Spring Break

I remember a time when Spring Break meant doing NOTHING for an entire week.  Sleeping in, ignoring school work, hanging out with friends...

That is not what Spring Break is in our house these days!  My children, darling as they are, do not understand the concept of sleeping in.  In fact, they wake up EARLIER than normal for some strange reason!  There is tons of housework to be done - I will be honest here, and admit that I have overwhelmed myself with school, work and kids this semester, and my housework is paying the price for it.  I have laundry to catch up on - it seems never ending, even if it is half of what I was doing this time last year (since Miss Sunshine is now potty trained, no more washing cloth diapers.  Which makes me happy, and kind of sad, all at the same time).  The floors need mopped since it has been raining nonstop since Sunday and my dog simply doesn't understand the concept of wiping her feet (haha!).  I have a goal to finish one of my online classes this week so I don't have to worry about it for the rest of the semester.  I also have two papers I want to get written this week so I don't have to deal further with them as well.  And I need to catch up on listening to my online Nutrition class lectures as well as get to work on the massive project I have due in that class.  Add in to that the 23 hours I am working this week (including two shifts tomorrow - it's going to be a long day for all of us!) and it's just not the Spring Break I remember!

We are still waiting on a call back to schedule the date for our next clinic visit at Shriners.  We need to call and reserve a hotel room for our family reunion this summer.  We have to pay the balance to have our roof replaced.  The van needs a lot of work done to it.  I hate money.  And bills.  And being a grown up.  Sigh.  I just keep telling myself we just have to get through two more years, and then things will be a lot different.  Our income will more than double once I go back to work.  I think we won't know what to do with ourselves with that much money, hahaha!  It will be nice to be able to put money in savings instead of worrying about bills every paycheck, though.

This is turning into a novel of a post, so I'll come back with other posts later on updates on Miss Sunshine and Monster Boy.  They have enough news to have entire posts of their own too!

Wow

So time has totally slipped away from me!  It's amazing, really, how quickly things go these days.

I'm not sure if I updated on here or not, but we made a trip to the original ENT that Miss Sunshine saw for her cleft a while back.  At her 3 year well child check, I mentioned to our doctor that I was a bit concerned about the notes we had received from Shriner's classifying her with moderate hearing loss in her right ear.  Of course, this was all while she had a non-functioning tube in that ear, so I wanted to have her hearing evaluated again.  He was game to send me to an audiologist, but when he took a look in her ears, said he couldn't see ANYTHING but earwax! So off to the ENT it was, to get her ears checked out, see if the impacted wax could be removed and see if the tubes were still functional.  Miss Sunshine did beautifully at letting the ENT dig his little scoop into her ears, even though she was definitely not pleased about it.  He was able to get enough wax out to see her tubes, and they are both still in place!  This is now the longest a set of tubes has lasted in her ears.  So off he sent us to see if they are still functional, and they were.  Not only that, but she successfully passed a booth test for hearing in both ears.  It was pretty entertaining to watch her take it, but she did great.  He said normal range is between 5-15 decibels (I think that's what it was, maybe it was Mhz, I can't really remember now!).  Miss Sunshine tested at 10 in the left ear and 10-15 (because of her age, they do a range if there is some discrepancy, because children at this age are notoriously hard to get accurate readings on) in the right - so normal range in both ears!  Yay for good news on hearing - this is my major concern these days.  Her palate repair was so successful that we likely will not need further surgeries (although this is of course not a definite...) so most of my worry has been focused on the hearing.  Now that we have resolved that, I can relax a bit until our next trip to Shriner's sometime this summer... we will also have a follow up with our local ENT in six months as well, to make sure the tubes are still working as they should and we don't have further issues with the earwax impacting against the tubes.

That was pretty long and I do have more updates to make, so I will try to get back here soon to do that - I've had a post typed up since Miss Sunshine's birthday, I was just wanting to add pictures to it which I haven't loaded onto my computer yet, if that gives you any indication of how behind I am these days!