Sam's Surgery in October

Waaaaay back in October, Sam had his tonsils and adenoids removed.

It's a decision we've made for several of our other children...but it seemed a lot more clear-cut with them.  For example, Hannah basically had strep for about 8 weeks and we couldn't get rid of it (which, eventually, is very bad for your heart), or Rex had chronic ear infections and a set of tubes.  

Sam never got ear infections.  But he was regularly getting sinus infection, and was just generally miserable all the time.  It was frustrating to watch, and we felt like it was seriously affecting his ability to learn to talk.  We had his speech evaluated twice, and both times, he was borderline but not severe in his speech delay.

We finally took him to an ENT, who tried various medications, but nothing improved.  He told us Sam's tonsils were big (a Haynes family trait, I'm afraid), but that he could go either way with leaving them in or taking them out.

At length, we decided to go forward with the surgery.  But as a mommy, I struggled with the decision, since it wasn't easily arrived out.  My mother fears were in overdrive, and I worried about all sorts of things going wrong.  He was the most miserable little critter during the week after his surgery that I continued to question our decision.

However...three months later, he is sooooooooo much better!  He doesn't get sick so often, and when he does get sick, he is able to resolve it without antibiotics, or even much congestion medication.  In fact, when the rest of us got miserably ill with flu-like symptoms over Thanksgiving, Sam sailed through it like a pro.  AND he talks like a maniac now.  

Pre-surgery "snacking."

Poor little man!  He was seriously miserable for about a week.  Sariah was a good big sister, and tried to keep him entertained.

We Interrupt the Season...

I know it's the holiday season, and I should be posting fabulous uplifting posts and be of good cheer, and whatever....  But I just need to take a minute to implore the powers that be for ... whatever it is that I need.

For those of you who know me well, and worry about me, this is NOT a full-blown meltdown.  More like a mini-meltdown.  Kind of like Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane when He asked His Father for this cup to pass from Him, but then He still got up off of His knees and pressed forward and did what He had to do.  That's what I'm going to do, too.

But this is the part where I whine and complain.  Not that Christ was actually whining and complaining.  But this is the part where I am less perfect than He, and I whine and complain.

Yesterday was an ... um ... adrenaline-filled day for me.  Lizziy went to the surgery center to get her tonsils and adenoids out.  After he performed the operation, the surgeon told us that we had absolutely done the right thing, that her tonsils had tonsil stones (something I'd never heard of until then, but what amounts to large amounts of nasty dead cells and bacteria and all sorts of ickiness in her tonsils that needed to move on out), that her adenoids were interfering with her breathing, and that the surgery should much improve the quality of her breathing, her sleeping, and life in general.  A good thing, even though it's nervewracking to put one of your babies under general anesthesisa and the knife, even if you've done versions of that to all of your other children, too.

Meanwhile, when she's in recovery, coming out from the anesthesia, the nurse is telling me they expect Lizziy will probably vomit, and the kid in the bed next to her starts puking, and my pregnant tummy just can't take it, I send Bob in to be with her.  Good plan, right?  He's always the one who handles the vomiting at home, and he's really good at it.  He'll even help me handle my vomiting, which I think it the epitome of true love.  Anyway, the next thing I know, he's passing out?  Having a seizure?  SOMETHING, on the floor unconscious.  He'll probably be furious at me for posting this, but you know what?  It was freakin' scary, to see my chosen love for life lying there and not knowing what was wrong with him.  And having a bunch of nurses and doctors there that weren't sure either.  That part wasn't terribly reassuring.  And one of my babies meanwhile lying in another room disoriented and nauseous and in pain.

So Bob comes back around, and they decide it was just the talk about blood.  Why do people pass out about blood anyway?  But I digress....  While he's getting his color back, and being babied by the nurses, with his feet up, Lizziy throws up in true Lizziy fashion, while the old man across the room starts hurling, I mean really hurling.  And of course, I'm standing there, pregnant tummy under control through sheer will power alone.

We all go home, pick up Sariah from my fabulous visiting teacher's house.  Lizziy is the model patient.  She was doing what she was asked, eating, drinking, resting, and not whining or complaining (unlike her dear old mother).  But Sariah just didn't get it.  She didn't get that Lizziy was tired and sick.  She knew something was wrong ... but I think what she understood was that she, Sariah, was suddenly not the center of her parents' universe, and it had something to do with Lizziy.  We'd all gotten up early, I'd had the scare of a lifetime, and now we have a cranky, righteously indignant 2 year old.

Rest will cure this.  Not.  We go to bed with a 10 year old daughter with a carved up throat in our bed.  Not a big deal, except now I can't flip around restlessly anymore like I usually do because I'm not supposed to be sleeping on my back because of the pregnancy.  And I have a toddler being potty-trained at night.  And an obnoxious greyhound with nighttime bladder control issues.  And hips that hurt because my sciatic nerve has decided to kick in.

So this morning, everybody expects me to be SuperMom still.  Or to clarify, they still expect me to be the SuperMom that they're always complaining I'm not.  I'm tired.  I'm grumpy.  I'm queasy all the flippin' time, even though I should be about 10 weeks past that.  I'm worrying.  I'm scared.  I'm bordering on emotional and mental exhaustion.  And today I'm supposed to balance my checkbook and pay the bills, buy groceries, go get Rex's birth family for a visit, finish getting ready for the holidays, take my oldest daughter shopping, do more laundry and more dishes, prepare a lesson for the primary class I'm supposed to sub in tomorrow, mop my floors, buy more ice cream, and be a happy, loving, supportive, always-there-and-always available mother and wife.

I'd rather go curl up in a corner and cry my little eyes out.

And where, oh where, I ask you, am I supposed to find time to facebook?!  This is the worst indignity of all, I think.

See?  I told you I'd get up off my knees and press forward.  That's what moms do, right?  They keep going because God will eventually give them a fresh energizer battery.  So.  I'm off to conquer the world.  :)

Ugh.

Sariah is on antibiotics again.  She has an ear infection (which I suspected) and bronchitis (which I did not anticipate ... even though she sounds awful).  Hopefully, we can get her feeling better, and she'll start sleeping through the night again.  Oh that will be a blessed day ... er, night.  She really hasn't been a happy camper.  And therefore, neither has anyone else.

Busy, Busy

We've had busy times lately.  A youth temple trip one day; a temple night the next day.  A Scentsy party on Saturday--mmmhmmm, I love that stuff.  Dinner with good friends.  A football playoff game (yay! the season's almost over).  Church, including the annual primary program.  A sick baby.  PTA stuff--just when you think it's going to die down, it starts up all over again.

I think the football game was the most exciting part of our weekend.  We had to drive all the way out to Prague, which is over an hour away, for Caleb's first playoff game.  It was also his first game starting off as quarterback.  He did a pretty good job.  They finished the first quarter with a score of 0-0, which I have to say is unprecedented.   Usually by the end of the first quarter, the score is 24-0, and not in favor of us.  The game wasn't a complete shut-out either--we got a touchdown!!  These boys have come such a long way from the beginning of their season.  They're starting to come together and get it right.  In any case, I think they had much more fun than they've had in the past.  They were still really psyched when the game is over, so I 'm going to count that as a win.

On the agenda this week, fewer football practices, a visit to the doctor for Sariah's hurting ear, less facebooking and more blogging....

Tender Mercies

I have a friend who frequently documents the Lord's "tender mercies" in her blog.  I've wondered for awhile where she came up with this phrase.  But lo and behold, I figured it out (and felt a little bit like a dunce).

I've been rereading the Book of Mormon for the first time in a long time.  I'm not very far in, but man oh man, Nephi sure talks about the Lord's tender mercies upon his family a lot.  How could I have missed this before?

It's helped me to become a lot more aware of the tender mercies in my life lately.  And I'm glad.  We're going into the Thanksgiving season, which is always a good time to be grateful for our blessings (and you get reminded a lot about it, too).  However, I've found that the best season of the year for gratitude is the Christmas holidays.  As a culture, we swing from the "extreme" gratitude of Thanksgiving to the extreme gimme-gimmes of the biggest gift-receiving season of all time.  It's very hard not to get caught up in all the commercialism and consumerism.  Granted, as a parent, the focus isn't quite as selfish--after all, I spend my entire December trying to figure out what fabulous gifts to give to my children, and I often struggle with composing a wish list for the people who would shop for me.  But still, I think I might even get caught up in vicarious selfishness on my children's behalf (for example, they would be happy with that gift, but they would be absolutely thrilled with this one, so who really cares that it costs $20 more and then I might have to buy more gifts for the other kids to even things out....?  I know you know what I'm talking about!).

In the past, though, I have observed that the best, most memorable, and most meaningful Christmases I've celebrated, have been those in which I've taken time to write personal notes on my Christmas cards, expressing gratitude for the many people who have blessed our lives.  Or those when we have focused on the needs of others instead of our very own wants.  Or when we've taken the time to truly enjoy our friends and family.  I'm talking about the Christmas seasons when we've managed to remember that Christmas is really about the greatest gift the world has ever received, the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

That's a tender mercy.

To encourage me in this line of thinking, Heavenly Father has recently ... er, blessed ... our family with a month of various illnesses to bring us to our knees help us remember to be humble, grateful, and loving.  I will commemorate our October by enumerating the things I counted most as our tender mercies, and lest you mistake me, I am completely serious about the beginnings of this list--I have never been more grateful for some of these things:

• Penicillin.  Thank you, Alexander Fleming and all the others who surely worked under God's inspiration to discover this in our world.  Strep throat is absolutely the pits.  I'd forgotten how much so.
• Tylenol.  Okay, really I'm thankful for ibuprofen, but I'm not allowed to take that while I'm pregnant, so I'll just be grateful for Tylenol, which did the best it could.
• Gatorade/G2.  Swine flu, anyone?  I credit gallons and gallons of Gatorade for keeping the 6 of us completely hydrated and hopefully better than we otherwise would have been (dehydration is supposed to be one of the most common side effects of any type of flu).  Now my 2-year-old is completely addicted to the stuff, but I suppose there are plenty of worse things she could be hankering after.
• The football carpool, and anybody else who drove my kids anywhere during the month of October.
• My husband and his willingness to come home early to take care of his flu-ridden family (if it were me, I'd seriously have thought about finding a weekend assignment...but he was blessed for his goodness, I think, in that he didn't actually get the flu).
• My husband and the mountains of laundry he did while he was home.  And the staggering quantities of Lysol and disinfectant he used in our house.  LOL!
• My sweet daughter Hannah, who mothers as well as I do, even though I never intended for her to take that job as a 12-year-old.  She seriously took care of the candy-infested children and cleaned up the kitchen and made sure a bunch of other things got done while I was in bed, teeth chattering with a fever that Tylenol could only do so much for (see above).
• My wonderful son Caleb, who took over getting Sariah back to sleep in the middle of the night when I was too sick to get out of bed.
• My Lizzy-girl who got up on time and got ready for school every day last week without being asked to, and who managed to catch up a great majority of her sick-work without her mother's assistance (translate: nagging).
• And my littles, Rex and Sariah, who forced me to get out of bed every day and participate in their lives.  If that sounds ungrateful, it's not intended to be.  I was really grateful that I had to just keep swimming, just keep swimming (as Dory would say), because they're little and they need their mom to be a functioning human being for them.  Without that, I would have crawled in bed for days on end.  I might have healed faster then, but I would have missed smiling and laughing at their antics.  And after all, laughter is the best medicine.
• Sunshine.  Sunshine.  Sunshine.  We usually have so much of that here that we don't have to stop and think about it.  But it's been a shockingly wet and drizzly September and October, much like the Pacific Northwest or England, as various friends of mine have pointed out.  It's been dark and gloomy.  Now I notice when the sun stretches in through my bathroom's eastern window.  I want to reach out to it and give thanks.

Over the last month, all of these things have given me quiet moments of reflection when I have felt the Lord's hand blessing our lives in little ways.  They are indeed His tender mercies.  (And thanks, Karen!)

Back from the Almost Dead

It's been an exceptionally long week. On Monday, Caleb stayed home from school with a fever and a cough. Over the course of the day, Sariah developed the same symptoms, and I started coughing. On Tuesday, a trip to the Urgent Care Center (because there were no more appts at the dr's office) revealed that Caleb had the H1N1 flu, more commonly known as the swine flu, despite the medical community's best efforts. And by Wednesday, they were all running fevers and home from school. We ALL felt like ... well, miserable. Bob flew home early to take care of us, and we've spent the rest of the week in various stages of recovery.

We are not out of the woods yet. Hannah and Rex are still actively running fevers, and all of the other children are still coughing. Needless to say, we will not be spreading our leftover germs at church tomorrow, but Mom is feeling significantly improved, so there is light at the end of the tunnel.

On next week's agenda: getting all the kids back to school, and nursing Bob through his run with the flu (he doesn't have any symptoms yet; I'm just assuming).

Meanwhile, I'm feeling up to updating my blog. I have lots of pics to put in and talk about; I just haven't had the down time. But I have it now.... Cyber-hugs to all, as I'm sure nobody really wants the real thing. :)

An Illustration of Illness

Yep, that's my boy. He came home from school sick yesterday afternoon. He was running a fever. A small fever, I grant you, but a fever nonetheless. He felt too sick to carry on, until I mentioned taking some pictures for the upcoming Primary Activity. Man, I wish I could do flips on the trampoline when I have a fever and a really bad headache. He is, in fact, so sick that he had to stay home from school today, and he has a doctor appointment later this afternoon. But what a sacrifice on my boy's part -- he can still muster up the strength this morning to get out of bed and jump on the trampoline with his brother if needed.