Pie, Zoo, Me & Dal date night & Cars

We kicked off our Spring break week on Monday with a free piece of pie at the discovery center. Because it was March 14th (3/14) they gave away free pie starting at 1:59 in honor of pi (which is 3.14159) I thought that was a cute ideaMonday is free day at the little Amarillo zoo so we took a jaunt over there to see the animals.

Tuesdays are $1 days at the movie theater so Dal and I went on a Mommy/Dal date night and went to the movies to see Tangled. It was a really cute show and we were really excited to be there.

This is what a picture looks like in the movie theater when you have your finger covering the flash :)

After the movie we went to the mall play area so that Dal could run around and pose for some pics

After playing at the play land we went to Albertsons and got some ice cream. I had stuck some spoons in my purse and when we got in the car Dal sat in the front seat and we ate some ice cream while we discussed the movie. He had a lot of questions about why certain things happened and he wanted further explanations on some things:) He had some great questions!

Once we got home we did a little photo shoot with the two of us. It was such a great night and we both had so much fun!

Today we went to Cadillac Ranch. This an Amarillo unique thing. There are a row of old Cadillacs stuck in the ground that people can come and spray paint to their hearts content. One of those places you really only care to go to once (especially with the wind blowing dirt everywhere) but we can say that we have seen one of the famous sites of Amarillo.

I have really been enjoying a little break from studying and clinicals and getting to enjoy playing with my family more. It has been wonderful!

Spring Break Here We Come

So my recovery went really well. I am pain free and feeling back to normal again and I can eat normal and don't even notice that my gall bladder is gone. These past couple of weeks have been pretty crazy with school and going to Lubbock for clinicals (which is two hours away) but I am very excited because I have this whole next week off for Spring Break! Woo hoo! I am soooo excited! We have a lot of fun things planned for some good quality family time. I'll soon be posting pictures of our Spring Break adventures!

Post-Op Update

Well I am home recovering from my surgery. It went well. I am feeling good considering what they did to me :) My incision sites are sore and I have a lot of tissue gas pain that is sometimes in my shoulder, sometimes my back, sometimes my abdomen (from the carbon dioxide that they pumped me up with for the surgery) but hopefully I'll be feeling back to normal soon.

Surgery was a new experience for me so I thought I'd share how the whole experience was...

I got to the day surgery center at 6:00 am. They had me change into a gown and booties, they started my IV, nurses talked to me, etc. Then Jake got there (he had dropped off the kids with the lady from our ward who was so nice tend them-they had a lot of fun at her house) to be with me in my room for a little bit before they took me back to surgery. Then the OR nurse came and put a hair cover over my head, she told Jake they would take good care of me and then she wheeled my bed down a few halls to the Operating Room. That ride through the halls was such a weird feeling. It seemed like I was watching a movie of the person being pushed through the hall going into surgery. I couldn't believe it was me. When I got in the OR there were a lot of big lights and TV screens and medical equipment. It was still such a surreal feeling. They moved me onto the operating table, strapped my legs to the table so that I didn't fall off, I looked around for a bit and then that's the last thing I remember from that room....

The next thing I knew I was groggily waking up and was breathing through an oxygen mask. It was the strangest feeling. Anesthesia isn't like sleeping where you dream and such, it's like one minute you are doing something and the next minute you are somewhere else doing something else, and you know time has passed but you have no recollection of it. It is just so weird! There were a couple nurses around me talking, monitoring my vitals. I felt some soreness in my abdomen so I figured the surgery was over and I was waking up. I kind of drifted off and on and then they took me back to my room where Jake was. After my surgery my surgeon had gone and talked to Jake and told him that all went well and some aftercare advice.

Back in my recovery room they let me rest for little bit and then they had me up and walking a couple laps around the hall. My legs felt really weak at first from the anesthesia, but then it felt good to be up and around. I rested a little more and then it was time to go home.

On the way home we stopped at the grocery store to fill my pain med prescription and get some groceries. I was walking around slowly holding onto Jake's arm, wearing my sweat suit, no make-up, kind of messy hair, and still wearing my yellow "Fall Risk" wrist band. People were probably wondering what just happened to me and what I was doing there. I'm sure I looked lovely :) It actually felt good to be up and about though.

So now it's been a couple of days. Getting in and out of bed is tough, bending down is tough and I have to dodge the Braelyn lap jumps and the Dal power hugs. I am feeling pretty good though. I think the most pain has been coming from that gas that is still in my tissues. I've heard that's the worst part of gall bladder surgery recovery. And the incisions will take some time to heal too. So house cleaning is going to have to be on hold for a little while, but I think we'll survive. As long as recovery continues well, I won't miss any of my classes (because my main professor was out of town the last couple days so we listened to class via podcast on the internet) and I will hopefully only miss one clinical day (tomorrow) and can make that up over Spring Break. So that worked out nice.

Jake has been a Superman and has been doing a wonderful job picking up the slack and taking care of the kids and I, all while feeling tired and in pain himself. He has made me some amazing soups, has kept the kids fed and happy with plenty of playtime and has kept the house from totally falling apart. He is amazing and I am so grateful for him!

Surgery Here I Come

Well my semester is fully underway with multiple exams every week, study time and clinical days. Dal continues to enjoy school and we all enjoy our Friday family fun nights, FHE, going to the park, kids museum, and any other little family time we can get.

I guess our life needed a little bit more excitement though because in the last several months I have had a few episodes of excruciating upper abdominal pain. The pain was so intense it felt like I was in labor, having one major contraction that I didn't get a break from for a couple of hours. I could hardly breathe. The last episode I had was in January and it was late at night and I almost went to the ER but luckily I found some leftover Loritab from when I had Braelyn. It took the edge off the pain enough for me to not have Jake get the kids out of bed and take a family trip to the ER. By this point though I knew that something was definitely wrong.

In my self-diagnosing internet research I determined that it was something with my gall bladder, probably gall stones. So I set an appointment with a GI doctor and when he came in the room I hardly got two sentences out before he said it was probably my gall bladder and I needed to have an ultrasound. Prior to my ultrasound I watched a you tube video of a gall bladder ultrasound so that I would know what stones looked like on the ultrasound. The ultrasound lady showed me the gall bladder and sure enough there were a bunch of glowing white stones on the ultrasound. Usually they aren't supposed to say anything until the Dr. looks at it but she told me that I have multiple gall stones. I was not at all surprised. I was bummed because I knew surgery would be the recommendation yet at the same time I was relieved knowing what had caused my horrible pain.

A little picture of a gall bladder with stones

So of course the doctor recommended surgery. I did some research on it and other possible options. Some people choose to use natural remedies or not-so-natural remedies to try to remove the stones on their own. The problem with those it seems is that the stones will most likely keep on coming back and you have to continue to deal with them. The cause of stones varies but it can be genetics (which are definitely against me because my mom and both grandma's have had their gall bladders removed) the good old hormones estrogen and progesterone (which is why gall stones are so much more common in women especially recently after having a baby) and other things. Looking at some of the possible causes made me realize that if I didn't have surgery I would probably always have to deal with gall bladder issues. The kicker for me though was the complications that can occur if you don't have surgery. A stone can get stuck in the bile duct and cause a major infection or it can get stuck in the pancreas and cause pancreatitis, which can lead to a lot of very serious problems. The Dr. also explained to me that after you have your gall bladder removed your body kind of compensates and part of your small intestines almost forms a little sac (like a mini gall bladder) to hold a little extra bile.

So we decided that surgery would be the best option. I am really nervous because I have never had surgery before (aside from wisdom teeth removal). It seems so weird that they are going to be removing one of my organs and then hope that my body adjusts and functions normally (which for many people it does). I am going to have the laparoscopic surgery which is the less invasive one. The surgeon will make 3-4 small incisions, I will be blown up with carbon dioxide gas and then he will use a mini-scope to see inside and other instruments to clip off and pull out the gall bladder. When the surgeon was explaining it and when I watched a you tube animation of it it seemed pretty freaky to me! I feel a little better knowing my surgeon has a reputation for being the best on the city and he does 200-300 of these surgeries a year.

This is where the incisions will be made

This is where the scope goes in and some of the other instruments

So I am scheduled for surgery this Wednesday at 8:00 am. A nice lady from church offered to watch the kids so that Jake can be there with me when I wake up. We are praying that all will go well and that I recover quickly because in my program it would be really hard to miss hardly any school or clinical days. So surgery here I come!

I couldn't leave a blog post without throwing in a couple cute pics of the kids so...

The kids hiding place during a game of hide and seek

My good-bye party before I head out the door to school

Braelyn gives me the cutest little sad hugs when I leave and then she gives me the most energetic and excited hugs when I get home :)

A New Year

2011...Here we go! Our goal for this year is to survive :) Throughout 2011 I will have a lot of school and clinical hours with not very many days off and Jake will have a lot of long hours with the kids. We know that this year will bring a lot of learning, pushing ourselves, pain (for Jake) and finding joy in all of the little things that we can. One nice thing is that at the end of 2011 I will be down to one semester left in Radiation Therapy school :)

Actually we've decided that being in school isn't all that bad. I'm gone random hours and home random hours and even though I have to study some at home I do get to see the kids more now than I will when I have a full-time job. So we know that we need to enjoy these years and make the best of them. We try to plan a lot of family fun time (FHE, Friday night movie parties, game nights, park outings, etc) so that we all have something to look forward to every week when life starts to feel overwhelming.

Before 2011 really gets going I thought I'd share how we celebrated kicking it off.
My sister-in-law Cat hooked us up with the public library's Noon-Year's Eve Party. It included some pirate time, treasure chest prize choosing, snack time and some really fun dance party time. Dal loves dancing and has quite the dance moves (he liked to watch So You Think You Can Dance with us) I only captured a couple of his moves with this video clip but here you go...

Braelyn liked to join in with the dancing time too
B-Rae and her Aunt Gabby (who brings a lot of fun to any party)

They even gave the kids noise makers and we got to pop balloons with confetti

Dal and his Aunt Sara-They had so much fun together!

This picture sums up the two of them :)

Gabby planned some fun games for New Year's Eve- like Bingo with prizes and a candy bowl game. They were so fun!

The bingo prizes were glow in the dark bracelets, headbands, glasses...whatever you wanted to make yours in to. So here we are showing off our glow stuff...

Now a photo in the dark, to get more of the effect. Then we had a dance party in the dark with our glow stuff. It was so much fun!

Happy 2011!!!

Happy 5th Birthday Dal!!!

On December 29th Dal turned 5. I can't believe he is 5! I can't believe he starts Kindergarten next year! We just love that kid so much and are so grateful to have him in our lives. A few things that we love about Dal...

• Dal is such a fun, energetic, sweet and thoughtful kid.
  
• He loves to play with blocks and toys and is so creative and imaginative.
  
• He is a real thinker.
  
• Some of the questions he comes up with about life and some of the connections he makes just amaze us.
• He can remember scripture stories and share them with amazing detail (and we thought a whole lot probably wasn't getting absorbed during family scripture time :)
• He loves to tell others about our church. Like the other day he met a little girl at the park-first he asked her name, her age, they played together a bit and then he asked her if she goes to church. She said no and then he told her "I go to the church of Jesus Christ!" He also asked his grandma if she goes to the church that has all of the truth. He seemed happy and relieved when he found out that she went to our church too. He will be quite the missionary :)
• He is a wonderful big brother- We love how he can find ways to make Braelyn laugh and come up with little things to play with her.
• We love how he gets so excited about all the little joys in life...like a Friday night family movie party, macaroni and cheese for dinner, going to the park, etc.
  
• When we drop him off at school he likes to give us a hug, a kiss, and a nuzzle (rub noses)
• We love how he is such a blessing in our lives!
  

For Dal's birthday we went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (we got in for free). We had a lot of fun checking out all of the cool exhibits. Dal especially liked the dinosaur exhibit. It does blow your mind how they were so huge!

Then that evening we sang Happy Birthday, opened presents and had ice cream.

We finished off the night with a fun movie with Aunts and cousins. We watched "How to Train Your Dragon"

Another fun birthday for Dal with lots of family around!

Christmastime Fun

I have a few weeks off of school so we headed to Colorado for Christmas. Jake has 7 siblings and all of them were going to be in town at the same time so we had a lot of fun people to play with. The kids had tons of fun with cousins, aunts & uncles, we played a lot of fun games and ate a lot of good food.

I thought this pic sums up nicely Dal's feelings about Christmas. He was so happy, excited and content :)

It was also fun for the kids to have a little grandpa & grandma time

Grandma made the kids some really cute coats. Here she is trying Braelyn's on her.

Here they are modeling their cute coats

Both kids enjoyed opening presents. Braelyn seemed more enthralled with the actual unwrapping than with the seeing what was inside :) And Braelyn was our wrapping paper clean- up girl. After someone would unwrap a present she would make sure she picked up every little piece of paper and take it over to the trash bag. It was pretty funny and she was really quick about it :)

Our new hats

Dal had some quality Aunt time. They were so sweet and spent hours and hours playing with him.

The kids also had a lot of fun cousin time

We had some fun park time too

A really special thing was that we got to attend two of our nieces baptisms-
Sabrina...

...& Emily
We were so glad that we were able to be there!

Mason & Braelyn holding hands. They were so cute together!