Jack is getting excited for his 4th birthday coming up. He wants to have a Spiderman party, and here, he's shooting his webs from his magical fingers :)
When we manage, we do clean our children :)
And the boys love to snuggle and watch Caillou before school. (Yes, that wretched show is back. Lucy loved this show when she was about two-and-a-half, and now Connor loves it. We escaped it for years when I stopped recording on our DVR, but now Hulu has all the kid shows ready to watch. The kids saw the Icon, and flipped out.) So, unfortunately, I have to hear that nasaly, oh-so-whiny character in the mornings. :(
Lucy still LOVES kindergarten, and especially enjoyed Character Day when she dressed up as Fancy Nancy. Shocker, I know...
Jack plays outside, a lot. It's great, and his buddy Cam across the street is a great playmate. Here, just the other day, they cleared out the entirety of Elaine's garage and made a pretty massive path to run down. This picture here is about HALF as long as that path got. Lining the sides are towels, tennis balls, ride-on toys, nerf guns, you name it, it's there. :) Now THIS is how kids should play!
And my very generous husband set out today to build me a sewing and craft table for Connor's old room that we're turning into my craft room! yea!!!!! He headed to Lowe's this morning, and voila, by dinnertime, he had created the craft table and begun the sewing table. See the yellow? Those are my cubbies for the wall. Fun find on the FB yard sale sight, although they've needed lots of coats of paint.
He let me tell him all the special things I wanted for the desks (sewing table to be super deep and counter height, craft table, more of a desk style.) He's making it so that the sewing table top lifts up and I can store supplies underneath. And look, he even made nice little mitered edges and pretty bordering so that it looks nice. And he was genuinely excited to make this for me. :)
Isn't he great!?!?
He's even going to let me paint the desk bubble-gum pink :)
And finally, what else we've been up to...well, I'll put it this way: my parents have always declared I'm quite dramatic, and I've always argued that I'm far less high-maintenance than they say. But, I will compromise, and give them this...I am VERY dramatic, but only when under anesthesia.
I had knee surgery a little over a week ago, but the surgeon didn't get very far. Like only about five minutes into fixing my knee, because my heart decided to stop beating. Twice. As soon as the scope went into my knee, my heartbeat did a little blip and then went flat for "5 to 8 seconds" said the anesthesiologist. When it did it a second time, they told the knee doc to get out of the joint, and they stopped administering the happy gases. My heart rate returned, and I woke up fine, although super weepy and scared. Two days after my knee was back to how it was before (I'm back to exercising mostly fine.) Three stitches is all there is to show for it. Well, that and now a growing cardiology case on me, as we have to figure out what in the world is going on with my heart.
A visit to Dr. Hartley at The Heart Center (don't you love his name - "Hart"ly :) revealed that I have ectopic atrial tachycardia. In layman terms, as I needed it described, in a regular heart, the sinus node - the heart's natural pacemaker -initiates the heart's pulses. For a reason we haven't discovered yet, my sinus node doesn't trigger my heart to beat. Something is overriding the sinus node, and, at a crazy, super high rate. For reference, a normal resting heart rate is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. My resting heart rate, at the dr.'s office, sitting on the table was 130. And it's ALWAYS high. Everytime I've gone to a doctor for anything - strep test, OB visits, to give blood, whatever, it's always somewhere between 110 and 130. I have always inquired as to why it's so high, and should I be worried, etc. and doctors always replied that, no, some people just walk around with high pulses. Well pooh on all those doctors, that none of them ever suggested that an EKG be done, because it turns out, that's actually a big problem indeed.
So, Hartley said I'd need to have blood drawn for tests, an Echocardiogram done - which is just an ultrasound of the heart, and wear a 24-hr heart monitor so they could track if the sinus node is ever coming into play (i.e. does my sinus node ever trigger my heart and I display a normal heart rate?), or is this overriding thing, the only impulse my heart is receiving? There's a specialist group within the Heart Center that deals with electro-physiology, and Dr. Hartley is getting them involved in the case.
I've had the echo, worn the monitor, and we should be getting some results next week. So, while none of this is any fun, and if I let my mind wander, I do find myself scared, I am thankful that we've discovered the problem. Perhaps the surgery blip was a chance to figure out the obviously bigger problem we're dealing with. There are genetic implications, so it's important that we not stick our heads in the sand and try to forget about it. I'm prayerful that the solution to what's going on with my heart is as much of a "sure thing" as you can get in the medical world. We'll see what we discover next...I'm just so grateful to still be around :)
