Well, here I am

After more than a month of not having the desire to write in my blog, I decide I should write a few updates, for myself if nothing else.
I have spent the last month trying to work as a substitute and as an admin assistant to my brothers insurance and investments business. I have felt like i am running in twenty different directions at once and have had several days of the blahs where I felt like I could do no more, no one appreciated me, and I should just run away. Do I sound like a teenager? I think I am regressing.
I have been so stressed about financials, taking care of kids, helping Naomi who struggles with Kindergarten, and finding a permanent job, I haven't been much fun to be around. Aaron often tells me that i have to learn when to say no to people and to not take on too much. When I do, my family suffers. I love my brother. I want to help him all that I can, but financially, I have to work at a secure job with steady income and his company is not quite there yet. Also, I cant spend all day working and worrying and expect Naomi to learn to read all by herself. I am expecting miracles when I am not giving Heavenly Father the room to give them to me. I have always been a glass half empty person and I need to be more optimistic and have more faith. I am working on it. I think I will be working on it for about 50 more years.

Cassie went to prom:SIGH:
Nina decided to sneak out her window at midnight and the cops called me at 1am. Savannah is her usual OCD wonderful self, Gabby will be in middle school soon, Olivia loves everything and is making a ton of friends and Naomi is still her mommas girl. She goes to school if she has to and has fun there but would stay home any day. She has developed some allergies and we are testing now to find out what. She itches constantly and breaks out in hives often. Frustrating, but we will survive.\
Last month the dog ate a plastic glove and required an expensive surgery. This month he was hit by a cattle truck and miraculously just wrenched his neck. He was very sore for a while but is alive. We think we are thankful. LOL.
Our ward is possibly going to be split as we are forming a new stake in our area. Everyone is very worked up about it. I am not the most understanding person I guess. I don't get the fuss. Moving to an entire new ward might be stressful, but everyone is sad cause they might not go to church with their neighbor anymore? Weird. Yeah, I am a jerk sometimes. We will see what hap;pens. I for one think everything will stay pretty much the same. We will see.
Otherwise, life is normal and goes on as always.

I haven't' posted in several days, maybe weeks, i can't remember exactly. Just haven't felt like I had anything positive to share and have been incredibly busy.
This week I have worked almost non-stop at my brother business to get appointments set up and things organized. He desperately needs a nanny/housekeeper if he is actually going to get any work done at home. I helped with his laundry, cleaned before clients came and helped with the business and financial stuff. Because I was there so much, I only worked as a substitute one day this week. Geoffrey has tentatively closed 2 deals and is working on several other profitable ones, but won't see any money for at least 6 weeks. Ouch! That means I don't get paid until he does. I am happy to help out, but our budget is a little sad, especially since the dog had a very expensive stay at the luxury vet in town a few weeks ago.
Chastain informed me that she was going to prom as her "boyfriend" is a junior. Now i am trying to scramble to find money for a dress ( we decide to sew one though it wasn't a ton cheaper), and plan for things like hair, shoes, dinner and flowers. these things are painful in more ways than one.
Savannah participated in a young artists festival where her short story was chosen for display. Katarina participated in an honor choir presentation and Cassie tried out for Skyview Idol. she was disappointed that most of the teacher's favorite students were chosen and not her, but I told her she had two more years to try out. She got over it pretty quickly.
I found out last weekend that my much younger sister is newly pregnant. She turned 18 in 3 months ago and has such plans for herself. I tried to talk to her about her options such as adoption, but she feels that she could never give up her child, no matter how much better a life it could have with two loving parents instead of just one. It has made me pretty sad and I am trying hard to support her and not see how depressed it makes me. It's really about her and not me after all, right...
Aaron and I started off the morning arguing and I have a pretty good sinus infection going right now so it hasn't been the best day. However, I am grateful for this blog because it helps me to realize how negative and ungrateful I can be. I have so much but I am often dissatisfied. I obsess about every little thing, especially when I forget to take my meds LOL. I am going to try this week to be a more grateful and happy person. So what if the kids don't clean like I ask them to and I find yogurt containers behind the couch. so what if I don't get invited to every party or get together. So what if the iguana tries to snuggle with my pillow or my mother is sad cause her boyfriend in grumpy too.
I have six beautiful children and a husband who tries so hard to honor his priesthood and always lets me know how much I mean to him. I have the scriptures and a wonderful ward family. This week I will remember all of these things every day, including the many more that I should be grateful for. At least I will try.

I tried to think of something to write last night, but could not find anything interesting enough to actually type. I'm not sure that its any different today, but keeping this blog/journal has become one of my new goals.
Aaron has been miserable since Saturday night, late with a terrible cold. He actually missed church Sunday because of it which is a big thing for him. Lat night he slept with a vapor patch on, cough medicine, mucinex and who knows what else. One minute he was sweating, the next he was freezing. I feel so bad for him. Neither of us got much sleep. We really needed it as, the night before Naomi had come into our room at 12:30am crying and we realized that she had large hives all over her body. I had no benadryl liquid here so I drove to the 7-11. They had none either and no other stores were open that late on a Sunday night. I came back home and cracked open a capsule mixed with it with water, and put her in my bed for the night. After about 30 minutes of rubbing hydrocortizone on her she finally fell asleep. About 4:30am I woke up because she had peed all over me.Great. It really hasn't been a good week for sleeping well. The next day she ran a slight fever so I kept her home. It's always something isn't it?

Tonight Cassie helped Geoffrey and I with his first seminar in probably 6 or 8 months.I thought it went well, but he said he could have done a lot better. I hate to see him get down and be hard on himself. He can be the biggest punk, as all little brothers can, but he sure has a big heart and is trying to hard. Just don't tell him I actually like him sometimes.

Random thoughts and first dates

I have decided that keeping a blog is better than keeping a journal. For some reason, I am much more into the blog thing than I have ever been about a journal. Whatever the reason, I like it!

Well, the dog got his stitches out, Cassie had her IV taken out and her thumb brace/splint removed so things are returning to normal around our house. We haven't hit the lottery yet which is my next endeavor. Aaron tells me you have to actually buy tickets to win, but I think that if I want it badly enough, it will happen. LOL

Cassie had her first date tonight. She had a blast and we played cards with the young man's parents and a few other couples. I talked to the woman who cut my hair today about my kids growing up and she was saying how hard the first date would be. I responded that Cassie has been growing up pretty rapidly over the last year, so I guess we had a little practice on treating her as a grown young woman before tonight's date. Still, I must have thought about her and what she was doing a million times tonight. My hope was that she would have the best time and just love getting older. I want her memories of childhood and stages of life to be sweet ones. I think that most of them will be.

I have decided that, in addition to winning the lottery my next goal is to learn to knit and.or crochet. I am going to solicit any help I can get and I am hoping to get a lady or two form the neighborhood to teach the girls and I how to do these things once or twice a month. I think it will be fabulous. I like learning new things and always think of myself as non crafty ,mostly because I don't have the ideas to get started. I am much better at copying others' ideas! Anyone who is interested in the type of class is welcome to come as soon as we get it planned out!

Tomorrow is fast sunday which always helps me to think more clearly about my blessings, which are too many to count, and areas that I need to focus on for the next month. I am so grateful that Aaron let those missionaries in 16 years ago. Our life would not be nearly as blessed without them.

Got the Blahs

Today I went to work at Nina's school, went to work at my brother's business, then came home cleaned, made dinner and bathed kids. Normal day, other than the half an hour where there was an iguana in my bathtub. That was definitely odd.
At any rate, it was a day where I just couldn't seem to shake the blahs. One of those days where I am not sure what to do with myself. I would love to curl up with a good book and pretend that the world does not exist, but my children remind me of reality much too often for that. I'm not really sad, not really happy just kind of...blah. I used to have a lot of those days and even more days where I was very sad, for no particular reason. I will always be grateful to the scientists who created Prozac. I'm pretty sure my husband is too. It makes life a lot happier and easier for me. Of course, maybe that's what people say about marijuana and other happy drugs. :)

When these days happen, i often think of all the wonderful things in my life or some thing that my children have done to make me laugh. For example, on Tuesday night, Cassie was a little out of it from pain meds. During dinner she carefully covered her spaghetti in salad dressing. We are still not sure why.
Another example: Naomi told me yesterday that she saw a dead bird. She states that it was "adorable." Okay... Today she said she had a bad day at school. She was put into the white circle (at least I think she said white, maybe wait). Anyway, kids that don't listen are sent there. She said it wasn't her fault and that her teacher must have been dreaming that Naomi was being bad. In fact she is positive that she heard her teacher snore. She is very imaginative, especially when trying to get herself out of trouble.
Last one:
One day we were driving somewhere in Pennsylvania. Naomi was 4 years old. We stopped by the side of the road for a minute to watch some deer in a field. Naomi saw them and said "Look Dad, dear! Kill it Dad! Kill it!"

Aren't kids great?

With all the excitement this last week including the dogs surgery and Cassie's bite from her iguana, I got started thinking about all the times that Cassie has been hurt. I am not sure if I can actually remember them all. Let's see...
1. At about 2 years old she got whacked in the head by the door handle at church when it closed too close to her. She got a huge Popeye type lump on her forehead within seconds. I never thought those bumps were real! I thought she was going to be seriously brain damaged but the doc said it was OK. Little did he know.
2. When she was about 4 she had to have glasses and she fell off a climbing toy in the backyard. She managed to get cut right next to her eye with the edge of her glasses. She required several stitches at the military hospital and Aaron actually asked the young doc to get someone else to do it because the doc was shaking too badly right next to her eye.
3. One day, age 5, she was riding her bike in our cul de sac in Okinawa when she ran up against a license plate that was sticking out at an odd angle. She came into the house bleeding everywhere as she had cut clean down to the bone on her foot. When I went outside to see what she had cut herself on, the baby (Savannah) followed me and crawled through the blood. Between Cassie' s footprints and the baby's hand prints, Aaron thought someone had been killed when he got home.
4. One day she came into the house crying saying that she had fallen out of the second story window of her room. Her father and I laughed at her but when we checked later we figured out that she had actually been sitting on a skinny ledge outside of her window and had fallen off. Luckily she landed in a bush with only a few scrapes and bruises. I discovered later that she had learned it from her father during a game of hide and seek. Nice dad.
5. One time she fell at a local park and landed on her dad, hitting her head at the same time. The great part was that she somehow peed all over her dad when she landed on him.
6. Age 3, she drank an entire bottle of dimetapp and was seriously out of it. She had to have a charcoal shake at the hospital. That was fun!
7. Cassie and her friend Stacy decided to ride the 4 wheeler at Stacey's house while no parents were home about age 12. Stacy was not smart and let Cassie drive, something she had never done before. Cassie mixed up the gas and the brake and ran right into a barbed wire fence causing about 50 stitches in her chest where the wire ripped her open, as well as another 25 or 30 in her arm, cracked ribs and a bruised liver. She still gets asked when she had open heart surgery because of her scar. Stacy had a few stitches in her little finger.
8. Cassie broke her foot when she was slide tackled in 8th grade soccer.
9. She thought she broke either her foot, toes or fingers at least 4 other times while we lived in Pennsylvania.
10. She was playing on the steps during a quarter of her basketball game while she was suppose to be on the bench, fell down and broke her arm completely separating the top bone of her arm from the bottom bone requiring pins, screws and casts.
11. One time we were trying to come home from fourth of july fireworks in Pocatello, Idaho in bumper to bumper traffic. Cassie had been chewing on a glow stick and managed to break it in her mouth. I turned around and told her to spit it out the window while laughing at her glowing tongue. She spit it out the window right into Katarina's eyes. Cassie was screaming "my mouth my mouth" and Nina was screaming "my eye my eye." Aaron just wanted to scream!
12. Finally, her giuana bit her requiring several days of intravenous antibiotics and lots of fun for everyone else.
She does make life interesting.
I'm sure there have been many, many more. If any of you remember anything,, please email it to me and I will add it to my list.

Today began when Cassie came up the stairs crying because she could no longer move her neck and was in great pain. Aaron looked at the red streaks that had now climbed up her neck and asked me to take her to the ER. He asked a great friend to help give her a blessing and off we went. An ER visit and a visit to the hand surgeon later, Cassie now has an IV shunt in her arm so that she can receive antibiotics once every day in addition to the ones she takes at home. She has a cool looking splint on one arm and IV in the other. She looks like a car wreck. To top it all off, I think she doesn't handle Lortab well. She threw up on my brother Geoff's floor first, then the living room carpet, then the bathroom floor during dinner. You would think she would be able to control this stuff a little more at her advanced age. LOL. Seriously, I feel so bad for her, but I do think that the infection looks a little better tonight. We'll see what they say when we go for the morning dose of antibiotics.
I spent some of my time int he waiting room today pondering the things I have and all the things I want. It would be easy to say that the want list is longer, but I don't really think it is. I have been blessed with so many things. Sure I get frustrated because my house seriously needs work and the bills seem to keep coming faster than I can make the money. In the long run though, I have a family that I can be with forever. I have children who love me and will someday reward me by having grandchildren. Not any time soon though. I have faith the in my Savior and I have a wonderful husband who supports me no matter what crazy idea I get next, like bringing home and iguana for my daughter's birthday! At the end of the day, I sure am blessed.