No Christmas In February

Well, I've meant to catch up what's been going on around here for a while now and just haven't, and the longer it takes the longer the list grows of things I should write about. And the longer the list grows the harder it is to do, so today, in an attempt to make the task manageable, I decided to delete a few things from the list so, I'm sorry, but you won't be hearing about Christmas this year (because really - who wants to hear about Christmas in February?), but believe me it was a great one - you wouldn't believe all the celebrating that went on around here!

On to January, which started bright and early New Year's morning with a trip to the emergency room for Wynn, who couldn't live with his back pain one more day. It turned out he had a herniated disc in his back, with some other medical details that I wouldn't know how to spell even if I could remember them. He spent most of January like this:

And taking all these:
But luckily avoided surgery with physical therapy and rest, and is doing much better now.

Also in January Ella made a leap into the world of maturity and finally allowed herself to be bribed into wearing underwear. Yes, we were all shocked.


It's been over a month now and she still cries most days begging for a diaper, but usually I win. Every child of mine has been more difficult to toilet train, which is something I've never seen addressed in parenting books and the main reason why we are only having four children.

The last exciting news of January was a new dishwasher.

Our last dishwasher broke in November and we stubbornly went through Thanksgiving, company two times and Christmas without a dishwasher, but when faced with a month with a husband who couldn't stand, sit, bend, lift or drive I had enough and we bought a new one. I wish I could say I was excited to have a new dishwasher, but mostly I just look at it and think it looks so innocent, just sitting there efficiently washing a whole day's worth of dirty dishes at once with no effort, but I know it's just giving us a couple of good years and then it will break too - just like all those other appliances that let me down in the past - the washer, the dryer, countless hairdryers...

And that's a quick look at January at our house. And yes, the reality was just about as dreary as this post makes it sound - but what else can you expect from January? Maybe in a few months I'll let you in on the exciting things that happened around here in February.