That Bewitching NIght

We had a fantastic Halloween Week. We started off with Carving Pumpkins on Thursday night, had Maci's classroom parties on Friday night, then Trick-or-Treating on Sat. We also picked our pumpkins out at the patch at Rutledge Wilson farm, which was really fun as well. Here's the pics, they don't need much explanation! Hope your haunting night was as fun as ours.

Surgery Schmergery

I know I'm behind on Halloween stuff, I'll get that posted today as well. Just thought I'd jot a little line about the cyst situation. My surgery was scheduled for yesterday, and went pretty well. I went in at 7am, they said the Dr. was ahead of schedule and they got me ready pretty quickly. Then I sat on a gurney for about an hour, guess his "ahead of schedule" turned the other direction. Then they gave me my happy juice and the rest is a blur, until waking up in another room feeling totally crappy! I had a slight cough going into this, and they wanted me to cough to get my oxygen levels up, You want me to WHAT?! youch, that really hurt. They wheeled me back in with Chris to wake up the rest of the way. I gotta say, I'm a lot more sore than I thought I would be, they made 3 incisions, all pretty small, but my stomach is feeling the pain. I went home about 7 hrs. after I arrived, drugged up nicely and ready for bed. I pretty much slept the rest of the day/night. This morning I'm feeling pretty good, still not moving too much, and my back hurts from being in one position too much. Thank goodness for my wonderful mom who flew out to help with the kids. She's totally babying me and it's delightful. The kids are having a ball with her, making cinnamon rolls this morning. Thanks mom!!

So the prognosis. When I went in for my pre-op a couple days ago, the Dr. assured me that they would try and save the ovary the cyst was attached to. He said generally this isn't a problem and it should be doable. Well, when he came in to speak with me right before the surgery, he said he'd been thinking about my case all weekend. He said because the cyst had grown so fast, egg sized in about 2 months or so, that he was slightly concerned that it was cancerous. He said if he got in there and the tumor was a solid mass, he'd have to cut it up in little pieces to get it out and get it off the ovary. Then if it was cancer, it would spread and I'd have to have chemo to make sure we got all the pieces. SO, he thought it was in my best interest to just have the whole thing removed. Cancer vs one less ovary. . . . seems like an easy choice, even though it was not what I was expecting or hoping. So they took the ovary. He said my left one would compensate and start ovulating every month, which is good, I didn't know it did that?! He checked out lefty and got it working as well as it can, so in a couple weeks we'll start the Clomid treatments and go from there.

Taking the ovary was my greatest fear going into this. Now that it's happened, I just feel that it's all going to work out ok. Chris gave me several priesthood blessings of health and comfort, and I truly do feel comforted by my Heavenly Father that everything will be ok. He knows our righteous desires to have another baby, and when the time is right, even if it's through adoption, I know that it will happen. It may take a while, years even, but I know that it will happen.

Thanks for all your prayers and thoughts, I have the best friends and family around. We'll keep ya posted! and I promise to get the Halloween pics up :-D

Haunted House

Here's some pics of our Haunted House of the gingerbread variety. We had fun slurping on the frosting and adding the finishing touches. Maci and Gav love every minute of meticulously putting on the candy and adding the windows, door, etc. Turned out pretty cute if I do say so myself!

The last pic is of the kids dressed up for our Trunk or Treat we had tonight at church. We had a great time.





There's a recurring theme here . . . Maci's cheeseball grin!! Still a cute one though :-D


One more, the kids have a thing about climbing on us when we're sitting down, maybe it gets our attention and makes us not ignore what they're saying?!? Anyway, this was the end result on one such occasion.

Gavin turns 4, take 2

So I'm MONTHS behind, but thought I'd jot down what we've been up to the last little while. Gavy's actual birthday on August 30th was great, we opened family presents and had his favorite dinner which I think was meatballs. Thanks to all the grandparents for the great presents. You've all hopefully heard this Thank You in person by now ;-D

I wanted to write down a few of my favorite things about Gavin.
Gavin is such a happy little boy, except in the morning. He needs at least half an hour to get into his groove, but after that, he's usually all smiles and loves to play and help.
He's very into Power Rangers and Bakugan right now.
Even though he's all boy, he still loves to play dress up and My Little Pony with the girls. He also HAS to paint his fingernails while Maci and I are painting ours, he has to be part of the fun. We usually paint them black to make up for painting them at all :-D
Gavin loves playing with his sister. They usually play really well together. They still sleep in the same room together, and I'm anxious to see how they do if/when we separate them any time soon.
Gav has a few fun words that he says that we get a kick out of.
Breakdast
Calapitter
Meed (Need)


I know there's way more of those, I just am having a brain freeze tonight. I'll have to come back and fill them in.
Gavin gives the best, tightest hugs ever. He'll come up and squeeze your guts out and say "I just love you so much" Melts your heart. He loves helping me run errands during the day and is my little helper. He's happy to do this, as long as we can cruise the toy aisle "just to look" while we're out. I love this little guy, and can't believe he's 4!!
Love you Gav!

SO, what else have we been up to? School started at the end of August. Maci has Mrs. Struckhoff and is really liking her and 1st grade so far. She's doing really well in school and is ready way above her 1st grade level. She loves doing her homework each weekend and just loves school in general!
Chris is still loving school and is very busy this fall. He's observing other students doing therapy at the school clinic, The Murney Clinic, one night a week, and has class 2 other nights a week, so 3 days a week he's gone from around 8 till around 9pm. Long days for him!! In January he gets to start seeing clients at the clinic, and he's very excited about that. He's loving school and has enjoyed giving practice IQ and First Interviews this semester for a few of his classes. He's still working part time and teaching the Deacons at church. Busy guy! but loving it all.

I've been busy busy with Super Saturdays this fall. I've done 6 in total I think? A couple in OR, UT, ID, and AZ. It has been a great blessing, but I think I've decided I'm a much better creator than producer, I enjoy the creative process much more than pumping out 60 sets of Spooky letters. But I guess it all comes with having a business. You do whatcha gotta do.

PTA has been very busy, and enjoyable for the most part. We had a successful Open House and had a good turn out, everything went pretty smoothly. Because of some of my health stuff going on I decided I just couldn't keep all my pans on the fire so to speak, so after much thought, I decided I needed to step down from PTA. I let everyone know last week, and they've already had 2 people step up and say they'd fill the position, which is a great relief to me!! So I will help from the sidelines from now on, but am happy to let someone else fill the "president" shoes and take charge. It's been a great learning experience though and if things settle down for me personally in the future I wouldn't be opposed to being on the board again. We'll see ;-D

On the baby front, we were planning on starting the Clomid routine, when they found a large cyst, about the size of an egg, on my right ovary. We waited a month to see if it would shrink, but there was no change. So we found out this week that I'll need to have surgery on it, probably around the 1st of Nov. I can't start any fertility treatments until this is taken care of, so it's kind of a must to get rid of it. It's a same day surgery, so shouldn't be too big a deal, recovery should be a couple days. We're hoping that after this we can really get going on the Clomid and hopefully see some "results" soon. Sorry if this is all too personal for a "blog" but I see this as my little journal, so I wanted to jot down my thoughts and remembrances about all this. I know hopefully when we get a baby here that this will all "seem but a small moment", and we're trying to keep positive about the whole situation. I am so grateful for the 2 beautiful kids that we have and for the most amazing husband that I am blessed with. But we still hope to expand our little family to a little bit larger ;-D

We've been so busy we haven't done too many "fall" things yet, but the weather has definitely cooled down. We hope to drive down to Arkansas sometime in the next couple weeks, we hear the foliage down there is a little more colorful than here. Hopefully we'll still get to enjoy a little bit of our favorite time of year.

I need to take more pictures! Next time. . .

Go Go Power Rangers

I can't believe my baby is 4 years old! Well, tomorrow he will be 4. He's such a little man, adorable and happy most of the time. He's growing up fast and loving every new adventure he gets his hands on! We decided to have a friend party this year, since last year we knew no one and didn't do a big shindig. Gavin invited 4 of his closest friends, 3 of which are girls ;-D His best little friend Emma couldn't make it, but the other 3 did, and with my two that made a party of 5, perfect size. It wasn't too crazy and I think the kids had a fun time. We did a Power Ranger party, Gavin wanted a Bakugan party at the last minute but I didn't know enough about those things to pull it off, so we kept it Power Rangers. I made it pretty easy this year, bought the invitations instead of trying to make adorable handmade ones, bought the cake instead of making it, I just wanted it to be relatively stress free, I have enough stress right now! and I knew Gavin probably didn't care either way.

We decided to do a Power Ranger training session, an idea I found online. We did 5 events, Bad Guy Bowling, Water Balloon Target Practice, Re-Building a City, Kung Fu Practice on the tramp, and then an obstacle course to finish it off. It was really fun and I think the kids enjoyed it. They got a little prize after they finished each one. I made some cool noodle swords for each of them to take home, that we used in some of the events. Then we had cake and opened presents. We decided to give Gav his present from us today, we got him a big boy Spiderman bike. We're going to let him open all the grandparent's presents tomorrow so he'll still have something to open on his bday. He loved his bike and we went to the park tonight and he rode it around quite a bit. He can go much faster than on his big wheel and can keep up with Maci better. Unfortunately for Maci, she left her bike too close to the driveway the other day and I ran over it and broke it. She needs a bigger one anyway, but now she's stuck riding her scooter until we get her a new one. I'm hoping to find a good one at a garage sale or something.

Enjoy the collage, I'm sure there'll be another post tomorrow!

1st Day of 1st Grade

How do I have a 1st grader? Where does the time go?!?! Maci needed no coaxing or bribing to have a bright and shining face for the 1st day of school. She was so excited and counting down the days. She started on the 19th. Her teacher is fabulous and Maci knows a couple of the girls in her class that were in her kindergarten class. She is excited that she gets to play on the "big kid" playground this year, and even has TESTS!

"So what has been your favorite part of school so far"-Mom

"Every Part! I love school" - Maci

There you have it, that's my Maci for ya! Her favorite subject is Art, I have no idea where she gets that from ;-D but she enjoys it all. She is also wanting to eat school lunch a couple times a week. As long as she'll actually eat the food, I'm ok with that. We'll see how that goes. I'm sure she's going to have a terrific year!




We have attempted to get Gavin signed up for Head Start preschool, which would be every day from about 8:30-12:30. It's kind of a need based program, and unfortunately I'm not sure we're needy enough! We are in the $ department, seeing as they don't even count our student loan money as income, but they also go by if you're a single parent, if Gavin has disabilities, which he doesn't, if there's been trouble at home, the list goes on. And we don't have any of those other things (which is a blessing, I know)! So we'll see if some people in front of us on the wait list drop out, but I'm betting that we won't get in this year. Next year he might have a shot, they also go on age and since he's not officially 4 till the 30th, on their charts he's a 3 year old. Another strike against us! Oh well, I'll enjoy my little Gavy sidekick for another year. Even part day preschool here is 100-200$ a month. Crazy!!

I'm also struggling with balancing PTA stuff already. Our President is moving to Houston and 2 of the VPs have balled out already, so I'm next in line for Pres. This would be fine if I had any idea how to be a PTA president. I DON'T!! But it looks like I'll be filling in for now. The principal is super sweet and has done her best to help me get my bearings, but I'm very nervous about how much time it's going to take and having angry parents because I'm not doing something right. I have 3 other great ladies helping me out, but none of us have ever done PTA before. SCARY!! I'm really liking the work we've done so far, I'm just swamped as it is. So it's going to be a very busy year. We may have to scrap some of the small stuff and just try and focus on survival and a couple fund raisers. I'm sure I'll be complaining, I mean journaling, about all my PTA experiences this year ;-D

Hope your first week of school was as eventful as ours was!

8 Years and Counting

Yesterday was our 8th Anniversary! I generally don't get too sappy on the blog, but it IS our anniversary after all. So I'm going to jog down memory lane a bit, more just to have it on record somewhere than for the benefit of those of you who may read this blog.

It's fun to get married in the summer, but we've found that the middle of August is generally a pretty hectic time! The past 8 August 15ths have included such things as 2 Boren Family camping trips, 1 Trip to St. George, 1 trip to Cedar City, and last years most exciting anniversary ever, moving to Springfield MO! Even though it's a busy time of year, I love having one day a year that we can focus on all the happy memories that we've shared together, and the wonderful life we've built for ourselves and our kids.

I've known Chris for almost 13 years now. He has always been the person that could cheer me up when I'm down, be my wall when I'm crumbling, give me a break when I need it, make me laugh more than anyone I know, be the BEST dad to my kids, be a wonderful provider even when he didn't like what he was doing, shows our kids that education is important and sticking in there till the end, be a worthy priesthood holder in our home, and all that other mushy stuff that wives love to say about their husbands. He is my best friend and I can completely be my true self whenever he is around.

Thank you Babe, for always being there for me and for being a TERRIFIC husband! I love you, and hope we have 68 more wonderful August 15ths to celebrate.

(yes I know I'm a day late in posting this ;-D )