Thursday, September 27, 2007

A Rough Week...


This has been a long week and it's still only Thursday!! It's hard to have sick kids!

Jordan spent Friday and Saturday last week with cold symptoms. I didn't think much of it, but Sunday she woke up with nasty snot everywhere!!! Monday morning she woke up with her eye matted shut with snot. I took her to the dr and had to wait 1 hr and 45 minutes! Our dr said they had received over 100 sick call-ins that day!!! Long story short, she had an ear infection and a sinus infection. Antibiotic for 10 days.

Well, I was suspicious of Lawson, b/c Sunday night he had gotten Jordan's "cold-like symptoms." Wednesday, he woke up with some gunk in his eyes, so I called him in an appointment b/c I was pretty sure he had the same thing. Well, his eyes were way worse than Jordan's had ever gotten. By the time of his appointment yesterday afternoon, he had tons of little "floaters" and gunk coming out of every hole in his head. Doc walked in and said..."Mmmm-Hmmm..I see why you're here!" So...Lawson had a DOUBLE ear infection and a sinus infection AND (listen to this...) Some ORGANISM in his eyes causing this puss. That's right, I said ORGANISM!!! Disgusting!


I know Dr. Newby is a lurker out there...any insight on this??? (By the way, I cleaned before you came, and I didn't know about the organism before you came...sorry!!!)

Jordan is actually a little better today--her eyes have cleared out a lot, but we are dealing with yucky diapers from the meds! Lawson, on the other hand, is still very yucky. He woke up this morning with both eyes matted completely CLOSED! He woke up crying "My eyes are cwosed! My eyes are cwosed!"


So...on the busiest baby week our class has had yet (a shout out to the Allens and the Smiths!), we are holed up in the house, Purell-ing like crazy, Lysol-ing like crazy trying to get these crazy kids better! With 5 days of crying, yucky kids, it can only go up from here, right?

So...if you happen to say a prayer today, would you throw our names into the mix?? I would appreciate it!! :)

Saturday, September 15, 2007

"The car has a boo-boo? Maybe it needs a band-aid!"

Honestly, I think it's gonna need more than a band-aid!!!

So....yesterday, I left the house about 2:45 to run some errands. I went to the bank, then to Southern Family Market to renew our car tags. We stood in line for 45 minutes (crazy, I know!) with the kids being so well-behaved on their stroller. Everyone in line was kind, and there was a particularly sweet lady who kept talking to them and playing peek-a-boo with Jordan. Finally it was time to leave--it was 4:30. I hopped onto 72, going east, and by now it was rush hour. So much traffic! The light at Nance turned red, and I slowed down. There was a lot of traffic, and I had to stop pretty quick, but was paying attention and had plenty of room. (Amazing, but I wasn't even tailgating, which I tend to do!) The car behind me also had come to almost a complete stop, but I looked in my mirror just in time to see that the car behind her had not been paying attention and therefore did not get the "Everyone's stopping" memo.

The white Ford in the back hit the red Grand Cherokee in the middle who hit me in the front!!! I'm telling you, she PLOWED into my back door!

It's crazy how in a millisecond you can think so many things...I swear, this was my thought process in less than a second:

Whoa, traffic stopping quickly. Will I have time? Yes, Plenty of time. Wait, I don't know if that car behind me is gonna stop. Yes, it's okay. WAIT...I don't think that other car is stopping. Oh my...She's gonna hit me! Wow, that was LOUD! Pull off, pull off...here's a driveway. Check the kids...is everyone ok?



So...I called Jon, then the police. While waiting for the officer, I decided to get everyone's information. So...I get out of the car, and who's in the car behind me? The nice, sweet lady from the line at the store!!! Crazy! She was so sweet, and it was totally not her fault...We exchanged info...then went to the guy in the Ford. They appeared to be uninjured too. However, their adult pregnant daughter was in the backseat. Totally hope she's fine!

Name? ..check. Address? ...check. Phone Number? ...check. Insurance info? ...um...I'm sorry...we've been going through a hard time and don't have insurance.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? (I stole that line from you, Anna!)

So...I call my insurance...who tells me that we have full coverage but will have to pay our deductible. Super stinky.

Well, an hour and forty five minutes after the accident, the officer shows up. Thirty minutes after that, he's giving me my paperwork and telling me Im free to go. And then he tells me I should take my kids to the ER to be checked because in another accident he worked on the guy said he was fine than COLLAPSED BECAUSE OF INTERNAL BLEEDING!! Hello...too much information!! Anyhow...I called the pediatricians office, and they recommended it to...so we headed off to get a quick dinner then go to Madison Urgent Care. (We did this so we wouldn't have to go to PED ER then Reg ER for me.)

(Remember....I was only gonna be gone about 1 1/2 hours! It's now 7:50.

So...we were at the Urgent Care center until 10:00. The kids were great. We tried several things to pass the time.

He's too close! He's too close!!

Well, She's touching me! She's touching me!

Of course, there was a football game on! Thank goodness!
The three patients...

So...at the end of the day, everyone's fine. The kids looked great after a thorough checkover. The doctor checked just about every place in their body that random blood could be leaking out. Took blood pressure, pulse, oxygen apsorption--everything was perfect. I had three x-rays of my neck. (Which is sore and stiff, but I'm totally better than I expected to be today.)

All in all, it was a long, crazy day...but it was a good reminder to be thankful that daily God has a protective hand covering us.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Grandmother's house

Before getting started...this is just a pretty long therapeutic rambling of a recent trip down memory lane. Permission granted to skip over this entire post! :)

I have begun the daunting task of going through all of my 'junk'. I have things from my wedding. I have things from college. I have things from last year. I am just the kind of person who doesn't like to let things go. I like the idea of knowing that if I ever want to spend an afternoon sitting in the floor going down memory lane I will have boxes and boxes of memorabilia to choose from.
So...you can imagine how hard it has been to slowly go through and decide which pictures and papers from my life are no longer worthy of their spot in their box.

Last fall, my dad brought down the things that I had accumulated at my childhood home in Michigan. Jon was soooo overjoyed that we now had even MORE boxes to move from place to place!! Ha! Just kidding! Well, I knew we were about to move in a couple months, so I didn't get all those boxes opened just then.

This week I have. I started going through the piles and piles of pictures and notes. Cards from years ago. Souvenirs from trips. Prom dresses. Stuffed animals. So Much Stuff!
Naturally, I have begun to feel a little bit nostalgic. The three pictures in this post brought back a flood of memories for me.

As early as I can remember, our family vacations consisted of trips to Tennesse. That's because we lived in Michigan and we had to spend our summer trip coming to see my dad's family down south.

My dad grew up in Lake County, Tennesse. He grew up in a hard-working family in a down-home community. My Granddaddy was a farmer, and my Memmy kept their farmhouse, three kids, and helped on the farm. The suffered Mississippi River floods, illness, and a house fire-but remained a tight family. One year, my Granddaddy injured his back and could no longer farm. They made the decision to pack up the family and move to the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois.

Until they retired, my grandparents remained in Chicago and made their annual trek back to Lake County when we did--Memmy's mother, along with a myriad of aunts, uncles, sisters and brothers still dotted the countryside.


My Grandmother's house

We would stay at my Grandmother's house. Memmy's mother was getting on up there in years. She had been married and widowed, then married and widowed again. As a baby, then a little girl, I heard story after story of how things were 'back in the old days'. Stories about Aunt Erma, or Uncle Pete, or 'The day Maw fell asleep in the back seat and we ran over a skunk in the car. She sat straight up yelling and hollering getting madder and madder because everyone else was just laughing!'

A full week or two of just visiting family and sitting around talking. We never had anything to do or anywhere to go.

One summer when I was still a baby, I came down with a fever. It was so hot, and Grandmother's house only had a shower. Dad went and bought a new metal trash can--remember those? Anyways, they filled it up with water, and I played in it just like it was a swimming pool!

I have memories when I was older of walking down the gravel road to my Aunt and Uncle's house because they had air conditioning. My brother and I would pick up rocks and hold them like each one was a treasure. When we got to the house, we would show Aunt Gracie and she would act so excited that we had found the most beautiful rocks on the way. Several years later, I noted that the rocks were all the same--cheap brown gravel. My memories still see them as beautiful, though.

My Grandmother had an old, old shotgun hidden in her closet. It was my daddy's Granddaddy's gun. I guess Grandmother kept it around for self-defense, but am pretty sure that the only action it ever got was when my dad would come down and shoot it. My brother and I had to sit on the little stoop at the back porch while my dad walked up to the edge of the cotton field and shoot into nowhere. For all we knew, the bullets went all the way to the Mississippi River, 10 miles away.

As we got older, we were even allowed to come up to the field to shoot too. It was so exciting to shoot into the open, or at an old Coke can my dad would hang for us. My Michigan friends' jaws would drop when I would come home from summer break talking about how I had been shooting guns that summer!!

Dad would take us into the cotton fields out to the side of the house--they seemed to never end! He would tell us how as a boy he spent countless hours in the fields picking cotton. Then he would take one of the bols that was just starting to split open and show its white fluffy flower and show us what real cotton really looked like.

Grandmother had one of those 4 room houses with doors connecting each room. We would get in trouble as two bored kids who decided to have races round and round and round.



My brother and me with Grandmother, 1984

Grandmother's kitchen was a big, old, country kitchen. Whenever we were down, she would always want to eat PaSghetti. Even as an old woman, she still said it that way. I guess she didn't have many Italian friends down there to correct her! After eating, the family would all do the dishes together then sit around and talk for it seemed like hours. I wish I was old enough to have remembered all the stories they used to tell.

Some days, when there was nothing else to do, my dad would take us for a ride in the car. He would take us on all the "back roads" and show us all the fields and streams he played in as a child. He talked about how he and his brother would spend the whole day running around in the woods, never even thinking about seeing a snake, mind you, and come running home just in time for dinner. Sometimes, he would even take us to the levee, then to see the Mighty Mississippi River. He would tell us about how that river gave life to the region, but then as floodwaters came would also take life away.

The Mississippi River

Sure...I spent most of my childhood in Michigan. Most people who know me or hear where I am from consider me a Northerner or a Yankee. Some people even say I still carry a northern accent...or whatever... But I have been sure, and after seeing these pictures and remembering am certain, that I also did much of my growing up down south. I have a distinct fondness for the ways of the south, the grace of southern people and the beauty of the land God has blessed the south with.

I am grateful for memories, and a chance to go back to a time that was so simple, yet so full.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Can a girl get some help???

Was it mean of me to run and get the camera before I squeezed her out of this miniature cabinet???

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Just a few recent pictures...

Haven't posted much lately....busy and tired--this is pretty much the story of my life! Anyhoo....just wanted to put a few new pics up...


Here's Lawson talking on the...calculator??? Hello, 10-4! Or is that "Hello, 10 minus 4 is 6!"??

Haircut time for the big L...That's me cutting--I took him to a girl barber--is that a barbress?--on his first birthday and didn't like how she cut it. He's never been back. I've been cutting it ever since, and he's so good about sitting for me!

Here's the Miss Messy!! She loves all things orange/red--this means every meal is a big mess! She is also a Little Miss Piggy--she eats more than any child I've ever seen!!!


She has officially earned the label of "climber". She climbs onto everything--usually not being able to get herself down!!! Chairs, picnic table, steps--you name it! Here's one with her adorable smile.

Last Saturday, Jon and Lawson went to see Playhouse Disney Live at the VonBraun Center. (Thanks, Nana, for the tix!) This show included Lawson's favorite characters from his favorite shows--Mickey Mouse and friends, Little Einsteins and Rocket, Handy Manny and his tools, and Winnie the Pooh (least fave). They both had a great time, and Lawson could not stop talking about it!!! We have now decided that he will be Mickey Mouse for Halloween, and Jordan will be Minnie. (That is, if Mommy can get her act in gear and get some costumes made!!!!)

Rocket, June, Quincy, Leo and Annie...Little Einstens

Mickey and the random girl in the show...

Now Raise Your Hands as High as You Can and Say BLAST OFF!!!!

Lawson must have been distracted!



Jordan loves to play with balls!!! This little basketball is one of her favorites...She'll roll/throw almost unendlessly.



Another climbing episode!!! The closed double stroller in the porch certainly is good to climb on, right?

Keeping cool in the sprinkler...