Pictures from this Week

I took these pictures on Friday. I had to get a shot of Camden’s haircut before I fixed it.

Here is Eli when he fell asleep on the bathroom floor after being sick that morning.

And Kolby was so excited when Grandma found these little boxes and cut doors in them to created garages for his toy cars. He kept asking Grandma and me for the rest of the day if we could think of any other boxes we might have somewhere that could be used to make more garages.

And these adorable shots are of Isaac playing Peek-a-Boo with me underneath the kitchen table, and showing off his cute little two front teeth.

I took these last two of Camden this morning, to show how his hair turned out after I trimmed it the second time (He sure looks different with the different haircuts, huh?)

A Very Long Post

So, this has been an interesting week for us – mostly good, and a little bit not so good. On Monday afternoon Michael took our van in to have the locksmith fix a problem with the automatic locks on the doors that had stopped working and a beeping noise that the car had started to make every time the doors were opened – both of these things started happening since the locksmith replaced the lock on the van last week. So, luckily those things were quick fixes, and after that Michael drove to pick his dad up from a hotel in Salt Lake where he was staying for another work trip, so he came and spent the evening with us. We had dinner, family home evening, and then we played some sports games on the Wii for an activity. (It was fun to sit and watch Dick’s facial expressions as Kolby and then Eli continued to get high scores in bowling and in golf (Kolby beat Dick at bowling, and our boys barely ever play the games on the Wii). After the boys went to bed, we played a while longer before Michael dropped his dad back off at his hotel.

On Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment with the midwife and had that fun glucose test where they make you drink the orange soda, wait an hour, and then draw your blood. Everything looks good with the baby and I’m doing well. And then on Tuesday evening Grandma and I went to Enrichment over at the church. There were a few different classes offered, including a knitting class (which I didn’t sign up for), and a basic computer skills class. I went to the computer class (for lack of another place to go, and because I thought they might want me to answer some questions about the new Relief Society blog). The person who taught the class was knowledgeable, but I was glad that other than a few new shortcuts I knew how to do everything that she taught in the class. After she was done, they turned the time over to me and I showed people how to get to the blog, how to leave a comment (which some people had had trouble with), and what different things were on the blog. I was glad to hear that several of the sisters had looked at the blog at home already (I wondered, especially with a relatively large population of older sisters in our ward, if we would get much use out of the blog, but I was glad to find that people of all ages had started to take a look at it so far). And, the thing that I was most excited about from that evening was that they are starting a new provident living group and are planning on doing monthly trips to different canneries in the area. I signed up to go this Saturday morning and I’m looking forward to it, since I’ve never been to one before. And I’m trying to decide what foods to get this time – I think that a case of six of those big #10 cans of oats for about $13 sounds like a great deal (especially since my kids like oatmeal, so that is something I know we could actually use, plus they have a shelf life of 30 years and you can’t beat that).

On Wednesday afternoon Kolby had his piano lessons. He has his lesson at 3:30 and he still takes a nap after lunch every day, so the last two weeks I’ve had to wake him up from naps for piano lessons and he’s been pretty grumpy while I’ve tried to get him ready to go. I guess I’ll just have to wake him up at like 3:00 and give him a long time to get going before we have to leave. His lesson went well. He got a new song to play and he got to the part in the book where he is learning the different letters of the notes. So, for his practice this week he has been doing his song, and then going through and playing all the ‘A’s on the keyboard, then all the ‘B’s, etc. It’s pretty cool to see that he can find all of the correct keys without messing up most of the time, and when he accidentally hits the wrong key, he realizes that he did the wrong one, and he will say, “No, that’s a ‘G,’ not an ‘F.’” So, he is catching on to that pretty quickly.

Thursday was a pretty rough day for me. The boys did a lot of crying, fighting, and whining, and I did a lot of yelling, time-outs, and some spankings. Besides dealing with all their whining and not listening to me (which seemed like a lot more than normal), I was also struggling because for about the last week or so I had been having an especially hard time with Isaac. I think he has been teething, and he has been extremely fussy some nights (but fine on other nights, so I’m not sure – but it looks like one of his top teeth might finally be coming in). Anyways, Isaac has always had this strong bond with Michael. None of our other boys seemed to have any preference for one parent over the other (although I know that lots of other peoples’ kids do seem to prefer Mommy or Daddy at different times), but all of our other boys were just as happy with one parent or the other. Isaac has always especially liked being held by Michael, and especially cried a lot when Michael left the room. I actually liked this most of the time, with him being the fourth child, because if he was having a really hard time I could hand him off to Michael and he could often calm him down. But lately, especially with Isaac having these fussy times with the teething, he seemed to be crying a lot, and me holding him wasn’t doing any good. He clearly wanted to be held, but then when I picked him up he wouldn’t calm down and would cry just as much. At church last Sunday (Michael had to be at the hospital that morning) Isaac had an especially hard time and I held him in the hallway for over an hour before he finally calmed down and went to sleep, just to wake up about 10 minutes later and cry for a good part of the last meeting. The thing was, he seemed to want my Grandma to hold him more than me, and he even calmed down a little when this cute teenage girl in our ward came over and started to play with him. (He could probably just sense that I was getting stressed and needed a change of people to hold him, but it really felt like he liked everyone else better than me). And with him being especially fussy off and on this week, I felt myself getting annoyed with all his crying for no apparent reason. So, by the time Michael got home from work after a long call day at the hospital on Thursday, very tired and ready to go to bed right away, I kept him up for a while trying to figure out what to do about Isaac and how I didn’t feel like he and I had bonded like we were supposed to. I confessed that I wondered if the fact that Isaac never let me nurse him (I pumped milk and he was bottle fed breast milk for 6 weeks before I switched over to formula) was part of the problem. And Camden did nurse longer than Isaac, but it wasn’t for a really long time, but with Camden I remembered that I would keep him up when I put the other two boys down for naps and I would force myself not to do anything else for a while and lay down and hold him while he was taking his bottle and he would often fall asleep while I was holding him. But with Isaac I didn’t do that – I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t really think of doing it with him, and the idea of getting all 4 boys down for a nap at the same time so that I could have a couple hours a day of no demands and just time to myself was very appealing. And now that he just turned a year old, he takes less than 5 minutes to empty his sippy cup and he is constantly on the move, so I don’t think that I could get him to lay down with me at this point, even if I tried. So I wondered if I had messed something up with him and that I had missed my chance and I could never make it better. It felt good to say all this stuff out loud to Michael, even though it feels really guilty to admit that you don’t feel bonded with your baby. But we talked about it, and just decided that I’d have to try to do other things with Isaac and see how it would go in the future. I think I needed to get all that out, because since then it has been so much better.

The next day I decided to stay off the computer except when all the boys were asleep – it’s easy to get on to check e-mail, then just upload the pictures from the camera real quick while you’re waiting for the internet connection to re-connect to read that last e-mail. Then you need to post something to the Relief Society blog real quick that you received in an e-mail from one of the Relief Society presidency (because you feel bad for already waiting several days before posting some things she sent you last week, and then it turned out the coupons she sent were expired by the time you got around to posting them on the RS blog, so you had committed to being better at just doing it as soon as you got the e-mails). And then when those pictures get uploaded from the camera, you might as well just post them on the family blog while you’re at it – the kids are all happy playing with their toys at the moment anyways – and all of the family members who live far away have expressed such gratitude for you keeping your blog up to date with pictures and videos of the kids so that they can feel like they are there with your family too – plus our blog isn’t just a blog, it’s our family journal and we are printing it into a series of books to save for posterity, so we’d better keep it up to date, since we all know what a good idea it is to keep a regular journal – so anyways, you post those photos that you uploaded from the camera to the blog (but first you have to open the pictures in Photoshop real quick, just to get rid of the red-eye in the pictures that must be genetic, because your husband and all your kids always have red-eye in most of the pictures you take). And hopefully the computer was cooperating all this time, the wireless internet connecting quickly and the computer not freezing up or slowing down because you have a few different programs running at once. Anyways, you can see how hopping on the computer to get something done real quick might end up taking an hour or two, and that’s if I don’t even have anything ‘big’ to work on at the time, like creating a new blog for the Relief Society, making and printing birthday party invitations, updating the books that I keep of each of the boys’ art work, trying to get some genealogy done, etc.

So anyways, I didn’t even turn the computer on until after the boys went down for naps. And while they were playing with their toys, I tried to pick up Isaac and hold him whenever he was in between running after his brothers and crawling after a toy. It would have been kind of a rough morning, because on Friday Eli woke up throwing up (he has always kind of had a week stomach – not that he is sickly or anything, but every few months he will have a day when he just throws up for no apparent reason, no one else in the family gets sick, and he fully recovers before too long). So, Eli was throwing up, and he asked for toast for breakfast, but then he didn’t really want to eat it (which is strange, because even when he is sick I usually have to explain to him why we can’t eat a big meal when we are throwing up while he is pitifully crying for me to get him food). He and I had a holdy on the couch, and then he told me he needed to go potty. He was in the restroom for a while, so I went to check on him to make sure he wasn’t sick again, and he was sleeping on the floor (the only time I have ever appreciated bathrooms with carpeted floors). I covered him with his blanket, set his bowl near him, and shut the door so he could sleep (after taking a picture), and he ended up sleeping in there for at least an hour. After that he ate and told me he felt fine, and he didn’t act sick again, which is always nice when there is a quick and painless recovery like that. So, we spent the day inside, playing together, and things went a lot better with Isaac. And he started doing the best thing ever – I was holding him and he laid his head on my shoulder. When he picked his head up, I said, “Isaac, give Mommy a hug.” And he did it again – since then he has been giving me hugs on demand, every time I’ve asked him to, and I felt almost like that was an answer to my prayers that he does like me (no, I didn’t really think he didn’t like me, but it kind of felt like he liked being held by other people more than by me) and that we did have a special connection. Anyways, that was a very quick change – I went from crying and feeling like I had messed up on raising my baby one night, to feeling normal, happy, and like he liked me the next day. Michael was glad to find out that I was feeling a lot better and Isaac had done well when he got home that afternoon. And things have gone just fine with Isaac since then. So, sorry if I don’t respond to an e-mail or keep up to date on everyone’s’ blogs in the future – but I think that is one little thing that I can do to have a better relationship with my boys, is to spend more time having fun with them than writing about and posting pictures of the fun we’ve had. (But don’t worry too much, Michael and I will still try to keep up our weekly blog posts and I’ll always have nap time to catch up on things).

So, back to our week. Oh, I forgot to mention that I cut Camden’s hair on Thursday morning too. I noticed that it was almost to his shoulders again, after just cutting it while we were in San Diego. So, I decided to just trim it like I did last time, but do it a little shorter this time so it would take a little longer before I had to cut it again. I totally messed it up, though. (Boy, am I glad that I waited until after we had our family photos taken to cut it!) I got it wait, combed it all straight, and cut it all the way around his head in a nice, straight line, but when it dried and curled back up, the back curled up noticeably shorter than on the sides around his ears. So, it ended up looking to me a lot like a really cute short little girl’s haircut (no, I did not think Camden looked like a girl, but I think he looked pretty silly with a girl haircut – which is kind of funny, that I would think a shorter haircut would look girly, even though I know others thought his long curls didn’t look very boy-ish). Anyways, I left it for a few days, thinking of how I would need to fix it, and then last night right before bed I ran him into the bathroom for a quick fix trim, because I couldn’t stand taking him to church with that haircut the next morning. I trimmed it shorter around the ears, and I think that fixed it – although I should have just left it how it was in the first place, this second trim looks a lot better than the first one (and a lot more like a boys’ haircut), and it can grow back out now. I couldn’t help thinking today, as he wore a little sweater to church that Kolby used to wear, and as his hair is now a similar length as Kolby’s used to be when he was that age (although still more curly), that Camden really reminded me of Kolby. I know that everyone thinks I am way off whenever I say I think Camden looks somewhat like Kolby did, but we’ll just have to wait and see – I wouldn’t be too surprised if they looked more and more alike as they get older.

Well, yesterday was long, but I got a lot done. I decided that I needed to get all the Christmas gifts and wrap them all before Thanksgiving, because both my family and Michael’s family will be here, so we can give everyone their gifts and avoid paying to ship them in December. So, I made a list and discussed it with Michael, and then went out and got it all done yesterday. (Oh, I guess I had already made the gifts for each of our parents a couple months ago, and I went and picked up something for my brothers on Friday evening, but I got everything else done on Saturday). I got everything done for the parents, brothers and sisters, and cousins (so I do still need to do it for Michael and the boys, but I don’t have to worry about shipping their gifts). Now there is one gift left that I need to make, and I’ll print some family photos for the parents and grandparents like we do every year, and then all we’ll have left to do is the wrapping. I’m pretty proud of myself that I could get it mostly all done in one Saturday – it only took trips to 4 different stores and about 5 hours (with three of the boys with me the whole time). While we were out, we also got some new jeans for Kolby and Camden (each of them had a pair that wore out in the knees in the last week or so), a new pair of pajama pants for Michael since his old ones got a hole in the knee this week too, and stuff for dinner last night. Oh, and Michael hit a milestone – I bought his pajama pants in a size large because the other sizes didn’t look like they’d be big enough for him, and when I brought them home and he saw that the tag said “size Large, 36/38,” he said there was no way they’d fit him. He had always gotten 34/36 in the past. But I said he should just try them, especially since they had a draw string. Amazingly, they fit, and he didn’t even have to use the draw string to synch them up around the waist or anything. So, Michael has officially gotten fat (no – I would never say that, he was the one making this claim). But really, it is nice that he’s gained a little weight because it’s kind of difficult to find a size 34/36 in some stores sometimes, and I think he looks very nice now that he’s “filled in” just a little bit. I guess eating free hospital cafeteria food has paid off. :) Anyways, after a good dinner of spaghetti squash and garlic bread – spaghetti squash is one of our new favorite meals, since it is relatively quick and easy to make, everyone in our family likes how it tastes, and it is healthy for you – we got the boys down for bed and Grandma stayed with them while we went on a date. First we went to a store that I had seen advertisements for called Tai Pan Trading (kind of a weird name, but it was a really cool store). It was a giant store filled with all sorts of Christmas items, home decorations and art, and things that you could use to make your own Christmas decorations. We only had half an hour there before the store closed (and Michael was disappointed to see a sign advertising free fudge samples, only to find out that that part of the store had closed earlier in the evening) so we probably didn’t even see everything in the store, but it was fun to just walk through and see all the fun Christmas stuff. After that we stopped at Target and picked up a snow brush for Michael’s car (since the one he had before had broken last winter). And after sharing a banana milkshake, we saw a late showing of the new James Bond movie. Although we were both tired, it was still nice to get out and just be together.

Today things went pretty well at church. Michael had the day off today. We got ready this morning and the boys had enough time to watch a quick church movie while Michael and I were getting ready and then Michael played a couple songs on the piano before we walked to church (it’s so much easier getting them all ready for church when I’m not the only one doing it). Although Michael had a headache at church, and Isaac was being extremely wiggly in Sacrament meeting (by wiggly, I mean throwing his entire body back and forth as to make it difficult for any adult to keep him from falling off their lap) so Camden, Isaac, and I spent most of the last meeting in the hallway, but Isaac and Camden played together on the floor happily while I listened to a good talk on tithing, so that was a lot better than last week’s church meeting went for us. After walking home and having quesadillas (or “didas,” as Camden would call them) for lunch, we have gotten the boys down for naps and I think they are all finally asleep – after two additional potty trips for Eli (yes, we do always make both Kolby and Eli use the bathroom before going to sleep), 3 or 4 trips into Camden’s room to tell him not to get out of his bed/not to get into Isaac’s bed/and not to get things out of the closet, changing 1 poopy diaper on Camden, moving Camden’s crib to a different side of his room so he couldn’t get into the closet as easily, and going in to find Eli repeatedly doing some kind of hand stands and then flipping over in the corner of his room – now there is silence and I think they are all finally asleep.

So, sorry for the long post, but at least this kind of rough week ended up being a good week for us. Hope it was good for all of you too.

A Fun Concert and Other Goings On

I’m going to write this week’s blog post, since Michael is on call at the hospital overnight today. We had a pretty good week this week. The boys really enjoyed their swim lessons, and we had fun swimming together after their lesson on Tuesday. Michael went and renewed his driver’s license this week, which was a pain – it took him several hours. But since he had a Utah driver’s license he was able to get a library card, so on Thursday night for Eli’s night out they rode bikes (Eli rode in the bike trailer) to the library and got a library card and checked out a few books and a couple kids movies, and then rode all over town before coming home. On Friday morning I used one of the library movies to bribe the boys into helping me clean up the dining room and kitchen upstairs for a couple hours – they really are good little workers. We got all the counters cleared off, organized things, took out the trash, and put away all the stuff that had started to accumulate upstairs. And on Friday evening Grandma Faun watched the boys so that Michael and I could go on a fun date. We stopped for Mexican food and then headed out to the Sandy Amphitheater for a concert by Michael’s favorite pianist, Jon Schmidt. This is the third time I have seen him perform, and it is always an enjoyable experience because he plays a variety of music – fast, slow, spiritual, patriotic, and funny – and he makes all sorts of funny comments and little performances between the songs, so it doesn’t get boring just sitting for a while. There was also a kid from Wisconsin who opened for him. His name was Jon Troast, and he played the guitar. We liked his songs a lot, and ended up getting his CDs (which we don’t often do). Now all I need to do is replace my computer speakers that got the wires broken somehow in our move, so that we can actually listen to the new music. It was a fun night. On Saturday I googled free things to do in Salt Lake, and we ended up going to a place called Wheeler Farm. There were all sorts of farm animals for the kids to see, they fed some ducks and geese, they were excited to climb up on some old farm tractors to take pictures, and we took a short wagon ride. Michael remembered going there in elementary school, and afterwards he commented that his childhood memories of the farm were much more exciting than our trip yesterday. But the kids had a lot of fun. When we got home they were very excited to tell Grandma Faun all about the wagon ride and all the animals. After naps and dinner, we headed over to the church for an activity with a handful of families. They had sports and snacks for the kids. It was fun to talk with some of the younger families a little more. One thing that was not so fun, though, was waking up to Eli throwing up in the night last night. After cleaning him all up and putting him back to bed, it seriously took me another hour to fall back to sleep – how annoying to just lay there in bed and not be able to rest. So, Michael left early this morning for the hospital, and I stayed home from church with the boys. Luckily it seems that Eli was not really sick, but just ate too much cookies and candy at the activity last night, since he hasn’t been sick at all today – I would always prefer that, because if he were sick it would be very likely that the rest of the boys would get sick too, and all of the kids throwing up is just about my least favorite thing in the world to deal with, so it’s good that he seems to be doing well. Michael called from the hospital this morning and said that his team had 15 patients, which is a lot for one team, and that none of the patients were scheduled to be discharged today, and I haven’t heard from him since then, so hopefully he hasn’t had a terribly busy day, and hopefully he’ll be able to get some sleep tonight. This surgery month has really not been as bad as we expected, although overnight call is rarely fun. We are looking forward to his next rotation, which will be an elective, so he can have four weeks without working overnight or on the weekends. That will be a nice break for him to catch up on some sleep. (But, it will also mean that he will be closer to his next rotation after that, internal medicine, which we’ve heard is one of the busiest rotations with frequent overnight call).

Home Sick

This week was nice, especially since it was basically Michael’s last week of his plastic surgery rotation (officially, his last day is today). Then he is mostly done with medical school. He planned one if his vacation months in April so that we would be able to get ready for the move, and then in May he has a course called ‘Preparing for Residency’ that only lasts a couple weeks until he graduates on May 16th! So, even though he is getting tired of the very early mornings he’s had this month, it will all be over soon. And then he will get to catch up on some sleep (at least for a couple days, until we start using the month of April for packing, cleaning, organizing, and figuring out all the details for the move). Right now I think the plan is to try to find a storage unit to store the majority of our stuff in Rochester for a year, and just take the necessities with us to Salt Lake, so I have been attempting to make lists of everything we own, separating things into one column for taking to Salt Lake and another column for storing until we get to Rochester, and trying to figure out which items we can leave behind. It is kind of hard to try to plan what we could possibly need in an entire year, but we’ll figure it out, I guess.

So, on Monday the Kearls watched our boys so Michael and I could go to the annual meeting that the school puts on about financial planning and buying a house for graduating students. We felt like it wasn’t the best use of our time – the portion about financial planning was pretty basic and we felt like we already knew much of what they said, and much of the buying the house portion was over our heads or did not apply to us. But they did hand out a good booklet on buying a house, which might be helpful in the future. We are still waiting to receive the packet of paperwork from Michael’s program in Salt Lake with his contract and the insurance information so that we can make some more accurate financial goals for the upcoming year. After the meeting at the school, we watched Enchanted with the Kearls when we went to pick up the kids, which was fun (even thought Michael now needs to borrow the movie to finish the second half of it since he fell asleep on their couch midway through).

On Tuesday Eli had his night out with Daddy. They went to the mall and got food from the Taco Bell dollar menu and then went to Barnes and Noble to read books together. Poor Michael said that he was falling asleep as they were reading, and it got to the point that Eli thought it was a game because he had to wake Michael up so many times as they read. But Eli loved it – he has been asking about when his night out with Daddy would be for the last couple weeks.

On Wednesday morning I had a group of girls and their kids over to make a playgroup schedule for the next couple months. We haven’t had a playgroup for a while, so I figured if I wanted to have it I would need to take charge. We got a schedule made and I am looking forward to taking the kids to the activities, especially to the ones we have planned at the playgrounds in the area once it gets warm enough out. After the planning meeting, Faith stayed and Amy came and we all had lunch together with all the kids. It was a lot of fun, even though the kids made it a little chaotic. That evening I took the boys to their swim lessons and Michael met me over there after he finished with his meeting at school so that I could go to the second half of the enrichment activity where they were making a bunch of baby quilts as a service project. I picked up Amy and we headed over there in time to help with cutting and tying a couple quilts. It wasn’t too late when we finished, so Amy, Faith, and I decided to stop at McDonalds for an ice cream cone (and some time out without any kids). It was fun to sit and talk, but then when we went to leave I saw that the brake lights were on on my car (I had driven Michael’s car, which I’m not used to driving, and must have turned the lights to the wrong notch – which was frustrating, because I was very careful to make sure that the headlights had turned off because Michael accidentally left them on the other day and the car had died). So, our jumped cables were in the van at home and there were none in Faith’s car, so we left the little car there and Faith gave us a ride home.

On Thursday, when Michael got home we headed over to pick up the car. We got there and realized that we had left the car keys at home and were quite frustrated that we would have to go all the way back to get them, until we realized that they were actually in my purse, so that was a relief. We got the car jumped and let it charge while we went inside and got the kids some food. Then we rushed home and I went over to my visiting teaching appointment after helping get the boys in the house.

On Friday I really wanted to get out of the house and go do something, so after dinner we met the Kearls at the McDonalds on National Avenue and let the kids play in the two-story play area there. The kids had a lot of fun, all except Katie who threw up all over Tyce’s lap (it was kind of a relief that Katie was already sick, because Isaac had been spitting up more than normal that afternoon and I had wondered if he wasn’t feeling well, but at least that way I don’t think we passed something to their family – not on Friday, at least). After stopping at Target to pick up a change of clothes for Katie and Tyce, they met us at our place and we put the kids down to bed so the parents could enjoy some games. I’m so glad that we have been able to find friends who are like us: people who enjoy to do things with the children, but are still willing to take their kids anywhere and do anything and are not ruled by the schedules of their babies. (If we could only do anything with friends when all of our children were awake, in good moods, and not demanding our attention, we wouldn’t have any friends).

On Saturday morning Michael had to go in and do rounds for his last call day at the hospital. I was proud of myself because I got up and made the kids a big breakfast of eggs and toast then deep-cleaned the kitchen, picked up around the house, and helped the boys clean up their room all by myself that morning. Michael got home around noon and put the other boys to sleep while I took Camden out for his activity with me (it was supposed to be his night out on Thursday, but we had to rearrange because of my visiting teaching appointment). I took him to the mall and we found some flip flops for the three older boys, and he had so much fun trying them on – he was taking little tiny, quick steps all around and acting really excited. (No, it’s not really flip flop season yet here in Milwaukee, but I’m hoping that it will be sometime in the next month or two). We took longer there than I had planned because I checked several other stores to see if I could find similar sandals that were less expensive, but didn’t find anything else. I was planning on letting Camden push one of those little kid-sized shopping carts when I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, but he fell asleep in the car so I dropped him off at home so he could sleep and went back out to get the groceries. After getting home, getting all the groceries put away, cutting up some chicken before freezing it for meals later on in the week, and having some dinner, the Hedgecocks dropped their boys off so we could watch them while they went on a date. The boys had un playing with each other, and then the Kearls came over and when the Hedgecocks returned we all played games together again. It was a fun night.

And Sunday went pretty well. This morning I made bread (I have just about resolved to be frustrated with somewhat flat bread from now on) and I made a cake for dessert (it’s really hard to make a cake while on fast Sunday and not be able to lick my fingers or anything). We went to church and the boys did well in sacrament meeting. Then, just before our Sunday school class ended we found out that Camden had thrown up. (Sorry, Sister Cook!) After cleaning up the mess in the hallway and getting all the other boys out of their classes and into the car, Michael took them home. The third hour of church was a combined lesson on genealogy that I stayed for. Afterwards I got a ride home with the Hymases and when I got home all four boys were napping and Michael had picked up around the house, put away the dishes, and prepared dinner (what a nice break to get home and not have to worry about any of that). He said that Camden had gotten sick in the car a little on the way home again, poor kid. Our home teachers came over to give us a lesson and then the Kearls came over for dinner. Michael made corned beef and it turned out very good. After dinner Michael had to rush off to his home teaching appointment, and while he was gone I did the dishes, cleaned up the water the boys splashed all over the bathroom floor while I was doing the dishes, out the boys in their pajamas, Tyce read them all a story, I cleaned up after Camden throwing up again, and they all went down to bed just before Michael got back. Then we played some card games and a round of Carcasonne. It will be nice after today that Michael won’t have such early mornings so we won’t have to cut our nights short so that he can get enough sleep to get up so early. We got to bed around 11:30 last night, and then Isaac woke up at 1:30am. I got up with him four times before Michael also got up and we finally got him back to sleep. The poor kid – whenever our boys get sick with a stomach flu (or whatever it is they have) I just give them Pediatlyte or Liquilytes to keep them hydrated, but no other foods until they seem better so they aren’t throwing up constantly. So, we ran out of the Liquilites last night, and we gave Isaac water, which did not make him happy. And then this morning Camden was very mad at me because I didn’t give him his cup of milk when he got up. I called a couple friends to see if someone would come sit with the boys while I ran to get some more of the Liquilites from the grocery store so I didn’t have to take sick kids out today, but instead Kim Morrison offered to go to the store and pick them up for me. That was so nice of her! So, now that we are all stocked up, we can hopefully kick this bug before it spreads to the older boys or Michael and I. Wish us luck and a quick recovery!

Sleepless in Milwaukee

So, last week Isaac woke up right as we were going to bed at night and wanted a bottle, and then he got up about an hour earlier in the morning than he normally does. That was unusual, since he has been sleeping through the night for quite a while now. (And a little inconvenient because Michael has started into his surgery sub-I this month, so he has been getting up around 4am to get ready to go to the hospital each day and then being ready for bed by around 10pm, and I have been trying to get up with the boys if needed so Michael can get some more rest). Well, the next night Isaac slept just fine, but Camden woke up in at 4am and wouldn’t go back to sleep. Michael had already gotten up and given him a drink of water before I even woke up. I got up and changed him and tried to get him to go back to sleep in his crib, but after he cried a while I finally brought him into bed with us (around the time that Michael had to get up to get ready for work), and luckily he actually slept in bed with me for a couple more hours before Kolby and Eli woke us up. Camden hasn’t had a problem with waking up for a really long time. The next night Isaac woke up around 1am and wanted a bottle. He was starting to get a little stuffy, and since his problems with his nasal airway when he was born he can breath well, but if he gets a little cold he sounds so stuffed up and he just wakes himself up a lot at night. I fed him, but he didn’t fall asleep quickly like he normally would have – he was content to stay awake for another half hour after eating before I finally just put him in his swing and went back to bed – he must have fallen to sleep on his own. The next night I was so tired, and luckily Isaac did better. Around 2:30am, though, Michael rolled over and told me that one of the boys was crying. I asked who it was, and he said it was Eli and then rolled back over and went back to sleep. I went in and was glad that all Eli wanted was for me to pick up the stuffed animals he had dropped on the floor, and then he quickly went back to sleep. (I gave Michael a hard time the next morning for waking me up on a weekend after I had stayed up with the boys earlier in the week, but he had no memory at all of waking me up or any of the kids crying the night before, and it was ok since I wasn’t up for long). Then last night Isaac had such a stuffy nose and he couldn’t even keep his pacifier in his mouth. He had woken up crying four times in the last half hour before we went to bed, and after I had to get up two more times to help him, I brought him into bed with us [that was the second time this week I had brought one of the kids into bed with us, and I have a pretty strict rule about not bringing them into our bed -- but sleep deprivation makes such "rules" not seem to matter very much]. He was snoring so loudly, and after half an hour of that I put him back in the swing and was very glad when he slept through the rest of the night (he even slept in until about 9:30am, which is much better than the 6 or 6:30am waking time he had been averaging last week). Unfortunately, one of the kids at church yesterday must have had a little bug or something, because around 2:30am this morning Michael woke me up and told me that Kolby had thrown up in bed. I found him in the bathroom, his clothes were just covered, and Michael stripped the bedding from his bunk bed while I took off his clothes, bathed him, and got him dressed again. We set him up a little ‘bed’ of blankets on our floor next to our bed and tried to get back to sleep. Fortunately, Kolby seems to be feeling better today and I am crossing my fingers that he is over it. Isaac has been sleeping pretty peacefully so far in his swing this evening, and we are just waiting for the last load of laundry to finish drying before we go to bed too. It sure makes a big difference when you are used to your kids sleeping through the night and they all decide to become nocturnal all of a sudden. Maybe tonight we will actually be able to sleep until morning.

Contagious

So, Kolby has strep throat. I was pretty surprised to get the call from the doctor this morning saying that his culture came back positive for strep.

Last year both Kolby and Eli had strep throat. We had never dealt with that before, and Kolby had been complaining for a few days that his teeth and his mouth hurt and he had trouble eating because of that. I was pregnant with Camden at the time and thought about waiting another day or so to take Kolby to the doctor – because he was complaining about his teeth hurting, we thought that it might be a cavity – and I remember feeling pretty tired, but deciding to take him in for an appointment anyway just to have it checked out. We took the boys in, and it turned out that Kolby’s throat was sore, not his teeth. The doctor did a rapid strep swab on each boy and both came back positive immediately. It turned out that it was a good thing that we took them in that day, because I ended up going into labor and having Camden that night. And with strep throat they need to take the antibiotics for 24 hours before they are no longer contagious, so it was a good thing that they had gotten started on that before we went into the hospital.

So, for the last few days Kolby has been acting sick, but I didn’t even consider the possibility that it might be strep throat, because it has been nothing like when he and Eli got it a year ago. Since Friday Kolby has been getting fevers off and on – he would seem fine for most of the day and then spike a fever and lay around and act tired and fussy. Then the next day he would feel warm, but wouldn’t have a high fever, but he would act normal much of the day and then act sick again later on. He did that for several days, and then on Sunday we thought he had gotten over it. We went to church that morning, and then after the first hour of church Michael took his temperature and it was 102.7 degrees and his face looked all red. Michael took him home and he got some rest, but Kolby hasn’t had a fever since then. That night Kolby woke up drying several times in the night, so I decided to take him to the doctor’s office instead of his preschool classes on Monday morning, but on Monday and today he has not had a fever or acted sick at all. I took him in yesterday, and we noticed that the red rash on his face was also on his stomach. The doctor did a swab and it came back negative, and since Kolby had been acting normal all day, we figured it was something viral that he was already starting to get over. So last night we took him to a birthday party. I felt pretty bad this morning when the doctor called and said that the culture came back positive for strep today. I had to call the moms at the birthday party and the preschool at the YMCA to let them know that their kids may have been exposed to strep – so, if any of your kids have been around Kolby over the last few days, I’m sorry and I hope they don’t get sick.

Anyway, I have had a cough the last couple of weeks and we had no specific plans for today, so I was planning on staying home in my pajamas all day today. When I got the call from the doctor, I knew that we would have to go to the pharmacy to pick up Kolby’s medicine, and I really didn’t want to get all the kids all packed into the car just for that. Michael is so thoughtful – I called to tell him that Kolby has strep, and he came home from work during his lunch break to get Kolby’s insurance card and went to get the prescription and bring it back home, and then he had to go right back to work. Isn’t that nice? He knew that it was something I could do, and I just really didn’t feel like it, so he volunteered to do that for me. How kind!

So, Kolby started his antibiotics this afternoon. Once he has taken the medicine for 24 hours, he will no longer be contagious. I was glad to find out that he will not be contagious anymore by tomorrow afternoon, because we are having a little birthday party for Kolby on Friday and he would have been so disappointed if we had to cancel it. Plus, if we had to cancel the party on Friday, I don’t know when we would have rescheduled it, because this baby will be here before too long.

It’s interesting that Kolby has strep throat now, with this baby due so soon. When Eli was born Kolby had roseola, and when Camden was born Kolby and Eli both had strep throat. So I have been jokingly wondering what contagious sickness my boys would have when baby Isaac is born. Hopefully our family is all healthy when the new baby comes. We’re getting close – only 14 days to go until the due date!