Most areas of our lives were affected in some way in December. I'll touch on all of these, some briefly, others in detail.
- Home: weather/power outages, dog destructiveness, organization, almost-lost computer files.
- Work: DH's promotion, my workload.
- Family: DS's birthday, Christmas, travel, DS's surgery.
On the home front, one of the first issues is our two dogs. They tend to take outside and destroy anything that is not tied down -- their history includes a couch, DVDs, DS's toys, books, magazines, newspapers, you name it. Unfortunately, their latest chew toy was my mother's notebook of treasured notes, mostly things that our son does during the days when she watches him. On top of that, my mother injured her leg "diving" into our drainage ditch to try to recover some of the pages from the notebook. Because of this, she was not able to make her homemade pies for Thanksgiving (the incident was a couple days before). This turned into a major family discussion, the result being that we will try to get training for the dogs/me/my mother, and in the meantime, use baby gates as barriers so the dogs can't get to stuff.
Also relating to house/home, we lost power on December 10 due to ice storms in the area. Our power lines are all underground, so there must have been transformer problems somewhere. We were among the more than 600,000 Oklahoma households without power, so we were definitely not alone. Unfortunately, DS had outpatient surgery scheduled for the 11th of December. DH's aunt and uncle live about two miles away, so we packed up our stuff (in the dark; the power went out about 5:00) and after we ate the dinner of chili I had prepared, again, in the dark, we "moved in" to their house. We felt very fortunate to have family in town who still had power, even though we had to wake up very early to get DS to the hospital by 6:00 am for the surgery.
Another home matter: we had purchased (a few months ago) an external hard drive because our 80-gig computer had run out of space due to the amount of pics and videos we had put on the hard drive. We transferred the majority of these items to the external hard drive. Well, after 2-3 months, we started experiencing problems with the external drive. Turns out (from my research on the internet), this seems to be a fairly common problem. We went to the company's website and ordered a replacement; fortunately, they had a deal where they'll send you the replacement drive and you have 30 days to then return the defective drive. So we limped the defective drive through and luckily were able to recover the majority of the data from the defective drive and put it on the new drive. I can't begin to comprehend how distraught I was and would have been had we not been able to recover the data -- pics and video of DS from birth to two years. Thank goodness we were able to recover most if not all of it. Since then we have used BB's 18-month financing to purchase a new computer with way more memory, so eventually we'll use the external drive just for backup.
Okay, on to the "work" world. DH was urged to apply for and after a couple of weeks of hem-hawing, finallly received a promotion to Parts Manager for one of the dealership's stores. He will receive a decent raise and commission, plus the use of a truck. We're currently upside-down in his truck so we can't really sell it yet, so we kind of have an extra vehicle for the time being. DH is hoping that he won't get "screwed" on the deal as there are still some bugs to be worked out. So we're praying quite a bit on this issue.
For me at work, I've had extra work lately due to the resignation of a coworker and surgery for another coworker. Another coworker was promoted to fill the resigned worker's position, but she has not yet been fully trained. Because of the coworker's surgery and another coworker's vacation, for the week before Christmas break, I was the only fully trained person with my job responsibilities. I guess it means job security, but I will be glad when the replacement person is somewhat trained so I can be relieved of some of the additional responsibilities.
DS's birthday was December 7, party on the 8th. I had chosen a car theme but decided at the last minute to narrow that down to Noddy's car. Turns out Noddy is a British cartoon character so it's nearly impossible to find Noddy stuff in the U.S. If only I had decided on this earlier, I could have asked my cousin to send some things from Germany. But I used some pics/art from the internet and made my own decorations, and I made the cake. I considered it somewhat sloppy, like his dragon cake last year, but it was fun and DS actually got it -- he saw it and said, "Noddy car." So I was pleased. He "got" the present thing this year, too, which carried over into Christmas, and for awhile it seemed like presents showed up out of nowhere almost on a daily basis. It got to the point that he would see an empty box and say, "present -- mine." We created a monster. I'll try to post other memories as I think of them.
Over Christmas, my parents went to Germany to visit my cousin's family. My mother is DS's caretaker during the week, so he had to go to daycare (DH's aunt has a home daycare about two miles from our house). That was only for three days; one of the great things about working for a university is we're closed for about a week-and-a-half over Christmas. We have to take 2-3 personal days, but it's worth it since work doesn't really pile up because we're closed.
On health -- DS had been seeing the urologist about every 6 months due to his undescended testicle. (By the way, can you believe an insurance company turned him down because of this?) At his 2-year visit, the doc said he would be leaving CHildren's Hospital later in the month. We had been putting off the surgery to see what happened naturally, but DS had grown so accustomed to this doctor (when he sat down at the 2-year visit, Logan put his head in the doc's lap), we decided to go ahead with the surgery while the doc was still around to do it. So we scheduled it for Dec. 11; this was less than a week after the visit, which was probably good since it left little time to think about it. Dec. 11 was a Tuesday. On Sunday the 9th, a major ice storm hit the area, and on the night of the 10th, we lost power at our house. We packed up and went to stay at DH's aunt's house in town. Woke up around 4:30 am the next morning so we could take DS to the hospital for the 6:00 "call time" for the surgery. Being at Children's really put everything in perspective. Nobody wants to see their child go through surgery no matter how minor, but there were so many sick children -- one boy was having his 10th heart surgery at the age of 12; we really are truly blessed.
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