Vacation is over...for now

Well our summer routine is now starting. My husband had the past 2 weeks off and we made great use of every day. We started the summer off with the end of school party. Our son was honored at the all school assembly for Perfect Attendance - he was the only one in the Kg-3rd grade so it was quite a special thing. He was very proud to go up with the older kids to get his award. Then the class had a little "graduation" ceremony with the kids singing the school song and the PeaceBuilder song. Very cute. Then we were off....as you know we started the time off with a trip to Lake Chelan. What a gorgeous time! We stayed at a fabulous house overlooking the lake and mountains and enjoyed the weekend immensely. On our way back from Lake Chelan we stopped by the Reptile Zoo in Monroe, WA. What a cool (and creepy) place. The boys loved it and we got try to match a snake skin we found at Lake Chelan. Very cool except we couldn't figure out what kind of snake it was - one of the zookeepers thinks it is either a gophersnake or a Western Rattlesnake (not what I wanted to hear after spending time in the area where we found it barefoot). When we arrived home we began work on quite a few remodeling projects. I've mentioned before how we are slowly but surely remodeling our home. This round of remodeling focused on the family room. We started working on this area when we remodeled the laundry room last fall. After many attempts with getting the paint right to match the rest of the house (don't ask) we painted the ceiling and removed the old ceiling fan (that we couldn't use anyway as it wasn't installed properly by previous owners). While hubby painted the walls of the room, I went to work on painting all the trim boards to frame all the doors and windows. The room looks great now. The new ceiling fan will go up next weekend - we hope - as we just ran out of time.

The rest of his time off we spent playing. We went to the Muppet exhibit (Jim Henson's Fantastic World) at the EMP, rode the monorail downtown Seattle, went to the aquarium, went to the zoo, went to the beach and finished it all off with going to a great fireworks show. Through it all we also had playdates for our son. What a great way to start off our summer. It seems that our summer is not going to be a lazy one. We seem to be already booking up with set playdates, camps, and events. We'll also be having another vacation later this month too. It won't be long before school will be starting. - augh let's not go there now - Happy Summer!!!!

Back soon

Hello friends,

I have been MIA for so long & wanted to quickly let you know I'm still here.  We were on vacation for a few weeks where I was cleaning out each room of my Aunt's house so that it can get ready for sale and then we went for a few days to Lake Chelan to just relax.  Several days after returning home I awoke to another chapter in our crappy 2010 year.  I thought I was having back pain, then it turned to constant vomiting and my husband thought I had food poisoning.  It progressed quickly to a need to visit our wonderful ER.   The following maybe TMI so at this point you can drop down to the next paragraph if you want :)  They thought I had kidney stones and said it could take 2 days to 2 weeks for them to pass -UGH. So then they did blood tests, xrays, CT scans......well to make a long story short it turned out to be a large cyst torquing my ovary and cutting the circulation off.  Yes extremely painful.  I gave birth to my son naturally with minimal drug intervention and this was a hugely worse pain - I was extremely drugged in order to lie still for the scans.  I ended up in emergency surgery where they originally started doing a laparoscopy to remove the cyst but then had to do a mini c-section in addition to remove the cyst and ovary together.

So I have been trying to recover from this fun event - the lap incisions are doing okay, the c-section (as all you moms out there with c-section scars know) is making it slow going.  I am finally able to sit up for longer periods but haven't been able to sew, craft, type, or do anything too much around the house or garden.  (& the yard shows it - tall tall grass).  So I'm hoping in the next few weeks to get back into the groove of summer fun and back into business.  For now I want to thank my wonderful friends who have been great about entertaining my bored, missing-out-on-summer kiddo for me.  I really appreciate it!  You're the best!

See you in a few!

Well it was a great surprise

As I mentioned last week, it was my birthday and yes my boys did spoil me. First a spa trip and then a weekend trip. It was great. We haven't done much traveling around our state of Washington and this was a perfect trip to a place so many people have told us about but we hadn't been yet....Lake Chelan. We had a great time - lots of swimming, some sunning, great vistas, and lots of relaxing. It was great. The second part of my surprise was that my wonderful hubby (who has been putting in tons of hours on the new Dark Void game) is finally getting 2 weeks off. We are planning to do some work around the house (including painting the computer room) and hopefully he will be able to do some relaxing. I am looking forward to having my hubby around after so many late nights and weekends away for the past almost year. In the meantime while the paint is going up and around the computer room, I'll be off the computer - at least until it is hooked up again. So until then, have a great week!