Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Back to School..

After a VERY long week off from school, my youngest son returned this morning. He was worried about going back, how was he going to open his lunch box and have a snack? Or how was he going to play on the playground? I reassured him that his teachers would help, and that his friends must miss him so much, and really, going back was going to be fun.
I drove the boys in, and what a reception my little guy got! It was wonderful. One of his classmates made him a card, and everyone else came running up to him with all sorts of questions, mainly wondering if he felt better, and if it hurt. It was very sweet. I talked with his teachers, who both gave me a hug (feeling my pain as well..)
He could have gone back yesterday, but the thought of that made his elbow hurt (quote, unquote). But last night, after a very trying day with him, we both decided that today would be the day. We're scheduled to go back down to Boston on Friday and have more xrays and most likely a new cast put on, depending on how well it's still fitting after the swelling from surgery has subsided. I'm looking forward to putting this all behind us. It's been a draining experience. It's also been a wonderful bonding experience for me and my son as well. We've had so much time with just him and I that I've gotten to see a sign of him that I rarely see. A smart, funny adorable little boy, who thrives from just one on one attention. Instead of the whiney upset little boy who just wants to be noticed.. It's made me realize that I need to spend more time with all of my children on a one on one basis.. If I can find the time.. oy. Ok, well, now I'm off to muddle through the rest of my day! later!

Saturday, September 26, 2009

Childrens Hospital..

Our day in Boston started out rather bumpy, when my youngest son fell down the stairs in the dark of 5:30 a.m. Nice.
It quickly proceeded downhill when we arrived at Children's Hospital and were told that he was definitely going to need surgery, and that it would most likely be around dinner time as they were swamped with cases. Nice again.
We were then "set up" in a waiting area (the only ones in this waiting area thank God). We were given  movies and a goody bag full of paper, pens, markers, slimy goo and a bunch of other things to try and keep my son's attention away from the fact that he was starving but couldn't eat a thing.
It was roughly two hours later that we were told by the surgeon that there was a rumor going around that they were going to open up another O.R. and get my son in there for surgery. Yay! The day was finally looking up..I couldn't believe I was actually looking forward to my own kid having surgery. It put things in perspective. It was clear that he needed the surgery, and now the only obstacle was waiting, and having to listen to my son whine about how hungry he was. Food is one of his favorite things, and it was torture with holding it from him.
We were brought up to the O.R. waiting area at about 10:30. We were elated. Even my son was in great spirits. The wonderful thing about Children's (well one of the wonderful things because honestly, there are plenty) is that the people there are  incredibly friendly, and are a huge source of knowledge. It's also like an assembly line and they have it down to a science.
I was allowed to go back to the OR with him, and be there until he was out. They gave him some gas which knocked him out, then the IV. No pain.. yay! Roughly two hours later the doctor came out and told us the surgery went great. There was no tear in the cartlidge surrounding the bone, which meant they didn't have to embed the pins and remove them surgically a month later. Rather they put the pins in and can take them out  in the office with no pain, and no surgery. He got it all casted in his favorite camoflague design and we met him in recovery. The nurse gave him some morphine after he woke up because clearly he was in a lot of pain. He napped for about an hour and roughly 45 minutes later we were on our way home.
I am so happy that he is on the mend. He slept great last night, but woke up this morning in quite a bit of pain. The pain medicine worked great and right now he is waiting for me to finish up on the computer so that he can go back on line. If all goes well, he could go back to school on Monday. I'm hoping it does, I know he misses his teacher and his classmates. We have to go back down in a week for another xray, and maybe a new cast, depending on how well this one continues to fit after the swelling subsides.. Here are a couple of pics.. before and after surgery...

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Boston Here We Come!!

I brought my son to see the orthopedic doctor today. I thought we would get his arm in a real cast, and be on our way. Hah! It only goes to show me, yet again, that you can rarely get what you expect.
We're bringing him to Children's Hospital in Boston tomorrow. The doctor is afraid that there might be cartilidge damage, or a sort of break that would require surgery, with pins.. Thankfully my little boys 6 year old brain wasn't paying much attention at the conversation that the good doctor and I were having. If he had, he would have been pushing us out of the way, looking for the nearest exit.. They'll be putting him under and doing some sort of fluroscopic imaging to check the blood flow to his elbow.. If he does require surgery, they'll do it then.. we were told to expect to have a long day, and not get home til tomorrow night sometime..
We have to be there at 7:15, A.M.!! Which means we'll be leaving at the ass crack of dawn.. and the kid can't eat, or drink! This is not going to make his "hollow leg" very happy, but hopefully we can bribe him with enough toys and junk food later that he'll suffer through the ordeal leaving us fairly unscathed..
I will surely update as soon as I can.. Wish us luck!

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

A note to my previous post..

I wanted to add that my son has the best teachers, and the most thoughtful staff at his school. His teacher was absent yesterday when he got hurt, but she just called me to find out how he was doing. His classmates are making him a get well card.. that just made his day!
Last night, after I got home from the ER with him,  the school nurse, also known as Nurse Judy called me to find out how he was. I thought that was very sweet, and above and beyond what she needed to do.
And one last note, on my son.. He's sort of a pain in the ass kind of patient. Yes, he's a trooper, but he's also like the guy you give a bell to and say "ring it when you need something.." Only it's my mom's cell phone, and he's been calling me from my room (where he is camped out) about every 5 minutes.. "I'm thirsty" or "I'm bored" or "I'm just calling to say I love you" ugh.. needless to say, my mom got her phone back, and now he's relying on his lungs to call for me, which coincidentially works just as well as her cell phone.. sigh..

Supporting Our Local Hospital.. it's what we do!

Nothing gets you out of the house faster than a call from the school informing you that one of your kids is hurt. Yesterday afternoon, I got that call.. again I might add.. This time the nurse was telling me that my oldest son had fallen in gym and hurt his arm. She thought it might be broken. Great.
Less than 10 minutes later, the girls and I arrived at the school and head for Nurse Judy's office. Much to my suprise, I find my youngest son, not my oldest son, laying on the couch in the nurses office. It's really not all that surprising though as my youngest son has had more trips to the ER than my whole family combined. And I guess when you have as many kids as I do, someone is bound to confuse them. Anyway, the poor little kid immediately starts bawling when he sees me. I can tell he's been trying to be as brave as he can be, but once momma is there, the flood gates are opened. At this point I see his elbow, and it is freakishly swollen, and clearly this is not going to be the day I anticipated where the girls and I chill at the house enjoying a day off from babysitting. Nurse Judy helps me get everyone to the car and I start making phone calls.
Long story short... his elbow is broken. Yes, his elbow.. who breaks their elbow?? Apparently he does.. After spending 4 hours in the ER, having about 12 different xrays, and shuffling kids around with the help of my mom and mother in law, the doctor put a cast on him, gave him a sling, and a perscription for codeine. He slept like a rock last night (thank you pain killers..) and we are meeting with an orthopedic doctor on Thursday.. They will most likely put a new cast on him, and restrict him to limited activity.. no soccer this season.. no riding his bike, and hours upon hours of boredom is what he can look forward to. This will surely enhance my favorite season of the year! Can you sense the sarcasm here??
Anyway, I'm thinking of getting this kid a bubble.. and maybe never letting him out of it.. I'm also thinking of starting a bank account specifically for the copays to the ER.. it would be smart of me to think ahead, don't ya think??

Monday, September 14, 2009

Kenaleen Garvey

I have no idea who this woman is, but it would appear that when we changed our phone service from vonage to comcast a couple of months back, we got her old number.
I would have thought that we could have kept our old number (one I sorely miss.. I know how stupid that sounds, but I really really miss my old number..) However, my husband was told we couldn't keep it, and were forced to get the lame ass number that once belonged to a Miss Kenaleen Garvey.
You would think that when she got her new number, or died or whatever happened to her, that maybe it would have been conveyed to other parties trying to reach her. Sadly, this is not the case. I get more phone calls during the day for her, than I do for myself. And these are not happy phone calls that Miss Garvey (or Gravy as she has been called on more than one occasion) is recieving. Creditors.. oh the lovely creditor. They are always suspicious, and most often call back when I tell them they have the wrong number.. weird that they don't believe me huh?
In a vain effort today, I called comcast, and begged to get my old phone number back. Unfortunately, vonage owns the phone number, and they couldn't do that for me. They did offer to give  me another number, but the thought of having to send out huge emails to all my friends and family with yet another number seemed like a waste of time. I guess I'll just have to keep taking calls for Kenaleen, and hope that one day they'll believe me when I say I have no idea who she is!

Good Intentions..

I wake up everyday with the best of intentions. Like this morning, it's my day off from babysitting, so I knew I had to do a few things that I could only do on my day off. First being a trip to the D.M.V. to renew my very expired drivers license, and the only reason I was doing this was because on Friday I made arrangements to switch my car insurance, and found out that my license  had expired back in my birthday month of June.. yes, I knew this, but time is something I have very little of, and the thought of standing in line at the D.M.V. with my 2 three year olds sounded less than inviting.
I did however, manage to get there this morning, fill out my paper work and wait in line with the girls who anxiously chewed on their sweatshirts as the heat of people starring at them wondering if in fact they were twins drove them over the edge. Forty five minutes or so later we got my temporary i.d. (they will mail me the new one in 60 days or so..) and headed to the girls favorite store.. Walmart.. got what we needed and headed home.
I found 7 missed calls on my phone, all from  my older sister, with one voicemail instructing me to call her back asap. Assuming someone had died, I called her back only to find that she was craving chinese food and wanted me to come meet her for lunch. I turned her down, only because my intentions for the rest of the day did not include a chinese buffet, but rather laundry, dishes, and scrubbing my black kitchen cabinets (they are dust magnets let me tell you!)
15 minutes or so later, my sister showed up, and insisted we go to lunch with her.. Her treat. Fine. Like I can turn down free chinese food! So, the girls and I went to lunch, they were of course on their best behavior, and despite one of them spilling their entire glass of water on herself, and myself, we ate away, and headed back home.
So, now with my belly all full of chinese food, and much to do, I am blogging. I should be cleaning.. I should be doing a lot. But after blogging, I'm guessing I might curl up with my girls on the couch and have a nice snuggle and read some stories.. Like the road to hell, my life is most often paved with good intentions.. and a hundred distractions!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Ouch!

My poor little nephew.. 22 months old, and he spent his day today in an emergency room on Long Island. Being the curious little boy he is, he thought he would see what would happen if he tried touching a decorative plate display on his grandma's wall.. turns out, it got him 6o stiches!! yes, 60.. thankfully, they had a plastic surgeon stitch him up, and he's going to be just fine. It breaks my heart to see this picture (and yes, grosses me out a bit too..) He just can not help but explore everything around him, with no fear.. no understanding yet of consequences.
I hear he was a trooper, and despite the severe laceration he got, he still managed to smile, and revel in the attention..

Thursday, September 10, 2009

13

Thirteen used to be my favorite number.. since 7th grade, when it was the number of the cutest soccer player in the school.
Since the day I met the medium, it's now a number I dread.. He mentioned something of significance with the number 13. He didn't know what significance it held, but I didn't get the impression that it was something that would affect my life in a positive way.
Every month, on the 13th day, I hold my breath. I don't relax until everyone is tucked into bed and safe and sound... there have been nights when my husband has been out at a show, and I can't close my eyes til I hear the door open at 2 a.m. (ah, the life of a rock star!)
When my youngest son got his concussion, it was the 5th day of the 8th month.. 8 and 5 equal 13..he was also born on the 13th.. These were the thoughts running through my head as I drove him to the ER. Maybe that was the 13th the medium was talking about.. I don't know.. I wish I never knew..

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Two Sets of Twins can be a BITCH!

At this very moment, I am outside on my front porch (I just love wi-fi). I  have my sister's kids today, and they are all currently hanging with my girls on the other side of the porch.. having a snack.. It has been a nightmare of a morning, like they usually are. All the twins have been trying to bite the other ones, or push them to the ground, or just randomly smack them in the mouth. I really can't wait til they have enough respect for each other to try and not kill the other ones. Would that require respect, or just a simple sense of humanity? I'm not sure.. whatever it is, it's exhausting.
I talked to my good friend blogless this morning, who's twins are 3 months old today. I'm so happy for her, that she is reaching that point in which her own twins are going to become easier (in one sense). I will never forget the day that I realized my own set of twins were hitting that mark.. the point in their lives when both my husband and I thought that maybe we could handle this.. I will also never forget the time my sister called me to tell me that she was having twins.. and the complete dread that I felt thinking, "crap, I said I would watch the second" meaning that I would also have to watch the third. I was pretty much just recovering from the infancy of my own twins, and the thought of being such an intirgal part of my own's twins twins did nothing to help me get out of bed in the morning.. Yet, here I am.. a month shy of the boys turning 2, and I think about what a breeze their infancy was. They were the BEST babies ever! Truly, they were.. but toddlers? Jeesh, there's another story.. I love them. With all my heart. They are afterall genetically half mine (hehe) but they are also exhausting, brutal, and totally full of BOY! I know that someday they aren't going to be so hard.. and that I will finally sit back and say to myself (and not my husband this time) "wow, I think I can do this.." but until then, wish me luck.. cause most days I'm not sure if I can...

Monday, September 07, 2009

That Was Easy...

It's the easy button, and it has taken over our home.. Staples stupid ass easy button.. My sister was here yesterday and her almost 2 year old twin gets a kick out of it, so she brought it. Unfortunately, she forgot it.. and my girls have not stopped pressing that stupid ass button. I even tried taking out the batteries, and they figured out how to put them back in. Tomorrow my sister is coming to drop off her children, and she will no doubt be leaving with that easy button. There is nothing easy about it. It's annoying, and has got to go!

Suck it Fall!

I'm about to bathe all the kids.. even the 9 year old still likes baths..
He's been sick this past weekend. Fever, headache, nausea.. Naturally, my husband was on line looking up the swine flu and h1n1 symptoms.. I encouraged him to call our pediatrician's, but slowly he settled down and now my son is feeling much better.
It was chilly today.. sort of. Not chilly where we needed a sweater, but chilly that at dinnertime we had closed all the window's. Fall bums me out. Big time. It's hard saying goodbye to the nice summer weather, when we know that the fall takes us into the long, cold, dark months of winter.  Every year, I try to think of it differently, and I believe every year I blog about how much this time of year pisses me off, but I always keep the same shitty attitude.. One day I'll snap out of it.. and one day I'll be dead, which is probably when I won't give a crap about the winter in New England.
Anyway, in other equally depressing news, I packed up our pop up camper today. It's been sitting in our driveway all summer, waiting to be taken out.. but alas it sat there, and only set foot on a campground once this summer.. More important than how many times we took it out, was how many times we slept out there..which might sound lame, but the kids loved it. We had many a night sitting around our chiminea, watching dvd's, eating popcorn.. We made memories this summer, despite not leaving our yard.
My mom is still living with us. We've been talking to contractors and are going to be building her an apartment over our garage. It's perfect really. She'll have her own seperate space, and will still be close by.. the girls are head over heels with their Oma.. If they aren't under my foot, then they are up her ass. She claims not to mind..
Anyway, I've got 4 kids to clean and one twin who is currently at my feet yelling something about the wonder pets.. and trying to hit her sister at the same time.. nighty night!

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Fantasy Football...

The time of the year that I dread is upon us again.. Football season. Along with the dreaded fall, comes the most uncomprehendable sport on the planet. I'm not sure what it is about this sport that I can't put my finger on, but for the life of me, I can not figure it out. It seriously can not be that difficult, I mean, the men playing this sport aren't exactly rocket scientists.
Every year I try to get my husband to explain it to me. Usually during a big game,where my questions are only annoying and his small amount of patience in explaining the sport to me (again) is waining.
Along with the beginning of the football season, comes with it, fantasy football. Another thing I just don't get. My husband is in two leagues, which leaves him on the computer all weekend, and in front of the t.v. for games I wish he would read about in the news, on  line or whatever.
One year he won. This put some money in the bank, which is always nice. However, for the amount of money it takes to play in these fantasies, and the time spent getting his line up ready, is hardly worth it.
Today he is at the first draft. Later this week, he'll do the second. I'm home with the kids, like I always am.. I told him that I wanted to go out tonight.. his solution? We'd get take out from one of our favorite restaurants. There must be a game on.. Can't wait til February, when the bowls of all bowls is done, and so is the fantasy season.. maybe then I can get my husband back.. at least until opening day at Fenway!

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

The Vintage Pearl..

I want something from this little shop.. a neckalace with all my kids names.. how cute would that be?? I  showed my husband what I wanted.. I'm sure I'll be getting it in the next few weeks.. but only because I'm buying it!

First Day..



My boys had their first day of school yesterday. I'm still trying to figure out how they got so grown up already. 1st and 4th grade.. where has the time gone? They came home yesterday, excited, and exhausted (at least the youngest one) He complained about the dinner he asked me to make for him (his favorite dish, plain noodles and italian sausage cooked on the grill..) Apparently, it wasn't what he "really" wanted.. It's going to be an adjustment going full days, and getting to bed early enough so that he's not totally wiped by days end.
Only two more years, and my girls will be joining them at school.. I have mixed emotions on that.. clearly, I'm going to have do something different with my days.. babysitting will have run it's course by then.. and I may be back in the work force (at normal hours) with the rest of the population.. but we shall see.. for now, I'm just trying to enjoy my last couple of years at home with the kiddo's.. if I haven't lost all of my hair or jumped from the roof by then!