projects like this!  And thank heaven for a handy, hard-working husband who can do such amazing work at half the cost of a professional!

Surgery

Lets see.  Where do I start the story of my surgery?  Puberty?  Thirteen years ago when I had my first painful attack while at work?  Being told by the doctor that I probably had polycystic ovaries and that we would "deal with it" after I was done having children?  The years of occasional attacks which lately have become more and more frequent?  The attack that almost killed me on St. Patrick's Day?  Hard to say where to start....

The pain that I had on St. Patrick's Day was one of the worst things I've ever felt.  I have had three or four really bad episodes in the past - this one rivaled them all.  It was bad enough that I actually made a doctor's appointment instead of letting it slide.  "Living with it" didn't seem like a great idea anymore.  What if something like that happened while I was at church?  Or the store?  Or worst of all, driving with my kids in the van?  As it was, I had to ask my parents to pick the girls up from school that day.  The next day, I was still in so much pain that I started to wonder if I had appendicitis or gallbladder issues. I didn't.

So, I went to the doctor on a Thursday afternoon.  I decided to try a new doctor - a female.  Her name is Robin Houpe.  I like her.  She started out giving me the speech that I was expecting.  The speech about how birth control pills are the best way to fight cysts that burst.  Then, she did an ultrasound to see if there was anything usual.  What she found was that my right ovary was completely hidden in either several small cysts or one enormous cyst.  The left ovary looked completely healthy.  After seeing the ultrasound,the doc said two things: 1) my pain was probably not from bursting cysts, but from the heavy ovary torsing (twisting) and cutting off blood flow and 2) birth control wasn't going to fix this problem - it needed surgery.

That was kind of a lot for me to take in.  I was expecting to take months trying to find a solution, not minutes.  My doctor said I could wait for six to eight weeks and see if it corrected itself, or I could just get the surgery done now.  I opted for the wait-eight-weeks option.  I think the doctor was surprised.  She reminded me that I was basically putting off the inevitable and that I could have two or three more attacks while I waited.  She gave me prescriptions for heavy duty pain killers, and told me that ovarian torsion is considered a medical emergency and that if I had another large episode, I'd better get to the ER.  I told her I would and I went home.  When I got there, my mom, my sisters, and even David argued in strong opposition to waiting.  They convinced me to go ahead and have the surgery.

So I did.  I went in on Tuesday, March 31st.  It was Spring Break, so my kids were all home with my mom.  David came with me to Ogden Regional Medical Center.  I arrived at 1:00 pm for a 2:30 pm scheduled cystectomy (possible oopherectomy if she couldn't salvage the ovary).  My doctor got called to another hospital, so I didn't actually go into surgery until around 4:00 pm.  I was terrified.  In my whole 37 years of life, I've never been hospitalized except to have babies.  I've never even broken a bone, let alone had an operation.  I was freaked out by the anesthesia.  However, in the end it was perfectly fine.  As they wheeled me into the operating room, they put something into my IV.  Soon, I was happy to be alive, noticing how pretty the hospital ceilings are and thinking lovely thoughts about my nurses and all mankind.  I remember everything about moving to the operating table, talking to the anesthesiologist, etc.  He said, "goodnight," to me, and I said, "goodnight" back, but after a few moments, I was still awake.  I started to say, "I'm still awake," but all of a sudden, I was in a different room waking up.  Weird!

Rockin' the hospital gown.  That thing was lined in plastic.  I literally - LITERALLY had sweat dripping down my back.

Waiting for the doc.

My surgery took about one and a half hours.  The doctor told David that the ovary was covered in scar tissue, old blood, and cysts.  So was the Fallopian tube.  It all had to go.  Looked like I also had endometriosis to her.  That surprises me - never heard that I had it before.  ???  Anyway, the left side looks healthy.  That's great news in terms of not needing hormone replacement therapy.  On a strange side note, she told David that while she was in there, she checked some of my other organs, but she couldn't find my appendix anywhere.  She finally found a small stump where my appendix should be. Weird, huh?  Anyway, when I woke up I had three small incisions on my abdomen - one for a camera and two for the instruments.

I was pretty nauseated when I came to.  The nurses gave me every anti-nausea drug in their arsenal.  I had a hard time staying awake - I remember just being bugged that everyone kept waking me up - I just wanted to sleep a little while longer. Looking back at it, I think the nurses were anxious to go home - I was the last patient of the evening.  They discharged me pretty quickly (I think - maybe it took longer than I realize - I was kind of out of it).  David drove me home, stopping at the pharmacy drive-thru to drop off my prescriptions.

After the surgery.  Hospital beds are not made for tall people.

When we got home, my parents were finishing bathing the boys.  They had eaten pizza for dinner, played all afternoon, and watched a movie on TV.  They had the best day ever!   David took over the bedtime duties and let them go home.  Once the boys were asleep, he ran to the store for my drugs.

The next day, my mom came over and helped out until David came home at night.  She came for most of the following day as well.  She was amazing!  The kids had so much fun playing with her and all the crafts/games/puzzles/treats she brought.  They had a fantastic Spring Break in spite of me being out of commission.   I was able to just lie in bed most of the time.  I was in a pretty good amount of pain the first day - mostly from the air bubbles that got trapped in my body (they blew my stomach up with CO2 like a balloon to perform the surgery).  I took pain pills - they didn't seem to help with the pain that much, but I felt so loopy I didn't even care.  By the second day, I didn't need the heavy pain pills anymore.  That was the day that David gave strict command that I wasn't to lift a finger (and he told the kids to stop me if I didn't follow orders). He didn't want me to push too hard too fast and get sidelined even longer.  He was smart.  It helped.  By Friday, I was able to do about anything I wanted, but I got tired quickly.  Each day was significantly better than the one before.  What a miracle laproscopic surgery is!  I was also so blessed to be taken care of by my loving family and many friends and neighbors.  Calls/texts, meals, and flowers all meant so much to me!

Beautiful flowers from my great friend, Heather, in Idaho.

Happy Sick Baby

Quinton sure has been sick this winter!  I guess he's just developing a strong immune system for later in his life.  His nose is very runny for about a week or so, and then it clears up for another week or two.  Then the nose starts up again.  His congestion sometimes leads to a cough for a couple of days, or horrible raspy breathing.  Every once in a while, he'll develop a low grade fever for 24 hours, or he'll have horrible diarrhea for a day.  Once he broke out in strange, intermittent, welt-like rashes over his face and abdomen for a couple of days.  Who knows what's going on with him?  It never lasts too long, and he's completely happy throughout, so I haven't done anything about it. However, the humidifier is now a constant fixture in his room.

Look at those cute, feverish cheeks!

Sure looks like he's suffering, doesn't it?

I love when they're sick enough to let you cuddle with them for a while.

Listen to how sick his breathing sounds in this 30 second video.  Poor baby!  The boxes next to the crib that he's climbing on are laminate for our front room.  I'll show pictures of it soon!

Worst.Visit.Ever.

I forgot to tell this story a month ago, but I was reminded of it today and I think I HAVE to tell it - ugly though it may be.

A few weeks ago, my parents called and invited us their house for Sunday dessert.  Of course, we said "YES!"  On our way to their house, I realized that I had left Quinton's diaper bag at home.  That, my friends, was warning number one that the fates were against us.  However, we ignored the warning and drove on.  "He'll be fine.  He's already had a messy diaper today.  We won't stay too long,,,"  These are the words of parents in denial...

We arrived at my parents' home and got out of the van.  One whiff of the air as I removed the baby from his car seat told me that the "he already had a messy diaper today" rationale was shot.  David offered to drive home and get the diaper bag, but I didn't want him to miss the whole visit.  (warning number two - also ignored). My mom, upon hearing of our situation, said, "Oh, I've got a pull-up here.  Will that work?"  Hooray for pull-ups!  But when I saw it, I realized that is wasn't a pull-up.  It was a swimming diaper.  Now, without getting too gross, I must explain that the whole idea of a swimming diaper is to let liquids pass through them.  They're just there as a net to catch solids, basically.  This, I must admit, was my third and final warning that the fates were against this trip.  If I had been smart, I would have sent David home to get a real diaper.  Instead, I said, "Well, he's empty now.  What else can possibly go wrong?" and went on my stupid way.

Dessert was delicious.  Afterwards, the older kids all huddled together on the couch reading a "Where's Waldo" book together quietly.  It was adorable - and a bit unusual.  I guess it was the calm before the storm.

My mom and I were sitting ton the ground, blocking the staircase from the baby.  I was sharing my berry dessert with him.  Suddenly, all heck broke loose!  The next few things all happened within 30 seconds or so.  Josh and Bron got in a fight over something, Bron hurt Josh, who fell into the fetal position on the floor screaming.  Dave grabbed an also-screaming Bronson.  The baby grabbed the bowl of dessert out of my hands while I was preoccupied with the screaming kids and dumped it all over me.  I picked up my sweet little bundle of joy to clean us both up.  Suddenly, I felt a warmth spread all over my hip.  Not the "good feeling" kind of warmth.  More of the "I'm being peed on" kind of warmth.  I screamed and set the baby down.  Bad idea.  Now, he was crying along with his brothers, as well as wetting my mother's hard wood floor.  Ugh!  Mom and I scrambled to get the baby taken care of, stop anyone from stepping in the mess and slipping, and cleaning up.  We managed to get Quin into her kitchen sink.  Oh, yes.  By the way, did I mention that my parents had BARELY had their kitchen and bathrooms remodeled?  Everything was so new that we were afraid to even use the new toilet.  Quinton skipped the toilet and went straight to peeing in her lovely new kitchen sink.  Luckily, it's a huge, deep farm sink so he didn't squirt all over the counter tops.  Then, we were able to use her fancy new faucet to give the boy a rinse-off.  Way to break her new kitchen in.

On that lovely note, we had to leave.  I was mortified!  But I was covered in pie filling and pee and I had a now-naked baby to get home before he needed to empty his bladder (or worse) again.  My parents were cracking up as they waved goodbye, but I'm pretty sure it will be a while before our family gets invited to visit again.