Hunter's Day in the Media

n the midst of making plans for the weekend, my awesome husband was blessed with being picked to referee the girls' state soccer tournament. It's a huge honor to be asked to referee the state tourneys! Refs from all over the state of Tennessee come to referee the tournament, and you have to be asked to do it! Hot stuff, that Hunter is!! I'm so proud of him.
Soooooooo, he was written about in the newspaper. Unfortunately, it wasn't what you would call a good article. There wasn't actual mention of his name, but we knew who it was about, so that's all that mattered. It boiled down to the fact that a coach was actually bad-mouthing the refs (which means Hunter and his refs b/c he was the center ref in the game). Who does that at the high school level? It's inappropriate at any level, but high school??? Coach needs to grow up. It was quite disrespectful, but of course, my humble husband just blows it off and says that there's nothing he can do about it. What a man!!! I love him, but boy did it make his immature wife mad!!! We joked that Lane Kiffen was recently fined for the same thing. Even better than that...Urban Meyer was fined $30,000 for the same thing! Tehehe! The inventor of football himself got in trouble for it. Still waiting for that apology to come to my sweet husband.

Upcoming holidays

Wow, I cannot believe that the holidays are here. Thanksgiving is in three weeks. It's going to be, for a lack of any better term, a doozy this year.
We are having both mine and Hunter's family at our house this year. That's right, just go ahead and pray for us now. So far I have counted 23 people!!!!!
I don't think I'm totally ready to deal with that, so I'm going to change subjects.
Things are going well in our house. Ema is doing great. She goes back to Vanderbilt on the 16th. Keep her in your prayers.
There will be more to come with planning the holidays...

Fun-Filled (Read: Busy) Halloween Weekend

Our Halloween started earlier in the week. My mom and I took the kids to a Mother of Multiples Club event at a Retirement Center. We dressed the boys up in their costumes...Ethan = Cookie Monster; Cooper = Elmo; Ema = Pumpkin. They absolutely hated getting their costumes on. It was all a fabulous idea until it came to actually putting them on. My mom and I had to basically drag them in kicking and screaming until they saw all of the other kids dressed up and realized they weren't the only ones and were ok. Thursday, we dressed up at my office. It's a big deal at our office b/c my boss loves Halloween. I was Marilyn Monroe. What's funny is the winner of the costume contest was someone who dressed as....ME! It was freaky! Two of the nurses dressed as me and my friend Ron who is our Nurse Practitioner at work. It was great, but it was really weird to look at her!

Hunter and I took the kiddos up to the Mayfield Dairy Farm in Athens on Friday. We were gone all day, and it was a lot of fun. The boys got to play in the "Corn Box" (aka Sand Box replaced with corn). They jumped on Hay Bales. They got to take their first Hay Ride. I was amazed at how well they did. They weren't scared at all. The tractor pulled the wagon full of hay to the Pumpkin Patch where they got to pick out their own pumpkin out of the real patch. Ethan managed to pick out what we thought was the largest pumpkin there. It's huge!

We came home and headed out to meet our niece Lindsey and her boyfriend, Joey for dinner. They came in town for the weekend to go to the UT/South Carolina game. She recently graduated from South Carolina. He plays Pro-Baseball for one of the teams in the Kansas City Royals system. They spent the night with us through the weekend.

On Halloween, I wasn't able to take the kids out b/c I was by myself (Hunter reffed), so we just handed out candy. Let me tell you how that went...JUST WONDERFUL! Cooper insisted on screaming at everyone who rang our doorbell, "No, go home, this is my trick-or-treat!" We had forgotten to get candy, so I had to give theirs away until Hunter got home with candy. That went over like a ton of lead balloons!

The boys had started to get sick on Friday and Saturday. Their coughs were terrible, so on Sunday, we didn't actually get to take the kids to the church Pumpkin Patch. Probably a good thing seeing as how busy we had been over the weekend.

I swear I'm going to get back to blogging more regularly so everyone doesn't have to read a book. More to come...

Sorry it's been so long!

Well, it's come to my attention (throat clearing...JANE!!!), that I haven't updated our blog lately. I have been absolutely insane for the last week. I was on call last weekend and had to rummage around for babysitters every day b/c Hunter was reffing all weekend.
Then it hit...Hunter got the swine flu!!!!! It was fabulous. He couldn't get out of bed for days. I was coming into work late and waiting on babysitters. Our normal helpers, Hunter's parents, were out of town all weekend until the middle of the week. READ: No babysitters! So, anyways, we managed. Hunter is still not 100%, but we are pressing on!
Emalinn is doing great. She went to see her regular pediatrician on Friday. All is good. She felt like she was looking wonderful. I talked to her about getting Tennessee Early Intervention involved with Ema's care. They are a state-funded organization that offer PT/OT/Speech Therapy and anything you can think of. They come to your house and everything that your insurance doesn't cover, they do! It's a great thing. Although Ema is doing well, I just wanted to get ahead of the game. Our pediatrician gave us some good news though! She felt like they would come to our house and say why are we here. She's perfectly normal! That was really great to hear. So, for now, we just keep on trucking. We go back to Nashville in three weeks!
That's pretty much all the update I have time to give now. I'll do better this week.

Back to Work

Well, I came back to work yesterday. Things were a little slow-going, but I guess I'm back in the swing of things. I really miss being with the kids though. When I have to leave them again after getting to be home with them, I'm secretly super jealous of Hunter...guess it's not a secret anymore!!

Just an update, Ema is doing well. The coolest thing that Hunter and I noticed after surgery is that she almost immediately had what Hunter calls a "panic button." She had never had a real "soft spot," but after surgery, it was one of the first changes we noticed in her. That's a good thing!!!

I'm only making this blog super short to let everyone know that Ema is doing well, so I won't go off on the tangent that I want to, but I will say that difficult times really do bring out the "true" in your true friends. I really do appreciate all of the prayers, support and help that we had from our family and friends...More on "true" friends later.

New Day, New Stress

Well, we got home Thursday evening after staying for 4 extra hours in the hospital. We were "discharged" at 7 am, but the doctors didn't actually write the orders until 11:30 am. The boys were with Hunter's parents, so we sent them on their way instead of making them wait for us. We got to see Hunter's brother one more time before he headed out to meet his wife for a vacation with her family to Vegas...
Side Note: We are so proud of Heath (Hunter's Brother). He applied and has been
accepted into seminary and is going this fall. It's such an amazing thing to be
called to the ministry and it's so cool to actually know someone who has been
called to serve the Lord through his work!!!
So, we got home after Ema slept the entire way! I couldn't believe it. She did so well and even slept through the night. Of course, I did make Hunter sleep on the couch so that she could have plenty of room to sleep with me!!
We have been spending the last couple of days getting adjusted. The boys came home this evening. I knew I had missed them, but I was so excited to see them!!! Our family will now try to get back to normal. Things will probably not ever be 100 % normal, but we are going to make every effort to try! More to come........

It's Over...So, Now it begins

Monday...we found out our van's transmission has something wrong with it. It had to be taken to Honda for an official "diagnosis." We of course only had one car which I have to drive to work, leaving Hunter with no car. The next day did not get any better.
Tuesday...I had a terribly rough day at work. It was actually pretty horrible for only a 1/2 day. We didn't get much sleep Monday night, so of course, I was tired and overslept Tuesday morning. On my way to work I was pretty tearful just stressing about Ema. My boss managed to get irritated with me about something first thing Tuesday morning. I became even more tearful. Hunter and I are extremely stressed; therefore, we are short with each other. (Read: Something else to make me cry!!) SO...I left work around 12:45 and made a couple of stops on the way home. The boys went down for nap and we packed our things. We headed to Nashville with both sets of grandparents following. We are lucky to have such a good family support system. We basically put the boys in the car w/ Hunter's parents and Ema rode with us. This way we didn't have to rent a car to take.
After a sleepless night...we got up around 4 am and headed out to the hospital around 6 am. We signed in and were called back around 7:00.
It was actually a really unique experience. The worst thing we had to see Ema go through was taking her vitals. She fell asleep in my mom's arms while we waited on the doctors to come back. We talked to the anesthesiologists, surgeons and that was it. She was actually taken from me at 8:30 (the scheduled surgery time). She was put to sleep with gas before an IV was placed, so she never felt anything. Within about an hour and 15 minutes we were sitting in a conference room talking to the surgeon. All went well and we could see her soon. Within a few seconds of leaving him, we were called back to recovery because she was awake and hungry.
The sight of her was truly as exciting as seeing her for the first time. She was awake and fussy. That was a welcome sound!!!
I really cannot describe what it is like to have your child go through something like this. When they took her from us, it was the most helpless feeling in the world, but seeing her again was the most welcome feeling in the world.
We have a long road ahead of us, but she's actually crying to eat right now, so I'll leave you and catch up again tomorrow.
Thank you, God, for being so good to us!