I didn’t take pictures today. Honestly, I think I’m losing my mind a little. I realize it sounds like it’s already far gone since I called Abe 29 times yesterday. It really was an emergency–I didn’t know how I was going to make it to school if he didn’t pick up, and I had no other way of contacting him. Anyway, as if that weren’t enough, I am having terrible nightmares about lice and eczema (just recently discovered I have this all over and every day it gets worse), and I feel like I’m barely scraping it together enough to even put on the appearance of sanity. The nightmares keep playing out in my head vividly all day long–in the background, while I try to hold normal conversations and interact with people.
I don’t handle illness, pests, or parasites well. It’s been a hard week. Mom, feel free to say a prayer for me. I would call you, but it’s so late there. Lots of love to you and Grandma.
I didn’t talk to Lily much today, so I apologize if this blog is a lot about me. First I want to say that I completely adore Mary’s new hairstyle, and well…Mary in general. Her new hair looks so hip and modern and with a few clips that Lily put in, it still looks very femenine. Add on to that Mary’s pink nails that Lily painted today and you have one adorable Toddler! (Pictures coming I promise).
Lily’s day included a visit from Ina, who brought over butterfly wings to give to the girls. Lily’s day overall was very good, but hit a kink of frustration when she was unable to reach me at work to coordinate a babysitting situation. She called my cell 29 times! I’m sorry honey! Also, the reason I am blogging is because it is Lily’s first day of school for her new Semester. It is a class about baking and pastries and she said she is very excited. I’m anxious to hear the report!
As for me, this is the first time in about a month that I feel free from work stress. It has been very intense and I had some big meetings today that I was nervouse about. Now with those behind me, and it being the beginning of the quarter, I hope to enjoy a little peace before it gets crazy again. Pictures!
Grandma, I am so sorry to hear that you went to the hospital today. The girls and I immediately stopped and said a prayer for you, and during dinner Lydia wouldn’t let me finish my prayer until I prayed for you. We love you and hope you don’t have to deal with pain. We love you so much!
I forgot to take pictures today, so Abe took a bunch before putting the girls to bed:
Mary is now allowed to have her binkies in her toddler bed. She occasionally loses them underneath the bed, and she searches for them thus.
As I blog, Abe is kindly picking through each strand of my hair for nits again. Thank-you, my wonderful husband. I love you.
We just stayed home all day. I’m pretty tired from the lice situation. Mary was lice-free until she napped, and then she woke up with a bite on her neck and some nits around her ear. My heart dropped when I saw that.
Other than that, I spent the whole day cooking, reading to the girls, and cleaning.
Here are the pictures!
Lydia and I tried to turn challah into brioche today. I should have just googled a brioche recipe; the challah didn’t convert that well.After being trapped inside all day, Mary really wanted to go outside and read books. After all she’s been through, I happily aquiesced.
We had pot pies in pumpkins tonight. Mary thought it was novel.After dinner, the girls sang a song before FHE. Lydia made up the words and Mary was her chorus.
We got part of the song on video! You can see it here.
We had a FHE lesson on reverence. Abe had the girls play a game like Stop and Go! wherein the girls danced and acted crazy when Abe called out, “Crazy!”, and they knelt and acted reverent when he said, “Reverent!”. This is them kneeling.Crazy!Crazy again!
Did I neglect to mention in my last post that after we thought Mary was the only person with lice, Abe discovered a ton of nits in my hair Friday night? Yeah, I thought so. Between that time and now, my hair has undergone: RID (scary, ineffective pesticide treatment), multiple sessions of nit comb-throughs, LiceFree! Spray, three blow-dry treatments (so hot and long that I thought my scalp would burn off), two tea-tree oil shampoo washes, a priesthood blessing, and right now: I have soaked 1/4 cup of pure tea tree oil into my scalp. Tome gave me an 8 ounce bottle, bless his heart. Oh, and I’ve laundered my sheets every day since Thursday.
From Amazon, arriving soon are these three exciting products: A Robi comb (a battery charged comb that zaps lice with electricity so that they die on contact), a Terminator comb (best lice comb on the market!), and a giant VAT of tea-tree oil shampoo.
All of last night’s dreams revolved around picking lice off of my head. Do I sound crazy and obsessed? That’s about how I feel. Poor Abe just wants a break, but every time we have a spare moment, I hand him a comb and order him to get to work on my hair. While he does that I pore over the Amazon reviews of different lice products and read them like it’s therapy. Most people write their terrifying lice stories into their review and send words of encouragement and support to the review reader. The reviews make me feel like I have a global support group.
When I am not actively combating lice, I perform tasks in a distracted state and have several times thought I might be losing my mind. Case in point: Yesterday, after forgetting a bag of groceries at the store, I went out and climbed back into the passenger seat of the car and sat there for a minute before I realized the car wasn’t going to drive itself back to the store.
Okay, enough about lice (even though, honestly, that’s basically all I think about). Today was General Conference! A welcome, uplifting, four hour distraction. One of my favorite talks was Elder Holland’s about caring for the poor. I also liked Elder Bednar’s talk on missionary work. He pointed out that the reason we do missionary work is because we have felt that power of the atonement in our own lives and desire the same blessing for others. That’s kind of how I feel about LiceFree! Spray and tea tree oil–I want to share the info with EVERYONE so no one else has to go through the panic and icky pesticides I used before figuring out which products worked. Oops! I wasn’t going to write more about lice…
I’ll just cut to the pictures:
Lydia and I made this plum cake today. I needed a pick-me-up. I should have taken a picture…but guess what? I have enough plums to make it again tomorrow, so maybe I’ll just do that since this one disappeared. Also, doesn’t my hair look like a perfect home for lice? I would chop it all off, but no salon can legally do that for me until this ordeal is over, at which point I will probably reconsider.
I discovered Mary reading Each Peach, Pear, Plum while the plum cake was baking.Abe must have taken this one.Tom and Suzanne came over for dinner. Tom gave Abe a blessing afterwards.Tom reading to the girls.I love the mountains in the background. Of course, I also find the little girl in the foreground quite endearing as well.
Also, here’s a daily dose of Too Much Information: After I spent all that time in the hospital with my friend Andrea, who had to deliver her stillborn daughter, I decided I wanted to get pregnant again. Maybe it’s because I wanted the baby to be alive, or maybe it’s because I love spending time in Labor and Delivery (really, I love that floor of the hospital), but I emerged from that experience wanting, for the first time in two years, to be pregnant again. Didn’t happen the first month (which was really about two weeks before my period came), and now I have soaked my hair twice in pesticides, so I think I’ll give my body another couple months to get these chemicals out of its system before trying again. Sad.
On the upside, I have a couple classes left on my Bikram yoga pass, so I can at least use those up now! (I can’t while trying to get pregnant because the heat isn’t good for in-utero babies).
Oh my goodness, I haven’t blogged since Wednesday! Whoa. I have a lot of pictures from the missing days, but I am so sleep deprived right now that I can’t really recall the details of what happened. On Thursday we found out that Mary had lice, and basically my world ended right then. Since no salon cuts infested hair, I had to cut Mary’s hair off myself.
I given exactly one haircut in my life, and the person went straight to the salon afterward to get what I did fixed. My heart drops a little bit each time I look at my shorn little Mary.
So all I’ve done since The Bad News is comb out everyone’s hair with a nit comb a million times, wash every single piece of clothing, bedding, and any other loose material I can find in the house, and fold a TON of laundry. We listened to General Conference today, which was the bright spot in this sad time. Oh, and I had Abe give me a blessing yesterday, which also helped.
Here are some of the pictures I have (dating back to Thursday):
Lydia and Audrey holding hands on the play ground at preschool (they’re the two little girls in white shirts). I spy on them before I pick Lydia up.On the way to the doctor’s office, before I found out Mary had lice.Lydia fell asleep on the way to the doctor’s.Lydia getting her hair cut. She didn’t have lice, but we cut it anyway.
Abe took Friday off, which was a HUGE blessing considering all the work we had to do around the house. We took a break in the middle of the day and took the girls to the park.
I did get my camera fixed, though! Abe went crazy and took pictures during last night’s dinner to celebrate:
Some of the laundry that we did. All of this is now folded and put away. This wasn’t even all of it.Mary was so exhausted after everything that she fell asleep like this.
The rest of my pictures come from our outing to the park today:
You can see Lydia’s new haircut. I actually LOVE Lydia’s new hair, so that is a little consolation.You
You can see what a terrible job I did on her bangs. No salon will fix it until two weeks after the treatment. 🙁 …But she’s still adorable! Here she is giving me some pretend food she cooked up at the playground.
I really like laid back days, and today felt like one of those. We didn’t get up until after 8 am, which is always a plus. I worked out a little on the treadmill, fed the girls a bunch, did some errands, and then Abe and I had a temple date.
My camera is still in the shop, but here are some pictures I took on my phone before the date.
I did Isabella’s hair because we finally had time. (Abe was stuck in traffic)
Isabella brought candy for the girls.Mary was having fun on her bike.
Today I stayed home and sanitized and organized all of the toys, children’s books, and children’s clothes in the house. It took all day. As the day wore on, I heard myself saying ridiculous things like, “Mary, put down that toy! I just organized that, and you can’t play with any of your toys until tomorrow!” …But, hours upon hours later, the toys are all disinfected and in their proper places, the books are sorted by color (ROYGBIV), and I have assessed the girls’ wardrobe situations (Mary = clothes galore, Lydia = one outfit away from naked. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but not by much!).
Mom took a picture of me organizing.Grandma, I think Mom took this picture for no other reason than that Lydia’s hair was out of her face. We WILL get her a haircut soon.While I was cleaning upstairs, Mary amused herself downstairs on her new bike.
All the organized books made me want to read to Mary, so we did that for a while. Then I ate too many carbs and indulged in too much Apple Barn fudge (thanks, Mom!)…and then Abe came home and we had dinner. Thankfully, my mom is here and she makes the world’s best salads, so I had salad for dinner. My body was grateful.
Then we had FHE. My mom had the wonderful idea of cutting up a picture of Jesus holding a lamb into puzzle pieces. We hid the piece with the lamb, and the girls had to put the puzzle together and hunt down the missing piece. Abe then explained to them that just like Jesus loves the little lamb in the picture, He loves us. He explained that whenever we are lost or lonely, we can pray and feel comfort and peace.
Mary spent a lot of FHE climbing on furniture.That made her happy.The girls climbed across “Daddy Bridge.”
Then Abe doled out horsey rides for the remainder of the evening.
Today after church and meetings, we headed over to Red Butte Gardens for an afternoon stroll (and to eat leftover birthday cake).
All together!Feeding the fishies.
In the three bears’ home.
eating cake
Then we came home and just chatted for a couple hours.
At one point, Abe came down to the kitchen after playing with the girls. He looked like this:
Tonight the girls made him the fairy in charge of bringing the treats in their tent. He complied.
And now Clark and Swathi are about to catch their late night flight back to New York. I am blogging before I take them. I hope they end up here because it will be hard to see them go. It has been such a wonderful treat to be all together! Thanksgiving, when we’ll all be together again, can’t come soon enough!
