5th Birthday!

Five years ago today I was a happy camper.  Finally no longer carrying around an alien in your stomach leads to a very happy mama for sure!

Today is The Youngest's Fifth Birthday and it's been a fun one.  We are not having the official party until either the end of January or February.  It's just too close to the holidays.  But he's had a ball today anyway.

In October I put in a shopping moratorium for the boys.   No spending on themselves whatsoever until after Christmas.  The purpose was twofold:  A)  So they wouldn't buy what was already bought for them as presents and B) So that they would save up their allowances and supplement what they did get for Christmas.  So today, the moratorium went away and they knew down to the penny what they had in their wallets.

The Youngest bought himself a Spiderman/Green Goblin/Venom action figure set with his $20 that he had saved and he's thrilled with it.  He got this after he had already opened his gifts from us.  To him, it's like a second Christmas already and his Aunt will be bringing another set of gifts over this evening.  His brother managed to buy five different Wii games for the new Wii they got this Christmas (which I got for free from Swagbucks by the way - Still happy about that one!)

Oh, and the Youngest got to eat Coconut Cake for breakfast too.  He's thinking that he's had a Pretty Alright Birthday!   Cake, presents, shopping...  I think I might have to agree.  Sounds fun to me too.

Catching up after another trip (yes, another) to the ER

For the past two weeks or more I had been having these pains and the only thing that helped was laying down.  On Christmas night I was having severe chest pains and thought I was having a heart attack.  So there was yet another trip to the ER for me during Christmas, but this time it was a good thing. 

I had my parents (while it was snowing profusely) drive me to the ER in their Podunk little town.  I'm not exaggerating the podunkness here of the town even a little bit.  There's not one red light, just one tiny four way stop.  If you blink, you've missed the town completely.  The teensy tiny hospital has traveling doctors that visit it and I got lucky this night by getting someone who knew what he was talking about.

Over the past month I've had two EKG's done, one Echo Cardiogram done and seen lots of docs who were hesitant about doing anything.  It turns out that the traveling doc knew what he was talking about and wasn't afraid to say it.

The chest pains were from an inflammation in the chest wall surrounding the ribs.  Every time that I would cough, breath or have an irregular heart beat (more about that in a minute), it would hit that inflammation and be excrutiatingly painful.  The cause?  Remember the virus that turned into a sinus infection at Thanksgiving?  That was the culprit.  He put me on a methylprednisolone pak and some ibuprofen it's helping already. 

Now, for the irregular heartbeat, he suspects mitral valve prolapse (which I evidently inherited from my Dad.)  So that will be the next thing that I have looked at by my fancy docs. 

Long story short, I'm feeling better (YEA!) and I am finally able to get up and move around somewhat.  A good thing, cause the three males in the household have let things pile up into an ungodly mess.   I've started chipping away at the Christmas toy mountain, Laundry mountain and the rest of the stuff that's been piling up on every flat surface.  I'm afraid it's going to take a while to catch back up.  :)