Saturday, June 23, 2007

Alex Loves Ella

Alexandria has a new favorite movie. Ella Enchanted. This is a lovely movie, we all just love it. It has the familiarity of Cinderella, but with a lot of different fairy tale themes mixed into it. Alex, being a two year old, has seen this about 25 times in the past 2 weeks. As much as I adore this movie, I am thankful that the girls have a tv/dvd combo in their room. Alex has started to know the words to two of the songs in this movie. One is a remake of "Don't go breading my heart", and the other is "Somebody to love." (I think it is a song by "Queen"?) She also dances to them. I haven't been able to REALLY capture it when she REALLY does it. She sees the camera (if only I had an actual video camera) and gets a little shy with it. The quality is not so good, just because I used only my cheep digital camera.


This is her dancing along to "Somebody to Love"


And here she is dancing to "Don't go breaking my Heart" She doesn't like me to sing with her, it can only be her, or she gets mad.



In other news, we got our Kitten Diego neutered last week. Of course, nothing medically in my life can ever just be a "simple procedure." The poor boy only had one dropped testicle, so they had to go in to find the other one before they could neuter him. He was in so much pain when he got home, it took him three hours to crawl out of his carrier. The first place he walked to was his litter box. I had to help him in and out though. My poor baby kitty. To make matters worse, Gizmo my older cat, who was so sad that Diego was gone, must have thought we brought a different cat home. He was hissing and growling at the poor guy. Finally after 5 days, he is starting to accept him again. I don't know why he was acting like that, I thought he would be so happy to see him come home after crying all day for him.

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Mini Vacation!

Didn't forget about my blog again guys, don't worry! We went up to Wisconsin for the weekend! Our lovely friends Matt and Jonelle rented a house on the lake for the weekend and invited us to come along! We haven't been on vacation since Disney World 2 years back so this was a treat for us! It's always nice to get away, we brought the two oldest girls with us, and poor baby Alex gets left behind again. Not by herself of course, but with her grandparents. I think they were more excited to get Alexandria to themselves than we were to go without her! I did feel really bad to leave her when it came down to it, but a potty training 2 year old would have made it difficult. Not to mention the three hour car ride. The girls just loved it. So did everyone else, but it's way cooler when your a kid. If your ever in the Dells, I highly recommend this show, but go for one of the night shows because that's when they have the water and light show too! When we got back to the house we built a fire and had smores! It was the perfect end to a perfect day! On Saturday we had a rental boat for the day. It was nice for the guys to go fishing with Mary and Anna while the gals went to a craft show and downtown shopping! We all went on the boat later, just cruised around, and Jason and the girls went swimming in the lake (with life jackets of course)! We had to check out early on the last day there. After check out we went to a water park. It was fun, but Jason and I got sunburned.

When We got home we picked up Alexandria right away. We all missed her so much! To make it up to her we went to Brookfield zoo the next Morning. We had already had plans to meet up with some friends there, but we stayed for only a few hours. It was hot, and the Cicadas were all over the place. One flew in my ear! I probably looked like an idiot screaming and flailing all over the place, but the darn thing was screaming in my ear. I hate those things. Also Anna was crabby. She had an eczema flare up, probably because of the lake water. Jason and I were uncomfortable with our sunburns anyway, even though we covered our shoulders just the sun beating down on us! We got to see Alexandria's favorites though, the Monkey house and the dolphin show. That's all that matters!

Thanks for checking in, and of course I will post pictures too!

Here was the back of the rental house.
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Here is a view from the deck looking our into the backyard where the lake was.
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Mary and Anna at the Tommy Bartlett show.
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Anna and Jonelle by the fire.
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Mary and Anna sitting on the dock waiting for the boat.
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On the boat with Daddy.
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See how happy Alex is? At the zoo!
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Waiting for the Dolphine show to start. The girls with my friend Jenny's son Brandon.
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Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Another one bites the dust!

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Anna just lost another tooth! She doesn't leave the suckers alone. She asked Jason to use the pliers to pull it out for her the other night. She was afraid that she would swallow it in the middle of the night. Of course he wouldn't do it, and neither would I. Teeth don't usually bother me, but this one sure did! I'm not sure why.

Mary on the other hand, just lets them come out when they are ready. She baby's them, won't touch them, won't bite or chew her food near the loose ones. She cries because they hurt her. I guess Anna has known true pain, so this is nothing to her. She has already had 6 cavities filled, and one root canal. She constantly fiddles with them.

Anna and I looked all over the place, but Anna doesn't know where or when she lost it. She is very upset, to say the least. She really wanted the money that the tooth fairy leaves. I think I might just put a note under her pillow from the tooth fairy, with money in it. Maybe the note should say she has secret powers to locate lost teeth, and she found it? Something like that.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Were back and ready to keep this blog to date!

Feels good to be back, but I have to get myself established again! I'm pretty sure that by now people who used to come here to visit have given up on me. Ghost town by now for sure.

So much has happened since last time I updated. Let me just first say that it has nothing to do with Anna's health. She has been great as a matter of fact!

Over a year now, huh? Can't believe I survived without one of these things (a computer) for so long. When my computer broke I had a neighbor friend who's husband works on computers for a living so she offered to have him fix it for me. Turns out that it was loaded with viruses, and needed a part that had to be special ordered and was a little pricey. I left the computer with them, in trust because what was I going to do with it? Besides, Lorraine and I had started being close friends when we were pregnant together, me with Anna and her with her daughter. She did a lot together, from having coffee in the mornings and watching each others kids when needed, to just hanging out and talking later in the evening watching our favorite shows. Really close.

A few months after I gave them the computer our husbands had a fight and there was a falling out between her and I. I figured a little cooling off time and things would go back to normal. In the mean time, they still had our computer and Jason was having trouble with finding a job to suite him. Jason had won Cubs tickets weeks back, and decided to call into work sick and take Anna to the game that day. Not the best move I know, but people do it. Lorraine, knowing Jason had the tickets, must have saw him leave that day. She had the nerve to call Jason's fairly new job, and ask for him. When they told her he wasn't available, she asked if he called in sick. I don't know if this is legal, and I still question it, but they told her that he had. She proceeded to tell them that he wasn't, that he was at the game and told them that he was the kind of person that couldn't be trusted in addition to a few more nasty comments. Now I ask you, what kind of person does this? Jason's boss called him a little later and told him that he saw Jason and his daughter on TV during the seventh inning stretch while they sing "Take me out to the ball game." Jason couldn't deny it because if it had been true that he spotted them (and it's not unlikely for them to catch a lot of fans on TV during this time in the ball game) he would be caught in an even bigger lie. He didn't get fired, but regardless of the fact, it's just not something that a friend does. I had a very loud talk with her, and from then on I knew that things would never be the same. I would have never nothing anything to that extreme to hurt a friend. Not only would she have hurt Jason by trying to get him fired, she would be hurting all of us. I did get the computer back but in much worse shape than when I gave it to them. Since I know nothing about computers I had no idea that parts were missing. I brought it to a dear friend of mine whose father also works on them. He told us there was nothing he could do for it. He said that he could tell it was intentionally broken beyond repair. I never could get a hold of Lorraine to get my parts, or whatever was missing from it. I decided to just leave it alone. It was not worth the frustration.

Since we lived in the same building with these "friends" we knew we needed to move. Since Jason wasn't making a whole lot of money at the time we didn't have a whole lot of options. We moved into the same apartment complex as Jason's parents, and had to get rid of our dog which was hard on all of us. It's a nicer, bigger place for us though. There are a lot of kids for the girls to play with, and a huge court yard for playing area. Mary had to switch schools. She was upset at first but made friends very fast. Anna had a very difficult time moving away from her best friend that she had known since the day she was born (Lorraine's daughter). Jason found a stable job and things have gotten better for us since. We got a kitten for our cat Gizmo because he was sad to loose his best friend in the whole world, the dog we had to give up. Of course the girls loved the kitten, but when you mention our dog Mary will break down and cry. Very sad, but we found her a good home, a friend of a friend that is taking great care of her.


The girls have all grown so much since I last posted. Alex most of all. From 1 to 2 is a big step. Anna just graduated from preschool, and is on to Kindergarten in the fall. I hate to report that she did not pass with high honors (ha ha). She is a talker for sure. I often got reports of her interrupting class, and not listening. That's just Anna though, hopefully it won't be a huge issue in kindergarten and years beyond that. Funny thing is, Anna's teacher and I figured out that her daughter in-law Heidi treated Anna in the PICU before and after her transplant. And she wasn't just any nurse (and fellow liver moms, or any frequent flyer's of hospitals, will probably know what I mean by this) she was THE nurse. We spent a good month there, so we got to know her well. She had Anna on most of her shifts, and had so much compassion. We love you Heidi!

Anna, like Mary, had no problem making new friends. A couple of close ones too. Only two kids from her preschool class will be going to the same elementary school, but I am not worried, she will make more friends and keep the old! Although she does mention her old best friend and how she misses her once in a while, she is getting over it, as am I.



I want to include some pictures of all three of the girls. This way I get to show you how much they have grown and milstones along the way! That will be it for this post. It's hard trying to remember how to do all of this stuff!

We celebrated Anna's Five year transplant Anniversary, she gets a new Leapster!

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Close to around Anna's Anniversary she gets a clean bill of health at Transplant clinic and sits alone to get her blood drawn for the first time ever. What a big girl!

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Then Anna gets her preschool diploma!
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Then lost her first tooth!
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Alex celebrates her Second Birthday
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Then gets her ears pierced!
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Mary, the nice big sister!
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Gets her hair cut, first BIG cut in all of her 9 years. She loves it, and so do I! What a mess it was to brush through!
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