Procrastination

Confession time: I am a BIG procrastinator.  Always have been.  Probably always will be.  It's usually on the things that I don't want to do or I know will be tedious to do, but I guess that's probably the same for most procrastinators.  One thing I have been procrastinating is this blog.  I didn't feel the need to keep it up since I am now back home with 90% of my family nearby.  So they all see me fairly regularly and don't need constant updating on my life.  

Also, it was easy to blog before when I kept the computer near the tv/play area where Jaden was. I could easily sit and blog while watching him play with his toys.  Now, it's in the basement of a two story house, and Jaden and I are all over the house playing with toys, eating, watching tv, or out in the backyard, so I'm not by my computer very often.  

And lastly, I have finally entered the era of the smart phone users, and so I am almost never on an actual computer anymore (and I can tell my typing skills have suffered!  It seriously took me 3 tries to type "anymore" correctly!).  But, this is a journal of sorts, and probably needs to be kept up.

So my real reason for talking about procrastination is something that I discovered yesterday, which I should have discovered three and a half years ago but I've been putting it off. And off. And off.  We have a digital voice recorder that we used to record a Priesthood blessing Jake gave to me right before he left for Boot Camp and Jaden's baby blessing which was done when he was 4 days old in the NICU (we didn't know if he would survive).  I have been meaning to transcribe it, but I have just kept putting it off until I stumbled upon it yesterday and had nothing else to do.  I sat down and transcribed my blessing (which was really sweet) and I started on Jaden's blessing.  I was about 3 sentences into it when, quite suddenly, the tape stopped.  I checked to see if there was a problem, and boy, was there ever a problem.  We had run out of tape in the middle of the blessing and didn't know it so I only have a part of it.  Whoops!  I suppose that will have to do.  At least I know it happened (a lot of things surrounding his birth are really fuzzy because of the stress and meds they had me on to keep me alive)!  But it just felt like another one of those "mom fail" moments, which are never fun.  Luckily, I am able to already laugh about it, so it's not as painful!

And to end on a good note, here is a fun picture we took in Hawaii (yes, we went to Hawaii for 9 days. I really should start blogging more if for no other reason that to brag about that!).  Please note the massive bandage on Jaden's face and know that everything is fine.  My whirlwind of a child just fell and hit his head on the coffee table and split his eyebrow open.  No big deal. :) Luckily for us, the scar blends in perfectly with his eyebrow.  No stitches were involved, thank goodness!

13 Weeks of Fun: Week 1

Hogle Zoo

It was hot and crowded the day we went to Hogle Zoo, but we had a blast!  And yes, the child leash (a.k.a. the child safety tether) does make another appearance. :)

 That's my mom, my dad, Robbie, our family friend Mykah, and Jaden.  Mykah and Jaden are the best of friends!

 Mykah insisted helping push Jaden's stroller up the hill. :)

 So Mykah started to love having her picture taken, so she posed on everything she could find, even if it was never meant to be posed with...

 Jaden found this Beanie Baby Snake that he has been quite attached to.  That snake got dragged all over that zoo that day!

It was so much fun!  Jaden's favorite part by far was when you could watch the sea lions underwater.  We ran around that building for almost half an hour.  I can't wait for the aquarium week!  

13 Weeks of Fun: Week 0

TIMP CAVES

Now that I am living at home, I thought it was a good time to make some fun memories with my youngest brothers.  So I came up with the 13 Weeks of Fun!  We brainstormed and thought of all of the fun things to do in Utah (came up with about 30 of them) and then everyone in the family got to pick their top 10.  From that, we compiled the most popular 13 things and decided to do one a week for the whole summer.  Our first week turned out to be unplanned as Hana was coming to visit and wanted to hike to Timpanogos Caves.  So we got tickets and hiked on up.  Some people, like Jake, blazed on up the trail with a Jaden on his back (literally), while other people, like me, just kept praying that I could put one more foot in front of the other without dying.  But we had a blast in the end!  And since this wasn't on our original 13 week roster, and it happened before the boys were out of school, we will call it Week 0.

 Yes, that is a leash on my child.  You take my stealthy, silent, fast, and fearless child up to the top of a mountain with a cliff edge and then judge me.

Thanks Hana for such a great idea and a fantastic way to kick off Summer 2013!

Since Then...

We went from here:

To here:

To here:

To here:

And then back to here:

Life has been crazy, but in the good kind of way.  We miss Florida like crazy, but we are enjoying being back in Utah and by family once again.  Jake is loving being back at his real estate appraisal office and we are enjoying living with my parents.  It's great to have built-in babysitters and free rent!

We've been to the dinosaur museum:

And going ice skating: (the camera was broken and wouldn't focus, but you get the idea.  And, Jaden LOVES to skate!  YES!!!!!  And my old skates still fit!  DOUBLE YES!!!!!)

And going swimming EVERY SINGLE DAY!!!!!

Jaden and I now have killer tans, thanks to his need to swim every day and the pool in our backyard.

However, when we were living in Florida my computer was right next to Jaden's play area, so I was on it all the time while he played.  Now we live in a 3 story house and Jaden and I are all over the place watching TV (The Octonauts is his current favorite), playing with his cars or army men, running in the backyard, jumping on the tramp, jumping on grandma's bed, playing on grandma's ipad, or watching a movie (Toy Story is his movie of choice at the moment).  So now I'm never on the computer, hence my lack of blogging.  But I will try to be better. :)

And Then Everything Changes...

So BIG news!







No, we're not pregnant








No, we're not buying a house








Yes, we are moving!!!  But not to where you may think.  We are moving to...







UTAH!!!!






Actually, Jaden and I are already here!  Jake and my dad will be driving the moving truck this weekend.  We are so excited to be coming home and being around family, but we are going to miss those beaches and that sun!

So, here's what is going on.  Jake has had some medical issues lately (not anything major so no need to be alarmed) and the doctor he was seeing recommended that he be released from the military on a medical discharge.  The exact details are slightly personal, so I won't go into it here.  However, it means that Jake is getting out of the military with an honorable discharge, and we couldn't be happier!  He will go back to doing real estate appraisals (which he was doing before and LOVED) and we will live in my parents house until we find the perfect rental.  So, if you missed us, then good news, because the Cuthbert's are back in town!

2!!!!

That's right!  My little boy has officially entered the Terrible Two's!  And we couldn't be more excited!

We are so lucky to have our little feisty Jaden in our lives.  There is literally not a day that goes by that I don't just stare at him in awe and wonder.  Here are some fun facts about our miracle boy:

*He doesn't like to hold his morning/nap time/bedtime bottle.  He likes you to hold it, and then he likes to play with your fingers.

*Favorite TV shows: Thomas the Train and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

*Favorite Movies: Lion King (this is a new favorite and I think I have watched it about 50 times in the last week and a half), Finding Nemo and Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas

*He is going through a Cheese-It phase.  That's all he wants to eat.  Thank goodness for multi-vitamins!

*He is a very quiet kid (comes from Jake) but has just started to hold long conversations in complete gibberish (comes from me).

*When he wants to show you something he will grab your finger and drag you over to see it.

*He is completely fascinated by his belly button.

*He spends a good portion of his day watching home movies of himself.  Vain child (comes from me).

*He loves to take baths.  He will take two baths a day if he can talk us into it.

*Jaden doesn't say "yes".  I mean, he can say it, but he doesn't.  He just says "ok!" instead.

*He is obsessed with dogs, and more specifically, dogs licking his face.

So here are the obligatory photos!

Jaden in the NICU

6 months (I love that you can see his apnea monitor wires at the bottom - we had taken him off oxygen for the pictures and kept putting the nasal cannula back in his nose in between pictures)

1 year

18 months

2 years!!! (ish - this was actually taken in November, but it's close enough)

Happy Birthday Jaden!  We love you more than you could ever know!  We are eternally grateful you were willing to fight to stay with us!

Whew! That's a lot of updates!

Between Christmas, my anniversary (6 years!!!), celebrating the New Year, Jaden's surgery, my birthday (28!!!), having my mom here (which has been nothing short of awesome!), getting ready for Jaden's birthday (2!!!), planning a family reunion to Disney World (including a Disney Cruise!), and preparing for a move (more about that in a future post), there just hasn't been the time to update the blog.  But I pushed it to the front of my list today, so enjoy!

Jaden's Surgery

Jaden had surgery on January 4th.  He had to be circumcised  and he also had some reconstruction work to be done "down there".  Things didn't form quite right, and we've known since birth that this surgery would have to be done.  We waited until now so that he was old enough to handle the ventilator (and more importantly, come off the ventilator ok, since that was such an issue in the NICU) but young enough to never remember this!  It was a same-day surgery, and the surgery took 1 1/2 hours.  Here we are in our surgery prep area:

 We made sure to bring a lot of Thomas DVD's and trains.  The hardest part was that he kept begging for milk/juice/snacks but we couldn't give him anything and he was miserable!  He didn't get taken back into surgery until 10:45am, and he was starving!

After surgery, they had us wait to go back and see him until he had woken up from the anesthesia.  But by the time we got back there, he was sedated again.  Apparently he tore out his IV 3 times and wouldn't stop rolling and thrashing around on the bed so they had to sedate him again.  I guess kids do better after waking up from sedation following anesthesia.  The nurses couldn't stop talking about how incredibly strong he was - it took three of them to hold him down!  Also, the nurse anesthetist told me that he completely freaked her out - right after she extubated him (pulled the breathing tube out) he sat straight up on the operating table!  Like, he was knocked out cold from the anesthesia one second, and the next, sitting straight up!  Something straight out of a horror movie if you ask me!
They had me crawl on his post-op bed to calm him when he woke from sedation.   He was still really disoriented when he woke and he wanted nothing more than to get that IV out!  We watched cartoons for awhile and then let him have some apple juice, which he kept down just fine.  Then they let us go home!

 They gave him a nerve block in addition to the anesthesia to help with the additional pain.  They said it would relieve his pain for about 6-8 hours after the surgery.  They lied.  Almost as soon as we walked in the door, Jaden started screaming.  And I mean, the kind of scream that you never want to hear your child make.  Blood curdling doesn't even begin to describe it.  That entire night was just a blur of awfulness that I want to forget.  The doctor had given us a prescription for Tylenol with Codeine  but that barely took the edge off the pain.  It was a long night.
The next morning he woke up at 4:30am.  As soon as we got downstairs, he wanted to get down to play with his trains, but as soon as he put his weight on his legs, he started to scream!  I quickly picked him back up and went and brought the trains to him.  He sat with me until 6:30am when he asked to be put down again.  I hesitantly put him down, and he ran off to play with his toys without even looking back!  It was like regular Jaden for the rest of the day!  Except we could always tell when he was peeing: his body would stiffen, he would hunch over, and then he would whimper in pain.  But then he would straighten up, smile, and run off to his next adventure.  He still had awful moments (like most diaper changes) but things have gotten progressively better.  I think we are almost done with the pain at this point.
At the end of the month he has his follow up appointment, and if the doctor is happy with his healing, he will discharge him from Urology, which means that Jaden will no longer have any specialists or therapists, just a regular pediatrician!  And we are also really happy realizing that this has been Jaden's only surgery since birth, which all things considered, is pretty amazing!