Sick Brain

 LETTER WRITTEN TO OUR MISSIONARY 1/2/22
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Hola Hermana!

Only one week and one day until you come home! Hopefully you'll feel better and we'll all feel better by then. Dad, Ellie, Kristina, and I have all developed fevers and feel pretty much like garbage. Dad got it first, so we did have Dad tested for COVID, but we haven't heard yet. If Dad tests positive, then I'll probably get us all in to get tested, just to make sure. It would be super random if we all got COVID the same week and we aren't even together. I hope you're feeling totally better now and that quarantine hasn't been too bad!   😷

NEWS FLASH:  A puppy in the best of  circumstances is stressful, but a new puppy with 7 extra people in the house and most of us feeling like crap is totally knocking our socks off.   She is terrible at sleeping at night, not very good at housetraining, and super energetic...not good combinations when you have a houseful of sickies that need lots of sleep and don't have the energy to keep an eye on a hyperactive puppy 24/7.  Hopefully we'll get this puppy training thing figured out soon. 🐶

Speaking of the extra people in the house, I am totally exhausted.  The K boys are sweethearts, but they  also make ginormous messes. Their flight home today ended up getting canceled, so they rented a car and drove home this afternoon instead.  Of course, with the aforementioned new puppy, the holidays, and the extra guests,  the house is a total wreck and my energy level is almost zero, so here's hoping we'll actually get it cleaned up before you get home. 😫

  

I don't have anything significant to say and my brain isn't really working very well right now, so I'll finish up with a few of my favorite pictures of Lucie from this week.  

And here's a random meme that struck me as particularly funny this week.   Like laugh out loud funny...yeah I  know I'm weird. 

And to finish off this bit of randomness that is my feverish brain...here is a hair-do I attempted on Ellie this week. 

We love you and can't wait to see you next week!   Hope you're feeling better!  😘💕

Love, 

Mom 💗💕💖💗💓

Real Life Again

May 27:   Real life again.

I am back for the last day of the homeschooling conference, but am now officially sick with what Ellie had and have zero appetite and even less energy.

I am pretty sure that I performed some seriously comical snoozing feats during a few classes today.

But we didn't last long.   

Adam is now sick too and we are going home early.

I was excited though that at least we would miss the traffic going home.  Surely the traffic in the middle of the day would be better than rush hour when the conference officially ended.   

Nope.   It's me, so of course it's going to take me another 2-1/2 hours.    

<sigh>

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Four Generations

It's getting to be THAT time of year again.  The time when our normally busy, but somewhat manageable schedule goes LOCO!  We've been doing end of year testing (required by Virginia law even for homeschool!), having planning meetings for next year, planning girls' camp crafts again, collecting youth conference registration forms, picking up Spencer from JMU, preparing for giving a talk in sacrament meeting this Sunday, going to a memorial service for a beloved former teacher of Adam's, and eating up the couple of days that my parents were in town.

All this extra stuff going on in addition to my normal running kids all over creation for 2+ hours a day  means that my own home has become a mere stopping place in the endless merry-go-round that my life has become.    I've spent no more than a couple of waking hours home each day of the last two weeks.

Tomorrow has the potential to be the first normal day in a while (except for the 4:00am drive to the school to drop Emma off on her field trip, the mommy-daughter activity day activity with Ellie in the evening,  and the extra chauffeuring duties I have in the afternoon), but all in all I am very much looking forward to some good old fashioned bonding time with washing machine again...at least for a few hours!

So I sit here tonight, eyes drooping with sleepiness, and the responsible side of me thinks I should be trying to dig out of the pile that my house has become or work on my talk or something, but instead I forgo sleep and sensibility and am writing this blog post instead.    I was worried that I would forget and let these precious pictures get buried into my computer files.  After all, it's only a few times a year that we see my parents and even less often that we see my last living grandparent, Nana Crain!  Four generations together is definitely worth staying up to commemorate!

 I had to share their visit with my two brothers and their families, so all in all we spent less than 24-hours together.   Luckily the weather was lovely,  and we took our lunch from Plaka (a greek restaurant) and headed to the park.

Ellie so loved seeing her grandparents and great-grandma again and I do have to say that I think she bonded with all three of them while they were here.  

Luckily my sister, AnnaLisa, lives close to me, so she  got to share in our time with them.

Adam's a little shyer about jumping into pictures, but I love how this one of Nana and them turned out!

My dad recently had knee replacement surgery and was hobbling around a bit while he was here, but that didn't stop him from being Silly Grandpa still!

I can't believe how tall Adam looks next to my mom in this picture!

Right after lunch they drove to Maryland to spend a day with my brother Matt and his family.  We loved having them visit and hope that they will be able to come again soon! 

At first I thought that we wore Ellie out with fun.  Turns out though, her fever (after the poor reaction to her medication) had returned.  The poor girl has now been spiking low fevers almost every day for about three weeks now.  Most of the time she acts pretty normal, but collapses once it hits 100º every few days (like in this picture).

Safe to say, she will never be trying that medication again!


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Blah.

Yesterday I drove to JMU and picked up a tired and weak Spencer who was starting his spring break with a violent stomach bug.    It was the first stomach bag our family has seen in 3 or 4 years (other than the c-diff he got while he was in the hospital).  

Then today Glen and I were sitting on our bed, each doing our own thing.

A child walks holding her tummy and moaning that she really doesn't feel well.  

One parent jumps up,  screams at  her to run to the bathroom, and escorts her to the toilet at the exact moment she starts vomiting.  

For the next minute that parent holds her hair, rubs her back, and talks soothingly to her while she pretty thoroughly loses the contents of her stomach.  

Finally the parent helps her to freshen up.  

All this occurs approximately 10 feet away and within direct line of sight from the other, unnamed parent, who is still sitting contentedly on the bed watching the BYU game and not having the slightest idea of anything being amiss.  

What?! I didn't hear any screaming or vomiting?    This is a great game!  

Now poor Ellie is begging to eat and already sad that she can't go to church tomorrow.  Good thing she has Spence as her #1 go-to guy for snuggles, since he's the only one who's already had the bug and doesn't need to be scared of her germs!

It's also a good thing I have a new haircut to distract me from the fact that we are already 2 for 7 with this stomach bug and it hasn't even been 24-hours yet since Spence introduced it to us.  

Blah!  

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Highlights and Lowlights

A little glimpse at the highlights and lowlights of this week: 

Celebrating: 
When I was a student driver back in the day, I couldn't get my driver's license until I went to the DMV and took a very stressful behind-the-wheel test which required driving through unusually configured intersections and parallel parking under pressure.  I remember a lot of my friends failing it the first few times they took it ...not me though!  I passed it the first time and and pretty much aced the parallel parking!   A fact at which I still will happily gloat about all these years later!  :)

Glen's experience was very similar, except that he can additionally boast that he passed the UK driving test the first time, which I understand to be a rare feat for gringo Americans. 

So with those expectations in our mind,  imagine our surprise when Spence came home from his last day of behind-the-wheel training (with the sleepy instructor) with a blue sheet of paper that wasn't just a certificate of completion as we expected, but actually his temporary license!    No behind the wheel tests at the DMV!   No parallel parking under pressure!   He is official and we celebrated with a little family excursion to Rita's (Spencer's new favorite frozen treat shop)!!! 

Being Neighborly:
Although my family loves to eat ham, we generally only have it on Easter....sometimes Christmas.     So imagine my family's absolute delight, when earlier this week our neighbor, Richard, showed up with a HoneyBaked ham as a gift to help us celebrate Spencer's recent clean check-up.  Glen and the kids weren't just happy about the ham, they were ecstatic!   Not only were they getting ham on a non-holiday, but they were getting a HONEYBAKED ham...our very favorite!  Our dinners and lunches this week have been ham-filled and delicious!   What a blessing to have such wonderful neighbors! 

Lots and lots of cupcakes:
 Cami baked cupcakes for another wedding!  This time it was 15-dozen mini cupcakes in her top 5 flavors (Greek yogurt with strawberry frosting, Andes mint, red velvet with cream cheese icing, carrot cake with cream cheese icing, and lemon).  We didn't hear how they went, but based on the goof-ups that we got to sample, I would guess that they disappeared quickly!

Fancy Breakfast:
When I told Emma that she could make  a hot breakfast for us this morning, I did not expect her to whip up a batch of cinnamon rolls from scratch!   Yum! 

A fun project:
I don't consider myself a very creative person, but I love to take other people's ideas and add my own little twist.  This fun project I did for YW and for my family took up a whole day and turned my house into a giant mess, but I loved every second of it! 

Lowlights:

R.I.P.
My fifteen-year-old  KitchenAid finally burned out and died.  Held together by duct tape for the last several years, this workhorse has mixed together countless batches of cookies, cakes, fillings, and bread, and this week it finally lost its will to go on mixing.  I will be mourning its loss every time I knead  together a batch of bread by hand. 

Ugly duckling apples:
Making our own caramel apples sounds like it should be in the highlight section and tastewise they would be, but since I had set out on a mission to make our caramel apples pretty this year, I have to put these ugly ducklings in the lowlights!

Not being prepared: 
One of my kids, who shall remain unnamed, gets an F- in Preparation 101.  Three late-night trips driving around town looking for forgotten ingredients and a hard-to-find, but necessary item (mini cupcake liners) did not bode well for sleeping this past weekend! 

Germs:
Down with a cold most of the week,   I am ready to be done with Kleenex and Benadryl.   Besides the lack of sleep, the worst part about being sick was missing book group.  One of my favorite opportunities  for intelligent conversation with other women, I was sad to have to stay home.  

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Thank goodness...

for modern medicine...

even if it does take up an entire shelf in our fridge...

and make me drop my mouth in horror at the "cash price" we could be paying if we didn't have good insurance....

and max out the number of alarms I can set on my cell phone, including a 1:30am alarm (to administer a medicine) and a 5:09am alarm (to help get Cami out the door for seminary)...

Although I'm thinking that being at home this round won't be quite as restful as it's been in past times, we're still comforted by the knowledge that our entire family is under the same roof again!   

HAPPY DAYS! 

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UPDATE: 

• We are home and it seems like we have an entire pharmacy full of drugs at our house!  Previous visits home have only involved a fraction of the medications we're administering this time, but because of the infection he is recovering from, they just want to make sure their bases are covered!  

• Here's a glimpse of his antibiotic vancomycin which he needs to be administered three times a day (this the antibiotic that causes his Red Man Syndrome if he doesn't take Benadryl beforehand)....

• Because he still needs the antibiotic administered intravenously and we randomly don't happen to have a hospital IV pump at home, they prescribed these cool little contraptions that basically have the antibiotic inside of a balloon-like device inside this pressurized container.  When he the device is hooked up to his central line, the balloon starts depressurizing and the medicine is delivered at just the right speed.  Weird, but cool! 

• Birthday greetings for Spencer are starting to pour in!  Thank you for taking the time to shower him with love and words of faith and encouragement.  Spencer insisted that he not open any of the letters until it's actually his birthday, but his (and our) excitement level is increasing by the day! 

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" There are many kinds of challenges. Some give us 
necessary experiences.  Adverse results in this mortal 
life are not evidence of lack of faith or  of an 
imperfection in our Father in Heaven’s overall plan. 
The  refiner’s fire is real, and qualities of 
character and righteousness  that are forged in the 
furnace of affliction perfect and purify us and  
prepare us to meet God."  Quentin L.  Cook

"Red Man Syndrome"

UPDATE:

• His chest pain is back, so they've repeated the battery of tests on his heart.   Thankfully all of the tests came back normal, so they've attributed the pain to either pleurisy or costochondritis, both painful but harmless conditions. 

• Spence has a fever of 101.3....his first fever since the first round. :(   I had forgotten how fast things happen around here with fevers.  Within a half hour of the fever developing he'd already had blood cultures taken, Tylenol given, and antibiotics started.    His ANC is 0, so his immune system is at its most vulnerable.  We're praying that the cause of the fever turns out to be nothing serious. 

• Shortly after receiving his intravenous antibiotic (vancomycin), Spencer developed an itchy, bright red rash covering his head, neck, trunk, and back.  It was a pretty intense 15 minutes, while the nurse and resident came in and stopped the infusion, administered Benadryl, flushed his lines, and observed Spencer as he grabbed his neck in pain.  Thankfully his oxygen levels remained fine and they actually do not believe it is an allergic reaction, but a common reaction to vancomycin called "red man syndrome".  Basically it means that he will need future infusions of vancomycin to be prefaced with Benadryl and to be administered much, much more slowly. 

• Spencer's 17th birthday is coming up on April 30th.    He'll almost certainly be in the hospital on that date, so our idea is to  shower him with cards and letters from across the country and we need your help.  Feel free to send him kid-drawn pictures, notes of encouragement, cards, funny quotes, etc.    (No gifts please.)   Please email me at goolds@verizon.net or my sister Kristina at littlechickenator@gmail.com if you need our address.  (Shhhh...don't tell Spence!) 
  

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Here's a pic I sniped of Spence yesterday while he tried to grab the camera from me.    Surprisingly he really liked it and posted it of his own free will to his Facebook account.  With him feeling miserable today, I find myself looking at it a lot, in hopes that he will be feeling like this again soon. 

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"Look to the lighthouse of the Lord. There is no fog so dense, no night so dark, no gale so strong, no mariner so lost but what its beacon light can rescue. It beckons through the storms of life. The lighthouse of the Lord sends forth signals readily recognized and never failing. "  

 ~Thomas S. Monson~

I Love My Boys....

even if they do shoot me evil eyes every time I pull out the camera! (Spence proudly admits to the fact that he's taught Adam everything he knows about picture avoidance/giving mom dirty looks). 

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UPDATE:

We are trying to usurp every moment of togetherness we can find while Spencer is at home.  We even pulled the kids out of school a little early today to have some family portraits taken! 

Unfortunately it looks like this stomach bug is making its rounds.  Glen is mostly better, but as of tonight Cami's down for the count, and Spence is on the edge.  Ugh! 

Tomorrow Spence will have his bone marrow biopsy/spinal tap done as an outpatient, then the plan is that he will be readmitted to the hospital for Round 3 on Monday. 


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I need new quotes.  Feel free to shower me with good ones at goolds@verizon.net. 

Good, Better, Best, and "Bestest" News!

Good News: Yesterday I was interviewed on a mid-morning radio show based in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Bekah, one of the show's hosts, apparently is a fan of Recipe Shoebox (my recipe blog) and invited me to be a part of their show on blogging.  For the few minutes that the interview lasted, we chatted about how the blog came to be and I in turn answered a few other blogging questions the hosts posed to me. My interview was followed by interviews with four other bloggers, who, based on a few comments I got, are some big-time, real-deal, famous bloggers, who are much more widely known than little old me with a few hundred followers compared to their tens of thousands.     

Not that I care or anything!   I was thrilled for the opportunity and found it a pleasant distraction in amongst the craziness we currently call our life.  After the interview was all done I even overcame my deep-seated hatred of hearing my own voice and listened to the interview replayed.   Only one time though. I heard enough to know that there were a few instances where my nervousness audibly came through in my voice and that I rambled a bit in a couple of places, but I could also hear that I didn't flub it anything like I had in the nightmares I'd had the night before.  I didn't freeze, I didn't have a coughing fit, and I definitely didn't start shouting insults at the hosts.  Whew! 

Listen to my interview here.

  
Better News: Spencer has been approved  and the Make-a-Wish foundation is going to grant him a wish!  He's not sure what he wants to wish for yet, but he's leaning towards a fun trip somewhere.   I'm very impressed with the Make-a-Wish foundation and am in awe at all the good they do in sharing joy and giving hope to sick kids.  See here for how you can help grant wishes. 

Best News: Spence's ANC was up again and the doctors discharged him from the hospital yesterday!  We had expected it to be sometime this week, but, like last time, were surprised at the pace at which it happened.  We are THRILLED beyond belief to be back together under one roof again! 

"Bestest" News of All: Yesterday we had a new nephew  born! Glen's sister, Lara, (yes, she has an awesome name) just gave birth to her first baby, a little boy named Caleb! Having him was a long journey for Lara and Brett and we're thrilled for them as they enter this new and exciting stage of their lives.  (PS  We're still eagerly awaiting photos of the little guy). 

Bit of Bad News: Glen celebrated being back home by coming down with a knock-ya-flat-on-your-back-icky-stomach-bug!   Here's hoping that the bug stays far away from the rest of the family, especially Spence and Ellie!   Spence for obvious reasons and Ellie because her and stomach bugs do not mix well.  Ugh, I have nightmares just thinking about it!

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"The best things in life aren't things."
 - Art Buchwald

Sunday Night Stream of Consciousness

Some random thoughts running around my brain tonight: 

• Stomach bugs are horrible and I especially hate how hard they are on Ellie.   On the other hand, because of Ellie's vast experience with vomiting, she's  extremely accurate.  She hasn't missed the toilet with her spewing in over 2 years. 

• Some of Spencer's friends called Glen, "buff and intimidating" and for some reason I can't stop laughing about it.  Buff maybe, but intimidating I'm a little more flummoxed about.

• I have awesome friends.  One immediately gave us Pedialyte when they heard of Ellie's sickness, saving us a Sabbath trip to the store.  And another brought popsicles and a little present for Ellie.  It was the first time we'd seen her smile since this all hit her on Saturday night. 

• This whole goody-a-day posting on my recipe blog is doing a number on my waistline.  Dang it!

• Watch your mailboxes!  Our Christmas cards arrived from Shutterfly this week and I just wrote our newsletter.  Now I just need to print, address them,  and get them in the mail.  Yay--I love Christmas cards!  If I don't have your address, please feel free to email it to me and I'll add you to our list. 

• I'm so happy that at least a few of my kids will still talk to Santa, even if they wouldn't look him in the eye if their lives depended on it. 

• I had this vision that no amount of snow could bring my homeland of Minnesota to its knees, but after seeing all my friends' updates on Facebook, I'm pretty sure that either everyone's gotten wimpy or this really was quite the storm.

• Glen stayed home from church today with Ellie and Adam (who has a different sickness) and I'm thinking I could get really used to coming home on Fast Sundays to a home-cooked dinner including cornbread and dessert (which he also happened to take pictures of for the recipe blog).   He took pictures of every step and even had Adam snap this one, so he could have both hands in it.  I'm so spoiled by my buff and intimidating man. 
  
  
  

• Our sleep number mattress is one of the best home improvement projects we've ever made.  Speaking of which, it seems to be calling my name right now.  

• Our very classy outside decorations could use a few stakes.  If you know where they ended up please call me.  They're either in the attic or the garage.