Now You See It, Now You Don't

Two completely unrelated, amazing things disappeared recently.

1. The Lunch Battle
Since my surgery F's been eating school lunches on the days he's at school for a full day.  While our school lunch program is decent, with a fairly "healthy" offering pretty much every day, they also offer a total kid meal every day.  There isn't one day a week when you can't get chicken nuggets, pizza, or a hot dog. It's hard for chef's salad, pasta, or teriyaki chicken bowl to compete with pizza.  While I was down for the count I think F ate pizza for about four meals in a row. When I bounced back I suggested that he think about which thing was the best for his body and pick that.

Today, for the first time since spring break, I managed to move fast enough in the morning to pack him a lunch.  I literally squealed with glee when it came home looking like this:

not a speck left!

Guess Mom's lunches are edible after all.  Perhaps this is the beginning of a long, healthy relationship with the lunch box.

2.  We took out the spruce tree that was taking over the front of our house.  Now, we LOVE our trees. They are all about 30 years old, huge, mature, beautiful but SO SO big. As soon as we moved in I had the 6 dead and dying Aspen trees cut down.  When the wind blew they'd knock the eaves and roof.  It was freaky.  A previous owner planted the two spruce in the front and they are stunning trees,  BUT HUGE.  We trim the one closest to the house twice a year. You can't tell from this angle, but when you'd look out our front window all you'd see was tree from 2/3 of the window.  It constantly bumps against the house and windows ( we've been trying to keep it hacked back).

The crew arrived just as F and I were headed out the door for school drop off.  We made sure they were working on the right tree and I dashed off to school.  When I came back 30 minutes later (must have time to chat with the other moms!) The tree was GONE. 

The guys hopped in their bucket and shaped the remaining blue spruce, it's a nice cone shape now and the twin tips at the top are gone.  Poor F missed the whole thing.  Luckily the stump remover came later in the day and F got to watch him grind the stump to nothing.

We see a lot more of the side of our neighbor's house now, our 3 year plan includes some large shrubs and a new smaller tree for the space.  We'll also put in a walkway from our back yard to the front.

On the surgery front I'm still pretty swollen (it's really hard to elevate your hip) and I'm barely limping. I still can't put all my weight on my right leg going up/down stairs.  It's getting stronger every day, but PT says it'll take a while to get it back.  I told her she's got until the start of ski season to get me up and kicking at 110%.

Still Alive and Kicking

Things are slowly getting back to normal here.  I'm still uber-tired and am in bed before 9pm every night, but I'm weaning myself off of the daily nap(s).  Last week I started driving again, like everything else it makes me tired. While FFM enjoyed riding to and from school with his buddies he's happy to have Mom back in the saddle again.  I still can't bend down to reach things on the floor and I will have to sit lounged back in my chair like a guy for another four weeks, but I can walk reasonably well, if not fast.  The nerves on the outside of my thigh are repairing themselves from the trauma of surgery so my leg feels like it raw and on fire most of the time, but it doesn't hurt to put weight on it.  It's not stable enough to hop around on, but I can take short walks in the neighborhood without too much trouble.

Other than putting my leg up and watching entire seasons of TV shows from the DVR and reading endless books I haven't done much of anything the past couple of weeks.  FFM is in class plays next week and he started getting nervous when he realized I hadn't started his Big Billy Goat Gruff costume. He's had enough on his mind lately so I started on it right away.

Since my excursions are limited, I looked around the house to see what we already had.  I used the same concept from his lion costume that we did a couple years ago.  Luckily I am very well stocked in yarn and we had a spare headband from St. Patrick's Day that I could cannibalize.

 I knit a tube and attached two ears to it.  Then I cut about a zillion 7" strips of various colors/textures of yarn and used a crochet hook to pull them through the knitting on the headband. I used about half a zillion twisted brown pipe cleaners to make the horns and a knitted triangle "pocket" for the chinny chin chin. If you're on Ravelry, find the pattern here: http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/lion-mane-with-ears

FFM is in two plays (I think most of the kids are) and his second role is narrator for The Gingerbread Man.  Luckily this role requires no costume, but FFM dug out a sparkly gold top hat from his dress up bin to liven things up.

Amazing Curative Properties of My Family

I've been having a rough time the past couple of days. After feeling great right after surgery my white blood cell count sky rocketed and I've been feeling seriously droopy. While I wait for the antibiotics to do their thing I'm sleeping a lot. A WHOLE lot. F has been an absolute gem, he's been amazing and helpful and such a good listener (I haven't had to ask him more than once for any thing this week!).
During my first nap of the day my Mom came over, fed F lunch, did a couple loads of laundry and vacuumed my whole house. So lovely to wake up to a clean house!
During my second nap of the day, late this afternoon,  I missed dinner. Travis checked on me as he was putting F to bed and asked if there was anything he could do. I told him I would love to have F come say goodnight. The next 30 minutes my two guys snuggled and giggled and gave lots of hugs and kisses. Travis read bedtime stories in our bed and by the end I was feeling remarkably better.
Now, I still believe I the power of antibiotics, but I'm pretty sure those hugs and kisses did wonders, too.

Spring Break '13

We really whooped it up and had a wild spring break this year (ha!).

Travis opted out of time off for spring break so the kiddo and I did our default vacation and headed into the hills for some mountain time.  We met some of our Kansas relatives and celebrated my Grandma Minnick's 85th birthday.  Go Grandma!

F and his Greats

FFM did a bunch of skiing with ski school, and toward the end of the week I took a bunch of painkillers and took him up myself.  He was raring to go and conditions were sublime so I pointed him down one of my favorite black runs and said "go forth!"

Hi Mom, Ripsaw is AWESOME!

We had a great time on our black run (it gets crazy fun steep just after the spot where I took this photo). He fell twice but was able to swing himself around and get his skis back under him lickity split. No more panicking Mom as he hurdles helter skelter head first toward large, stationary obstacles like trees or lift poles.

what a great season, think how fun next year will be when Mom's hip is fixed

The weather was SO nice we hung around for a leisurely apres ski.  Beaver Creek's junior activity of the day was a juggling magician and a Noisy Kids Parade.  The kids got noisy instruments and paraded though the village shouting and banging and shooby dooby dooing at the top of their lungs. So simple, so much fun.

F at center back in hat and sunnies,
right in front of Old Man Winter who is wearing his spring getup.

Midweek the Gales showed up and we headed to Glenwood to soak in the pool.  We ate a lot, played a lot of games, and the adults sat around relaxing and let F's cousins Ryan (just 10) and Skylar (11) deal with the squealing excitement of a 5 year old who loves his relatives.

We headed home on Friday to catch up with Grammie Pen Pen who came from Silverton to help out during my surgery. The Easter bunny brought a chocolate bunny and a magnetic dart board for our growing basement game room.  After church we worked really hard at relaxing the rest of the day.