Christmas Happenings

One of the crafts that I did at Super Saturday was this muffin tin advent calendar. The original intent is to just put a piece of candy in each, but I came up with a bunch of different Christmas-related activities to do for each day. We looked at Christmas lights, sang Christmas songs, got a new Christmas book, new Christmas jammies, baked cookies, delivered cookies to neighbors, gingerbread houses, etc. Shayla really enjoyed being able to do “Advent” every day, and it kind of forced us to take time to do all of these things even when the schedule got busy. We did miss a couple of days, and sometimes I would change it up as we went along (that works since she can’t read yet).

We put our ghetto “Charlie Brown” Christmas Tree up the day or two after Thanksgiving. Shayla loved having the lights on, and she would go turn them on first thing in the morning. We also had lights going up our stair way that she would turn on as well. Easton never really messed with the tree, but Shayla had a hard time keeping her hands off of it. One time I found her like this…

Yeah, I wasn’t so happy. From that point on, I decided I didn’t really care about the tree looking “pretty” anymore. Not that a ghetto tree looks all that pretty in the first place.

Shayla also loved listening to Christmas music, and we all had fun dancing to ‘Nsync. I posted this video on FB. Easton was cracking me up. The boy usually dances by bobbing up and down like every other baby does. I have no idea why he decided to rolling around was a good form of dancing.

Our ward Christmas party was on the same night as David’s work party (which had lots of awesome prizes), so we went just long enough to let the kids sit on Santa’s lap. Sidenote about the party: We really wanted to win either an ipad or the TV. Since we are about 1 of maybe 2 people left on earth that don’t have a flat panel TV yet, we thought that should give us higher priority in the drawing. Well, the winner of said TV was the guy sitting right next to David, who he also sits next to at work, who already had a nice TV that he bought last year. We were a little bummed. Back to Santa…Shayla had written a letter to Santa earlier telling him what she wanted for Christmas, so we reminded her to tell him. When she sat on his lap, she showed no emotion, she wouldn’t talk to him, she wouldn’t smile for the camera. Nothing. She wasn’t scared of him. She talks about Santa all the time. Guess she wasn’t interested in interacting. Easton had no idea what was going on.

Trying to get her to say SOMETHING

We went to see the temple lights one Sunday night.

That same night we went to a neighborhood that has a large circle where every house is decorated. One of the houses has this in the driveway. It was two-sided.

We went to CA to spend Christmas with David’s parents. His brother Jonathan and family came also. We were also able to spend time with his sister’s Allison and Jennifer and her family who live nearby. Since Shayla has been so into her beach picnics, I wanted to take her to the beach to have a “real” beach picnic. Except when the time came I decided it would be too difficult to haul all the food there to eat, so we took some play food, had our beach picnic, and then played in the sand and waves. I just love all of these pictures, I just couldn’t narrow them down.
 

Easton had a little bit of a cold during the week before we left, but it seemed to be on the mend. However the day that we left for CA, he started getting green snot goop coming out of his eyes, and the runny nose started getting worse again. You can see here how red and sad his little eyes looked.

He thought the water was kind of interesting.

More bum crack. I had completely forgotten that these pants had the little elastic sizers inside to make them smaller. (They used to have to fit over a diaper bum). After we fixed that up, the plumber crack showing improved a bit.

Shayla loved playing in the sand. Easton loved eating it.

Playing with her cousin Hannah. So cute when little kiddos hold hands.

Some family beach pics

The next day was Sunday and we just went to church and hung out. I don’t remember anything super exciting we did that day. On Monday (Christmas Eve), the Fords, Allison, Mom & Dad Snow, Jonathan & Ali all went to the CA Science Center to see the Endeavor Space Shuttle. It is free to get in, but you make reservations to see the shuttle. They loop you around the whole building before they finally let you in to see it. It is a lot smaller than you would think, but it was more interesting to see than I had originally thought it would be. Definitely worth doing if you’re ever around there. We took our kids back home after the shuttle because poor little Easton looked miserable and he desperately needed a nap. Everyone else stayed and explored the museum some more.

Shayla really wanted to touch the spaceship, which wasn’t actually possible. Luckily touching the beam holding it up was good enough for her.

The CA Science Center is right outside the Coliseum where the Olympics were held, so we grabbed a quick picture there.

That night we all had a yummy dinner of ham, cheesy potatoes and such. Then we played chimes, which was a tradition for David growing up. It was very noisy, but we had a good time and we weren’t too bad at it. I don’t have any pictures of this since we were all needed to play. The little girls left out their stockings, cookies and milk for Santa, and carrots for the reindeers.

On Christmas morning, we started off by eating breakfast first. Luckily the little girls aren’t quite old enough to care about that yet. We also had to get all the pictures out of the way before letting the girls in.

Easton was looking better in the morning. His fever seemed to be down, he actually ate all of his breakfast and he had more energy. We let him open a gift or two before he went down for a nap.

Shayla loved opening her gifts of course. She got dress-up stuff in her stocking, and also a princess dress-up dress that she picked out when we were shopping at Target a few weeks prior. She was so excited about it and wouldn’t let me put it back. When we got home, I hid it and it was exciting all over again when she opened it up. Ever since Christmas she puts on the dress as soon as it is washed, and is constantly putting her jewelry on and off, on and off.

She also really loves her Disney Little People Princess Castle. She is all things princess right now (although she still isn’t really all that interested in watching the movies).

Our favorite Shayla moment was when David was opening a gift (she was helping of course). He got the wrapping paper off and got down to the box. Then she says, “It’s a ne-ew box!” in the most excited and innocent way possible. We were cracking up. I don’t think she would have been so excited about getting a box if it had been her gift.

When Easton woke up from his nap, we let him open his gifts, though he wasn’t really all that excited about it. His fever had come back up and he was pretty warm, hence the no clothes.

Ali got one of those nice forehead thermometers for Christmas, so she let us give it a trial run since Easton was feeling pretty hot. Well, we ended up getting a reading of 104.1 I think it was. It was now the third day of a fever, and being over 103 (the two things our Dr. told us to bring them in for), we decided it was time to take him in. Of course there were no Urgent Cares open on Christmas day. Well, one was, but they said they won’t see children. We ate some lunch, and then it was off to the ER we went. Luckily Shayla had no problem hanging out with the family while David and I went. We walked in, and there was maybe one other person in the waiting room. They got us right in to triage. They did a rectal temp on Easton, and it was 105.5. Yikes. They gave him some medication, and then we got back to a room fairly quickly. It was about 3:30 pm when we got there. The nurses came in first to draw some blood to measure his white blood cell count. They put a hep-lock in, so that if they needed to give him an IV, they wouldn’t have to stick him again. The process of getting it in was a nightmare. They basically swaddled him up tight, except for the arm they were putting it in. One nurse did the blood draw, and another had him pinned down. Easton was just screaming. Of course he looks at you with that pathetic look, like “why are you letting these people do this to me?” There was a whole lot of cuddling that happened that evening. Here’s what it looked like all secured on his arm:

They did nose swabs to test for RSV and the flu, and then we had to take him to do a lung x-ray to look for pneumonia. Again, the boy was not happy about any of this, nor was he happy about the multiple rectal temps. From here, it was just a whole lot of waiting for test results (and for the doctor to make his rounds to us). Come to find out one of the swabs didn’t work the first time, so they had to redo it. I guess it can take up to two hours for that one (I think it was the flu) to get results. They gave him an IV of saline solution just to keep his fluids up. He didn’t seem to be dehydrated. Then we waited, and waited, and waited. We had to ask for a diaper because I didn’t think to bring anything with us. We had to go to the cafeteria and get Easton some milk because the poor boy was starving and pretty inconsolable. Once he had some food in his belly, he calmed down a lot. But then any time anyone else walked in the room, he would just start screaming. He knew that meant they were about to do something horrible to him. After all the results came back, the only thing they could see was that there was a “possibility” of pneumonia. So, then they hit him up with antibiotics for that. The antibiotics were given through IV as well, and I think it took 30 minutes for that to be completed. Well, we thought that meant we would get to go home soon, but then we had to wait for the doctor to make his rounds again. He gave us the option of staying overnight to keep an eye on him, or he would let us go home, but we would have to bring him back in the next day. #2, thank you. So then we had to wait for the discharge papers to get finished. I have learned from my few stints in the hospital that everything takes forever. They tell you that you are done, and then over an hour later you are still waiting to be discharged. By the time we got home, it was after 9:30, over 6 hours after we got there, and that was with no wait in the waiting room.

Easton was looking much better by the time we got home. He missed his second nap and got to bed super late, not what a sick boy needs. The next day we really debated whether we should take him back. We were told we would be put on the “fast track,” but we didn’t want to spend hours there again, and was there anything else they could really do for him at this point? He was still running a fever, but the eye goop was gone for the first time in many days. I called our doctor, and after waiting over an hour for them to call me back, they of course said to take him back. We walked into the waiting room and almost every chair was filled. It was completely different than the day before. Even on the fast track, it still took us two hours before we got called back. Any parent knows how awesome it is to sit in a waiting room for hours with a small child. More rectal temps. Doctor comes in and talks with us and checks things out. He seems to be doing better. Keep doing what we’re doing. Decided to give him one more dose of the strong antibiotics (we had a prescription for another antibiotic). I wasn’t a huge fan of shooting him up with all of these antibiotics when we didn’t even know for sure if it was pneumonia. (Although I called pneumonia on Christmas Eve. The only time I’ve ever had all that snot goop coming out of my eyes was when I had pneumonia. It was awful). It seems like that’s what it was, though, because the next day after a couple rounds of all the antibiotics, he was a ton better. So, our fast track to the ER took 3 hours. Not very fast if you ask me. Somehow we think Obamacare is going to solve all of our healthcare problems. It’s going to get 100x worse than this.

The next day we were going to take the little girls to a train park, but we got there and found out it was closed. So we went up to the Point Vicente Interpretive Center. Apparently it used to be Marineland. I had never heard of it before, but they were around even before Sea World, but I guess Sea World put them out of business. Now it’s just a small little museum talking about ocean and nature-type stuff. It was very windy outside, but it was very beautiful there.

Run Mommy! Run fast! I was trying to get a picture of the drool hanging out of her mouth. It was so cold and windy that she had no idea it was there.

David stayed home with Easton so he could get some sleep. This is how I found them when we got back.

That night we actually had a little bit of time to play games after the kids went to bed. Then we were up early the next morning to head home. We had an enjoyable Christmas, but it was too bad we had to spend so much of it with a sick baby and not being able to enjoy family while we were there. The bright side of Easton’s whole illness (besides the fact that it was really pretty minor in the long run), was that it happened before the new year. This year we opted for the high-deductible medical plan to keep from having our premiums increase. We rarely go to the doctor other than well-checks, so we felt like it would be ok to do. So it was nice that the ER trip happened while we were still on the old plan. Now we only have to pay 20% of a whole lot of money rather than all of it. We still haven’t got the bill yet, so we’ll see how much damage it does.

We invited people from the ward over for a New Year’s Eve get together (it’s our tradition starting last year). Most of the YW are at the dance, so it is hard to get a babysitter. We ended up only having 2 other couples show up, but it ended up being the perfect amount to play games and we laughed and had a good time, all while the kids slept upstairs.

That closes us out for 2012. Actually, there is another small post coming up, but then we’re done until Shayla’s birthday in a week.