Seniors

This year, even with all the chaos of our lives, I couldn't keep my girls from growing up.  This was their senior year.

Let me just say that again: THIS WAS THEIR SENIOR YEAR!!!  When did that happen?!

We had their pictures done in the fall.  Here is a sampling.  My family will be happy to finally see them!

I Didn't Know Mascots Wore Cups

Overall we are a sports family. Chatty would be the biggest exception.

Today around our house there was some discussion about Pablo Sandoval, nicknamed the Kung Fu Panda, getting hit by a baseball in an area that would be the least desirable place for a man. The clip was shown on ESPN's Not Top Ten or one of their similar lists and so talk was rampant. Except for Chatty. She wasn't around when we were all talking about it.

Hubby has been out of town for the week. Tonight at the dinner table Buddy asked him if he saw what happened to the Kung Fu Panda. Buddy told Hubby that he didn't think the Kung Fu Panda wore a cup because he actually acted like it was painful (Buddy plays catcher and of course wears a cup, has been hit sometimes by foul balls, and says as long as you have a cup it shouldn't hurt that bad).

Chatty chimes in, "I didn't know mascots wore cups." (She thought it was a random character, not an actual team mascot, like when the president characters ran out at Nationals' games, and he got hit by the ball. Although the Presidents are tied to the Nationals and aren't really random, but that's where her thought pattern was going.)

I think this one tops the bucks and points.

And yes, having a boy that has played baseball for so many years has led to cup being a common part of everyday vocabulary, other than one you drink from.

♪ They Were 16 Going On 17... ♫

Now they are 17!

They have been since December 3rd.

I keep hearing, "Have you done our birthday post?"

We saw the new Chronicles of Narnia movie (LOVE it) in the afternoon on the 10th and then had a sleepover. We had two decks of Dutch Blitz going so the boys could play too.

Dutch Blitz with eight people is fast and furious! I teamed up with Caboose part of the time to help him out.

We kept things small since Hubby is still recovering. We had a variety of ages over between 13 and 19. I love that about our kids and their friends. Age doesn't really matter, and they didn't have to become grown-ups to realize that. These girls all have strong Christian values and have great attitudes. They enjoy being together and playing games and not gossiping or talking about boys.

The first group of three girls went to sleep at 2:00 a.m. and the second group of three went to sleep just after 4:00 a.m. They decided they should get a little sleep.

The other night when we went out to eat, the waitress asked if we needed two kids menus. She was thinking of Caboose and Sparky. Hubby said pretty soon people are going to think they are twins! Sparky didn't think that was very funny.

By the way, they don't drive yet. We are going to enroll in driver's ed in the spring/summer when the roads aren't snowy and icy. You know, I wonder if they even do driver's ed in Michigan in the winter? Well, I just know Hubby and I do not have the constitution (especially me) to teach them to drive.

We'll warn you once they are on the road! :)

Cinderelly And The Goldfinches

It reminds us of the part in the Cinderella movie when the birds are all flitting around Cinderella.



The birds have even gotten used to seeing the cat watching them through the window.

The nyjer feeder on the left was full at the beginning of the day. This was the middle of the afternoon.

We're going to have to get a bigger feeder (see the bird in flight on the way to the right feeder above?).

We're also going to have to get a better camera.

And maybe quit taking them through the back door.

One last bird in flight.

"I Hope I Don't Have The Fanciest Dress"

"Can we please get there extra early so people aren't watching us walk up? I'd rather be watching other people walk up."

"I can't walk in these shoes. I think my dress is fancier than everybody who is here already."

It's Senior Banquet time for the girls again, an event arranged for our church's youth group (9th-12th graders) each spring.

Girly Chatty loves shopping for the fancy dress and accessories. Sparky doesn't. Can you guess that she was the one who said all those things at the beginning? She had the teeny tiniest of heel on her shoe. Like maybe an inch. But this is only the second time she's worn one.

The first time was last year's Senior Banquet. Since Sparky has a tiny foot to go along with her petite frame, the heel last year was chunkier because we could only find her a shoe in the children's department. It had pictures all over the shoe (which her foot did cover up when it was on) of a current pop star. She cringes to this day to think about it, but she was going to wear them again this year.

Fortunately, they had almost the exact same shoe in the adult section this year in a size 5, appropriately named the Hannah, just without the pictures. And a slightly skinnier heel.

If you go back and look at last year's pictures, they are even wearing the same color dresses as last year. Just so you don't think I posted the wrong pictures.

Sparky picked out a sweater because she likes to be covered up. She didn't want to wear a bracelet, but you will notice that she is sporting her (ratty) friendship bracelet and a couple of brown or black ponytail holders. A nice matching bracelet wouldn't have worked. I see that now that I've looked at the picture closer.

Here are the girls with two of their good friends. The one on the left is a grade older, and the one on the right is in the same grade and shares Sparky's love of green.

Green girl has a set of older fraternal twins that are a brother/sister and a set of younger brothers that I think are identical. I can't remember what her mom told me. If they are fraternal, they look an awful lot alike. They are Caboose's age and friends with him, and they call each other Brother so nobody really knows who is who. She is sweet as can be and has one other sister in the middle with her.



This is the entire sophomore class. Some of these kids just come to the youth group and don't come on Sunday, but they have been a part of the youth group since they were old enough.

They went to a nice restaurant and then the rest of the evening's plans were a secret. Since it was only in the 50's here, I think they were probably happy when they got inside where it was warm!

Innovation

She had to do the dishes.

She thinks she needs accompaniment.

The iPod was dead.

Her phone will play music (don't even ask me how) but doesn't have a jack for headphones.

It was my idea. (The scarf was just an extra accessory from earlier igloo building and not necessary for the look.)

Secret vs. Play-Doh

I think it's obvious that we have some pretty strange funny conversations in our house. The last few days have been no exception. Oddly enough, they do not include Caboose. At least not this one.

One of my recent CVS bargains was this Secret. Chatty was the recipient.

Somehow Sparky discovered it. All I really know is that she thought it was cool and she discovered it was a gel (like I didn't know that because I bought it).

She progressed to comparing it to Play-Doh. Now I'm the first one to admit that I have fears of permanent damage to my children because I didn't let them play with Play-Doh when they were little. Maybe like once, but that's about all I could handle. It's just too messy. I couldn't even do it outside. And me of all people should understand the desires of children, seeing that I continued to (gently and in a completely funny way) berate my mom for not getting me an Easy-Bake Oven when I was a kid.

Of course I then got it for my 31st birthday just to shut me up.

So Sparky told me all about how the deodorant comes out like the Play-Doh on the hair people.


Of course if I could have actually found a picture of the Play-Doh squishing through it might have been more effective for the visual, but this was the best I could do.

So pretty much for the last two days we've been talking about Chatty's cool new deodorant. Exciting days at our house.

Happy Sweet 16 x Two

I have a multitude of mixed emotions about this day. I can't even begin to put them into words.

Hubby and the girls had their last Bible study for this session tonight. They took birthday cake for a snack. Since we didn't know if they'd come home with any for the boys, Hubby thought it would be a good idea to get some cupcakes for the house. He thought this was funny:

He told the girls they were for them and their two friends who are coming over tomorrow night to sleep over. I added that they'd even get party favors since the Elmos are plastic rings. He let them believe it for about ten minutes before he spilled the beans.

You know, when we used to go to Wal-Mart when the girls were about two, Hubby would push them in the stroller while I shopped. He always took them over and they would look at toys (never asking for a thing!) and they usually ended up playing with the Tickle Me Elmo. It was their favorite thing to look at, other than the real fish, and they never had one — a Tickle Me Elmo, that is. I don't know if anyone else in the family realized the irony of these cupcakes.

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Last year after the girls' birth stories I promised I'd follow up soon with their follow up. It's been nearly a year and I haven't done it. One of my faults is that if I don't do something right away, and it's not especially important, I'm not going to do it. Well, I'm going to remedy that now.

Also, if you haven't read their birth stories you might have a little trouble following this post, but you can go back and read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. It's a little long, but it is a miraculous story.

I was two days from taking the girls home from the hospital without monitors. At that point they would have been off their breathing medication for one full week, and if they'd had no apnea spells then they would be free to go home without the monitors. I'd been telling the nurses for about five days that I would hear Chatty snort every once in a while. Since she was so tiny, it was obviously a very tiny sound. They never heard it and there was nothing else they saw to identify anything.

On this particular day two days prior to rooming in and taking them home, I went to the hospital to feed and visit them. While I was doing the required two minute hand scrubbing, I could see three gowned, gloved, and masked people working around Chatty's bed. That was the longest two minutes of my life. I got in there and they told me they were preparing to take her up to the PICU and quarantine her. She had developed RSV, which at the time was a very new virus, and she was having serious apnea and heart rate drops.

The snorting had been an early sign of the RSV, but since she was showing no other symptoms it would have been nearly impossible for them to have known. She was immediately so congested that she was having difficulty breathing, so she would just stop, causing the apnea, which in turn caused the heart rate drops. That's why she had to go to the PICU. She had to be quarantined because of the RSV. I found out from infectious disease that the virus can live on a dead surface for six hours. That's scary.

They put one of the little tents over Chatty's head for oxygen and Ribavirin. At the time it was a brand new treatment for RSV. Most of the time patients would receive it for three days. She had it for five and was still testing positive. At that point, even though I'd taken six showers a day between visiting the girls, I passed the virus to Sparky. They moved her up to the Pediatric floor to a room and moved Chatty out of the PICU to share the room with her (since she was better although not well). Chatty got three more days of the treatment and Sparky got three days, and they both tested negative. The best thing was that neither one had to be reventilated.

At this point things started passing a little funny in Chatty's diapers, and to make a really long story short, the doctors said that she tested positive for Rotovirus. They also qualified that with the statement that you can get a lot of false positives when you have RSV. When the girls went home, the diapers stayed weird, we sent a few to the pediatrician, and finally after a month I told him that when she only gained an ounce in a week that something was terribly wrong. He finally agreed.

The pediatrician asked about her coloring (which was yellowish). I told him that her coloring had always been different and I'd even commented on it in the NICU. The doctors and nurses always said that even twins can have different complexions. The pediatrician asked if she'd had her bilirubin checked. I told him the last time was when it started going down after her mid-December heart surgery. Then he said she was a little yellow in the whites of her eyes and she appeared jaundiced. Here are a couple of pictures of her about this time, one of her with her sister so you can see a comparison.


We went through a multitude of horrible tests with her over the next two weeks, and the ultrasound techs at the hospital couldn't even find her gall bladder (later at Children's they did and said it was small). We were referred to Arkansas Children's Hospital to see a specialist and a surgeon. I found out after we got there that they expected to see a patient that had biliary atresia (where the bile ducts constrict), which is non-correctable and would require a liver transplant.

One of the first things that was done after we got checked in and met the doctor was an ultrasound. The technician was so excited that not only did he call in two passing doctors, but he told me everything he was finding on the screen, so I knew when I walked out of there what to expect. He found the gall bladder, and then what excited him the most was that he found a cyst in her single bile duct. The reason that excited him was because it was correctable.

Chatty had surgery the next morning, the doctors had to do a lot of cutting and pasting because of the amount of damage that had been done, including leaving out the single duct and her gall bladder. The surgery was about four and a half hours, and at the time she weighed about six and a half pounds. She was four and a half months old; adjusted age due to the premature birth was one and half months.

About five days later they had to go back in during the middle of the night. They weren't sure what was wrong but she was getting worse. It turned out to be peritonitis. They cleaned her abdomen out and closed it back up. We were there a full two weeks. My aunt kept Sparky the entire time three hours north. My mom and stepdad had to make a milk run because I was pumping. It was insane.

The most disturbing thing was one of Chatty's iv's that she had. Because she was so small and her veins were tiny, she would blow them after a day or so. They'd exhausted every possible place and finally the surgeon put one in her neck. Holding your baby and feeding her while she has an iv in her neck that you don't want to make move is something that is difficult to even try to put into words.

Two weeks later some of Chatty's labs were elevated, but with medication over the next year to help the bile drain, everything started working normally. She has not had any residual effects from the cyst or the surgery.

She has, on the other hand, had four eye surgeries. Sheesh!

Here's Chatty just three months after those earlier pictures. The transformation is amazing!

Here are pictures of the girls when they were two years old. Chatty's is actually on her second birthday. Sparky was always on the move, so her pictures were all a little blurry. I picked a different one that shows her in what is now one of her favorite colors (green) in one of her favorite items of clothing (pajamas). You could always find her with a book in her hand or close by back then. She's always had such nice posture, even at two!


Jeremiah 29:11 "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

Rome Wasn't Built In A Day

...but our quilt was.

That's a picture of it laid out on the floor before I started sewing it into strips. I had the unfortunate experience of learning to 'ease in' so I wouldn't have puckers. Basically, when the lady cut my large squares, they were just the tiniest bit off, so to get my corners to match I would have had puckers. I got to learn how to make sure I didn't. Ten long strips of pinning and sewing to make sure. It was tedious, but I suppose a lesson well learned.

There is a group at our church called Far Above Rubies. It's based on Proverbs 31:10, "Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies." There are several activities during the year for the moms and daughters to do together, most of them not being this extensive. There were four sets of moms and daughters who participated and made a quilt on Saturday. Here are the girls in front of a (gasp) Michigan sports team quilt for one of the dads.

And have you ever seen shoes like these? We did find out they zip in the back to get them off and on.

Sparky had no desire to use the sewing machine, so she ironed all day. Chatty sewed some and ironed some. It was the first time for Chatty to use a sewing machine. She would have been happy if she'd gotten to do more, but time was an issue, as was the whole easing in thing.

Here is the actual birthing of our quilt (I just couldn't bring myself to use those words in the post title). It was amazing to see it rolled up, stuck through the opening, and then unrolled into the nearly finished quilt. You know something though...before I sewed all these layers together I had to pin all the way around the edge every inch so it wouldn't pucker. All the way around except for the roughly two foot opening, which didn't seem to make much of a difference when the entire thing was somewhere between 90-100 inches on each side. I was certainly glad when that pinning was done, and there wasn't a pucker in sight.

At this point all that had to be done was stitching all the way around the edge and ties through the middle to hold all the layers together. It was a full 12 hour day, but definitely worth it. Chatty said at one point, "You know, we could make a quilt every weekend."

No, Chatty, I don't think so.