Well the month of January has been nasty to me and my family. Talk about a horrible way to start the year. I guess I had better knock on wood as there are technically 8 days left in the month.
Lets see where to start…
I would say that it started on 1/10. Mid morning I received a phone call from the person renting my house that they were going to be moving out effective 3/1. For those of you who don’t know here is a small back story. Dawn and I purchased a home in Rio Rancho nearly 7 years ago now. After living in it for less then a couple months Dawn got a job with the District Attorney’s Office in Lea County and had to move to Hobbs. Six months later, after finding a job, I moved to Hobbs to join her.
This was really good for the both of us as we were both making significantly more money then our previous jobs. Unfortunately this left us with a newly purchased house that we were ‘up-side-down’ on. Luckily for me I had friends at my old job that needed a place and agreed to rent the house. This was the start down the long road of ‘investment property’ ownership.
Long story short I found myself in an all to familiar situation of needing to find another tenant to move in. To add to the already stressful situation I am now living in Vegas and Dawn is still in Hobbs. Neither of use have the time to travel to the house to get it ready to rent. All these issues combined to drive me to the decision to get rid of the house. When I say get rid of I mean literally. I contacted one of those ‘WeBuyUglyHouses’ outfits and have them started on the prospect of buying the place.
Next piece of news came from my cousin Kenny. I had received a call about the news the day before but I will allow his email to speak for itself…
Hello all. Just so everyone knows, I was injured in a road side blast, I am doing good, in the hospital, on my way to Germany. I think this is going to be the last I see of Iraq, I dont know, cant say for sure. General Johnson gave me the purple heart last night. Hopefully I’ll be home soon to see everyone. I’ll be in Landstuhl tomorrow night, I think I’ll stay there for a few days. Take care, see ya’ll later.
Good news is that in the follow up emails it appears that he is doing good. Just want to give him a shout out and let him know that I am thinking of him and that he is in my thoughts always.
Final thing to go be negative this month is that little one got sick around the 16th. The following picture was taken the night of the 16th. It was an interesting night for sure. It started with little one wanting to just lay down right in the middle of the floor. This is particularly strange and she normally sits in her chair all night. Well I setup a pillow and her blanket so she could be as comfortable as she wanted.
Later that night, or should I say early next morning, Lexi woke up around 4:00 a.m. I picked her up out of her bed and placed her in bed next to me and we both fell back asleep. About an hour and 15 minutes later she awoke crying. Now there are times when she wakes up in the middle of the night crying and I can tell the difference between waking from a bad dream, crying in her sleep and a cry of pain which this one was. It was so different that I threw on the light and started asking her what was wrong. She replied, ‘Hurt, Ouch’. I followed this by asking where she hurt and she pointed to her ears. I went ahead and checked her temperature and sure enough she was around 100°, nothing to serious. Initially I thought she was running hot because she was in her total body PJ’s, snuggled up next to me and lying under the covers. I decided that I would go ahead and give her some Childrens Tylenol and take the covers off her to see if it would break by morning.
Morning rolled around and sure enough she was still running a fever. Instead of taking the risk of taking her to school just to have her get worse I took the entire day off. I took her to the doctor and sure enough she had the beginning of an ear infection. Luckily we caught it early and I can report that she is doing great.
Even with all these negative things occurring there have been positives as well. One of which happened tonight.
To start Lexi finally took her first shower. I know that this may sound insignificant however for me it was a big deal. I was taking a morning shower and she was watching me and I asked her if she wanted to get in with me. She nodded her head yes. So I went ahead and stripped her down and brought her into the shower with me. She did really well. She wasn’t too excited about the water spraying directly on her however. We ended the event by turning the shower off and playing/getting clean with the water coming out of the faucet.
Next event was, with a little nudging from her daycare, we have started toilet training. This week started the second week of her going to school without diapers. I am proud to report that she has only had one accident from all last week until today at school. Of course this means that I need to reinforce this at home as well and I can say that she has been doing a great job. After hitting a couple bumps the first couple days we have a breakthrough over the weekend and it feels like we may be approaching cruise control with her.
This leads into the third and final event so far this month. Tonight I went out on a limb and took her out without a diaper on into public for the first time. We left the house at 6:00 and had to go grocery shopping. Lexi was an absolute dream and such a good girl the entire trip. I made sure that before I left the house that I had her diaper bag and a extra pair of pants in the event that she had an accident in the store. She did great and made it all the way home without having to go potty and not having an accident!! To make things even better right before putting her to bed she told me she had to go and she did just like a good girl. So she has now had her first public outing without wearing a diaper.
I can definitely say that this month has had its ups and downs. With everything being so busy I just have to remember to take the time to stop and enjoy the ups while they last. Also the last picture here is of her with some pigtails that the girls at school put in. Yeah she is in her birthday suite since she had just finished going potty and we were going to go get ready for bed.
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