Christmas 2008

This year we did things a little different. We did our traditional shopping after Thanksgiving. Which, I know there are some of you who think we are crazy, but we really do get some awesome sales and we usually have our family shopping done, sooo, this year we kind of shopped for ourselves.
When we arrived home with our packages, we looked at each other and said" Why don't we call this our Christmas and maybe just do stockings for each other. So this is what we decided on.
Kaitlyn had Diane, Diane had Chad, and Chad had Kaitlyn, even though Diane helped Chad quite a bit he did come up with a lot of stuff on his own. Our criteria for the stockings were, you couldn't buy anything over $5 and everything had to be wrapped individually, some of us even provided a small wish lists.
Well, each of us did go over on one item, but not by much, and Santa did bring one family gift. He brought us The Price Is Right WII game, way to fun for those who are wondering. It's like you're really playing on the show. Anyway, Christmas morning I find Chad and Kaitlyn jumping on my bed trying to wake me up, like hey, it's only like 11am leave me alone. But they managed to get me out to the living room and we proceeded to open our overflowing stockings. It was alot of fun opening all of these little gifts, most cost around a dollar, and it didn't break anybody's budgets. After all was said and done, we had agreed that we might do this again next year. It was low key, but we still had to think of things the other person would like or frequently used along with some fun stuff. It didn't detere from the Spirit of the day and I think I can speak for all of us we had a nice relaxing day.
We had our traditional Christmas breakfast. I have to say turned out great, all of the food was so good. We played, took naps and just enjoyed the day.
As the day rolled on, the snow storm came and landed around 6 to 8 inches on top of what we already had. It was so beautiful, we watched out of our front window, the wind blowing, snow coming down like a whirlwind of flurries trying to find a safe place to land, and we inside protected by the elements of weather. What a wonderful day to remember.

Life in Utah this week

Doctors, doctors.......Right now I won't see one until, umm January 8th, I hope. I am making a very quick blog entry because it is late but I promise I will give full details this Sunday, hopefully with pictures of our fun happenings on Saturday.
So stay tuned for further information..... Exciting isn't it!!!!!

Hit me with your best shot! Fire away!

I just want to start out with saying, even though I have had a whirl wind of medical issues this year, and they continue to happen, my life has been extremely blessed by the generous prayers and help of service sent my way.
I am now dealing with another turn of medical events that we are hoping will pan out to be nothing, but in this game of, wait and see if the cancer comes back or not, we are a little nervous to say the least.
I saw my regular doctor on Tuesday this week. My symptoms were very similar to the same ones I had before the surgery back in January. My first thoughts of what was going on were, "It's probably just a urinary tract infection". The nurse when I had said this was looking at me a little weird, but when I told her why I needed this to be the diagnosis, she could see why. I get in to the exam room and Dr Cook comes in and he's reading the screen on the computer of what information the nurse took. The nurse comes in and hands the doctor the results of the urine specimen. I quickly say to him "It's an infection RIGHT", he looks at me and says "no, you have blood in your urine," (sorry it's so explicit), I quickly come back with "maybe kidney stones?". He's sitting there pondering what it could be while I kept trying to say to him what I think it should be or might be. He looks at me and says I think we are dealing with something a little bit more serious than that. I'm like "what!". He then goes into "my gut feeling is that the cancer has spread to the bladder and we need to have you seen by a urologist, when is your next cancer check?", me "December 22nd, why?" ..."Who's your oncologist? "Dr Chen, I do have her number!" "Well, I want to call her and tell her what's going on and see what she thinks about this.".... So we're sitting together in the room and he calls the Huntsman center and gets through to her nurse Katie and explains what is going on and she connects him to Dr Chen's cell or something. He leaves a message with her and then tells me, "you might as well go back to work and then I will call you when I hear back from her".
I left for work and within 45 minutes he called me back and said "Dr Chen wants to move your CT scan up ASAP, so Huntsman will call you and tell you when it is". I didn't get the call until Wednesday and of all times they scheduled it for this Friday at 9:30. There was no way that I could do it, I have a Ward Christmas party to do, and my help was coming to set up at 10. We did get it rescheduled for the following Friday same time, so that works out so much better.
On top of all of this going on, Kait and I went over to Wal Mart last night to pick up a couple of things and fill up my gas tank for the weekend and we get in the car and the car won't start. I'm like "HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT! FIRE AWAY".
I'll update as I can, but no guarentee.

In the life of me

It's been a little while since I've updated my blog, so I figured I might as well do this before the Holiday's really begin.
So, "Graceful" herself, (me) kind of rehurt the lovely knee that I just got fixed.
The day before Halloween Kait and I were cleaning and low and behold I have Chad's slippers on because I was going in and out of the house to put garbage in the trash can. Well, my foot stays put on my step and my body goes forward. I didn't think much right at the begining, but as the weekend goes on so does the pain. I end up borrowing a knee brace from my Bishops wife and after 5 days of wearing that, I still am a basket case with the pain. Now, I have a lot and I mean a lot of knee problems in my little ol life, but I have never experienced pain in the knee like this type. I call my docs office and get an appointment the following week.
I see doc Rob PA on Nov 12th only to find out that I have a severely sprained ACL, not on just one side but on both sides of the knee. He tells me that if I'm not doing better by my post-op (Dec 18th) they will probably need to do more surgery to see if something else is wrong. I just about lost it right there. I am so done with surgeries this year you don't even know.
So, elsewhere in my life my step daughter Amy is getting married in March and we are so excited to have Chuck a part of our lives and it looks like they will be moving to Utah, yeah.
Next thing is I'm the new ward activities chairperson, yeah me. I have the Christmas party December 5th with the usual 250 in attendance. Everything is falling into place, considering I only have 1 actual commitee member who shows up for the meetings. Lori is awesome though.
The Grandma mobile is expanding again with Pam and Wendy due in May and June respectively. I warned Chad when we got married that I don't have kids that have babies by themselves and once again my children proved it. We are so excited for both of them. But, we sure miss having them around. Someday they will be closer and we can use the little play area down in our family room more frequently.
My birthday is tomorrow and I'm always exited about them. I always like the cake stuff. But, this year once again I am grateful for being alive and as well as I can. It sure beats the alternative of not having another birthday.
Since the next couple of weeks is going to be crazy I might not be updating for a little while. Everyone have a great and Happy Thanksgiving. Love you all

I Love Halloween

First of all we had Kensie, Elizabeth and Brett over early October and all
Kensie wanted to do was run, run, run. She's been walking since the end of July. She didn't turn 1 until October 30th. She's just smart. That's how all
of our grand kids are.


Kait and me got way into decorating our
pumpkins one night. It took Chad a few more days to finish his. We sure had fun

On Halloween we had a fun neighborhood party. No kids just some neighbors and friends. The ages spanned from 11 to 87. We did a calm version of "Fear Factor" and we were surprised that everyone participated. We gave them "vampires blood" to drink, mummies to build , bags of unknown food to eat and then skits to put on for the whole group. Lots of great food and friendships deepened as we got to know some of our neighbors and friends better. We already have plans for next year. Bring it on.

The party goers.

As you can see we had those in costumes

and those who came in street clothes

Either way we had a great time.

Halloween time

Ok, so those who know me, know how much I love Halloween. Well this year since we are fairly new in the neighborhood and have a place to host a Halloween party we are doing it, along with Kaitlyn's help. Adults only, fear factor games, and of course lot's of food. We have invited somewhere around 60ish people we'll see how many of the neighbors we scare.
Last year all we (Chad and me) had time for was Trick or Treating to one of our next door neighbors. Costumes and all. They claimed that they had quality candy not quantity. Wrong they just gave out snack size chocolates. It did give us the chance to start pitching our party for this year, along with several other neighbors throughout the past year. We invited ages 18 up to like 87. So fear factor should be lot's of fun for everyone.
Pictures will follow after the party.

Happy Haunting Everyone

The doc needs a new measuring Tape

So I had instruction to take the bandage off today. Not knowing what I would find, except the doctor told us that the incision was only about 1 inch long. Wrooong, it's 3 and who knows how wide, and I can't sit, so I went searching for some more bandage, and I found the exact type that the doc used. A medical supply place in Layton had it and now I can have cushion again. Yeah. You should have seen me getting in and out of the car. Where's the camera's when you need them!!! I looked like an old lady trying to get in the car, but then I couldn't reach the car door handle without the dang thing hurting , not a fun site. What a dilemma, I was just happy that the parking lot was empty because I would've needed to explain to some people what I was trying to do. Oh well, I got what I needed and that's all that mattered to me.

Cross your fingers, no more surgery

This is the lovely dressing I have to keep in place for 5 days. It's not easy trying to sit on one bum cheek. This is what they call a pressure bandage to prevent bruising and swelling. All this for a tumor the size of a walnut, go figure.

Anyway, the surgery was Oct 15th. Overall it went well and it doesn't look like there is any cancer. We will get the pathology report within the next week or so. Dr Randall was wonderful, along with the entire staff at Huntsman cancer center. We had a bump in the road early morning on the 17th, which took us to the ER, lucikly all of the pain,I was having was what they call delayed post op pain. It was not fun to not be able to move your neck or swallow very well, but back home and to bed I went to get through this. Pain meds have helped a lot but sometimes I forget and then I'm back to square one again. You'd think I'd learn by now!!!!

Snow on October 12th

Can you believe it. Here it is October and the weather guy last night said that the winter storm warning is probably not going to give us as much snow as they thought. Well he was wrong. I measured it at 8:45am and we had a solid 5 inches already with more coming down.



Now the big downfall of the snow was our wonderful square foot garden, like disintegrated over night. You can see all of the snow on top of the covering that we hoped would protect the vegetables. I was able to save some but we are going to loose a lot :(





Now the fun for the weekend. There were two other ladies that helped me put on a wonderful baby shower for my visiting teaching partner. She had a wonderful turn out. We literally had women show up before Sunny even arrived and we had ladies showing up even after the time set to be done. Thanks again to Karlinda, and Erin for all of their help, what a great success. This is Sunny's first baby due Nov 8, it's a girl. Weee loove girls. We like boys but girls have more choices for outfits and cutsie stuff.
And of course we had great food.

The other thing that was neat was we got to spend time with Amy and Elizabeth this weekend. Amy stayed with us on Friday night. And all five of us (after the baby shower) went to see a play at the Washington Terrace Playhouse theater. We saw Aida. The director is the director at Layton High and several of the actors Kait knew from the Titanic and Amy and Elizabeth also did several shows with the director also when they went to Layton High. It was fun to spend some time with the girls. What an exhausting weekend.

The haircut

So, this was supposed to be just a normal haircut with the hair going to the chin line all the way down around the back. But, I trusted Kenzie my hair stylist and let her do her thing. You know how it goes with talking about everything thats been happening in the last several months. Well, she finished and my hair was shorter than I expected, but I love it. It now only takes about 6 to 7 minutes to blow dry and style for the morning. Getting up at 5:20am this has been nice to not have to fuss with the hair for 10 to 15 minutes anymore. Anyway, tell me what you think???
Conference today and yesterday have been awesome as usual, I love this time of year to hear the words of our leaders and get their direction and guidance. Last night it was cold enough, and rained enough to have snow on the mountain peaks. I can't even explain how beautiful and majestic it is to be so close to such beauty. I drive on the bench of the Wasatch range, I can look over the valley and see for miles. I still marvel over the views out here.

Pictures of our campout

Love camping at Camp Lomondi Very beautiful This was in September before the color change.

Night with the Girls

Ok, so I have a picture of me and Kait along with Megan, Amanda and Anna when we went down to Phoenix in September. I might get the hang of this yet.
Today I have another PT session. I usually start out the session pain free but end up in pain lately when I leave. I'm crossing my fingers that I leave pain free today.
Went and saw "The Women" last night with Kait and my sister in law Susan, we loved it. It differently is a total chick flick. About halfway through the movie I realized that there were no men in the movie AT ALL. So girls don't take, or make your male partner go with you to this one. But, Susan and I gave it two thumbs up.

Can you believe it I'm finally a blogger. Hopefully this will keep us more connected than the e mail way of communicating. It's a busy year already and we hope that this will be easier.
This week we have Amy in town. We might even get to meet her "mister right". We will be having dinner with Biff Brett Kensie, Amy, (hopefully Chuck) and us three Chad Kait and myself on Sunday after conference. We are excited to see them and share some fun times. I'll try to post some pictures in the near future, that ought to be interesting for me to do.

So here goes. I hope this blog will help our family stay connected with each other. This has been a busy year with a lot of twists and turns, but we plug on through. I have enjoyed reading other blogs and staying up with family news. I'm looking forward to trying to keep up with all of our news.