Countdown Is On

(courtesy 2009)

Poor Megan. October is not her month. Besides having 'oct' for a prefix and being the tenth month of the year; go figure, octopus, octagon, octomom..... (8 anyone?), here are the top three reasons it's hard on her.

1) I talk in my Dracula voice for a good majority of the month.

2) October is the month of her dad's, my dad's, her sister's, our daughter's and her husband's birthday. Not to mention most of my friends growing up had October birthdays too. (Adam, Laura, Jacob, Tony, The United Nations, etc) Don't even get me started on extended family birthdays in October (Hi Nora, and Nora's soon to be new sibling)

3) I get so excited for our annual California road trip that I blog at 3:00AM instead of sleeping.

That's right. It's time.
10 days.
9 nights.

Friday -> Victorville (Like an opening night teaser)
Saturday -> Beach
Sunday -> Church, then Beach (Don't judge, it balances out)
Monday -> Disneyland
Tuesday -> Beach
Wednesday -> Sea World
Thursday -> Beach
Friday -> Beach
Saturday -> Beach
Sunday -> Beach, then cry eight hours back to Utah

I am excited because Adelaide's birthday is on the 13th. So when we leave Friday we will give her her first present. The Unicorn Pillow Pet she has been asking for for over a year now. "PJs fit right inside," she tells me just after the commercial announces that fact.

Then, before Megan and Reggie fly down on Monday night, I will sneak Addie into Disneyland where she will finally be tall enough, using some tricks I've taught her, to ride the bigger rides like Splash Mountain, Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain. She's gonna love it.

Now I know why we had kids. Without Adelaide, I never could have sold Megan on all these things. I am still trying to figure out how to get her to get me a Pillow Pet for MY birthday. Garments fit right inside.

Best Movies Ever

Now that Adelaide is almost five years old I figure its time to introduce her to movies without Shrek in them. First was The Burbs. She didn't really get it. So I tried The NeverEnding Story. She loved it. She said its one of her favorites. It was rough at parts but she pulled all the way through.

Best Lesson:
It's OK to cry when the Swamp of Sadness consumes Artex.
Or else, you're a total jerk.

PS- She wants a Luck Dragon for Christmas.
PPS- Artex is alive at the end of the movie and it's OK to cry/cheer when you see him then too.

My Poor Heart

(Feel free to enjoy the WIKI links in the story)
Yesterday morning I drove myself to the ER. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to sleep through the night feeling a tightness and a pain in my chest and shortness of breath. After nearly five hours, I rolled out of bed and got showered up. Then I Laid back down to recover from expending all my strength to just shower and dress myself. After a bowl of Cocoa Puffs (this fact is important) I drove to Orem and checked myself in with an expected lung problem.

First they drew some blood from my apparently over-zealous vein which leaked all over my bed sheets and shirt. Then they did an EKG to check my heart signals. Then I was off for X-rays of my chest. The chest X-ray came back showing swelling around . . . my HEART?

So, next they wheeled in a machine to run an ECHO on my heart. Of course they need me to lay on my side (which kills) and the tech is teaching a newbie how to run the machine (which makes the procedure take twice as long and become almost unbearable).

The ER doctor came back to go over the results. He said,

1. I had serious swelling around the heart.

2. Of the 100 people that come in with this condition, 99 go home, and I was the 1 that needed to stay.

3. The wall movements of my heart were irregular and did not look good.

4. I could be IN or ON THE VERGE of a heart attack.

5. They wanted to do an angiogram to check for blockage and fluid in and around my heart.

Hmm. I'm 31 years old. Never sick. Healthy. Active. Extremely good-looking. None of this made sense. I scrambled for my phone looking for support. I just manage some text messages to Megan, Randy, and Mike and a blubbery barely audible call to my PA brother Jef who works on an open-heart surgery team before they are moving me downstairs and prepping me for my procedure. So now, I'm alone.

In case you are NOT reading the WIKI links (which I have already told you to feel free to read ), an angiogram starts with an incision in your groin so they can access the femoral artery and send a catheter up into your heart to have a look around. Many emergency heart surgeries are performed as a result of angiograms gone wrong, i.e. puncturing the vein and damaging something with the catheter on its way or while it's in your heart.

After they shave my special zone (groin entry, remember?) and dope me up, I find myself in a recovery room. Randy is waiting outside. My chest still hurts and now my leg is sore. They tell me it went well. There was no blockage or build-up of fluid. My blood results show good cholesterol , but high blood sugar (thanks Cocoa Puffs). Mike and Megan show up. I am given some anti-inflammatory and [pain meds.

And now I am home recovering. Still not sure of the cause. They say bacterial and viral infections usually spark something like this. And so here I am, I fought off a heart attack under my own power and I survived Pericarditis. The pain and swelling are slowly going away and I am home recovering.

The only question now is, do I let the hair grow back in awkwardly and uneven, or shave the rest down there and start from scratch?
PS - Happy Birthday Kip.

Labor Day Weekend

We had the privilege of having Rick, Jen, the kids, and Ma and Pa Idaho come down for the weekend. We went to the Treehouse Museum in Ogden on Saturday, Sunday we went up to Payson Lakes, and Monday to Hogle Zoo.

Cousins are the best.

These girls are two peas in a pod.


We discovered that there are wild Jimmys at the zoo.


We stopped at Hires for burgers (chicken strips for me) after the zoo.

It was a fun weekend! I can't believe we are at the end of summer, it's gone by entirely too fast but this was a great way to send it off:)