Will I be better? Probably not...

This last year has been one continual roller coaster ride. I haven't taken the time to blog some pretty life changing events. My bad. Some events have been monumental on the good side, some on the bad. But we are alive and intact, so I'm just grateful we have all survived our series of unfortunate (and very fortunate) events. I hate the way blogger adds pictures, I can never figure out how to comment so that the pictures scroll down in order. As I type, I am probably putting all of this commentary at the end of a long line of pictures that are in reverse order. I'm lame, I know it. I only have a moment to blog, and probably no time to figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it. So if you have no patience for such things...wait, if you are reading this it means you have already scrolled through my pictures and read to the end. Sorry. I want to be better about blogging, but I doubt that will happen, so I hope you have enjoyed my apparently twice yearly blog post. From here on out one of two things will happen. One, I will blog 20 times in the next week, and then not again for 6 months. Two, I will try to blog 20 times in the next week, fail at that, and blog again in 6 months.

Oh, never mind, it appears that blogger has changed a tad, and adds the pictures at the end, not the beginning. Still makes my pictoral review backwards, but I'm not going to change anything. So our adventure started last November when Ryan had both knees scoped. I chose this picture because he was helpless and couldn't change the fact that I gave him giant moobs.

So when Ryan was about 4 weeks into his recovery from knee surgery, he started having stomachaches. Me being the super duper mom that I am, I bought him pepto and gas-x. After about a week of downing these pills, I had just called the Dr. to make an appointment when his pain became unbearable. Long, long, long story short, I rushed him to the emergency room. His condition rapidly declined and they couldn't figure out what was wrong with him or manage his pain, so the Dr. went in with a scope and still couldn't find the problem. Ryan has a fantastical scar down his belly now (it takes a little jog around his belly button) because they had to open him up to find that he had a hole in his mesenteric lining that had entrapped a large portion of his small intestines. Most of us are blessed with a generous amount of fat to keep our mesenteric lining protected, but Ryan has no fat. He spent 5 days in the hospital and lost some precious lbs, but he is alive and that is a great blessing.

Then, in the course of 1 week in February, Ryan turned 20 (and in another spectacular example of good mothering, I couldn't find any candles so we used a 2 leftover from my yearly 29th birthday and a peanut butter cup with the center cut out)

Beautiful baby Coby was born.

And Alex turned 16 in a ninja, dinosaur sort of way.
Life seemed to be settling down...seemed to be...

Then, Alex was in dance class, her right knee dislocated, when the knee cap slid across her femur, her femur sheared the back of her knee cap off and cracked her femur. I didn't have a car at the time, so LonaMae earned her brownie points for taking me to the studio, helping me load Alex in her car (not an easy task) and taking us to the Dr. After a trip to the orthopedist and an MRI...and surgery, to discover the extent of her injuries, I am very glad I didn't tell her to "walk it off". The surgery took 3 1/2 hours and required sending out for some special equipment. We won't know if we are for sure in the clear until she is a year out from her surgery, but she seems to be doing very well now. If the bone doesn't stay attached to her knee cap she will need a cartilage transplant in California. As much as a trip to Cali sounds nice, I am praying we are in the clear.
So...

Brian thought it would be fun to hop on the surgery band-wagon. He had a tendon cyst removed from his right index finger, and the tendon on his wrist tightened up. Considering this 51 year old hasn't had surgery since his childhood tonsillectomy, he did amazing.
Alas, No time to include all the other fun stuff now, but there has been some fun stuff, and I will get to it. Maybe in another 6 months.