Holidays

 WHAT??!!!! It's almost CHRISTMAS??!!!

Guess we better stop being NAUGHTY!!

 

Well since the last post.... We did it... We moved in to the New House!!!

We do not yet have flooring upstairs, doors hung, or steps to the front porch, but we are IN!!

 

 

 During the process of moving over

 our first dinner in the new house

yep, she's a red head, with an attitude to go with it.. :)

And the two older kids are crazy excited for the new house, but they miss their loft bedroom with the skylight.  Can't win them all I guess.

 

 This is MY kitchen!

Counters on the left are extra deep, because my  hubby is building me a drawer behind the lower cabinets for my 5 gallon buckets with flour, sugar etc.  :)  And behind the little man on the counter is an awesome range... with a convection oven! (actually it has a stupid button on it... converts it for you so you don't need to actually know how to use a convection oven. ha ha) I LOVE IT!

Cookie making is so much easier!

Now to try the bread

 And our living room, no banister up yet... we have a big cedar chest in front of the stairs now so L can't climb up there.  Even with out the upstairs we are in heaven... so much more space!!!

The far right of the picture shows the door to the "crawl space"  with 7 foot something ceilings, and currently holding our bed and storage room.  Actually down stairs will be the movie room and "Costco room"  Ever see Blast from the Past?  Just imagine going shopping in your "crawl space."  That's what I have... pictures to follow... also housed inside my "crawl space" will be my sewing nook!! 

 Add to the mix an Alaskan Christmas tree, acquired from our front yard :)

Decorating TALL trees isn't easy, may require shorter tree next year.

 All this makes for one HAPPY MOMMY!!!

 The view from our front windows, front yard.  LOVE IT!

For those of you not in AK, we didn't get our first snow this year until the second week of December!

And when it snowed... it really snowed! The kids were playing outside so long yesterday in negative temps that their cheeks were a bit frost bitten... but I couldn't convince them to come indoors... they just wanted more layers. :)

 

So much has happened this year with our family, mostly it's been another wonderful year of bliss and peace.  This little miracle man has been living life at full speed.  He goes to Preschool four days a week and LOVES it!!

Just a quick update on his status...

We recently had MRIs of his liver and heart to determine the level of iron build up in his organs.  We prayed and fasted much, and were blessed to only have iron build up in his liver.  Heart is still clear and strong!! Because he has build up in his liver, treatment plans have changed.  For those of you that don't know, because of his many, many, many transfusions following transplant his body has a great store of iron.  Which isn't great. Genetically it's called Hemachromatosis which means that his body can't break down iron on it's own.  This disease only presents itself in older individuals though, highly rare for a child to have it. So we are all in agreement that it's probably from all the transfusions.  For the past year he has been doing monthly phlebotomy visits at the PedOnc office.  It hasn't been as helpful as we hoped, so we are going to try weekly visits for a while, drawing more blood... which means: Pokes every week, with possible IV for fluids, with possible swelling (Henry always liked to get bloated with IV fluids in the past) which may lead to a port or something to prevent weekly pokes and IV and swelling... which means germ a phobia again, and fevers taking us back to the ER...

While it's a bit disheartening I cannot help but be grateful everyday that ALL we have to deal with is iron overload!  There are so many more scenarios that I wouldn't want to be living right now.  The Lord has truly blessed us with two years of peace and joy!

H is strong and has done amazing so far, hopefully a big kick in the pants will help his iron deposits decrease and allow him to go back to normal life. 

For now we will enjoy the rest of the year in "normalcy!"

MERRY CHRISTMAS!