And so it begins... Again

Well, I thought I had lost the black cloud that was hanging over my head last winter but it seems to have found my family once again. Maybe it has something to do with November? Novemeber last year started a season of hospitalizations for my son. We started with Hannah bringing us all home head lice from school and finally ended up the season of the black cloud 5 hospital inpatient visits, 3 surgeries, and many many ER and Dr. visits later in June.

Yesterday while I was at Hannah's best friends play I got a call from my husband. He was in a complete panic and told me that Jack got his fingers slammed in a door and he had at least 2 broken fingers and the rest were, in his words, "mangled". I have never gotten from that end of town to my end of tiown so fast in my life, I got to the ER just as they called Jack's name to come in. I took him from Mike and we went into the triage room. As soon as the nurse saw his finger (TG it was just one and the blood had my husband confused) she took us right into a room calling the Dr to follow as we passed the nurses station. The Dr. looked at Jacks mangled finger and immediately ordered morphine for him. This is when I got the first real look beyond the blood of what was wrong. My poor baby boy's finger is hanging by a 16th of an inch of skin just below the first knuckle on his middle finger, right hand. The dr waited until the morphine kicked in and then numbed the area and started stiching, he only did about 6 stitches to hold it from "flopping" as he put it, until I see the surgeon tomorrow. They sent us on our way home with codine and a strong antibiotic to keep a staph infection away hopefully. Thankfully he has been on an antiobiotic for a week already for an ear infection so we have a head start on the antibiotics. I'm so pissed and feeling incredibly guilty for not insisting that they keep him there and have the surgeon see him in the hospital sooner then me calling tomorrow.

If you are reading any prayers or good thoughts would be nice, I'd appreciate it. We still don't know weather or not they can save the finger or not.

signing out~
Jeni

The Evil lurking in Barnes and Noble Childrens Section...

This picture was taken at the Harry potter release party in October of this year, this is not the evil of which I am referring...

What has happened? Have I done something wrong or is this something right? Let me tell you a story, a story of 3 kids and their parents who think it is a HUGE treat to be able to go to Barnes and Noble to pick out a new book or two once a month. I am raising the next generation of reading geeks, I hope... One can always hope.

So, yesterday was like any other Saturday here, busy with projects going on in and out of the house, buckling the house down for winter, cleaning up, laundry, kids playing together nicely (ok so thats not normal but it honestly happened yesterday, all 3 of them , it made my heart soooo happy), so I decided I would take the kids after dinner to Barnes and Noble to pick out a new book or two as a treat. I'm getting really bored with the same board books Jack keeps bringing me and I have been wanting to read David Sedaris since I have heard good things about how funny he is.

It starts out as a normal drive, nice, about 15 minutes to get there, and we pull into parking lot hell. Barnes and Noble is in a new mall here called Crocker Park, it is an outside mall (which is dumb for winter in Ohio..) with a movie theater, high end five star restaurants, all of the stores you would find at a normal mall plus many extras. Well, lets just say, Saturday night, is NOT the night to try to park there at 7pm. I drove into the parking lot at 7pm and we finally found a parking spot at 7:50pm. I was just about to give up. Thank goodness it wasn't a cold or rainy night because we had a long walk to get to the book store.

We get to the store and first look at the bargain books, I got some great books there for the kids. So then we head to the elevator that will take me to reality.... We exit said elevator when my beautiful, sweet, smart oldest daughter drops a bomb on me. "Mom, I really think I don't want a book this time, I really would like to buy a diary. I have a lot of things I'd like to write down that are private so I would really like one that has a lock".

WHAT??????? What things does my BABY (who is 7 1/2 by the way) have that she needs to keep secret, from ME? My heart is in my throat but I agree that maybe a diary would be a good thing, but it comes with two keys, maybe she will give me one? Surely she means she doesn't want her sister to see it, surely she does NOT mean I can't read it, I mean really, what can a diary of a 7 1/2 year old say anyways?

So, we walk into the childrens section where Megan starts browsing for the perfect book, and Mike takes Hannah over to the diary section. Can you believe they have a WHOLE DIARY SECTION? I couldn't bear to watch so I was browsing board books with Jack to find something that won't drive me crazy to read 50 million times a day to him. I know that Megan will take the longest to pick her book so I continue to keep her in my sight as she browses along. Megan seems to think that only the bargin area is where the kids books are (which is kind of nice). And Hannah and Mike come over to me and she shows it to me, that evil secret keeping thing. She picked out the PERFECT diary. Unpickable lock, not at all like the kind I had growning up where you just pulled on the lock and it opened. Oh, and it's blue. Blue is her current favorite color. She used to be a pink girl, pink princess, she was the biggest girly girl I had ever seen. I always thought God was playing a huge joke on me with that, me, a tomboy from way back, getting a little girl that is so opposite from me. I bet he is up there laughing daily at the irony of it all.

So, who is this girl? She looks like Hannah, she smells like Hannah, she speaks like Hannah. But who is this secret diary keeping grown up kid who no longer likes pink? Maybe if I find the key to the evil diary I would know? I can't do it though. I want her to come to me on her own, I don't want to be that mom who only knows whats going on with their kids through friends or by searching through her diary and her things.

Being a mom is harder, so much harder than when she was a baby. The older they get the harder parenting gets. I sure hope I'm doing the right thing.

Signing out~
Jeni

Circle month

Do you ever feel like you are living in circles? I mean like runnning around, repeating the same tasks, whatever they may be, over and over again?

I feel like the last month has been spent accomplishing nothing yet working hard. I have gotten a new attitude (isn't that a song?) about cleaning and about wanting my house clean so if I get the dreaded "popovers" I am not entirely humiliated. I have made a promise to myself to get more organized, to keep the house up, keep up with laundry so it's not such a chore and I don't spend all weekend at one chore. However I find that I clean, run errands, etc in circles. I clean the living room, go to the dining room, then head to the kitchen. By the time I walk out of the kitchen, having cleaned it and started some sort of dinner my living room needs to be cleaned again, oh then there is something I meant to do in the dining room, oh and I have to now go finish up supper. Oh the kids are hom enow, I have to start back in the kitchen making a snack, head to the dining room, oh, back to the living room and over and over again because now I have to clean up their messes as they go through the house.

We got a new Puppy since my last post. He is really sweet and tends to be training easily. We rescued him from a kill shelter on a monday, if he wouldn't have been adopted by Wednesday he would have been put down. He is a 10-12 month old black shepard. He is great with the kids and the kids LOVE him. I did forget how much a new puppy costs though, sheesh! So, my point with this paragragh is if you have a chioce to buy from a breeder or rescue a dog, please consider rescuing.

Sign out~
Jeni