Feeling good

I got my stitches out this morning and I'm so happy about it. They were getting really itchy and uncomfortable, and now I have a lot more movement in some directions without any pain. You guys, it has been two years. And I had carpal tunnel during my last two pregancies too that went away post-pregnancy. So this hand pain in some form or another has been going on for over five years. I am SO pleased to have so much improvement. My right hand isn't asleep when I wake up anymore. I feel like it has so much more blood flow. I thought my left hand felt much better than my right, but post-surgery it just feels mushy and not very touch sensitive. My right hand has a lot more range of motion and it's going to take some time to get all the feeling back in my fingertips, but I think it will come, or at least improve. It's been just 11 days since surgery and it's so improved. I'm already planning when this fall I can schedule my left hand. My deductible is met. Time to do all the things! lololol.

This is our last week of summer. I remember being a tiny bit jealous of folks that didn't start school until after Labor Day when I was a kid, but as a parent I'm ready to get back in the school swing of things. I've seen approximately a million first day of school pictures. We are starting things up this week. We're doing one last round of swim lessons. Going to ice cream with a former teacher and class. We haveback to school night this week. Should be a nice week to get in the swing of thinking about school starting.

Surgery Week

I've tried a million billion treatments to help the carpal tunnel I developed during my last two pregnancies that was aggravated about two years ago and has been a problem ever since. None of them really helped much. I had a few that had some positive results, mostly upper cervical chiropractic care and topical CBD oil, but nothing made it go away. So I finally got around to doing surgery on my right hand this last week. I'll most likely schedule the left hand later this fall. It's hard to do much without your dominant hand, but aside from that, the recovery has been remarkably swift and less painful than I expected. I never even took any of the meds. Took ibuprofen twice. It just wasn't too bad. I'm very grateful for that. I've got a pretty awesome wound with stitches in it for another six days, but otherwise every day I can do more with my hand. It's really nice! And hopefully as full healing occurs I will see a drop in the symptoms that made the surgery necessary. I'll spare you the surgery photos, but it is a gnarly wound. Good times.  2019 has been a year of working through medical issues and slowly finding solutions. The process is ongoing and I hope by the end of the year I'll be past most of them. Mid-thirties hit me like a ton of you're not healthy anymore bricks, so I'd just as soon move on from these last 2.5 years. Here's to better health!

And we're back

The last few weeks have been a total whirlwind of traveling to reunions and spending time with both sides of the family. It was fun and now I'm glad to be back home and settled in for a few more weeks of summer. Kids don't start school until Labor Day here in Washington, so we have three full weeks of summer left, plus the Labor Day weekend, and Aaron has a few extra days to wait because he's in kindergarten and they stagger start them the first few days.

So I'm sitting here watching all my friends' kids going back to school and happily not having any schedule yet. My kids are running around the house gathering every pillow and blanket to add to their ultimate blankeyland they made over the weekend and slept in the last two nights. And I'm grateful our family room has a door I can close so they can keep that blankeyland going as long as they want.

It's good to be summer. And we're having an incredibly temperate August. The high today is 80 and that's the highest it will be for the next 10 days. It rained the last few days, which is unusual in the summer. I'm just sitting here thinking this is the most ideal weather it could possibly be for the last few weeks of vacation.

And here's some fun photos from our trip.

A day at Rattlesnake Lake with friends before we headed out to Utah for the reunions.

We had a one-day reunion with Bill's extended family on one side, aunts and uncles and a plethora of cousins. It was in Provo Canyon and the weather was perfect, the kids had a great time, and we all ate great food.

 While we were down in Utah we picked up two kayaks that my grandma gave us. She and my grandpa had many, many amazing adventures with these and I even got out on them back when I was in college and before I got married. He's gone now and she doesn't use them, so she so generously gave them to us and we can't be more excited for our own adventures in them.

 Chloe has a deep, abiding love for apricots that we discovered on this trip. She ate so many from Bill's parents' tree while we were there. She also adored that yellow bow my sister-in-law let her borrow. She wore it the entire day and was oh so careful to make sure it stayed on. Since she never keeps anything else on her head and so I stopped putting bows on years ago, I was pretty impressed.

 Movies were watched with cousins. Grandma and Grandpa have their own popcorn maker in the basement and the kids pretty well lived on popcorn for a few days.

 Festive Bill.

 Grandma tye-dyed shirts with the kids and this was one of the cousin shots before we got the four other cousins out. Unfortunately we used water-based dye so it washed out like 90 percent of the color in the washer, so now my kids have demanded we do it again with more permanent dye. We might even do that. 😃

The kids are ready to get going in these kayaks. We built the stand to hold them the day after we got home and we even took the yellow one out over the weekend to test it out. As expected, it was fun.