My Dad

I've been thinking for a long time that I needed to start blogging again.  Today, I had a great visit with my Dad on the phone and he mentioned getting on my blog to look for a video I had posted and that was the prompting I needed.  I talk to my Mom every week on the phone, usually on Sundays.  Lately, she has had some health challenges--knee replacement surgery, a scare with possible throat cancer which turned out okay--so I've called more often throughout the week.  I have felt tremendous gratitude for my mom and I've felt blessed to have such wonderful parents.  I felt like I should call and visit with my Dad today, hoping I would catch him home.  I wanted to tell him how grateful I was for the beautiful relationship he has with my girls.

We read scriptures every morning and I try to talk to the girls and explain what we're reading.  Recently, I asked them what they thought it would be like to go and have a visit with God.  What would He look like?  Where would He be?  What would He do and say when they were with Him?  They had some sweet insights: for example, Anne thought there would be no ceilings or roofs in heaven.  Interesting.  They started talking about how God might ask them if they were good girls, if they were obeying their mom and dad.  Then I asked them what might happen if they were to see their Poppy, my Dad, after a long absence.  Their faces just lit up and they started telling me about how he gives them great hugs and they can just see his love in his eyes.  He would wrap his arms around them and ask about their lives...what were they up to?  What brought them joy?  And he would listen to them. 

Then I asked again, what it might be like to go and visit with God.  Would He maybe embrace them and would they see His eyes light up with love for them?  Would He ask them how things were going and listen?  And if He had something to say, wouldn't you want to know what it was?  As we talked, my heart felt full as I realized how much their loving Poppy had shaped their lives in beautiful ways.  I thought deeply about what I really thought it would be like to spend some time with God.  I do imagine He would greet me with a similar love and concern.  I felt a desire to do more listening to both my earthly and Heavenly Father.

As I began my conversation with my Dad today, he said, "You've been on my mind a lot lately..."  Thanks, Dad. 

This picture is more than a few years old, but I thought of it because it I love how Audrey looks so safe and comfy with her Poppy. 

Spring has Sprung!

We are so excited to have had a mild winter and now a nice Spring!  (All except for the allergies that have come along with the beautiful weather).  The girls have watched with excitement as our daffodils have popped up and our trees have begun to blossom.  We have been getting the garden ready to plant and the girls are looking forward to having their own section to tend.

A favorite diversion for our girls is the fun of waking before Mom and Dad on Saturdays (which for the record, doesn't seem to happen often) and getting to snuggle in our bed with us.  Somehow, this is a little less fun for the adults, as the wiggling and giggling girls seem to push us out of our spots!  This reminds me of the nursery rhyme..."there were six in the bed and the little one said Roll Over!"

As the weather was warming up, we also got out to see Peter's Grandma and Grandpa Bird.  They will turn 90 this year and celebrate 70 years of marriage!!

Our girls have learned how to be more and more creative.  Carissa has been learning how to do hair and Anne is sometimes a willing guinea pig.  This day, it was piggy tails.  Coupled with my old sunglasses...Voila!  Pop the lenses out and you have dress-up glasses.  

We had a fun pizza night when Dad went out of town for a conference in St. George.  He travels so seldom, the girls seem to think it has to be a girl's night when our one boy in the home isn't.  You can see that silliness was in the air!  They made ginger-girl cut out pizzas!

In the background of this picture, you can see the creation Audrey  made with extra boxes from Costco.  They love to make "furniture" for their dolls.

Carissa had a blast getting as wacky as possible for Wacky Wednesday.  She wanted to wear Audrey's silk zebra print pajama pants under the skirt, but Audrey was just too concerned for their safety.  

I didn't even know she could strike a pose like this!

With birthdays just around the corner, the girls were thrilled to get a package in the mail from Grandma Becky and Poppy from Kansas.  With memories of last summer's visit and their trip to the rodeo, there were squeals of glee to see new cowgirl boots to replace the ones they have worn out.  

Anne has wanted to wear her awesome boots every day, even with capris.  Well, at least she matched the colors!  She is counting on being able to go to the rodeo this summer...she is almost 10 (she says).  One of these days, I'll remember to catch the other girls in their boots.


Our next excitement is celebrating Carissa's birthday this Saturday with an Easter Egg hunt with all of the Clarke cousins!

Elise's Hospital Visit

We have been so lucky to not have a child in the hospital before this January.  Unfortunately, we got to find out what that experience was like with Elise this month.  She woke up on Saturday with a very swollen lymph node, which seemed painful for her.  The next Friday, after first trying antibiotics, we took her to an ENT who then sent us to the hospital for a CT scan.  They saw it was abscessed and we were checked in and prepping for surgery in a few hours.  She ended up fasting from 10 am until after the surgery, finally getting to eat at 9 pm that night.  I am amazed at how well she did, thinking back on what those days must have been like for her.  

This is how she woke up from a nap on a Saturday.

We took her into our family doctor, who put her on strong antibiotics and ran some blood tests.  After three days of the oral and injected antibiotics, this is how it looked.  I don't know why the color is off in this picture--it was hard to get her to hold still.  By the time we went into the O.R. for surgery, it was red and hot.

This is how it looked the day after surgery.  It continued to drain for several days and had a small knot under the incision for a few more days.

Audrey actually took this picture.  Elise looks like nothing bad every happened!  She was such a champ having to go through something so frustrating and painful.  We're sure glad to have her back.

This is several days post-surgery.  You can hardly  notice the incision or the lump.  Now, there is only a small scab that is healing nicely.  We're grateful for the skilled doctors and nurses who took care of her and for the kindness they showed us, too!  

A Crazy Experiment!

Disclaimer:  this is a long post...feel free to skip down to the big bolded letters if you don't want to read about our saga with Peter's health issues...

From the early days of our marriage, Peter started experiencing health problems.  As an English major, I felt overwhelmed trying to understand what the doctor told us and decided to learn a little about the human body and how it worked (or didn't, in Peter's case).  He has had a range of diagnoses...from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (read--we have not clue what this is, so we'll give you a blanket diagnosis and send you on your way as clueless as we are) to eventually Crohn's Disease {feel free to do a little search on google to do a nice read on what his symptoms were}.  The first Gastroenterologist, who we went to see through a referral from our family doctor, did suggest some diet changes, and Peter noticed that some foods seemed to aggravate his symptoms.  Nothing improved, however, so we went in to another doctor for a 2nd opinion.  Gastroenterologist #2 told us it was ulcerative colitis and said diet had nothing to do with it, but gave us some nice, expensive medications with terrible side effects.  In the end, Peter decided that his illness was better than the side effects of the sulfa medications.  

We moved two states away, made a few simple diet changes and crossed our fingers.  I bought cheap, used copies of any book I could get my hands on that mentioned ulcerative colitis from amazon.com and did a lot of reading.  Many of the books suggested specific diets, and we tried a few of them.  The Specific Carbohydrate Diet seemed promising, but left Peter with very few food options and was hard to stick with.  

As we learned later when he received a Crohn's diagnosis, it is normal to have ups and downs with the disease, where he would enjoy times with very few symptoms followed by terrible flare-ups.  After suffering another bout of flare-ups and then a nasty flu bug that passed through our whole family, we tried a mostly vegan diet (another good link with similar information).  I loved it, but it was hard for everyone else.  We stayed on it for about 10 months (during which none of us got sick...nice), but that all ended when I got pregnant again.  My ability to prepare any food was nixed and so we reverted back to quicker, easier convenience foods.  Can you guess what happened with Peter's gut?  

That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, we moved into our first home, and then we found out we were pregnant again a couple of months later.  Did I mention that stress also seems to exacerbate Peter's symptoms?  Being of a noble character, he suffered quietly for quite some time.  I tried to broach the topic, but I think he was afraid of me pulling out the vegan diet again and turning into the food police.  He was losing weight and starting to look sick enough that people noticed and asked how he was doing.  I admit, I pushed things a little and expressed my concerns to his parents and our Bishop (whose son has Crohn's).  Poor Peter was now under their scrutiny and agreed to go to yet another gastroenterologist, for  yet another colonoscopy and upper G.I. endoscopy.  

Peter's mother watched our girls while I took him in for the tests.  When they wheeled him out, he looked so helpless lying there under the anesthesia.  The anesthetist came out to tell me that Peter just wouldn't go under, so he had given him "a larger dose than I've given anyone in a very long time."  He wanted to let me know Peter would probably be out for quite some time.  I tried to read my book, but had this cold lump in my stomach.  The doctor came out and looked grave.  He showed me pictures they took and said, "I'm sorry.  Your husband is very sick.  This is not good."  I wanted to cry, but instead tried to look like I was holding it together while he explained what he saw.  He took biopsies, but felt that even without those results, he was confidant that Peter had Crohn's, as well as celiac disease, serious damage in his stomach and esophagus from GERD and Barrett's esophagus.  Then I really wanted to cry.  Barretts' esophagus meant pre-cancerous cells.  He explained the tremendous odds that Peter would have full-blown cancer somewhere in his digestive system, probably sooner than later.  Whew.  

Peter finally woke up a little and asked me what they told me.  I didn't want him to know the gravity of it yet.  We wheeled him out in a wheelchair (which he is bummed that he doesn't remember) and I took him home.  I had to pull over for him to throw up a few times on the way home.  He tried to chat with his mom when we got home, but ended up going to the bed to sleep.  When she left, I left him sleeping and took the girls to the store to fill the prescriptions--a strong steroid, another sulfa medication and a medication for the reflux.  The lady ringing me up gave me the total of something just over $500 (for a month's supply) and I said, "Oh, I'm sorry.  I must have forgotten to give my insurance."  Nope, that was after insurance.  I remember thinking that there was no way we would be able to afford these medications that my husband so desperately needed.  Fortunately, the Bishop's family knew that if we filled a 90-day supply through the mail, it was much, much cheaper.  That was a huge relief, but I was still scared.  Peter did get a blessing from his Dad, and I prayed and prayed for a miracle.

When we went back in to the doctor, he seemed perplexed that all of the biopsies came back negative.  But he did not want us to get hopeful.  He felt confidant that he had seen signs of each of those illnesses and officially diagnosed with Crohn's.  He took the medications and thankfully, did not have the terrible side effects like he had with the previous medications.  Even on those medications, however, there were still ups and downs and we knew from our research that the meds would only be a temporary fix.  Especially the strong steroids were dangerous to stay on long-term and the doctor was weaning him off of those as quickly as possible.  As he took a smaller and smaller dose, the flare ups were worse and worse.  The projected path with that route of treatment was to use these drugs off and on as symptoms recurred, then to move on to stronger and then stronger meds as they stopped working.  Eventually, we could most likely expect portions of his bowel to be removed and even to have it removed entirely and have a colostomy bag instead.  In addition, the incidence of colon cancer in someone who struggled with years of Crohn's flare ups is very high.

I had read another interesting book that suggested that animal products were something we could include in a healthy diet for Peter.  We found a book written by a  man who had also suffered from Crohn's, who had brought about full recovery through diet and homeopathy.  Both of these books suggested a similar diet, and it was one that sounded palatable to Peter.  We decided it was worth a try and began to follow their recommendations in earnest.  It worked!  Many of the meal ideas also went along with those included in the first book we tried, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  When they differed, we just did what Peter felt would work best in his body.  He took probiotics, a homeopathic anti-inflammatory medication and added flax seed oil to his diet.  And he has felt stronger and  healthier than he had in years and he gained back a lot of the weight he had lost (and as a side benefit, I lost a lot of the weight I had been hanging on to from baby #4).  

While the different books we read and the diets we tried seemed to be very different, we noticed a few common threads: no white sugar, no refined white flour and no processed foods.  Whether or not the diets included animal products, they all asserted that our diets should be from whole foods, grown as naturally as possible and consumed as close to their natural state as possible.  Whole, real foods were our measure.  Even with the addition of animal products, the bulk of our diet came from plant foods.  As we ate healthier, we felt better and kicked some of the nagging cravings that kept up bound to the standard American diet.  

Enter the crazy experiment!

As we were eating healthier, it was insane to watch how much junk food our children were consuming from outside of the home.  As Halloween came and the other holidays approached, we started to muse, "I wonder how much junk our children consume between Halloween and Christmas?"  They left their candy out for the "Sugar Plum Fairy" on Halloween night and she left them a little toy in return.  They didn't seem to miss the candy much and their behavior was better.

We decided to see if we could, as a family, go without any treats...that's right, no sugar or refined flours.  We made a paper chain and did a countdown from November 10th to December 25th.  We told the girls that if they would just bring home the treats they were offered (or just tell us about them if they passed one up) we would take them to a hotel with an indoor swimming pool and have a little vacation as a treat.  I decided to keep track of it all on the fridge.  I knew it would be a lot, but even I was just literally astounded.  Previous to eating healthier, we were having a big treat every Monday  night and having some sort of a dessert after nearly every dinner.  We also pigged out on the treats at Peter's mom's house every Sunday.  

You can see my whole chart here.  But the summary is:

Our three children were offered...

a total of 41,734 extra calories; 1,927 grams of fat; and 6,470 grams of sugar!

I figured that this was about 25% of their daily allowance for calories and 35% of their daily allowance for fat.  (And this is following the guidelines from the USDA, which are not necessarily the healthiest goals).  I couldn't find a RDA for sugar, but the sugar grams they would have eaten per child would have been somewhere near 16% of their daily allowance for carbohydrates.  And these were empty, nutritionally void calories.  If we had also been eating treats at home as we were previously, I am certain that these numbers would have been double.  That's 50% of their daily calories in sweets, 70% of their daily fat in sweets and 34% of their daily carbohydrates just from sugar.  

Sorry if I've scarred you for life.  Our next goal is to go through the end of March and the girls will earn an ice-skating trip.  Sorry, this only works if you are lame and boring.  Then the rewards seems exciting.  

Adventures...which nearly always seem to include Anne!

This was a note written to me by Audrey when I was on the phone.  I always tell the girls not to interrupt Mommy on the phone, so Audrey thought of the note.  If you can't read her penmanship, it says,

"Dear Mom,

Anne will NOT eat her food.  I do not want to waste food.  I tell her, eat apple cider or food on her plate.  Love, Audrey.  

P.S. What will I do?  Sighn (her spelling) on back.

Isn't Anne just stubborn?  Oh, yes!"

Audrey's job is the clear the table and she had to wait on Anne to be done, which was "so frustrating!"

Anne got into the dress-ups and came dancing and singing into the kitchen, pleased with her beautiful ensemble.  She wore this around for quite some time.

Yes, the word stubborn comes to mind.  Anne decided she didn't want ketchup on her grilled cheese like her sisters.  Nope, she prefers mustard.  I gave her a little on her plate and then (silly Mom!) I left the mustard on the table while I went to change Elise's diaper.  This was the result.  I was actually calm when I saw the mess, and it just cracked me up!  I cut the sandwich up into bites and gave her a fork, and she ate it!  Guess she does like mustard.  Who knew?

This is Elise trying to get to the dishwasher.  Peter had put her down to play in the middle of the blanket with a toy so that he could load the dishwasher.  She worked really hard to get her little body to that dishwasher door!  He snapped the picture because it just reminds us so much of Audrey.  What a fun adventure these little girls are!!

Another Interview

I interviewed Anne again, about foxes.  She didn't sit very still this time!  But it was, nonetheless, quite informative.

I also tried to get a video of how cute Elise is when she's just willing herself to get across the floor.  It looks like she might just try to swim.  

Then, we got a video of Carissa making Elise laugh.  It was impromptu (thus the poor lighting), since those moments cannot be planned.  I think Elise will have some sort of phobia of quiet and open spaces, after the lack of personal space and quiet that she has experienced birth.

Halloween

Our girls had a great Halloween.  They had a lot of fun planning their costumes and so actually getting to wear them was exciting.

Here is Anne, the adorable kitty, looking with adoration at her sister, Dorothy (aka Carissa). This was the morning picture before sending Carissa off to Kindergarten.

Audrey was Mulan, which is her favorite cartoon heroin.  We even painted her face white and let her look like a china doll.  I didn't like how old she looked and decided she won't be wearing make-up again for a long time!!  

Audrey poses like she's ready for the stage.  It cracks me up, because Peter and I have not a "thespian" bone between us.   

I just had to add this one, too, because Anne's face is just priceless.  She let me paint a pink nose and whiskers on her for when we went out trick-or-treating.

We had heard about a Sugar Plum Fairy who could come and trade a kid's candy for a toy, so the girls decided to do that.  That was maybe the most exciting part!  They talked together and wondered if this fairy  maybe knew the Tooth Fairy and the House Fairy (the fairy who works for Santa and checks to see if kids are keeping their rooms clean).  It made me wonder what we'll do if we ever have a boy!