A Sapless Thanksgiving Post

I love Thanksgiving. But man, it's hard not to get all sappy when I think about all there is to be thankful for. The boys are dreams, truly! And Troy is just plain dreamy. (he's going to love that I wrote that) So instead of getting teary-eyed and mushy I'm going to post funny pictures of H&E. You're welcome.

Now, bring on the turkey neck! Joke. No one should eat that - for any reason. Seriously, why do they include that in the turkey? While they are funny and extremely entertaining, they are definitely gross.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Blue Man Group

I love hair cut day. I think the boys just look so cute with their hair all cut and gelled and colored. I know I'm completely biased but really, aren't they super cute kids?

In other news - the official race results were posted this week and Troy finished 42nd out of 192 people in his 10k. Isn't that awesome? I think so. He thinks it's just "OK." Whatever. He changed his tune a bit when we saw that I placed like 126th out of 193 people. Yeah - not as awesome. That's cool though. It was still fun.

One last thing - Eli officially got his cast off 100% yesterday. His humerus is healing well with lots of new, strong bone growing over & around the break. Now it's more important that he work on his range of motion instead of protecting the bone. He's doing great and I think he's really happy to be rid of Big Red for good!

Boo!

I feel like we've been celebrating Halloween for weeks now. Oh wait, we have been. I think this has been the longest ever Halloween season. I'm (secretly) glad it's over. Now we can get on to the business of eating candy, which I much prefer over giving candy to strangers ;-)

Here's how the Halloween madness in the Schally household went:

Pumpkin carving - you'll notice that we're in shorts and t-shirts. This should have been our first clue the it was probably too hot for the pumpkins to survive. But, it was a great excuse to make cookies and hang out outside with the boys. Eli's pumpkin is Frankenstein and Henry's is the ghost. I'm sorry to report that within 3 days these pumpkins had collapsed on themselves and were completely moldy. It was kinda sad but mostly disgusting.

The next big event was their good friend Teshe's birthday party. It was a costume party and the kids all had a great time playing scary games, eating creepy food and hanging out in the spooky basement. Here are the boys before the party. Eli is Iron Man 2 and Henry is a skeleton. Eli almost didn't make it to the party - this was the day he got the pins taken out of his arm and he was pretty traumatized by that. But, he pulled it together at the last minute and headed out.

Troy and I were lucky enough to get to dress up again this year for a costume party. Our costume choices are always a hot topic in our house - discussions and brain storming sessions that last for days. I'm not sure how creative we ended up being this year but it was fun nonetheless. Troy went with a tried and true favorite - the ever-annoying mime. And I decided on the wicked step-mother/witch handing out poison apples from Snow White. We knew that our party hostess was going to be Snow White and thought this was be funny.

And last but certainly not least was the big day! The boys spent the night before with Uncle Wade & Aunt Tanya - they carved a new pumpkin and watched a couple of Halloween shows. Just in general had a ton of fun. And on Halloween we had our neighbors over for dinner and then all the kids went out trick-or-treating together. I loved this. This is why we moved. I love that we have families to hang out with, that our kids have friends right next door and up the street. Love it! And the kids had such a great time. They always have fun trick-or-treating but this year was more than that. Once they'd filled their buckets and made it around the neighborhood Troy brought them home (and the other kids headed home too). But when they got home Henry dumped his bucket out and proudly declared that he was going back out for more!! Eli, on the other hand, was done and already in his jammies. I think the dads had fun too - evidenced by the red cups (actually they were pink) carried throughout the neighborhood. I heard though that there needs to be some cup modification for next year. I guess they sloshed around a bit too much in their strollers. It didn't seem to stop them though.

Here are our little monsters in their costumes. Eli is a werewolf - because all Halloween costumes are supposed to be scary so he couldn't wear the Iron Man 2 costume. Plus, this one fit without his cast! And Henry is (again) a skeleton. Both were really good costumes. Henry's actually kinda freaked me out though.

Hope you all had as happy a Halloween as we did.

The Three Bears

You probably thought this was going to be a cute Halloween post...

About a month & a half ago Troy started talking about signing our family up for a race. He was pretty much the only one who thought that was a good idea. But, after some convincing and cajoling, Henry and I agreed. Eli, like the stubborn little person he is, stood his ground and emphatically said "NO!" With that, we signed up for a "Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear" race, which means Troy was going to run a 10k (6.2 miles), I was going to run a 5k (3.1 miles) and Henry was going to run a 1k (0.6 miles).

Now, if you know me, you know that I'm not a runner. Sure, I'm athletic and did sports in high school but cross country was not one of them. I mostly stuck to the 100 and 200 meter distances. And while I do run on the treadmill for exercise, I by no means enjoy it. Troy, on the other hand, is a runner - always has been always will be. He runs a long way really fast. Henry likes to run and he's fast but it's mostly around the yard or to play tag with his buddies so this was going to be his first try running a race. So, this race has been a big topic of conversation in our house since we registered. Mostly me complaining or Henry deciding to not run it. I'm not sure I'd say it brought us closer as a family. <--- just kidding ;-)

Troy and I both did some training - mostly on the treadmill but we did venture outside for a run or two before the race. And we measured out a 1k route around our neighborhood for Henry so he could train too. Troy took him on a couple of runs, which went really well - they ran pretty fast. But Henry wasn't super interested in the training thing and regularly said no when we asked him to go. Oh well - we knew he could do it.

We knew there were going to be a couple of obstacles on race day - the fact that it was trail running and the fact that it was probably going to be pretty cold. Turns out we were right on both counts. The trails weren't in great shape so that made it difficult. And, it was under 40F during the 10k and the start of the 5k. When you're running that's not bad but when you're the people standing around waiting it's pretty cold.

Here's our Baby Bear when we got there. Henry only agreed to do the race on one condition - that he could wear a sweatband! And he really wanted it to be red, white and blue stripes. I went to every store I could think of but no one had them in stock. So I ended up with this NBA one - which has all the colors on it, just not striped. I got another one too that was just red and white. He loves the sweatbands and wears them around the house a lot. He's really looking forward to wearing them to basketball practice too because that's what the professionals wear.

Here's Papa Bear finishing is 10k. Troy did a terrific job - finishing a little over 44 minutes. His goal was 47 minutes. We were really proud of him! To run that much faster on a crappy trail with mud, rocks, hills, water and (most of all!) piles of horse crap is amazing!!

Papa Bear and Baby Bear after the 10k.

Mama Bear and Baby Bear before the 5k started.

Mama Bear finishing the 5k. The race wasn't super great for me. I thought the trail was difficult to run and got a side cramp toward the middle of mile 2 that I had to deal with. And while I secretly was hoping to finish closer to 30 minutes I knew realistically I'd probably finish in 34-36 minutes. Anyway, I finished in a little over 33 minutes. I'm happy with that. I know to the runners out there that's super slow but for me, it was decent.

Here's our boy - happily (and maybe a little anxiously) awaiting the start of his race. He totally rocked that sweatband! But you'll notice it's a different sweatband than he arrived with. Sometime during my 5k he lost the NBA one so I'm really glad that I brought this one along too. It turned out that this really wasn't a 1k race. They just set up cones for a little course around the finish line area. It was maybe a 0.5k, maybe. Plus it was crowded and they were running on grass. It was terribly unorganized - not the experience I was hoping for for him.

That ketchup lady kept getting in the way of my picture. Geez!

Here's Henry rounding the first turn. He was running really fast and trying to pass these little kids in costume. Right after I took this picture he tried to go around them by going off the course a bit up on the hill and tripped and fell. He just looked up and started to cry - poor little monkey. But we got him up and dusted him off and even though he didn't want to finish I ran the rest with him.

Here we are at the finish line - you can see how not happy he is to be finishing. But they handed out candy and a ribbon to all the kids, which helped some. Troy also (unbeknownst to Henry) slipped a medal around his neck that we had brought for him. Henry was really hoping he'd get a medal but this race wasn't handing them out except to the winners of the 10k and 5k. So I ran out to a trophy store and bought one. That medal turned the experience around for him. He was so happy and proud!

You know what? It was really fun. Not necessarily the running part (for me or Henry) but the whole experience of having a shared goal to work toward, talk about, train for. Spending the morning together cheering each other on. Celebrating our personal victories together. And I know I'll regret this but I think this is something we could do again as a family. And maybe next time Eli might be willing to try too. And maybe next time we can pick a race where we don't need winter coats to keep warm...

Skol, Vikings!

On Sunday we took the boys to Severs Corn Maze in Shapokee. It was really cool - a great alternative to the apple orchard/pumpkin patch/farm animal petting zoo we usually do in the fall. We've never done a corn maze and I wasn't sure if the boys would like it or be bored and quite honestly I wasn't sure how good our orienteering skills were ;-) Turns out we all did great - we made it through the maze, we found all 26 Vikings fact sign and the 6 challenge signs. It took a decent amount of time to get through it but it really was a lot of fun.

They also had a little hay bale maze set up. Since we got there right when they opened it wasn't very busy and we were able to walk/run through this it but later in the day the kids (& adults) were all just running & jumping on top of the bales instead of walking through them. This was fun for everyone but Eli who didn't want to/wasn't able to jump from bale to bale. He didn't really care though.

Like all the standard family fun activity places - they had plenty of places set up for photos ops. These were especially fun because Henry is a huge Vikings fan and Eli pretty much loves any opportunity to ham it up.

The boys have mad love for big slides. This one was no exception. It was tall, steep, bumpy and super fast. I'm not sure if you can tell by the look on my face but I was more than a little nervous about Eli being on there but he insisted and since we are trying to let him do all the "normal stuff" he got to go. Like my hair?

I'm normally not a huge fan of the petting zoos but at least this one had some cool animals that I'm not sure I've ever seen in person before. Kangaroos, ostriches, camels, lemurs, water buffalo, llamas, Chinese pheasants, weird little small deer, some blind white thing that looked like a cross between a rat and a kangaroo, other stuff too. I think the coolest part was some of the kangaroos had joeys in their pouches. You can kinda see the opening in this picture. Those little babies were crazy though - moving around in there, making their mamas all uncomfortable, sometimes a body part would accidentally come out of the pouch. It made me glad that I'm a "normal" mammal and not a marsupial one!

They had all kinds of other stuff too - a magician, a juggler, crappy (but delicious) food, face painting, a band, and... pig racing! Seriously. They had a little track set up and the pigs all had cutesy names - Britney Squeals, Dale Oinkheart, Lindsey Loham. The big prize for the winner of each race was a mini donut. I'd race for that too ;-)

It was a perfect day.

ps. Happy Birthday to Ben Todd!! I hope you have the best day ever! We are so excited to see you (and your whole family) this weekend.

Thinking about thinking

When we met with Henry's teacher yesterday she was telling us about a survey the kids did at school. The results were meant to be indicative of their learning style. She gave us a little hand out with the 4 different styles along with a couple of bullet point to describe each.

Step-by-step: follow a routine, get things done, keep themselves organized

Social: work well with others, know when people are happy or sad, like to help others

Curious: like to figure things out, learn mostly from reading, ask questions

Creative: are imaginative, come up with creative ideas, put drawings and are into their work

I would have thought Henry was strongly in the step-by-step category but it turns out that he's equally a social learner and a creative learner. We were pretty surprised. But then upon further thought I guess it does make sense. In regard to the social style he really is empathetic and sympathetic toward other people and he does enjoy helping other kids learn stuff. The creative one was a little more curious to me but I guess he really does like to draw stuff, make awards/trophies/etc, he loves to make cards for people. I didn't really realize that these attributes were part of his learning style - I just thought they were personality traits or stuff he likes to do. It's very interesting to find out that your kid is kind of different than you thought. I hope this information can help us get through some of the challenges that are likely ahead. Not everything will come easy to Henry so the more tools we have to help him the better off we'll all be.

Plus - he loves to play basketball!! He's been playing every.single.day since we got BB hoop last spring and I gotta say - he's getting really good. He's a fantastic dribbler and can make tons of different shots. It's great to see him work so hard toward a goal.

Big Red!

And here it is in all it's glory - the big red cast. Eli's been back at school for the last 2 days and has done great. I wasn't so sure that he'd make it all day but he's a champ. I think the distraction of school and his friends is the perfect remedy for his pain. He did have one instance where he couldn't or didn't want to ask for help getting to the bathroom so he just peed behind a tree on the playground. Interesting. I will say, though, that he can be pretty cranky by the time he gets home - not that I blame him. Overall I think Eli is doing really well. We're not really giving him much in the way of pain meds now - trying to use Motrin for the most part.

And we had our first adventure in bathing this person. I guess we were successful in that the cast didn't get wet but I can't say the same for us, the 4 towels we used and the bathroom. Geez. Any and all ideas for a better way to do this would be fantastic!

Today we got to meet with Henry's teacher for our first conference. She told us that Henry is doing really well - that he fits right in, he has friends and kids want to hang out with him, and that he's doing well with his school work. It's really all we could ask for. I'm just so happy that he's happy!! Clearly I was much more worried than I needed to be on his behalf.

Kids are so resilient!

Iron Man

What's the best treat you can give a little boy who just spent an entire day (over 12 hours!) not eating nor drinking and in a bunch of pain b/c his arm is super broken? I'll tell you... anything his little heart desires. And Eli's little heart desired this Iron Man mask. And since he was even tougher and braver than Iron Man these last 2 days he 100% deserves it!

On Sunday the boys and I were at the little park down the street from our house. They were playing and running around and all that. Eli was climbing the rope ladder and when he got to the top he scooted over to a bar-thing and sat up there. Usually when he does this he asks for help getting down - I assumed he would this time too. So when he said he was getting down I started to go over there but it turns out that he jumped down instead. All I saw was him laying all crumpled on the ground crying. And you know how when your kid is really hurt they cry differently... well he was definitely crying differently. Poor little monkey. It didn't take long for Troy and I to decide he should probably go to the ER so off Eli and I went. I'm so glad we decided to just head to Children's b/c they were really nice. They took him to a room immediately - in fact a doctor followed us into the room and examined him before I could even put my purse down. He was given some pain meds within minutes and then off to x-ray. After that things slowed way down but in the end they told us that he'd broken his humerus right above the elbow and that since it wasn't lined up correctly that he'd probably have to have surgery the next day to set it. So we left the ER with a splint and a sling and orders to see the orthopedic surgeon ASAP on Monday.

We called at 8 am on the dot so that we could get the very first available appointment b/c we were told no eating and drinking until he sees the doctor and they decide if surgery is necessary. Our appointment ended up being at 2:45. I knew we were going to be in for a long day. Have you ever had to withhold food and water/juice/milk from a 5 year old? It's not fun, that's for sure. I felt so bad for him b/c he was just so thirsty and his tongue was so dry. Plus - he had a broken arm for goodness sake. And it hurt. So he and I spent the day vegging on the couch watching Netfix (streaming to the Wii).

The appointment with the orthopedic surgeon was at Gillette, which is part of Regions so Eli was excited to be at Auntie's hospital. The whole process there was pretty slick - they definitely have it down. We were taken from here to there, seen by nurses and doctors and told he would in fact need surgery but that they couldn't do it until 6:30. We had about 1.5 hours to kill so we hung out in the waiting room where they have TVs, games, Wii, toys, air hockey and other kids. The bad part was that some of those other kids had food. At one point Troy and I were watching Eli watch another kid eat a bag of chips - oh poor Eli! He didn't say a word but I know that was a very sad moment for him. He was so hungry and thirsty.

A nurse came and got us around 5:15 so we were thinking that maybe we'd be done early. We were taken to a pre-op place where we had a little curtained off area and Eli could watch a DVD. And! on the bed was a new stuffed animal and a handmade quilt - both his to keep and take home. Isn't that great? He LOVED the stuffed animal and it was so perfect for him b/c it was a parrot. And what pirate doesn't need his very own parrot? After much consideration Eli named him Fluffy!

We ended up waiting and waiting and waiting - watching Scooby Doo, gathering about a million stickers, beating his nurse at Candyland, and asking one million times "what's taking so long?". A little after 7 they finally took him and me back to the OR. I got to stay with him until he fell asleep and thank goodness he did b/c I couldn't hold me tears in any longer. It was so hard to see my little person have such a bad day and then be put to sleep like that. My emotions got away from me.

Don't be jealous of my outfit up there... I got to bring it home so if anyone wants to borrow it you sure can! It's "one-size-fits-most"!

I think it was 15, maybe 20 minutes before the doctor came out and said he was done and that everything went really well. Eli did great. He came out of surgery with 2 pins and a bright red cast - just like he requested. Then we waited a bunch longer, picked up his Rx to take home and finally I sent Troy home to relieve Erica (who had had Henry all afternoon - thank you again!!). Knowing that Eli was fine and just working on waking up we felt like it was fine for him to go. About 2 minutes after he left the anesthesiologist came out and said that Eli was having a pretty tough time and that maybe having me back there would help. I'm not sure it did at all. He would just cry and cry, big tears and lots of snot. Then in an instant he'd be asleep and then just as quickly he'd be awake and crying again. I felt like this cycle went on for eternity but of course it didn't. Finally we got him to drink a little water and after that it seemed like he started to truly wake up. Lots of things were really bothering him - the IV, the monitor, the pulse ox-thing, the fact that he could actually see the air (from the oxygen mask) - but he was more awake and at least talking to us. Things got better and better and finally he was ready to come home. We got him dressed and in a wheelchair and all loaded in the car. He slept so soundly last night and didn't wake up until 9 am today.

And here's our boy today. He woke up in a good mood and has been pretty happy all day. His first request was a trip to Target for his special present. He's been eating and drinking. We've playing and watched movies. We went up the street to watch some of the huge trees in our neighborhood be taken down. So, he's fine. A little tired and sore but fine.

It's really scary when your little one gets hurt. We are so lucky that Eli is fine. We are so lucky to have so many people who love and care about Eli. Thanks for your emails, FB posts, texts and phone calls - truly!

ps. Happy Birthday to Jack Todd! Jack - it's not snowin' on your birt-day!! Hope you have a super fun day - we can't wait to come to Iowa next weekend to celebrate with you and Ben!