We are well! At last. Well, except Alice. She's still working through the last of some GI symptoms. We are in crunch time with our move though. The photographer comes this Friday to take pictures of our home, and then next week it will go on the market. So allow me to leave you with a few pictures from our week, and hopefully I'll be back with more updates next week. Lots of packing to do in the meantime!
Oof, September is really doing its best to keep us down and derail any packing progress. Jared had plans to take Alice to his parents' home on Tuesday so I could get a lot of packing done while Jack was at school, and so his parents can get more Alice time before we move. On Sunday evening, two days earlier, Jared's mom called to tell us she had food poisoning and wouldn't be coming up for Alice's birthday the next day. Thinking, "Oh, surely she'll feel better by Tuesday, food poisoning usually only lasts a day," I encouraged Jared to still go on Tuesday because I desperately needed that time to pack; this move is already on a fast timeline to begin with, and with two young kids at home it is tough to push the needle on the packing in a meaningful way.
Well. Karma had the last laugh--I probably should've let my sweet mother-in-law recover in peace. Alas, it was not food poisoning. It turned out to be a horrendous stomach flu. And you can probably guess the end of the story from there. Nearly a week later, we are all still home having family sick days together. Alice was the first to get it, then me, then Jared, and Jack was the last one to fall last night. We are two weeks out from our house being listed and it is not looking good on the packing front. And someone's always up all night vomiting so no one's getting the sleep they need. The cherry on top is that the stress is giving me cystitis flares, which puts me out for hours at a time. And then the next day I feel more stressed because we're even further behind on packing, and then the cystitis flares up agin. It's a bad cycle and unfortunately the only way out is through. We might have a rough month ahead of us. In the end though, it's all in the name of getting our family moved to Utah, which is ultimately what we've been dreaming of for years. So, trying to look at this intense month as a blessing instead of a problem.
I don't want to overshadow Alice's second birthday though! We had a lowkey, sweet birthday celebration. Jack was at school and Jared had the day off. We took our little girl on a day trip adventure to Camano Island. We started out at a cool playground with a sculpture park. Then we got pastries and a burger at the Camano Commons. We finished off collecting seashells at a quiet beach, then back home for a nap. It was the perfect day, and Alice loved all the attention! At two, Alice is sweet and spunky. She want mama in sight at ALL times, but isn't often interested in snuggling (but sometimes!). She likes to "help" and will clean up her own spills and take the dishes over to daddy at the dishwasher. She loves makeup and watching "Baby," aka any video from my phone of "Baby" Alice and Jack. She loves music and singing, and she can communicate quite a bit, with an ever-growing vocabulary. We love our Allie Baby Sweetie and are so excited for her to be TWO (it's the only number she knows how to say, so whenever she counts she says, "Two, two, two, go!").
Well, I need to get back to packing. The next few weeks my blog posts will probably be light on words to maximize packing time. Here are some pictures from our week:
Well. That week was a doozy for me. (Somebody start a business and call it Doozy. What a fun word.) Here comes a blog post about my urinary tract! Feel free to scroll onto the pictures if that's not your favorite.
Early last week I suddenly started having UTI symptoms. Unfortunately I suffer with a lifelong health condition called Interstitial Cystitis (IC), which happens to have the exact same symptoms/feelings of a UTI. Because of this, I shrugged off my symptoms as an IC flareup and started quadrupling my water intake to try and stave it off. A day or two later, I was feeling worse and a bit debilitated. I had Jared grab me a UTI test strip from his work. The test came back as positive for leukocytes and blood in the urine. Unfortunately, that could just as easily be a sign of an IC flareup as it could a UTI. Ugh. "Hey Laura, just get on some UTI antibiotics, just in case!" You and my husband are telling me as you grab me by the face. Not so simple. Antibiotics often make an IC flareup worse, so I wasn't willing to take them without being absolutely certain it was a UTI.
At this point my only option to verify the presence of UTI bacteria would be to go to a primary care doctor or urgent care and have them send in a urine sample for cultures. Jared told me it would probably take 3-5 days to get the results back. I was like, "No, I'm pretty sure it's just a bad IC flare, triggered by the stress of preparing to move." Then I started to get depressed because if that were the case, then this flare could potentially last for months. My condition worsened over the next few days until Saturday, when I was feeling SO awful and realizing that no amount of resting or water drinking was making this any better (water almost always helps with my IC flares). Then I checked in with myself again and realized that I felt like I was coming down with flu symptoms (achey and fevery). This was the red flag I needed in order to say, "This is definitely a worsening UTI. Get me on some antibiotics STAT." These are the moments when I feel so dead inside grateful for the sacrifices we made getting Jared through med school and residency. He was able to call me in a prescription and pick it up from our local Rite Aid in less than an hour. With a dose or two of antibiotics in me, I started feeling much better on Sunday. Three cheers for modern medicine.
And now for some pictures of the better moments from this last week:
^^The kids running out to greet me enthusiastically as I arrived home from thrifting Alice some birthday presents. One of the perks of the younger years of kids. They are so excited to see me when I get home.
What a week! We had a great time crossing off my very top Washington-must-do: exploring Mt. Rainier with my parents. (The night before when Alice was up screaming half the night in our campsite--not as great of a time. But it was still worth the trip!) I have lots of pictures that tell most of the story from this week, so we'll jump right into those. They do begin earlier in the week, and then we'll get to the Mt. Rainier content:
