MIA

It's not because I go completely blank when I open up blogger, even though my daughters give me enough material to write about for weeks.....And it's not that I have to have the perfect, quiet setting, with no other chores around the house and nobody else in the room....And it's sure not that I am so worried about having typos or sounding dumb that I haven't blogged in the longest time...It's just that it's been a busy couple of months for us.  You believe that, right?!?

Thought so.

So, never in a million years would I dream of all that's happened in the past two months in my family.  Let's start around mid-April.  My dad went on his annual trip to the Llano Crawfish Open with his buddies.  He was pulling weeds, some of which were tougher than others, and developed a terrible headache...fast forward to 3 weeks later and he has brain surgery.  He had a subdural hematoma (brain bleed) that was worsened by him taking the anti-platelet drug, Plavix (which makes you bleed and bleed and bleed).  So when we were told about his condition on April 23, surgery was the only option to remedy his condition and that was not an option for at least 7 days...then it turned into 14 days, thanks to his wonderful and very conservative neurosurgeon, Dr. Stuart Crutchfield.  He had surgery on May 7th and overall (minus a few speedbumps) has had an amazing recovery.  He had the best nurses ever in the Neuro ICU at Mother Frances Hospital, which just so happens to be my amazing mother-in-law's unit.  One of them decorated his head dressing with this since he's a huge Saints fan.

Now rewind to the week of my dad's surgery to May 4th.  Emily loves gymnastics and decided that she would use the arms of our couch and love-seat as makeshift parallel bars, so she pushed herself up with her arms and began swinging her legs from front to back...like she's been told MANY times not to do. So, the momentum of her legs flying back caused her to slam face-first into the living room floor.  After the bleeding, blood-curdling screams, tears, doctor visit and x-rays, we found out that our poor baby girl had broken her nose.  Here she is on the way to DirectCARE that evening:

Here's my poor sweet girl the day after it happened:

We had to wait about a week to see her ENT, Dr. Fulmer, since he needed the swelling to go down before he could really check it out, but he said it did need to be surgically re-set, so we did that on May 13.

OK, now rewind to May 12.  I get a call from a random number on my cell phone, that I totally screened that I wasn't able to answer in time, from a nice man that lives about a mile and a half from our house.  He informs me that he has our dogs, Colby & Katie, and that Katie has most likely been hit by a car.  You see, Colby is a digger and a bad influence.  Poor Katie was just the follower and ended up getting hurt.  The man said that although Colby was extremely skiddish around him, he would not leave Katie's side.  Each time he would walk away, Katie would cry and Colby would go back to her.  How sweet is that?!?!  Anyway, Jarrod went to get them, and I met him at our vet (who by the way is AMAZING for staying open late for us).  She, luckily, had no broken bones and was sent home to rest on pain pills, anti-inflammatories and some antibiotics (she had a nice road burn).  She was getting around pretty slow there for a few days, but she is back to her old self now. 

Whew!  I'm tired just thinking about all that.  The whole brain surgery thing made the others seem like a piece of cake though, so that's the positive part of God's timing in this situation.  During these past couple of months, there were a whole lot of GREAT things in the mix like Mother's Day, Madelyn's baby dedication, Jarrod's Master's graduation, Emily's dance recital, and plenty of other fun stuff too....but this entry is long enough for tonight.

A special thank you to my rockin' sister-in-law Rachel who came to our house at 6:45 in the morning so that I could go to the hospital every day before work and hung out with our girls the night we took the dogs to the vet.