It all began on the night of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. I had been feeling kind of bad during the day, but that evening, while watching all the countries parade into Olympic Stadium, it hit me hard-- fever, chills, body aches, and a deep chest cough. All weekend long I was bound to my bed, taking Advil for fever, sleeping, and doing little else. It knocked me flat on my face. Determined to avoid an after hours clinic, I went to the doctor on Monday morning. She diagnosed me with acute bronchitis, but after listening to my crackly lungs she said it was borderline pneumonia. I'll through that in so that you can feel extra sorry for me. :) I got some antibiotics and returned home to sleep it off. Modern medicine is a glorious thing, and by Tuesday morning I was feeling a lot better. A few days after that, and I was back 100%.
Now, as any woman knows, when you are down for the count for a few days, the house can go from "nice and tidy" to "train wreck" in a matter of hours. Let's just say that after four days of me mostly laying in bed, the train had not only wrecked, but had caught on fire and exploded. But, I had little time to clean up because the following weekend, we were headed off to Lake Tenkiller for our annual summer visit. My aunt and uncle spend most weekends out there and are gracious enough to take us out on the boat, make our meals and make us feel like we are at a nice hotel for a weekend. They are awesome! Our lake trip was wonderful. We went tubing and swimming and played outside and slept in and ate delicious food. Coming home Sunday night, we were ready to head into the last full week before school started.
Our lake crew: Me, Leah, Hannah, Nikki, Parker, Eli
Our husbands stayed home with our youngest so that we could take the "big kids" on a special trip.
Nikki and I are out on the tube. I hadn't done that in a long time and I screamed like a little girl.
I also used muscles that I haven't used in a long time too!
Lake kids
I am a list maker (I think I've mentioned this before). I can hardly function without a list. So of course, for this last week at home, I made a long list of "things to do before school starts." Among the usual things like laundry and home organization projects, I had listed "get girls haircuts", "buy school supplies", "update cafeteria lunch account", etc. But after one day home from the lake, a sudden (and freaky) storm blew through our area of Northwest Oklahoma City/West Edmond. It was sunny and hot one minute, then dark clouds blew in, the wind picked up and rain started to pour down in sheets. Before I knew it, the howling winds lifted our trampoline up over our fence and blew it two blocks down the road where it landed with a large, metal-twisting thud. A dozen power poles fell or snapped in half in front of the girls' school and in the neighborhood directly behind it. One even crashed into a house (thankfully no one was injured). Our power promptly went out after that and stayed out for the next 48 hours. The temperatures shot back up to just over 100 degrees and our house got hot, stale and stinky fast. We packed up our clothes and the contents of our refrigerator and headed to stay with my dad for the next two days. It was like a forced vacation of sorts. We watched the Olympics, hung out with my dad and enjoyed a little unexpected time away from home. However, my list of "things to do before school started" got tossed out the window!
Our poor, injured trampoline.
We had to drag it off the road and then take it apart to get it home.
Yep. Slightly embarrassing moment.
Finally, the power came back on and we moved back into our house. Mike's Dad, Richard, had scheduled a trip to Oklahoma to visit us and play with the kids and he arrived while the whole power outage fiasco was going down. The day after we were back home, he ended up having a mild stroke. He was in bed reading a book when his right leg went completely "dead". He could feel it, but it wouldn't move at all. Mike took him to the emergency room where they did a CT scan and saw where his brain had hemorrhaged a small amount of blood. He ended up staying in the hospital overnight and undergoing two MRI's. We immediately dropped all our plans to be with him. Thankfully Mike's mom got a flight to come down the next day and Richard was released soon afterward. He has no permanent brain damage, but he still can't use his leg. They decided to stay in Oklahoma City a while longer to do some physical therapy before heading back home to New Jersey. He is doing much better, but we are praying he is able to get full use of his leg again soon.
So with all of that going on, plus getting the girls ready to start school today, I have had to prioritize my time to get things done. Today dawned cool and fresh and the girls had a wonderful first day of second grade. Second grade! Where has the time gone?! I'll blog more about school tomorrow since I've written you a short novel to read. Hope you enjoyed my story! I'm hoping life goes a little more drama-free over the next few weeks!
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My beautiful second graders!!
3 comments:
My goodness! That was a drama-filled tale for sure! I hope things settle down now for you.
Wow, you've really had a lot going on lately. Sounds like you covered it all--the good,the bad and the wind-blown.
Glad you're back. The summer was so hectic for us, but a good hectic. I didn't blog much either. Looks like you all had fun and I'm so glad Rich is on the mend.
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