Thanksgiving, Alexa, Neurology Check, SUDEP, Baptism for Dead, Kitchen Experiments, Christmas

Again I am behind, but here's our 9 day catch up post!!

Josh got to do double duty last Monday.  They have remixed his allergy shot serum, but the allergist office went with a different company for remixing the serum.  That, unfortunately, meant that he had to come back for allergy shots once a week for the next 6 weeks for him to be up at his normal dose since they wanted to be extra cautious.  Each weekly shot was stronger than the previous shot so it took 6 weeks to get up to his normal dose when it usually just takes 3.  Boo!  Talk about a pain in the bum!!  We were on his 5th week of weekly shots and it was time for the next shot.  Monday Josh had a neurology appointment so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone.  I checked Josh out of school after lunch and on the way down to Primary's we stopped by to get his allergy shots done.  He was pretty excited (not really) as you can see:

 Here's the second arm getting the shot:

After sitting and waiting for 20 minutes after the allergy shots to make sure there was no reaction we were on our way down to Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake.  After his seizure back in September the neurologist wanted to see him again.  They built a new medical office building adjacent to the hospital and that's where a bunch of specialty clinics moved to including the neurology office.  It's a really nice facility.  The waiting room faces outward to a wall of windows where you can see the Salt Lake valley.  It's a pretty cool view:

 When we went in to see the doctor I thought we would have a quick visit and be done.  I was a bit mistaken, though.  In examining Josh the doctor was asking him questions about his different things including seizures.  That's when Josh said that he had been having weird overwhelming feelings that would come on all of a sudden and then disappear after a minute or two.  It's hard to explain, but it concerned the doctor.  She was afraid he was having auras that never progressed into a tonic clonic  (grand-mal) seizure.  However, it was possibly the beginnings of a seizure that didn't end up capturing the whole brain--if that makes sense.  Josh has focal seizures that start out in a small area in his brain, but then progress to involve the whole brain which ends up in the whole tonic clonic seizure.  Auras are common for people with epilepsy and they are different sensations for everyone. Sometimes they can be feelings of deja-vu or feelings of disorientation, etc.  Like I said it's hard to explain.  Anyway, the doctor was concerned about this so she increased his medication and she wanted to see him again in 6 months or sooner if anything happened between now and then.  Now if that wasn't stressful enough to hear,  the doctor then brought up the subject of SUDEP.  SUDEP stands for Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.  I have read a bit about this, but I still don't understand too much about it as well as anyone else.  It is a phenomenon that happens in people with epilepsy where they will unexpectedly pass away with no known cause even after autopsy.  Sometimes the death can correlate with a seizure, but not always.  The neurologist wanted to make us aware of the possibility even though Josh has low risk factors--Josh's seizures are well controlled with medications (uncontrolled seizures are a big risk factor), Josh is young (usual age for SUDEP is 20-40), etc.  That brought my stress level up a bit after hearing her talk about it, though.  It was probably good for Josh to hear about it so he knows how important it is for him to take his medications regularly.  Thankfully, he is really good about taking his medication every day and rarely does he miss a dose.   I am trying not too worry too much about it since we are doing everything we can to prevent it from happening, but it will be a constant concern in the back of my mind....Ugh!!  Anyway, the rest of the appointment went well.  Josh is over 6'3" without shoes on.  I seriously don't know where his height comes from.  Josh, even though he is in the Teachers Quorum, he helped with passing the sacrament Sunday and he was so much taller than the rest of the young men while Daniel, on the other hand, is the shortest young man.  It's kind of funny how that all works out.  Anyway, back to the neurology visit--other than increasing Josh's meds, the warning of SUDEP, and going over seizure safety the appointment went fine.  Hopefully we won't have anything else to worry about until we see the neurologist again in 6 months...

This past week was Thanksgiving.  The Young Men in our ward challenged the Elders to a game of flag football Thanksgiving morning.  I was nervous to let Aaron and Josh go play since I didn't want to end up spending the day in the ER if something were to happen.  Thankfully, they had fun playing and no one got hurt bad enough to need the ER.  Phew!  Someone took a picture of all the guys playing on the church field.  Aaron and Josh are in there somewhere:

 A few weeks ago Aaron wanted to try out a different recipe for smoking a turkey.  It turned out pretty tasty and looked pretty good, too:

 We were having a full house for Thanksgiving so we picked up two 15 pound turkeys to feed everyone.  Aaron brined one using an apple spice brine.  The other he dry brined it using different seasonings.  After waking up at 3 am Thursday morning he put both birds on the smoker for them to cook.  We had dinner at 1 pm.  Like I said we had a full house.  My brother Bryan and his family came, as well as my sister, Johanna and her family came with her niece on Burke's side.  My nephew who lives in Provo, Taylor, came as well as G&G T.  We did miss my sister Jennifer and her family who live in Ohio, however, they were represented with Taylor.  All in all there were 22 people that came to share Thanksgiving at our house.  Here's the beginning of dinner after the prayer was said:

 I was so glad to have all the help!  Everyone contributed something for dinner and everything tasted so yummy!  After dinner was finished and cleaned up we played some games while the cousins played together.  It was a fun day.  After it was all over Aaron and I went out to brave the Black Friday crowds which were a bit crazy.  We were a bit disappointed in the sales for this year so we didn't end up getting very much which was fine with me.

Saturday we wanted to take the boys to do baptisms for the dead.  The young men were going for an activity the following week so we wanted to take Daniel for his first time before he would go with our ward.  Also Matthew doesn't do well with long waiting times so we usually don't let him go with the ward because he can get a bit agitated and quite disruptive with the long waits.  We decided since Josh would be going to do them Wednesday that he could stay back to keep an eye on Sarah and Noah so we could take Daniel for the first time and Matthew so he could still participate without the long wait.  Saturday mornings at the baptistry are open for family times so we thought we would head there since you would need an appointment for the afternoon and we didn't make an appointment.  When we got there the parking lot was incredibly full so I was wondering how long the wait would be.  Here we are before we walked in to the Ogden temple:

 When we got to baptistry the place was packed and it would be over an hour long wait.  Hmmmm....that would not go over well with Matthew so we decided to try for an appointment.  The only open appointment was for that night.  Since we had open time right then we decided to try a different temple to see if we could get in sooner.  We went up to the Brigham City temple and they were able to get us in pretty quickly--thank goodness!  Before going we had found some family names to do which makes it a bit more meaningful.  Here we are outside the Brigham City temple:

 Aaron baptized all of us and helped confirm us as well.  It was a great afternoon.  Daniel said he had a good experience and that he is excited instead of nervous to go do baptism again for the young men activity.

Also during the weekend I finally got around to trying out how to make yogurt at home.  I mixed everything up Friday night and let it incubate.  When I got up Saturday morning I was surprised to see that it had worked.  I strained it most of Saturday day and ended up with some thick Greek style yogurt to eat.  Wahoo!  Here's what it looked like after I strained the whey out of it:

 Since plain yogurt doesn't taste very good I made some lemon curd to flavor the yogurt with.

It is pretty tasty even if I do say so myself!!  It is always cool when things turn out how they are supposed to!!

I also made some home made cottage cheese.  I don't know if I like it as much as store bought cottage cheese, but it was still fun to try out:

I also made some egg nog, but it wasn't around long enough to even take a picture of it. My kids really like egg nog to say the least!!

Aaron made some smoked jalapeño popper Mac and cheese.  There were mixed reviews on this recipe after everyone had tried it.  Aaron really liked it so he's been eating the leftovers.

 After we got home from the temple we put up the Christmas decorations.  Poor Josh was extremely allergic to dust so he was sneezing up a storm and couldn't breath the whole time we were pulling out the dusty decorations.  However,  I still needed him to help me since he can reach a lot taller places than I can.  He really earned his stripes that day!!  Breathing is over rated anyway, right Josh?!  Here's Josh and Aaron putting up the front Christmas tree:

 Here's the kids trying to straighten out the branches and I really stress the word trying.  Oh well you get what you pay for especially with free labor, right?!

You can't see all the smashed branches behind the tulle fabric wrapped around the tree so I still call it a win even with the free labor--haha!

 The kids got to decorate the family room tree with all our keepsake or home made ornaments.  This tree is my favorite:

 The kids dug through the decorations to find an extra stocking for Sophie because they didn't want her being left out.  Sophie's is on the very right end of the picture:

 Aaron and I decided to try out an Amazon Dot which is a voice controlled device with a small speaker that can interact with you.  It also interacts with different blue tooth devices around the house.  It can connect up with our sound bar as well as our Christmas tree lights as well as other things.  The kids have had a lot of fun playing around with Alexa which is the name of the interactive voice of the Dot.  The kids thought it was hilarious when they found out Alexa will pass gas if you ask her to.  This is what living in a house almost of all boys will do to you....:

Alexa will also do Mad Libs stories with you as well as play 'Would You Rather' scenarios.  The kids have had a lot of fun playing around with her.

I have worked the past two mornings bright and early which means Aaron gets the kids ready for school.  Thankfully he has a bit of a flexible schedule within reason.  Anyway, Monday afternoon Josh had a mandatory Cross Country meeting at the high school right after Jr. High got out.  That meant I had to pick him up and take him over to the high school as soon as he got out of Jr. High.  It also meant that he had to change into his running clothes and leave all of his school supplies in the van so he could get them out later.  Unfortunately he never got them out of the van so when he was ready to leave for school Tuesday morning his back pack and trumpet were still in the van which was with me at work.  DOH!!  Luckily, Aaron was nice enough to take him over to my work to get his stuff out of the van.  Aaron was double nice because he surprised me with a Fiiz drink since I was not able to sleep much the night before and was quite tired.  Anyway, with Aaron needing to take Josh to pick up his stuff that meant Daniel was back at home watching Sarah and Noah which can make for some interesting things such as this voicemail Aaron got while he was driving Josh over to pick up his school stuff from the van:

The broken up dictated voicemail said, "Hi, Dad.  We are playing.  We're we were messing with Alexa and she or she accidentally ordered Mountain Dew? for us so yeah, take care of that.  Hello Yeah, she said that we can take care of that with the Alexa app. in the list so please take care of that bye."

The kids had been playing with Alexa and ended up ordering a case of Mountain Dew.  What?!  Maybe Alexa wasn't such a good idea....but it still makes me laugh.  Luckily, Aaron was able to cancel the order and make sure the kids can't order stuff from Amazon without a password again.  There are worse things to order than a case of Mt Dew so I wasn't too upset by it.

We are getting down to Daniel's last few oral immunotherapy for cashew visits.  Wahoo!  That will be an awesome Christmas present to Daniel and to us.  It is a win-win situation since Daniel will be able to eat cashews and we won't have to pay weekly copays and other fees.  Wahoo!  However, they wanted to see Daniel's blood levels of milk allergen--IgE levels as well as sunflower IgE levels, too.  If the sunflower IgE has gone down we might be able to do an oral challenge in the office to see if he can eat sunflower seeds at his last OIT visit for cashews.  However, when Daniel heard blood draw in the office he came a bit unglued.  He is terrified of needles and absolutely refused to go.  It took me a good 4 days of talking to him before I would get him to even consider it.  Luckily, he has a mean mom that wouldn't take no for an answer so he ended up getting his blood drawn yesterday.  He was NOT happy, but luckily, the phlebotomist got the blood with only one stick.

Now we just wait for the results to come back.  Keeping my fingers crossed!!

Since I have been gone most of the week since I home today Sophie has not left my side.  She has curled right up next to me in what looks like the most uncomfortable position.  Whatever works for her I guess--haha!  

(You are looking at her tummy and the bottom of her chin if you can't quite tell what you are looking at.)

What a crazy 9 days!!

Sunday Talk and Piano Playing, Wax Museum, Field Tripping, Crazy Hair Day, Turkey Trot, Date, Pie Eating Contest, Escher, BYU Game

It has been quite a busy week for our family.  Here's a few of the things that have been going on around here...

Monday morning I had to work at the butt crack of dawn.  I really hate when the alarm is set for 4:30am--ugh!!  However, things went smoothly for me at work.  I am still trying to switch gears from giving shots to being a clinical supervisor for students especially when my brain isn't all the way turned on at 5 am.  Anyway, since I had to work Aaron got to take Daniel to his doctors visit.  It was just his annual check up (I know it was way past his birthday, but better late than never, right?!).  Daniel had to get his 12 year old immunizations and was not happy about that at all!  Daniel HATES shots.  Good thing Aaron was with him and not me--haha!  Daniel begged them to put the numbing gel on his arms before the shots were given and they actually did.  After the shot Daniel was saying that he couldn't move his arm anymore.  He really could he was just using his dramatic acting skills.  Phew--glad he survived his immunizations.  Aaron was quite the trooper and I guess Daniel was, too--haha!  

After I got off of work I got to come home and help Daniel with his big school Wax Museum project. Each student was assigned a Greek, Roman or Egyptian mythology character in which they had to make a back drop, find a costume and write a small speech about them to perform.  Daniel was assigned Perseus.  He was the character that cut off Medusa's head among other things.  Daniel asked me to help him with his back drop.  I sketched it out adding a dead Medusa body at the bottom per Daniel's request and then had Daniel color it and I shaded it.  Then we got his Perseus costume together.  Good thing I had an old Stripling Warrior costume that we could adapt to use--wahoo!  The teacher had told the kids they could get help from their parents as long as their parents didn't do the whole project for them.  I made sure there was still plenty of work for Daniel to do.  Anyway, I ended up painting the Medusa sugar skull head while Daniel pinned the gummy worm snakes on it for her 'hair'.  This was the result:

Tuesday I got to be a chaperone for Noah's field trip down to the Loveland Aquarium in Draper.  I was even lucky enough to ride the bus which gave me a great appreciation for the regular bus drivers that have to deal with that much craziness every day--haha!  I was so glad to come home to my quiet house for a few minutes before the kids came home.  Anyway, here's my cute bus partner:

 I had 5 kids in my group and they were all really well behaved.  We had a fun time visiting all the different displays and exhibits.  Of course you can't pass by any photo op.  Here's one of the photo ops they begged me to take:

 My favorite exhibit is the jelly fish.  I could sit and watch them swim all day long.

 Here's a HUGE King Crab we got to see:

 The kids had fun walking across the huge net bridge a few times:

 They even got to pet a ginormous cockroach:

 They loved the touch pool where they got to pet a sting ray as it swam by:

 The kids liked the underwater looking bubble at one of the exotic fish exhibits:

 It was a fun field trip and I was glad I was able to go.

Tuesday evening Josh had a Court of Honor where he received his scouting Life award.  That means he is now able to start working on his Eagle project.  Eek!  That came fast.  We are trying to figure out a good project for Josh.  Hopefully, we can get things in motion soon!

Wednesday was crazy hair day at the elementary school.  Daniel and Noah wanted Mohawks.  I think I ended up using almost half a tube of hair gel just to get it to stay up since their hair is so long and in serious need of a haircut.  Sarah got to wear cupcake hair:

 Here's the back of Sarah's cupcake hair:

 Wednesday afternoon Josh proudly handed me his certificates that he had received at school.  Way to go Josh!!

 These early mornings seem to be taking a toll on Noah.  Matthew has to get up way early (about 5 am-ish) to catch his bus to school.  Matthew is not a quiet morning person so he ends up waking Noah and sometimes Sarah up, too.  After a few really early mornings and late nights (Noah sneaks out of bed for lubs until about 9:30 pm) Noah gets tired.  He sat down next to me Wednesday afternoon and fell asleep within a few minutes the poor guy!  I will take it though because it doesn't happen very often anymore that one of my kids falls asleep on me.

 Thursday I got to work an afternoon shift.  Things were going great, but got even better as the night went on.  The facility I was at was having a pie party for the residents and their families.  Well whoever ordered the pie ordered way too many.  They had loads of extra pies leftover.  They were trying to give whole pies away after the pie party since they had so many left over.  They even begged me to take one for each of my students.  It was funny.  Aaron was excited since I was able to bring home some apple pie.  Wahoo!

Friday was a crazy day.  Early morning was piano for Josh, Matthew and Sarah.  Then it was the Wax Museum for Daniel.  They were supposed to be super still until someone pushed their blue button.  When their button was pushed they gave their 60 second speech about their character.  Aaron kept heckling Daniel, but Daniel wouldn't move until you pushed his button.  However, we did get a smile from him while he was waiting for us to push his button:

 Here's Daniel's speech about Perseus:

After visiting the Wax Museum Aaron had to go back to work and I had a flu shot clinic end of season party I got to go to.  They had a catered lunch which was yummy.  They also had an end of year gift which was a cute hot chocolate mug with a packet of hot chocolate, a stirring spoon, and a large syringe filled with taffy for us to take home.  In addition we got a 'bonus' where they would pay us for attending the 2 hour party.  Wahoo!  It was a fun afternoon.  However, in a house with crazy kids things don't stay normal.  Within the first 10 minutes of being home from the party, Noah promptly broke my hot chocolate mug in pieces.  Boo!  Oh well, at least it was a fun afternoon.

Friday afternoon Josh had a school dance he wanted to go to.  Right after the dance the cross country team was invited to participate in a Turkey Trot run with the community.  Aaron picked up Josh from the dance and took him over to the race.  It was a two mile run and Josh won first place in his grade and the prize which was a 19 pound turkey.  Wahoo, Josh!!  Here's Josh showing off his frozen turkey he had just won:

Ever since Matthew has turned 16 he's been announcing to everyone that he is old enough to date.  While I was picking up Matthew from the Sadie Hawkins dance a few weeks ago a girl came up to me and asked me if I was Matthew's mom.  I said I was and she said that her and her friend have wanted to take Matthew out on a date and if they could get my contact information.  I gave them my phone number and promptly forgot about it since I was still trying to find Matthew among the Sadie Hawkins crowd.  I was surprised to get a text last Thursday asking if it would be okay if her and her friend took Matthew out on a date Friday afternoon.  I was so happy.  They came and picked Matthew up Friday afternoon and he was so excited.  He gave them directions to get to Pace's so they could have some ice cream.  Matthew made them take pictures and text them to me.  Here's Matthew giving them directions in the car to get to Pace's:

They got to have ice cream together.  Matthew LOVED it!!  I am so grateful for awesome people like this!  It really makes me happy to see that other people really love Matthew!

 Friday night the grocery store by our house had a pie eating contest for kids 12 and under.  We went with some friends.  Noah complained the whole time before it started about how he didn't want to be there and how he doesn't like pumpkin pie, blah, blah, blah.  We told him just to try it out so he finally decided to at least try it.  Here are the kids up to age 8 waiting for the contest to begin:

 What a ham:

 Noah was a bit of a cheater Mccheater pants, though.  While they were giving the directions, he kept getting 'tastes' from his pie which was interesting since he was just telling me about 20 minutes before that he didn't like pumpkin pie...:

 He went to town when they said GO!

 Amazingly enough Noah won first place for the kids 8 and under.  He won a candy cane and a $5 gift card to the store.  Wahoo!  He did decide that pumpkin pie wasn't all that bad, either--the crazy kid!

 The second round included kids ages 9-12.  Sarah, Daniel and their friend Landon were excited.

 They all started out with three pieces of pie.

They couldn't use their hands so they dove in with their faces when it was time to start:

 There was a two way tie for first place.  It was Daniel and another girl.

 Daniel got a candy cane and a $5 gift card to the store, too.  Wahoo!  It was a fun contest and I think the kids enjoyed themselves, too.  Hopefully they will still like pumpkin pie when Thanksgiving comes in a few days!!

 Early Saturday morning Aaron was awakened by the chirping of our smoke detectors.  Ours are hardwired into the house with a back up battery so this rarely happens.  As he looked around he noticed that our power was out.  He called the power company and it was estimated the power would be fixed by 3 am.  The chirping of the smoke detectors was pretty annoying, but he fell back asleep.  Unfortunately, the power still was not on by 7 am.  We were starting to sweat a bit since we had just bought our fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving the night before and they were sitting in the fridge.  We didn't let any of the kids open the fridge since we wanted to keep it as cold inside the fridge as we could.  They were a bit upset they weren't able to eat breakfast, but keeping the turkeys cold was more important.  We had a whole day planned for doing things so we decided to leave a bit earlier than we thought and picked breakfast up at McDonald's.  The kids weren't upset after hearing that.  Thankfully, our power came back on about 10 am and our turkeys were still okay.  Phew!!  As we headed out we drove down to BYU for the game.  We went earlier because they are having a really neat Escher exhibit I wanted everyone to see.  It had just opened the day before so we hadn't seen it yet.  It runs until May so we might even come back to see it again before it finishes.  Anyway, it was pretty cool.  They wouldn't let us take pictures inside the exhibit so I took a few outside the exhibit.

 Here's the entrance into the exhibit:

 I loved seeing all the prints from him. Here were my two favorite that I got a quick picture even though we weren't supposed to take pictures.  Don't tell anyone--haha!

I love that the kids were able to see this as well and Aaron and I.  I hope they feel more culturally well rounded--haha!

Here's two of his works that are pretty famous:

We looked at a few other things around the Museum of Art as well:

 They have this cool rainbow string piece that is neat to see:

 Aaron and I met and dated while we were both students at BYU.  We had our special spot on campus that we would sit and talk for hours while we were dating.  It was an outside vent that blew hot air to keep us warm during the winter months while we dated.  We visit the vent almost every time we are on campus.  Much to the disgust of our kids we kiss while standing on the vent to remember back when we were dating.  Hubba Hubba:

 After visiting our vent we went over to the pregame tailgating party.  Aaron made us stop by the Traeger booth where we got to sample some Tri-Tip meat over some crusty bread with a pesto sauce.  It was pretty tasty.  We also stopped by to get the kids' faces painted to show their spirit for the game:

 Here's Noah showing off his painted face:

 The kids tried tossing the football in the QB challenge game.  Sarah, the lefty, was pretty good!

The rest of the kids not so much--haha!

 Can't pass by a photo ops:

 We finally got to our seats.  It was a bit chilly, but not as bad as we thought it would be.  We still had a few blankets and jackets just in case, though.  Here's me and my buddy Daniel waiting for the game to start:

 We love it when we can find cheap tickets!!

 BYU lost, but we did have a fun day together.  We wore out 4/5 kids so they slept on the way home so that is a good thing, right?!

 G&G M have a friend that loves to send Matthew train stuff.  Matthew was excited to see the three train belt buckles.  They were pretty cool!

Our awesome neighbor gave Matthew a Union Pacific 2018 train calendar, too a few days ago.  People are so awesome!!  Matthew loves it!

About two months ago Matthew's piano teacher told us that he had passed off a piano piece he could play for sacrament meeting as well as Josh.  So we got in contact with the musical person in our ward and signed them up to play a musical number for sacrament meeting.  The next opening they had was in 6 weeks which was fine.  They could use the 6 weeks to fine tune their songs.  Matthew got to play his piece last Sunday.  I was so nervous for him, but he was really excited.  He was so excited that when it was his turn to go up to the piano he started yelling out exit numbers from the interstate and city names all the way up to the piano.  It was more noticeable since we were sitting in the back of the chapel and he had to walk quite a ways up to the piano **Sigh**.  We had told him not to do that, but when they are out of arms reach what can you do?!  However, once he got up to the piano he did great.  He played his piece and it was beautiful.  He was so excited.  He did some hand flapping all the way back to the bench where we were sitting, but it was okay.  His piano teacher even came to listen to him play.  It was pretty awesome!  Josh's turn to play was the following week.  The funny thing was, was that a week ago he was also asked to give a talk in church, too.  The poor kid had double duty yesterday.  We let him write his own talk about Repentance.  He did great.  When it was his turn to speak they had to raise the podium pretty high since the bishopric member before him is a lot shorter.  He did great with his talk.  Then the next person spoke.  After he finished his talk Josh got back up and went and played the piano.  He did great.  I was so nervous for him.  As a parent in the audience you just hope everything goes okay for your child!! Luckily, he did great and got to sit back down on the stand.  However, he did struggle a bit with staying awake the rest of the meeting.  Aaron had to keep texting him telling him to sit up!!  Crazy kid!  His piano teacher came again to see him play which I was so grateful for.  I am glad for the support my kids get in the extracurricular activities they do.  I am grateful for the many opportunities they get as well.

Life is going by pretty fast lately.  Hopefully, things slow down during the holidays so we can fully enjoy them.