Mission Accomplished

Today I did something momentous. I finished Tessa's baby book.

Yes, she's 5 years old. Yes, the scrapbook supplies and pictures have been organized and sitting in my bedroom for literally years. Yes, I should win an award for procrastination for putting off this project for this long.

The problem is that I hate scrapbooking. Scrapbooking was all the rage back in 2001 when I had Henry. I tried, oh I tried, to like it. I bought all the cute paper and embellishments and supplies. I even went to a weekly scrapbooking night that some women in our ward in Ogden organized. But it just wasn't me. I would finish three pages in the time it took them to pick out coordinating papers for one of theirs and I didn't even enjoy the execution all that much. The problem was that once Henry got a nicely scrapbooked baby book, I felt compelled to do the same for my other children. I dutifully put William's together, finishing just before Tessa was born - she was my deadline. Since no other babies came along after Tessa, however, my self-imposed deadline of finishing the previous child's baby book before the next child was born dissipated. So all that stuff just sat there. And sat there. And sat there.

Today, however, I was perusing my To-Do list and realized how sad it was that for years the first thing on my list has been "T BABY BOOK". Since I had gotten roped into watching Tessa's dance recital for the 2000th time in the past few weeks, I figured I should do something constructive. So I pulled out my scrapbooking supplies and went to work.

Now it's done. And I have a headache and a burning desire to set fire to any and all remaining cardstock and glue sticks in my house.

101 Ways to Use a Pink Cast

1. Threaten your older brothers with bodily harm if they bug you.

2.

Hmmm. So far she hasn't come up with any other uses for her cast. She did tell Henry and William that if they bothered her, she would "bonk them on the head". If only we allowed violence in the home she'd be in business.

She's actually pretty much back to normal - all except for her newest fashion accessory. Luckily it goes with most of her wardrobe.  

The Things We Do

I was thinking today about the things we do to make our kids feel better. Or entertain them. Or make them do something that they absolutely, positively do not want to do. My list from just the past few days includes:

*Telling Tessa that the doctor told her to eat ice cream three times a day to help her bones heal. Since I've been hiding ibuprofen in her ice cream, this gets her some pain medication without the tears.

*Telling Tessa that chocolate pudding has lots of vitamins to help her heal and be healthy so she could have some for breakfast. See above re: the hiding of ibuprofen in food.

*Playing Justin Bieber videos from You Tube as Tessa lounged on my bed and bossed me around. Hey, she wanted to hear music!

*Watching Daddy Day Care on Netflix.

*Playing Sequence - State and Capitals - with a 5 year old who can't read.

*Going to multiple stores looking for the DVD versions of The Little Mermaid and/or Sleeping Beauty. FYI - Don't Bother. They are apparently IN THE VAULT. Hmph. Tell that to Tessa.

*Buying a Barbie music karoaoke DVD and singing along.

*Promising a trip to Build a Bear in Salt Lake City so that Tessa can pick out a new friend. Of course she remembers this promise, made about midnight after her surgery. I barely remember making the promise - how does she remember it?

It's been a long week.

Deja Vu

I spent Tuesday night in room 101 in the Cache Valley Specialty Hospital. This is the same room that Henry spent a few days almost exactly 18 months ago to the day following his thyroid surgery. I think room 101 must be the designated pediatric room or something - they have more beds in this hospital but it's close to the nurses station and has easy access to the recovery room so maybe they just put all the peds patients there. This time it wasn't Henry in the hospital, though, it was Tessa. She fell off a swing set and fractured her arm, right above the elbow. She needed surgery to insert some pins and they kept her overnight. This unpleasant experience was made more unpleasant because Jay is currently in China for work. I'm sure from his perspective it isn't the kind of call you want to receive when you are halfway around the world, away from your family. It wasn't really the kind of call I wanted to make either. Thank heavens for good friends in our neighborhood to took the boys for an impromptu sleepover and came to sit with me at the hospital. I have the best friends!

She came home Wednesday morning. Wednesday wasn't a good day. She threw up off and on all day and could barely keep water down, much less pain medication. She slept fairly well Wednesday night and made marked improvement today. She stopped vomiting and started eating. I was able to figure out how hide her ibuprofen (thank heavens for my garlic press) in a spoonful of ice cream so I was able to get three good doses of pain medication in her without any tears (since she was terrified to take anything after throwing everything up the day before, the ice cream trick is being kept a secret). She perked up and moved between the family room and my room, watching TV and movies and just hanging out.

She probably could have used a nap but didn't take one today. By the end of the day she was wiped out and sobbed at the thought of a bath, even though she desperately needed one. We compromised on a sponge bath and hair washing, accomplished by having her sit with her back against the bathtub and leaning her head backwards over the side. I'm going to have to find some button up tops for her to wear because switching out her shirts is guaranteed to induce tears. But we made it through the day and she went to bed around 7:30. Her friend Easton brought a balloon over and I hung it on her doorknob so that she could see it. She's got some good friends who have brought over balloons, treats, Rapunzel jammies (sleeveless ones - hooray!) and a stuffed animal, whom she named Dork and is sleeping with tonight.




Hopefully tomorrow I can coax her into her sling (she's not a fan) and out of the house for a bit, at least to sit in a chair and get some fresh air. If all goes well, we'll be at the baseball fields tomorrow night, cheering on Henry and William as they play their games. Nana and Aunt Laura are coming for a visit on Saturday, which will cheer her up.

Let's hope we don't spend any more nights in CVSH. I've seen enough of room 101, thank you very much. Come on William, we're counting on you!

Sayonara, Soccer

Soccer season is over for the year. Thank goodness. Neither of the boys enjoyed it this year and they were both glad to see it end. The weather was bad. I mean really, really bad. As in "Let's play soccer in the rain/wind/snow/sleet/hail/thunder and lightning" bad. You know it's bad when you are hoping it will start lightning during a soccer game so they'll cancel. Seriously, it was bad.


And it wasn't just the weather, unfortunately. The Wright boys went a combined 0-20 in soccer this year. Henry is competitive enough that he still went out there and gave it his best effort. William, not so much. He complained about leg cramps and the weather. He stood around. We gave him the whole "your team is counting on you to try" speech. He stood around some more. So we bribed him. I prefer to think of bribes as incentives. Whatever. The "incentive" was that if the boys both tried their hardest for their games, no matter what the outcome, we would buy them a game that they had been saving to buy themselves. The key word was Effort. Hey, it got us through the soccer season.


The season was so crappy that I didn't get a single picture of either boy playing soccer. I was too busy worried about coats and umbrellas and such to remember to bring a camera, believe me. Luckily our neighbor took this picture of William for us:

It's a great picture and it makes William look like quite the soccer player, doesn't it?

Anyway, so it's over. And it's over forever, as neither Henry nor William plan to play soccer (officially, on a team) again. I think with Henry it has just run it's course. He has played for five years and he just prefers other sports, especially baseball. William played for three years, but this was his first year playing positions and he just didn't enjoy it. It was enough of a chore to get him out there playing that we don't plan to offer him the choice next year. Lest we forget Tessa, she only likes to play soccer if she can use a pink ball so I'm guessing the rec league is out.

Jay and I were absurdly happy after the last soccer game of the year. Just the thought of not having to deal with soccer next year made us almost giddy. It's not so much soccer itself, although it's not our favorite sport to watch. It's the fact that soccer is played here in April and early May, when the weather is, to put it nicely, unpredictable. Although who knows? Maybe we'll have an early, warm spring next year with sunny, 65 degree days beginning in late March. The memories of huddling under an umbrella in a downpour or being pelted with sleet or getting wet just getting out of the car will fade. We'll wax nostalgic about signing our children up for spring soccer and all the good things that it teaches them.

Nah.