My New Motivation

I know today is Christmas, so Merry Christmas to everyone. But that's not what I am going to write about today. My favorite part of the day today was David's gift to me. He gave me a Garmin Forerunner 305, which is a running GPS unit and I have been wanting one for a long time. It gives me my heartrate, pace, distance, calories burned, and changes in elevation and a lot of other training features, all on a watch. I have been feeling really bummed lately because I have been gaining a lot of weight with this pregnancy. I have also been exercising minimally and eating terribly, so the weight gain is kind of to be expected, but it is also hard to take. So even though I won't be running for the next few months, especially outside, I am going to use this awesome new gadget to help me be motivated to keep fit and not put on another twenty pounds by April. I have a treadmill sitting about five feet from me. I have a Zune MP3 player and a music subscription to all the music and podcasts I want. I have no excuses.

I was just reading a fitness blog about not focusing on limiting the bad foods, but instead focusing on all the good things to eat. I think I will try this philosophy and see how I do. Wish me luck.

The End of An Era

It is amazing to think that almost three and a half years have passed since Jenna first got sick. There have been so many ups and down and blessings and miracles that I can't help but be greatful for everything.

To officially signal the end of her medical journey, she got her port removed this past Friday, December 12th. Paige stayed with Mom and we headed to Denver early on Friday to make it to her first appointment at 11:30, which was with Dr. Maloney, her oncologist. We knew she was going to have to be NPO, the medical term for fasting, after about 9:00 am, so we stopped at IHOP in Pueblo for Breakfast. That silly girl ordered a cheeseburger and apple slices for her last meal.

Dr. Maloney was very impressed with how well Jenna is doing and how much she has grown. The next check up appointment won't be until next December! Here they are together.

After that, we went down to radiology for a routine abdominal ultrasound. David went in with her while Jack and I went to get some lunch. They were checking for any neuroblastoma and everything looked normal, so yay for that.

Finally, we checked into the surgery center. After seeing nurse after nurse and getting her changed into the hospital jammies, we went into the play room to wait. Her surgery was scheduled for 3:45 and we had to wait about twenty more minutes for the anesthesiologist to get done with another surgery. Finally, it was time to take her back to the operating room. Jack stayed with a nurse and David and I put on all the required sterile jumpsuits and masks to be able to take her. She was nervous and scared and it was hard to watch her be put under. It breaks my heart every time she has to go through that. The surgery only lasted about twenty or thirty minutes and every thing went great. She woke up without having any fits, which was a big relief.

We are thankful to Kirk and Alyson for letting us stay with them once again. Jenna is always excited to play with Lydia and they have a good time together. We took our time going home on Saturday and did some shopping for snow clothes for the girls. Paige pretty much wears everything out now so there aren't many hand-me-downs for Jenna.

Walgreens Pays Me To Take Their Stuff

Here is my latest deal from Walgreens. I ended up making money on all of this stuff. I'm sorry the picture is kind of crappy, but I was in hurry to get it all put away. I got:

(4) bottles of Arm & Hammer Laundry detergent

(3) kid Colgate toothbrushes (Santa needed them)
(1) Reynold's aluminum foil (I'll be getting a lot more of these for free)
(4) bags Hershey's Reese's and York patties

(4) packages of gift tags

(4) gift bags

(2) 3-roll packs of Scotch tape

(1) Demet's Turtles

I spent: $13.70

I got back in Register Rewards (or basically store credit): $11

Total in rebates: $7.70

Net profit when it's all said and done: $5.00

I plan on doing a few more of these deals before the week is out!

Christmas Card

Deer in My Backyard

I had just clicked "Publish" on the last post when Jack started yelling for me to look at something in the backyard, so I went to see what he was excited about and this is what we saw:

Cooks in the Kitchen

I had been dying to try this Peppermint Bark Popcorn recipe from the Our Best Bites blog. It is the best cooking blog ever. So last night after dinner, we gave it a shot. It turned out sooooooo good! Crushing the peppermint sticks was the most fun for the kids, as you can see. Jenna is using the meat mallet and Jack is using his tiny, but real, hammer that Grandpa Johnnie got him.

Worst Vacation Ever

I can say this now because it's over. We went to see David's family for Thanksgiving and spent the entire week there. Don't get me wrong, it was great to see his family, but we ALL ended up getting the flu over the course of the week. And we couldn't just get it all at once and be done with it. Each day a new person had it. I happened to be lucky enough to get it on the drive home. But now that we are home, everyone is healthy again.

I was able to go Black Friday shopping with Marsha, so that was a big plus. We made it to Kohl's at 4am, Walmart by 5am and Target at 6am. I got most of the kids' presents and a few other things. I was exhausted from shopping and not sleeping due to kids puking, but it was a good day.

Title-less

I was lying on my bed this morning, trying to feel better, and I could hear Jenna and Jack in the kitchen dishing up some yogurt.

Jenna: Grandmothers are great, huh, Jack?

Jack: Yeah, grandmothers are great. I can't wait to go to my Grandmother's.

20 Weeks

I meant to take a picture of myself at 18 weeks, but that came and went before I got it done. So here I am at 20 weeks. The little squirt is supposedly around 10 inches long and weighs about 10 ounces. And since I keep forgetting to write about it, I had a quick ultrasound done a few weeks ago and it appears to be a girl! I will be having the official, big ultrasound next week, so I'll let you know if it still looks like girl.

My Latest Deal

I went to Safeway this morning to pick up a few things that were on sale and this is what I got:

55 pounds of flour

8 pounds of powdered sugar

10 pounds of brown sugar

21 boxes of Quaker Instant Oatmeal.

I spent $29.07 for all of it, after coupons. Not bad, I'd say. I'm tempted to go back for more flour and sugar, but I've run out of places to put stuff and I haven't even gotten to the oatmeal yet.

Halloween

David had to go to Houston last week to deliver a pump and pick up another, so he had the ingenious idea to take us all with him and play in Dallas for a few days. We left on Tuesday, October 28th, and only got as far as Clayton, NM before we stopped for the night. We were driving the four-door Dodge truck, so while we all fit, it made for some pretty uncomfy sleeping arrangements for the kids in the back seat. So we stopped at a hotel and then went the rest of the way on Wednesday.

On Thursday, David went on to Houston to take care of business and the kids and I went with Emma, Karen and baby Dylan to a pumpkin patch. We all had a lot of fun. The kids LOVED the bounce houses so much that they didn't even think about pumpkins and the fact that we didn't get one.



Friday was Halloween and it was a new experience to go Trick-or-Treating without coats on! We went around Emma's neighborhood. Justin had lined their garage with black sheets and then put the candy bowl on a table in the middle. As the kids would come to Trick-or-Treat, David, Justin and Cameron would jump out of the sides wearing masks and scare them. It was fun to watch from across the street. Jack got pretty freaked out, though.



Paige wanted to be Link from The Legend of Zelda, so I made her tunic and hat.



Jenna was a devil. I'm not sure what made her want to be that, but I guess there is something tantalizing about the props in Wal-Mart.



And Jack was a lion. And now I wish I would've wiped the dinner off his face first. This was what it was like Trick-or-Treating with him.


Jack: Trick-or-Treat!

Lady at the door: Here, have some candy.

Jack: Do you like my costume?

Lady: I do, what a cute lion.

Jack: She likes my costume!
And there's Karen with Dylan on his first Halloween. Isn't he a cute skeleton?

A Mini-Wheat Explosion

I love to coupon shop. It is like crack to me. So this is my haul from Safeway today. I got twenty-four boxes of Mini-Wheats for a grand total of $7.68, or $.32 per box. It's a good thing my family likes these! And, of course, I can't do it without my little helper!

No mail today

My favorite part of every day is getting the mail. It's like Christmas every day. And I don't get bummed out by bills because most of them come to my email inbox. I have a ton of magazine subscriptions, so I get a new one at least once a week and we also have a Netflix subscription which means we get new movies a couple of times a week. And the grocery store ads come out on Wednesdays.

Today is Columbus Day, a federal holiday. Boo. That means there won't be any mail. Normally, I'd be sad and pine until the mail comes the next day, but luckily for me, UPS still works on lame holidays such as today. I ordered a new flat iron last week and I checked the tracking number this morning and it is supposed to be delivered today! Yay! And I'll be even more excited when the UPS man delivers the part to my washing machine so I can quit having to use the laundromat.

Belly Shots and Naps

I barely have any pictures of me being pregnant with any of the kids, so I've decided that since this is the last pregnancy for me, I'm going to document it well. I've been taking belly shots every four weeks for comparison. It's kind of fun! So here is me at six weeks:

And ten weeks:

And this morning at fourteen weeks:

Yesterday was General Conference, which means a nice break from Primary! I slept in until about seven, then took a nap from about eight to ten and then took another forty-five minute nap in the afternoon. It felt so good and I still slept all night. Growing a baby is hard work!

Jenna's last infusion!

I haven't written anything about Jenna's massive medical history, so I'll give you a recap. When Jenna was 21 months old, she started puking and losing her balance. I immediately took her into the pediatrition, who told me it was probably a virus. That was on Monday, August 1, 2005. Bu that Thursday, her eyes developed a weird, rapid back and forth movement, or nystagmus. I took her to the ER on Saturday night and they saw some fluid in her ears and prescribed some steroids. She could barely walk by this time. On Tuesday, she still wasn't better so I took her back to the pediatrition, who was Dr. Bresnitz, by the way and I refuse to have my kids see her anymore. She didn't know and sent her down to the ENT, Dr. Taylor. He said her ears looked fine and it could be a growth in her head. He also said that in order to do any scans on kids, they have to be sedated and it is hard to sedate them, so he wanted to wait a few weeks and see what happens. What?! Are you kidding me?!



After talking with my friend Wendy McConnell, who is a nurse, I decided to call the Children's Hospital in Denver and see what they have to say and if we should take her there. They told me to get in the car and get there as quickly as we could. So on Friday morning, August 12th, we went to Children's and they started the battery of tests to get her diagnosed. Apparently, they don't care that it is hard to sedate kids. If it needs to be done, they do it. So finally, at about 10 PM we got the diagnosis. She had a type of pediatric cancer called Neuroblastoma and it was in a tumor on her left adrenal gland. They admitted us to the oncology floor that night and planned on doing surgery the next day.



The next day, after meeting and talking with Jenna's new oncologist, Dr. Maloney, they decided that they would do all the tests to try to stage the cancer before doing the resection. We went home that day to do laundry and to pack. We hadn't planned on having to stay for a couple of weeks. On Sunday, we called Bishop Reschke to come help give Jenna a blessing with David and Dad. Word had spread at church and Sheldon Lowder, Gary Snell and Corey Houskeeper came as well. Dad gave her the blessing and it was very comforting. After that, Jenna and I headed back up to Denver and David and Paige stayed behind. We were building an addition on our house and the carpet layers were coming that week and David needed to work. We stayed with our really good friends, Alyson and Kirk. They have been awesome to let us stay with them throughout all of this, and we really appreciate them.



Over the next week, Jenna did test after test to see if the cancer had spread anywhere else in her body and luckily, it hadn't. Her surgery was scheduled for Monday. David and Paige came up to Denver on Saturday. His mom and Karen came as well and my mom came on Sunday. We got to the surgery center and they got her history and prepped her with some drink that made her loopy. Then we were able to take her all the way to the OR and wait for her to go to sleep. I was so sad and emotional leaving her there. Did I mention that I was about five months pregnant with Jack during all of this? The surgery went well and they were able to do it laproscopically so she only has four little scars instead of a giant one, which also meant that she was able to heal faster. They had to remove the adrenal gland as well. This was Monday, August 22 and the cancer was gone.

After the surgery, she spent a couple more days in the hospital and then we took her home. The plan was to start chemo in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure where the miscommunication happened, but she was also diagnosed with Opsoclonus Myoclonus Syndrome (OMS) at the same time. It is an auto-immune disorder of the nervous system and it is what was causing her symptoms. Basically, it makes her body attack her brain. So somehow, we didn't realize that it was it's own disorder and that the chemo that she would do was to try to put the OMS into remission. She did six rounds of low-dose Cytoxan along with IVIG over six months. She was also on oral prednisone and began walking again after about a month of treatment. Every time we tried to wean her off the prednisone, though, she would start the OMS relapse. This happened several times. I finally got on the internet in about December of 2006 and found a Yahoo group of OMS families. I learned so much about this disorder and the big deal that it actually is. It is so extremely rare that most doctors have never heard of it, but there is a neurologist in Springfield, Illinois that kind of specialized in it. So we told Dr. Maloney we wanted to go see him so she got us set up. The first appointment we could get was March 1, 2007, so we gladly took it. Dr. Pranzatelli did a spinal tap in which he looked at the B-Cells and T-Cells to see what was going on there. Apparently, both were elevated, so he gave us a course of treatment and we went from there.

The treatment consisted of four rounds of chemo, Rituxan, given once a week for four weeks. It would target the B-cells specifically. And she also started injections of ACTH, which basically makes her body make its own steroids instead of giving them to her artifically. It worked! David and I learned to give the shots and she got them every other day. She did so well with them and rarely ever complained. We took her back to Dr. Pranzatelli in October, 2007 for a check up and he did another spinal tap. The b-cells were still in the normal range, so that was great news! We continued to taper the ACTH over the next few months and she had her last shot in April, 2008. She had been getting IVIG every month throughout all of this, so now it was time to taper the IVIG. That gets us up to date. One of Jenna's favorite thing at the hospital was ice cream! The freezer was usually stocked.




We had been doing every other infusion at the hospital in Alamosa, which had been working out fine. When we saw Dr. Maloney in August, the plan was to have her last infusion done here and then go back up there in December to take her port out. Oh yeah, her port is a little box in her chest with a line that goes right into a vein and then right into her heart. It has been great and have saved her from having to have an IV placed every time. It is all under the skin so we just put EMLA cream on it to numb it and they put a butterfly needle in to access it when she needs an infusion. She got it before the very first chemo.



Jack has a runny nose, so I couldn't take him with us. David came home from work to stay with him, so that was nice. Jenna likes to stop at the DollarTree before an infusion and she picks some stickers, a puzzle and a new coloring book. We got to the hospital and got her accessed. Then we had to wait about an hour and a half for the pharmacy to deliver her IVIG. We learned a while ago that the pharmacies won't start getting the meds ready until the patient is in the building, so that stinks. She finally got started and sat down to do her puzzle. All of a sudden, she started feeling really sick and that wasn't normal. She finally fell asleep, which she also doesn't normally do. The IVIG came in two bottles and each bottle should take two hours to infuse. The first bottle was empty just over an hour after it started. That was too fast! I told the nurse that and she slowed it down for the second one. It's no wonder she was feeling sick! That's what happens if it is pushed too fast. I called her nurse, Robin, in Denver and she told me that Jenna should've been given more Benedryl and Zofran when she reacted and it should've been slowed down immediately. I was furious. But luckily, she felt fine when she woke up from her nap, so no damage was done. She finished up her infusion and we went home. I am so glad that this was her last one, but even if it wasn't, she would not be getting more done there.

I am so thankful for all of the miracles that Jenna has been blessed with. I still look at her and feel amazed at what she has gone through. She hardly every complained. The nurses and doctors all love her. So many people have prayed for her and for that we are forever grateful.

Alligator Farm

Yesterday was the preschool's annual trip to the Alligator Farm. What? In Colorado? Yep. There are about 400 alligators that live in a fish farm near Mosca, CO. It is the most redneck zoo you could ever believe, but it is actually kind of cool. I think they even had a Ripley's Believe It or Not there a couple of years ago. So, anyhoo, the preschool goes there every year for a field trip and this year it was Jenna's turn.

Before we get to the scary alligator pictures, I want to show you Jenna's cool new 'do. Thanks to my buddy, Bethany, I found this cool blog called She Does Hair. I tried the smocking hairdo and I think it turned out really cute!

On to the Alligator Farm. Lauren watched Jack for me so I could ride on the bus with Jenna instead of having to drive my own car. Thanks, Lauren! I had forgotten how uncomfortable school buses actually are. Luckily, it is only about a thirty minute ride. Billy Bob the redneck alligator wrangler showed the kids a small gator up close and they all got to touch it. Jenna is deathly afraid of everything with four legs, so I was really surprised when she touched it!

Next up were the reptile cages. They have a ton of boas and pythons and other slithering things, along with some lizards and some giant turtles that roam around.

Then we went outside and saw the BIG gators. Apparently, the hotter the gators' enviroment is, the bigger they get. These ones live in a hot spring, so they get really big. And they keep growing their whole lives, which can be about sixty to ninety years!

Silly ducks, don't they know that the pond is infested with alligators?

Here is Jenna at the top of where you can stand and look over the big pond. Note the silly ducks in the bottom right corner and the giant alligator on the left side.

The gym

Remember how David was working late the other night? He went to work at about 6:30 Thurday morning and finally got home at about 8:00 on Friday morning! Poor guy! So while he slept, I took the kids with me to the gym to give him some peace and quiet. Have I mentioned that I love the gym? I prefer to run outside, but since it is now dark and cold outside early in the morning, I am resigned to the treadmill for the winter. Yes, it's only September, but I live in the arctic. And I'm a baby when it comes to the dark and the cold. And I do love the gym.

I have been a group fitness instructor for a little over eight years now. I was about six months pregnant with Paige when I got certified and she was about two months old when I started teaching. Right now, I am teaching step, kickboxing, and these awesome classes for older adults called SilverSneakers. I am a really awesome yoga teacher, but I don't have any classes of my own right now. Boo to that. And the daycare is non-existant at my gym. It is a mom-and-pop joint and the owners don't think it is worth it. So my kids just watch tv in a little room while I teach, which works out fine for now. However, I'm having another baby. I finally told my boss the other day and she still insisted that they won't bet getting a daycare, so my days may be numbered there. :-( But every dark cloud has a silver lining and here's mine. I just found out that the other instructor is pregnant. Ha! And she is due around the same time as me, so if they want either one of us to teach, then they should really reconsider. And did I mention that this is a small gym in a small town and that we are the only instructors around? Ha!

About me

Welcome to my blog! I set this up a while ago and have been waiting for just the right thing to say to get started. Since nothing has come to me yet, I guess I should just get started. David is working late tonight, and for some reason, it is hard to go to bed by myself.

So here's a little bit about me. I am 27. I have three kids and am about 12 weeks preggo with my fourth. I'm still a little bit shocked about that because as many of you know, I was plenty content with my three. But when that still small voice won't stop badgering you, you listen. So here we are.

Let me tell you about my three kids. Paige is eight and in the third grade. She is a self-proclaimed tomboy and refuses almost everything having to do with pink. She loves to read and is really good at it. I cut her hair the other day and it looks really cute. But don't tell her it looks cute. Remember, she's a tomboy. Tell her it looks cool, or great, or whatever other adjective you can think of.

Jenna is four and she just cracks me up. She has a very funny sense of humor. She is in preschool again this year and loves it. She has been through more medically in her short lifetime than most people will ever go through. She will finish up all her medicine the first of October and will get her port removed around the first of December. You are all invited to her "port-party", as we will be celebrating this big milestone.

Jackson is my little buddy. He is two and is in the middle of potty training. He is doing really good, but some days, he just tries my patience. He has also added prases to my list of things I never though I'd hear myself say, like, "Yes, poop in the potty makes me happy." He is 100% boy. He loves trucks, motorcycles and balls. His new love is play-doh, which he can earn for using the potty.

Here is a picture of us all. This was taken last month when we went to my Uncle Gaylon's funeral. That was a really sad time, but it was fun to take the kids to Temple Square. I haven't been there in years.