Month of May

May has been rough.  With all the storms and weather, we haven't gotten to play outside for most of May.  Harper also went through a weird few weeks where she was waking up or staying up for hours in the middle of the night.  Paige is still waking up twice a night so for a few weeks they were tag teaming me and I wasn't sleeping much.  But we are getting Paige on a little bit of a routine and Harper has been diffusing a sleepy oil at night and it's gotten better.  

Harper and Paige are both doing well otherwise.  Paige is getting big and we are working on sitting up and staying standing.  Harper has gotten to be more of a mom than a big sister lately and tells people what to do when it comes to Paige.  They still play well together and Paige loves to watch Harper do whatever crazy activity she is doing at the moment.  

Cody is in his last month of school and we are so ready for summer.  Cody has really enjoyed his kids this year.  He even had one who made Paige knitted slippers and Harper a knitted backpack.  He is still enjoying the back room at church and he gets a little extra time with Paige.  

Not much else has changed.  Life just keeps going and the girls keep getting bigger.  It's weird to think that we are done with babies so I hesitate when I put Paige down or have to leave.  She's still little but I know she won't be for long.  Plus, she's pretty cute and fun to hang out with.  

Taylor is graduating high school this year so she got the last two weeks of school off.  It was great for her and awesome for us.  She got to come see us for a little while.  Plus, we got to go down and see the family at the beginning of May.  It was our first trip since Paige was born and it turned out pretty good.  We saw the Hunts, Longs, Largents, and Klusmans.  Long day but a good day.  At the end of the day, I got a phone call that I had left Harper's water bottle, so we drove back to get it and Taylor met us outside.  I filmed her running her fastest back to the house and girl got props for being so quick.

Since the prevacid and getting into a routine and just getting bigger, Paige has become this happy little bundle of baby.  She doesn't seem super chubby, but she has rolls on rolls on rolls.  She loves to be talked to and loves attention.  She is either hungry, tired, or super happy.  Girlfriend is just happy most of the time.  

A few May happenings.  We all wanted to do some canning. Stephney started it and canned some jelly and it was so good.  I canned pepper jelly and was being super cautious because I knew it was kind of chaotic to get done correctly.  I messed one small detail up so I stopped to text a friend and at that exact moment, it boiled over and practically exploded.  It got sticky, scalding jelly all over the stove, oven, cabinets, floor, etc.  It was miserable.  

Because of the rain, it's also been an abnormally bad season for ants, flies, mice, and snakes.  We had one 3 foot snake here and Cody's parents found a few at their house.  This one was on their driveway and looked about 4 feet long.  I hear they are good snakes, but I don't really care.  I just don't want them near my house.

We got to see the Gatlin's and meet the boys!  I was so excited when she texted that she was coming to Dallas with Todd for CrossFit.  We met them in Plano at the mall for dinner and play time.  They adopted Michael and Caleb at the end of March and we were dying to meet them.  They are precious boys and so fun to get to watch.  Michael is energetic and fun and Caleb is more shy and an observer. Both of them already love Nikki and Todd and they are so lucky!  It's so good to see how God has planned specific lives to meet, even when we didn't know it.  She also got to meet Paige which is wonderful.  We love Aunt Nikki and have missed her lately!

Taylor and Carleigh went to Prom at the beginning of the month. Aren't they gorgeous?  They had fun and it was supposedly a great prom (it could be that Carleigh planned pretty much every detail of the dance).  

And of course, the new generations passive aggressive way of making a joke out of things that are actually true.  

Harper's Eye Surgery

It has been 6 months in coming, but Harper finally had her eye surgery. It started in November when we discovered the problem.  She saw two doctors in December who diagnosed her with Amblyopia, or lazy eye in her right eye.  It is a problem with the muscle on the inside of her eye that pulls her eye too much so that it gets stuck and can't come back out.  We did patching and glasses and although they helped, they were not a full solution as her eyes still crosse and her brain was still trying to not use the eye as much.  As her brain stopped using the eye, it got more and more lazy and her 3D vision started to deteriorate.  So we scheduled surgery.  But it got cancelled due to a change in insurance, which made us start all over with a new ophthalmologist.  We ended up going to Children's Hospital in Dallas and seeing someone there who scheduled her for surgery the next week.  They will go in through the bottom of her eyeball and cut the interior muscle of both eyes to make sure both work perfectly.  It should be quick and have no scars.  Plus, she should be back to normal after a day or so.  

We had to be at the surgery center at 6:30am so we were up at 4:30.  Paige ate and went back to sleep the whole way but Harper just sat in her car seat and relaxed the whole drive.  We waited in a pre-op room for about 2 hours, watching cartoons, meeting drs and nurses, and getting everything ready.  She was pretty shy and nervous so she wasn't enjoying all the attention.  The only thing that was making her happy was laying by Paige.  Eventually they gave her the "giggle juice" or liquid valium, and she relaxed considerably (she didn't like it at first though and spit most of it back out onto her hair - yuck).  Since she was much more compellable, she finally put on the nightgown and talked to the nurses some.  I asked her how she was feeling and she ended up singing "I wanna Rock and Roll" for me.  It definitely worked.  We prayed over her and she went into the operating room around 9. As she was wheeled away, she was sobbing crying out "Mama" so it was a little rough for me.  But I just knew that we had prayed for this surgery for months and that God was with us.  

We went to a small waiting area and fed Paige and just hung out until she was done about 10am.  When we got back to her post-op room, they said she would be in when she woke up from the anesthesia anywhere from 20-45 minutes.  While we were waiting her surgeon came in and said it was a perfect surgery and he was hopeful that she would be completely healed.  Such great news!  She was in within 15 minutes though still quite a bit groggy.  She immediately cried and wanted to be held, so I picked her up and we sat and rocked.  She had a sip of water, got her iv out, and relaxed for a bit.  After about 30 minutes, she was so much better, more alert, not in too much pain, and ready to go.  So we got discharged and headed out before 11am.  It was so nice to be home early and have naps waiting.  

Harper slept the entire way home and Paige slept for half of it.  When we got home, we thought Harper would just want to go back to bed, but she was rested and didn't want to.  She was kind of grumpy, so we just let her do whatever she wanted for the day.  She laid on the couch and watched Disney for hours and seemed completely content.  Paige ate and took her nap for the afternoon.  And eventually Cody and I fell asleep as well.  It was a nice, quiet day.  Cody said that we should have known Harper hated naps enough that not even valium and general anesthesia would keep her down.

We got dinner from Patti Cornelius (Cody's coworker) and the Spiegel's brought Harper a new toy.  We also got dinner the next night from the Piazza's and a visit from Aunt TayTay, present included, so it was a great day.  We are so blessed with our friends and family!  As the day progressed, we kept family and friends updated and asked for prayers for peace, for the surgery, for her recovery, for her grogginess.  And I'm so thankful to say that God heard those prayers and seemed to answer them all almost immediately.  We were covered in prayer and were so thankful that God was with us the whole time. 

Her eyes are red on the inside because of the surgery but not as bad as we had imagined.  They are almost unnoticeable unless she looks way to the side.  She was fussy that day and then didn't sleep well that night, thus having a very hard day the next day.  But day 2 after the surgery she was fully back to normal and a happy little girl.  She had a little double vision, blurriness, itchy eyes, and sticky lashes the first day after, but that was all gone by day 2 as well.  We are so incredibly thankful that God protected her and has helped her to recover so quickly.  We had her post-op appointment later in the week to verify that she had no infections and her eye swelling was going down.  The doctor gave her the thumbs up and said she was doing great.  And then hopefully we will see improvement in her eyes in about a month or so.  All we are looking for now is that her brain begins to use her eye 100% again.  Since she did so good and was such a crazy good kid during all this mess, we took her to Braum's for late night ice cream after her post-op appointment.  She loved it!   

May Storms and Texas Flooding

It has been raining for weeks now.  Like, storms, tornados, crazy wind.  Not a single day has gone by that it hasn't at least drizzled at some point in the day.  And I'm serious when I say weeks.  It started about the beginning of May.  This first set of pictures was taken on Mother's Day.  We had big storms all weekend.  It poured all day for days on end.  Highway 75 had closed in Van Alstyne because of 3 feet of standing water on the highway and access roads.  Entire fields of crops along 75 were huge lakes.  Sunday morning, we were an hour late to Mother's Day brunch at Kristen's because a huge storm had blown through around 8am.  A tornado had touched down in the metorplex and Frisco had gotten sirens around 7am.  We made it to brunch and it rained all day.  We headed home after lunch and we were just hanging out for the day.  Suddenly, we were getting storm warnings and it looked like a major storm was heading this way around 3pm.  It was pointed more towards Sherman but turned towards east Denison about 15 minutes before it was supposed to hit.  Cody still didn't believe it but I was starting to get worried.  Our cable went out so we were listening to the emergency radio and it was pretty nasty out.  Right as Cody was heading outside to get a closer look (!!!) when our neighbor Morgan Helm texted that the news just said it was hitting Single Tree Rd, which is about 100 yards away from us.  It was a rough few minutes of anxiety.  It hit about 5 minutes later, but thankfully it hit about 3 miles down our road.  We didn't have any damage, and the main damage from the tornado was just trees ripped up and thrown around.  When we went to look around later, you could see exact spots where the tornado skipped around the ground.  3 foot in diameter trees were just pulled straight out of the ground.  Someone got a picture of the tornado from Sherman and I honestly can't believe it was so big.  It was insane but we were seriously lucky.  We did get so much rain that our pond was now almost 5 times bigger than normal.  It was overflowing on all sides and was bigger than I could have ever imagined.  The creek was a rushing river and had come up and over the creek bank.  It ended up almost 20 feet across instead of the normal 5 feet across.  

After a few more weeks of rain, Texas started flooding.  Lake Texoma was gaining about a foot a day.  They opened the flood gates to try to keep it from going over the spillway.  But even with the dam open, it was only going out half as much as it was coming in.  We kept hearing reports of lakes flooding the close neighborhoods.  We went to look at the dam and spillway on Saturday morning of the last week of May.  It was about a foot from going over and ended up going over the spillway on Sunday evening.  The river that came out of it is huge and rushing.  It flooded the road going to the lake and cut off access from the Texas side.  There were even men who kayaked down the lake, over the spillway, across the road and down the river.  It was a ton of water!  Sadly, there was another tornado scare on Memorial Day while we were in Frisco for Grayson's birthday.  This time it hit about 6 miles away and didn't have too much damage.  Sadly, over Memorial Day weekend, the Blanco River down south of Austin flooded and the town of Wimberly was pretty devastated.  It was so sad and heartbreaking.  We are thankful for the rain because it was much needed but we pray for those affected by all the flooding.