Prayer

Eli said his very first prayer at dinner today.

"Heavy Fader.... have a good day .... play with friends .... Amen."

I love that boy!

Toad

We're all feeling a bit better around here, and spent some time enjoying our backyard this week. I even found a sandbox for FREE that someone was throwing away - one of those cute turtle shaped ones with a lid. We had a bag of sand sitting around that the homeowners left, so the whole awesome sand set up was FREE. Did I mention FREE??? I LOVE free! Lol. Also free this week - an adjustable height basketball hoop by Little Tikes. People throw the craziest things away around here - Fridays are trash days and yardsale days around here, so if you go driving around to the sales you'll inevitably find free stuff along the way....

But this post is about the TOAD. We have a little visitor in our backyard. He's dug a little hole right by our garden box and is hiding out down there. It's been 3 days and he's still there! I was playing soccer with Eli and just caught a little movement out of the corner in my eye. At first I was scared to look in there - what with giant wolf spiders around here and all - but it's just a little toad. He doesn't scare me... though I won't be reaching in there to dig him out anytime soon =). Eli's had a blast going out to check on him everyday. We could have used his presence a few weeks ago to help out with thos darn squash bugs in the garden! Oh well.

Hand, Foot, Mouth

Yep, I'm talking about the DISEASE! What, never heard of it? Consider yourself LUCKY! HFM disease is really just a virus - causes a fever and congestion and a lovely rash on the hands and feet and sores in the mouth.... and apparently also in the diaper area. Seriously, it should be "hand, foot, mouth, bum disease," but I guess that sounds too yucky, even for a disease lol =). That's what we're in the process of recovering from over here. We think Eli picked it up from nursery (of course) only he never really seemed sick. I noticed the rash in his diaper area, but took it for heat rash - afterall it's pretty steamy out here! A few days later I noticed some bumps on his feet and knees and thought he'd gotten chiggers. Then I noticed one or two on his fingers, then a giant sore on the tip of his tongue. We still don't have a doctor, so Brad checked him out and said, "It's a virus!" I was like, what? Oh no, we'd been at a playgroup all day (I hate when people knowingly spread disease - I didn't realize he was sick but still felt bad - hopefully no one else gets it)! He never got a fever or anything, but that night woke up screaming in pain 3x because his tongue/mouth hurt. Brad went to the store at 3am to get anbesol... that same night Owen got a fever, and that's where the drama really begins. The next day was Friday so I just accepted that the boys were both sick and we laid around and watched a lot of TV. Owen suffered the most from this nastiness - he had a fever for 4 days straight. Sunday was the scariest - the mouth sores appeared and his fever wouldn't respond to tylenol anymore. He refused to nurse and we were getting ready to take him to the hospital! But, I was able to pump some milk and get him to take it from a dropper... and we switched to baby Motrin which helped with the fever and pain. That night his fever got to nearly 103 so I was up rocking him and giving more motrin at 2am. So scary and awful to have a sick baby! And strangely enough he only ever got a few spots on his feet - his diaper/thigh area was another story though. Brad stayed home Monday because we were thinking again that we might have to take Owen in if his fever persisted, and I was starting to feel pretty sick myself - not to mention exhausted from several sleepless nights in a row (but he took some flack the next day at work - grrr!).

Thankfully both boys are doing better. Unfortunately when you have been the caregiver for two sick kids, you tend to get it! I only ended up with two little bumps on my toe, but I feel like I've been hit by a bus! It's just congestion/sinus pain/runny nose but I must say it's the worst of it's kind that I've had in a long time! So, we're still laying around in our PJ's watching a lot of TV, lol. I'm going to have to put Eli though TV Detox when all is said and done - thankfully we have two PBS channels here.

A New Leaf

The family who owns the home we are renting planted a garden for us before they left - how's that for the pioneer spirit?! I've never gardened before (other than herbs) so having one will be a learning experience for me. I have been really excited about it - up until I had a few run-ins with some NASTY bugs out there. For some reason I hadn't realized that gardening=BUGS, so I guess I'll have to get over that if I'm actually going to enjoy this as a hobby =). I think if we ever actually get it weeded, that might cut down on the bugginess - right now it's a bit of a weed forest as we've been busy with other things!

We were able to get a couple of zuchinni before the bugs ate it (there's a nasty type out here that eats the stalk from the inside out), are still getting tomatoes and cucumbers, and are awaiting one little cantaloupe. Feel free to pass along any general gardening tips, FAVORITE things to grow (I hope to expand it next year), etc! Oh, and anything fabulous to do with BASIL! I love the way it smells by my front door, but I'm sure it can be put to much better use... so far I've used it here and there in my cooking, but it's getting HUGE!

A Sampling:

Cucumber, Tomato, Basil Salad - YUM!

Stephen's Lake Park

We visited a local park last Saturday... the weather was in the 70's and GORGEOUS! A nice break from the humidity. There's a little splash park (which my kids are too little for) and a lake with a beach. The sand was really gritty and the lake is manmade, which gives me the heebie jeebies (kind of a germaphobe) but the kids had fun. Eli enjoyed digging, and Owen loved the water! Good thing we got out when we did because this weekend we're trapped at home with sick kids.

Bear Creek Trail

We've mostly been busy unpacking, cleaning, and getting all the odds and ends of a move taken care of since we got here. We haven't had too much time to get out and see the area yet, but we did manage to make it to the Bear Creek Trail Park one evening last week. You can actually access the trail just down the street from our house - it's a nifty walking/biking trail that runs for a couple of miles on our side of town (there's a longer one downtown) and it winds up at a park about a 5 minute drive from our house. The park reminds me of the wildlife sanctuary that we visted near our home in MA. It was a fun little place to walk around - lots of winding trails and pathways through this marshy/pondy area - a pleasant little surprise in the middle of suburbia. Of COURSE we brought the bugspray along, as well as a couple of those new cherry limeaide chillers from Sonic (YUMMY by the way). Eli had fun throwing rocks off a bridge into the river - it was hysteria when we had to finally peel him away and head back to the car. We'll have to make a few more trips out there this summer - we really hope to get a bike for me and a trailer for the kids so we can go on family bikerides!

Tubes

Well it's about time I blogged about this. Back in June (a week before the big move) we went through with having tubes put in both of Eli's ears. Whenever I say that, people assume he's had a lot of ear infections, which actually is not the case. He'd had 2 in a year - very normal. The issue with his ears was the fact that he had chronic fluid behind his eardrums (which can go hand in hand with infections) which was affecting his hearing. He was testing at a mild to moderate loss, which is concerning at his age and stage of language development. We tried a lot of different approaches, including chiropractic, but with it being there for 8+ months we decided that tubes would be appropriate. What we held off on was getting his adenoids removed (x-ray shows they are enlarged, and they can contribute to fluid getting stuck in the ears) because it's a more invasive surgery and there was just no time for him to recover before us packing and moving.

One reason I held off so long on the tubes is that Eli was pretty much sick with something from October on through May - I was hoping that once he finally got "well" that his ears would drain. As a mom I was concerned about how often/long he was sick and kept looking for answers. At one point I wondered if he might have hidden food allergies (his dad had them) and our Dr. ordered a blood test - no allergies, but it was discovered that he's got some sort of immune deficiency! Apparently kids can just "inherit" this and they hopefully outgrow it. In the meantime, it means he's much more susceptible to infection (ie. a simple cold can become sinus infections or pneumonia more easily than other kids) so I'm just grateful he didn't wind up with something more serious last winter. AND it makes me more PARANOID about this upcoming winter! Maybe I should start nursing him again, lol =). In the meantime I'm trying to boost his immunity with fish oil and acidophilus supplements.

As for the actual procedure, Eli had to be at the hospital at 6am and wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything. Brad got up and took him so I could stay with Owen and head over later. Plus, only one parent could be with him while he went under and I was afraid it would be traumatizing for me to watch. Apparently he did really well - they let him play with the mask and he thought it was fun until they made him lay on the bed (I really don't know why they wouldn't just let Brad hold him as he fell asleep). The procedure was really quick, and Eli was already awake by the time I got to the hospital... and I could hear him WAILING from down the hall. Apparently when he first woke up he was all cuddly, then it was like he remembered being forced to lay down or something and he freaked out, got all upset and was screaming at nurses and Brad and wouldn't calm down. They were wheeling Brad in a chair while holding Eli to transport him to the children's floor when I caught up to them. Even seeing me didn't help calm him down. It was actually kind of heart wrenching for me to see him in his hospital PJ's, clutching his stuffed Orca Whale and sobbing. But good news - as soon as we went through the door to the children's floor, there was a giant fish tank! Eli stopped in mid-sob and said "OH, FISHIES!" So we sat there and watched the fish for like 20 minutes. We finally convinced him to come to the room with us where we got muffins and yogurt to eat. Eli wanted to play in the "kid cage" or the hospital crib. He thought it was fun to be locked in there - but I admit it gave me the creeps because I remember seeing pictures of my sister laying in one of those when she nearly died from meningitis as a baby.

After they were sure he was recovered from the anesthesia, we finally got to go home. He was cantankerous off and on the rest of the day, but found excitement in the fact that our driveway got put in that day so he could watch a digger, dump truck, and road roller from the front window all day long! By the next day you'd never know anything happened to him! We followed up with his ENT the next week, and they said the tubes looked great, and his hearing tested NORMAL. He was starting to be a great talker anyway, so I didn't notice too much change right away, other than the fact he FINALLY caught on to whispering when I'm trying to put Owen to sleep. I honestly think he just couldn't hear me before when I was trying to teach him. Most of the words that he was pronouncing strangely have started to clear up already, so that's a good thing.

All went well until we'd been here a week (so 3 weeks after surgery). It was July 5th and Eli woke up with a pretty good fever - he was an oven to the touch. He wouldn't even let Brad look in his ears, so we figured they were hurting. It STINKS to have a sick kid no matter what, but especially when you don't have a trusted doctor set up, AND you have doctor-phobia and don't like new ones. Blah. We had to go to urgent care, and sure enough the tube in one ear was infected. He'd had a cold so it was probably a complication from that, but we at least got some antibiotics. Later the Elder's Quorum President (who happens to be a resident in the same specialty as Brad and lives down the street) came to help give him a blessing. It was a rough couple of days for him, but he's doing fine now. We still have to set up a doctor though.

Here are some pics from the hospital ordeal.



Eli's nifty neoprene headband for keeping the splashes out of his ears in the tub. He's supposed to wear ear plugs as well if he's going to be submerged (which he doesn't like anyway).

Giant Spiders

Ok, the promised spider story... a few days after we got here, I decided to do some laundry. The laundry room is downstairs in a semi-finished basement. I was switching the wet laundry from the washer into the dryer when a GIANT HAIRY spider came running, and I mean RUNNING out from behind the washing machine straight at me. It JUMPED from the wall and into the washing machine with it's legs all splayed out as wide as they could go (about the size of my palm) - terrifying because I was bent over the machine with my arm in it at the time and it flew right past my face! I ran upstairs screaming bloody murder (luckily didn't wake the kids) and Brad was laughing because he thought I'd seen a mouse (the owners warned us they'd had a little mouse problem, but thought they were all gone). No way! This was WORSE than a little ol' mouse! I made Brad come downstairs to get the rest of the laundry out - that spider was in there somewhere! He put on his heavy work gloves to do it too. After he'd pulled all the laundry out and put it in the dryer, he still hadn't found the spider. I was worried that it was buried in the clothes, and that it's hairy dead body was going to fall out of the dryer on me if I ran it.... we went ahead and started the water in the washing machine just to make sure the spider was out, and sure enough it had been hiding under the agitator and came running back out. Brad then caught it in a bowl and left it in there to drown.

After some searching on the internet though, I realized that this was not a poisonous spider as I'd feared. It was just a Wolf Spider - terrifying but basically harmless. I also read that they get aggressive when they have an eggsac or young to protect. My dad said it was TRYING to scare ME away. So part of me is terrified that there are more little Wolfies waiting to fly at me during laundry time, and part of me feels HORRIBLE that I murdered a mother protecting her young. We should have just let it go outside - but at the time I thought for sure it was a brown recluse and was going to kill us all....

The Move

Admit it, you all desperately missed these picture laden posts! Haha. Anyway, here are the highlights from the move. I packed 95% of our stuff by myself - thankfully a lot of it was still in storage in the basement, and we had saved all the taped and labeled boxes for everything else. Also, the two most AMAZING babysitters in the whole world (two adorable young women from my ward) spent 3 afternoons straight at my house playing with my kids so I could pack. They brought toys with them, did art projects and playdough, and even built a snail cage outside. Eli cried everytime they had to go home. So THANKS Julia and Hannah - I wish I could have brought you with me!
Here's a little excitment we had with Owen in the midst of packing. He likes to poo when he's in his Bumbo - they should make Bumbo potty seats!

We picked up the moving truck the night before we intended to load. After we got the truck home, we let Eli sit in the truck with Dad while he backed it up just a few feet to the back door. Remember of course that our duplex was on this hill with no driveway (well actually it got paved a couple days before we left!) and when Brad hit a little bump, Eli went flying off the seat and into the dashboard. A crazy mistake for a family of carseat fanatics - here's the nice shiner and scratched lip. Let this be a lesson....
The next evening a group of wonderful people from Church came to help load the truck. I wish I'd gotten a picture of the Relief Society President with my kids - Owen really loves to cuddle her, and she brought Eli a plug-in fish tank which he LOVES. The perfect pets - no feeding and no cleaning! Anyway, the whole truck was loaded in less than two hours - I think we had around 12 people loading. The only hitch? My piano fell off the dolly inside the truck and NEARLY crushed the Elder's Quorum President... my heart skipped a few beats. He was able to jump out of the way thankfully, but it's pretty scratched up and about 15 or more keys don't work. I haven't decided if it's worth paying to fix it - Brad is ready to be rid of it, but I'm emotionally attached (even though I don't really play). You can't see it in this picture, but there's a giant digger behind our truck there. It was entertaining for Eli, but a bit of a nuissance to us that the owners decided to start digging the basement for a new duplex the day we loaded our truck... lots of equipment had been coming and going our past week as they finally paved the driveway as well (though it still doesn't go up to the house or even the walking path *headscratch*).

The road trip took us two LONG days to complete. THANKFULLY Brad's dad came to help drive. He drove the truck and towed one car so Brad and I could ride together with the kids. I get carsick, so I did most of the driving so Brad could turn around and tend to snacks, binkies, etc. This is who we ran into at a truck stop in New York:
Another stop in the Midwest somewhere (PA?) had a flock of crazy Seagulls. They were attacking people for food and would catch french fries in mid-air. Needless to say, it was nearly impossible to get Eli back in the car after this kind of show.
On day two of the drive, we stopped in Columbus, OH to say hello to some long-time friends. Brad has known Shyler since they were kids, and our families were in Surprise together at the same time for med school. Owen is one month YOUNGER than this cute little guy! It was great to catch up with them, and have the kids burn off some steam so they could take a good long nap in the car.
Since we stayed in motels for two nights of the road trip, we had to get creative with the sleeping situation. After our last vacay with the Bensons, we figured out that 4 of us in one qeen bed was not a good idea. So this time around Eli slept with "Ga-pa" in one bed while Owen slept in his usual spot with Brad and I. The funny thing is that Eli thought he was cuddling Brad at first... when he fully woke up and realized it wasn't daddy, he freaked out. It was just the surprise of it though... by the next night he was asking to sleep with grandpa - who has the magic touch for putting kids to sleep by the way! (First two pics are of Eli, third is of Owen - he and grandpa took a couple naps in the recliner together in Missouri.)


The day we moved in was hotter than I don't know where! It was HUMID and STEAMY! We wondered what planet we had crashed on! We felt so sorry for the people helping us move in - some really great guys from our new ward showed up to help out. We are renting a home from a really nice family who did their residency out here, and have now moved to Boston for a fellowship. It just so happens that they are LDS as well... we found each other in a round about way but it worked out well. Now we just need to find a good family for OUR house in AZ! (hint hint!). Anyway, the weather hasn't been nearly as bad as that first day, and we are still working on getting settled in. I think it takes 100x as long to do things with kids as it does without. Thank goodness we had Grandpa B. for an extra day - we got more unpacking done in the two days he was here than we have in the rest of the 3 weeks since! He is magical with the boys... he must have raised a few or something =).

Stay tuned for the story about the giant spider, and Eli's tube drama.

Moving and Michael Jackson

I couldn't take being without internet anymore, so I'm on a brief escape ALONE to the local library.... I wanted to at least make it known that we arrived here in Missouri safely. It was a SWELTERING day to unload the truck, but since then, the weather has been nice. We're still unpacking and cleaning and organizing, getting used to bugs (and giant hairy spiders that attack you in the laundry room - more to come on that), and just trying to get settled. We've been here two Sundays and haven't even made it to church - the first week because the kids were exhausted, and this past one because we had to take Eli to urgent care for a high fever (his ear tubes got infected!!! grrr!). So it's been a little crazy. I have lots of pics I'm of course dieing to post, but will have to wait til we've got things hooked up at home.

And as for Michael Jackson, it was on our drive out here that we heard of his passing on the radio. Is anyone else saddened by this? Of course I watched the funeral today and actually found myself tearing up a few times. I guess it's because I can relate to families who are grieving a sudden loss, and I can't help but feel for them - especially his kids. I didn't realize I had been such a big MJ fan until I found that I could sing along with just about any of the popular songs they played of his on the radio this past week. My mom had a bunch of his cd's, and she and my sister and I used to rock out to them! Some of my fav's are Man in the Mirror, Heal the World, Bad, and Dangerous. So what about you??? What are your MJ favorites? Come on, I KNOW you all must have at least one....