May 2020

 UGH... it uploaded the pictures backwards again. So heres the month from the end to the beginning.

Lots of fun outside in the sand and water...reminding me of our fun days with the hose running in the sandbox at Stanford's Escondido Village. Alec used playmobile and with his phone tried to make a slow motion flood. 

Gwen got a hair cut!

We made a kitchen table using a pre conditioned butcher block kitchen counter top from Home Depot and some wood from Lowes. We borrowed Jared's and then our neighbors table saw to get the 4 x4 wood blocks a little smaller to better match the thickness of the top. We followed plans from Ana White for the base, but instead of the wood slats for the top we used the butcher block counter top. It turned out just as I imagined and WE LOVE IT! We ran into some issues with the Kreg Jig pocket holes and we sanded it forever and ever but it turned out awesome. Probably total cost was $500? 

For Memorial Day we headed up to the Ridge for a cookout.  Uncle Jordan brought his drone which was fun for the kids to watch. 

Chris turned 39! Tiff and Mary surprised him by making him The Great Canadian Ketchup cake! We had all the Archibald's over to celebrate with dinner and a game night. We just put a movie on for the kids downstairs and put the little ones to bed. It was really fun.

To celebrate the last day of school, we let the kids pitch tents in the backyard and sleep in them... with a TV in each tent. We ran extension cords to the different TVs and the wifi signal was strong enough for them to stream a movie to watch. We had Charlie and Alec in one tent and Gwen and Freddy in the other. I believe the kids slept in their tents multiple nights. It was a fun Corona-Virus Pandemic-Friendly way to celebrate. 

We made a family goal to go on lots of hikes this summer. We LOVE living here in Utah with so many gorgeous mountain hikes so close. We took all the kids to hike the Y. The kids did amazing. Chris carried Max on his back almost the entire way up... NUTS! I had Theo on mine. He fell asleep 3/4 of the way up. We ran into the Brooke and Evan Millar and family from California....AGAIN. Last summer Chris ran into them  on the Y trail when they were in Utah visiting. So bizarre and fun.  After we finished we got cougar tails at some pandemic event thing Chris signed up for at work where you register for a time to come and pick up your order from your car.

Kids are out of school! We've survived the online distant learning. UGH. It was TERRIBLE.   Like, hard to even describe.  Every teacher seemed to have a different way of organizing assignments, and some would even have multiple different systems for different things.  It took literally hours to determine all of the assignments that the kids needed to do, and then we had to try to get the kids to do it.  It was basically a full-time job for someone just to keep some of the kids on task, and combining that with a young Theodore (9 months) and Max (2 years) made for pretty chaotic and stressful times.  But, the kids made it through, and we made it through, and here we are.   Freddy got to participate in his kindergarten graduation via a drive-through, where he got to put on a hat.  Freddy has been so excited for kindergarten all year long and it has been great to watch him grow and learn. 

  

For mother's day this year we made a big card for GG Archibald, who has been staying with Grandma and Grandpa Archibald after a fall in her own home.  Her memory is fading, so we always make sure to label our cards with our names.  We made a big card with a pop-up bouquet of flowers that was really fun.  

For Brittney's mother's day treat we tried our hand at a low-carb cheesecake.  We used mostly monkfruit sweetener instead of sugar, and we thought it turned out very tasty.  We took a piece over to Grandma and Grandpa Archibald to share it.  We will probably have to learn a lot more recipes that work with less sugar and are still fun and "treaty" to eat.  Brittney is the best.  This past little while has been so stressful for her, with the kids at home doing school, and especially with her health as we figure out what is going on with her blood sugars and diabetes.  Add all of that onto still settling into a new house and it has been A LOT.  But she is a saint and keeps us going and having fun together.  She deserves far more than one mother's day each year.

We've enjoyed some Friday afternoons at Thom and Brittany's pond near their house. Talking with Jess and Brittany while the kids happily swim is so enjoyable for everyone. Theo and Max still keep me on my toys but its worth the conversation, sunshine, and kids being active time. 

Theo loves the Roomba. He'll chase it on his hands and knees until it changes direction and then he gets scared and crawls away from it.   We only had it for a few weeks before we took it back because it didn't handle the transitions very well from carpet to hardwood or clean well around the vent covers in the floor so we'd have strewn about crumbs around all these difficult areas. 

Theo loves to be right where the action is. Here he's helping Chris with the final mudding coat of the kitchenette area we took out in the playroom. Man! I wish I would remember to take 'before' pictures! 

The other first thing to do now that we've taken over the house is turn the library downstairs into a bedroom for Alec. This involved taking out all the built-in bookcases, large desk area and build a closet. We needed to get this done before the new carpets were installed so we had a little time crunch to work with.  After pulling out the old carpet and bookcases, we found lots of crawling bugs/larvae looking things. We had just dealt with a bunch of ants all over the place in the house but mostly downstairs so we hoped it was just ant larvae but we took pictures and contacted a company who verified that they were...TERMITES.  Lovely. We got a guy to come look at it in person and they have a really neat way of dealing with them. The termites here live under ground and come up through soft spots (likely caused by water leakage) to eat away at stuff like wood and drywall and then they go back down to live in their colony many tens of feet under ground. So treatment was drilling a small hole (nickel sized) in the concrete about 18 inches apart were the worst damage is, and then also around the entire perimeter of the house. Then they shoot down with a high pressured thing some poison that kills them off. Amazingly, it only took a few hours and $1,050 later... we're done! I was so worried it would be much worse.  We're glad we took out the shelves and found the problem before it caused any structural damage!  Apparently I only took before and during pictures, not any 'after' pictures. Man! I wish I would remember to take 'after' pictures!

I guess the other thing I should talk about in May 2020 was that I got an official diagnosis of Latent Auto-Immune Diabetes in Adults. This was both upsetting and relieving.  Its been MONTHS of me testing my blood sugars at LEAST 4 times a day, trying to keep them in the right range with diet, exercise and pills(metformin) and it wasn't working.  I was losing lots of weight as the only thing that worked to get right numbers was to NOT eat, or at least not eat very many carbs. Like I tried to target 0-10 carbs for breakfast, 15-20 carbs for lunch and dinner and snacks to be 0-5 carbs. I ate a lot of eggs for breakfast, I had almond milk and protein powder for meal shakes, I did KETO bread if I absolutely needed bread for something (it didn't taste very good) I ate salads a lot, cheese, nuts and beef jerky for snacks. Changed all my rice intake to cauliflower rice, all pasta to spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles.  I had to be careful of too much nuts and protein though in case it lead to another kidney stone, so I really felt limited in my food choices. I use food as rewards and emotionally eat when I'm sad or stressed so to NOT have that as a coping mechanism while I struggled raising my 6 crazy kids in my in-laws house, on top of a Pandemic that required home schooling them too??!?! I cried... A LOT.  We use food a lot to bond as a family too. We started stopping our tradition of Sunday night treats and book reading...because I didn't feel like making a treat I couldn't eat. I guess I'm not that self-less. I felt little joy at family dinners and gatherings because while everyone could enjoy the food, I could barely eat a few things.  But back to my diagnosis. I was relieved to get the diagnosis for a few reasons: 1 - at least this meant that I was doing all the right things to try and control it ... it just ISN'T controllable without insulin. So I wasn't a failure. 2 - I hoped this meant that I could go back to eating some of my favorite foods... as long as I gave insulin for it. The diagnosis was also really upsetting because I assumed I'd be getting a pump and needing to be connected to a device and tubes and medecine OR I WOULD DIE... for the rest of my life. It's daunting and depressing.  One big blessing in this time was the doctor I ended up getting to be my endocrinologist: Dr. James Craven. He has excellent bedside manner and is extremely intelligent, a great listener, understands my rambling questions, and so patient. He took so much time with me to explain things and treated me with respect, (not condescending). He was sympathetic and kept pausing to say, "How do you feel about this?" "what do you think about this?". He is wonderful. Plus he has either a Scottish or Irish accent so its just a pleasant to listen to him.  The plan is for me to get needle injections and inject myself with insulin 4 times a day, once at night for my basal insulin, and then once 15 minutes before each meal using a standard ration of 15 carbs for 1 unit of insulin.  So for at least the next few months I would need to still be very restrictive on my carbs so we could get a read on how much insulin my body needs. I could either have 15 or 30 carbs per meal, 3 times a day and 1-2 snacks could happen as long as they were under 7 grams of carbs.  Its funny how this tiny additional amount of carbs felt like a lot... I could eat a regular piece of bread with an egg for breakfast!  But being tied to a cooler or fridge so my insulin could be refrigerated (which ended up being a misunderstanding...apparently I could've just stuck the insulin pen in my purse sometimes without the bulky mini cooler!)  and still injecting myself with a needle 4 times a day plus finger pricking to check my blood sugars at least 4 times a day plus more if I felt low was not my favorite.  And it turned out I was EXTREMELY sensitive to insulin.  I kept having EXTREME (30-40) lows in the middle of the night, after dinner etc. We cut my carb ration back to 30 carbs per unit, and cut my basal from 10 units to 6 a night.  But that was too light so we settled at around 7 for basal and 25 ish for my carb ratio. But this took MONTHS of research, of writing down my blood sugars first thing in the morning and 1-2 hrs after a meal, how much insulin I gave, how many carbs I ate at ANY point in the day, how long and what type of exercise I did etc.  I hated keeping the record but it was necessary to see what my body needed. I met with Dr. Craven every month for the first little while, and with a nurse educator a few times in between those visits to go over my numbers, adjust ratios, ask questions etc. Again the timing of this was pretty stressful. Having all the kids home, and doing final projects/tests/assignments for school, moving in/out/around the house with James and Dixie finding a condo to buy across down. And Theo and Max being at a needy/challenging age.  Some days I wish I could just disappear. Life was too hard. Somehow we got through it.