First week of April

Monday we had a horrible storm first thing in the morning. There was some golfball sized hail and lots of thunder and lightning. Greg and I spent lots of time cuddled up on the couch. We also started working on Iheartorganizing’s Project Purge. 🙂

Tuesday all the kids were at school. I visited my rheumatologist (more about that here) and then met my friends E & H for Thai food. They brought me an early birthday present: scrapbooking pens, a layout book, and a nifty cottage mug. 🙂 (How did I manage not to take a photo?!) After school the kids spent time exploring the creek since it was still fairly full of water. Even Greg went over the fence (he usually stays behind with me) and took a look around. David had his first lesson out of his new piano books & Ben counted out how many songs left in his current book so he can “catch up” (they’re not using the same books, so he’s not really catching up, but that’s how he thinks about it).

Wednesday Greg and I went to the library for story time. There was a lady there from our local professional ballet troupe and she read the kids Pocahontas, as that’s the show they’re currently putting on. Since the version she read was the Disney version (and therefore mostly romance), the boys all got fairly bored fairly quickly. By the end of the story Greg was the only boy left in the room. We exchanged our books from last week for some new ones and went on home for lunch. After school Ben planned & prepared our snack as part of his scouting electives. We didn’t have raisins for ants on a log, but we did have craisins & dried cherries, so we tried those instead and it worked out well.

Thursday was another all-kids-in-school day, but I was feeling under the weather, so instead of being productive, I stayed on the couch and watched TV and dozed all day (fortunately for me my coffee date friend cancelled that day -serendipity!). It was a beautiful day, though, and the day that my rosebush erupted into blooms.

Friday Greg and I spent all morning playing with his kitchen & grocery store sets, something we haven’t done in ages. Greg made me six kinds of soup (because soup is good for you when you’re sick) and set up a “table” with a table cloth for our meal. It was very fun and something I could do while sitting down, which was great since I was so dizzy. That afternoon my parents arrived back from Germany and so we went over to visit and look at all their photos. Nick and David left for a while to go fishing with Uncle Mark in his boat (which we’d planned before we knew my parents would be up – my dad had been selected to serve on a jury that week, so we thought they’d not be up til Saturday). When they came back we had dinner together at their house.

Saturday we got up and I felt pretty good at the beginning of the day. I was perky and could finally smell stuff again. We went over to my parents house for breakfast and hung out for a while. By the time we left to go back home, though, I was starting to feel weird. Dizzy again, and tingly in my extremities. I went home and took a shower, hoping that would make me feel better, but it didn’t. I tried blow drying my hair, but couldn’t feel if the drying was blowing hot air or not, so I asked Nick and he said it was. I decided that I shouldn’t continue, for fear of hurting myself. The rest of the family got dressed and went on to church. I was supposed to follow along in the second van, but I was getting so confused, I couldn’t figure out how to drive. I called my mother in law to let her know what was going on, so she could tell Nick why I hadn’t made it to church (our phones don’t work out there very well) and laid down to rest. My parents eventually got back to me (they were out buying a new van, which took hours longer than expected, even once they’d picked it out), picked me up, fed me a bit of lunch, and took me back home to rest some more when I couldn’t manage more than a couple bites of toast. Once my in-laws brought the kids back from church (Nick was staying late for Men’s Club), I walked the kids over to my parents house for dinner (frozen pizza, the kids favorite), as I wasn’t sure I should be in charge of an oven. My parents tried to show off the new van to the kids, but something went wrong and the new van wouldn’t start. They spent the evening calling back and forth everywhere trying to get a technician out, but ended up leaving town the next day with the problem unresolved. The pizza, being left to me in the meantime, did in fact end up crispy critters. 😦 The kids ate around the burnt bits and were very sweet about the whole situation.

Sunday Nick made us a nice breakfast at home before running off to work. I was still feeling really weird, so the kids and I stayed home and had a quiet day. The kids were really well behaved all day and mostly kept to themselves, David with his Legos, Greg with his games, and Ben with his book (he’s reading Barthe de Clements “Nothings Fair in Fifth Grade” – which I read as a child).

Yesterday morning I woke up feeling nearly normal. I was finally able to drive the car & managed to get the kids to school, the mail stamped & mailed at the post office, and the milk & bread purchased at the grocery. Of course, I spent all that time also fielding phone calls from the various doctors offices that were finally calling me back (I’d left messages over the course of the weekend asking for advice). The rheumatologist didn’t think it was a drug-reaction or an RA related event, even though he’d specifically mentioned numbness & tingling being a possibility at our appointment earlier in the week. My primary physician wanted to see me “right away” but didn’t have a hole in his schedule until today, which the nurse thought was all right to wait since I was feeling okay by that point. Greg and I spent the rest of the day doing our quiet little Monday things: tidying, dishwashing, laundry, watching movies, the usual. The big kids came home and had a snack before David ran off with his friend on bikes, riding through the neighborhood. Once he and Nick arrived home (within moments of each other, so I was surprised into not taking a picture of David arriving home), we had a bbq picnic outside (another one of Ben’s elective’s for scouts).