About a boy named Joel....

This week has been a week of joy for my son Joel.  This weekend started out with him losing his first tooth!  Now, Joel has a sensory processing disorder.  He was dismissed from Occupational Therapy this last year, but he still has some sensory difficulties.  His teeth being a little loose have bothered him for some time now and we have been SO afraid of what would happen when the time came for a tooth to come out!  Well, this past Monday, at a lovely picnic with some neighbors, his tooth went one way and then the other and he yelled to us that it was really loose.  I thought to myself that we were about to have to take Joel home and let him calm down.  Instead, Joel reached into his mouth, pulled out the tooth, and with a bloody grin showed the tooth to everyone!  I was so proud of him and everyone cheered for his tooth coming out!










There is is folks!  He was eating ice cream at the time and bit into the cone and it came right out!  Speaking of eating ice cream, I got the cutest picture of Connor as well.  It was one of the last days of Summer and this picture just reminds me that it is GOOD to be a kid in the summer time!

  Little Boo Boo, standing on a slip and slide, taking a HUGE bite out of his ice cream...now THAT is finding the joy folks! 

So today was another wonderful day for Joel!  I woke up this morning with the words from Finding Nemo in my head "First day of school! First day of school!"  Joel got up, got dressed, and allowed this Momma to take some cute pics of him.  Now, if you have been on Pinterest at ALL in the last few months, there have been moms pinning like CRAZY trying to get ourselves as creatively ready as possible for that first day of school photo.  This morning, I took two of the cutest ideas I have seen on Pinterest and combined them.  I took a picture that I hope will lead to many more like them in the years to come.  So now, I give you the "First Day of School" shot....
  A picture of Joel, holding a picture of him on his first day of Kindergarten.  Next year it will be a picture of him holding THIS picture...and so on...FUN!  It was fun navigating my way through the parental trenches of first grade this morning.  I think we did pretty well and Joel had a great first day.  I even made some home made chocolate chip/coconut/peanut butter/cinnamon/Iwentcrazywiththeingredients cookies!  Joel gave them three hundred thumbs up, so I will take it!  I am so thankful for this week of Joel and how much joy he is finding.  Between getting tooth fairy money and a certificate from Nute the tooth fairy, to being able to play on the bigg-ER kid playground, it has been a week of fun things for us!  I am so thankful Connor starts school next week!  I am going to need a weekend long nap! LOL

Same idea, different blog

So I have decided to post some happy moments from my week onto this blog.  It has been up for a while, but I didn't blog too much before because I didn't LIKE blogging, and I didn't know how to work the page very well...well...doing it for a year, I have come to understand this blogging thing and I am much faster at typing than I am writing in a journal.  So I guess I will write on here, post it on facebook when I feel like it, but have the moments to savor in scrapbooks that I can make out of these.  So I will do some moments in bullet form for the week.  I probably won't post everyday like I did in the Happy Challenge, but there have been so many things that have filled my heart with joy this week and I don't want to forget them!

• Ginger jumped up on the couch this week for the first time.  She was so happy when she did it and her little ears were pulled back into the "proud doggy" pose.  She was wagging her tail and licking me and I was yelling "good girl!"  It was such a happy moment and so precious!
• This was the last full week of our summer.  We did a lot of fun things and made so many friends this summer!  I am so excited to look back and see how much fun and how productive we were this summer!  Last summer I was in bed almost all three months, so it was great to get out, get swimming, go to the beach twice, and play with friends!
• Joel learned how to ride a bike!  He has been working on it for a year now, but he has had such a mental fear of falling off.  Well, my brother came over and I begged him to teach Joel.  I just KNEW someone other than a parent could do it! LOL  In about 5 minutes, my brother was running along beside Joel as he rode his bicycle without training wheels.  He then rode over to his friend's house and has been riding every day since then...so proud of him!
• This past week I saw my rheumatologist and I am officially back on my chemo treatments (methotrexate) for my rheumatoid arthritis.  A lot of damage has been done to my feet over the past few months, and there is a good chance I will need some cortisone shots in the top of my feet (let me just say OW! now)  But hopefully I will not be gimp walking for much longer...time will tell!  I am just so thankful that my arm has healed enough so that I can be on my treatment once more and stop any further damage from occurring.  It has weighed heavily on my mind as I woke up each morning, barely able to make it down the stairs, that all of the pain was permanent damage happening to my feet.  I am so thankful ALL of the symptoms of my RA should fade with the next few months.  Exhaustion, fever, and severe pain...be gone!

I am really looking forward to this week and Joel starting school and going into First Grade and hanging out with my mom and niece while my brother and sis-in-law are on vacation.  Here is to all the joy that will come this week!  Have a fantastic Sunday Night!

Listen to this playlist: cmelygo's Playlist

The House that Built Me (A song by Miranda Lambert) a memory by ME

So, I don't blog often.  I start to write a blog and then think...who else besides MAYBE my husband wants to hear this stuff??!  But today, or yesterday rather, I think I did something that is blog worthy.  Here goes...
I hear this song by Miranda Lambert all the time and I am constantly reminded of the home that built me.  I dream about my childhood house constantly.  There are so many happy memories of swimming in the back yard, playing hide and seek with street friends out front, learning how to ride a bike for the first time, and all the other wonderfully childish things of yesteryear.  My old house, back in Westminister California is a place where time was much easier, friendlier, and happier for a lot of reasons.  When we left that house, I was ONE angry kiddo.  I blamed my parents (being almost a teenage girl I now realize that was the typical thing to do) and I made the choice (now I realize I CHOSE it) to be very unhappy and miserable.  There where instances and situations that didn't help my adjusting to my new home (like being bullied CONSTANTLY from 7-10th grade....threats of having my head bashed in by girls in the locker room, NASTY rumors and comments by the girls at school and other organized establishments, let's just say I am grateful daily that I didn't go to high school during Facebook)
        Our new home had a lovely back yard, but the pool where we spent literally EVERY day of summer with diving board plus slide was just not there.  The front yard where we let our puppies romp and play was some 35 miles away.  And so my dreams of my old home were always in my mind.  I would go back from time to time and drive by it over the years, but that was it, until yesterday.
Yesterday we drove out to Long Beach to pick up something from Craigs List.  On the way back, the boys and I were headed home on the 405 when the Miranda Lambert song started playing in my head.  So we exited Beach Blvd and headed over to my old home.  There were a couple of cars in the drive way, and the place looked so much the same.  The thought crossed through my mind "I have two little children, surely if I knock on the door I won't seem like some crazy person if I bring the kids along!" So I carried Connor and walked Joel up to the door, we knocked, and a very nice man answered.  I explained who I was and he asked "is your last name Bouslog?"  I told him it WAS...he told me they still get mail for us...some 20 years later we are still getting mail there! LOL  He invited the boys and me in and we were able to walk around.  It was so wonderful to get to show Joel where I used to eat breakfast in the morning before school, the room where we had our very first Apple computer set up to play games on a green and white monitor.  The man led us out back and I got to show Joel my old playhouse (now turned into a storage shed) where my friends and I would have tea parties and sing and dance.  And then the pool...oh how glorious it was to see my old pool! And all of the dreams I have had about that pool really were correct! It is one of THE biggest backyard pools I have ever seen.  I wondered in years past if it was just because I was a kid that the pool had seemed to big, but no it is about 7-8 feet deep and still had the diving board!  The man asked me all kinds of questions about the house and the re-model my parents did a year before we moved out.  It was so nice to take a trip down memory lane.  So nice to talk with this man and see a place that had SO SO many happy memories.  So nice to go back and visit a home that is being taken care of and loved.  And so like the chorus in the song says
"If I could just come in I swear I'll leave, won't take nothin but a memory, from the house that...built me."  And that's just what I did.

There are so many things running through my head!

Ok, so here we go folks, BLOG number ONE!
I hope you like it!  So here is my thought for the day...have people forgotten how to use the English language correctly?  Every time I turn on the TV, I hear, "his and I's relationship" or "between you and I"  It's ME people, ME ME ME ME!  It drives ME crazy to hear this all the time.  I want to drag all those skinny, uneducated girls back to high school and make them ALL re-take a semester or two of English.  Ok, that's it...done with the rant, and now on to....
Illness:
Some of you may know that our family has been ill for the past 5 weeks.  It started out the baby and I had the flu, then Joel got it.  David took some time off work to take care of all of us.  The next week Connor had a really high fever and a strange rash, which led to the diagnosis of either Roseola or Hand Foot and Mouth.  Either way, we ended week two of not being able to go grocery shopping and not having much house work done.  Onto week three, Joel woke up one morning, asked for Raisin Bran, and by the time he was done eating, he had developed Croup!  Yep, it can in fact come on that quickly.  So off to bed he went for the next three days, and thus ended week three of our not so fun sick train.  Then on week four it was my turn once more and I woke up with laryngitis in time to go to a conference about swallowing disorders with my good friend.  While at the aforementioned conference my nose started running and I developed a head cold just in time to be down for the entire weekend of General Conference!  So we are onto week five now.  Just a couple of days ago, I had finally recovered, gotten my voice back, and was no longer using Kleenex like crazy.  Joel wanted to spend the night at his grandparent's house, and so all was looking well!  We were finally healthy!  In fact, I had just said to David yesterday as he was getting ready to go to work how wonderful it was that we were all finally feeling well!  The world was once again a place of health!  I could do laundry and not worry about waking the kids, I could grocery shop with my son in school! Of course all of this lasted about 3 hours because when I went to pick Joel up from my mom's, he had a fever of about 103, was glassy eyed and had a runny nose.  Alas, our picture perfect family was once again under the weather.  I have had so many appointments in the last five weeks I have had to cancel!  I truly believe people are starting to think that either a) I have developed a case of Munchhausen syndrome and am keeping my children sick because I want them to be with ME all the time...yeah right or b) I have become some sort of compulsive liar who is not very creative at coming up with excuses and keeps using the "oh my kids were sick, sorry I missed it" or c) that I am telling the truth but that I must live in a cesspool of germs and bacteria therefore no one will want to ever play with my children or  come to my house again!  As my babysitter said, I should just place a large BLACK X on our front door warning people to stay away from our house of ill.