Along for the Ride

It's time to party!

Looking forward to a great shindig tonight with 50 of our friends and family. if you don't see another post for awhile, at least you'll know i have a good reason for not being on the computer. :)

his birthday is actually on father's day so the celebrations will continue with a lobster dinner saturday night with our family and presents on sunday. good times!

Our budding thespians vol. 2

whew, everytime i think i can whip out these blog posts, there's more going on. school is out (as of friday) and the weekend was overly stuffed with activities but we are now starting to relax a bit (other than the alarm going off at 5:55am everyday for swim team practice).

so here's the next thespian event from may and it is tori once again. the school play and the church spring musical always fall on the first week of may. this year, tori's school part was limited to chorus so it wasn't too bad having both on the same week. next year when she may have lines for the school play it could get interesting.

this was the first year with mr. popplewell in charge of the kids musical. he was still learning the kids names let alone figuring out what grades they were in, so when he came to me and asked if tori could be elijah (the lead) i was a bit stunned. he said she had the best vocal try out by far. that was very nice to hear but i told him she was only a 3rd grader and at church, there is a bit of a pecking order for the speaking and singing parts and you need to give them to 5th and 4th graders first. plus, tori had never had a part before.

it turned out to be the right decision all around. elijah was played by olivia (4th grade) and tori was given a solo/duet along with 3 lines and she was over the moon. she was also very nervous. so that was more then enough part for her. but her voice is beautiful. i could very easily see her taking voice lessons and really getting into theater. she sure has the drama part of theater down. if they ever need a pissed off 9 year old who has to stomp up the stairs, scream and slam her door, do i have the kid......

but i digress....tori's solo was beautiful and she made her daddy cry. ok, both of us cry.

the widow and elijah

the main cast....love how they are all singing and looking different directions.

olivia's grandmother made all the costumes (including 14 ravens) and mr. popplewell borrorwed pillars from his school to make the set more realistic. here the widow is receiving her instructions from elijah to use the last of her oil and flour to make bread for him. he promises that God will not let the jug run dry, but she's not convinced.

Tori sings her solo. eventually elijah joins in and they sing opposite each other, which was not easy. luckily mrs. powell was there to mouth the words so tori didn't get confused. she did a great job.

the widow and narrator 2 (miriam) right before the performance. miriam is like another daughter, i love that they are such good friends.

Share

Ok, now that the internet issue is resolved (took 6 days, 4 phone techs and 1 in person tech) I need to get back to May. And that will happen tomorrow. but for now, here are a few sb pages i've done recently. i was going to say that these pages would remind folks what the kids look like but, only the first one is recent (well, "my ball" is recent too but it isn't exactly a telling photo). the rest use nostalgic photos.

tomorrow is the last day of school and i hate the fact that i'm actually grateful.

til tomorrow......

Inquiring minds want to know

if your dog always lifts his right leg when he pees....does that make him a northpaw?

The end of the world

my internet is out at the house.

has been since tuesday night and 2 hours on the phone with tech support was not helpful. so the tech is coming to the house on saturday. i have to wait til SATURDAY. gah!

just know that zo is fabulous, the band concert was pretty good last night and that i'll be back as soon as i can. i feel like i lost my right arm.

on the flip side, i've been reading "the collectors" by david baldacci and enjoying it. even when the world is ending one can find a silver lining.

Her angel caught her

that is what tori told chris in the ER waiting room last night. and i think she was right.

i have great photos from the memorial day parade and pancake breakfast, but those will have to wait as i need to write this story down first. i know that we will remember this for a long time to come and it may even become one of those family stories that you laugh about in later years (because everything is ok) but the details will get lost if not recorded.

we had 3 other couples over for dinner last night. 8 adults and 6 kids all tolled. the kids ate first and were already finished and off playing, we had just finished eating as well when out of the corner of our eyes, something dropped onto the deck. that something was zoe. she was up in our bedroom and wanted to wave at tori (out on the patio) and leaned on the screen. the screen gave way and zo hit the deck. it took about 10 seconds for me to ask them to call 911. we just had to…she fell out of the window! and she did her eyes into the back of her head thing that she does when she hits her head but came back to me fairly quickly. she was crying, there was blood from biting her tongue and scraping her elbow but she seemed ok. still, I’m glad we called the ambulance. we had a hard time getting her to lay still, so i ended up holding her in my arms while she cried to "go to my bed". 

the EMTs came (heck, the whole fire station team came and apparently a cop tagged along too but I didn’t even know that) and zo was put into a collar, taped to a backboard and she and I took a ride in an ambulance. my concern was obviously neck/head trauma but she seemed to be acting pretty normally, albeit a bit scared. right before i got into the ambulance, the EMT told me that because of the distance of the fall (about 10-12') this would be treated as a trauma and they would have to put in an IV. this is when i  questioned the sanity of calling 911 for a second.....sigh. but we had to know that she was ok so that second past fast and we all piled in the ambulance. and i mean all. i think there were 5 of us in there initially getting her hooked up to heart rate monitors, blood pressure cuff and the IV. frankly, the IV and blood pressure cuff were almost worse than the fall (at least for her).

we took off after she was all wired and they tried to give zo a little stuffed fox with a delnor shirt on (we live on the fox river and delnor is the hospital) and she was having none of it. she was clinging to her build-a-bear dog named sparkle and didn't need another stuffed animal. i admired her spunk....very zo...which was nice to see. she didn't talk much. just a lot of nodding of her head or looking to me to answer for her but there were so many people in and out of the ambulance and the ER room. who can blame her.

chris got to the hospital right after us. our friend chris drove him as he was not really coping well and couldn't drive himself. tori also came. she said this morning she was the "worry-iest" of the whole family. but she saw zo fall and zo was waving to her so i'm sure she felt some kind of unnecessary guilt. she and our friend chris waited in the lobby and zo sent her the stuffed fox on my suggestion. i didn't go out to see tori as my shirt had blood all over it and i didn't want to upset her anymore than she already was. we eventually sent her home with assurances that zo was fine to go to bed while we waited for test results.

so Dr. Proust came in and did a quick check. she seemed fine. of course the only thing she complained about was her elbow and the EMT's had put her IV on that arm along with the foam board and a lot of gauze....so he couldn't even look at her elbow. figures.

anyway, protocol dictated neck x-rays and a ct scan of her brain just in case. he didn't think it would show anything as she didn't exhibit any concussion symptoms, but we all wanted to be sure. having watched chris fall off a roof and fracture his skull, i knew that just because she seemed ok, didn't mean her neck was all right. learned that the hard way 6 weeks after chris was supposedly better.

so the x-ray techs came into her room and took pics of her neck from 3 angles. she even had to open her mouth (not an easy feat in a neck brace). the doctor came back and told us that it all looked great but he couldn't see c-7 (closest vertebrae to her shoulders) and that he wouldn't take off the brace until they did another x-ray. they took us to the x-ray lab this time. i held her shoulders down from the brace to get the picture and then we did more open mouth pics. her neck was immobilized at a bit of an angle so those were not clear pics the first time either. zo decided that she liked this room better than her ER room. maybe it was because of the low lights.

we were wheeled back to the room and then zo said she had to pee. well, this is a trick when you are strapped from head to toe to a back board. but the IV got to her and we had to figure out something. we decided to do the cat scan first as she said she could hold it. so we took another ride to the cat scan room and chris and i watched while she had brain pictures taken (which she thought was kind of cool). back to the room again (ER room 16) and now the pee problem was urgent. so they brought in a bed pan and we managed to get most of it in the pan. LOL

after that, we just waited. and waited. you know, the typical ER routine. there had been a care flight helicopter that came in while we were there. tori and our friend chris watched it land which was kind of neat for them, but care flight helicopters are never a welcome site (chris rode in one when he fractured his skull 15 years ago). that trauma pushed back the reading of our CT scan as is to be expected. i totally understand the "arms and legs" of the ER room. learned all about that when i was a kid, right dad?

meanwhile, aunt dianne showed up. chris and i had walked out of the house without cell phones. he probably would've forgotten his wallet with the insurance card if i hadn't reminded him to grab it when we went out the door. so dianne came to see how zo was. she had to know. and i totally get that. we've been through a lot together and i was really glad when she came. i knew we needed new clothes and she could report back to everyone else (by this point, most of the neighborhood knew plus all our friends who were at the party, etc.) so she headed back to the house to get zo's tinkerbell nightgown so we'd have something to take her home in. while there she was able to tuck tori in with a story while claire hung out at the house with the kids and milo. neither of the kids went to sleep until we got home from the hospital, but i appreciated all the effort nonetheless.

the PCT was sent in to clean her elbow up and that made her cry. but we got it all bandaged up and all that was left was her IV which she kept trying to look at. When Dr. Proust finally came back in, the CT scan was great and he told the nurse to remove her IV. that made her cry again, but she hung in there (as did mom and dad).

after all the tests, it was determined that zo fell 12 feet and all she had to show for it was a scraped elbow and a couple bruises (the sunburn she got earlier in the day....). we all marveled at her luck. i guess being only 39 lbs. helped in this case. that and the fact that she is "small and mighty".

i told chris when we got home that i expected that zo would be in the ER again. she has a fearless bent to her personality and i just don't think this will be the last time. heaven help us.

i really think tori nailed it though....her angel sure did catch her and allow her to walk away from such a fall in such great condition. as of this morning, after sleeping for a LONG time, she is doing great. her elbow hurts a little but she isn't even sore. she's enjoying some tom & jerry cartoon's and cracklin' oat bran. it is all good.

Our budding thespians vol. 1

May has been the month for performances.  so this is post 1 of at least 4 that will be posted about our thespians....or thesbians as connor calls them. LOL i love how he mispronounces words....

anyway, the first play of the month was the musical RATS! put on by the 3rd-5th graders of AGS. as a 3rd grader, tori is not eligible for a part. they are only allowed to be in the chorus as one of the children of hamlin. RATS! is the piped piper story reworked to teach a good lesson about following through with your promises. It was cute, but the performance was a bit painful to watch. the stage was way too small for so many kids (a good problem to have but a problem nonetheless) and the microphones were mediocre at best so you missed a lot of dialogue when the kids were shy and didn't project. but tori had a good time and in the end, that is more important than whether i heard the sheriff's lines or not.

unfortunately, i don't have any decent photos of this play. everything was blurry. think i may need to invest in a mono-pod if this thespian stuff keeps up.

Zoe's birthday wish

So, a couple weeks after zo's birthday, she mentions to me that her birthday wish didn't come true. This was a bit of a surprise to me considering the fact that she blew the candle out so quickly on her birthday cake there was no time to make a wish. but or course i went along with this conversation as you are supposed to do when you are a mom. you know, pretend you know what the heck is going on until the story is all lined up for you.

she goes on to reveal her wish to me (which really helped!) that her birthday wish was, "flowers in front of the house".

here's where the mom's all collectively sigh because that is just so darn cute. and also, i sighed in relief because this is a wish that i could grant. so zo and i set off in early may to buy flowers for the containers. i let her pick what ever she wanted (that meant no greenery filler plants, flowers only mommy) and she knew what colors she wanted. so these are zoe's flowers. i did go back out and buy a little filler plant (cause they were cute) and added a few more plants to fill out the planters but i think she did a great job.

i hope all her birthday wishes are that easy to make come true.

We interrupt the catch up for a real time post

because friday marked zoe's last day of preschool.

and my last day of preschool....ever.

i've been so busy this month that i didn't give it any thought really. the fact that my baby was heading to all day kindergarten next year and how i would feel about that. or what a momentous event it is to not have to go to preschool again. we've been going to preschool for 9.5 years (connor was 33 months old when he started) and more importantly, we've been paying for preschool for 9.5 years. and we won't have to do that anymore.

and on friday morning, when zoe woke up she cheered "yay! today is my last day of school....but i'll miss mrs. felt." i'm not sure connor and tori were ever excited that preschool was over like that. but zo is so ready, anxious, excited for "ALL DAY kindergarten" (emphasis is hers). i just think she's going to really shine next year and it will be quite an adjustment for me as we've been a team for the past 4 years (when tori headed off to all day kindergarten) but how can i be sad for long when she is so darn ready?

but that first day of school is going to be a killer.....i'm gonna miss her.

Life at the speed of light

seriously.

it is like i blink and another week is gone. we've been sooo busy.

here's the list of things i need to post about from the last 2 weeks:
tori's RATS! performance
tori's Elijah performance
zoe's school concert
connor's Pecos Bill meets the Dirty Dan gang performances
swim team
connor's new boy scout rank
building a trebuchet for a medieval faire
going to sholes school with tori's classs (circa 1875)
planning chris' 40th birthday party
working on VBS t-shirts and crafts
attempting to plan a summer vacation
my lovely girls being at each other's throats every other minute and making me insane.

well, maybe i don't need to post about that last one, but man, they are baaaaaaaad. must be the end of the year stuff right? please say right otherwise i'll never survive the summer.

and just when i have 20 posts to write, typepad decides to upgrade it's interface and i have to figure out how to add photos and post all over again.

good times.

hope to be back later tonight with the RATS! post. but first we have soccer practice, choir practice and i suppose i should figure out what to feed everyone for dinner too.....