Reading

Peanut has started this new thing where she likes to do the reading. We always read books to Peanut before she goes to bed and last night we decided to start reading the Book of Mormon Storybook. So we read a few pages to her, have family prayer, and then let her down to play for a bit. She opens the book back up and starts jabbering. Turns a page and jabbers some more. It was so cute! It was hard to catch it on video because whenever Peanut sees the camera she has to hold it and push buttons. But here are two okay attempts.

I have caught her reading everything from cereal boxes to CD cases. It's pretty entertaining.

Playing at Grandma's

A Week in the Hot Hot Desert

The evening of Wednesday Sept 17th, my sister Krystal and I decided to leave the next day for St. George and surprise my mom for her birthday. We had it all planned out to arrive there and stand on the doorstep holding a happy birthday banner, wearing a birthday hat and blowing birthday horns. We were in place waiting for my mom to answer the door and here she comes driving into the driveway. I quickly blow my horn really hard hoping my mom could here it in her car and in doing so scare Peanut half to death. So she's screaming and wont settle down! So much for a good happy birthday mom! Haha!
We had to try pretty hard to get a picture of Peanut with the birthday hat on. Hence my hand still there putting it on while Peanut's hand's there trying to pull it off. She looked too cute though!
This is Peanut's "Ace Ventura" hairdo. I was getting her hair wet to tame it down and Krystal freaked out at how cute it was and had to take a picture.
We went to see my parent's new mansion where Aunt Krystal became Peanut's horsey.
And later that night, Peanut got to attend her very first rodeo and see some real horsey's in action! My parents have yearly seats to the Dixie Round-Up so we tagged along one night.
Not really sure what Peanut thought of it. She took everything in for about 5 minutes and then was back to her wiggly, exploring self.
Luke's sister and brother-in-law were in town so we got to go out to dinner and play for a little bit. Peanut had a heyday and was going crazy! She loved all the people to play and walk with.
Sunday, my brother and his family came over for Sunday dinner and once again Peanut was in her glory. She'd follow the kids everywhere! This is them playing doctor. (Glad Peanut could switch roles for once and not have to be the patient!)

I've decided that I'm horrible at taking pictures (which is probably why I don't really post anything anymore). These pictures are pretty much the only ones we have of our trip and half of them are from my sister camera! How sad. Anyways... the rest of our trip was pretty uneventful we visited some old friends, surprised Grandma Roz at work, helped my mom get ready for foot surgery and then surprised Luke by coming home a day early! It was a really fun trip but it for sure drained me! Who knew sewing two curtain panels and seven couch pillows could take so much time! Thanks mom for your help!

Sorry

So, I meant to post a follow-up on Peanut's leg about 3 weeks ago but it seems like it's just been crazy busy around here. Her leg is fine. We took the splint off to see how she did and she didn't really show any signs of pain or discomfort so we didn't take her in to the fracture clinic. We did however have a regular doctor's appt that week and when he was examining her and pushed on her leg she screamed! So he had her leg re-X-rayed and it showed the healing bone from a fracture right where the doctor had pushed on her leg. BUT since Peanut was getting around just fine and wasn't complaining about it he said that putting a cast on would probably just cause more problems. She's bounced right back with her climbing all around, wanting you to walk her EVERYWHERE, and unfortunately, falling down the stairs again :( -No broken legs this time though!

For those of you who didn't know: we were planning on moving (across the street and four houses down). We would've been closing on it this week. About a week or so into the contract after doing pretty much everything else, we got the house inspected and the results weren't in our favor. So we decided to just stick it out in our small house for a while longer.

After that was all over and since I wasn't having to pack and move, Krystal and I decided to surprise my mom for her birthday. We stayed there for a week (details to come in a future post) and while I was down there sewing curtains and pillows, Luke was home painting our family room. We bought some new couches and had to redo the room to match ;)
This is a pretty pathetic picture to show you our new room but it's all I have and I don't feel like, nor have the time, to take a new one and upload it to the computer. So anyone who wants to see the new room will just have to come visit! ;) To explain the picture: Luke had the crawl space open to put some things away and Peanut wanted to go under there too. I was busy, so to keep Peanut from getting in the crawl space Luke trapped her in the space between the couches. I thought she would've thrown a fit but instead she just threw all her toys over the "wall" and waited patiently for us to let her out.

I still have a bunch to do to get our family room back in order and switch computer desks and clean the house and do laundry and entertain a 16 month old explorer/tag-a-long and you get the picture but I'm gonna try and post a few cute pictures and videos of our favorite Peanut!

My One Cent Stamp

This works*

*You may want to check with your mail carrier before you try it though

Why do they keep increasing the cost of stamps by one cent? I've about decided that I should just always keep a book of one cent stamps on hand for this purpose. It's kinda ridiculous.

The story about using a penny. . .

I needed to get something sent off in the mail and came out of a neighbors house heading home and saw the mail carrier at our box so I hurry and run to my house and grab the envelope. I get there and the post officer tells me that I need a one cent stamp on it because the postage has gone up, but that if I wanted to give her a penny she would get the stamp for me. So the post officer waits there until I can run back home and get a penny. A PENNY! I couldn't really believe it. So the next time I needed to mail something and didn't have a one cent stamp I taped a penny to the envelope (pictured above) and it worked! So forget the one cent post office stamps! Just use a penny!

Gimped Peanut

I think I deserve the worst mother of the year award today. In fact, I think I'll just reward myself with it right now! Done. Why do I deserve it? I took my eyes and attention off my daughter for a matter of seconds and turned just in time to see her reaching over the first stair and tumbling down all seven of them!

She cried for a few minutes and after I got her calmed down I moved all the extremities for discomfort and nothing. So I figured everything was okay. There was no loss of consciousness and no major injuries (besides my self esteem) so I went back to getting things ready for dinner. We had some friends over and had a great time. After dinner, we got Peanut down to join the bubble fun and she walked a few steps and started crying. She was totally favoring the right leg and would barely walk. She wanted to so bad but would just start crying. We talked it over and decided to watch her and see how she was doing in the morning cause maybe it was just a sprain or bruised bone or something. Well at midnight she woke up just screaming and we couldn't really calm her down. After I finally got through to Wee Care she was sleeping but not soundly. The nurse convinced me to just take her into the ER "just in case."

So after about 5 hours in the ER

We have our little gimped Peanut

They couldn't see any fractures in the X-rays but they say that there can still be something that's not showing up and from his examination the Dr believes she has what they call a "Toddler Fracture." He said they're fairly common and that the immunosuppression drug she's taking already predisposes her to easy bone injuries. So she got a pre-cast splint which we will take off in about 4 days and if she's still in pain then they'll probably put a cast on.

So, in the end, we have a mother who feels absolutely horrible and a little girl who's back to wanting to go places but having a hard time getting there! :(

Where I've Been. . .

She's been crawling like a maniac and walking with assistance for a while now (these videos are kinda old) and just never wants to sit still! So if we're somewhere that she can't crawl she'll grab for my fingers and off she goes!

(Sorry for the video angle but I don't know how to change it.)

While I'm glad that she can finally get where she wants to go on her own, I'm not ready for her to be mobile yet. As you will see (have seen) in one of my next posts.

Family Pictures

Back in the middle of July we went down to Provo for Mikki to take some pictures for us. She did a great job! And we had lots of fun (especially eating ice cream!) Here's some of my favorites. . .

Girls Camp

I was lucky enough to be called into the YW Presidency in May and I absolutely love it! We have the most awesome girls in our ward who are seriously some of the greatest examples to me. This past weekend, I decided to leave my sick peanut home and head off to Girls Camp for a couple of days and I am SO glad I did! It was so much fun!

This is almost everyone who was there

Thanks to Luke and his co-worker's wife, Susan, for taking such good care of Peanut while I was gone!

Ear-Infected Peanut

I've been "out" for the past few days because I ended up buying Breaking Dawn at the midnight release party Friday night. (So, yes, I'll have two copies if I can't return one. Let me know if you're interested!) I was going to blog about it but got a little too busy reading. Malerie did a great job blogging about it (not to mention the super cool Breaking Dawn blog background) so you can just go check out the pictures there. My favorite was the little girls dressed up as Rosalie and Alice. It was crazy to see all the Twilight fans - very entertaining.

I finished the book today and absolutely loved it! It was a very crazy, fantastic ending to the Twilight saga.

Back to the post title. . .

We all went to bed Sunday night and everything was fine, for a couple of hours at least. Then Peanut started waking up frequently. Luke would get up to make sure she had her binks. And I figured it was becuase I tried to feed her too much too fast. After she kept waking up after her food was done, I decided to take my turn (4:30 am). I went to move her back up in bed and she just about fried my hands off she was so hot! I took her temp and it was 102.8. So I strip her down, turn the swamp cooler on and bring her to our bed cause we have a ceiling fan in our room. She slept pretty good after that and by morning her temp had come down. I called the doctors to let them know and of course there was no answer. So I just left a message cause I didn't really feel like it was an emergency. They call back around one, which by then Peanut was pretty much back to her normal self, and I tell them the story The doc wants to get some labs done and to look at her ears just in case. So it was off to the hospital! We go to registration and we wait. We go to the lab and we wait. They put the urine bag on and we wait. We go to the doctor's office and we wait. The urine bag doesn't catch anything so another one goes on and we wait. The doctor's waiting for lab results and has to go to a meeting so we wait. All the while Peanut refused to eat or sleep which is very draining for both of us! Still no urine and still no doc so we wait. The doc gets out of her meeting looks at the labs. Determines that it's an ear infection but also notices that Peanut tested positive to EBV the end of June! The results got missed because of some copmuter error I guess. So Peanut's on an antibiotic for the ear infection, an antiviral for the EBV, and extra stress doses of prednisone. Just when I thought we were doing well and the meds were slowing trickling off! And not to mention that Peanut's been drinking about 6 oz a day! On her own! From a sippy cup! Great progress!

Peanut really is doing great! While the doc is concerned about the EBV, she's not totally stressing it. So I'm trying not to stress over it. My delemia from all of this is that I was hoping to go up to girl's camp on Thursday but am now worried to leave my peanut. What to do, what to do. . .