Thursday, July 16, 2009

A rose by any other name...

Ainsley and Hudson are both going to VBS this week at Abundant Life. They have loved it (although there is an Ainsley story from the 1st and 2nd nights that when I have time I will write down for my other blog). I confirmed tonight another example of something that Hudson and I have in common. This year at preschool it took him a really long time to learn the other boys names, and aside from 1 or 2 he never knew any of the girls names. Like me, Hudson just has a hard time remembering peoples names. I was suspicious last night, and confirmed tonight, that he is just calling any boy he plays with "Jackson" or "Connor." We originally thought Jackson from church was going to go to this VBS and Conner was his best friend at pre-school. So rather than learning the kids actual names, he is just calling them the two names that come to mind easily. I guess that works when you are 5. I think I'm just going to pick a name to start calling people who I can't remember. Will that be a social problem?

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Catch-Up

I know, I know... everyone is busy. But I promise, we have been really busy, which is my excuse for why I haven't blogged anything despite 35, or maybe 350, possible blogging entries. So for the two of you who may still check my blog despite the lack of entries, here is why there has been nothing new for quite some time:

  • We sold fireworks. Some people go on vacation with their friends. We run a business with ours. There is no family better to hang out with in a parking lot for hours at a time, stress out over fire marshall visits, worry about slumping sales, be happy that we are not selling in Vancouver this year, and generally be hot and dirty with than the Strandbergs. Any money we have made or will ever make is not going to be enough to balence out the fact that our children are now OBSESSED with fireworks and for the rest of their lives will spend way to much money on them. The highlight of the year for us really was that Ainsley spending hours there with us, by choice. She actually got quite good at running the adding machine, counting back change, and memorized tons of prices. Overall, even if we made no money, she improved her math skills by at least 1/2 a grade in 10 days and loved every minute of it. While I'm happy for people to buy fireworks from me if they are going to buy them anyway- I have to admit (and please forget I said this by next summer if you buy fireworks from me) I just don't get it- go light some dollar bills on fire. (and this is where Eric tells me to stop saying that.)
  • For Ainsley's 8th birthday, Andrew's parents gave her a trip to Seattle on the train with them by herself. (awkward sentence, sorry-not going to fix it). She took that trip in June and had a spectacular time. Hopefully soon I will upload pictures of her trip, she had an amazing time and so did Jim and Arlene. They said that it was so fun to see something through the eyes of an 8-year-old. I need to remember that!
  • We have been keeping the medical community in business. We finished fireworks on Sunday, then Monday morning we took all three kids to the doctor for shots (good mom points that I'm not waiting until the week before school to get them caught up! Some post in the past that I'm not going to spend the time linking to records a time when everyone was way behind. We were behind this time also... but at least I got it done!) Of course with our kids there is a story to go with the shot adventure. Hudson and Camden always "shoot" each other and everyone else by yelling "fire!"with play guns, or you know ANYTHING because anything can become a gun if you are a boy. For Camden this has evolved into yelling "fire!" when he is yelling and really mad at something or someone. "Fire" has become the worst word he knows. This has continually evolved into yelling "Your Fired!" at me or anyone else when he is mad. My response is often, "great, I don't like this job right now anyway." He is not a little Donald Trump wanna-be, he doesn't know it has anything to do with an actual job. However, our poor nurse doesn't know this, because of course as she was giving him the shot, you guessed it, he yelled, "YOU'R FIRED!"
  • We moved right along from the shots to at 1:30 taking Andrew to have back surgery. He has struggled for 5 months with a back problem that is a re-occurrence of back problems from last year. After trying physical therapy, steroid shots, and rest, nothing has fixed it. So the next step was surgery. It was a 3 hour surgery and when the doctor came out he said that he would have never gotten better. A bump, like a knuckle, had developed on his disk. There was a nerve that was fusing itself right on that bump and that was causing the pain in his back, hip, and down his leg. They chizzled off (ewee-yuck!) the bump and cleaned out the disk. He should fully recover. You never know how God is going to answer prayer because we have been praying the other treatments would have fixed the problem, or make it tolerable so he could avoid surgery. However, if one of them would have worked it would have masked the pain and without fixing it there would have been long term nerve damage. So we feel so blessed he has had the surgery and is now on the other side. He is recovering well, although month 6, 7, and 8 of your pregnancy is not exactly when you would choose to have your husband not able to lift anything over 15 pounds (of course ruling out all of our children and all of the bags that we will be taking when we travel different places this summer) but we will make it!
Okay- I'm tired of writing- and if you have read this your tired of reading and really should get busy doing whatever it is your avoiding right now. Hopefully at some point soon I'll get pictures off my camera and do a better post. Until then this will have to do.