First Day of School 2009

Heading to Universal

Well the girls are off to Universal with friends. I was supposed to leave with them this morning but I wasn't feeling well, so I decided to catch up with them later. I have had a very upset crampy stomach since Thursday. Not fun.

So Mike has been gone all week to Spokane visiting his family. His mother's surgery went fairly well. The surgeon was able to get most of the tumor but decided to leave the part that was wrapped around the motor cortex. Carol will need some radiation to help it reduce further. The biopsy showed that the tumor was not malignant but not exaclty benign. This type of tumor has a 30-40% chance of recurrence.

Carol got home from the hospital yesterday (Friday). She is still suffering some weakness on her right side which will hopefully go away when the swelling in her brain subsides. As for now, she is having problems with her right foot not cooperating. Hopefully a little physical therapy and she will be as good as new!

Mike is flying back today and I will be picking him up at the Orlando airport at 12:38 am. Ugh. I'm such a good wife. So the plan was to spend the day in Orlando at Universal with the MVs and the FDs and then pick up Mike at the airport and stay to play on Sunday and Monday. Slight change of plans for me. I woke up feeling fine, my stomach just a bit bloated but by the time I got out of the shower I was so cramped up I couldn't stand up straight. So I took some Advil and Gas-X (couldn't hurt, right?) and sat down but it didn't really go away. Claudia came and got the kids and I went back to bed. An hour of bedrest really helped.

The doctor prescribed something to help so we'll have to cross our fingers and hope for the best. good thing for insurance. The prescription was $512!! Copay was $50. Yikes. Walmart didn't even carry the stuff so I had to go to Walgreens. Anyway hopefully everything will work itself out soon. Otherwise I'm going to have a very hard time going back to work.

So off to Orlando soon. Will post pics later. And yes I still plan on posting the rest of our vacation pics but I promised myself I would get my chair covers done before I worked on anything else. Three done, three to go. At this rate the vacation pics should be up by Christmas!!

What's Up? you ask

Well maybe you weren't asking, but if you are visiting my blog, there's a chance you might be mildly interested. . .

Carol's surgery lasted four and a half hours yesterday. The surgeon was able to remove 95% of the tumor. He left the part that had grown into the motor cortex, not wanting to deal with those kind of side effects. The tumor was more aggressive than anticipated and it looks like Carol will need at least a round or two of radiation. Another side effect has been some reduced mobility on the right side. Although Mike did tell us that his mom could feed herself with her right hand she was not able to control her right foot. So no walking as of yet. So it is not the perfect outcome, but it is what it is and way better than it could be. We shall be cautiously optismistic.

As for us? Well I got about two hours of sleep last night. I will have to admit I slipped up and had way too much Pepsi yesterday and it appeared to make me wired. So I brought it on myself. ugh. But I had to get up because I promised Claudia to pick her up from the RV repairshop at 9. So I picked her up, dropped her off at home, grabbed Kacey and headed back home. Neither Kenzie nor Becca wanted to get out of bed to play with Kacey!! Lazy butts. Finally Becca got her butt out of bed around 10:30. Claudia and Carlie came by around noon and brought pizza for lunch. The girls played, we visited, we ate, the usual. Then Claudia took pity on me and took my kids back home so I could take a nap. I love you Claudia.

I wish I could say I was super productive but this morning was just a haze. My washing machine is acting up and I ordered a new drain pump for it. I hope I can install it myself and I hope that fixes it. Thirty minutes after ordering the part, I went to fold clothes and now my dryer is on the blink. No heat. Just tumbles round and round blowing cold air. Great. So I think I will be calling a repairman for that one. Ugh. If it isn't one thing, it's another. If I hadn't already ordered the part I would have been at Jetsons buying a new washer and dryer!!! I can't stand unreliable appliances. I can't even stand thinking about the laundry piling up. It drives me nuts.

So after my nap I took Claudia back to the RV place and picked up the kids. Then I finished my third chair cover. Half done!! Yeah. And then the girls and I tackled the living room. We dusted from top to bottom, vacuumed everything that didn't move (and even a few things that were moving around), and cleaned the leather couches and ottoman. Not fun but needed to be done. And I am kind of freaking out thinking about going back to work with a house that is in shambles. I feel no motivation to do housework when I get home from a long day at work. Who does? Actually I feel no motivation to do it in the summer either, but in my head I know it's easier to do now.

After cleaning I watched Eighteen Kids and Counting which always astounds me. How that woman can function without ever losing her cool I do not understand. Yet I envy her unflappableness (sure, that's a word. Trust me.) And we watched the Little Couple who went to the doctor to see if she should have a baby. I get the desire but her stomach is about 3 inches long. And I know how uncomfortable it is to have a kid pushing against your ribs and your bladder at the same time. I was one that never "dropped." There wasn't anywhere to drop to!!

Ah, eleven o'clock, and it's definitely bed time. Even with an hour long nap, I am seriously sleep deprived. Plus I should call Mike. I haven't talked to him since about two o'clock. And he's very old fashioned; he doesn't believe in boys calling girls. He thinks it is very forward. Whatever. He just never calls me because he sucks. Love you Honey!!

Sometimes I amaze myself!

So here is a photo of my dining room chairs. I bought six of them plus a 108 inch dining room table at a yard sale in Austin several years ago. I should say a shed sale because this couple was emptying out their old shed. These chairs and the table were pretty beat up. They were a pickled oak with a cream colored nubby fabric that was covered in years of dirt and grime and CAT HAIR!!! But the whole set was $30 which fit into my budget at the time.

So Mike ripped off all the upholstery and I painted everything black. I debated going with white but our rental house at the time had white walls so I went with black. The fabric was from Hobby Lobby as was the foam for the new seat bottoms. In all it was somewhere around $100 for paint, fabric and foam. I have never been crazy about the style of the chairs. I think they look pretty outdated, but hey for $30 who is going to complain? But over the years the upholstery has gotten spilled on and painted on and glued on, etc. Our dining room is much more of a crafting space then a simple eating space. At any rate, it was time for an update. I've been looking at new chairs for a few months and I almost went with brown leather ones to match our sofa and loveseat, but Mike didn't really want to spend that much (approx. $150-200 per chair). He figured if we were going to spend that much, just get a whole new set. Well, a whole new set isn't really in the budget and we are leary about buying new furniture for this house when we are not certain how much longer we will be here.

So I started thinking about recovering the chairs with a new fabric, something lighter in tone but durable. And then I saw a picture in a Pottery Barn catalog of some chairs with covers on them. Aha! I thought. That's the answer! I've made chair covers before for my last set of dining room chairs (rescued from the dumpster at our apartment in Lynnwood) so I knew it was a possibility. But I didn't know how it would look since the back of this chair isn't upholstered. It's kind of bumpy. So I ended up buying more foam! There is now a piece of foam cushioning the back and the chair cover goes over it.

Looks pretty good, huh? Kenzie helped me pick out the fabric. The cream goes with our wall color, the pale blue coordinates with the curtains in the living room curtains on the other side of the room. The mini stripes in red, mustard and sage coordinate with the accessories in the dining room and living room. Plus the cover can be stripped off and thrown in the wash!

I will have to admit this redo is much more expensive than the last one. The foam cost about $40 and the fabric was about $200. It was on sale and I probably bought too much, but I didn't want to risk running out. So far I have one finished and another one almost done. I am hoping to finish two today and get the other three done by the end of the week. Then I can post pictures of what it looks like altogether. But so far, I am pretty darn pleased!

Prayers Needed

Well Mike is off to the airport today so that he can fly into Spokane. He got a call Friday telling him that his mom had had a seizure Thursday night and doctors had determined that it was caused by a tumor in her brain. Currently she is resting at Sacred Heart in Spokane awaiting surgery on Monday. The good news is that the tumor appears to be benign. The bad news? Yeah, I think you can figure that out for yourself.

Mike will be gone for a week, so there will be some serious girl time in the next week. The past week the house has been craft central! We spent a couple days making cards and I must admit there is still a folding table set up behind the couch holding a bunch of papercrafting supplies. The dining room table is sewing central because I am making new chair covers for the dining room (one down, five to go. . .) Pictures will be coming. Thursday we spent the afternoon at a ceramics studio where we all painted for a couple hours. Next week the pottery wheel will be here so we can start throwing our own pots. Ok, just kidding about that.

So while Mike is gone, my goal is to get the covers finished and clean up all the crafting stuff. I should catch up on some scrapbooking too, but I always manage to push that off. I need some crafty friends that can kick me in the butt. Oh, and my garden is coming along too. More on that in a different post I think. Plus I need to finish blogging our earlier trip. See? I won't miss him at all because I will be up to my eyeballs in projects!!

Please keep my dear mother-in-law in your prayers. Hmmm. . . that sounds funny. Dear. Like she's a doddering old lady. My MIL is strong, feisty, fiercely loving, funny, independent. . . and she raised the best man in the world. It's going to take a lot more that a tumor to bring her down. I love you Carol.