Christmas and updates

It has been a fun filled Christmas season around here. It has been more and more fun every year as Maddie has grown older and understood more and more of the Christmas season. I am looking forward to watching Mollie go through the same process of understanding Christmas. We started off Christmas morning here doing our family Christmas. It was great watching Maddie light up and Mollie was completely overwhelmed by the wrapping paper and the entire production. She wondered around and would check stuff out periodically but by the time all of the Christmas present openings were over she finally was able to unwrap something. We played all morning and even got a visit in with Grandy. Later, we headed over to Trey's Aunt's house for some Christmas gift exchange. We watched 9 cousins play and glow as they exchanged gifts. After that we headed to my parent's house. We arrived just in time to eat dinner and then we opened some more gifts. It was a great day and also very exhausting. We had promised Maddie we would take her ice skating so the next day we headed over to the Ice at the Parks and took on the endeavor head on. She did really good and learned very fast. She fell a lot but she was a great sport. My Mom took a bunch of pictures and we got some really good ones. It was a lot of fun spending that time with just us three and I look forward to when Mollie is old enough to strap on some skates too. Between the gifts, dinners, music, decorations, friends, and family...we have felt so blessed this year. I am thankful for the experience and memories we have all made.







Mollie has been such a trooper. She hasn't really known what to make of all of the festivities but she has done her best to keep up. On the 20th she woke up in the middle of the night with a 105.6 fever. It was very scarey and I was moments from going to the ER. Luckily, she responded to medicine quickly and she was able to eventually settle down. The next morning I took her to Urgent Care to see what was wrong. They diagnosed her with an ear infection probably caused by Strep. She was put on antibiotics for 10 days. Thus, I have been pretty over protective of letting her go outside or just in general doing too much. She hasn't liked that one bit but I didn't want her to be sick on Christmas. It seemed like the medicine helped at first but then the last few days she has started running fever again, coughing, not sleeping and feeling bad all over again. I took her into the doctor again on the 30th after being up with her most of the night again and this time they are saying she has Croup. I feel like we are in a never ending battle. Needless to say there has been a lot of sleepless nights around here, terrible coughing fights, and tonight when I layed her down for bed I started noticing she is weezing. I don't want this to turn into breathing treatments again because it is so difficult but I do want her to get better. I just wish we could kick all of this sickness. Please pray that she will get better soon and that the doctors will have wisdom to figure out what we need to do to help her get better and stay better.




Among all of the dealings with Mollie being sick I have somehow hurt my back. On a scale of 1-10 for pain with 10 being the highest amount of pain I am at about an 8 on a daily basis. I thought maybe a pulled muscle or something like that but after a week of intense pain nothing has got any better. I can barely pick up Mollie, lean over the crib, or sit on the ground. I have had some major back issues over the past few years and I am hoping that this is not turn into something serious. After an injury playing soccer when I herniated a disc, fractured my sacrum, and displaced my tail bone I was told I could continue to have back problems. I suffered from a lot of pain during pregnancy but it went away after the delivery. I was also informed that I had a fractured L5 that was several years old and that it would never heal at this point. The doctor's said that it could cause pain and problems too. Right now I am just hoping that it can quit hurting so that I can do the day to day stuff. Luckily, Trey has really stepped up and helped me so much. He let me lay in bed all afternoon today with the heating pad on it and took care of the girls. He has been such a help. Please add me to your prayer list please that this will get better with minimual treatment.

So now that I have celebrated, complained, and thrown a pity party on here I have more posts for later....like Maddie turned 5 this week and we had some fun celebrating with her. I will post all about her later.