So. I'm a little behind on this poor little blog. No good excuse... holidays, life, new year, work, travel, kids... I just haven't made it a priority. Plus I'm pretty sure a total of maybe 8 people actually look to this sad excuse of a blog, which is now mostly just daily posts of the kids, so that drove it even more so to the bottom of the to do list. And then the more behind I got, the less I felt like updating it. Plus, things have been just a teeny tiny bit crazy the last couple of weeks. So I decided in the interest of all of that, I am just going to chalk January 2017 up and sum it up in one blog post. I haven't decided if I am going to give it a peace sign or flip off the month as a whole, but we'll see. In the hope of staying positive, I might just say peace.
So, January 2017... as much as I want to do this:
I won't. We are just going to put on our super hero helmets and surge forward.
January 2017 brought a lot of the mundane, normal stuff: going to Miss Collette's, school and work starting up again, cuddles on the couch, playing soccer...
But it also brought some out of the ordinary stuff as well. In mid January, I headed off to Vegas for a conference, and then took a little day side trip to one of my favorite places in the world: Phoenix! I got to see some old friends while I was there, as well as some old colleagues, and it was really good for my soul to do that.
Missed the boys like crazy, but got pictures and face time with them, so it wasn't too bad.
I got back on a Thursday night, worked Friday and then Grandpa Joe came to visit! We got to see the whole family and grandpa Joe brought belated Christmas presents, too!
(One of the mornings that weekend, the boys decided to camp out in the bathroom).
Grandpa Joe came the weekend he did so that he could help out Justin on a Monday morning, as I headed to Alaska on Sunday... yes, the sunday after I returned from Phoenix on a Thursday... bit of a whirlwind. But, I got to facetime the boys that trip, also, so wasn't all bad.
(Pictures I received while I was away... )
Alaska was beautiful and everything was great...
Until Friday the 20th... the day I was leaving to return home. I had just woken up and looked at my phone. Texted Justin about a bizarre dream I had (we were going to Hawaii with the kids and Justin and I got stuck at security. We looked at the clock, realized it was the time our plane was taking off, and RAN to the gate. The plane was just backing out with our kids on board!) At 6am Alaska time, right after I sent that text, I got a call from Justin. Figured he was just saying good morning in response. But NOPE. "So, um, I'm actually in the ER."Wait, WHAT? At first I thought one of the kids was sick or something. Took me a few minutes to actually process what was happening.
The night before as I was talking to him before bed, he had said he thought he was getting sick. His chest was tight, felt like he was getting a cold. Apparently at 4am the next morning, he woke up with excruciating chest pain and couldn't breathe. He finally called Collette around 5:30am, managed to get the kids out of the house (though said he made Owen walk and had to sit down after carrying Bennett and the kids' bag to the car, because he was in so much pain), and told her he had a "little emergency" and had to bring the kids over.
He dropped them off, broke down in tears at her house from the pain, and drove himself to the ER (SIDENOTE: we have had extensive discussions about this little thing called 911, how it is a great service and how we PROBABLY SHOULD NOT HAVE DRIVEN. The ER also reprimanded him for this as well).
He got to the ER and they promptly got him in, basically thought he was having a massive heart attack. Within minutes he was hooked up to every machine under the sun and they were asking him if he had a will. When I talked to him it was about an hour later. He was not in any better shape and no one knew what was wrong.
Fast forward a few hours later, and his EKG results were weird, his lungs from an x-ray looked ok, his heart enzyme blood test came back normal (meaning likely not a heart attack), but they were going to do an angiogram of his heart to rule out blockage.
Meanwhile I am in Alaska freaking the f#*$ out. And can't get out of Juneau until 2pm that day, putting me in to Seattle at 5pm that night. I am talking to him, talking to others, but seriously, I was a mess. It was completely unnerving.
A few hours later the angiogram came back: heart looks totally healthy. "We are sending you home. Take ibuprofen as needed." UM...??! He said this was by far the scariest day of his life, the worst pain he's ever felt, and basically the end result is that no one has any idea what the hell happened, WHY, and he should take ADVIL!? WHAT? Oh, yeah, and by the way, see your cardiologist as soon as possible. Hey, thanks.
So, I get home that night and he's definitely not 100%. To kind of sum up this madness, here's what we later found out after seeing the cardiologist and primary care doctor a few days later: cardiologist said that his heart looked totally fine. Couldn't figure it out. Maybe we should do a CT scan to rule out a pulmonary embolism if the ER didn't test for that (later found out: they did. Wasn't that). So the cardiologist was not helpful at all. Finally some resolution at the primary care doctor: she has had two people hospitalized lately with endocarditis which is a result of some weird virus that is attacking the heart and lungs, predominately in adults. In Justin's case, it is the same virus, but it led to pericarditis which is inflammation of the heart, thus the pain. She gave him some supplements to take for the virus, but said the pericarditis pain can last for 2-3 weeks.
It was good to know that ultimately it was just some weird freak virus and nothing crazy wrong with his organs... but still... NO FUN.
Meanwhile, during all of this madness, we had put an offer in on a house. This was not in any way shape or form expected. The house just popped on the market, and we were bored one sunday so we decided to go look at it. It was great. In an awesome location, bigger, etc. We really did like everything about it. The issue: we weren't planning on moving from ours for several years, so we were going to have to cram several years of work in to our house in about 2 weeks. Oh, yeah, and Justin has some weird virus/heart thing. Prior to that, I was making calls to the mortgage guy, realtors, etc. while I'm on the road in Vegas/Phoenix/Alaska to iron out all the details. The day after Justin got out of the hospital and I was back to Alaska, we had a work party at our house. 5 of our friends joined us to work on our house, I made a massive trip to Lowe's, and we got moving (Justin had worked the whole week prior to his little episode). I also started to pack up unnecessary crap so that we could list our house the following week:
We spent the entire weekend working on it and made huge progress. Everything was looking good. And then, Monday morning we get a call from the realtor on the house. Sorry, you are bumped. We got a full price, non-contingent offer on the home... so it counters your offer. Sorry. We had known that COULD happen, and were ok with it, but it would have been nice to know before we spent the whole weekend boxing up parts of our home and working away! So there was that... big bummer.
We did find several treasures in the boxing up process that the boys had forgotten about (royals hats), so it was not all bad! Except now, a crap ton of my house is boxed up and in the garage...
Two days later, and it was this guys' birthday. Amongst the virus/heart thing, the traveling, the house thing, it was almost overlooked. But not quite. We had a little family celebration for him.... I think after his little stint at the hospital, he truly thought he might be dying and was just glad to be alive to see another year (I really think that experience really scared him).
The day after his birthday, we got the gift that kept on giving (and not baby buns):
Barfing kid:
Owen started puking Thursday night and kept puking until Friday morning. He has spent the last couple of days, still not 100%. B meanwhile has a nasty head cold, and hopefully he will not contract whatever the barf thing was.
We were able to get out of the house for a little bit a couple days after the barfing started, which I think the kids were happy about. Hair cuts all around!
And that leads us to now. I am in the midst of my busy season, with travel coming up the next couple of weeks. Justin still has a little pain in his chest and the remnants of the virus still in his lungs but is better. Owen is still not 100% but a little bit of advil and he is a new kid. Bennett has boogers for days, but hopefully also on the mend. We lost a house that we were pretty excited about, even though it unexpectedly came in to our lives. And with that, we have two days left in January and we are hoping we are on the flip side. The positive that we learned in all of that is that we are pretty resilient as a family, and at the end of the day, we really only have minor illnesses and are healthy overall. We have a great house, a pretty good life, and are happy. But I still partly want to flip January 2017 off... really could have done without some of the moments, even if they were learning moments that made us stronger. So, instead, I will just leave this at peace, January. It's been real.
