Saturday, November 20, 2010

Shutterfly Fun

Hey all,

A friend of mine had a link on her Facebook account to get 50 free Shutterfly greeting cards if you are a blogger, so I figured, what the heck, might as well try it. My friend swears by Shutterfly and has used their services a lot.  For instance she has made really cute books through Shutterfly about each of her kids.  However  I am new to shutterfly so I can't really tell you if it is good or bad, but hey for 50 free cards, I am willing to give it a good try.  I'm actually kind of excited to see what kind of creation I can make.   I am going to use these free cards for Christmas this year.  I wasn't really sure if I was going to send them out this year, but with this killer deal, I might as well.  Here are the links, go for it, try it, what's the worst that could happen.
http://blog.shutterfly.com/5358/holiday2010-blog-submission-form/

Here are some links to different products and services they have.  Happy card making!
· Holiday cards to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/holiday-cards

· Christmas photo cards to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery
· Desk calendars to http://www.shutterfly.com/calendars/desk-calendars
· Photo mugs to http://www.shutterfly.com/photo-gifts/photo-mugs
· Birthday cards to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/birthday-cards-stationery
· Holiday invitations to http://www.shutterfly.com/cards-stationery/christmas-invitations
· Choose your favorite product from our Cards & Stationery page

Thursday, November 11, 2010

My dad was helping fix and organize things at my grandma's home in Cali and along with it, inherited her old car. So he had to drive it home to Michigan and of course had to come through Utah, so we were able to have a quick visit with him at my brother's home. It was fun, the kids always love see their grandparents even if it is for short time.
Kirsten's new party trick is to make a silly face, so I was trying to get her to do it for one of the pics, however it took about 5 shots to get her to do it and by that time my kids had been holding that face for too long, so this was the best that we got.
Thanx grandpa for taking time to visit with us.

Monday, November 8, 2010

Crazy Hair

It was Red Ribbon week last week and last Friday was Crazy Hair Day.  One of the things McKenzie really wanted to do was cut her hair before Crazy hair day so that it made it even crazier.  I actually wanted to try and make an attempt at crazy hair, so I went to the party store and bought every color of colored hairspray, cuz I never have it when I need it, and let the kids choose what they did.  Mac wanted  kind of a Shrek thing going on, only with 3 ear instead of 2.

 I'm not creative enough yet with hair, so I tried so weird twisting pony tail things with Morgie and sprayed it Cougar white and blue.

 Micah liked the Cougar theme so we striped him up.
 And we got one more day of nice walking to school in and got a crazy hair shot of everyone.  Man, I'm ready for spring to come back already.  I wasn't finished doing my outside walking.

The Hair is Gone

I finally caved and let her do it.  McKenzie has been begging me for sooo long to let me cut her hair and I convinced her to wait till after Halloween to do it so she could put it in a ponytail, (cuz let's face it, 50's girls did not have A-line hairstyles back then).  With all of the chaos of Malia's surgery and . . . pretty much that, I couldn't even think of anything else.  But Thursday, she soooo kindly reminded me again, and I got my friend, at the last minute, to show up at my door with a hair supplies in tow, to surprise Mac with a cut.
 I love her hair short I do have to say.  She had exactly 10 inches, just enough for Locks of Love.  We were going to go with Wigs for Kids cuz apparently the other charges for wigs and Wigs doesn't, but they need 12 inches and I just couldn't put up with 2 more growing inches.  1 was hard enough.  We'll see if she will let it grow out again.
 Thanx Brookie for helping us out.  You da Bomb!

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Going Under the Knife

The day finally arrived.  Big changes were coming to such a small little girl, and we were all excited for the end results.  For the last year and a half, Malia has had a lower than normal voice and been getting sick a little too often for our comfort.  After talking with her pediatrician at her last well child check up, he referred her to an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor who scoped her and said her adenoids were almost covering her nasal passage and her tonsils were not much better.  She gave us the info we needed and we decided to get them both removed.  We knew something was wrong and it needed to be fixed or there could be serious repercussions later down the road.  So we scheduled 1 month ago for today.  We really didn't talk to her about it until about a week ago when we attended a "Pre-op Hop" to help kids who are prepping for surgery could get themselves acclimated with the surroundings and equipment that was going to be used on them.  Amy her helper was amazing.  She was really thorough, gave her a doll to decorate, instruments to test out and even gave her the mask that they were going to use on her so she could practice at home.  She was actually excited to go and use the things she had been practicing with.  Last night, we went out to eat at IHOP because it was going to be the last real meal she was going to be able to eat for a couple of weeks and she wanted hamburger and fries AND juice (go figure).  We wanted to have her voice on record to see if there was a difference after she healed so we videoed her at IHOP.  However, she had way to much sugar yesterday and so she was acting really goofy and making her voice higher for part of it, oh well, we tried.

She realllllly wanted juice. 
 Grandma was even able to come down to help out with the rest of the kids so Randy and I could be with Malia the whole day.  (can you see a theme here with the juice).
 We were scheduled to be at the hospital at 7 AM and since we weren't going to the one right down the hill from us, we had to be up at 5:30.  We were a little tired.  But she is still smiling.
Eah and Mom before surgery.
 

I just had to get one more vid. of her beforehand, cuz who knows what was going to happen after.
How quickly it can change though.  Here she is about 20 minutes after she came out of surgery, man that anaesthesia was not her favorite.  She was thrashing and wailing and gnashing her teeth.  It was sooo sad to see her like this.  Her doctor said that her tonsils were actually worse than what she thought.  That when she went in there, they were "kissing" which meant they were actually touching each other when she was laying down.  So it really was good we decided to do both.

Such a sad little girl.
 She didn't do well in recovery, she could not keep her O2 levels up above 88 and wouldn't drink anything.  The meds that were in her body was just making her act weird and she just wasn't really "there" for a long time.  So, because they needed beds for other surgical patients, they transferred us up to the Pediatric unit to finish recovering and try drinking juice and eating Popsicles.  It was nice to not have people on top of us and have a little privacy.  She slept a lot and whined a lot and ate and drank very little for a long time.  We watched Marley and Me and tried to convince her to drink something.  She eventually got her footing and walked around a bit and we found the playroom.  At which point we realized she needed more pain meds and gave her the option of drinking her meds and getting the IV out or keeping it in and getting the meds put into her IV.  She really hated that IV and probably would've done anything to get that thing out.  So she took her meds and proceeded to spit it out, so we tried a different med and she drank it up.  She was soo happy to be free of that stupid tube.  We went down to the playroom again and gave her a different juice and got a few sips out of her.  It wasn't until this person
 showed up and convinced her that the sooner she drank her juice the quicker she could get out of there (which she apparently didn't hear the 50 million times before that was said by me and Randy and every other nurse out there).  Thanx a million Andrea, you Da Bomb!!!! 

She had fun with the play room toys, especially anything she could push around.  The wagon soon became the big hit.
 And of course I had to get the backside hospital gown shot.  It was too perfect.
 Sorry I couldn't resist another one.
 So after 7 hours of absolute fun, we were able to go home.  She made out like a bandit.  In the surgical wing, Amy brought her a quilt made by the Project Linus group along with a stuffed duck (which by the way worked wonders in recovery, she loved having it rubbed on her skin).  Then in the Peds unit she had a fleece blanket, beanie baby bear, sippy cup and pillowcase waiting for her. Andrea brought a new baby doll for her.  Oh and of course Grandma had to spoil her a little get her a Fur Real puppy, Toy Story 3 and have the kids give her a new Barbie.  Maybe she'll want to have surgery again, hopefully not.
The crazy thing is, she almost seems back to normal.  Her post op instructions told her to be on bed rest the next 3 days and light activity after that, HA!  That's not going to happen.  She wants to eat real food sooo bad and has no desire to sit still, cuz she knows if she does she will fall asleep, and of course who would want to do that?  We caught her with a stolen bag of Cheerios trying to stuff her mouth.  This is going to be a trying 2 weeks.  I'm just grateful she has done so well, except for the little hiccup recovering.  I'm so happy we got it done now when she can recover quickly and not when she's a teen or older and completely miserable the entire time.  I'm grateful for amazing technology.  Which reminds me, I need to get my Grateful Turkey up and going for the month.

Holy Halloween Batman!!!

Wow, the last few weeks have been nuts with Halloween preparations that I didn't have time to make individual posts about each of these, so I'm not going to.  You just get to have another reeeeeaaaalllyyy long post to read over, or not.  I was asked by Micah's teacher to help chaperon their field trip to a pumpkin patch.  It was a lot of fun, very chaotic, but fun.  These kids were hysterical.
 We took a hayride, I thought these 2 were cute together.
 Found a tepee made out of corn husks. . . and I only lost 1 kid the whole time (that's actually really good considering I had 6 and the pumpkin patch decided to have 4 other schools of kindergartner's there.  So there was a sea of 5/6 year-olds.  It got a little tricky keeping everyone together.
 We picked out pumpkins and I helped the older girls one night to carve theirs.
 The had fun scooping the guts by themselves, finally.
 Their masterpieces.
 I helped Malia the next day while everyone was at school.  She really loved the guts and was sad when it was all cleaned out.
 And of course we couldn't have a Halloween without pumpkin Ralph on our steps.  Micah didn't carve his pumpkin.  He was too preoccupied playing Harry Potter Lego's on the Wii and didn't want to do it until after Halloween.  So I told him maybe we would paint his for Thanksgiving.
 OH and did you hear, it snowed The Tuesday before Halloween?  Something I wasn't ready to wake up to.
 Luckily it didn't last very long on the ground.
 I'm the room mom for Micah's class again, so I got to put together his Halloween party this year.  I had a ton of help from sooo many mom's it was awesome.  I loved it.  He's the Cowboy riding the horse.
 Morgan was a Vampire, but didn't keep the wig on for very long.
 As you can see in the parade, this was about 15 minutes after the last shot.
 Mac was a 50's girl, my mom sent me the skirts we used as kids.  It was fun seeing her wear it.
 Emme was also a 50's girl, they had fun being twins.  I also helped out at McKenzie's party since Micah's was already done.  They had a lot of fun wrapping each other up in toilet paper and making sure no one ate Pete.
After the partying on Friday (which also included our ward party and trunk-or-treat)  Grandma and Grandpa took the kids home with them so Randy and I could have an evening together and party with a few of our friends.  We stayed up till 2 playing games and just having fun.

We got to Gma/pa's Saturday and they had more partying planned for the kids.  Lots of games and treats.  We went trick-or-treating Sat. night in their neighborhood.  Eah was a princess, she loved wearing the costume and holding the umbrella cuz  it had been raining right before we got out there.
 Getting ready for more candy.
 Still no wig but just as happy.
 Wondering if she's getting too old for this. . .
 And most of the crew.
 And of course we had to have pumpkin BOB to complete the Halloween festivities.
 Yummy cheesy goodness (even if my kids don't think so).
I love Halloween, but this year was just a little too chaotic for me, hopefully next year will be calmer since it lands on a Monday.  I love seeing my kids grow up and see how their tastes change.  What will next year bring?