Thanksgiving Week (an update)

The kids made this Happy Thanksgiving sign. It didn't come out very well on here, I guess. If you click on the picture, you can see it bigger, though.

My mother and grandfather fly into town today, so I thought I'd sit down and write my update, since it won't happen after they get here.

Things to report.

Miciah's Tooth Trauma

Round 2 of Miciah's tooth trauma. Last year right about this time, if you remember, she had to have a tooth pulled after an ER visit where we found out that her tooth was just gone. Rotted out without us being able to tell. They put a spacer in to allow the adult tooth to come in correctly.

Well, a few weeks ago she came to us in the middle of the night (4:30 a.m.) saying that another tooth hurt--this time the same tooth, just on the other side of her mouth. Rob took a look at it briefly, gave her some Tylenol and sent her back to bed. I asked him what he thought and he gave me that look that says nothing good is coming her way. So depressing for her.

We took her in to the dentist and sure enough, tooth number 2 rotted away without us knowing. They showed Rob the x-ray of the tooth from last year. The tooth was totally fine. The dentist said it was pretty incredible that that amount of damage happened in a year's time. They gave her an ultra-powerful flouride tooth treatment (FINALLY people are believing me that she just has crummy teeth!) and scheduled a tooth-pulling session for December 17th.

Dec. 17th was 4 weeks after they brought her in. I wondered if she would last that long. What if it started hurting? It took her another week or so to start complaining about it again. Some nights before bedtime of her complaining. But the last straw, really, was when she came home from school and said that she'd had to go to the school nurse because her tooth hurt. Clearly, we wouldn't be making it all the way to Dec. 17th. We called Children's Dental (the ONLY place I will be taking my kids from here on out, by the way. They're that good) on this last Friday morning and told them she was in pain and we needed to set up a time before Dec. 17th. I was ready for them to put up a fight, tell us how busy they were. But the lady just said, "If she's in pain, bring her in right now. We'll put her in the emergency chair." Oh. That was easy. WHY DIDN'T THEY TELL US THAT BEFORE?!

So we took her out of school Friday morning and Rob took her to get her tooth pulled. They said the tooth was massively infected, and it was good we didn't wait until Dec. 17th to bring her in. She got home by about noon and was pretty mopey. I remember tooth trauma from my childhood, so I'm very sympathetic about stuff like this. But by about 2 pm she was running around being crazy and she said, "I got a day off school!" I looked at her sideways, wondering if it was worth it to get a tooth pulled for a day off school! I wouldn't think so.

Snaggletooth was very nice to her and gave her a full dollar for the tooth trauma. This is the note she wrote to him:

Working the system. That's our Miciah. And she got a piece of candy.

Soccer

Miciah is now playing on an indoor soccer team, and loves it. She is the shortest, slowest, and probably youngest on the team (they didn't have a slot for her in her age group, so they put her one age group up). At her first practice one of the girls put her arm around Miciah and paired up with her for a drill. I was glad that she was able to find a friend so fast. Miciah later told me that the girl had said, "You're so cute!" and "You're so little for your age." ... I suggested to her that she could run a little faster when she was on the field and she said, "You don't run as fast as you can when you play, either." I think that's a tally mark for Miciah.

She has now played 2 games and her team has won them both. She has claimed, after both games, that she scored a goal. In fact, she was so desperate to say she scored, apparently, that she claimed that she scored a goal for the OTHER team. I think she might be wanting to be like me (and that wasn't meant to be cocky). The day before her first game I had a game and I scored 2 goals. It's interesting how compelling it is for kids to want to be just like their parents.

I think it's fun to note my own soccer playing. Mainly because soccer is (and probably forever will be) a love of mine. It's nice to be in touch with that part of me, even though it feels like I pay a small fortune to play, especially when our budget is so tight. In my last game, Friday night, I accidentally did the full splits. By the way I can't DO the full splits. On my way down I heard a sound that I knew was my muscle. Not good. And Saturday morning I woke up knowing EXACTLY where that muscle runs and where it connects in the body. It hurt the entire length. But it's fun to play. Hopefully bruises and over-stretched muscles will be the extent of my soccer injuries.

Stress

Rob's job continues to be stressful, though we seem to finally be figuring it out (slowly). Really, it's the job and calling combo that gets us. This month has felt like a culminating event in terms of stress. It was a crucial time for us to say, "Enough!" and put our lives back together the way they should have been to start with.

For instance, as related to Rob's calling: Is there another meeting that Rob could attend, please? Because I think he needs a few more. ... Ugh! NO! I finally got to a point where I said, "If I hear the word 'need' in the same sentence as 'meeting' I will scream." Because I can think of a lot of things I need and NONE OF THOSE THINGS are a meeting. But we're figuring out how to meet halfway. Rob has figured out that he can say no to some meetings, and I've become willing to let him go to all the meetings he says he needs to go to. And he's learned that if he wants to attend a meeting at all, he leaves the word 'need' out of the sentence. Instead he'll say, "Tamra, there's a meeting that I'd really like to go to..." I know he's saying roughly the same thing as before, but it's a change in attitude for both of us, and it really helps me.

Calendar

I finally have my 2009 calendar. It's amazing how much you need one for the new year come October or so. The kind I buy happen to cost only like $2.50. It was fantastic how excited I was when Rob came home with my calendar. Not quite update worthy, I'll admit, but I'm excited, so I'm including this pointless piece of information.

Sickness

This whole month feels like it's been filled with sicknesses going around our family. It took a full 3 weeks for Rob and I both to feel like we were feeling much much better again. Still, we have a cough that's just hanging around. Not bad any more, but still just hanging there until we've almost forgotten about it, and then it shows up again. Still, last Sunday I declared us all healthy. Hopefully we all stay that way.

While I was sick I lost a little weight. Not because I wasn't hungry (it was a strange sickness, really. No huge symptoms other than a cough and feeling crummy, but still apetite in tact), but because I felt too crummy to get off the couch to get something to eat. My stomach did feel a little not right a few days, because my main caloric intake was mucus drainage and cough drops.

Needless to say, the Health and Fitness Challenge Rob and I were doing was completely thrown off track by this sickness parade. There were several days where exercise was impossible, and many other days where we just didn't want to, even though we could. And after we were finally feeling better, the challenge only had a week and a half left! So the challenge is now over and we completely bombed out of it. But that's alright. We still got some good benefits from it, and Rob still lost some weight, even though it wasn't the amount he wanted to lose.

Reading

A good thing about being sick is that I read the rest of a fantastic book: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It's really long, but it's SO good. I feel like I learned a lot and it was fun to read, too. Highly recommend it.

Then I started on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, which I'm not quite done with yet. My brother, C, recommended it to me and then bought a copy and shipped it to me. I was 70 pages into it before I'd realized I'd spent any time on it at all. It's sci-fi, and it's fantastic! If you like sci-fi at all, I highly recommend this book. (I did read ahead to find out what happens at the end. I needed to know what happened to Mike, my computer friend.) Really. I can't emphasize enough how good this book is. I almost decided, before I started reading this book, to let almost all fiction reading cease in my life and move on to non-fiction near-exclusively. Robert Heinlein single-handedly changed my mind.

Thanksgiving Plans

My mom flys in today with my Grandpa O. (her dad). They will stay for 2 weeks. Tomorrow my dad will be here, too, and he won't stay for 2 weeks, but he'll be here for Thanksgiving. It's fun that we'll get to have them here for the holiday!

While they're here, my computer usage will probably be limited. When there's family in town, why would I spend my time on the computer? Just so you know, when you're wondering where my Thanksgiving pictures are.

Miciah's Parent-Teacher Conference

We had a parent teacher conference with Miciah's teacher, Ms. L. Miciah does great in school academically, and we knew that before we walked in there. Instead, we wanted to know if she was ever over-emotional or bossy in class. She said she's not over-emotional at all. She isn't bossy: in fact she helps other kids with their work in a way where she doesn't tell them the answers, but leads them gently to it on their own. I thought that was an excellent compliment for a 1st grader. But Ms. L did say that she occasionally has to ask Miciah, "Miciah, who's the teacher?" Miciah will quickly correct her behavior and point to Ms. L, the real teacher. When Ms. L said that I laughed and said, "We have that conversation about 8 times a day! "Miciah, who's the mom, me or you?""

She also said some very good things about Miciah and her abilities, especially her reading. Miciah is very confident about her reading. Miciah says she struggles with her math, but really she just makes silly mistakes. Ms. L said Miciah makes most of her mistakes because she's trying to get done really fast so that she can be the first one done. That competitive drive. We wanted to half-apologize for that, but Rob and I just looked at each other and said, "Yeah. That was us." Capable and competitive. Not a bad combo, so long as she's not cocky.

Pictures to Share

My boys especially love markers and crayons. Teancom likes to color the floor with crayons (I made him cry (which is not hard to do) by telling him it was NOT appropriate to color on the floor). And Elijah likes to color himself and furniture with markers. (Miciah likes to color, too, but she colors on paper--novel idea). This is one of my favorite recent colorings:

I like to tell people that I love that kids color themselves with markers and they give me this look like, "Whatever." Seriously! I think it's awesome. I would color myself with markers on a near-daily basis if I felt I could get away with it in public. In fact, maybe I should try it.

The other day the kids came upstairs talking about "snow" they were making downstairs. Uh oh, that's never good. I think they were using packing peanuts and shredding them up real small. I sent them downstairs with an order to not do that any more, but I didn't really care, cause it was my night off (soccer night, and Rob let me go early so I could buy myself some boots (I ended up buying retro little boys boots on clearance (the womens' boots were awful, I thought). I found out that I wear boys size 4) because I needed boots, and I also needed a break from the kids). Right before I left Rob walked downstairs and saw the huge mess and was about to yell at them when Miciah crawled out from under a table with her hair looking like this:

And instead of getting mad, he said (in true Tamra fashion), "I'm going to go get the camera and take a picture." And THEN he cleaned up the mess. Kids are awesome.

A fun Playing with Daddy session from a Saturday morning:

Rob attacks!

Rob wards off a Spider-Man attack from Teancom while pinning Elijah with his leg.

Elijah, still pinned, attacks Rob by pricking his ankle with something. Rob is mid-manhandling Teancom when Miciah runs up with Spider-Man for the attack!

Miciah climbs on Rob's back while Rob has Elijah pinned, and Teancom needs to take a break for a phone call.

What good memories!