ERRGH! Technology.

So, I had this great post all written up today, and pictures loading. But my dear husband accidentally closed it while the pictures were loading. And it was taking FOREVER for them to load. So tomorrow I will start them loading early so that hopefully by evening they'll all be loaded and posted before he gets home. Also, my phone died on me this last weekend while we were in Anchorage, and I'm not eligible for a phone upgrade 'til April, so AT&T recommended that we go to Wal-Mart, get a phone there, and wait 'til April to get a new phone. We finally got unlimited texting... but with this new Wal-Mart phone it'll take me approximately 47 minutes to send one text. *sigh*. Oh well. I'm super spoiled. Hopefully this'll teach me to be less spoiled and selfish. I'd welcome that.

Catching up in pictures.

Ok, so, I think since I'm so far behind, I'll just sort of caption these pictures and explain a little bit about what was going on. So, without further ado, here is the month of November in pictures.

 I hated not being able to really hold him, stupid IV's.

 But we got a smile anyway.

 These are some pictures Mom took, and one I took of her and Micah. They were so sweet together. :)

 I woke up one morning to discover Mr. Chicken Wings here managed to do this in his sleep somehow.

 Nomming on the "Nom" bib...

And just chilling for the evening. All he lacks here is a beer bottle in one hand and the remote in another. :P

And now, he is screaming his ever loving head off again, so, time to go. More pictures of our trip later.

A trip and other things

Well, here I sit, wondering if I'm EVER going to get a chance to write a post AND post pictures at the same time. So far, I've been unsuccessful. Micah is finally down for his short nap, I've been hard at work today, and actually have things DONE on my long list of "to-do's"! The reason for my inability to post is the little guy I write about so much. He's been going through a "phase". He has been so incredibly cranky the last several weeks, and rather screechy (is that even a word?) every time I put him down for one minute. This is not conducive to getting any housework done, let alone posting anything, or any other relaxing activity. I feel myself like I've been going insane, almost like the first 8 weeks of his life. Praise God though, the last couple days he seems to be doing better. This week so far has been a lot less exhausting than last week. I've even gotten enough sleep the last two nights. I'm not sure if that's because we're finally back on a sort of routine, or if he's gotten less cranky. I think a little of both. We've had a lot more smiles out of him the last two days than we have since we got home from the hospital. I'm so grateful. That felt like it was going to last FOREVER. Even though I kept reminding myself, "This too shall pass...this too shall pass..."

Also, a side note on what's been going on lately...I find myself wondering often if I'm ever going to get over my freakish need to have everything neat and orderly. I was joking around with Scott last night that my blood pressure spikes every time I walk into our room, which right now, is an absolute disaster, due to my frantic attempts at completing The Great Laundry Switch. Fortunately today, it seems like I might actually get it done. I'm very, very much hoping to get the house nice and clean before we leave tomorrow for Anchorage, I really dislike coming home to a dirty house. I feel like I MUST get right to work as soon as I step through the door, and that I didn't deserve that little vacation I just took because I did not get the housework done. And I feel more than a little frustrated when Micah prevents me from doing anything. What a selfish, spoiled creature I am. Gross. I should just be thankful we are all clothed, and there is a roof over our heads, and we have more than enough food in the fridge.

Anyway. On to brighter things for which I AM very grateful. As I said before, we are leaving tomorrow for Anchorage! I am so excited. We're staying with some very good friends of ours, people we haven't seen since summer, and we greatly miss them. They are wonderful, godly people. And they haven't met Micah yet, either, so that'll be a lot of fun. I'm also grateful we just get to leave Fairbanks for a while. It is so ridiculously COLD out here. Anchorage is at least above zero, which will feel warm to us after being in -40's all week. And it'll be great to be with people we love, to kind of dampen the hardship of not being able to be with family. Our plans are to drive all night tomorrow night so that Micah's sleep schedule doesn't get messed up, because he sleeps really well in the car, and an 8 hour drive during the day would most likely make him sleep all day, which we don't want. It's seriously hard to keep that boy awake on the road.

I'm babbling now. So much going on, my brain is just jumping everywhere. Hopefully today I will post pictures. I keep saying that, I know. But there really, actually might be a chance this time. Just maybe. If not, and if I don't get to post anything before Thanksgiving... have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

STILL here. I think.

So, maybe TODAY is the day I will finally post pictures. I have a lot to catch up on. Gracious. But while you're waiting, here's a little news about our area. I'd use this as an excuse for not posting lately, but, well, that's really not the reason. More on that later. For now... enjoy.

http://newsminer.com/view/full_story/16470974/article-Record-Fairbanks-cold-continues--air-quality-warnings-issued?instance=home_news_window_left_top_3

Oh, and Jessie, if it's 50 degrees over there...you guys have been about 90 degrees warmer than us. :D Just sayin'...

BRRR.

Just wanted to share with you all that it is currently 43 degrees below zero.

Also, I am for some reason completely exhausted, even though Micah only woke once last night. I think I just want to hibernate this winter.

About to go meet a friend in Fairbanks, thankfully it's so cold outside the roads will have traction because the tires sort of freeze to the road. Isn't that weird?

Yesterday, Micah had another scream fest that rendered me incapable of uploading pictures in peace. Hopefully today will be the day. Gracious.

Sleep deprived yet again

A very important lesson was learned last night. Do not EVER take Unisom or any other sleeping aid for that matter, when you have to get up in the middle of the night/morning to feed and care for a baby. And I should have realized, even in my delirious state of exhaustion last night, that he WOULD wake up again. And again. And again. Because he didn't even FALL asleep until 11:30 last night. That should have been my first clue. The really pathetic thing is, Mom and Scott did most of the work. And yet I still felt so tired, as though I was the one doing all the work. Talk about feeling guilty. Scott finally managed to get the silly boy to go to sleep, and he was the one who got up every single time Micah woke up last night. He even ended up having to feed him some formula at one point, because another thing our offspring has been up to lately is screaming his ever-loving head off every time I try to nurse him. I know he is hungry but he usually refuses to eat now. I have to try a new trick to get him to latch on every. single. feeding. It's even gotten as ridiculous as laying him down on his changing table (which, for some reason, he enjoys laying on), and standing over him to feed him. Absolutely ridiculous.

And now, Scott will be returning to work tomorrow, and my Mom is flying out today (which I am rather sad about) so I will have to be the one getting up with him tonight should he choose to have another screaming fest at all hours of the night. What a nightmare.

At least though, I am not in pain anymore, the incisions are healing well, and I can eat pretty much anything, I've discovered, with no repercussions. I even ate pizza yesterday and felt just fine. Today I'm trying to take it easy again though, I've been eating lots of junk food the last couple days, happy that I can eat what I want after all. But I'm trying to remind myself that I don't want my liver to malfunction next, so I'd better start eating right. Also, I lost 10 pounds in the hospital, none of which I have gained back yet, and I rather like this new feeling, and I want to keep it that way. Besides, I know I just feel good overall when I eat healthy, so I have a lot of reasons to keep on top of it. And I need to feel as good as I can while our little bugger decides to be an absolute pill for an indefinite period of time.

And I'm going to post this now because I wrote this YESTERDAY and I didn't actually post because I wanted to include some pictures, but the pictures I wanted to include are cute, happy ones that do not match the content of this post at all, and since I may not have time today to get to the pictures (I never know what each day is going to throw at me), I figured I might as well do it right now and perhaps post more later. With the pictures. Does this make any sense? Oh well.

Because things have already gotten better since my pathetic gripe fest.

More later.

Praises

For the first time in quite a while, I am sitting here once again, listening to Micah coo at someone, the house is fairly decently in order, I can look forward to more rest after I'm done with this, it's snowing outside again and everything is peaceful. Also, I feel almost normal again. This is the biggest praise. I am still uncomfortable in some ways, the incisions are still healing, so I still have to be careful, but for the most part I've been able to eat again without pain and enjoy it. I have to be careful with what I eat right now, to avoid another day of more pain, but I am so thankful for where I am now. It seems like it's been ages since I was not in some sort of pain.

I feel like sharing the whole story now, and I kind of tend to chatter on because I like detail, so bear with me here. Or you can just skip it and scroll down and look at all the pictures. :P

As you all know from my prayer requests, I was having some rather painful (huh, that word is going to come up a lot I'm thinking. Perhaps I will grab a thesaurus.) attacks that ended up being gallbladder attacks. The Sunday I ended up in the ER for one particularly excruciating episode, I was given medication that was supposed to help, but all it did was make me nauseated. For the rest of the week after that day, I was pretty much having what I thought was a non-stop attack. It kept me up very late into every night, I couldn't sleep in my own bed any longer. It was very hard to feed Micah because I had to sit still and I couldn't curl up into a position that felt better. For those days, I just pulled out the sofa bed in the living room and hung out all day on it with Micah, and I had his diaper bag close by so I didn't have to get up to change him. It was so bad at that point that I couldn't even stand up without being hunched over. At the ER visit, they told me about the gallstones, and had me schedule an ultrasound appointment for the following Thursday, and then a consultation with a surgeon the day after that. I didn't make it to either appointment.

Thursday morning, at around 3 am, I started getting sick as well as still hurting, so Scott once more packed us all in the car and we went to the ER. They did blood work and discovered that my levels (as they told me later) were off the charts, and I was admitted into the hospital with pancreatitis. It was a pretty miserable day. I was taken to the other hospital down the road via ambulance (those things are so bumpy! They need better shocks.) to get that ultrasound done, then taken back to the hospital and put in a room where I stayed for the remainder of the time I was there. This of course is all really shortened, by the time I got into my own room, it was about 8:00 in the morning. Later that day they also gave me a CAT scan, and that's pretty much all I remember of those first few days. I was very drugged up on morphine, but in so much pain that even morphine hardly helped, and I was also getting sick every couple of hours. I pretty much stayed curled up in fetal position for three days. I was also not allowed to eat or drink anything by mouth since that would just aggravate my condition. I vaguely remember a few things, like the nurses telling me that on my first night there, my heart rate sped way up and my blood pressure was extremely low, and I was severely dehydrated. I also remember that on my second day there, the silly fire alarm system was going off. All. Day. Long. They were trying to fix it I guess. And I remember one of the nights being annoyed because the people in the other room had extremely loud visitors, someone was clapping and hollering at a football game on TV. It startled me every time he shouted. The next three days as I waited for surgery, I felt much better, but I was starving by that point, and I have this thing with needles...I absolutely HATE them. And I had to be stuck multiple times a day (because people kept missing) every morning, and I kept going to sleep at night dreading the 3 am nightmare of having blood drawn, and at one time, having a new IV inserted. Blech.

I was very happy when the day finally came (Wednesday) where my levels were normalized enough to have the surgery. I didn't do anything funny when I came out of the anesthesia. I know I cried a little bit because I was having a hard time breathing, or so I thought. Every time I started falling asleep again, my breath would get really shallow and it made me feel very panicky. Thankfully, Scott was by my side that whole time, and he kept me awake with conversation and calmed me down when I started panicking again. Praise God the surgery went well and I was able to go home the very next day. Things have been getting better ever since.

I have definitely learned a few things from all this. The whole time I was trying very hard to praise God through it all and remember that He has a purpose for everything He allows and does. I think I can definitely say that I grew closer to Him during all this. There were a few times where I truly thought I could die and it was very scary facing that. I realized I'm not ready to meet Him yet, I want to grow closer to Him first and serve Him better and not waste my life. So I think this may possibly have been a wake up call.

The second thing I learned is that I actually have organs in my body that I have to take care of, so I can be healthy and take care of my family, and so I'm making efforts to actually start doing that. Not nearly as important as learning more about God, but still important. So, even though it was a terribly difficult time, I AM thankful that God allowed it to happen and that He gave me the strength to get through it.

And I am also very grateful to all of you, for all your prayers and encouragement, and for those of you who were physically there for me as well during our time of need. I now have an even better understanding of how the Body should be working together, and it amazes me.

And now, without further ado, I'm going to post some pictures to catch you all up. Enjoy!

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth yet.

I am home. Finally, home. I am now recovering from surgery and very tired, very sore, and still rather weak because I can hardly get anything down without getting sick. I wanted to post a much longer post today, but I've pretty much been sick all day and feel horrible and it just won't work today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. But I did want to post and thank you all for your prayers and let you know that I am finally in recovery although still in pain, just a different pain now. We got some good (not good photography-wise, just good faces from the boy) pictures at the hospital since we spent a very long week there, so I will try to post those as soon as I am able.

Thank you all once more, and I will post more about all the crazy stuff that happened after my last post when I'm feeling a bit better.