Snippets

The kids and I drove to Utah over Mother's Day weekend to spend time with my sister who flew in from Minnesota.  I still need to blog about the trip, but since my sisters always had their cameras out, I let them take all the pictures.  Now I don't have any pictures on my camera from the whole weekend, except a few from the zoo.

Maggie at the Hogle Zoo.  I expected her to get a little more excited over the animals, but she didn't.  She was tired though, so that might explain it.

Blog posts with pictures are always more fun, so I'll wait to write about my trip until I get pictures to go with it.  Here's what's been happening in the meantime...

Do you want the bad news or good news first?

I'll give you the bad news first, so you're left with something more positive.

I've known for a while that my back is crooked, and I've been told a couple different times that I need to get it x-rayed, the first time being in junior high when they did scoliosis screenings in P.E.  My back and neck have been bothering me a lot more lately and a local chiropractor was running a special for an initial exam and x-rays for $15, so I figured it was time to get it checked out, especially at that price.

It turns out my C7 and T1 vertebrae are fused together, which normally wouldn't be a big deal since there's not a lot of motion there; however, they are fused together at an angle, which is throwing the rest of my back off in an effort to compensate for the angle.  I have 10 and 14 degree scoliosis.  The fused vertebrae were congenital--they've always been fused like that and always will be--so there's not much we can do about it, except keep my back as healthy as possible.  Eventually it will probably lead to arthritis unless I get adjusted fairly regularly.  And that's the problem.  He wants a good chunk of change to get my back in the best possible shape it can be in, and right now our budget and I feel like the chiropractor is more of a luxury than a necessity.  He's actually really affordable as far as chiropractors go, but it's going to take a lot of adjustments and it adds up quick!  I don't want to end up being a grandma that can't pick her grandkids up though, or find out later on in life that I can't do the things I enjoy because I'm in too much pain.  So it's a bit of a quandary.

There should be a gap/disc space where the arrow is pointing.

I was standing up straight, but it makes it look like my head was cocked to the side.  The problem vertebrae is just below my chin.  See how it's angled and not symmetrical?

Here's the good news.  I have suddenly felt a strong desire to write, illustrate, and publish a children's book.  I have considered it in the past and I've had a few ideas, but nothing that I really felt I needed to run with.  This idea is different though.  It's keeping me up at night because I can't stop thinking about it.  I get comfortable in bed and a few stanzas pop into my head, so I get out of bed to write them down, just to repeat the process when I get comfortable again.  I could go into depth about how I feel there's been some divine intervention here, but I'll just say the timing of events has suggested such in many different ways.  For example I had absolutely no idea where to start and I've heard that children's books are the hardest to publish (kind of overwhelming).  Then I was reading The Pioneer Woman's blog and ironically she went into depth about the process she just went through to publish her children's book.  I'm not going to share my idea on here since I never know exactly who's reading this, but the few people I've told my idea to in length have told me it's really good...so here goes.  I know it's probably a little premature to be announcing this, but I'll feel more committed by letting all of you (whoever you are) know.  Maybe it will never make it, but maybe it will; I'll never know until I try.  I will at least share the prototype sketch of my main character with you...

It probably doesn't surprise you that it's a cow.  She's not just any cow though...
I need to tweak a few things to bring her to life a little more.  And I'll most likely use watercolors, not colored pencil.

My friends and I walked to the park the other day.  Desirae is majoring in photography so she snapped some pictures of the kiddos...

For some reason Maggie calls milk "pop".  We don't even drink very much pop, but it gets really confusing when we do because she calls pop "pop" too.  It shouldn't have surprised me the other night when I made a strawberry milkshake for us and she called it a "popshake."  Now whenever she sees the blender she says, "make a popshake."

I never know exactly what songs Maggie learns in nursery, so sometimes I'll start singing a song and then ask her, "do you know that song?"  Now whenever I start singing a song she says, "I know that song Mom!"  At first it confused me until I realized she said it because I always sing a little and then ask her if she knows it.  It's especially funny when I make up a song and she says, "I know that song Mom!"

When we were driving to Utah we kept passing billboards for Brad Paisley and the Stadium of Fire.  Since he was wearing a cowboy hat in the pictures, every time Maggie saw one of the signs she would get all excited and yell, "Daddy!"  Maggie always associates cowboy hats with Daddy, which is funny because he wears a ball cap more often than he wears his cowboy hat.  And for the record, Jonathan is much more handsome than Brad Paisley.          

Maggie and Jonathan just came down with some type of bug so it looks like I need to go play nurse (and possibly custodian).  Adios.