Missing Corn & Missing Teeth

The kids had a good start to their week.  Our friends from Awana had a Fall Party at their house complete with a candy corn relay, a race to make a scarecrow, bobbing for apples, plus lots of food and dessert!  They have so much fun at this friend's house because they basically have the run of the upstairs and there are many, many toys.

A few days later, we went to the Health Museum in Houston for a CC field trip.  The museums here often have a free afternoon once a month so that everyone has the opportunity to visit the museums (which can be quite expensive).  This particular museum has a free afternoon every week!  I hadn't realized it or we probably would have visited earlier.  It was small, basically there were only two rooms for the kids to go in, but both rooms were incredibly interactive.  The first room was the human body.  They got to crawl through a colon.  The had a "Texas-sized heart" that was beating with blood flow lights.  The favorite part of this room, though, was the ear section.  They had a sound proof booth in which the kids could go in, scream at the top of their lungs, and it would measure the decibels.

Caroline in a colon.

The other room in the museum was all about how people didn't let physical disabilities overcome them.  They had a girl without legs and her ski-sled.  They had a wheelchair that made music.  There was a section that you could make a walking cane for a blind person that had electric sensors.  It was a neat section.

We left before traffic got too bad and met up with Todd for a dinner out.  We went to Sweet Tomatoes, one of our favorite places.  And just like every time we go, I made Henry cry.  It is a salad buffet place, and towards the end of the meal, Henry had his salad plate in front of him that was nearly empty, he had a mostly empty soup bowl, a bread plate, and he was in the process of eating his ice cream.  I mistakenly believed he was done with his salad plate, so I handed it to the server.  As soon as the server left, Henry's eyes just welled up with tears.  He hadn't finished his corn....  His corn.  Every time I do this to him.  I just don't learn.  Poor kid.

For Awana on Friday the kids dressed up for Character Quest which just so happens to fall right around the Halloween holiday.  Josiah and I found a good deal at Goodwill last week on a $5 blazer.  He was very happy to get a "suit" back into his life.  He's our little Alex P. Keaton.  He went as James Madison.  Caroline went as a butterfly.  Henry had the hardest time figuring out who he wanted to be, but finally decided on Johnny Appleseed.  Henry originally wanted to be Abraham Lincoln, but when he saw the fake beards I bought, he said they made him nauseous, so that was the end of ole Abe.  For Johnny, he had a aluminum foil "pot" hat and a bag of seeds, but he refused to put a picture of an apple on his bag or the word, "seeds," to help people know who he was.  Apparently that wouldn't be authentic.  "Seeds."

Butterfly

Johnny

James

I was supposed to work at Awana that night, but decided, instead, to spend my morning at the hospital.  I woke up just fine.  At 8:15 a.m. my stomach started hurting.  Not long after I lost my breakfast in the trash can, which followed with intense abdominal pain.  It was so sudden and so incredibly strong and sharp and dull and intense.  I tried to look up appendix, but couldn't even focus long enough to read the little webpage because of the pain.  Josiah had already called Todd at work and he was on his way home, but, thinking I was going to die from a burst appendix, I called for an ambulance.  They arrived before Todd, checked me out and loaded me up in the back and took me to the hospital.  They had the sheriff's deputy that drives our neighborhood watch the kids for the few minutes before Todd arrived.  I thought that surely with how quickly they took me that it must be my appendix.  Morphine did nothing for the pain.  At the ER, they tried more morphine and another drug which didn't even touch the pain.  They sent me for a CAT scan and discovered the cause.  The doctor said (as I'm throwing up in a little hospital bucket), it was a kidney stone.  I spoke into my bucket, "That's it?!!"  My first thought was, that's embarassing, I'm strong like ox, how could I not handle this?  However, as the male doctor told me, the pain of a kidney stone is worse than childbirth.  But the pain was in my abdomen, not my back.  They gave me a medicine for that specific problem and finally, finally, the pain subsided.  So, Todd packed me up and all the kids, got my five medicines, and brought us all home, with me, a bit more humble. 

Saturday was more of a quiet day.  I looked at Caroline's mouth in the morning and told her that her tooth was so loose, she could probably just pluck it right out.  She said that she would wait for it to come out on its own.  Then that afternoon, I was talking with her and noticed a hole.  I looked in her mouth and her tooth was gone.  She had no idea where it was, either.  She wasn't too excited about it, but I cannot get out of her as to why.  She was excited this morning to see the Tooth Owl with a new message: "Whoooo lost a tooth?  I don't know, because there was no tooth in here.  Please give this [quarters] to Caroline anyway."

So that was our week.  And next week is sure to be far less dramatic in the medical department.