Happy January!

New Years

No, we have not disappeared! This year has started off a little crazy with some bad luck and unfortunate situations. New Year's Eve was also our 10th anniversary, but we are celebrating by going on a trip in February, so we didn't plan anything here at home. The plan for New Year's was to let the girls stay up to play until 10pm and watch the ball drop (or at least a past one). Unfortunately, Claire hurt her lip really badly, and the evening became about taking care of her and calming everyone down. I feel so lucky to have Chris as a healthcare provider who can stay calm in emergency situations and can take care of medical things for our family. Shay took Adrian away so Chris and I could get her split lip cleaned and super-glued shut safely. We gave her some medicine and then spent the next day trying to figure out how to get her to eat because it was so swollen. When she woke up on the 2nd with it still pretty swollen, I called the doctor's office, and they had an opening for them to look at it a little better and make sure it wasn't worse than it looked. It was a pretty traumatic beginning of the year, but she is healed and 100% acting normal because kids heal remarkably. We are putting scar gel on it, so hopefully it will disappear completely or be easy to cover with makeup if she is ever self-conscious about it. 

School

The girls went back to school just fine on Tuesday, the 6th, with Claire being completely back to normal and just a little shy about letting people look at it. She said there were a lot of people who asked about it, and she told them every detail of what happened! I think that was oversharing, but hopefully, plenty of people were excited to share Christmas excitement, and they didn't focus on it once the story was out there. They were bad at doing their reading the last few days of break because of my need to baby my Claire and not focusing as much on getting them to read. Luckily, there were days they did twice as much to earn extra video games. I did see their report cards, and Shay is a super star that has all 3.0, which is equivalent to straight A's (for those who aren't in education and don't know that they changed things!). It is much quieter at home again, but Adrian knows how to make a mess with his toys and dumps out the baskets of toys just to start throwing them onto things he can't reach. I find toys in my kitchen sink, on the counters, on the table, and up where our books are, too.

Hand Surgery

The second week I missed was because I had hand surgery! I might have been able to type up a short update with my left hand, but it was miserable to try to do anything, so I procrastinated. I had a growth in my index finger on my right hand that has been getting larger within the past year, so I finally got the courage to get it taken out. The hand specialist didn't know what it was from the x-rays but ultimately said the only way to fix it was to cut it out, so that is what we did. I get the stitches out this coming Tuesday, and I think it will be a relief because it is uncomfortable and annoying to have it wrapped and barely able to move. I don't know how long until it is fully healed, but I'm glad it went smoothly, and the test results they did on it afterward said it was a neurofibroma and negative for malignancy, so good, I guess? Maybe there will be more information about it when I go for my follow-up appointment, and they will explain if it might come back. Now that I'm healing, I can get back to taking pictures and sharing our updates every week. Sorry!

Life

Despite the injuries so far this year, we have also had some good moments as a family. The girls have really liked playing Super Smash Bros on our new Switch, and we have good evenings together, all fighting the computers. It is bringing back good memories of playing when I was younger, but I don't have the anger at my brothers because I lost so often. Adrian makes life so happy when he does cute things, and he does them so often! He knows exactly what he is saying, and it is cute to hear him formulate his sentences of gibberish. He also likes to eat daddy's food instead of his own and was helping him know which pieces he wanted by pointing at them and patiently waiting for daddy to feed them to him. Chris had friends come to town to hang out a few weeks back, and I went to a party for a friend, too, so we were able to go have a lot of fun. We are very happy and looking forward to a great year.