Dear Blog Followers

I know we're two weeks into the New Year and I still haven't added pictures. I also know that I have an awesome new camera and haven't posted any pictures from that. But you see, just because it's a new year doesn't mean the chaos has stopped. In fact, it seems like it's picked up.

One New Year's resolution I thought about having was talking and blogging less about the kids medical stuff. But hey two weeks into the new year and we've been to the pediatrician twice already. Bug fell ill with strep and upon looking in Roo's throat he had strep too, just not the high fever and vomiting like Bug had. Roo just had a rash appear one day and it was gone a day later. However, the following week Roo was sent home from school with a 102 fever. Pretty high for him. We're not sure if it was more of the strep because his antibiotics were poorly labeled and should have been refrigerated and thus didn't work or if it was just some other yucky virus going around. Either way, he's on a new round of antibiotics and doing much better.

I played with my new camera a bunch but for some reason the software won't load properly. I need to investigate that further and am hoping there's a good download from the Nikon site.

I noticed that the water spot on our kitchen ceiling looked bigger and darker than usual. I had hubby cut a hole in the wall so we could inspect, it was a three day weekend after all, plenty of time to fix it. We figured out what was leaking and it was the toilet in our master bath. Since we already had one hole and had a few older water marks, one from when we moved in, I had him cut a few more holes just to be sure those leaks were inactive. We figured out that they were and I asked him to see if the ugly window wall was load baring or not. It wasn't, so I decided we should take down the wall and turn it into a knee wall.

We took down the wall and the hubby cleaned up and I told him it wasn't short enough. He was not happy but I had a chance to "live" with it and it was the wrong height. We called my parents to get the height of their knee wall. About 37 inches, so we made ours shorter and put trim on it to finish it. It looks great, it opens up the kitchen/family room area, lets more light in and makes the entire area look bigger. This may have been one of our best home improvement project yet!!

Hubby spent the day today fixing the flooring in our bathroom and reseating the toilet. On Saturday when he started the project he gave up. He's never given up on a project. I asked him how it was going and he responded that he didn't want to talk about it. That's not good. I posted on Facebook that we needed help. My friend Mary that I used to work with volunteered her husband Will to come and help. Will drove about 45 minutes to get to our house and spent the afternoon helping the hubby fix the problem. It needed to be fixed pretty much how I thought it did so I made sure to tell hubby that I told him so. He was really happy to have Will help him and walk him through the one step that made him think it was a "needs a plumber" kind of fix. It's great to have friends that are willing to help at a moments notice and it's always great that we can borrow Uncle Nate's tools too!

Since today is a holiday but doctor's offices are still open, I took advantage of the free day and took Bug for his annual RAST blood work, went to a doctor and dental appointment for myself and got a bathing suit for swim lessons with Bug. A productive day for mommy and daddy!

So tonight after we got the kids to bed and I got Bug's lunch all packed for tomorrow and I headed toward the couch to relax and thought about how productive we were this weekend, I stepped in water. Are you kidding me. I don't know how we earned this karma but I apologize for whatever it is that we did. Hopefully the fix for this will be easy. Looks like the overflow for the tub in the kids bathroom is leaking. The floor doesn't look wet at all, just the pipe, so please blog followers, cross your fingers for an easy fix.

Happy New Year and What We Did On Our Winter Vacation!

Of course too much time has passed again since I have update the blog. This blog update won't even have pictures to start with, I'm just that far behind. I always find it interesting after the holidays the list of people I wanted to at least send a card to that I just ran out of time. For example, we really wanted to send something to our peds office and it just never happened. I'm hoping to send a happy new year something nice in the next week.

I haven't re-read my last blog post to see where I left off so I'll start where I think I left off!

Roo's asthma medicine has been working really well. The day we stopped giving him the rescue inhaler he coughed a bunch when he went to bed, I gave him the inhaler and since then he's been doing well with the daily inhaler. He goes back to the pulm next week so we can talk about his progress and make any necessary medicine adjustments.

Before the holidays I was thinking about how it's been a year since I herniated a disc in my back. That combined with some holiday stress was enough to bring on some back pain. I called my pain doctors office and let them know what was going on and how the back pain usually goes from some to minor to not being able to walk the next day. They called in some pain meds and muscle relaxers. After I finished grocery shopping for Christmas and changed into my pajamas I took the medicine. Within a half hour I wasn't feeling right, mostly just really tired but still off, we headed up to bed but I stopped for a drink of water along the way, the first clue to the husband that something wasn't right. And then wham. I was out like a light. I've gotten so much better feeling the fainting coming on but this time it hit me like a ton of bricks and I hit my head on the oven on the way to the ground. Good thing, it broke my fall and I didn't hit the counter or floor full force. The next day, the back pain was gone. I flushed the pain meds, too scared to take that high a dose ever again!

This year the boys really enjoyed celebrating both Hanukkah and Christmas. We had a nice family Hanukkah dinner on Friday and the boys enjoyed lighting the candles and saying the prayer every night. They of course enjoyed the presents but we were able to not go overboard and begin the discussion that the holidays aren't all about presents. Their favorite surprise was the box of Transformers from the Bloobs. Grandma and Grandpa also got them some super cool gifts including a Buzz Lightyear bicycle for Bug and an "ipad" as Roo likes to call it (Innotab).

The Sunday before Christmas I took the kids to brunch at the club where grandma and grandpa live. Bug was awesome about eating the food I brought for him and the boys were really well behaved the entire time. We decided to make it an annual tradition. Plus, who can pass up brunch!

Daddy's family came for Christmas week and my family joined us for Christmas day. The boys really enjoyed preparing for Santa on Christmas eve and left food out for Santa and his reindeer. Christmas day the boys enjoyed opening their gifts with all of their grandparents together in one place. The boys had fun playing with the presents the entire week they were off from school. One of the best surprises for the boys was the arrival of their cousins Maddie and Annabell. Roo had no idea they were coming, if he did, he wouldn't sleep for days ahead and would be crazy Roo. The kids had a ton of fun playing with each other and the boys were for sure worn out by the end of the week. For all of the girls calmness, the boys ran around like crazy crazies. It was great seeing everyone and especially great seeing all the kids play together.

One of the best surprises for me was the awesome DSLR camera the entire family surprised me with. I knew Daddy was up to something but was never able to figure it out and was so excited to see the exact camera I've been wanting for about 2 years now in my hands! We played with it a little bit that week and it takes amazing pictures. I'm going to go over all the CDs that came with it so I can start taking advantage of all of its awesomeness!

During the week we all took a trip to the Air and Space Museum at Dulles. Roo was not at all into the trip and was a bit difficult the entire time. Bug wanted to be carried the entire time by mommy only. When everyone was going up to the observation tower I took the kids out to the car so everyone could take their time and enjoy the rest of the museum. The SR-71 and Space Shuttle are always amazing to see and of course the boys were excited to point out the Transformers exhibit.

Over the holidays I also had a chance to catch up with Joi and Mark when they were in town. It was great to catch up and I love that even with the distance between close friends like Joi it's like we're never out of touch!

Family had all left by mid day New Years Eve Day and since Bug had been up a lot the night before with an upset tummy we ordered Chinese and had a relaxing New Years at home, we even went to be early! The Chinese food didn't agree with me but luckily that passed quickly enough that I was still able to get some sleep that night. I hadn't had Chinese food in probably at least six months so I don't see myself having it again anytime soon. We've also decided that we need to cut out McDonald's as our "easy" out and about alternative for Bug. It was always nice to know that we could get him food there if we needed but several times recently it seems like it isn't agreeing with him or possibly even giving him a bit of eczema or a hive or two. I'm not upset about cutting out McDonald's at all, it will just make our long trips require a bit more food planning.

This week ended up being a bit more crazy than we expected. I got a new car on Monday. My back has been hurting so much driving my van that I finally gave up and got a new gas guzzlin SUV. I couldn't be happier with how comfortable it is, it's like night and day and my back thanks me! The boys went back to school and we went back to work with the New Year goal of earning more extra time, something that we know is totally out of our control. On Wednesday afternoon just a bit before we were going to leave to get the boys the school called and said Bug had a fever. When we got there he was acting totally normal and I asked why they took his temperature, his teachers said because he said he wasn't feeling well. They remarked that he was acting fine and they were shocked when it was above 102. We debated whether or not it was a real fever but that night proved it was real. I took Bug to the ped and he was diagnosed with strep. The swab made him throw up and he threw up all over me, fun! I remarked to the ped that Roo had a rash earlier in the week and that it was already gone. She said to look in his throat and if it was red or has little pustules to call her and she'd call in antibiotics for him. Sure enough his throat was yucky strepy. Amazing the difference between the two kiddos. I don't know if we would have ever known Roo was sick if Bug hadn't gotten so sick, so we're grateful for that. And, we're also excited to have our kick germ butt fighting Roo back after the fall he had!

So, I'm sure I've missed out on some details and I know once I go through all my pictures I'll figure it out. Hopefully I'll get the pictures posted soon. Happy New Year!