Things I wish for

I wish I wasn't sick: on Thursday night/Friday morning, one of the techs came down sick, they went to employee health and turns out it was H1N1 flu. I worked Friday and Saturday. About 3 or 4 in the afternoon in Saturday, I started coughing. Yesterday, I didn't feel too poorly, but stayed home from church just in case. I feels worse today- aches, cough, hurty head. I wish Tyler was here: Tyler going to Kentucky for 4 days is bad enough, but to have to go when I'm sick is worse. I wish my mom was here: Ever since I had kids, my mom has never been closer than 4 hours away. I can manage fine between my friends and visiting teachers, but there a some jobs that you really only feel comfortable asking your mom or sister to do (i.e. can you come over and do my dishes while I zone out on the couch? Or, Tyler has to go out of town at the last minute, can you take my kids for 14 hours tomorrow because I'm having a hard time switching my work schedule?). I wish Ethan would learn how to entertain himself for more than 30 seconds. Then maybe I could get more things done, or maybe just more zoning out. I wish I could simultaneously stay home more and work the same amount. I wish I didnt live in dread of the coming summer, or, I wished we lived somewhere that didn't have 6 months of triple-digit heat.

A few months in a few pictures

 Why so long with so little blogging?  1. My laptop died.  Turns out, having to go upstairs and turn on the ancient desktop that takes SO LONG to load anything is a real deterrent.  2. I'm tired and lazy.  What with the holidays and then Tyler losing his job and me working overtime (P.S. Tyler lost his job.  Don't be sorry though, because... well, that's a different post.) plus having 3 kids under 6, at the end of the day, I just want to sit on the couch and not move.

However, it's not like we haven't done anything.  Here's 3 months' worth of life in 8 pictures.

 Lillian is in kindergarten and is doing really well.  Except for last week when I got a note home saying she stabbed her neighbor with her scissors.  Mrs. Gracia said that she talked to both parties several times and couldn't decide if it was an accident or not.  After talking with Lillian, I'm not sure either.  "Mom, I had my scissors open in my hand and she moved her arm into them!"

This is Lillian and her teacher after the Thanksgiving play.

 Then for Thanksgiving, Tyler did something crazy: he drove with the girls to San Francisco.  From Tucson.  By himself.  He's nuts, right?  I could only get Wednesday and Thursday off, so I flew up with Ethan on Wednesday and back on Thursday.  It was all worth it so I could eat my weight in my mother-in-law's crescent rolls.  So delicious.

It snows in Tucson, did you know that?  The mountains right by our house are home to the most southerly ski resort in the norther hemisphere.  We drove up there and went sledding, which lasted all of 20 minutes.  Since we don't own snow clothes, we had to improvise with the kids.  I gave Lillian some leggings to wear under her jeans, but I guess I didn't specify that she had to wear both, because she just put her jeans on.  She was probably thinking that I was crazy.  I mean, who wears two pairs of pants?  She jumped out of the car into 3 feet of snow and started screaming.  And didn't stop.

 Nora turned 3.  I might be biased because I am her mother, also she is the size of a 4 year-old, but I think she's really advanced for her age.  Plus the pediatrician told me so.  I mean, she can count by 10's to 100.

Look at those cheeks.  She is so stinking cute, I just want to put her in my mouth and eat her.

 In January, we had our 7th anniversary and we went horseback riding out in Vail.  It was supposed to be a sunset ride, but we chose to go on the one day of the year when it was overcast.  No matter, it was a good time except that my horse hated Tyler's horse so whenever he tried to ride next to me, she would bite at him (the horse).

We rode past the largest sahuaro I've ever seen.  The picture doesn't do it justice because there's no reference point, but I'm telling you, this sucker was like 30 feet tall.

Tyler built me a compost box.  I have been composting fairly successfully in a plastic tub, but the Arizona elements were starting to get to it and large chunks were breaking off at fairly regular intervals.

And finally, finally, we got a picture of a kid asleep with food in his mouth!  Huzzah!

Ward campout

In August, we geared up for our second ever family ward campout.  If you don't remember, our first attempt at the ward campout was an unmitigated disaster which made it on to my top-10-worst-night's-sleep list.

This time, we pulled out the big guns- we borrowed our neighbor's 8-man tent and brought the port-a-crib.  I think it paid off.  My kids slept all night.  The ward children?  Not so much.

Have I told you about how our ward has over 100 kids in it?  At any given second, at least one of those kids was crying.  All. Night. Long.

I would hear someone crying, wake up thinking it was Ethan, remember that he was sleeping 2 inches from my head and that he would be much louder if indeed he was crying, and then try to fall back asleep.

Repeat 500 times.

Also my kids woke up at 5, hence the only pictures I have are of the sunrise.  We were the only ones awake and out of our tent.

It does give me hope that if we went with just our family, or maybe one other family, we could manage a pretty decent night.  Maybe.

Mt. Lemmon is usually about 10-15 degrees cooler than Tucson proper, which is really nice on normal mid-year days when it's 100 degrees in the city.  However, we went when there was a heat wave and it was 112 in the city, thus 100 on the mountain.  We had planned to hang around and do some hiking, but hiking with our kids is bad enough, there was no way we were going to attempt it with the triple digit heat.

What kind of rash spreads from the groin?

I worked 3 in a row one week in September.  When that happens, I don't see the kids at all for 72 hours.  When I came home on day 2, Tyler told me that Ethan had a little rash in his groin folds.  He described it as mottled and flat.  I guessed it was probably heat or diaper rash (it's still hot here in September, remember?), and to just tell Holley to try to keep him really dry.  By the end of day 3, Tyler called me and told me the rash had spread.  Spread where?  Um, his whole body.

I couldn't get a really good picture of it because he was all squirmy, but the first picture is his back, and this is his belly.  It was all over his trunk and arms and legs, up onto his occiput and ears but not his face, hands, or feet.  It wasn't in his mouth/lips or eyes.  It was splotchy and slightly raised, but it didn't seem to bother him at all; he didn't cry if you touched it and wasn't really extra crabby, just normal crabby.  He didn't seem to be scratching and he didn't have a fever.

I knew it wasn't measles, rubella, impetigo, scarlet fever, or chicken pox.  It probably wasn't dermatitis because we didn't change anything soap-wise.  He hadn't been stung by a bee or eaten anything out of the ordinary, plus he wasn't having any itching or swelling, so I didn't think it was an allergy.

I decided to take him to the doctor to see what they thought.  Because we go to the pediatrics center at the UofAMC, we have to be seen by a resident before we get to see the attending.  I was lucky enough to get a first-year.  (Side note, I'm always amazed at how little the first-year residents know, what they heck do they teach you in medical school?  Also, they are very awkward talking to patients and asking the nurses for things.  Don't they practice that?  Along the same lines, I'm amazed at how "smart" they become by the time they are fourth-years.)  I went through the whole thing about how I didn't think it was A, B, C or X, Y, or Z, but I wanted to come in mostly because it was Friday, and I didn't want it to turn into something crazy over the weekend and have us end up in the ED.

The resident mostly just agreed and said he had no idea what it was.  He brought the attending in, and she was a little smoother in saying that sometimes kids get "little viruses" that manifest like this, but it would be difficult to tell exactly which virus he had.  She predicted that it would spontaneously clear in 48 hours.

And it did.  It went as fast as it came.

Crazy, huh?

De-Lurk Day! Hello? Guys?

I have had this feeling for about a year now.  A feeling that I am no longer funny or interesting.  This may be a by-product or the cause of my lack of regular blogging.  I think it's sort of a self-perpetuating cycle.  Sure, my kids are cute, but there are lots of Mormon Mommy bloggers who have cuter kids, fancier cameras and hours to spend in post-production and coming up with witty captions.  And their kids all have big hair bows.  I can't compete with that.

Anyway, I get the feeling that many of the people who used to read my blog have abandoned ship... hopefully to be replaced with new readers who just don't like commenting.  Right, guys?

Hello?

So, it's time for a new De-Lurk Day!

If you read and never comment, today is day to de-lurk yourself.  Even if you're fairly sure that I know that you're a reader, comment anyway, it makes me feel good about myself.

Sonora Desert Museum

Tyler's parents came to visit for a week some time in September, I think.  During which time, we finally got a proper visit to the Sonora Desert Museum.  We have tried to go on multiple occasions but were foiled every time.

The Desert Museum isn't really a museum, it's like 30% museum, 70% zoo, but with only animals from the Sonoran Desert in it.

Tucson has a lot of bats.  I love bats.

I think it has a lot of fossils too.  Here's the little area where you can discover a dinosaur.

This picture is sideways because I was holding the camera at a funny angle.  Isn't she precious?

Somehow this was the only animal picture I managed to take.  It's a mountain lion.  I think I had my camera out because I was hoping that the mountain lion would pounce on the squirrel that wandered into the pen.  He didn't.  He just watched and watched.

Also at the Desert Museum, you can learn all about the 5,000 different snakes and insects that live here, like the kissing beetle that likes to eat the soft, thin skin on your face and mouth while you sleep.  Welcome to Arizona.

When we first moved here, I was pretty sure that the environment was doing everything in it's power to kill me.  From scorpions to kissing beetles and jumping cholla, I knew I would be dead in 5 minutes if I ever got lost out there.  Now that I've learned a few of her secrets, I think I would last at least 45.

Thanks for visiting Mark and Darlene.  We'll see you at Thanksgiving.

Biblical Birth Order

One of my patients at work started talking to me about birth order and the Bible.  I'm not sure why... as far as I can remember, she told me that she was from California, and I asked what part, and she said that she was from Ojai, which is sort of near Santa Barbara, which is where I went to school for 2 years.  She said her daughter still lived there and that she home schooled her kids.  I said I could never home school, not because I don't want to, but because I'm fairly sure that Lillian and I would just fight and that she benefits from the peer pressure of all the other kids.  So she started in on birth order and personality traits according to the Bible.

Apparently, the oldest child is supposed to be very controlling and bossy.  I don't want to point any fingers, but my oldest sister's job title is Controller.  Just saying.  It's not that Lillian is bossy, she just refuses to be bossed.  She is the boss of herself, and that is final.

The second child is supposed to be very eager to please and sweet.  This fits Nora perfectly.  She is naughty sometimes, but mostly I just want to squeeze her until her head pops off because she is so cute and sweet.

For these first two, she kept coming back to the example of Jacob and Esau.  Which, I'm confused about... was Esau controlling?  Was Jacob sweet?  At face value, I would say that Esau was greedy and that Jacob was tricky.  But, she was so sure of herself, she might as well have said, "The second child is always sweet, like Jacob.  QED."

Moving on.  The third child is supposed to be "happy-go-lucky."  Anyone who has met Ethan knows that this description is the exact opposite of him.  He is not happy or go-lucky.  He mostly cries a lot.  I keep reminding myself that he probably won't cry forever, but some days...  Our conversation got cut short by my Ascom phone beeping, so I didn't get the chance to hear the Biblical evidence for that one.  Any ideas?