Dang, I was cute!

My dad periodically goes through stuff in his office and when they come to visit he usually shows up with a variety of treasures. This time I got a Heinz ketchup magnet (?) and some old pictures. One is a picture of me from my freshman year in high school. Very early 80's. Very attractive. And he also gave me this...






I sure was a cute baby if I do say so myself!!

Delivery Man

Some people go through all of the trouble of going to an appliance store to get a refrigerator and then have some men in a truck deliver it. Not us. We like to do things our own way.

Who needs a delivery truck when you have a strong husband and two daughters willing to walk beside him?

Here's the rest of the story...we were looking at getting a refrigerator to keep in the garage for the tons of food we buy to keep our brood happy and growing that never seems to all fit in the refrigerator we have. But refrigerators cost a lot of money so we hesitated. And thankfully so, for in waiting God gave us an idea! Our old refrigerator was at our old house which we are renting out. And our renters had recently bought their own refrigerator. So I asked them if they were using it, and they very kindly said that we needed it more than their family of 3 did so we could take it back. Yippee! Now how to get it from that house to ours. Hmmm. We called several friends with trailers but none were available. Our friend Carol, the ever resourceful one, suggested Sam rent an appliance dolly from U-Haul and walk it over since it is only 4 blocks away. So we did. And for the measly ten dollars to rent the dolly I got a refrigerator in my garage and the priceless memories of my husband walking four blocks with a refrigerator. Not something you get to see every day! And you can believe he got a lot of interesting looks along the way! Two guys were standing in the park watching him walk past with their jaws on the ground. They sure had something interesting to talk about at dinner with their families that night!!

Adding Insult to Injury to Injury

Yesterday Sam painted the final wall in our bedroom that was waiting to be painted. Yay! A finished project! And paint fumes! So I slept on the couch not wanting to asphyxiate myself. Having inhaled the fumes for hours already Sam felt he had built up an immunity and went ahead and slept in our bed. At 3:15 this morning I was awakened by Noah who was crying and clearly in pain. "My ear hurts really bad and Daddy won't do anything about it!" Assuming that his dad just hadn't actually awakened fully, I got up and came to the rescue...or tried anyway. In my "It's-three-in-the-morning-and-I-can't-quite-think-clearly" fog all I could think was the fact that there must be a rule in the ear infection kingdom that says they may only show themselves between 2-4 a.m.. I gave him some ibuprofen and I think I said something along the lines of "Let's see if we can just get you through to the morning" but it may have sounded more like "Lesheifweekengetyoootoomonin." I gave him a heating pad to lean against and told him to try to get back to sleep and wake me again if it isn't getting any better. Yeah, that lasted about 30 minutes. Clearly ibuprofen was like a pea shooter at this King Kong ear infection (which by the way I had been watching for since he has been sick for the last ten days and he had shown no signs at all). So, I went and got Sam up. I told him Noah has an ear infection and had tried to wake him up but clearly didn't succeed. "Oh, I woke up, I told him to lay down with me." Oh, silly me, why didn't I think of that? So Sam won the privilige of going to the ER based on his home "remedy" for earaches.

Sam and Noah headed off for the ER around 4:30. They got to see the new Banner Gateway Hospital and Sam says it's lovely. A few other more urgent cases came in right after them, so they had a bit of a wait. When the doctor finally came in and looked at Noah's ear she said, "Whoa, no wonder that hurts!" Apparently it was a "raging" ear infection. She very kindly gave Noah some pain medication at that point. Since we are all about saving money, we went for a 2 for 1 special and had them x-ray his ankle while he was there. Talk about being efficient!! It turns out that his ankle is not broken, but is sprained badly with possible ligament damage that might require casting. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I don't like paying a co-pay only to hear that nothing is wrong, so I feel like we got our money's worth in that trip for sure! They splinted Noah's leg/ankle/foot and then sent him home with some prescriptions.

They stopped and got donuts on the way home--which was very thoughtful--and then the rest of the family got ready to go to church, leaving Noah and I behind. I headed off to Walgreen's to pick up his prescription and 7 minutes later my phone rang and Noah informed me that he had thrown up. "Oh, Buddy, I'm sorry. Are you okay now? Um....did you make it to the bathroom?" (After 4 months of chemo I try to avoid vomit any way I can--and thankfully he had made it!) I wasn't very thankful for that pain medicine at that point (having been administered on a very empty stomach!). I got some Sprite and his scripts and hurried home--although I did stop at Safeway to rent a movie for him to watch. (Earned some Good Mom Points there!)

He has proceeded to spend the day on the couch alternating between nausea, vomiting, high fever and general discomfort. I decided to skip the pain medicine that was prescribed to him since it needed to be given with food (very wise I think) and gave him ibuprofen in between ralphing sessions when I could get a few crackers in his tummy.

This poor kid is having a very rough weekend. And it's a three day weekend too to add insult to injury to injury. What next? The plague?

"But I'm at Costco..."

So, on Friday I'm at Costco and I am reaching for my phone to call Emily to let her know where I am and my phone rings. Always weird when that happens. So, I answer with a pleasant "hellooo." And she responds with, "Mom, Noah says he thinks he broke or sprained his foot." Unusual greeting if you ask me. No preamble, no gentle lead in, just BAM. And I will readily admit to rolling my eyes a bit at this proclamation. You see, my precious Noah is a bit dramatic when it comes to injuries and so it is hard to know when there is truly something wrong. I was at Costco with shopping to get done and so I was erring on the side of "right, whatever." So, she puts Noah on and he proceeds to start crying into the phone, which you all know means I can't understand a single word of what he is saying from my aisle in Costco. After a few "Honey, I can't understand you, please calm downs" I finally understood that he wanted me to come get him because he couldn't walk home because he hurt his ankle at lunch recess. But I'm at Costco! At that moment God sovereignly ordained that my friend Laurie walked out of her house and saw the tears streaming down Noah's face and came over to help. He handed her the phone and she agreed to take him home for me. Mind you, I'm still thinking "right, whatever" when it comes to this injury. So I continue shopping. (yes, I am the Queen of Compassion) Then I call Sam to ask him a question and I find out that they had called him too (apparently I didn't hear my phone the first time they called) and so he wanted to know what was up. Hmmm. They called Daddy at work, maybe he is actually hurt. So, I called Emily back and by this time they were home and she had Noah laying down with an ice pack on his ankle. "Is it swollen?" "Ooooohhhhh yeah." "Great." So, I got home checked it out and discovered that there was indeed an actual injury. One certainly worthy of tears at the prospect of walking home 4 blocks. What I'm still trying to process is him not going to the nurse's office to have it looked at when he was clearly in a bit of pain from lunch time through 2:45! I guess he was okay sitting at his desk and didn't have to get up all afternoon so it didn't bother him too much. Until of course it was time to leave.

Thankfully, our neighbor is a paramedic and he graciously came over and looked his ankle over and declared it to be truly injured, i.e. sprained or possibly broken. We are in the let's wait and watch it stage hoping upon hope that it is not broken and that we will not have to go to the urgent care and have an xray because that is certainly way more painful than a sprain. So, Noah has had to lay around with his foot propped up and iced. Which isn't so bad for the first few hours, but it does get old for an active 11 year old. And the hopping on one foot thing started out strong, but isn't something that can be kept up for an extended period of time. And then the Lord provided through Rachel's teacher who had a pair of crutches in her garage. How, you ask, did we find out that she had crutches? Well, she was very sweet and came to Rachel's soccer game this morning and during our conversation I mentioned that Noah had sprained his ankle and we didn't have crutches so he was trapped at home. And voila! A short time later we had crutches. So now he is Mr. Hopalong Cassidy and you can bet he loves the attention! Our neighbor did mention to him that girls will fall all over him if he is on crutches and I did notice a little smirk on his face...

Once again proof positive that there truly is never a dull moment around here.

It's beginning to look a lot like...November?

Okay, there are just some rules in life that should never be broken. I'm not talking about wearing white after Labor Day or wearing a hat in a building or anything minor like that. No, it's something way more grievous than that. I'm talking about waiting until after Thanksgiving to put up Christmas decorations. I have historically had a hard time when I see one of our neighbors' lights go up the week before Thanksgiving. It's like they just want to skip over Thanksgiving entirely. And you can't claim to be putting them up early to avoid the freezing weather like in the Midwest. I just feel like there should be some sort of order to this whole holiday thing. All I am asking is that you wait until Thanksgiving has been officially celebrated before we jump into Christmas. I want to enjoy the Christmas build up and it is nearly impossible to fully enjoy it when it lasts for months. So you will understand my irritation when I was walking home from the kids' school Thursday night after Noah's music program and I see this:



The reindeer and candy canes are a little blurry because I took the picture from across the street. But you can see Santa in the background. I mean, come on people, it was only Nov. 8 when these decorations went up. NOVEMBER 8! They took down their Halloween decorations and put these up in their place. I had seen them earlier in the day and I was hoping against hope that they would at least have the common decency to wait to turn them on until it was more appropriate, but alas, they clearly don't have any respect for tradition. I'm on the verge of shopping around for lighted turkeys and pilgrims to give to them to use for the month of November because they obviously feel the need to have lawn decorations from September on and in the absence of Thanksgiving related yard decor they have jumped ahead to the Christmas stuff. It's just wrong. I'm going to have to avoid that corner for the next couple of weeks so I can prevent myself from hyperventilating over the tragedy of it all. So, please, if you care about my sanity at all, please, please, please wait until after Thanksgiving to decorate for Christmas! Thank you for your support.

I'm hours away from being taken seriously...or not

This will be my last post from my 30's. Yes, it's true, when I awake tomorrow morning--without an alarm clock mind you as a special treat to myself--I will be 40. Wow. Is this when people have to start taking you seriously and really consider you an adult? I hope so. I've always wanted to be an adult...some day. In my case it probably won't alter much though as I will still be me and not necessarily worth taking seriously. :-)

I subbed in a kindergarten class today--and I actually enjoyed it. They were an obedient bunch (for the most part) and they made me pictures and hugged me throughout the day which can only make you feel special. I told them it was my birthday tomorrow and they all said, "Ooooooooo. How old will you be?" You should have seen their faces when I said I would be forty. I might as well have said a hundred and eighty three. They started offering up how old their moms were and several decided their parents were 60. I'm sure their parents would appreciate being aged by several decades.

So, in honor of my big day tomorrow I am meeting a friend at The Coffee Shop for some yummy Hot Cocoa in the morning, going to Joe's Real BBQ for my free lunch and then for dinner we are going to Joe's Farm Grill for free cheeseburgers and fries for the whole family (it's their Customer Appreciation Day). You've got to love free. :-) Anyone that wants to join us for my birthday dinner at the Farm Grill is more than welcome. I thought it was very sweet of them to throw me a birthday dinner (they're calling it customer appreciation so that no one is offended if they don't do the same on their birthday).

If it looks like milk...

(Kristi encouraged me to blog this conversation. I was thankful to have a witness.)

Tommy (drinking a glass of milk): This milk looks like milk but it doesn't taste like milk it tastes like something different that looks like milk but it's not milk.

Me: Huh?

Kristi: What does it taste like?

Tommy: I don't know. Well, I know, but I don't know what it's called but it looks like milk.

Me: Huh?

Kristi: Huh?

Rachel claimed to have understood what he was saying, but at this point we still do not know what he is thinking his milk tasted like. The answer is trapped in Tommyland.

Projects, Dizziness and Ick

I've kept my husband plenty busy today. He finished painting the master bathroom and a wall in our bedroom. Let's just say it took a little longer than he anticipated. Hours longer. Yikes. Really we need to start factoring in that unexpected extra few hours whenever a project is started. But we are both, for some reason, serious time under-estimators. Sam's area of major underestimation is home projects and my weakest area is cooking. It always seems to take longer than I think and therefore I always start it later than I should and therefore we usually eat later than we'd like. You'd think I could adjust this little habit I've formed by just starting a half hour earlier or something, but no, my way is much more "exciting" for everyone involved.

Now Sam is hanging some shelves and a thing-a-ma-bob on the wall for me. It's a cool looking metal thing-a-ma-bob to add interest to our wall. It's working, I'm interested in the wall now. He loves when I come home from the store with yet another item to hang. Really he does. Truly.

I had some side effects this week, which surprised me. What that means is that they have been seriously reduced lately, which is a huge thing to praise God for. But then when they hit I'm wondering what is wrong with me and then it dawns on me that I take a very powerful medicine to keep my leukemia under control. Oh, that's right, I have leukemia. Darn, I keep forgetting.

Like right now, I'm feeling a bit dizzy. And I'm quite tired and forgetful this week. Quite. The fact that it is 9:35 and I am not falling asleep on the computer tonight is pretty impressive. Of course I am dizzy and attempting to type so if my words start to come out sideways, I apologize.

No exciting Tommy stories this week, uh, er, month. I'm sure he has done something worth noting, but refer to the last paragraph where I mentioned that I am quite forgetful this week and we'll just chalk it up to that. I'll try to think of anything he has done that is noteworthy.

Well, that's it from Dizzyland. I just thought I'd check in because it's been a while. I'll tell Tommy to do something really ridiculous tomorrow so I can post it.

Oh, wait! I remember something that Sam did that is just as ridiculous and I told him I would blog about it. He likes to eat peanut butter out of the jar (all the while I am attempting to teach my children about manners and germs and things like that) and the other day he dropped a big bloop of p.b. on the floor while we were talking. Without skipping a beat in the conversation, he reaches down with his fork, scrapes it off of the floor and proceeds to eat it. I, the Manners and Germ Teacher, could only stand there with my mouth agape. What was that???? I mean the man is 39 years old and this is how he chooses to mar his mother's good name?? I KNOW she taught him better. But then again, she probably mentioned that eating pizza or birthday cake out of the garbage can was a bad idea or that pork accidentally left on a grill for several days should not be eaten. And yet her son has over the years partaken of the aforementioned foods from the aforementioned locations. All I can do is watch from the sidelines in horror and hope my children don't see. Because I know a certain little fella--one who has previously wiped something off of a shelf at the dollar store and then licked his hands--that would most certainly follow in those footsteps!!