Addison Poetry

Addi is going to be turning "8" in a month and will be baptized on April 12th. She is so excited, especially because she gets to go to activity days. Since this pic she has her hair cut in a A-line cut and she loves it. Her teacher said that Addi gave her the courage to cut her hair. Addi is into friends, science projects and visiting the science museum as much as possible, jumping on the tramp, piano, and, don't tell her I told you, a boy named Carson in her class. She is all about learning tricks on the bars at school and not running after the boys like all her girlfriends (well she used to be into that). She recently told me she wants to take dance again, which I'm pretty surprised about with having to wrestle her to the ground to get her to go a couple years ago. I thought she might like to play soccer or do gymnastics. Well, whatever, I know with her that she needs to want to do something or it's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved.

She loves her baby brother to death and is super helpful with him. And it's a fight every time we get into the car, who gets to sit by Asher. Well, it's all good I'm just glad they love their brother. She's growing so much that I feel like I'm constantly buying her new clothes. She will most definitely outgrow her Mom. :)

Asher Blain

Asher is starting to get down some of the basics to crawl and seems like it will be no time till it happens. Man my world is going to change. He does a push-up, brings his knees in and starts to rock and lunge. He says "ma ma" and the letter "k" sound all the time. He tends to be a momma's boy and isn't too keen when Dad comes and takes him away. The boy likes to eat and isn't too excited to get baby food while we eat. He's like "what's up with that" and yells. He loves big people food and man oh man--smoothies! Today I made a milkshake and the instant he heard the blender going he gave me the staredown, like where's mine. His arms and legs were going as fast as they possibly can and then he got all sad as he didn't get any and I drank mine. He's such a sweet boy! He loves to smile at everyone while we are out and about.

Man he is growing up fast.

London Autumn falling as usual

London decided to climb like a monkey, as usual, and fall, as usual, and break her arm last tuesday. We took her to our neighbors, who we lovingly call the Rohm urgent care center (the dad is a family doctor) and had her checked out. He wasn't sure if her arm was broken or sprained, so he wrapped it up and we gave her motrin and went off to the pinewood derby at church. While we were there she fell running right onto her same hurt arm. Awesome! The next morning she came in and said her arm still hurt and her fingers were all swollen, so we decided to take her into the peditrician to have x-rays taken. And yes it was broken thru and thru on her radius bone and bent upwards, so they sent us to the orthopedic doctor that same day to have them set and cast her arm. By the way, the doctor was in awe at how calm she was for such a bad break. At the orthopedic doctors they told me (Tracy) that they would have to push on her arm to set it and would just do it real fast without sedating her. They set it and she just whimpered a little bit as I held her, but then all the blood ran down my body and I started to sweat. I about fainted!! What a baby! So they bring me a chair and a washcloth while London is getting her arm casted in hot pink, she was excited about that. Anyways, she has it on for a month and gets it off on St. Patricks Day. She still runs around like crazy and is still falling everywhere. She's going to give me a heart attack. Enough already little London! Maybe we shouldn't have named her Autumn (or in other words, Fall). What did we do?!

Every Day Is Like Sunday

Well, OK, not every day is like Sunday, but today certainly is. I have been thinking about this last week and I thought it might be fun to write about what happened following Asher's recovery from RSV. If you read that post then you know that right after Asher began to feel better, and I mean within hours of his breathing returning mostly to normal, I had to go to Dallas for a national meeting for the company I work for. Not a great situation, but I really had to go.

So, my district, which has the uplifting and inspiring name of Skeleton Key, got the blessing of forgoing a standard meeting room or conference room and instead holding our portion of the meeting in a hotel room. Yes, that's right, a hotel room. Fourteen cranky salespeople and our national visitors crammed into a single hotel room. Now, the hotel staff did replace the bed with a conference table, but the whole point is that things were a bit cramped for the four days we were meeting. Add to the previous the fact that two of our numbers were coughing like they were paid to act as if they had Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, another got a stomach flu easier to catch than a pop fly, and a third came down with pink eye and had to be quarantined to her room for twenty-four hours, and you start to get an idea of the pleasant and motivating nature of our meeting. Recently one of our district members sent a voicemail comparing our meeting room to a petri dish. He even mentioned the fact that many of the members of some of the northeast districts (Boston, New York, etc.) had contracted our contagion.

By the end of the week I began to suspect that every object on our confernce table, every handout passed to us, and every writing implement was an infected fomite. I developed an acute obsession with handwashing and insisted that I not drink or eat anything anyone else in my district had touched.

Alas, my efforts were to no avail. As soon as I got home my eye began to itch like I'd rolled it in fiberglass insulation, my throat began to burn, and my chest congested near the point of respiratory distress. I immediately began a regimen of occular antibiotics, esther C, Airborne, Zicam, NyQuil, Tylenol, and Ibuprofen. My cold lasted only a week and I never once awoke with my eye glued shut by that nasty custard-like discharge associated with conjunctivitis.

Asher's bout with RSV

So, 26 January 2008 Asher started to develop a really bad cough. We didn't think too much of it as he'd had a head cold for the p;ast few days and we just thought it was part of the natural progression of things. Then the wheezing started. Later that evening we started to worry about the possibility of Asher having RSV, but didn't give it much creedence. On Sunday things got worse. I was out visiting a family I home teach when our neighbor who is a family doctor dropped in to check on the little guy and told Tracy he was taking Asher to his house to give him breathing treatments immediately.

Tracy called me and told me I needed to pick up a nebulizer and a prescription of Albuterol immediately. I dropped everything and broke every possible traffic law I could to get the medicine as quickly as I thought necessary. When I got to the doctor's house Asher was much worse. He was clearly in respiratory distress and although staying remarkably calm and good natured I could tell he was in a bad way.

The craziest part about the whole thing, you know besides the fact that my son was in danger and clearly sick, was that I had a national meeting in Dallas starting the next day which would run through the majority of the week. I phoned my boss and told him it didn't look like I would make it to the meeting.

After a few more breathing treatments I took Asher home and followed the doctors instructions which included liberal application of breathing treatments and not a whole lot of sleep. Between Tracy and myself we gave Asher treatments every couple of hours through the night until his breathing finally eased at about four o'clock Monday morning. At about seven AM I awoke, and determined Asher had largely recovered. I threw my bags in the car and went to the airport.

Tracy has been such a trooper. She continued with the breathing treatments as needed by Asher while I was gone, and took care of the girls with very little sleep through the whole week. What a great woman she is.

As you can see from his picture, Asher is about the cutest little thing I've ever seen. He has such a wonderful charisma already and we feel he more than adequately makes up for the terrible babies Addison and London were when they were his age. (I'm only partially kidding there, I seriously would've taken Addi back if I could've found the receipt within the thirty day return policy.)

Good Intentions

After recieving a link to Gina B's blog I decided that I am completely lame and it is indeed time to get onboard the slow train to bloggersville. So, here's our latest family picture. . . much thanks to Kristi Johnson for her patience and professionalism in dealing with the poor attitude I exude regarding family pictures and the acquisition thereof.