And The Winner Is...RSV!

I know it's extremely helpful to know now, but we finally do. It was a positive RSV infection. Or VSR if you will. Since if you read the symptoms and progression of RSV Calla seems to be doing the whole thing backwards. Hope you are all well and let me know if you need a good chicken soup recipe.

The Blog of the Sickest Sickos

I am going to rename the blog. I think I really should and then just include tips on how to meet your yearly insurance deductible as quickly as possible. (Sorry Mel, I think we have you beat this year!) Calla spent 2 days and nights in the hospital this week. She was able to come home yesterday (Saturday) morning and we are glad to have her back and on the mend. She started out with croup and then they thought she had pneumonia and/or RSV (with a fever of 106. Yikes!) and now tomorrow they will have the viral panel results back. How timely of them to get them to us after we got home. The nurses and docotors were fabulous, though, and I can once again say I am SO glad we live in a time with modern medicine and hospitals...let's just hope we don't have to take advantage of staying in one any more this year! I swear the next post will be a happy, non-sick post!

Joe Ja

This morning Calla kept saying "Joe Ja" over and over. It took Hadden and I a minute to figure out what in the world she was talking about. Finally she said "Daddy there!" and we caught on. Yes, Daddy is in Georgia. Calla is having a very hard time with this concept. She has been crying for him daily and saying things like, "why he not coming here?". I think she is just a little too young to understand how work trips work. There are a few things that have been getting us through our LONG week that is nearly over! Honey Nut Cheerios every morning is one of them. My kids almost never get sugar cereal, so they have both made sure they eat at least 2 bowls each morning to make up for that.

We miss you Daddy in Joe Ja!

Death of the Red Couch and Subsequent Projects

THE RED COUCH!

I debated whether I should tell the entire story that applies here, but maybe one day we will want to remember it, so here goes... We bought the red couch from our friends who were moving out of town. We had just finished our basement, and were therefore unwilling and unable to spend money on furniture to put in it. So, we were excited to inherit the red couch, which we knew to be comfortable for a very small sum. The kids loved it, especially the fact that I let them climb, jump, hurdle on/over it.

Recently the red couch had become less comfortable than it once was (note before mentioned climbing, etc.). So, Chris and I decided, for our anniversary, we would buy a new couch for downstairs. We went to R.C. Willey and found some great deals (who knew R.C. Willey carried things other than overstuffed paisley couches? Not me.) They happened to be having a "no sales tax weekend" since it was New Years, so we ended up buying couches for up and downstairs, which we were very happy about. So, we put the old couches, including THE RED COUCH! on KSL classifieds and sold them.

The only problem was we couldn't actually get THE RED COUCH! out of the basement. It was not for lack of trying or gouging out our walls in the process. We finally called the guy who was coming (or had decided not to come and forgot to call us!) and told him we couldn't get it out of the house in 1 piece and we were going to cut it up. Chris did, and took it out the window in pieces. It has been a rather frustrating afternoon and so we decided to load everyone in the car to take the pieces of COUCH to their final resting place in the dumpster at the store and get an ice cream. To make a long story just a little longer, I ended up driving us out of the parking lot after the couch was disposed of and everyone was eating ice cream and I hit a peninsula of ice that the snowplows had left poking out into the road. The truck got high centered on one side and then getting it out totally munched the underside of the truck, causing the passenger door to need to be slammed in order to stay shut. So, now the truck is at the body shop getting fixed and THE RED COUCH! is gone ARRRGH!

Part 2: The New Couch

Four days later, the truck finally arrived with our couches! Well most of our couches. They forgot 1/3 of our sectional. How nice. Notice in the picture the huge body pillow cushioning the large metal plates that hold the sectional together. Now if we can only make it till Tuesday without anyone impaling themselves on it, we might survive. I wish this were the end of the story...last night I was on R.C. Willey's website searching for an ottoman or some sort of table for upstairs and I found our couches on sale. So, tomorrow we will be calling them to put their "30 day price match" policy to the test.

The final installment of the longest couch story ever involves the patching of all the gouges made by THE RED COUCH! We never actually got around to the touch up painting after we finished our basement, so this seemed like a great time to do that as well. (Did I mention Chris has been out of town since the morning after we threw the COUCH away? So, really it's all just me here with these snowballing projects and two kids.) And then, if you are doing all the touch up painting in your whole house, why don't you just enlist your neighbor who just glazed a faux finish on her basement walls to come and help you do a similar finish on the downstairs living room walls? The answer is, because you should be sleeping when you are the only parent home to dole out patience with those kids. But, it's done. Except for the recovery of the extra $ we spent at R.C. Willey and the arrival of the final section of sectional. Stay tuned. I really hope the end of this story is simply that they bring the other part and give us our money back. This story has to end somewhere...

Faux walls looking into toy room without faux finish

Close up of our handi-work

Christmas, or the Lack Thereof

 

 

I know this will be quite shocking...Calla was sick on Christmas. I'm not talking hey, let's wipe her nose once or twice sick. I'm talking 103-104 fever barfed all over me immediately after she got out of bed, had to go to the instacare on Christmas, sat all day in a stupor crying and feeling terrible, up all night coughing and burning up kind of sick. So, that is why I only have two pictures. One was from 2 days before Christmas, the night before she got the fever and we were down in Salt Lake seeing the lights. My kids were cute under "the red tree." The other is the sad sick picture, which was actually taken the day after Christmas. See those dolls? I sewed them. Don't ever sew dolls. Just don't do it. Hope your holidays were happy and healthy! We are really aiming to not get sick for the next major holiday, but I think we're on a roll here.