2014 Update

How did so much time go by?  I have thought many times about writing a blog and always seem to get distracted.  I do not know how it happens, but it does.  

Life in Indiana has been, well interesting to say the least.  The weather is kind of out of control.  We had one of the worst winters in history, SNOW, Snow and more snow.  Then we had RAIN, Rain, and more rain.  No really hot weather.  And now we have pretty much skipped early fall and have gone straight to early winter.  On Saturday, October 4, 2014, we had flurries.  Yes real actual snow.  Who ever heard of snow at the beginning of October!  That is just the weather.  :)

Let's see.  Christopher is now almost 15.  I can hardly believe it.  He is a typical teenager. He thinks he is in charge of the world.  He has decided that he is the man of the house and that his sister and brother need to obey him also.  He will learn.  (Insert evil mom laugh.)  He is an unhappy eighth grader.  (He absolutely HATES homework.  His school has an after school program that requires kids to go to it if they do not finish homework.  He is there A LOT.)  He is still in Scouts and at times threatens to quit, until the next meeting or activity, then he has a blast and forgets to quit.  

Cassidy is 13, an official teenager and everything that goes along with it.  She is in seventh grade and actually real likes her classes.  She is a big help everywhere and usually does exactly what she is asked without complaining, although the whine and complaint do happen.  She still deals with asthma, still pretty severe.  She gets very annoyed when she has an asthma attack.  She was in the hospital last week and when we got there she knew all the nurses and respiratory staff that she saw.  That does make her life a little easier.

Barry is 11.  He is still a sweet little boy.  He is in Scouts and seems to have a good time.  He is in sixth grade.  He has had a difficult time in school this year, but that is not completely unheard of  at his school.  There are some tough sixth grade teachers.  :)  He really enjoys hanging out with his friends.

We started attending a new church and really like it.  My kids LOVE the youth group.  They meet every other week and my kids really look forward to it.  I have found some old friends and made some new ones at our new church.  We have not been going long, but I really like it. I have two classes to finish to get my degree.  I should be done in May.  One this semester and one next.  I cannot wait to be done.

Hopefully I will remember to update this blog more frequently, but we shall see.  :)

So Long 2013

Well, time to say goodbye to a VERY stressful year.  Any of you feel differently?  Anyway, let me tell you about our last couple of weeks.  Cassidy has been doing better (finally) and for the moment her asthma is under control.  HOORAY!!!  She has been approved for the new medication, but we are still figuring out all the details.  We will probably start in the next couple of weeks.  I hope it will make the difference that her doctor is expecting.

Our Christmas was fantastic.  Most of my brothers and sisters were home.  My kids went to their grandparent's house the Saturday before Christmas.  They had a great time.  Apparently they had a gingerbread house building contest.  I thought their houses looked great.

We had our normal extended family over for Christmas day.  Everyone ate way more than we needed to, but it was SO good.  :)  It was fun to see everyone.

Now to my favorite part.  My family is very large and loud.  We all went to Nick and Krista's house for Christmas and pirogi.  (We can it something else, but I have no idea how to spell it.)  We had seven kids from 4 months old to 14 years old, 10 adults and lots of fun in a little house.  Nick was smart and took the munchkins to the park to get them out of the house while the baby slept.  The adults undertook the task of making the pirogi.  We make them from scratch and it is a long process, but worth it I assure you.  My mother also makes borscht.  My kids really like pirogi and look forward to it every year.  We opened gifts, lots and lots of gifts.  The kids were beyond excited.  Cassidy wrapped a gift for Chris with the help of my neighbor that took him FOREVER to open.  They wrapped it with lots of paper, tape, and ribbon.  (Chris has decided this year that he did not want ribbons on anything.)  She got a kick out of making things difficult for him.

On the Saturday after Christmas, we hung out with my brother and his wife and kids and my sister and her husband.  We explored Albanese Candy Factory.  Never a good place to go when you are hungry.  For those who do not know, they actually have a chocolate fountain.  Candy, candy everywhere.  My sister-in-law decided that we had to go get lunch right after we left there.  :)  We went bowling.  I am not very good at bowling, but it sure can be fun when you are playing with family.  We got two lanes, one for kids with the bumpers and a ramp for the little ones and one for the adults with the gutters wide open.  :)  The kids had lots of fun and my brother-in-law can really bowl.  :)  I think my favorite part of the day was dinner. We had chicken tacos with all sorts of veggies.  (Avocado, cucumber, peppers, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, fried mushrooms and onions, and cheese.  Sounds good right.)  My mother thought we were crazy to add cucumber and carrot, but my kids love it and so did my sis and bro-in-law.  Once dinner was over, we played hand and foot.  If you have never played, you are really missing out.  My boys got to play for the first time and Christopher is a card shark.  He and my mother were partners and they kicked butt.  However my brother and his wife beat everyone.  Everyone kept asking Barry which cards to pick.  Apparently he really helped them all, but not so much himself.  I think they both had a good time.

Over all we had a good holiday and so far a healthy one.  :)

Asthma Strikes Again!

Well, how was your Thanksgiving?  Mine was great!!  I had a great time with family and friends.  I taught a new friend and a cousin how to make a fleece tie blanket, refreshed another cousin on the technique, made lots of fruit salad and desserts, and talked a lot.  We had 35 people at my mother's house so it was a little full, but I sometimes think that is the best time.  Everyone hung out and had fun.

Everyone knows that a lot of stores were opening on Thanksgiving evening and I said, "Nope, no way.  I am NOT going to shop on Thanksgiving!"  Well, little did I know, but my cousin decided that while she was in Indiana, she would take advantage of our lower sales tax.  (For those interested, she lives in Chicago and Chicago has the highest sales tax in the country, so you can see why she would want to do this.)  She has not know where ANYTHING is in Indiana.  So guess what that meant?  Yep, you guessed it.  I went shopping on Thanksgiving!  We had a good time.  It gave us time to talk and catch up with each other's busy lives.  We got home at almost 2:30 am.  Talk about tired!!  My daughter made it through Thanksgiving with no visit to the hospital!  (Remember last year we spent Thanksgiving day in the PICU.)

Friday, all three kids went to visit their grandparents.  They have been going over there every other weekend.  I enjoy the break and they have been getting to know their grandparents better.  I think it is a win win situation.  On Saturday morning, I got a call asking if Cassidy could take some allergy meds.  Sure why not?  (Her nose was running.)  I got another call  that afternoon.  She took some Tylenol for a headache. (No fever.)   That is fine.  I was totally not worried.  I knew she had a new inhaler (194 puffs left) so she should be fine with her breathing, right?  Apparently not.  At 8:30 Cassidy called me and asked me to pick her up because the inhaler was not working.  (For those of you with asthmatics you know that sometimes using the nebulizer works better because it allows the medicine to work over a slower period of time.)  So I went and picked her up.  I ended up with all three kids coming home, but that was fine.  While I was in the car a found out that the inhaler only had 52 puffs left.  WAIT JUST A MINUTE!!!!  I know Chris also uses the inhaler, but he and Cassidy agreed that he only used the inhaler four times while they were there.  (Each use is 2 puffs, even if he messed up and had to do three or four puffs each time, he only used it 16 puffs at most.)  Let's do the math:  194-20 (benefit of the doubt, maybe he forgot a use or two.) = 174, 174-52= 122 puffs!  I dropped the boys off at my mother's and headed to the ER.

Now most of you know that most ERs are always busy, but here we have a hidden gem.  It is a new facility and still fairly unknown.  Every time I have been there, we are taken straight into the triage room and then straight back.  No different Saturday.  We went straight back.  Cassidy's pulse ox was 88.  She was given 2 breathing treatments right a way and an oral steroid dose.  Pulse ox stayed the same.  Added oxygen, still the same.  So she got admitted.  The ER we go to is only and ER, not a full in patient hospital, so they transferred her by ambulance to our local hospital.  I had the ER doctor call her asthma specialist and we were able to avoid an IV!  Cassidy was VERY happy about that one.

She was in the hospital from Saturday night (the only kid on the peds unit) through Tuesday afternoon.  She actually goes back to school in the morning.  When will my child catch a break in this whole thing!

Forgotten Memories

What is it about broken, lonely places that strike such a cord in our hearts?

Today my neighbor and I were talking about our dream homes.  He wants to renovate an old dairy barn into the house of his dreams.  I would love to get an old church or school and make it into my dream home.  In the process of our talking, we started looking at old abandoned buildings of any kind ~ schools, churches, barns, etc.
1.
2.
A church in France.

It got me thinking.  We found some eerily beautiful and haunting buildings.   What would it take to rebuild or refurbish some of these places?  I decided to see what else we have left behind.  Empty, lost looking cars or moss covered train tracks.
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Then I found the saddest abandoned places of all, amusement parks.  Have you ever looked at pictures of these forgotten places?  Knowing that they were probably lived with laughter and joy makes the pictures of broken carousals and vine covered Ferris wheels that much harder to look at.  These pictures were gut wrenching.  Some of the pictures I looked at came with the story behind the reason the park was closed.  Others I actually looked up.  Here are a couple of pictures from the abandoned parks.
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This picture is of an amusement park that never had its chance at laughter and fun.  It is in Chernobyl.  It was supposed to open 5 days after the nuclear meltdown.
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A roller coaster in Germany.

Beautiful aren't they?

I looked for pictures of my home town's abandoned places.  I grew up in Gary, Indiana.  I went to school at Nobel Elementary (now closed) and Emerson Visual and Performing Arts (again, now closed.)  Emerson was one of the very first high schools built in Gary.  It showcased the fight for equal rights in schools and became an actual Fame type school in its waning days.  I remember where my classrooms were and what they looked like.  I remember friends I made then and all the fun we had.  It was built in 1908 and was open until 1981.  It reopened in 1982 as a visual and performing arts magnet school.  It stayed open at the original building until 2008.  Now you would never know that it was open as recently as 2008.  It is kind of sad.
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I also found incredible pictures of the Methodist Church that has been featured in many movies including Transformers 3.
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These places and spaces would have such stories to tell if only they could.  Can you imagine the history most of these buildings have seen?  Emerson was 100 years old when it was finally closed in 2008.  Both World Wars, the Great Depression, 9/11, the building was around for all of that history.  These events were discussed and survived in this building.  Most of the other buildings are as old, some even older.  You can find much older buildings in Europe that have been around of centuries.  What could we learn from these buildings?  They show us the architecture and style of time period they were built.  They mirror the tastes of the people that lived then.  Even as buildings, they have so much they could teach us.  That brings me back to my original question.  What is it about broken, lonely places that strike such a cord in our hearts?  I do not know that I will ever be able to answer that, but I do know that I have found a new interest.  I want to see what these builds and places can teach me.  I never would have thought about an amusement park in Chernobyl, not that it particularly matters, but I never really thought about the lives that were interrupted.  I learned about the accident, but only that it happened and everyone had to leave, but as a child I did not think about the actual cost.  Can you think to what it would be like if you were a child in Chernobyl and you knew the park was opening soon?  I would have been so excited and then to have that gone, man it would have been very hard leaving everything behind.

Anyway enough rambling, I just had to get my thoughts down.  They may not make a lot of sense to everyone else, but they do to me.  :)

By the way, old forgotten cemeteries are just as interesting.

Here are the sights I found the pictures:

1.  http://www.flickriver.com/photos/genbug/tags/barn/
2.  http://photorator.com/photo/15346/a-famous-spot-in-france-st-etienne-abandoned-church-
3.  http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2013/03/33-more-breathtaking-and-incredible-photos-of-abandoned-places/
4.  http://500px.com/photo/17857761
5.  http://www.pixellica.com/inspiration/urban-decay-derelict-amusemen-park
6.  http://sometimes-interesting.com/2013/06/12/emerson-school-of-gary-indiana/
7.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/slworking/5914990794/in/photostream/lightbox/

Asthma Sucks! It Really, Really Does!!

WOW!!  I know most everyone knows that asthma is super common and more and more people are diagnosed with it all the time, but what most people do not know (unless they have asthma or a loved one with asthma) is that it sucks big time!  I grew up with a brother who had asthma, so I thought it was no big deal.  We dealt with it and he is a wonderful brother.  He still has asthma, but he knows his triggers and how to deal with them.  Then I had kids.  What a difference that makes!  Christopher was diagnosed with asthma and severe allergies when he was about a year old.  Never fun and hard to watch your child struggle to breathe.  However, we started to figure out what his triggers were and now he does pretty well.  My child is much like my brother, allergic to everything under the sun.  Chris is allergic to dogs and cats, Christmas trees, tree nuts, peanuts, the list goes on.  Again, now that we know, we can avoid or prepare for any issues.

Then along came Cassidy and Barry.  Neither one of my youngest kids had any breathing issues until Cassidy got pneumonia in second grade.  (She is in sixth grade now.)  She was diagnosed with asthma that May.  I have Christopher.  I know how to deal with asthma in a kid.  Boy was I wrong!  Cassidy is so different than Chris.  I still do not know what her triggers are.  She has been in the hospital eleven times since third grade.  She misses lots of school and hates that she does.  She cries and apologizes to me because she is always sick.  How do you help your child with that one?

This school year has been rough.  We are in the last week of the first quarter and she has missed about 20 days of school.  She has been to our primary care doctor repeatedly and to her asthma specialist at least once a week.  She ended up in the hospital last week because of her asthma.  She is finally back in school, but she is not allowed to go out for recess or participate in gym because of her wheezing.  She is still on oral steroids.  She has been on the steroids for pretty much the whole months of September and October (at least what we have gotten through.)

Here is a list of what we have done the past month to try to help Cassidy:

1.   Urgent Care with her primary care doctor on a Monday.
2.   Appointment with her asthma specialist on Thursday.
3.   Follow up with her primary care doctor on Tuesday.  He put her on an antibiotic.
4.   Appointment with her asthma specialist on Thursday.  He has me call him that afternoon so he could check up on her.
5.   Appointment with her asthma specialist on Friday. (The following day to see how she was.)
6.   A bad weekend.  She started coughing so badly, she was throwing up.
7.   Back to her asthma specialist on Monday.  He put her in the hospital.
8.   Hospital visit from Monday through Wednesday.  On O2, but no IV much to Cassidy's delight.
9.   Appointment with asthma specialist on Thursday.
10. Back to school on Monday.
11. Appointment with her primary care doctor on Tuesday.
12. Appointment with her asthma specialist Thursday (today).

Nine doctor's appointments in 3 weeks.  No child should have to do that!  During her hospital stay, her asthma specialist decided that she would have to be put on a different medication.  A shot, twice a month that costs $800 a shot.  He is going to fight with our insurance to make sure she gets approved.

Here is the way he let me know she needed this medication:  "We need this medication.  It will change her life.  She will not need oral steroids as much and will feel better.  We want her to survive her childhood."

Never something a parent wants to hear!  Wait, you mean my daughter's asthma is so bad it might kill her with out this medicine!!  You better get it approved, the quicker the better.  I want her around for a long time.

I have always known that asthma can be deadly, but in my experience it is treatable and the people I love will be okay.  I call Cassidy a brittle asthmatic.  Just like with brittle diabetics, her asthma is very hard to control and we have no idea what really triggers it.  Now I am praying this medicine is approved quickly and she really does improve!

Family Tree Update

Guess what??  I am finding more family members I have not seen in years!!  I have remembered things about some of these relatives that I did not know I knew.  With most of them, I still do not know exactly how we are related, ie. cousins, niece, etc., I just know we are related.  I have been figuring this out as I update our family directory.  I am having a great time working on it, however I am kind of at a point where I need help.  Because I am not sure who is related to who and how, I cannot fill everything in the way I would like to.  Here is to hoping my newly reacquired family members will help me out.  :) 

School Is In Session!

I cannot tell a lie:  I AM SO GLAD SCHOOL HAS STARTED.  You know I love my kids, but even moms need a couple of hours once in a while to recharge.  During the summer those hours are few and far between.  Like teachers who need their summer breaks, I need my school time.  I also enjoy helping my kids with homework.  It reminds me of how much I do not remember (anyone want to explain direct objects {DO} and indirect objects {IO} to me.)  It also helps me keep my mind sharp.  (Math is my favorite!)  This year it also has told me (in eight days) how quickly things are taught now.  I do not remember learning DO and IO until high school and my oldest is only in 7th grade!  This year is also the first year that all three of my kids are excited to go to school in the morning!  Homework gets done every night.  This is a big deal because for the past two years Chris has been on a "homework strike."

Here is a quick health update:

Cassidy's asthma is at it again!  She had a major attack last Saturday in Chicago.  It was bad enough that I almost called the paramedics.  Since then she has had decent days and horrible nights.  She is up most of the night  and day, so she is extremely tired.  This week has also been very hot.  Ninety plus temps everyday with the humidity close to 90 percent.  It has made things uncomfortable for everyone.  (Some schools in the area closed early due to the heat.  They did not have AC.)  Hopefully now that the weather is cooling off she will start to feel better.