rain on tulips

Eight years ago

…And today…

I can’t believe its been eight years! GC shares her birthday with her cousin, born a year later, and this year they got to celebrate together! Grandma took them out for cake lunch…

…and for pedicures, complete with chocolate and icees and tiaras…

…followed up with the big Black Tie Affair, all formal dress and candles and everything!

Happy birthday, GC! Hope it was wonderful, and can’t wait for you to get home so we can hear all about it!

(And I’m really looking forward to the blackmail pics of Uncle A with a bow on his head??? Mwahahaha!!)

We survived!

Our last package never got here… but we’ve made the best of it, and have something to still look forward to!

I’m posting from my new mini-laptop, which is quite exciting, but for the headache of having to install all the right software and transfer all the old content from my old laptop, but its going rather smooth so far…

Photo up top from post-pajama-fest last night… haven’t dealt with post-present-fest photos yet today. Maybe when the computers have been better dealt with, and I’ve found a good out-board cd drive for the laptop.

Oh, and its snowing again. Of course. Ick!

But… there’s ham and funeral potatoes in line for Christmas dinner, so its not a total wash, and we’ve gotten about six phone calls from excited kids at Grandma’s so far this morning, so I think its going to be alright!

Prettier if you could see the big fluffy snowflakes falling fast and furious.

Less so if you know that I’m still waiting on (at least) three or four boxes to make it to my house today… tracking still put one in California at the last scan. (Granted, that was at 3am yesterday, but still!)

White Christmas? Bah, humbug!

in a little Christmas crazy?

I’ve been shopping and shopping and shopping the last few days and not making any progress.

The snow keeps falling and falling and falling, and the roads are chunky ice off-road adventures. Ugh.

And the bad news reports have been trickling in that the big box delivery trucks may or may not make it past the chunky ice off-road adventures to deliver the last of the Christmas gifts pre-Christmas.

Oh boy.

This whole white Christmas thing leaves a lot to be desired! (Though the NCIS marathon is kind of fun….)

The snow started again yesterday afternoon, and went on most the night, far as I can tell. Another proably 5 or 6 inches out there, but with the wind, its blown clear across the porch and buried all the footprints the kids made in the front yard yesterday. So glad we got the other kids through the airport when we did.

The worst of it right now, I think, is that its all the powder snow over packed snow and ice on the roads so they even cancelled church this morning for the danerous driving conditions in town. That’s certainly a rare on around here! Glad we got out to the store for milk last night!

After a bit of an adventure finding their cousins’ house on their own yesterday (its only a 2-block trip, but somehow the map they were following got them confused, and they wandered the neighborhood for an hour before they got where they were going — ACK!) GC and DS got to spend the day making gingerbread cookies with cousins, and face-painting, and my parents (who are visiting my grandparents who live in the area) and my grandparents stopped by and visited for a bit and delivered some dress shoes so they would have some for sunday.

I hear they had a great time, if some of the gingerbread likely couldn’t be tasted under the tonnes of sprinkles that adorned the tops! Ah, well… at least the mess was in Auntie E’s kitchen and not mine! LOL

You would think that with the 6+ hours we spent at the airport yesterday waiting to put kids on an airplane I’d have gotten better photos of them… but I didn’t. This is it.

Their plane left two and a half hours late (they left the ground at the time they should have been landing). GC kept asking me why we even bothered showing up so early in the first place. (I did it on purpose, just to irritate her!)

We did get to talk to the kids after they landed, when their grandma picked them up; they were waiting for luggage and discussing the wonderful benefits of sour gummy worms.

Hoping to have lots more (better) photos to share from Grandma’s house soon!

Upgraded my blog software today. It seems to be working ok for now; please feel free to let me know if you run into any issues in the next few days!

In the meantime: back to wishing the snow were gone, knitting feverishly and futilely for Christmas, and living in full-on denial how close Christmas really is!

Now the snow arrived.

This is the storm that they expected to hit yesterday when they call school on account of inclement weather. I wish I’d had enough presence of mind to do all those ‘other’ last-minute shopping things yesterday that I put off in case the storm really moved in in the afternoon. Silly me, listening to the weather forecasters.

• The fevers and strep throat that wasn’t strep throat but sure felt like it and kept a couple of kids out of school for a couple of days. Still lingering, but not nearly so bad.
• The amazing concert with the amazing band (and the pretty good opening bands, too) that played all kinds of great songs we knew and songs we want to know and brought in a guest guitarist and yes, I got the t-shirt!
• Got snow, but they didn’t cancel school and I had to navigate icy roads in a high school parking lot with teenage drivers — twice.
• Total non-readiness for Christmas.
• Had a snow day today, and here we are at 4:30pm, still waiting for the snow to fall. Meanwhile, all the snow on the lawn has melted. Go figure.

Many more things have hit my head as “I should blog this” moments, and then immediatly slipped through the sieve that is my brain this month… still knitting on the commission sweater, still acclimating to the migraine meds, still wishing I could sleep in more…

EK had a sedated BAER (ABR) hearing test and an MRI on Friday – took MUCH longer than they had said at the outset, but doesn’t it always? And, they forgot to call me back when she came out to recovery, as well, so by the time I called and got back there with her, she was eating her second popsicle and watching Curious George on television.

We got the results of her BAER/ABR immediately (they did that test first): her hearing is good in her right ear, and less good but still good in her left. So, that was good to hear. There is still the question of whether the ‘clearinghouse’ processing part of her brain is dealing with the sounds correctly, but at least we know that the sounds are going in correctly. And, that the ‘echo’ effect that they usually don’t see in kids who have tubes like EK was present as well, so that’s good. We’ll still continue behavioural hearing tests every 6-9 months, but for now we got good news.

This evening, though, we got a call from EK’s ped that she got the report on the MRI, and that EK has a syrinx from t6 through t12. We have a referral to see a neurologist (or to make an appointment to see a neurologist) and find out whats next. I know that in many cases its nothing, and nothing to do, and nothing to worry about. So I’m trying not to worry about it. But in the meantime, I’m worrying about it, and all the possibilities, and … yeah.

To ward off the worries, I’m making lots of progress on the sweater-for-commission that I’m working on for Christmas for a woman at church; working my way up the fronts toward the shoulders now.