Stickers, Stickers Everywhere

So lately (and by lately I mean since about April when Tyler was out of town for a conference for two days), Lydia has been a bear about going to bed.  Like we start bedtime with a bath at 7:15 (like always), and sometimes she's still putting up a good fight at 11:00.  She's the queen of stalling.

So a few weeks ago, I made a chart.  The chart says "Before bed each night, Lydia needs to:" and then shows a list of things she needs to do.  I have it written out (because she's working on learning letters), and then I drew a picture illustrating each item on the list.

Below the chart is a calendar with open boxes that Lyd can earn stickers to put on there.  If she earns three stickers (which only get stuck on in the morning... my mama didn't raise 'no fool!), she get's a "surprise" (Note: "surprise" means a reward to anyone not three years old...).  She's three years old, so three is THEE number that makes her little world go 'round.

This chart business has worked wonders on bedtime.  Lydia does only one task at a time (even though she is capable of stringing tasks together... whatev... it works, so I don't interfere and point that fact out) and then runs back and checks her chart.  I hear her saying "Take a bath... check.  Eat 5 cereals... check." So I know she gets the point of the chart.  And DANG IT she wants needs those stickers!

So far she has earned...going to see the movie "Brave" in the park...going to Hardee's for breakfast...going to Pizza Ranch for supper... going to the pumpkin patch.  Let's be real... some of these things we had already scheduled to do....but sssshhhhhhh! Lydia doesn't need to know that!

Girlfriend with her chart.

Life Without Some Organs

When I was pregnant with Lydia, I remember having my first gallbladder attack.  I remember being on the phone with my mom, wondering if those spasms I felt were contractions.  She told me she thought they were up too high to be contractions (and thank goodness, as I was only about 20ish weeks pregnant).  I all of a sudden had the urge to purge (that's all the dets I'll make you read about, Folks, but you get the picture).  After doing so, I felt much better. I have had this same feeling off and on for the last three and a half years.  About a month and a half ago, I had the same problem, but this time it was the worst I've ever had it and it just never really went away.  I went to a surgeon to be checked out and he ordered an ultrasound to be done.  

During the ultrasound, it was found that I had polyps inside my gallbladder.  The surgeon called and talked me about the polyps and said I had two choices:  1.  Leave the gallbladder and monitor it each year with ultrasound or 2.  Take it out and not worry about it.  Apparently the polyps were very unlikely to be cancerous, but he said if they developed (which was a pretty good chance), I may have a hard time dealing with that.  I am a worrier (about life in general, let's be real), so when I asked the doctor what his opinion was, his words were "Why worry about it?  Take it out and be done with it!" He also wanted to do a procedure where he inserted a camera into my stomach to see if there were any polyps/damage in my stomach as well.   

So... very nervously, I had my gallbladder removed on September 19 and the doctor also took my appendix while he was in surgery.  He found that I have some reflux damage that I now am being medicated for too.  

While everything was scoped out, I still have had some serious soreness, but the hardest has been trying to nurse little Henry.  We are working at getting back to working together, but since surgery, we've had some hard times because I can't really hold him how we are both used to.    

A Movie in the Park

Tonight we went to the park that's down the street from our house to watch the movie "Brave."  It's one of Lydia's favorite movies and at one point, Tyler looked at me and said "she's over here reciting the movie." HA! That's my girl! Tyler and I had actually gone to a college football game this afternoon that was 45 minutes away from the town we grew up in (and where we left our kids for the afternoon.  College football is not for the childrens. Ain't nobody got time for that!).  So after the game, we drove the 45 miles back to our hometown and picked the kids up and then traveled 45 more minutes home, just in time for the movie to start.  It was so much fun! Our town's wrestling booster club sold concessions (which included cotton candy... a life staple in my little world!) and there was a blow up screen that the movie played on.  I didn't get any pictures, because I was in charge of baby-rocking during the movie (and keeping him warm... it got CHILLY!).  I hope our town does the movie in the park more! We spent $3 on concessions and watched the movie for free.

Fire

I'll admit it.  I always laughed when they made jokes about Sophia's nursing home burning down on Golden Girls.

Until August 6, 2013.  My Grandma's senior living community burned down.  Like burned down, burned down.  My mom called me a little after 10:00 p.m. and said that there was a fire at my Grandma's apartment and that they were headed out there to check into it.  The next thing I knew, my brother sent me a picture that showed the fire.  It was big.

Long story short:  someone's heating pad in a recliner chair caused a fire that went up into the attic. The fire started across the hall and down one from my Grandma's apartment.  The building was built in a square, with a courtyard in the middle and apartments on the outside of the square and the inside (courtyard side) of the square.  My Grandma's apartment was on the inside, facing the courtyard gazebo, on the south side of the building.

After a long, sleepless night, knowing the fire fighters were doing what they could to fight this, the dust settled and we realized how bad this was.  My Grandma had grabbed her purse before leaving, but literally owned what she was wearing.  Everything is gone.  When my Mom called, I thought someone like burned a cake and they'd be back in the building in an hour or two.  Not so.  This is what things looked like the next morning.

This is looking into the courtyard from her front door. 

Grandma had left her wedding ring on the end table where she always left it when she went outside during the fire.  She was sick about it.  A week and a day later, the fire fighters finally got to go back into her apartment to see if there was anything left.  My Mom gave them a description of where her ring should have been, where all of her furniture was, and a general layout of her apartment.  

After about 15 minutes of digging through 18" of debris, a fire fighter came out of the apartment with this....

The jeweler who is fixing the ring up (because although it looks fine, it was very sooty, and needed some attention to the prongs holding the diamond on) said that the fire was within 200ish degrees of melting that ring to a puddle.  That happens at 1700 degrees (I believe that's the number he said).  Grandma is thrilled to have it back.  

My Mom, Dad, and I all got to go into the apartment about 3 weeks after the fire to try and find things to salvage.  

My Grandma's front door.  It pretty much melted off the frame.

My Mom, Dad, and me looking for anything to save. We are in Grandma's apartment, but had to keep stopping to re-evaluate where the boundaries of her apartment had been. 

We found a lot of broken pieces of things.

This is Grandma's China that had been in a hutch in her bedroom.

Everything is gone.  The cedar chest is gone. The Grandfather's clock is gone. Her wedding dress is gone.  She had down-sized so much to move from her house into this apartment.  The things she still had were the things that meant the most to her were the things she still had.  They were the things she had worked to protect her whole life.  Things she had kept her kids and eventually grandkids from climbing on or throwing balls around.  Things she had kept safe on the trip from Detroit to South Dakota where she settled.  Things that my Grandpa had bought for her or with her.  It's all gone. 

The overwhelmingly relieving part of this is that of the 43 residents in 41 apartments, every single one made it out safely.  Many lost a lot of their stuff; Grandma unfortunately was one who lost everything. 

Our Newest Addition

So, in May I wrote about how we'd be adding to our family in July.  Well..... (3 months later I finally have time to write about it, but whatev. I'm a new mommy again, don't judge!), Henry Andrew decided he wasn't going to wait until July and came into our lives on June 24!

On Friday, June 21, we had a terrible awful makemystomachchurn kind of storm.  The rain fell at our house horizontally, that's how windy it was.  It sounded like a freight train coming at our house.  It was the kind of storm that had me sitting in our basement crying... well, until the rain started pouring into our house through the windows.  Then I got off my 38 week pregnant buttooski and held towels up the windows to help save our new carpet!

Anyhow, after the storm finally quit, our power was out.  And it stayed out for hours.  (Side note: Let's be real --- I learned very quickly how little food we have in our house regularly that can be cooked without power!  So, we ventured out to the side of town with power (apparently there's two companies in our little town making things run!) and got some sandwich makings for supper.)

After we put Lydia to bed that night, Tyler and I sat in our basement and played "The Game of Life" in the dark. We NEVER get to play board games, even though we have a bazillion of them and I love playing them!  Anyhow, as we were sitting and playing, I kept telling Tyler when I would have contractions.  I had been having them every so often for a few days, but nothing regular.  I had been to the doctor a week and a few days before and was dilated to 3 cm and effaced 50%.  When the doctor told me I was that far dilated, I couldn't believe it and I didn't know what to do with that information.  When Lydia was born, I was never dilated on my own at all and had to be induced 5 days after my due date. Tyler finally said to me "I think we need to start keeping track of these contractions.  That's the 3rd contraction you've told me about in half an hour."  At about 10:30, I called the hospital to talk to an OB nurse to decide what to do and she said to wait a while longer, but to definitely be keeping track.  However.... we live 45 miles away from the hospital we deliver at.  We decided to set a time that we would make a decision to 'stay or go' by (By the way: the "should we stay or should we go" decision was one that gave me much grief in the days/weeks leading up to Henry's birth, as we never had to make those decisions with Lydia).  When that time, which was midnight came, we decided to pack our stuff up and head to the hospital town to have things checked out.  So we packed up our stuff.  In the dark.  And let me tell you, when it's dark, it's dark.  And it's really hard to pack stuff (even though my hospital bag was packed) when it's dark.

So about 1:15, we pulled out of our garage to head to the hospital.  Tyler looked over at the lights on in our neighbor's house and said "What the heck?! They have power?! They don't have a generator!" When Tyler got out of the van to go pull the string to put the garage door down (because that's another thing that doesn't work without electricity... we could write a book about it!), he tripped the fancy schmancy laser beam thingy that makes the door not shut on little children or dogs, and it turned the overhead light of our garage door on.  Yep. The power came on.  RIGHT as we pulled out of our garage. AFTER we had packed in the dark.  Whatev.

We continued on our way to the hospital.  It was a pretty quiet ride.  The storm had been very stressful and we were both tired, but excited!

After we dropped Lydia off with Tyler's parents, we went to the hospital and they hooked up the monitor to record my progress and contractions and all that jazz.  Of COURSE the second I laid down, the contractions slowed down (and felt to me like they stopped, but the machine was registering some.. thank goodness... or I'd feel like a total ninny who thoughtshewasinlaborbutwasn't!).  But... I wasn't in labor labor, just the pretend kind that freaks a prego out and causes her to make her husband pack in the dark.....

So we got sent home at about 3:00 a.m.  But heck if I was going to drive the 45 miles home in the middle of the night.  And I certainly didn't want to get home and then have to turn right back around (because of course, I knew the second I got out of the car at home, my water would break.... Murphy's Law anyone??).  So I vowed right then and there that I wasn't leaving hospital town until I had a baby to take with me.

Saturday, June 22, I hung out. I walked around Target. I walked around Walmart. I visited all the people I had to visit in hospital town (which is the town Tyler and I grew up in, so we have peeps, of course!). I walked 17.2 miles with my bestie (okay, okay... it really was only like 4 blocks... but it FELT like a marathon walk!).  By Sunday, I was bored.  I told Tyler that I couldn't walk around Target one more time -- I know, right?! GirlwhocouldLIVEattarget can't stand one.more.time. going there. (It was a moment I'm not proud of, nor will I ever admit again).  So we decided to go home, but my mom asked us to stay for supper.
I packed our stuff up to get ready to go home.  I dropped Lydie off at my parents' house before supper so that Tyler and I could run to Walmart quick before we ate.  After we went to Walmart, we decided to drive around the golf course to see the tree damage from the storm.  In the course of driving around the course (there's the English language at its finest confusion!), I had contractions start up again.  They went from being 8ish minutes apart to about 3 minutes apart (p.s. -- anyone pregnant out there? There's an app for that.  What a genius, yet useless app!  We used an app called "Contraction Keeper" that was a huge help in tracking contractions... what the heck did people do to track before technology?!) On our drive to my mom and dad's I asked Tyler to drop me off and go get our suitcase from his mom and dad's house to take me back to the hospital.

After we ate supper, we went back up to the OB floor (yes, I quickly became that mom that goes to the hospital with false labor 72.9 times before actually delivering).  This time, they kept me 4 hours, until 10:00 Sunday night before sending me home.  My doctor wasn't on call that weekend, but her partner was the on-call doctor.  She came in to check another one of her patients and stopped in to see me.  We decided that I wasn't active enough in my labor to stay, but that I should go to the clinic Monday morning to see my regular doc (who would be back in commission as of 7:00 a.m. Monday morning) and decide what to do.  She couldn't break my water (on purpose), because I was only 38 weeks, 6 days.  Those things can't be done until 39 weeks.

Monday, June 24, 2013, I went to the doctor's office at 8:30.  I told Tyler while we were walking in that today had to be the day.  I couldn't take the false labor game anymore.  If my doctor told me today wasn't the day, I was probably going to cry (hormones, what?!).  When I got into my appointment, she said I had options to strip membranes (nothankyou), just wait (doublenothankyou), or be induced (thankyouverymuch!).  She called over to the hospital, which is attached to the clinic I go to and they didn't have anyone there delivering, so I got to go over and be induced.

We grabbed our bags out of the car, walked over to the hospital, and called Lydie.  When I told her "Brother's going to be born today," she was SO excited!  Anyhow, we went up to the OB floor, got checked in, and got started on the induction process.  I was giving the first part of the induction at 10:15ish.  At 12:09 (which is funny, because that's the time Lydia was born!), my doctor broke my water.  At 5:30 I started pushing.  At 5:43, we had a baby!  

Henry Andrew (my grandma's maiden name was Andrews) weighed 6 pounds, 15 ounces and was 20.5 inches long.

We love you, Henry! 

Cha-cha-cha-changing...

So..... since the last time I blogged, we've had a lot of changes in our house.

* We are having a baby boy due July 1.
* I accepted a new position with our church.  I am the Director of Youth Ministries as of tomorrow.
* I have been working part-time at my new job since November.
* I resigned my position and all my duties at the school.
* We have switched daycares.
* We bought a "Mom Van."
* We have researched and researched and researched different health insurances, life insurances, annuities, dental insurances... if it needs to be changed due a job changed, we've changed it.

If you know me at all, I do not tend to handle life changes very well.... and to have all of these at once is getting me a little overwhelmed!

What's Happening, Hot Stuff?

In the past two months, I have...

1.  Finished Couch to 5K.  Towards the end of July I finished the program and have continued running.

2.  Added 1.25 miles (13 minutes) to the top of my 5K program.  That means I now run for 43 minutes at a time, without stopping.  I used to not be able to run 60 seconds.  I am planning on running my first road race in October.  My original plan was to run just the 5K, but now that I'm only about 1.5 miles away from a 10K (6.2 miles), I think I'm going to aim for that.

3. Gone on a family vacation with my husby, daughter, and inlaws.  We went to my husband's mom's hometown in Northern Minnesota and it was fab.  It had been since about a month after L was born that we went anywhere on vaca (and that's where we went then too!), so it had been over two years.  It was time, we had a good time, and we can't wait until next time.  How's that for time!?

4. Started my 6th year of teaching school.  The year has gone well so far, and we made it through homecoming week last week.

5. Attended T's 10 year class reunion (just yesterday).  It was a good time seeing people we hadn't seen in a long time.  I graduated from the same school, just a year behind T.