I've Fallen Off the Face of the Earth......

Ok, that would be too convenient an excuse, wouldn't it?  I have NOT fallen off the face of the Earth.  I have NOT been kidnapped by pirates, aliens, or roving packs of wild apes, wolves, or hedgehogs/armadillos/fruitbats in disguise.  What I HAVE been doing is getting my family to and from an impromptu Idaho vacation including 3000 driving miles, a transmission repair in the middle of  Nowhere, Wyoming and some wonderful family time, friend time with Ange, and new mountain scenery (score!).  Getting ready for school to start on a shoestring budget, and everyone settled into a routine with three kids going to three different schools on three radically different schedules.  All of this while frequently (almost constantly) dizzy and fighting a wickedly persistent fatigue and gearing up for sinus surgery.

BUT.....The results of the long-awaited and much-anticipated sinus surgery (on the day before my birthday) are starting to show.  My nose is almost back to non-swollen normal proportions, and best of all, I AM NOT DIZZY ALL THE TIME ANYMORE!!!  Seriously, I feel better than I had in years.  I am in control of my own body again, I have the energy to pay attention to things and people again (not necessarily in that order).  I have actually still been awake at midnight not once, but TWICE this week, instead of being dragged in a half-congealed state upstairs to bed at 9pm because I'm too dizzy to get there on my own.  I am still tender and sore in there, and the stitches inside my left nostril are more than slightly annoying, but I feel like I have my life back.  I feel like I have my mind back.  I feel like I have my SELF back.  I can walk up the stairs without having to carefully place each foot.  I can bounce up the stairs like a kid.  I can go to the grocery store without running out of steam halfway through the produce section.  The children are beginning to stop watching for me to grab the wall and running to be my crutches.

Many thanks to those who have put up with my inconsistencies, never knowing if I would actually be in a condition to go to an evening event or activity. I am grateful for my visiting teachers who kept us fed while I was recuperating from the surgery.  Never ending gratitude to the Alien who held our family together and functioned as Breadwinner, Dad and more than half of Mom so many days.  Thanks to my kids who seldom complained when mom was too dizzy to do household tasks, take them fun places, or finish everything I'd promised.  Thanks to whomever introduced me to the concept of a "Yoyo Dinner" " (You're On Your Own-which works great when there are leftovers and sandwich-makings and everyone wants something different anyway).  Thank you to the Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon who listened when I said I didn't care if he was sure the surgery would fix the dizziness, I needed it done because I couldn't stand to hear one more doctor/specialist tell me their own special version of "There's nothing wrong with you, go home"  and I didn't want to live on my couch anymore. Thank you so much for all who prayed for me and cared about me and my family and drove me to events and places I would have missed otherwise without making a public spectacle of me.  And most of all, thank you, Lord for this marvelous blessing.

Sister Okazaki

I am reposting this from "Casa Camisas", because she said it all so well. I like her comments, and I too loved Sister Chieko .

One of my favorite people, Chieko Okazaki, passed away last week. I think I was 11 or 12 when she was in the general RS presidency, and used to get so excited when it was her turn to speak in LDS General Conferences -- her talks were always interesting, always engaging. I usually don't like trite online tributes to people who didn't really know me, but I came across a quotation from one of her talks (it's from a BYU devotional, years ago) and it touched me so much that I wanted to share. Sis. Okazaki was a person with a very strong personal relationship with Christ, and in this passage, she expounds on how women in particular can grow closer to Him:
"Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It’s our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don’t think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don’t experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism.
Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, “And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He’s been there. He’s been lower than all that. He’s not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don’t need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief."

A Brief List of "Do"s and "Don'ts" for a Successful Cub Scout Day Camp

Here are a few observations from our week (so far) of Cub Scout Day Camp here in the wild woods of the Illinois suburbs with the Caveman.

DO pack multiple sets of rain gear on a stormy day, just in case some kid in your den doesn't have any.
DON'T hand the only adult size set to a kid in another den whom  you won't see again for a week.  You will be soaked to the skin.  All day.  And also look like the only person in camp who wasn't prepared.

DO teach your child to read directions carefully.
DO your best to teach your child to keep his hands to himself.
DON'T forget to teach your child that an "epipen" is not a "pen".
DON'T (as a camp director) leave a "lost and found" epipen sitting on a table for two days in front of 350 cub scouts.  SOMEONE will follow the directions.
DO try not to laugh when the camp director calls you and tells you your kid just shot himself up with adrenaline because ......well, isn't it obvious?

Construction Zone!

And the first big  project in the "new" house has begun.  Here is our stain comparison.

Can you guess what's going to happen here?  We're building custom bookshelves in the bedroom (happy happy dance of joy)!  They're going to start with some red oak kitchen "upper" cabinets, set onto a base on the floor, with pine bookshelves going all the way up to the ceiling, 10 feet wide.  So here are the stain colors on the two different woods, so that we can have it close to matching our current furniture.  We're using a color called "Ipswich Pine", which is of course, after bringing home 8 new colors to try, the one we already had on hand from another project.

So here's the "before" set.  The room still has contractor primer on the walls, at 12 years old.  The rest of the house was professionally (and very tastefully) painted right before we bought it, and I must confess to being pretty intimidated about doing any painting myself (as well as enjoying the fact that it didn't have to be done!)  We have a vaulted ceiling and that inset where the cedar chest and bookshelves are is the new construction zone.  The carpet will come up and the baseboards will disappear to give the cabinets a really solid base, and the shelves will be secured to the wall with cleats, and have an open back to the painted wall.

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Can I tell you how NOT fun it is to try and paint a ceiling, times 3 because it's not FLAT!
Luckily, I just had to hold the light and reload the paint roller, as the Alien is taller than me!

This took a lot more paint and time than we'd actually planned, but it's coming along nicely.   

And here's the first glimpse of the new color!  It actually turned out to be the same as the lower half of Caveman's room.  The primer and ceiling white went on just fine, but when I opened up the can of this stuff, it's like pudding!  We're having a hard time getting it smooth, and it's taking two coats to be really even.  We got all the way around the room twice with a two-gallon bucket of KILZ primer, but it's going to take at least 3 gallons to get the color on evenly.  Anybody have a guess, is it like that because it's so dark?  It's certainly thicker than the other times we've used the same brand of paint.

I will post more pictures later, but I want to go ahead and publish before I forget for another three months.....

Playing Catch-Up

Piano Recital--52 kids!!  And we survived sitting through the whole wonderful (but long) thing!  Caveman is in the white shirt facing the camera, and Dolly is in turquoise on the far right.

Yeah, yeah, it's been simply AGES since I put up a blog post.  And that's one of the reasons I procrastinated starting a blog in the first place, that I only seem to have worthwhile thoughts to post when I'm walking the dogs, and then when I get home, POOF!  They evaporate.  Well, that and the real fear that I would neglect it, and therefore feel guilty.  Mostly the guilt thing.

So what have I been doing while I wasn't blogging?  Well, I mostly did a lot of not much, but I do have some accomplishments to show off.  Here is a cute checked dress I made for the Dolly, out of fabric I've been saving since she was tiny and never seemed to get around to it.  Now that she's ELEVEN she's about to outgrow all the yardages I have on hand, so I got them out and here are the results. One checkered dress, one mother/daughter set in blue velvet, and a nightshirt and shorts out of pink plaid flannel.  I know, I can't believe I bought that, either.  You know how I feel about pink.

So what else has been up?  Two medical crises, well, ok, an allergy attack and some hip x-rays and physical therapy.  The Caveman has a narrowing of a cartilage disk in the lumbar area of his back, and it's causing a curvature.  He's enjoying all the fun and games at physical therapy, and we go back to the orthopedic surgeon in June.

The Monkeychild had a virus and an allergy at the same time, and WHOOMP! here is the reaction.  It was a very uncomfortable four days till it started to get better.  He had to undergo a whole series of prick tests for allergens (again!) and came up negative on everything.

Dolly had her birthday celebration at a local nature museum, and found a new friend in the butterfly haven.  It stuck around for over 20 minutes and had to be removed by a museum volunteer.

A few holidays, a field trip or two, and that's what we've been up to!

Twas the night before Christmas......

Beach pix-in honor of the first snowfall of the winter!

Started this post a while ago-better get it out of "drafts" now that it's spring.