Cute!

Yesterday, I had a play date with my friend Heather and we let our kids hang out too. They were SO cute together. We went for a drive in the car and they would just look at each other and giggle the whole time. In this picture, Josie says, "I hold a hand!" Cute kids!

It seems to me that Josie grew by leaps and bounds during the week she lived at Mimi and Papa's house. She says the funniest things now (and has SO MUCH HAIR!) Here are a few of the new phrases she says:

"I dunno!"

"Lissa, What doing?" (This is usually followed by me saying, "What's my name?" and then a big grin and a "Mommy!")

"I do it all by myself!"

"Don't push me!"

"Listen to me!"

"Look! I'ts my (fill in word here)!" When I went to pick her up, it was "Look! It's my Mommy!"

About 2 minutes ago, I asked Josie to show me her CUTEST smile. Here's what I got. She's such a doll. I am SOOOO happy to have her home and be back to life. Things are much more busy/crazy with a nearly-2-year-old in the house, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.

Good News!

Just as we got you all scared for us, we have great news! After a great weekend in Ogden with the family (and JOSIE!), I came home for my next check up. After an hour of waiting in the lobby, and another 10 minutes waiting for the doctor, he told me that my platelet levels are above 160! The normal range is over 150. Such great progress! And Josie gets to come home! We are so thrilled. I'm not totally out of the woods yet. I still have to go in once a week for a check-up, and finish up the steroid treatment, just to be sure I don't drop down again. Luckily, I get to switch to a lower dosage each week.

I also chatted with the doctor about what exactly caused this chaos. They (the team of doctors who have been dealing with me this month) thought that it was a medication I had been given during my D&C. The hematologist was finally given the records and to our dismay, I wasn't given any of the drugs that have been known to cause it. Well, it turns out that in some cases with miscarriages, and all the stress that a body goes through during that, the immune system can get a little crazy and start killing off things it shouldn't. That's what happened in my case. I'm just glad there is some explanation for it. In most cases of Thrombocytopenia (medical term for low platelets), they don't know what causes it. Also, since I have had this condition, I am now considered a high risk for getting it again. But, we know now what symptoms to watch for before it gets to a critically low level, so we can handle it!

Thank you all, for all the help, calls, texts, e-mails, meals, and EVERYTHING. This has been a totally crazy month for us and we're glad that we get to end it in some sort of normality.

And we're excited to have this little monster back home!

Our Crazy Month of May...

Since news is leaking out all over the place, I decided to post an update and correct all the crazy stories that are circulating. Our month started off in a pretty horrible way. Our trip to California was delayed a bit by a miscarriage, followed by a D&C procedure to make sure everything was ok. I was about 8 weeks along, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been, but still, horrible! Any of you who have been through that know what I mean. Thanks to all the family and friends for thoughts and prayers. We really felt your strength and had the comfort of the Lord to help us through that. It was great to spend a few days with my family to help us keep our minds off of what we were going through.

We got home from California and thought we were returning to life as normal. Unfortunately, that wasn't in the plans for us. On Saturday (15th), I woke up with bruises all over, and especially bad on my arms and legs. I seriously looked like I'd been in a fight. The doctor guessed that it was either a result from an infection (I guess that can very rarely be a sign of infection..) or a blood condition. I got through the weekend and went in on Monday for some blood tests and I was told it would be a day or 2 before they got the results back. I was surprised with a call from the doctor at 8 am the next morning. Short story, my platelet count was critically low and the doctor wanted to be sure that I was especially careful to not bump into anything or hit my head. Platelets are one of the main things that help your blood clot. If the count is critically low, a tiny bump results in a big bruise, and a bump on the head could result in serious internal bleeding and brain injury. I got a couple more calls from the doctor throughout the day as he tried to get a hold of the specialist (a hematologist), which made it pretty clear that this was serious.

We got in to see the hematologist that afternoon. He asked a lot of questions, did some more tests, and succeeded in scaring us to death by sending us over to the hospital for a CT scan (I'd had a migraine the night before and he was concerned about bleeding). Everything looked pretty good for the seriousness of the situation. No internal bleeding, aside from the bruises, and I got started on a steroid treatment, and a standing appointment for a blood test each day. To give you an idea about the seriousness of everything, normal platelet count is over 150. At the time of the D&C procedure, I had 249. On Monday, I had 2. Platelet count is considered critically low if it is under 20. So you can imagine the doctors were a little concerned. They basically told me that I could either go live in the hospital until my count was up, or completely limit my contact with Josie and stay home. So, Josie has been living at Mimi and Papa's house all week. Let me tell you, We miss her!!

At this point, they aren't exactly sure what the cause is. The hematologist seems fairly certain that one of the medications I was given during the D&C procedure caused it, but he hasn't been able to obtain my records from the specialty hospital yet. It could also have been a toxin that somehow got into the blood stream. They took a bunch of my blood yesterday to run tests, which we will hopefully see the results on Monday. All we know for sure is that my antibodies went a little crazy and started killing my poor little platelets.

The good news is that the steroid treatment is working and we are seeing progress. I was at 2 on Monday, 3 on Tuesday, 10 on Wednesday, 14 on Thursday, and I'm all the way up to 25 today. Hurray! I'm no longer in the "critical" zone, but I'm still borderline, and Josie still can't come home. But, I did get a free weekend and I don't have to go in until Monday to get tested again. So we are looking forward to a couple of days with Josie, and hopefully she'll be able to come home soon. I'll post again when we have some more information. Have a wonderful weekend!

Crazy times

The our life since the last update has been CRAZY. Going back a ways, Justin and I celebrated our 5th anniversary on April 23rd. It was fantastic! Josie got to spend the weekend at Mimi & Papa's house and she had a blast. She didn't want to come home with us. But, we got back to normal life after that.

The week following that had some rough times, and I have to say THANK YOU to a great friend who sent flowers from across the country.. Thank you! They are gorgeous!! (and still alive.. hurray!)

And this last week, we went to California for my sister Kimberly's wedding! We left early early Wednesday morning and got to spend the rest of the week hanging out with my family. I LOVED it! We were only missing 1 family (we missed you Dan & Trisha!!!!!) and we had a lot of fun together. Josie loved spending time with Grandma Tutu and her cousin Noah. She asked me today, "Where Noah?" and now she says, "Noah at Mommy's house." I'm afraid I was a terrible slacker with taking pictures. I need to get all my family to send me the pictures they took of the trip. Here are a few that I have:

Hanging out with Aunt Kimberly at the mall.

Setting up for the wedding..

..complete with a practice walk down the aisle...

.. and beautiful pretend brides. :)

Here are a few Saturday morning shots:

Bride getting ready. Lucky for her, her sister is a certified make-up person (way to go Kelley!)

Dad did a great job of keeping Josie occupied with plenty of walks around the church. Aren't they cute?

Greg and Noah

The wedding:

Josie was the flower girl of sorts, and took a flower to Tutu to start things off. She was so adorable.

Kimberly and Jon

The open house after the wedding was at my sister Andrea's house. Shawna took care of the food. It was all SO delicious! I learned a few new recipes that I need to try out sometime.

A lively crowd.. My dad, bro-in-law Nate, Kelley and Josie

Outside--party zone

The wedding and the reception were wonderful. I wish I had a few more pictures to show how great everything went. It was so fun to see all the people that I knew when I lived there. We ate lots of great food, had a WONDERFUL time with my family and wish that we could have stayed longer. On Sunday Morning, we hung around for a while to have breakfast with the family and a little Mother's day celebration with my mom. I think the last time I got to celebrate with Mom was when I was in high school. It was fun to have one last party before hopping in the car for a LONG drive. Josie was a super star on the drive. Her favorite part was the stop in Reno where we found this:

It was a great trip, and we already miss all the fam, but it is great to be home and sleep in our own beds... Last night when we got into the house, Josie said, "Yay! Josie house!!" Me and Justin felt the same as we collapsed into bed. Yay for long drives being over!

Congratulations to Jon and Kimberly! We're glad we could be there for your special day!

Recent times

This is going to be a long update with quite a few pictures! First off, Easter! We had a wonderful Easter weekend! We were able to watch General Conference at home, and Josie was enthralled by the idea of church on TV. It was a great conference and we really enjoyed listening to all the talks. If you want some more information on that, check out www.lds.org. You can read the conference talks and even watch some. It was GREAT! On Saturday night while Justin was at the Priesthood meeting, Josie and I got ready for Easter by coloring eggs. She thought it was great. 

Here we are getting ready:

I turned my back for 2 seconds and ended up with this:

Here are our beautiful eggs!

We had a great time! Easter morning was a lot of fun too! Josie had been watching the Mickey Mouse Easter show where they had an egg hunt, so she did a great job on her own little egg hunt. She found all 6 eggs all by herself. Here are a few Easter morning pictures. I took more videos than pictures, but I haven't uploaded my videos yet. So the next update will have all the videos.

This picture was today, but its a picture of her Easter dress that I made for her, so I decided it fit under the Easter category.  She looked adorable in it!

Other exciting news, Josie has LOTS of hair now, and loves it when mommy fixes it pretty. Here are a few of the styles we've tried lately.

In my world, I still try to keep up with my craft and sewing projects. Don't forget to check out my craft blog, if you're interested. Here is one of my favorite projects:

And we put them to use making some banana-chocolate chip bread today...

Latest and greatest news, we've upgraded our VW Beetle! We've been doing lots of shopping/comparing/everything lately for a new car because the Beetle has just been getting less and less reliable. When we test-drove this car, Josie told us, "I like it! I like-a dis car!" and she still says it every time we get in. We love it too! Its a Toyota RAV4. Isn't it pretty? :)

Josie likes to drive it too.

That's all for this update, but hopefully I'll stop being lazy and get some videos posted soon so you can see the  Josie-monster in action. Until next time.. :)

Latest news..

We've been LOVING this gorgeous spring weather! And I, for one, hope it doesn't go away! I know that Josie agrees with me, because she is forever asking to go outside. For a while, here's how our conversation would go..
Josie: Outside! Bike!
Me: We don't have a bike.
Josie: Find one, Mommy. (in the saddest voice you can imagine..)
Me: We can't take someone else's bike.
Josie: Please, Mommy. Outside, find a bike! (still in the sad voice.)

So we broke down and bought her a tricycle! She absolutely loves it, and always wants to ride it. She's figured out how to pedal, now we need to work on the steering..

I'm not always very prompt in getting Josie down when she finishes her breakfast, so she sometimes gets creative to keep herself busy while I finish eating.

She decided to try out her cousin Gavin's bumbo seat. She's a little big...

We had a sad evening at our house on Thursday.. Josie decided to try to climb one of our stools by herself and ended up pulling the stool down on herself. I have never had such a distraught baby (or ever been so distraught!). This was her first pretty serious injury! The lump on her forehead appeared immediately and it was HUGE. She cried for a good 5 minutes straight, the moved on to whimpering, and then decided that holding a bag of ice on her head was pretty funny. She went right back to normal and everything is completely fine. (THANK GOODNESS!) She has a couple of pretty good bruises on her head and a big one on her arm, but she already thinks they're pretty cool. Funny girl. Here are a couple of shots after she calmed down:

Big girl!

Josie is getting SO big, I just can't believe it! She talks in sentences all of the time, and I can understand her about 80% of the time. She tries to say anything and everything she hears (scary, I know!). Just the other day, after watching a Sesame Street, she started saying, "Umm... turkey cow!" and we couldn't figure out where she'd even heard the work turkey, until we remembered that they had a farm/animal segment on the Sesame Street and asked a little girl what kinds of animals she saw... (yea, she saw, um.. turkeys, cows, etc.)

Just yesterday, I was woken up by some crazy yelling coming through the monitor. Once I woke up enough to be coherent, I realized she was yelling, "MOMMY, WAKE UP!!"

So here are some pictures of our big girl for you to enjoy. She's still a big cheeser and tons of fun to have around. Here she is helping mom get some cleaning done....

Like any girl out there, Josie LOVES shoes. She'll wear any that she can get her hands on, and we even have to try some on at the store sometimes.

She loves accessories--here she is with upside down sunglasses, toy bracelets, and of course, her car.

I encourage you all to invest in one of these $10 hampers from Wal-mart. Its one of Josie's favorite toys. She was inside and saw this toy on the ground and decided she wanted that too, so reached out the hole in the side and tried to pull it in.. While I took this picture, she was saying, "Stuck! stuck!"

We also love to pretend, and Josie's favorite is pretending to be asleep. I was working on a sewing project and she grabbed all my scraps and draped herself in them and "fell asleep". I was a little too slow with the camera, but you get the idea..

If you haven't seen Josie lately, you will be SHOCKED by the amount of hair she has! There's enough for pigtails! Yay! I think I'm more excited about that than anyone else, but its so stinkin' cute! And yes, she's still very much Justin's daughter...

We've been learning emotions lately. Here's how it goes: Happy! (Big smile), Sad (frown), Surprised! (gasp!), etc. This is Josie's "sad".

We had a ward talent show and Josie very much wanted to get up on the stage. She didn't get to go up, but she got to say hi in the mic.

And last, but definitely not least, Josie has decided that some days, she is ready to go potty in the toilet! On Monday night, we were all happily shocked when Josie ran to the potty after a bath and sat down and peed. We had a repeat occurrence Tuesday! Yay Josie!! We are very far from potty trained. But still, its exciting news and we are very proud of her!

Funny thing that just happened as I am sitting here blogging:

Josie ran into the bathroom and said "Oh no, light off". So she came scurrying out to the living room, climbed up on the couch, flipped the light switch, then ran back to the bathroom. "Oh no, light off..."