THE 4th, THE CASTS, THE SURGERY.........A VERY BUSY WEEK!

Before I start with my latest complaint (I seem to have a lot lately!), I will start by saying how dang cute Brooklyn was on the 4th. We felt like being crazy and headed to the fairgrounds for the fireworks. Those of you that don't know, Brooklyn has ALWAYS been terrified of a noise louder than a sneeze. Actually those used to terrify her too! When she was little I couldn't put away groceries around her because the sound of the bags made her hysterical. Clapping, vacuuming, doorbells, knocking, and laughing terrified her and she would sob uncontrollably. So to say the least, it was a huge step for us to attempt to sit directly below the fireworks. After the first firework went off her little fingers flew into her ears for the remainder of the show, but she loved it. She would take her hands off when she would get really excited to clap once then put them right back in her ears. It was so cute. And it's only taken us 2 "short" years to be able to take her somewhere with noise!

So she finally got those heavy casts taken off on Monday. I seriously couldn't sleep the night before because I was so excited. Brooklyn has loved it too and crawls faster than ever now just cause she finally can for the first time in almost 5 weeks! We made it a good day and went swimming with her cousins. Her legs are pretty beat up though from being in the casts and her toes drug out of them the majority of the time so we are constantly keeping a dozen bandaids on her legs and feet.....again. She also has developed a terrible rash on her legs since they have been taken off so I wonder if she touched something with latex, which she is allergic to.

Her eye surgery is on Thursday and I'm not very happy about it. The doctors are loosening her eye muscles because occassionaly her eyes are pulled the wrong direction ( I happen to find it very cute!!!). The good news is that they may loosen the muscles too much so her eyes will fly the other way so we will do surgery AGAIN to fix it. Cool huh? What's even cooler is after her surgery we can't get her eyes wet for another three weeks. How's that for timing??? When they told me that in the doctors office I seriously almost cried. Only three days after getting her casts off, water is once again forbidden. I'm a little frustrated and I have been throwing quite the pity party lately so if anyone would like to join me let me know!

Happy Birthday To Me!

For my Birthday(July 2) Jonny did a very un-Jonny like thing and planned a last minute trip to Jackson for just the two of us. The key word there is planned, because usually we drive around lost tyring to find hotels in the middle of the night wherever we go and spend the rest of the time trying to buy tickets to a place that is usually sold out. But not this time! It was so much fun! I called my mom Tuesday morning and asked her if she could watch her favorite grandchild for a couple days and of course she agreed. That is the beauty of living by my parents and Jonny's parents. We always have a babysitter! So we packed rather quickly and headed up to Jackson. Here is a quick re-cap of our little vacation.

* On Tuesday night we went to the Bar-J wranglers show. It was alot of fun, but it could have been a little funner had we not gotten there so late and had to sit in the very back crammed in with some people who did not smell so good. Let's just say I didn't eat much of my dinner while sitting elbow to elbow with those people!

* On Wednesday, my Birthday, we decided to take a hike first thing in the morning up to a beautiful lake. It only ended up being about four miles and was quite enjoyable not having to pack a two year old along! I would just like to point out that Jonny has been complaining since about being sore. I guess I am just in better shape than him :) That same day we also played mini-golf which I beat him by three points, while also getting the only hole-in-one of the whole game. Then we raced a couple of times down the Alpine slides. Jonny did beat me at that both times, but I figured he was feeling a little inferior at that point anyway! Then we had my Birthday dinner at our favorite and of course cheap restaurant Bubba's. Jonny somehow convinced the waitress and half the staff to come over and sing me happy birthday. I was quite embarrassed, but I got a free Banana Cream pie out of the deal so I forgave him rather quickly!
* Today we intended to go to the Temple on the way home but the Idaho Falls Temple was closed and we didn't want to drive all the way to Rexburg. We were also missing our little girl quite a bit so we rushed home to kiss her cute face! We didn't take many pictures but here are a few from our hike.


It took us about ten times before we actually got a picture of us and the lake in the same picture. It started getting a little funny how difficult it was!

Five More Days!!!

We are so excited that it is almost time for Brooklyns Casts to finally come off! They are so big and heavy that my back has been hurting from lugging her and her cement shoes around for the last four weeks and we have several scratches in our wood floor and we seem to be able to find exactly where she has been crawling by the chips left in our trim all around the house. Character marks right? Despite the headache they have been, the time has gone by rather quickly and we have still been able to enjoy some fun by the pool and Brooklyn hardly goes a day without hanging out with at least one of her many cousins that she adores! Here is a couple pictures of the fun Brookie has had the last couple weeks.....

Lots of kids have to put garbage sacks on their
legs when they swim........don't they? Brookie
didn't seem to mind as long as she had a Popsicle!

Jonny and I decided to take a leisurely walk with Brooklyn

on Sunday and this is who we ended up with. If you look close you

can see Brooklyn's legs propped up by the steering

wheel so her legs don't drag while we push her. Good thing

she is flexible!

VIVA LAS VEGAS!!!

For those of you that are daily bloggers and occassionaly check any of the people's blogs on my friends' list, I'm sure that you have probably heard all you can about our trip to Vegas that we got home from about a week ago, but how often do four bestfriends get to leave their kids and husbands home to go on vacation together? Well in five years since we have all been married, it has NEVER happened, hence our excitement.

So the four of us loaded up my friend Jessica's Honda and took off to Vegas. Actually everyone had it pretty easy since Jess and I had at least another three hours added to our trip since we started in Pocatello, but none the less the drive was fun. What? no screaming kids? No one yanking the daylights out of their carseat straps yelling "OUT! Mamma! Out!" No one had to get out two hours into the trip because they decided they were hungry, or bored, or had to pee. (actually they tried, but I wouldn't stop the car until we were almost out of gas! I'm alot of fun, can't ya tell?)

Poor Jonny had to work every day at the Bookstore, while juggling his Realtor duties and playing full time dad. While I was gone he took Brookyln to the eye doctor and found out that she needs eye surgery, her Go-Go- Boots fell off the day after I left so he spent a day dealing with that (we have since gone back to SLC and got her fixed finally!). To say the least he looked completely trashed when I got home and perhaps I gained a little more respect from him, if that is possible :)

We loved our hotel we stayed at and tried to relax as much as we could. We tried for three days to get tickets to Mamma Mia, only to be told each day that they would have plenty the next day, so on Friday we excitedly asked to purchase four tickets to the show only to be told that it doesn't play on Fridays! We were pretty mad, but got tickets to the Knights show at Excalibur. We also realized that we are all pretty bad drivers, and have poor sense of direction without our husbands around. Anyway, I'll let the few pictures that I actually took speak for themselves........

Basking in the sun in the Lazy River. We decided that some pervert got the idea to create see through tubes. I posted this picture small so you can see very little of the rest of us through the tubes! After going around the river for about two hours poor red-headed, light skinned Keri was left with the worst sun burn ever. Not quite the way to start out the trip. We got told that we resembled the four girls off Sex and the City. I was the only sinner who had even seen the show so it meant very little to Jessica, Angela, and Keri.

This is how Angela and I spent most of the trip....with our noses buried in a book. We perferred doing this to shopping with Keri and Jessica for SEVEN STRAIGHT HOURS!!!

Although as you can see, we did manage a few hours of shopping when we weren't reading. This is the reason Jonny told me that he thought it would be "fun" for me to go work at Costco when it arrives at the end of the summer. Sorry Jonny, this is my job. And no, I am not pregnant but I agree that it appears that I am based on this picture......

And Here we are testing our line dancing skills at Stoney's. We are not the brightest since we decided to pose in front of the Bull (that I successfully rode), for a picture only to realize that we covered the whole thing up with our cute little pose. It wasn't until later that we wondered why we didn't pose ON the bull......what a great idea. I'd also post a picture of me riding the bull but Keri was the photographer who got pictures of me and NOT the bull while I was riding it. It's OK Ker, I forgive you. I just know not to ask you to take pictures again.

Here we are at the show at Excalibur. That's our waiter sticking his bald head in the picture behind us. He would give us a look of sympathy when the drunk brothers next to us would order another beer or two. I'm not sure who was more entertaining, them or the show!

See ya in Vegas next year Girls!!!

Go-Go-Boots for Brooklyn

Too Stinkin' Cute!!!!

Well we finally got new casts on Brooklyn today. We found someone in town who specializes in casting people who have sores on their feet so it worked out pretty good. Of course we are still terrified that they may rub or the positioning of her foot may slip, but at least it is something. These casts are closed at the toe so we really can't see if her foot is slipping which is a little scary.

I also decided that these casts look more like Go-Go-Boots than casts. I think Brooklyn actually looks quite trendy! This came at good timing because after all the stress the last few weeks I am definitely ready for my trip to VEGAS with four of my very best friends (there are a few friends that I wish could make it but can't :( . I am sure they are all ready to kill me because I have not been able to give them a definite date that we can finally go until today so we are off tomorrow evening, yay!

Enjoying a good book before bed!

Cute Brookie

Well not much has changed this last week, but I have gotten pretty sick of getting onto my blog and seeing the picture of Brooklyn's gross feet and figured I should probably put something a little more positive on my blog this month! So I decided to just post a couple of my favorite pictures of Brooklyn. In doing this I realized that I definitely need to take more pictures of Brooklyn and also more pictures with me or Jonny with her. I don't think I have one recent picture of all of us so I guess I will make that my new goal.

Brooklyn's first time in her car seat going Bye Bye!

I love this picture because it is one of the few pictures that shows her thick dark hair that she was born with before it started falling out thus becoming the comeover, followed by the bald spot in the back that just grew in about 6 months ago, followed by the afro in the back that never combs out no matter how hard we try.

Brookie at 6 months old

I love her big brown eyes in this picture with her little tweety bird mouth that is so small! And who could miss the three chubby rolls on her arms!

One Year Old.

Her left ear used to stick out quite a bit which was only brought to our attention when we got this picture taken. I love this picture so much because of that and also since her ear no longer pokes out (probably a good thing in the future!), and I also got my one year pictures taken in this dress and look identical to her.

Posing with one of her favorite cousins Mya.

Brookie's Poor Feet

Can you believe that these terrible sores happened in just one day? And they are five days old so they have even healed a little bit. I guess we know for sure now that she can't feel her feet which of course in an instance like this is good. She posed so good for these pictures and even after wanted us to take more pictures of her "ouchies." When we showed them to her on the camera (actually she screamed until we gave her the camera!) she got sad and stuck out her bottom lip and said oweee mama. Oweee dadda. She sure knows how to get sympathy! I was putting bandaids and cream on her feet last night and she looked up and me with her big brown eyes and said in the cutest most sincere voice, "thank you mamma." How lucky am I to have such a sweet little girl!

Well here is the shortened version of our weeklong saga that unfortunately did not end today......

We went to SLC last night and stayed the night at my aunt's house and then went to our Doctor's appointment this afternoon. After waiting for over an hour for the doctor he finally took us back and poked at Brooklyn's feet for a minute and told us he would NOT be able to re-cast her feet because the sores were too bad (hmm, do you think he could have let us know this beforehand?). We kind of stood dumbfounded (even my mom who decided to join us and she is very rarely speechless!), thinking that this was some sort of a joke due to the in depth conversation Jonny had with the doctor about the condition of her feet just days before. We could tell the doctor felt stupid and though we didn't give him a piece of our mind like we wanted, we could tell that he knew he screwed up. So, after another 5 hour roundtrip drive, we get to go back up on Wednesday to recast Brookie's feet after the sores have healed. Yay!