Is It Naptime Yet

Jon has been a doll. He has let me sleep in on the weekends and he takes care of the girls and gets them breakfast.
It’s been great.
Thanksgiving Day:
Jon made Thanksgiving breakfast. Yummy blueberry muffins that we’ve had in our cupboard for a while.
We hung out at home and I made pies for my parents house.
We got there at 12:45 thinking “dinner” was at one. Only the people who live there and were staying there were there and the turkey was an hour behind because my mom started a turkey dripping fire in the oven.
No one else showed up till around 2 so we only saw some people for about an hour. We ate at 3 or so and we jetted out of there around 3:45.
We got to Ann’s house late, 4:30 but they waited for us since I had the rolls.
Ann and Doug have a new little Yorkie and the girls just loved him.
Lilah held him at every chance and she thought it was funny that he liked to nibble on my belt.
We got home around 8:30, just a half hour past the girls bedtime, though they didn’t get to bed till 9.

Friday:
I went to my parents house with the girls because Andrea and Brien would be heading over there later and Jon needed time to work on a term paper.
I hung out with family and held the baby a little and I even cleaned out my car.
It was a nice day.

On a down note I’ve been getting sick since I went out on windy Wednesday. Today I feel my worst and since I’ve procrastinated writing my lesson I still need to prepare it.
I’m terrible I know it.
I’ve also slept or rested most of the morning since I’m feeling stuffy and just plain terrible.
I have gone over it, so that’s a plus.
I love the holidays, just not when I’m sick.

Auntie Carolyn and Uncle Derek!

Lilah loves the flowers and the bear- even if her face doesn’t show it.
(She’s not showing much of any emotion right now except discomfort for her hands and arm.)
Her mommy really enjoyed the surprise also.

Flowers!- Hey where’s the excitement? She was busy asking why people send flowers.

A little smile.

Sausage fingers. Not a good pic- really just a close crop of a larger one, but her fingers are very swollen.

The hives are also darker in real life. The flash washed out the some of the pinkness she has. She does looks more like herself today though.

Update from 5 minutes ago: 🙂

She loves the bear!

 

 

The hives have gotten worse so I went and picked up the steroid the nurse prescribed. Lilah will also be sleeping with me tonight so I can monitor her breathing. She’s had no problems thus far, but since she was progressively getting worse as the day went on I don’t want to take any chances.
Her face is even more covered with hives and her legs are mostly red with white welt middles. It’s so sad.

With the first picture she was more, ‘Mom why are you taking pictures of my bumps and why must I hold the shirt up?’ it wasn’t until the evening came on that she started acting more like how that picture feels.
She’s my sad little girl.
So I think I’m gonna skip the birthday party we were invited to and the temple session with the RS sisters that I was thinking of going to instead of the birthday party because I was looking forward to that before the girls were invited to the party. I just need some me time and since I’m assisting Lilah’s class on Thursday, if I feel like I still can with all her skin problems, I wanted part of a day without craziness which interprets to time away from kids. Life is just crazy!
I may still go to the temple if the night goes smoothly, just because Judy is a very capable person, she does have 6 kids, and like I said, I need some me time to relax in this sea of craziness. Jon told me that this is probably what life will be like for the next few years and I say, why can’t I have it easy?
So we’ll see how the night goes. I’m praying Lilah doesn’t start wheezing, which is the reaction I had as a girl and would be cause for another expensive ER visit.

Nine days after starting Lilah on amoxicillin she is now having a reaction of hives. We had only one day left of the medicine, or two doses.

Damn allergic reaction.

Jon woke me up at 5:53 am to tell me Lilah had hives and I of course called my mom to see what I should do and he went to the Mayo Clinic family health book. She’s not wheezing and they’re just getting a worse, now looking better since I put some anti-itch cream on her, but no wheezing which would make it more of an emergency.

I’m just waiting for it to be 8 am so I can call the doctor and see if I need to take her in.
Poor baby, I hate hives.
………..

Well, I called at 8 am on the dot. The nurse said there was no way to tell what the rash is from unless they see it, though she thought it would probably be form the amoxicillin, so I brought her into see the nurse practitioner.
It was an allergic reaction and I’m to give her Benedryl. If it looks as though it’s not clearing up I have a steroid prescription to get filled that should help.
I feel like they are getting worse, but I’ll wait a little bit to see if they affect Lilah. She’s been pretty much her regular Lilah self, just spotted.

I have some pictures so you can feel some sympathy for my poor little girl.

She’s a dalmatian.

her back.

Lilah’s leg after lunch. The others were before lunch.

I think the hives started being more defined in their borders.

I had Judy watch Eden for me so she could have some fun while Lilah got taken care of and I picked Naia up from Julie’s work after the appointment, since it’s right by my doctor’s office and I wasn’t positive that Lilah didn’t have something contagious.
Before I picked Naia up we stopped at Smith’s to get the Benedryl and I got us a couple doughnuts as a treat. The baker there thought Lilah was cute and she felt bad that she had some sort of allergic reaction. We got a couple of free bite sized cookies, though she was just giving them out.
Lilah’s become shy around everyone, grandparents included. I think she may be doing it for attention. ‘If I act like a baby I’ll get more attention’, though Jon will say she’s just shy. There are times she acts shy and doesn’t speak and then there are times she acts shy and doesn’t speak, but she makes baby type motions or sounds. I don’t know what to do with her.

So my worry about my girls having the same allergy as me has manifested itself in Lilah. I guess time will tell if Eden has it also.

We were going to have family pictures taken today, but I forgot about Lilah’s gymnastics’s class that goes from 5:30-6:00 pm. So I rescheduled it for next Wednesday.

It’s not like we can do gymnastics or pictures tonight though. Even if she’s not contagious I don’t want the other parents worrying about her or the other kids shunning her, since it would be the first class and we know no one in it. I also don’t want to worry the teacher with a new student that has a full body rash.

I hope she gets better soon.

I had an eye doctor’s appointment today. Judy Lee watched my girls and I took Naia with me to the doctor. I figured one child that I can leave in a car seat would be much easier than 3 children with 2 that would move around at their own free will. I’m also responsible for Naia once Julie leaves her in my care, so I’d feel bad leaving her with another babysitter.

My eye prescription didn’t need to be changed and so this will make two consecutive years that my vision hasn’t changed.

I’m sad because I wanted new glasses.
We gorilla glued a nose piece that had fallen off about two weeks ago so I was hoping that I’d have a valid excuse and would need a new prescription since the gorilla glue is like super strong super glue and my glasses are bound to break in every other place besides my right nose piece now. I’ve never kept a prescription longer than a year, which means I’ve never had a pair of glasses for longer than 2 years because I think once we just had the lenses changed.
I am happy to have my eyes stabilized. I wear a -5.00 which is pretty blind, so had my eyes continued to change like they have in the past I’d probably be legally blind by 35. My doctor mentioned how at age 23-24 women’s eye sight stabilizes and that’s the age they suggest getting laser eye surgery. I would love to get laser eye surgery but it costs too much money to even consider when you have a house payment, a car payment and home improvements to pay for, not to mention other costs that “come” up. I’ll probably be forty or seventy by the time laser eye correction becomes a priority, or legally blind. Maybe they’ll have a magic pill I can take by then.

If you go here you can kinda experience how blind I am.
When I complete an eye exam I can’t even tell that the top letter is an “E”. All I see is a blur with no distinguishable shape.

On an up side whenever I have the Lee’s watch my kids they always tell me I need to bring them over more often because it takes them so long to warm up to the place. Judy had to take kids to school and so it wasn’t until about 20 minutes before I came to get the girls that they left the couch once the kids were dropped off. I guess that’s what I get for having shy children.

So we found out that Lilah did not have protein in her urine, under closer testing, and she did have a UTI. So my question is how reliable are these dipsticks if they were both wrong!? Or did the nurse testing my daughters urine somehow mix them up?
So I have some amoxicillin to give to Lilah starting tomorrow.
I am like deathly allergic to the penicillin family so whenever I have to give my girls a medicine in this family I worry. This is only the second time though. I think Lilah took penicillin for her ruptured ear drum and now we’ll see if she has any reaction to this.
I had penicillin without any reactions and then one day I had a reaction to it that showed my allergy, so I will probably never consider my girls out of the woods for this allergy. Instead of giving Lilah the medicine tonight I’m waiting until the morning so I can watch for any reaction.
I wonder if my nervousness for a potential allergy will ever go away. I’m seriously nervous about giving her the medicine because I remember how bad my hives were and the itchiness that affected even my eyes and I never want my girls to go through that. In a way I don’t want to give her the medicine, but I know it will do her good and that just because I have the allergy doesn’t mean she will.

Other news about Lilah is she appears to be not sucking her thumb as often or really at all, mostly. This morning she complained about it hurting and I mentioned it might be sore because she sucks it. ( Jon mentioned to me how he’s noticed that she hasn’t been sucking it as often so he doesn’t want to have any negative attention due to sucking the thumb. I was just telling her how it is.) Once Jon mentioned not seeing Lilah suck her thumb as much I realized that I’ve noticed that she doesn’t suck her thumb at nap time and she’s not sucking it as much when we’re watching something or in the car, or when she’s bored. Instead she’ll eat her fingers or her blanket or the stuffed animal she has, which I totally don’t approve of, but this is mostly at nap time, when I think she’s most susceptible to wanting to suck her thumb. I am wondering if it’s a conscious decision or unconscious, but probably a little of both.
I am a little relieved to see her not sucking her thumb as often but that’s only because she’s getting older, though I didn’t mind except when she didn’t want to hold my hand in public because she was sucking her thumb, which is about the only time she’s ever let it get in the way.
We’ve never given her any grief for sucking it because often if a child is teased or discouraged in a negative way from sucking their thumb they will either react two ways, not sucking it anymore or the more common reaction is continuing to suck the thumb due to psychological trauma. As a psych major I know that most thumb sucking past the age of five is due to psychological trauma or emotional trauma, not always but often.
Since neither of our parents, and most of our family members, don’t approve of thumb sucking by toddlers we often had to remind them not to tease Lilah or give her the impression it’s wrong. I’m sure as Eden gets older we’ll have the same small battle.

We let out girls suck their thumbs so they could self sooth and there wasn’t any searching for a pacifier in the night because they lost it while sleeping, though we did have to help them learn to use their thumbs and find them when they were very little.

Yesterday I missed a phone call form my dermatologist office. I was taking a nap with Lilah.
I worried about what it might mean. They have a policy where if you don’t hear from them in a week you’re fine, so I was a little perplexed.
I thought maybe it was insurance, though I hadn’t been billed , or possibly I did need another surgery to remove more precancerous cells from the mole they took off in June. I didn’t want that to happen because I now watch Naia and not picking up a 6 month old would be hard while I’m taking care of her and since Eden is in a toddler bed I would have no other need for help besides when I had Naia. I also remember how hard it was to not do anything and to depend on Jon to do chores or whoever was here when I had my surgery last time. So I worried and called early this morning. They had gotten behind on their biopsy reports and my mole had been precancerous, but the doctor removed it all and I just needed to go in for a check up in about 6-8 months, instead of a year basically.

This is my third mole that has been precancerous. I’ve had four removed thus far and one of them needed sutures. None of my other moles look as though they need to be removed, though a couple are suspicious to me.
It’s frustrating to have all these precancerous or abnormal moles. It makes me happy that we’ve caught them but it brings a burden of worrying about skin cancer for the rest of my life. It also makes me worry about my girls and knowing that they will be susceptible to skin cancer and my family.
So I urge everyone to get checked now so it’s easily fixed instead of later when it might leave a larger scar or be more damaging.

So we’ve decide no more little rubber bands for Eden’s hair. She’s pulled the last trick and put the last rubber band into her body.
Today she was asleep once we got home from a morning of errands. I laid my angel down and she and Lilah took long naps.
Well both girls awoke and at some point before I got in there Eden took her hair holders out once again.
I asked where they went and she said her nose. I couldn’t see anything when I look up her nose with a light and we found one of the rubber bands in her bed. I would have taken her to a quick care right away but we have a well doctor’s appointment tomorrow. So I was torn, should I talk her or do I wait? Well the night progressed and I checked up there after dinner sometime. I saw where it was lodged and as I went to retrieve it with tweezers the thought that I could do more harm then good came to mind since it was in a precarious spot and then I remembered how a woman’s son had aspirated a popcorn corneal and had lots of problems. I finally decided to take her to a quick care. It was 7:45 and I was I hoping to get there before 8 pm. Well it didn’t matter that I made it there before 8 because it closed at 7:30pm. I called Jon and asked him to page the doctor to see if it could wait until tomorrow. I guess he chuckled at the thought of waiting and said, yes we should get it taken care of tonight. I was waiting at Target to return shoelaces while he paged the doctor so I just finished some shopping.
(We’ve decided to try the little barrettes to see if they’ll keep her hair out of her face, since Jon won’t let me cut bangs on her.)
I went to the ER and waited forever. We finally got in and it took very little time to get the small clear rubber band out. I think it was easily 1/2 inch in but more between 3/4 to an inch deep within her nasal cavity from how far the light thingy went up her nose. The first doctor couldn’t find it at first so I think for a few seconds he thought I was just an overreacting mother until he spotted it. I held her head while the first doctor held the light and the main doctor retrieved it and a nurse watched and also held Eden’s head. It was a little scary for Eden and she didn’t want to talk after that, but she did give the nurse a high five.
Eden got stickers and I received lots of complements on her cuteness and her good behavior of being calm while they got the rubber band out.
So that was my night. I got home around 10:40pm and Eden was still awake, as was Lilah who was anxiously awaiting her sisters arrival.
Oh the adventures of motherhood!

Jon’s new thing is to drink green tea. Now green tea is not technically against the word of wisdom so he’s still not breaking any rules, not that he cares, but I kinda do mostly for the sake of the girls and setting examples. I forget where, and maybe it’s a wise tale and hopefully Jon will give me some links to back me up since I’m just too lazy to look for them, but it has been said that in countries where tea is apart of their cultural that the church has said it’s okay to drink green and white tea, they just don’t advertise that too much here in the U.S. Green and white tea have less caffeine and I’ve even been told by a highly creditable source that the caffeine make up is completely different in black than green tea. Green tea also has health benefits, that’s one of the reasons Jon’s drinking it.

Anyways, I’ve tasted some of the tea’s Jon’s gotten and they just taste like not flavored enough water. I’m just not use to the subtleties. He also doesn’t add any sugar or sweetener’s so I think that makes them even more bland.
Well, while I was looking for his tea the other day at Smith’s I came across this Chai tea Latte mix. I have a friend who drinks Starbuck’s chai tea. Now they use a powder, I believe, but chai tea is made from regular black tea, so technically we shouldn’t drink regular chai tea because it is just spiced black tea, powder or not. Anyways the Chai tea latte mix that I found also comes in a green chai tea latte mix, in which I bought some and tried it. I found it delicious and on further search found out that it’s made by the same people who make Stephen’s hot cocoa, the best hot cocoa in America, I’ve never tried any others.
So I am recommending this Pacific Chai Green Chai Tea Latte mix. It mostly taste like spiced milk, but it is tasty. I’ve only tried it hot, but I think I’ll try it iced next time.

Well I’m trying to get serious about working out. Well exercising. I don’t have a gym membership for a few reasons: one it costs money; two I don’t think there is one within 20 minutes of me that I would like to go to anytime at night or early morning when it’s still dark; three I’d have to go in the evening when Jon got home or before he goes to work (I’ve mentioned how I don’t get up until he leaves at 7:30 right?); fourth even if I had a car Jon doesn’t trust gym daycare, so I’d have to do a trade or wait until he got home anyways.
The last reason is I’ve never been to a gym so I’m afraid I’d look like a complete idiot trying to work certain equipment and also I’ve heard gross things about the germs and bacteria on gym equipment.

My solution Winsor Pilates. I have an aerobic workout and a toning one that I plan on alternating each day, where as before it was do one or both of them once a week. I also have other videos once I get good/bored of these.
I’ve worked out each day of the week, or three days thus far. I plan on doing my ab workout tonight. It just works out better for me to do the toning at night on days that I do it, and the aerobic during the day on those days.
I’m changing my diet a little. I think it has helped, though I’m not sure. The one reason I’m becoming diligent is I gained like 5 pounds last Sunday. I think the trip up to Utah caught up with me and it all went to my gut, butt and thighs, especially my gut. My pants are getting very uncomfortable and I fell so self conscious in them because they’re so tight. For this reason I want to really lose weight and why I’ve been motivated to workout three times this week alone.

So here are things I’m hoping will help:
Drink more water or at least a glass at each meal. (In the end it will be about 6 cups a day.)
Have a smaller breakfast and a snack in the mid morning. (I like a big bowl of cereal at breakfast and I don’t eat until lunch.)
Eat eggs regularly to help with protein intake. ( I like them with toast at lunch, this way I last longer. I get so light headed at 3pm or right at the time I’m finally able to work out when I eat a light lunch without eggs. if I have my afternoon snack before I workout I then cramp during the aerobic and have a need to stop anyways. I honestly wonder if I have a blood sugar problem.)
Eat less sweets and chocolate. (I’m doing well on this. We still have some of the chocolates in the cupboard from valentine’s and the girls have helped me eat most of them, though I’ll be glade when they’re finally gone. I did just buy some girl scout cookies on Saturday though.They’re for a good cause at least.)
Don’t eat after 7-7:30 pm. (This is a hard one. I get hungry at 9 and have a snack. This was explainable when I was breast feeding but now it’s just habit.)

I already feel better after trying this week to not eat at night. It may just be placebo though. I’m just trying to regulate and do better. I want to eat in a way that I can continue it the rest of my life, or for a very long time anyways. I just want to build good habits. I know there are faster ways to lose weight, but I don’t mind if it takes a while. I really just want to be healthy and happy to know that I’m taking care of myself and I hope that I lose weight along the way. I do want to lose some weight quickly, like the 5 pounds I just gained, but we’ll see.
I know the Wendy’s I had for lunch is not going to help the process. Maybe I should do the aerobic and ab workout today……