JARED LEAVES AND ALL HELL BREAKS OUT!

Jared has been gone a month. It's been a month. A long month. My hands no longer work. I can't cook or clean. I can't cut my own food. I can't wash my own hair. Showers are painful. I have dealt with the pukes from the boys, pukes on the floor, pukes in places they don't belong. Then I walked into my bedroom closet, thank heavens without shoes on my feet, so I could discover that the carpet was wet...really wet....and then upon further investigation I see our toilet is leaking and its going through the wall into our master closet. My hands don't work to pull up the carpet so I had to make an emergency call to our Home Teacher - Andrew Brooks. He ran right over and helped me to get the carpet ripped up to help it dry out after I called Denise and her husband Scott helped me and Jared over the phone figure out how to get the toilet to stop leaking. Then the next phone call was to Eric Szymanski to see if he had a giant fan to borrow to help me dry out the carpets and if he could help me tack down the carpet after it drys. I have never had to call on my home teachers for blessings or help - but in the last 4 weeks of Jared being gone, they have come over and given me 2 blessings for my hands and then helped with my leaky toilet. Thank heavens Heavenly Father loves me and puts great people in my life who are so handy and so willing to help us! In the mean time I will try to laugh my way through this and document the whole thing with pictures for someone's entertainment!

6th GRADE CASTLE PROJECT!

The project I have been dreading. Way to much work goes into this and way to much parental support - ha ha! Eli chose to work with his buddy Irvin from class. They decided to make a baseball themed castle. It was pretty awesome! The hardest part was having Jared home for a weekend and trying to squeeze it in. The finished project was awesome! Sadly, they didn't win, but they certainly were a fan favorite!

NATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY!

This is the one we were most excited about! This is the one that Emma had to do ridiculous amounts of non-sense to get Perry to accept her into it. It didn't matter she has a 4.5 gpa, cheers, STEM, key club, link crew, nope she needed more. So she did 4.5 gpa, cheer, 5 man, STEM, key club, link crew, puma pals, red cross and I feel like I am forgetting something...basically exhausted herself to get into this dumb thing....and it better be worth it!! I am thinking like free college perhaps - ha ha! Way to go Emma - you certainly earned it!

MY WALKING DEAD HANDS!

 In October 2018 we went up to Nate's cabin for a family trip. My hands started get some cracked skin from eczema - no big deal - that happens. Came home and they still weren't getting much better, but still no big deal. In Jan 2019 we went down to Tucson for a soccer tournament and my hands got extremely worse down there. Lost to 2 pinky fingernails actually - that was the start of me losing 9 fingernails during this process. I kept going to different doctors trying to figure out what was wrong with my hands and get some medicine that would actually work, but everyone kept telling me they were fine, I just had eczema and here is some cream or pills to take. Nothing was working. Jared went to Oregon for work. My hands got even worse. Some days I couldn't even wash my hair my hands hurt so bad, I couldn't do dishes, cut my food, etc. I had a gallon sized ziplock baggie full of meds and nothing worked. I tried CBD oil, celery juice, changing my diet, natural oils, gloves, you name it, I tried it. I finally went to another dermetologist, brought my ziplock baggie full of medicine and showed her my hands. She was an angel. Instead of sendiing me home with more creams and pills...she took nail and skin samples and sent them off to a lab. Long story short....we finally figured out that because of the cracked skin I got at Nate's cabin and then in November I bought poinsetta plants from costco and planted them in my giant red pots out front, the soil from those plants had a fungus in it and got in my skin and my body has been fighting a fungal and bacterial infection for almost 6 months now ....that I now have those PLUS it turned into an eczema autoimmune disease. There were some shots I could take every other week, but they are $3500 a shot. After the first month we woud certainly meet our deductible, but I was stressed and panicked and I called Jared in Oregon and he was the best and cried with me and told me not to worry and we could sell his jeep, or whatever we needed to do to make my hands better. Dr Ruth was so great and filled out some paperwork for me and got my insurance to cover it and some other companies to cover it and while we were in Hawaii doped up on steroids to make sure my hands would be ok (ya my hands love hawaiian air, best hands in 6 months) we got the call saying we were approved and we were good to go! Every other Sunday from now on until who knows how long I take a dupixent shot...the shots burns, but it's worth it. My hands are better and functional now! They do still flare up when I am getting sick, weather changes, altitude changes, etc....but we can nip it in the bud pretty quick!