Gifts

One of the things Craig got me for Christmas was this bumper sticker, which he designed and had printed:

I love it so much!!!

November Portraits

So I mentioned that we had family portraits done in November and that I was SO happy with how they turned out!  Now that Christmas cards are over and past, I am excited to post a billion of them on my blog.  We ended up with 99 pictures from a 20-minute session (I LOVE this photographer-- she's the same person who did our pictures a couple years ago-- the picture I'm still using as our banner was her work, actually!).  I'm telling you this mostly so you can understand the remarkable self-restraint I'm showing by not posting all of them here.  But I am going to post a lot.  #Sorrynotsorry.

The location was gorgeous and I sort of loved the random people out rowing on the lake

Our main Christmas card picture

Why are families so cute walking and holding hands?

I especially love the face Colton is pulling here

Hey, we finally got Camille to smile!

My boys are so dapper!

And my girls are so cute!

One favorite and one outtake of each kid:

Love this one of Bentley

This one makes me laugh-- that is a very Bentley face to pull!

Pretty Kendra

And a funny one!

Ryder at his finest...

I especially liked how that one tree in the background matches my dress!

Looking adoringly at Craig

This one is actually my favorite-- I love how our heads are inclined together like we're sharing a joke

Capturing the circus that is our life!

And here we'd gotten cold and put our jackets on, but that looked pretty good, too!

So there you have it-- most of my favorites!  Aren't you glad I'm not an instagrammer?  Just think what I'd do to this poor blog!

Anyway, I cannot thank our photographer enough.  I honestly don't know how she got our motley little crew to look so good.

Post-Christmas Holidays

We got home from Ohio and everyone was sick.  So we spent most of the next week looking like this:

And this:

It was delightful, as I'm sure you can imagine.  Kleenex and cough drop wrappers everywhere.  Everyone constantly hacking.  I'm pretty sure all the kids did was lay around and watch TV.  (Which was all they would have wanted to do even if they'd been healthy, so really they got their wish!  I wouldn't have let that happen if they'd been healthy!)

It seemed like as soon as one kid would feel better, another would drop.  Or one that had been sick and recovered would suddenly have a 24-hour fever.  It was ridiculous.

Craig kicked it into overdrive and got TONS of stuff done.  He bought himself a new suit.  He set up a great little charging station for me in the kitchen.  He hung up this cool swing thing that Colton got for Christmas:

I like that it matches his walls!

Colton, sweet boy that he is, promptly let Ryder and Camille enjoy a turn, too:

I woke up one morning to find that Colton had gotten his new paints out and was already blossoming into an artist!  I was very relieved to see that he hadn't spilled a drop.  But we had a nice chat about how paints are only to be used at the basement table, not in our bedrooms!

And Ryder used his new Spider-man glove that can shoot water and/or silly string:

And we attended the neighborhood tree burn:

Our poor tree-- Craig had taken it down and put it outside and then it suddenly rained for a good thirty minutes!  Just enough to get it good and drenched.  So our tree was VERY smokey, but it still burned just fine!

But mostly everyone laid around being sick.

So as you can imagine, I was just as happy for the break to end and to send them all back to school.  I like my routine and was anxious to get back to it!

So naturally, they had one day in school (which Ryder came home early from, because he had a sinus headache), and then it snowed, giving us two snow days and a 2-hour delay.  So much for my routine!  And, to really make it all worse, the first snow day I had someone coming out to tune my piano!  So I wanted it quiet!  Do you know how NOT quiet five kids tromping in and out of the snow are???  Not quiet.  Not quiet at all...

Colton finds THE weirdest way to wear this hat...

So the kids had a great time and I'm glad they got some days where they were healthy and could play!  We also managed to do some shopping at Barnes and Noble (yay for my kids getting some fun gift cards!) and Old Navy (my big kids REALLY needed new pants), so that was good to get done.  I hate to spend a Saturday shopping, so it was nice to get those things checked off the list.

But really, I will be so happy to get back to normal life.

Also-- it occurred to me that I am so lucky that I like my "normal life" so much!  What a blessing to actually enjoy an average day in one's own life and not only live for the weekends!

Lumpy

When I started exercising a couple years ago, my left wrist started to hurt.  Well, actually, EVERYTHING hurt because I hadn't exercised in forever.  So I figured that was normal muscle soreness and I'd push through the pain and eventually nothing would hurt much.

Well, I built up muscle and things stopped hurting so much.  Except my left wrist.  Eventually, it dawned on me that this must not be a case of sore muscles, since it wasn't getting any better no matter.  I wondered if it might be a touch of arthritis, since my grandma (and maybe my mom?) have arthritis.  Craig got me those little handle things for doing pushups, but they didn't help at all (and they DID make doing pushups significantly harder!).  And as the pain persisted, a little more research convinced me that maybe what I had was tendinitis, instead.  I mentioned it at my last physical, and the nurse practitioner said that made sense.  She said exercising wouldn't help, so just be careful with my wrists.

It's been amazing to me how many exercises use your wrists!  Inchworms, pushups, crab reaches, walkouts, mountain climbers, burpees...  A LOT of them rely on putting weight on your wrists!  I figured out that if I held my hand a little differently, it helped a lot.  Rather than having my palm flat on the floor, I'd put my weight on my fingertips, or hold that hand at an angle.  It worked.

But I developed a lot more empathy for people with other body parts that hurt-- if I think it's hard to exercise with a bum wrist, imagine trying to find stuff you can do with bad knees or a bad back!

And then a few months after that, I noticed that I had a lump on that wrist!  I'd just been assuming I was seeing my wrist bones, but the lump didn't match my other wrist!  The two were noticeably different. 

A quick google search told me that what I have is a ganglion cyst.  And another visit with a doctor confirmed it.  He explained that they used to treat these by bashing them with a giant book (hence their fun nickname, Bible Bumps!) and they've also treated them by sticking a needle in and drawing out the fluid, but he strongly discouraged both methods because all that does is form scar tissue around a cyst that will just grow back.  He said the only thing that might work is surgery, and surgery is more likely to be successful if they're not dealing with scar tissue, too.

Around this time my wrist pretty much stopped hurting, so I'm not inclined to bother with surgery until it either a) hurts a LOT or b) gets a lot bigger and uglier.  So hopefully we can kick surgery down the road a bit.

But a weird thing happened over Christmas break.  I didn't find time to exercise at all, and my wrist got really sore again!  Getting back to my workout routine this week (#Newyearsgoals) seems to have helped.  Who would have guessed?

So now I guess I'm really on the hook to keep up with my exercising. 

Anyway, I've started thinking of my cyst as Lumpy.  It looks like we're going to be together for a while.

December Week #4!!!!

The following Monday we'd been planning to go to Kings Dominion, since the kids were out of school.  But enough kids were sick that we finally decided that wouldn't be a good idea after all.  I managed to get Colton in to see his ENT doctor, who confirmed that he definitely had an ear infection but said his tubes were working beautifully and to just keep using his ear drops like we were doing.  So that was good (but also, super gross: working tubes basically means you've got snot oozing out your ears.  BLURGH.  But better than staying stuck in your eardrums, I guess?)  And of course there was plenty We seemed to keep busy enough running out to stores and wrapping presents that this didn't feel like a huge loss (although I AM still hoping we can go soon, if everyone can just get healthy already!!!).

And suddenly it was Christmas Eve!  Some of our friends in our ward had planned a brunch and games at the church, so we had fun attending that:

Camille demonstrating her sweet ninja moves!

Kendra did a great job wrapping up Ryder!

I think I've mentioned this before, but IT IS SO FUN TO HAVE FRIENDS IN MY WARD FINALLY!!!

So that was a great morning (other than Colton still being under the weather).  Then we went home and I ran around doing my last cleaning before Craig's parents arrived and it was Christmas (because I am NOT doing laundry on Christmas!).  Craig worked on pies with his Mom and I worked on mashed potatoes.  I tried a new thing by cooking the potatoes in my instant pot, but alas, it did NOT work.  They were way more work, I made a way bigger mess, and then they didn't even taste good.  Utter fail.  But if that's the worst thing about your Christmas, that still isn't bad at all!

We had our usual pizza (YAY for pizza on Christmas Eve!) and then drove around looking at Christmas lights.  The tacky lights place that we've enjoyed visiting in the past is no more-- it's really sad, apparently the man who did it died of cancer.  But I had to drive by his place just in case and to our utter delight, his neighbors had put up a whole bunch of lights and decorations!  It felt like a (minor) Christmas miracle and I was so happy we'd driven by!

Then we sang hymns.  We didn't have any real pianists this year, but the kids each knew a couple Christmas songs and I could usually plunk out the melody at least, so we got by...

And then it was time to open Christmas jammies from my parents:

We've done this enough years that the kids knew exactly what to expect and even said, "When do we get to open our jammies???"

So it was kind of fun because this year we (sort of) tricked them: THEY GOT ROBES INSTEAD!

This shot is so blurry, but I love that you can see how excited Camille is!

So snuggly and matchy!  Perfect for Christmas Eve!

We got the kids to bed and then the hard part was waiting until they were asleep so we could get to work!  Tom wanted us to watch the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert from last year when Kristen Chenoweth hosted it, but we couldn't get it to work at all-- YouTube was being so slow on our TV, it kept freezing after a couple minutes.  Then Craig flicked around on our channels and figured out it was being broadcast on PBS in an hour, so we just waited and watched it on regular TV like we were back in the 90s or something!  Crazy, huh?  But it was a lot of fun to watch!

And then we could finally do our thing:

The kids weren't allowed to get up until 7, and as you can imagine, they were right on time.  Just convincing them to give me a minute to use the bathroom before we let them go downstairs was like trying to hold back wild horses.

Can you feel the excitement?

Somehow Bentley beat everyone down the stairs without knocking anyone down!

Then Craig proceeded to take a whole lot of live photos, which are very fun, but I haven't figured out how to post those on this blog yet.  So I will not be sharing any of them!  But here's one of the still ones he took near the end of the craziness:

It was a lovely day!  Everyone seemed very happy with their gifts!  Craig's turkey was (once again) delicious, so hopefully no one cared too much that my mashed potatoes were gross.  (Seriously!  They were NOT GOOD.  How does that happen???)  I was exhausted and put myself to bed early.  So did Colton, actually, but that was mostly because he was sick.  (It's always so weird when your kid puts themselves down for a nap.  I can't decide if I'm sad because they're clearly unwell or just excited that they're napping!)

The next day he was STILL sick, so I took him in to see a pediatrician.  I thought maybe he needed oral antibiotics in addition to the ear drops, but the doctor said whatever he had was viral and there wasn't much to be done.  He tested him for flu and it was negative, so that was good.  He said we could go to Ohio as planned, but that the less he coughed all over everyone the better.  So we loaded up the van and drove to Ohio!

We'd been planning this for months: Leah was also stopping by Rachael's (on her way back to New York from Tennessee), so I'd get to see two sisters (and 4.5 cousins!) for the price of one short 5-hour drive!  What a deal!  Unfortunately, about ten minutes after Leah and family arrived, Colton threw up.  So then I felt terrible for dragging him all over and for exposing everyone else to his germs.  HE HADN'T BEEN THROWING UP BEFORE!!!!  Ugh, I hate moments like that when you feel like the worst parent ever.  (In my defense, no one else has thrown up-- I think it was really just brought on by a coughing fit.  But it's still gross.)

Anyway, we enjoyed everyone's company!  Craig got to see Rachael and Ian's beautiful new house and I gabbed with my sisters so much I lost my voice.

Colton and Theo enjoying all the mag-snaps!

Eliot and Camille together, Harrison, Rachael (and Baby #3!!!) and Craig in the background

Leah & Brian gave us a drone for Christmas and Craig LOVES flying it!

This is an AMAZING cousin shot!

So it was great seeing everyone, but unfortunately Colton didn't seem to be getting better and then Kendra was getting sick, too, and with my voice gone, I decided we should not stick around until Sunday as planned.  So we loaded up as headed home Saturday afternoon.  So it was a very quick trip, but still fun!

We got home no problem and have pretty much sat around coughing ever since.  It's been very sad.  I've never had all my kids so sick for so long.  My guess is they'll all feel better just in time to go back to school and then they'll be very bitter about it.  And who could blame them?

But at least Christmas was happy and they got to see lots of family.  It definitely could have been worse!