Playing Catch-Up

Oh, where to start??  It has been a crazy week and I am so far behind, I'm playing catch-up in a big way!  EVERYTHING needs my attention and I'm grasping at straws to figure out who gets what.  So, I thought I'd blog :) Not because I have time to, but because I need the mental break.  And the outlet.  And I have some crazy stories to tell you!  Soooo, without further ado, here are some bullet points to sum up our last few days...

• Ava is wild!!  I don't know what her deal is, but she has made the switch from passive observer to aggressive participator!  She is Miss active and into EVERYTHING she can think of :) Sometimes she races from one thing to the next so fast, she has no idea what she's doing.  But we love it.  We've laughed harder at her in the last few weeks than all these months combined.  And so has she!  She's developed this great belly laugh now that she often breaks into it.  One of her new "tricks" is that she LOVES to roll around in anything soft, mostly her blankies, and shriek and squeal.  She squints her eyes together and laughs and laughs while she throws herself around. This day, she pulled my long, down coat off the back of a chair and proceeded to roll around for 10 minutes in it.  The child is weird!  And so darn cute.  I find myself shaking my head at her all day long.  Who's baby is this??  
• I am now a week and 2 days overdue for her 10 month update and it's stressing me out.  I haven't taken the classic "chair" picture yet, so I can't do it.  I keep forgetting about it until it's too late and she's asleep in bed.  And with every day that passes, I stress out more about it.  Not a big deal in the scheme of life, but I need to get it taken before she turns 2.  Hopefully it will be making it's blog/facebook debut soon.  
• This past weekend we went to my parents house in Iowa and it was very fun!  We had a few days there to relax and catch-up and we needed every minute of it.  Ava was quite the entertainer and she spent most of her days trying to get inside Tigger's kennel.  She followed/chased him all over the house and did everything she could to crawl in his home with him :) He tolerated her well and somewhere, Ryley was watching it all thinking, "Now you know what I go through!"  My parents loved having us home and we loved being there.  We got to spend some time with my sister and brother-in-law too, which was fun.  I'm so thankful we can quickly get out of town and escape every now and then from reality :) 
• We got home on Monday night and went to Bible study Tuesday morning.  Afterwards Ava and I had lunch with a friend and came home for a nap.  I laid down too and when I woke up, all was not well.  I felt terribly sick and called Travis to get a minute by minute update on when he would be home.  I barely held it together.  After he got home, I experienced a nasty bout of the stomach flu.  All night.  It was horrible.  Ava cried because I couldn't hold her and I kept shutting our bedroom door to keep all the germs away.  Obviously she's way too little to understand that, so she just stood at the door banging on it and crying.  And I laid in bed and cried too.  We were a pitiful bunch :) Travy was a gem and he played all night with her, while checking on me.  After one particularly bad experience, I told him I would rather go through labor and delivery all over again than throw up.  And I was serious.  I HATE to be sick.  Thankfully I made it through the night. Because I married the nicest man on the planet, on Wednesday he took Ava with him to work for the afternoon so I could keep sleeping and resting.  Hear me publicly say that he is wonderful!  And sweet!  Ava was great for him (of course) and even slept in his office for about an hour and a half.  How??  How does he pull that stuff off??  I would have loved to be a fly on the wall however, during their little "take your daughter to work" experience!   So thankful he gave me that break. As it turned out, I needed to be rested for what lied ahead...
• Ava came home before Church and I played with her before bed.  While I waited for Trav to get home, I cleaned the house because Trav's Mom was coming the next morning (today).  Around 9pm, I got a call from him telling me that he was on his way but that he had a problem.  He thought he needed to go to urgent care.  Why?  Well, in classic "youth pastor speak" because "he got shot in the eye with a dart."  Yep, a dart.  In the eye.  Shot by a student.  Accidently.  I honestly didn't know whether to laugh or not, but as he quickly explained it, he let me know just how much pain he was in.  So, we called an eye doctor we know and came up with a plan.  Vicodin got him through the night and this morning an emergency appt. revealed that he actually scratched his cornea.  Which isn't a totally serious thing, but it is incredibly painful.  She gave Trav more vicodin and some anti-biotic drops to use 4 times a day for the next several days.  So far it seems to be working, although he is still in some pain.  Of course this would happen to him and of course it would happen while I was still sick.  On the eve of his Mom coming to visit and days before our winter retreat.  Obviously I'm thankful it wasn't any worse, and I've only teased him about being a one-eyed pirate a few times, but seriously, who gets shot in the eye with a dart??  And a dart with a velcro tip no less??  Only my husband.  
• So, here we are at home, kind of a mess but in one piece :) Trav's Mom is here now and Ava is loving the extra attention.  We leave tomorrow for the Junior High Winter Retreat, which I haven't even begun to prepare for.  Oh well, I'll scrape something together tomorrow I suppose!  

Now you know where I've been and why I'm so behind.  I'm hoping to catch a break over the next few days although we're going on a retreat with 60 junior highers, so all bets are off :) Life is never dull around here!  Thank goodness this isn't my first time around the block..

Hope you have a Happy Friday!!  

To say we need the weekend to get here soon is a MAJOR understatement...

More stories to come later, I'm sure of it!!