Saturday, July 16, 2011

Yeesh! I suck at this updating thing!

We all (2 babies, 2 dogs and me!) made it safely to my mom's place in IL. We've been here just about 2 weeks now and are slowly getting settled in. The girls are starting to get into a schedule and I'm trying to acclimate to that. I should have figured I'd have to give up my noon time wake-ups sooner or later!
It has been great to see family and friends and I even met Mishu's dad and sister in Indiana so that they could see the girls and they could pass on to me some excersaucers. The girls love them and we use them outside. It has pretty much been non-stop doing things and seeing people since we arrived. I know that in the next few weeks it will slow down. I just need to survive those few weeks! No, I jest, it has been great to see everyone. I missed them all so much.
Mishu is doing well. I can't say much, but what I can say is that he is NOT meant for desk work and thankfully that did not last very long!
I am really glad that the girls are too young to remember him being gone like this, though I am a little worried about what will happen when he comes back for mid-tour leave and when he returns to the states for good. We read the book Daddy recorded for them (Hallmark's Guess How Much I Love You...or something like that) but I had to send it back to him over there because somehow in the move up here, the last page was recorded over. I also sent him one more Christmas book to record for the girls and then I have to eventually get more "regular" (read: non-Christmas) books so that the girls don't get bored by the one. They absolutely love listening to his voice read them the story. We also did a local Build-a-Bear type thing and there are voice boxes in each of the two Teddy Bears we had made for the girls saying "I love you Anna" or "I love you Lorraine." They also have these (slightly creepy looking) Daddy Dolls that go almost everywhere with us. They are ACU dressed stuffed dolls with yarn for hair (that you leave long for mommy or cut short for daddy) with a plastic window at the face for you to insert a picture of your soldier. They do seem to love to look at his picture. So hopefully it wont all be too foreign when he comes home.
Outside of the military things going on in our lives, I went to a little reading/play group at the local library today and it was pretty cool. It was the first playgroup I've ever taken the girls to and they seemed to enjoy it. It is every Friday and Saturday, maybe Mondays as well, and I am planning to make it at least to the Friday ones. Also, not tomorrow but the Saturday after, the girls start their first swim lessons! It is a Mom-and-Tot style and my mom will be helping me. I can't wait. I went to the Conquerors swim practice and the girls loved being in the water. If you'll remember, the Conquerors is the Special Olympics Swim Team that I used to volunteer with and that my brother is on. Well, as I said, the girls had a blast. Lolly just was chilling in my friend N's arms (who has twin boys herself that I used to teach swim to) and N's respite worker and myself held Anna. Anna just loved moving around in the water and even would kick her feet when I had her on her tummy, on the top of the water of course! She even started splashing! I can't wait to start the lessons with them! I know my mom is looking forward to it as well.
School is well, going. Too quickly and I have to get my butt moving in it. I know I can do it, it's just the motivation isn't there. Everyone around me is super supportive and my mom and Mishu even are constantly on me as to what I have gotten done. I can't wait for it to be done and it will all be worth it but it is such a long road to get there! Now is probably a bad time to say that I am kind of scared to have my own classroom! I think part of my problem right now is that I took on the hardest of the four classes I'm taking first and the 5+ page paper on two different cultures is kind of daunting. My plan right now is to get the two other topics done in this class (four total topics, I have one done already) and work on the research as I start on another class. The hardest part of this topic/paper is that six out of the ten research sources must be hard-copy book. I never realized how daunting of a task that is until I now have infants! Thankfully though, I have people here who are more than happy to watch the girls while I snoop around the library for an hour or so. I just looked at everything I have done and everything I have to do and I have 19 total assignments this session (which ends the end of September) and I have three of those finished. Eeek! I really have to get moving! I am working at having another two of those down by this coming Thursday though.
I can't think of much more going on right now other than all of that. I am going to try, right now, to update at least once a week.
Ciao!

Friday, June 24, 2011

Um, hi blog...been gone for a while! :p

So yes, long story short but I am still here, I have so far survived mommyhood of twins and I'm still kicking! Just...been super busy! I will update very soon but here is what has happened recently. Half over with school and freaking out about that....have almost nothing done and 4 classes to finish before the end of September. The girls are 6 freaking months old already!!! Mishu is deployed and while that sucks, I will survive it fully intact...if the girls let me! We (Mishu and I as a family) decided that it would be best for everyone for me to move up to IL with my family during this time, due to health concerns (which if I haven't addressed yet, I will soon.) for a majority of the deployment. Um...Oh, yeah...he was involved in a crash a few days before he was set to go over, still got sent over just a day late and well, the truck has been in the shop every since. Grr...that sucks. Because this is a whole month that I've been here alone. If it weren't for my health issues, I could easily do this alone. But...we have the girls and since there is no way for family to be down here at the drop of a hat due to an emergency, basically I feel this is playing with fire. So the sooner I can get moved up north, the better. But I digress. I have like, 2 minutes of coherent thought (who ever would have thought that would happen at what...Ass-crack O'Thirty?!) to post a little bit of an update. So there. Yep. I'm still alive and kickin'. I'll post something that makes sense soon! :p

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Letter to TIME Magazine

Please visit this website ( http://likeitfortime.wordpress.com/ ), it is a great site that shows many reasons that the Military Family should be named this year's TIME Magazine's Person of the Year. Also, please print out this letter and send it to TIME Magazine (TIME Magazine Letters / Time & Life Building / Rockefeller Center / New York, NY 10020) on March 4th. The more of us that send this, the bigger impact it will make.Thank you!


Dear TIME Magazine Editor(s),
I’m writing this letter to ask you to consider the military family as your 2011 TIME Person of the Year. If you accept nominations from the public/your readers, please consider this an official nomination.
Military families will be the first to say they don’t want to be honored or praised, but I understand Person of the Year isn’t an honor; it’s a “recognition of somebody’s effect on the world,” as Richard Stengel has said.
I also understand Person of the Year is, as another TIME editor has said, “given to the person, group, or thing that has most influenced the culture or the news during the past year.”
Evidence of the military family’s impact on recent news and popular culture can be found in the efforts of Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to raise awareness of the military family, in Oprah Winfrey’s multiple shows honoring the military family, in the upcoming fifth season of Lifetime network’s “Army Wives,” and in the E! Entertainment channel special, “E!Investigates:  Military Wives.” Any time the wars in the Middle East are in the news, so is the American military family.
Regarding the military family’s effect on the world, Rudy Giuliani was chosen for Person of the Year following the September 11 attacks because he “embodied what was really most important, what we learned about ourselves, which was that we could recover,” explained a TIME editor.
The military family embodies what is most important after a decade of war and multiple deployments: a resilient and unifying force even as the families grow weary of being separated – sometimes permanently – year after year, those years apart filled with agonizing anxiety and uncertainty about the future of their families. That resiliency speaks volumes about who we are.
When the American Soldier was chosen for 2003 Person of the Year, it wasn’t for making the news. It was, according to TIME, “[f]or uncommon skills and service, for the choices each one of them has made and the ones still ahead, for the challenge of defending not only our freedoms but those barely stirring half a world away.”
According to a February 2009 study conducted by Boston University’s Sloan Work and Family Research Network, “43.2% of active duty forces have one or more children.” Without a military family care plan—siblings, grandparents, spouses, or others to care for those children—nearly half of our deployed forces would be rendered useless.
The challenges the families of service members experience don’t include the direct threat of mortar rounds and IEDs, but they do include the 24-hour awareness that mortar rounds or IEDs could kill the person they love – their parent, their child, their best friend – any minute of any day, as well as the unique task of trying to maintain a sense of normalcy for children who have a revolving parent and a home environment that is in a perpetual state of flux.
I hope you’ll give this nomination the serious consideration it warrants.
Sincerely,

Friday, February 25, 2011

MilSpouse Friday Fill-In




Aside from no deployments, what is one thing you would want to make the MilSpouse life “perfect”? submitted by Oh How Delightful
I personally would like to live closer to family. 

Just how many peppers did Peter Piper pick? submitted by Married into Army
Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers, now whether they are pickled peppers puts me in a pickle, pondering if the peck of peppers Peter Piper picked were pickled. Hehe!

If you could have any career in the world with nothing holding you back, what would you do? submitted by It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To
I’d like to stay in the field I am studying now, Special Education. I truly love working with the individuals I worked with, and I’d love to focus on the severe profound, more life skills cases. 

Do you have a service oriented tattoo and if so what is it. If you don’t what would you get? submitted by The Squid’s Accomplice
Nope and nope. I do intend to eventually get some Sailor Jerry based tattoos when I can afford them! 

Imagine a block of time has opened up in your busy day for you to take a class in anything you like. What subject would you choose?  submitted by To The Nth
Hrm. Probably an art class, anything art. I love them all! Art history, specific artistic classes (photography, clay manipulation, sketching, etc.)

Friday, February 18, 2011

MilSpouse Friday Fill In


 
What is your favorite MilSpouse blog (not including Wife of a Sailor who we all love, or your own)? submitted by Our Crazy Life (Wifey note: whaaaat? You can’t say my blog? No fun! LOL, just kidding)
    Hrm. I follow a lot and I don’t read them often enough. I’d have to say one of my favorite to follow is Jessica at It's a beautiful ride... . Maybe it’s because I know her in person and it’s good to see some of her candid insights on things. 


    What are your favorite perks about your s/o being deployed (we all know there are perks)? submitted by Ramblings of a Marine Wife
      I would have to say the MONEY was the biggest perk. We were not living together nor technically back “on” in our relationship at the beginning of his deployment though so I will get back to you on that after the next one (because I’m sure there is going to be another before his ETS date.)


      How long did you date your before getting engaged? Married? submitted by Utterly Chaotic
        We dated 3 months before getting engaged…the first time. It was 6 years before we were engaged for the last time and were married 7ish years after we first started seeing each other. 


        What do you think your would do if s/he wasn’t in the military? submitted by Adventures of M-Squared
          Oh man, I have no clue. I doubt he would still be working at FedEx, he was getting fed up there, that’s one of the many reasons he joined. I would have to say probably be in law enforcement. It’s something he’s always been interested in. That or as a firefighter/paramedic. 


          If you could talk to the Secretary of (fill in your appropriate branch) what is one suggestion you would like to bring to their attention in order to improve the lives of military families?  submitted by My Life as His (Air Force) Wife
            I would say make every post/installation/whatever have the DoDEA and really focus on the quality of the education. Make it easier for the records to be transferred and the curriculum to be a smooth transfer. Also make it possible for the children of the families that live off post (but close by) to attend the schools as well.

            The beginning.

            ~Ok so here is my birth story. This was all written at least a month and a half ago.~
            I went in to the doctor’s office on November 22nd, pretty much really sick and in pain. It felt like my gall stone issues but worse and spread all over my abdomen instead of just focused on one side. They tested my urine and blood pressure and the docs wanted me to go to the hospital. They were pretty sure I had pre eclampsia. 2 days later, that’s what I got diagnosed with. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I was actually on the surgical board for cesarian section but the girls looked good and my protein levels and some other stuff decided to behave for the moment so the docs decided that we would try to hold out as long as possible. Over the next 2.5 weeks my levels went up and down but the girls stayed nice and healthy. On the night of Thursday, the 9th, my levels went way up again so they ordered another BioPhysical Profile (in depth ultrasound that includes non-stress test) for the next morning. For those of you on my twitter or Facebook, this was the night that I just was really uncomfortable and unhappy and just really wanted my damn graham crackers and the nurse was about to bring them to me but my levels came back and she had to call the doc first. So it was a “yes but no but yes but maybe….here you go” moment with my graham crackers. I was just not feeling good and for some reason just focused all my anger and angst on getting those damn crackers!
            Well, the next morning, after the ultra sound, they found that one of the girls amniotic fluid was low, so they told me not to eat anything (after I already had ordered breakfast and it was sitting in front of me. This does NOT make for a happy Corie!) and to just wait for what the doc might say. Well, the doc ended up moving me back to Labor and Delivery (I had been in post partum for the better part of 2 weeks) for monitoring and said we might deliver the babies that day. Well, that changed from might to “we are” within less than half an hour of being in L&D. I had already given the doc Mishu’s info to get a Red Cross message across to his command (Mishu told me to do this, it’s what his command told him. I guess they were in the middle of a Change of Command ceremony and needed official word he NEEDED to leave.) I called Mishu AS I found out my surgery was scheduled for 1 (this was at 12:30) and thankfully someone had already let him leave. He made it to me about 5 minutes before the team was scheduled to be up. The team was running a little late but I ended up delivering at 2:53 (Anna) and 2:54 (Lorraine) in the afternoon on Friday. They gave me a shot of Diloted in my back (like an epidural) and wowee did that feel weird. Took about 2 hours in recovery and sometime around 5 that evening they were able to wheel me into the NICU to see my baby girls. Anna was born at 5lbs 5oz at 17" and Lorraine was born at 4lbs 8oz at 16".
            They are doing ok as of right now. They are off IV and were out of the isolettes but their bilirubens have gone up (they were elevated since birth but borderline so they held off on giving the girls the phototherapy) and are now on phototherapy. Will be on it for at least a few days and because of this, they will most likely be back in the isolettes. This means that they will be in at least a week, maybe a week from when they are done with the phototherapy.
            My recovery is going fairly well I think. My incision is healing well, but I got a lot of fluid build up due to the pre e and it’s still here. I’m drinking as much water as I can and walking but it’s the best (as in not effecting me the most) in the morning. As the day goes on it gets worse, heavier and more sensitive. I am really hoping it goes away soon.

            ~Here are some more recent updates to it.

            My c-section incision has been healing well. I have to remind myself that I am still recovering and not to push too far. All of the adema is gone and I am pretty much down to my pre-pregnancy weight. Definitely not size though. Another thing I have to keep reminding myself is that the body, nor the uterus bounces back quickly. I still wear the clothes I wore during pregnancy. I still feel as if people are looking at me that I am pregnant looking. Hopefully common sense should prevail (and it seems it has so far) that I am not that pregnant with two tiny (well, not so tiny any more!) infants.
            Off the topic of the c-section, the girls came home 8 days after they were born. We were so thankful to have them home before Christmas. They have been doing great so far. I will get back to them in another post.
            On January 3rd, I ended up in the ER with extreme gall bladder pain. I had been dealing with it throughout the pregnancy. Hell, that's how we found out we were having twins! It wasn't easy to deal with throughout the pregnancy but I dealt with it. Now that I was no longer pregnant, for whatever reason, the pain seemed to last longer. It would last for hours before going away, if at all, which by the time I was in the ER and they had me hooked up to IV's. At that time I had gotten in to my doctor's office the next day and had a referral to see a surgeon about finally getting my gall bladder removed. I ended up back in the ER the next day after I came home. I was fully admitted to the hospital at that point and had surgery for them to remove the gall bladder. Well, the day I went home, I ended up BACK in the ER with the same damn pain. Turns out it was a rogue mini gall stone that got stuck in the common bile duct and they did an endoscopy to get rid of it. All in all, I was in the hospital for a full week with all the ER visits and admissions. All went well for about a month and half. All of a sudden, the sharp, long lasting pain came back. I thought I was through all of this. Apparently not. Was sent home, ended back in the next day. *sigh* So now I have a referral to a GI specialist and we will see where that goes. So far (knock on wood) I have not had any more issues. Let's hope it stays that way.
            I've also been referred to PT for my knees. These buggers don't seem to be wanting to treat me nicely lately so I'm sure soon I will have some updates about the evil physio-terrorists I will be going to! ;)

            I will also soon post a progression of my belly pics. It really helps to see them all together to realize just how BIG I was! I didn't even get one just before the birth. The last one I have is about 1 week before birth.

            I will leave you here with some pictures from the girls first few days:
            Mishu and me with the girls in the OR:





            Anna:

            Lorraine:

             Anna in the NICU:

            Lorraine in the NICU:

            Lorraine under the bili (UV) lights:

            Anna under the bili (UV) lights:

            This is my Foodie Friday!

            So, I know that I haven't even really blogged about the girls' birth, but I promise I will do that today as well.
            I think I will start posting a new recipe every Friday. I will have either cooked it Thursday night or Friday during the day. So here is my first one!

            Corie's Smothered Pork Chops

            Prep time: 10 minutes
            Cook time: 50 minutes
            Ready in about 1 hour.

            Ingredients:
            4 pork chops
            2 cans cream of mushroom soup
            half bag of frozen grean beans
            1 small onion
            1 packet onion soup mix
            1/2 tsp salt
            1 tsp pepper
            1 tbsp minced garlic
            1 1/2 cup french fried onions
            Noodles or rice to serve over

            Directions:
            Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
            Place the pork chops in a glass 13x9 pan.
            Round slice the onion and place evenly over the pork chops.
            Sprinkle 1/2 tbsp minced garlic evenly over the pork chops.
            In a medium mixing bowl, mix the green beans, 2 cans cream of mushroom soup, salt, pepper, the remaining minced garlic and the packet of onion soup mix. Spread evenly over the pork chops.
            Bake for 40 minutes.
            Spread the french fried onions over the dish and return to oven.
            Bake for another 10 minutes.
            Serve over rice or noodles.


            And here are the pictures.
            In the pan:


            All ready to NOM:

            Monday, January 17, 2011

            testing

            Trying out blogger on my Droid. :-) I know I need to update, lol! but life has been hectic in general. I will update soon, I swear.
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