Randomness...

~There is a chick in our ward named Nicki who has the cutest hair! I asked her who she goes to, since I'm still trying to find someone to do my hair. She said she does it herself and that she works at a salon here in town. I figured if she can do her own hair that well, she must be GOOD!  Well, you can imagine how thrilled I was when she called me a couple of weeks ago and asked me if I would like to do a trade. I would watch her kids 1 or 2 days a week and she would do my family's hair.

Ummm, yeah!!!!

 To  be honest, I was a bit worried. I mean, you never know what you're gonna get when you watch other people's kids. But they are so well behaved. Ty is 8 years old and Max and Matthew LOVE playing with him. Tessa is going to turn 2 in July and she and Gracie get along really well too. I do have to save poor Tessa from my bully daughter, who has a hard time with this whole sharing thing, from time to time. But other than that they are getting along really well. Ty has great manners too. So far it's going great and everyone is happy!  It's been fun getting to know Nicki as well. I finally found a picture of what I want my hair to look like and I can't wait to have it done!

~Between having Zack on a Cal Ripkin Majors team, Matthew on a Cal Ripkin Pee Wee team, and Max starting T-ball this week on a city league team, we go to a LOT of baseball games! We have 9 this week alone. Tonight will be #7. It's been a lot of fun watching the kids having such a great time! It's been really fun to see the different ability levels too. T-ball and Pee Wee are just so remedial compared to Majors. Everyone cheers for both teams and are just so positive and nice. There are a few overzealous (crazy) parents who expect super great things out of their poor kids at this level and are continuously disappointed when it just doesn't work out the way they want it to. It cracks me up to listen to them! Then you go to the Majors and h-o-l-y  c-o-w! The parents REALLY get into it! Last year was really fun to watch but this year is AWESOME!!! All of the players finally really get how to play and they make some incredibly awesome plays! It's exciting to watch and I don't dread the games like I used to. I think a lot of why I dreaded them so much in the past was the way I felt physically. It has been so incredible, the contrast between how I feel this year as compared to how I felt last year. It was bad! It just makes me so grateful each and every day that I feel better. I still have some sporadic pain here and there most days but most of the time I feel great! It's truly a blessing!!! An answer to prayer for sure!!! 

~I have finally started trying to lose some weight. I have gained 20 lbs since November and I can't fit my fat butt into any of my jeans except my maternity ones and ones that have that stretchiness to them. Definite low point!!! And I saw some very cute, thin, girls I went to high school with and I looked like the stay puffed marshmallow man. So humiliating!!! So, I decided I have to do something about it! I've been trying to exercise and I have made some minor changes with my eating habits. I lost 10 lbs!!! Which inspired me to keep at it! Brian has lost some weight too. We both need to be healthier for sure!

~My kids have finally figured out that it's so much more fun to play outside than it is to stay in the house, which is a huge plus! Last year I had to force them to play outside.

~We were able to find Matthew's backpack that he left at school on the last day of school. It had his inhaler in it and some other medicine equaling about $70. I was totally freaking out. We looked in the lost and found 2 different times before we found it.

~I feel like we live at the dentist office. Matty and Zack both have retainers. Both of them have broken them twice. They have only had them since like April or something. Matthew even threw his away at school and the super nice janitor spotted it on his tray in the garbage can and took it out. Thankfully! Course, about 3 hours later he broke it. I tell ya, this could drive a mom to drink!

~So we all know it's not good for us to eat fried foods. I rarely fry. Maybe a few times a year. I found another reason not to do it a few weeks when I was frying some chicken for my family to have between baseball games while I was at a Young Women's barbecue and homework burn. I placed a wing in the front of the pan and reached over it to put another one on the other side of it at the back of the pan and right when my hand was about an inch above the first wing, it popped. Oil splattered on my wrist. It burned it bad! It blistered up and has gone through some interesting changes over the past 2 weeks. Not fun! There is one part that I can't get to heal and it was the most blistered. So frying is not my friend! I feel so bad for people who are burned in accidents.I can only imagine what they must go through!

~Oh, and for those of you wondering, the Essure thing has been wonderful!Just make sure you get everything worked out with your insurance company and your drs office before having it done.

Well, it's done...

I had that Essure procedure done Tuesday. No more babies.  :(   :)   Can't decide whether I'm happy or sad. I always wanted 5 or 6 kids but we couldn't have kids for like ever and now I have this stupid nerve pain crap that makes it impossible to imagine being pregnant again or caring for a newborn baby again and I live in constant fear of getting pregnant again under the current circumstances but still...I'm kind of sad. I officially can't EVER bring another life into this world. No more kicks. No more exciting ultasounds. No more teeny tiny clothes. There are a million negatives and a million positives. I am INCREDIBLY grateful for the 4 beautiful children we have been blessed with and thank my Heavenly Father every day for being blessed with the divine gift of motherhood. I'm totally feeling like it is the right decision for us. For me. The procedure only lasted about 5 to 10 minutes. It went super well. I watched the whole thing on a little screen and it was rather interesting. You could see the entrance to the one tube just as clear as day but the other one was covered with endometriosis which made it rather hard to find and then he had to put it through the endometrioses. I've had a lot more pain on that side than the other but the pain still hasn't been too horrible or anything. It's been a great way to go about this whole thing and I would definitely suggest it to anyone! Especially if you have Dr. Thorpe in Provo do it because he was AMAZING through the whole thing! He totally redeemed himself in my eyes! He delivered Zack and it didn't go so well and if I could have kicked him I would have but I couldn't feel my leg because of the epidural :) But after this whole experience I say he's WONDERFUL!!! I am glad it's all over now. Just 3 months until I have an xray with dye in me to make sure they are completely closed off and then it will truly be OVER!!! I'm blessed and grateful and everything but still...I'm a woman...and sometimes women can feel happy and sad at the same time and that's ok. For 16 years becoming a mother has been a BIG part of my life and thinking. Each child took time to come to our family and there were lots of hoping, praying, begging, pleading, etc. It's just kind of strange to think it's over. That that part of my life as a woman is over. That my mind has to switch. That we are entering a new chapter of our lives. I'm sure it will be a wonderful chapter as well, it's just going to take me a while to wrap my mind around it and accept the new realities of my life.

PART 2 OF...Stick a fork in us...we are DEFINITELY done!!!! (we think!!!)

Oh yeah, we're done! To see part 1 go here . There is absolutely NO way I can go through a pregnancy again! I realize now that the Trigeminal Neuralgia was most likely the cause of the major dizziness I felt while I was pregnant with Gracie and why I had so many headaches and why I felt so crappy.  I know I would have felt that way to some degree but the feeling car sick all the time, like my head was spinning and stuff is how I feel a lot of the time from TN anyway and add pregnancy to that and UGH!!! When I think about being pregnant again it makes me hyperventilate a bit so I'm thinking...definitely done!!! We were weighing the options...vasectomy or tubal ligation. I told Brian that I figured I had carried and delivered 4 babies so he was up! It was his turn to experience a bit of pain and sacrifice his body a bit to keep us from having more since tubal ligation is supposed to be more invasive, more costly, more of an uncomfortable recovery for a longer period of time than having the big V. He is a big ol' chicken :)  and started googling options for this sort of thing and discovered a procedure called Essure. Basically, it is something they do right in the Dr.'s office, all we have to pay is our $25 copay, they give you a percocet and a Valium for pain management because it can feel a bit crampy during the procedure if you don't do that, you don't have to be put under or anything, the Dr. says its like having a pap smear. They open you up with that double shoe horn looking gadget and insert a scope into you and release metal coils into your fallopian tubes. Scar tissue forms around them, eventually blocking them completely. 3 months later you go have them put dye up in you and do some sort of x ray to make sure nothing is getting through the coils. This is a permanent fix. No reversing it. The accuracy of this procedure is even better than either the tubal ligation or the V mainly because they actually check to make sure it worked and things are COMPLETELY shut off. There is no affect on your hormones or periods or anything like that. Everything continues on as normal, whatever your normal is. The recovery is the easiest of the options as well. They say you feel loopy that day from the medication you took and then some people feel a little crampy like you're on your period for a day, some people a few days. That's it. Seems like the best option for us financially and physically. I still would prefer to have Brian have a V instead of me having to do anything but since I live in constant fear of getting pregnant again, at this point I don't care I'll do anything to ease my mind. This TN is just more than enough to deal with right now. I was a bit sad as I watched all the cute little pregos at the Dr.'s office. It's still hard to think about that part of my life being completely over. Not an easy choice. If I could guarantee another pregnancy would be as easy as my pregnancy with Matthew was, and if I could know for sure that the baby would sleep through the night from day 1 like Gracie did, and that the baby would be as easy as Gracie was, and if I could know that if the pregnancy was as hard as it was with Gracie I could hire a full-time maid to clean while I was pregnant and a nanny to take took care of my other kids while I laid around feeling like I was going to die, and I could know that I could hire a maid to clean once the baby came or a full-time nanny to help me take care of the baby while I cleaned and kept up with life, then SURE, I'd be all over having another baby! So, there you have it, we are DONE!!! I am scheduled to have the Essure done on January 4th. Dr. Thorpe will perform the procedure. He was the Dr. on call ,instead of Dr. Dayton, the night we had Zack. I'm trying to look past THAT experience!!! No fond memories there!!! Not many Dr.'s do this procedure and my favorite Dr., Dr. Harrison referred me to him. Little nervous but also looking forward to a little peace of mind!!!

Very interesting...

This morning in the car on the way to preschool I asked Max what he thinks he'll ask Santa for this year. He said he is going to write Santa a letter and ask him for a baby.
uuuhhhh...WHAT!!!!
I hate to break his heart but all Mommy wants for Christmas is her tubes tied so this may not work out as he would like!!!
We may have to take a little trip to the toy store so he can find a little something DIFFERENT to ask Santa for!!!! 
OY VEY!!!