Happy New Year!

 

I know, I know.  I'm a little late wishing everyone a Happy New Year.  This has been a long butt year and it's only the 21st!  Since I last posted, we've had a lot of excitement, good and bad.

 

Late October, Ls girlfriend came to see us for a week.  I would share pictures of that, but my computer crashed and took all those pictures with it!  I'm working on getting our pictures off of the hard drive and when I do, I will share them.  We had a wonderful time with her.  While we were showing her all the neat things in the area, we got to see some sights we'd never seen before.  She's a very sweet girl and we look forward to the day she is a part of our family officially.

 

Things calmed down just a wee bit so we could get geared up for the holidays.  I stress the 'wee bit' part because it didn't really calm down much at all.  Somewhere in December, L started having pain in his right jaw.  The same jaw he had a wisdom tooth removed from in November of 2010.  The same jaw he had the remainder of his wisdom tooth removed from in December of 2011.  Or so we thought......  L had a flight planned to spend a week with his girlfriend's family in mid December, so we were eager to find out what was going on with that jaw.  Off to our new dentist we went only to find out that the old dentist had left the roots of that wisdom tooth in his mouth!  We were furious!  A week of antibiotics and a consultation with the oral surgeon were scheduled.  His flight was delayed until after everything was taken care of.  The morning of his surgery we were all a little nervous, but we were prepared.  Five minutes after they took him back for the procedure they brought him back to us!  He had some sort of an infection in his tonsils and they refused to do the surgery until it was cleared up.  On the way home we went to our family doctor to find he had mono!  So.....surgery was cancelled.  Bed rest was ordered.  We got creative with our Christmas activities since he wasn't able to do much but sleep.  While he was sick, R got a flu that wasn't covered by her flu shot.  A week later, she was doing better.  Thank goodness she had Christmas spirit for our entire family!  If it hadn't been for her, I don't know if our house would have been decorated.  She got the tree decorated almost single handedly.  She also kept us focused on getting all the other Christmas activities finished.  It was a low key day.  Mom spent the night with us and we shared our Christmas gifts and relaxed as well as we could.  Christmas is very interesting since Mom has Alzheimer's.  She used to really get into it, but it's just another day to her anymore.

R, or Bean as we call her, got this travel Scrabble game for her and me so we wouldn't have to worry about Harper messing up our tiles.  This was spelled out for me when I opened it.

 

Christmas day was also a tough day for RL.  He started having some shoulder aches and pains in October which slowly started taking over other joints in his body.  A trip to the doctor and some blood work told us it wasn't rheumatoid arthritis.  However, the pain just got worse and turned into swelling in the wrists and fingers.  Christmas day was the first day he was experiencing pain at it's worst.  Another trip to the doctor and more blood work and still same conclusion.  The doctor is leaning toward psoriatic arthritis now.  We will know more after seeing a rheumatologist on the 14th.

RL and his canine heating blanket during his arthritis flare up.

 

R got a new camera for Christmas as well as some great little bunny slippers!  A lot of experimental photography has been going on!

 

R had her birthday last week.  At least one party animal showed up!

Harper after a little too much excitement over the holidays.

 

Everybody started feeling better, wisdom teeth have been removed, Christmas decorations have been put away and we are trying to move forward with this new year.