Fall 2017 Update

Welcome back folks! How have things been for you? Super crazy? Oh, good…. same here!

Our last update came in July, and I shared with you that we survived the spring soccer season even without a microwave, and had suffered through a Lyme disease care with Lady Bug, I had a sinus infection, we all went on a family vacation, and Hubs had a weird reaction to a bug bite. Turns out, Hubs had contracted Lyme from a tick that was attached and gone in record breaking time. After that diagnosis and a second round of antibiotics, all was well with him.

At the end of July, two days after Hubs ended his second treatment, Monkey got this weird eczema patch on his shoulder blade. This isn’t unusual for him because, like me, he has super sensitive skin. But the size was a little odd. So Hubs marked the outer edge of it with a pen, I put some calendula cream on it, and we watched it. Four days of watching it grow, marking the new area, and applying cream, I started to get worried. He had no other symptoms besides a huge mood shift, but his spot was getting bigger and bigger each day, and had some faded areas in the middle. So just to play it safe, I called his pedi so we could get it looked at.

The pedi had determined he had Lyme. And again, we saw absolutely no tick. The one time this summer I see the tick, we go through antibiotics as a precaution. The times I haven’t seen ticks, and we’ve been obsessively checking, someone gets Lyme. And what’s even more peculiar, is that Monkey’s symptoms were considered night and day compared to Hubs, who was laid up in bed for 2 days with a fever, nausea, and a huge rash that spread so fast. Monkey’s started out as a mood shift, and a slow progression to his rash. Absolutely nothing alike.

I had decided after his appointment that I was just going to take another hiatus from the blog. The deciding factor there was that I didn’t want to have to worry about trying to keep up with this and making sure he was okay, so I just decided to step away for a bit. It turns out I made the right decision because not only did I not sleep well with “mom-guilt”, but he also had some pretty wicked nightmares {a side effect of the medication}, and so sleep in general was very rare during his treatment.

Three weeks of antibiotics later, he had been deemed as cured. By the time he was ending his antibiotics, we had shifted our focus to gearing up for school with more doctor’s appointments, open houses, orientation nights, kindergarten orientation appointments, numerous forms to fill out, bus route changes, and the list goes on and on. In between all the crazy, we still had tons of harvesting and preserving from our garden to do, as well as adjusting to a new soccer schedule.

It wasn’t all crazy-busy though. We took some time during August to just step back and enjoy the moment. Ladybug was super excited that we found some monarch caterpillars, and insisted that we bring them back to the house. It was hard to say no to her, and a month later they still talk about watching the caterpillars metamorphose into butterflies.

We also took a day to enjoy the solar eclipse in our back yard. Since we weren’t able to get the eclipse glasses, we looked up how to use Bookworm’s telescope to project the eclipse onto a box that we hand on hand.

With all that craziness done, and after hunting down some first-week-last-minute school supplies, I think we’re adjusting to our new schedule okay.

Now we’ve hit the stage where they all bring home germs. We’ve had two stints of pink eye, a chest cold that’s made its rounds through the family, and I’m currently battling some laryngitis.

I’m not used to the quiet that occurs during the day. I still have things to do around the house that need done in order to keep on top of everything during the crazy soccer season, but I thought I’d start making it a habit to get on here a few times a week. I’ve got a ton of topics that were had lined up for the summer, so there’s no shortage of content to come. But I also loved the accountability that coming here and showing our budget and debt payment for the month gave me. It really helped with motivation, which is what I really need at this point in order to crush this last credit card before moving on to our student loans.