Hot dogs in top ramen anyone?

I just noticed Chris fed the kids top ramen with hot dogs in it (not on the side but actually IN the ramen) and I had a good chuckle over it. Now we don't normally feed our kids such...interesting fare for lunch but its been quite the week already and this interesting combo just seems to exemplify it fantastically! 

Earlier this week Chris had to take the day off because he got some sort of chemical burn on his face from welding, now it was healing nicely until he decided to exfoliate his face while I was in class Monday which left him looking like this..

. He took the day off because it was burning badly (imagine that!). I called my mom and we had a good laugh at his expense and I kept asking him what the HECK he had been thinking and you wanna know what he said? "I was peeling like a snake and it was gross". Anyway he was back at work on Tuesday which also just happend to be the day he got out of the shower to discover our 2 and 4 year olds had gotten a knife out of the butch block and popped a balloon (thank goodness it wasn't something else!), Michaela nearly gave a Mason a concussion, the little darling also broke into her sisters room and took off with not only her babylips but also some smelly nail polish that she managed to get on our hardwood floors, Alyssa nearly missed out on soccer practice because she was refusing to her homework, and I'm sure a few more fights and other loveliness has been blocked from my memory. In all I feel like its been a hot dogs and ramen sort of week.

P.S. As I was writing this I had to take a break because Mason ended up getting shoved over the arm of the couch on his head...don't worry his pupils are responsive, he didn't lose consciousness, and he didn't vomit so I'm thinking he's going to be just fine. Oh and be a dear and don't tell my husband I posted this picture or he might get me back with a super unflattering one of myself ;-)

Its been a few..

Since the last time I posted to this site Michaela's strange lumps have cleared up with the help of her medicine and she is her normal sassy self, doing gymnastics, bugging her siblings, and just being 4.

I started my first quarter at the university a few weeks ago and boy has it been an adjustment. It funny when I told people I was getting ready to start and that I have three kids, a dog, and of course my handsome and very supportive husband several times I got "good luck with that!" with their eyebrows to the sky! I was honestly kind of flabbergasted that someone would be so negative about my starting school but hey to each their own. So, we are in our third week of the quarter and I finally feel like I've gotten my feet underneath me and its about darn time too! I'm not sure why the transition to a four year university was such an adjustment but it was and I think a lot of it had to do with mentally adjusting to the fact that after years of dreaming I've finally made it to this level. Perhaps more importantly I have put a lot of pressure on myself to do well and have taken on financial commitments based on my future earning potential that freaks me out and in researching my masters program for when I'm done with the two years I have left at Eastern I found out that they only accept 25-35 students out of a pool of about 50 applications so I need to have a REALLY good GPA and be as well rounded as possible considering I have some serious time constraints due to my many commitments in order to have the best chance to get in. At the same time I'm planning the classes that I'll take this summer and fall so I can register later this month and it looks like there is a good chance that next summer I won't have any classes available to take and will most likely be getting a job and that brings with it the issue of childcare. I just keep trying to remind me "one piece of the puzzle at a time" and pretty soon the puzzle will be done.

Wait and See Continued...

Today was the follow up visit to Michaela's last appointment in the saga of her lumpy lymph nodes and since it was a half day for Alyssa and Daddy wanted to go and see what the good doctor had to say we ALL

made the trek into Spokane and I think we are all feeling a bit more optimistic about those suspicious lumps on her neck even though Chris and I found two more the night I brought her home from her last doctors appointment. Miss Michaela has been on a twice a day dose of augmentin and while I HATE the idea of her on antibiotics they seem to be doing the trick and we will continue to watch and wait for another 10 days until she goes back again. These things are tricky because the last two lumps she had removed were classified as abscesses and those things can go from "hmm lets wait and see" to "HOLY cow! off to surgery we go!" very quickly. We are all praying that these lumps recede without the need for surgical intervention or harsher antibiotics and we are hopeful. At the very least the doctor reassured us that at the very least he is not concerned that it might be cancer because she doesn't fit the clinical picture of a kid

with cancer. For one she has a TON of energy, she eats TONS of food, and overall
looks perfectly healthy beyond the fact that she has these strange little bumps. On a brighter note Michaela began her gymnastics classes at the YMCA this week and my 38 lb, 4 year old had an absolute BALL! We will probably move her to Spokane Gymnastics when she is done with this months YMCA classes because we have a feeling our little gymnast  is going to quickly get bored with the limited options offered at the YMCA program.

Wait and See...

I'm not certain how to start this post because I'm feeling a little lost at the moment. When Michaela was 18 months old we discovered a lump on her face. We did the normal stuff took her to the doctor, gave her the medicine they told us to give her but regardless of what we did the lump wouldn't go away and got bigger and uglier not to mention we started discovering more lumps in her neck. As we progressed through this I got more and more ANGRY at the doctors because they didn't seem to be taking this THING seriously! We did a CBC and it came back normal and yet my perfectly healthy 18 month old had this horrible looking lump on her face that had at that point begun to change colors! Finally I told the doctors that we'd had enough that they needed to do something more than give me an antibiotic to give her. Within a week of seeing the ENT the first time she was at the childrens hospital having her lymph node removed from her face and left open to drain the INFECTED material from her body! Just after her 2nd birthday we were back at the hospital to have another surgery to remove the other lump that they had left to "see" if it would drain removed.
Fast forward to this morning and imagine the horror I went through hearing my now 4 year old tell me "mommy I have some bumps on my neck" as she lay in her bed while I was getting her big sister ready for school. It was like the world stopped, I tried to calmly walk into her room and have her show me the lumps when really all I wanted to do was cry. The kids and I all took Alyssa to school and when I got home I began calling the doctor she had seen in Vancouver for medical records to be transferred and the new doctor here in Spokane to get an appointment. All the while hoping it was nothing but knowing that I was just kidding myself. I was able to get her into the doctor early this morning and we've started on the road of antibiotics again to hold off any infection until we can figure this thing out. The doctor said it was VERY rare for any child her age to have this going on once let alone twice and that we would probably need a CT scan but he wasn't sure yet. I'm scared and worried; not only did the doctor find the bumps she had shown me but he found additional ones in her neck. As I sat waiting for our turn at the doctors office I remembered how the girl who couldn't hold still has begun falling asleep on short car rides and how I've had to adjust the elastic on her jeans again because they were getting too big. This fall we celebrated because Michaela weighed 43lbs at her checkup, today she weighed 39lbs. Right now we sit and wait while she takes her medicine and head back to the doctor on Friday to see if there's any change and we go from there.

Successful First Week

Well, Alyssa survived her first week at her new school and lived to tell about it! I'll be honest and say I was SO nervous to send her off midway through the year to a new school in a new area and I felt a ton of guilt too because this last move was conceived and executed so that "I" could continue my educational goals at EWU. We did a ton of research on the area and the public school system because while I wanted/needed to continue my education we wanted to make sure that Alyssa didn't suffer for my aspirations. We were lucky enough to find a rental in a rural area that is halfway between Cheney and Spokane that is thankfully in the Cheney SD and Alyssa gets to attend a brand new school that just opened this fall; she was so excited to check out brand new books from the library on Thursday! My girly made some new friends in her class and experienced her first week of school in an area that doesn't completely shut down when we get a bit of snow, although our "bit" this week was more like 3 feet of snow and that came with a 2 hr last start. It warmed my heart that first day when I picked her up from school and she had a HUGE smile on her face and shared with me how much FUN she had that first day and how AWESOME it was :-). Alyssa loves her new PE teacher and the fun games they play and she's even learning FRENCH! I make her come home and teach me some new words on days she has World Languages :-) Even as we move into this new chapter of our life I don't want to discount our time spent in Vancouver and am extremely glad that Alyssa has been able to Skype with her best friend Sophea  a few times the last few days.

Life, It's a Beautiful Struggle

WOW! Its been a long time since I've added anything to this little blog and so much has happened, where to start? I haven't been only a SAHM in a very long time as I've been taking full time college classes at Clark College from fall 2012 until I graduated with my AA this past fall. As of mid February we've relocated just outside the city of Spokane WA so that I can continue my education at EWU. I've always wanted my degree but since Chris and I had our first daughter when I was barely 20 its always been a struggle to balance finances with aspirations and for obvious reasons I worked 40hrs a week and sometimes even two jobs during my early to mid 20's. It wasn't until January of 2009 that I was actually able to see myself going back to school when I was laid off my low paying crappy job. As I looked at my future I saw myself working similar jobs for crappy pay and crappy hours it was looking pretty bleak, even as I knew that I needed to make some serious changes about my education I truly wondered if I was SMART enough to earn a college degree. To go EVEN further back I had indeed started on my degree right out of high school but lost my grandmother to a long battle with cancer my first quarter in and at the end of my second quarter I was expecting our first daughter and decided to take time off to...yes WORK to provide for our baby. After our baby came I jumped right back into school when she was two and a half months old but I could feel something was off. I was always tired, very forgetful, and just overall out of it. I struggled through a few quarters before it came to light that I had a SERIOUS thyroid problem that caused a serious hormone imbalance in my body but by that point I was already in academic trouble because of my poor grades so I went back to work but this time I worked TWO jobs while raising our almost two year old. By the time I worked up the guts to actually put one foot in front of the other and finally went back to school it was fall 2010 and Chris and I were getting ready to celebrate our second daughters first birthday and I was SHOCKED when the first paper I submitted earned an "A" grade..when I mean "A" I mean 100%! I was freaking out and actually called my mom and a close friend and exclaimed to them "See I'm not STUPID!!". Its amazing what self doubt can do to a person added to that the nasty little comments made by my own family about how I was a drop out and would never go back to school or amount to much of anything or how about my personal favorite that I wasn't smart enough to earn a college degree.

In the end WE DID IT! As my husband says "One down, two to go!"