The VonSick Family

Saturday Lilla started acting kinda not herself. Sunday we decided to take her to see the doctor. Apparently she has a virus in her respiratory area. Monday we took her back because she was getting worse. Tuesday, they admitted her immediatly upon arriving at the emergency room. Wednesday was a very long day full of tests, nebulizer treatments and lots of drugs. So, they finally released my little one from the hospital today. Ok, so it was only 2 days, but those 2 days seemed like an eternity. Particularly because I'm sick, I just wanted to be home. And Lilla was climbing the walls in that room. The weirdest part of the infants ward is the cribs are like cages. I kid you not. They are all metal and have bars from top to bottom. Apparently people have a tendency to leave their kids there, they think of it as daycare, and so their kids would climb out at night. Nice.

Well anyway, Lilla was so ready to get that IV taken out of her arm I thought she'd about chew it off! She happily said, "See ya later!" to those nurses and, "Yeah, we're home!" to Ellie the dog. Even Ellie was happy to see her. She gave her a couple of big Ellie kisses as a welcome home gift. Gotta love it!

4 down, 2 to go

So here we are at the "most wonderful time of the year", and I have to tell you...I am TIRED. Oh, yes, so tired. Even though it is just at the beginning. This last week we have been to 4 Christmas parties. I was supposed to go to an added one last night, but by the time we had returned from Louisville Lilla was acting kind of funny and I had a feeling she was getting sick so we sat it out. It's a good thing too because she is very sick and is now on some pretty strong meds. Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day!

Anyway, I digress (does anyone ever notice I use that word way too much, I get off the subject way too easily apparently), after seeing the doctor today, we did head out to my mom's with an added 3 hours of driving and celebrated a small family Christmas there. Now, we have two parties left. One, is the party for my husband's family here in Indianapolis. That is always a crazy time. There are about 30 of us, and half are little kids that are very excited about the gifts, and it is just utter mayhem. The paper is flying, the mouths are squealing and the food is being dropped all over the floor. Chaos! And, since I come from a fairly small family, wow, is it overwhelming!

Then, Christmas day we are driving to Chicago for a big party with my extended family. I think it will be more of the same from the previous day, only more adults doing the squealing and dropping food thing than the kids. Ahh, the holidays, got to love them!

Measuring Trees

Last night Michael and I finally bought a Christmas tree. Oh, yes, we did have one already that had been a hand-me down probably of a hand-me down, but it was rather Charlie Brown looking, so we decided now that we have Lilla Christmas matters more and we should get a tree that the angel on top no longer dwarfs. We had actually been looking for the past few weeks and I had thought just about every tree we looked at just looked too fake. Now I know, it is fake, but in the age of actually being able to clone a living being, you'd think they could make a tree look presentable for goodness sake. So, we looked and looked and looked, and finally saw that Menards was having a 30% off sale this week so we went over to our friendly neighborhood Menards and looked some more. Of course there was only one that I liked and we couldn't find a price tag so we needed some help. There was no help to be found for quite some time, and the last trees of that variety got snapped up. Ugh!

Well, we decided to run over to another Menards, and try to find one there. Yeah! We found one! So, we loaded it up in the car (and when I say loaded it up, I mean opened the box, took out all the pieces, shoved those said pieces into the trunk and shut it as fast as we could before they came forth) and went home. Mind you, when we opened the trunk those pieces than flew out of the trunk. Too funny!

So, then we started to put up the tree and realized it was a lot bigger than we had really realized. Oh, how humongous it looks in our living room! Also, because the actual box was too big for our car we had to leave it at Menards and therefore could not take it back. We had to move all of the furniture, and put some in the garage and other rooms before that big old tree could be shoved in a corner. But, let me just tell you how beautiful this tree is! We didn't have time to put the lights and ornaments on last night, and it is already fabulous! And you should have seen Lilla's face light up when I brought her into the living room today and she saw that tree there. Too fun!

Moral of the story...don't forget to measure things before you buy them!

Rat tat tat

As I sit here writing I can hear a rattling in my every breath. I have pneumonia so that would begin to explain the issue. Still you have to think, that really can't be good. When I breathe, it sounds like paper being crumpled up. Definitely not good. I'm on some antibiotics but I'm not too sure they are working all that well. I get up in the night and almost cough up a lung and I feel like I'm losing some serious oxygen. Just an FYI that pneumonia happens when your capillaries that usually hold air fill up with fluids, ie green and yellow gunk, oh yeah, good times! The moral of my story is, go to the doctor early, don't wait until it turns into pneumonia. That paper rattling noise is rather annoying.

Learning how to do the watermelon crawl

So this week my daughter finally began crawling. It was such an exciting time for my husband and I as we watched her actually move from place to place without having to just throw her body there. That is how she has done it up to now. Also, she does this back up thing where we say, "Beep, beep, beep", I suppose you probably had to be there but trust me, it's quite amusing.

Anyway, as she gets faster and understands more that she is actually able to move herself from place to place without the assistance of her sucker mom, I just see how this little miracle is changing right before my eyes. Less than 10 months ago she was just a bundle of blankets wrapped up and ready to come home from the hospital, and now she is becoming more and more independent of her mama. Amazing how that works, the rest of her life is going to be more and more of the same. It's a strange knowledge, it's really the circle of life, but, it kind of makes me sad. :(

Go Grandpa

Last week most of my maternal side of the family (minus my husband and brother-in-law, oh, and aunt that talks to horses) went to Tampa to memoralize my grandfather with his friends in the community where he had a home since 1979. Good old Regency Cove. The place has changed in lovely small ways in the past 27 years, thanks in large part to my grandpa. He was what my grandmother kept referring to as "an icon" in the community. Now, I'm not quite sure she actually knew the definiton of the word icon, but I think we all got what she meant, and if it helped her to feel better in her grief, why not let her hold on to that belief?

Anyway, I digress, after I returned home I decided to look up Grandpa's old battalion to see if I could find out more about this soldier who had served his country proudly in WWII. I was thrilled to see his batallion had a website talking about their time serving. I got to know a little bit about the pioneer my grandpa was. Apparently, his batallion rode into the Marshall Islands and Guam on these amphibious vessels called Amtanks. They had never been used before for any reason so it was a risk and an experiment. They would go from water to land in suprise attacks on the beach. Many men were killed as they were learning to use them and there was no manual for really how it would work, so they were brave to be the first. thankfully, Grandpa made it through and lived 81 wonderful years to tell about it. Go Grandpa!

Why so difficult?

So I've just decided to come back to blogger.com and I'm not sure if I'm going to stay. I mean it's not like I had so many blogs here to begin with. For some reason I started out 3 strong over a year ago and then I forgot all about it and moved on with life. Well, just recently I've decided I like to blog, gives me a good place to vent I guess, so even though I blog on myspace I decided to keep an additional one here. In trying to figure out just how to put a picture on it though I've gotten so frustrated I almost gave up altogether. I mean, why does it have to be so difficult? Whatever happened to good old fashioned cut and paste? So, so much easier.