Major Catching Up and the Holidays!!

Oh wow I am so behind on here.. I'm afraid this is going to be a super long post to get all the catching up I need to do.. I have been such a slacker lately..

Well I have to apologize. I put all the pictures on here in the wrong order so we are going to have to work backwards in time..

My parents were able to come out here to spend the Christmas and New Year holiday with us.. It was so great having them here. And so much help. I only felt bad that the last week they were here I was down alot and we were not able to go and do some of the things I had wanted to do.. More about that to come..

So anyways here is my mom Christmas day.. My dad and Steve and I have been planning a trip to Hawaii for the whole year to give to my mom for Christmas.. It was so hard to keep it a secret all year. she would continually say she never goes anywhere and we should just book a trip and go.. It would be so hard to say just wait and kinda have to hee hom around and make excuses of why we couldn't go.. LOL so we didn't have all the trip finalized yet so we ended up getting her a magazine brochure on Hawaii to give to her. At first she didn't get it she was like why am I getting a magazine on Hawaii...
And then with a little hinting it finally sunk in.. She was so totally surprised.. It was great.. Sorry mom I had to post the pictures.. She threatened me not to post them but I just had to..
Steve was keeping busy trying to get everything caught on tape..
Me and my dad and Steve were planning on going Ice Fishing while they were here and since Santa knows everything I ended up with an ice fishing pole and some bait..
even Lucky got some nice treats in his sock from Santa!!
oh crap I dont know what I pushed to make it underline everything and I have no idea how to get it off.. Anyways I wasn't real great on getting very many good picts since I was dishing out the presents but here is the best one of the kids with some of their loot.

Grandpa always has to start his mornings off with a cup of hot chocolate!!

Allie is so into Twilight and New Moon so she got a ton of twilight stuff.

This was a picture of our Christmas tree just after we got it decorated up. I bought all new ornaments for it this year since I hadn't bought any for several years. I really like how it turned out. We actually got 2 tree's this year.. Our big artificial one below wouldnt really fit upstairs in our great room so we put it down stairs and decided to start a new family tradition. We went to a nearby tree farm and took a trailer ride out to the orchards of pine trees and got to choose the perfect one and cut it down ourselves. Then they take you back to the lodge for hot choc and can go meet santa. Our family had a blast and thought it would be great to do every year. So we ended up getting a little bit smaller one to put upstairs. And the best part was I let the kids decorate this one with all the ornaments they have collected over the years and they thought that was pretty special, not to mention the fresh smell of pine was an added bonus!! Of course I am horrible with bringing my camera to such funtions that I didnt get any picts nor did I even get one of the final product of the real tree. I know I am a loser!! Owell at least I got some of the atificial one..

Ok so that was our Christmas and now to our Thanksgiving.. We were kind of bummed because we were not going anywhere and nobody was coming here for Thanksgiving so we were not as excited for turkey day It ended up being a blessing in disguise when you find out what happened..... Our month of November was pretty Crazy.. Austins Birthday was on the 9th and we had a little party for him at a basketball/arcade place.. It was pretty fun for him and of course his dumb mother forgot her camera so we didn't get any pictures of it.. At least we did get some pictures of his little family celebration.

Then Steve's birthday was on the 14th. Which wasn't so fun for him.. He finally came down with the swine or at least a very bad flu so the day of his birthday he still wasn't feeling so hot..

Then to top the rest of the month off.. For the week of thanksgiving the kids brought some guest with them...Yep you guessed it LICE!!! Oh gross me out... It was so horrible.. What really pisses me off was 2 weeks prior Jessie had started itching her head alot and Steve looked at it and said he saw a bug in her hair.. I said oh maybe its just from playing outside on the playground but we did take her to a dermatologist anyways and he took one quick look at the top of her head and said oh its just dry scalp start using a dandruff shampoo so we were relieved and of course figured he knew what he was talking about and had her start washing her hair with denorex.. Then 2 weeks later on Thanksgiving break She is still itching alot and Logan is just scratching her head to the point its bleeding. Steve got after them and said quit itching your head. We took them in the bathroom to look and their heads were just covered in them.. I about puked.. I went into a frantic panic.. I called their pediatrician and got an appt for the next morning and confirmed it was indeed lice. Then started our horrible week of vacation.. We had to bag up all their toys, stuffed animals, bedding, sleeping bags that they had slept in in the last couple week just everything... We probably had 12-15 huge yard garbage bags of miscellaneous stuff, because not only did we find it in the girls but we also found it in the other 2 kids and also found 1 or 2 nits on me so we practically bagged our whole house.. Then we started the whole laundry fiasco.. We probably did 40-50 loads of laundry that week. Our Washer and Dryer was constantly going the whole week. We thought they would probably burn out on us.. Every day we had to was their bedding and clothes and pajamas.. And everyday we vacuumed the whole house and sprayed everything down. We had to vacuum all the cars.. It was such a nightmare. So on top of all this cleaning we had to do daily picking through their hair to remove all the nits which are tiny tiny tiny little eggs left by the lice..

Never having this before we didn't know to what extreme measures we had to take and we heard all the horror story's of how the lice shampoos didn't work and many people experience a second outbreak then you have to start all over so we were freaked.. So we would start in the morning after breakfast. Steve would take 1 kid and I would take the second kid and we would go through their hair little sections hair at a time to pick out and remove these nits that are like glued to a strand of hair and are extremely difficult to see so you really have to have alot of light and look at every strand of hair.. The first night there was so many in the 2 youngest girls and of course they have the most hair and with Jessies major thick hair it took us all night.. 4 hours of picking through it and pulling the nits off with your finger nails.. I just cried because it was so overwhelming with how much they had. Poor logan would fall asleep while we picked through her hair. It was midnight by the time we finished going through their hair that first night..

Starting on the second day we would go their hair twice so we would do 1 3hr session after breakfast, break for lunch, then switch kids and start all over again.. we found that if I did say Jessies hair the first time then steve did it the second time it gave us better chances of getting more nits because we would both have our own way of parting through their hair so we would always find more nits that the other one missed. So take in mind we had to do (2) 3 hr checks on them and dont forget the other 2 kids everyday.. So this is 6 hrs a day per child and we have 4.. Austin was much easier being that he was a boy. We just shaved his head the first night to a buzz cut which made going through his hair alot faster...

So by the time we would finish up with the kids hair checks and all the cleaning and laundering everyday it would usually be close to 11 or 12 midnight then of course once we got them into bed steve and I would have to check each others hair.. which mine of course which is long and thick took a couple hours too.. We didn't do quite as thorough checks on us as we did with the kids because steve never did have any nits and I only had like 1 or 2 so we tried to do just the bare minimum with us.. Still by the time we would finally crawl in bed it was like 1 or 2 in the morning.. Then we would start all over again every day for a whole week.. It was so exhausting..


This picture was when steve told logan to put her nose on the lamp so she would hold still cuz it was so hard to get her to sit still for 3 hrs at a time then have to do it again later in the day.. The kids were truly amazing sitting there pretty much the whole day.. We brought a little portable tv with a dvd player in with us and that helped us out immensely with getting the kids to hold still..

We were barely lucky to even get a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day.. we were just going to put it off to the following day because we were just so consumed with all this but I managed to get the turkey in the oven on our lunch break and we finally were able to sit down for our turkey feast late that night.. It was pretty sad but you do what you gotta do I guess..

Later after the whole ordeal we found out that we didn't quite have to go to the extent we did with all the cleaning.. But at least we were very thorough and our house was the cleanest house in the neighborhood for that week and we didn't get any re infestations so that made it worth it I guess.. It was kind of funny because you have to leave all your bagged stuff bagged for like 3 weeks so just when my parents arrived for Christmas we were able to unbag all our stuff and it was like having an early Christmas.. The kids were so excited to see all their toys they hadn't been able to play with and had pretty much forgotten about.. They were so excited!!!

Now to the present.. Well as you my followers know I had fractured my hip the end of August and then found out I had 2 herniated discs in my back that was pinching my sciatic nerve. It has been a very hard time for me physically for the past 4 months.. My hip finally healed and started feeling better in November however my back has continued to get worse. I started doing spinal injections the first week of December and had 1 done about every 2 weeks along with Physical Therapy to try and help alleviate the pain but to no avail they did not work.. after my 2nd and 3rd injections I started taking a turn for the worse and was starting to have more pain. On new years eve day I had my last injection which was thursday and by Sat I was in the hospital.. I had gotten up that morning and could feel that it was going to be a bad day with it. I went to bend over slightly to lift the toilet lid and it pinched my nerve so bad I was in alot of pain.. So I hobbled to the kitchen to load up on my 20 mg of Lortab which if any of you are familiar with pain medication that is one hefty dose of pain med.. More then what they usually give you after most surgerys.. But this was what the Dr.s told me to take. I had been taking this high of dose for probably a week. Then I hobbled to the shower thinking maybe the hot water would relax things up a bit.. Wrongo!! I couldnt even bend or lift my legs to even soap off.. I was in so much pain I just cried the whole shower.. When I got out I bent slightly to just pull some toilet paper of the roll to wipe my tears and that movement dang near killed me. Once again it squeezed the nerve so tight it was just excruciating.. I cried out to my mom or Steve to help me get dressed because I couldnt even move. They got me all dressed and shipped me off to the hospital ER which was another horrible joke in itself.. The Dr. forgot about me. Several times!! And get this to top it off he told me my results of my urine test then came back and blutly told me he had lied to me that he didnt know where my urine was put and that they would go try and find it..

This was pretty much how the whole day went.. They ended up giving me 2 shots of pain medication through my arm muscle then had to start an IV to give me another injection of pain meds before I was released.. So on top of all that I had already taken at home I was higher then a kite. They had called my Neurosurgeon from the hospital and he never bothered to call or come in.. we had previously sched an appt with another Neurosurgeon for a second opinion earlier in the week but couldnt get in with him until next week.. We didnt even think to have him paged because he had never seen me before so we didnt think about it, But come to find out he was actually the Dr. on call that day and he said if he would have been paged like he actually was supposed to have been because he was the on call Dr. for that day but the ER didnt do it he said he would have operated on me then.. DANG!! So long story short I was able to get in with him on Tuesday and have scheduled to have surgery on the 13th next weds.. So now if I can only stay down and get through the week. The thing that sucked was those last few days while my parnets were here I was down so we couldnt go do anything but it was such a blessing to have them there while all this was going on... And actually my mom bless her heart will be coming back out the last week of January to help with my recovery so that is another blessing.. I have such wonderful parents... My dad is actually having surgery the same day I am.. He is having his knee replaced so that is why this has all been so hard because she needs to be home to help take care of my dad. So hopefully he will have recovered enough by the time my mom comes out to help out here.. What a crazy couple of months hu?????

At last this is why I have not been on here so much hence all the catch up.. And who knows when I will get back on here again at least for a while until after my recovery.. Sorry for this being so long and detailed.. I will try better to get on here more often.
I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and is having a wonderful start to the brand new year.. Here is to a better new year!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Halloween Week Catch Ups

Ok so here is a little catch up for the past couple weeks.. The week before Halloween we or at least the kids got swine flu all but Austin.. Allie was the first to start with fevers of 105 and nasty cold symptoms then it spread to Jessie and Logan and finally me, but by the time it got to me I think I just got the cold symptoms of it.. I never got a fever or the body aches and pains just the good old cough and congestion and runny nose.. It was a very long week.. each of the 3 girls missed a week of school.

Logans idea of not having to blow her nose so much during her rough week of flu.. Alas we all got over it just in time for Halloween. Remember you can click on pictures to get bigger view.

Here my little pioneer girls are wanting to help me make some homemade bread. They had a field day helping knead the bread..

A little oddly shaped but they came out tasting so good.. I was very happy with the taste and texture.

Here is logan almost everyday about 2 hrs after she gets home from school.. school days are long days for her still..

Family Home Evening Pumpkin Carving Time!!

The Master Carver!! The kids and I clean the pumpkins out and Steve does most of the carving.. Austin actually did most of his pumpkins carving this year.. Dad is always so miticulouse.. It's usually a several hour job.. I forgot to take picts of the finished work but they were awesome...

The week of Halloween was dress up days for the kids at school. So by Weds finally everybody was well enough to go back to school and it was Wacky Weds. So we did the kids hair all up crazy and had the girls wear their clothes backwards and inside out, and Austin wore a dress but ended up taking it off shortly after he got there because to many kids made fun of him.. I swear kids are so mean these days.. All week he was made fun of for something.. I felt so bad he came home and said they did this kind of stuff all the time in Utah and everybody did it and out here all they do is tease you and make fun of you.. I felt so bad.. He was so looking forward to these days of dressing up and now it's totally ruined for him..

The kids had a Halloween parade at school so I was able to get a shot of each of them with their class.. Here is my little vampire girl.

Our little Pioneer girl or Laura Ingles as she would say.

And our Ozzy Ozbourne.

Getting ready to go trick or treating.. Out here there is a law that all kids have to be in by 8:00 PM so we had to get an early start.. Plus it was really windy and cold thus the gloves so the kids tuckered out pretty quick.. I kind of like the idea of a curfew for halloween night.. I think its alot safer for the kids.... It was really strange though because like in Utah I would buy like 6-7 bags of candy and be out withinn 2-3 hrs and have to end up shutting my lights off and turning kids away.. Since this was our first Halloween in MI I wasnt sure what to expect.. I bought like 6 bags and ended up only having like 7-8 trick or treaters and that was it so i have all this left over candy ontop of what the kids got.. And man oh man did they score out here.. Our neighborhood has alot of nice big homes in it and everyone was giving out like full sized candy bars and kittles and starbursts and bads of chips it was crazy... The kids made a hauling..

I didnt get to make a big halloween dinner like I was wanting too but I did get a recipe for this worm jello I just had to try and it turned out to be a pretty good success almost to much because my kids wouldnt eat it because it looked to real I guess.. I was a little dissapointed with the purplish color. Next time i think I will do red jello instead I think it would have made it more real looking. But I think they turned out pretty good if I do say so myself..

For an update on my hip injurys go here to see my other blog.