34, Here I come!

All the girls after brunch at Blue Mesa on Sunday:

Really good picture of Paco and Bowen:

Today is my Birthday and I was really bummed that I had to go to Open House tonight. Until I went to Laine's class and saw this:

Nice Boobs Laine!

Pictures from Abilene

Blake ridin' dirty

Two cute moms:

Bowen being mean:

Two cuties on a swing:

I went back to the Headache Clinic today and met with the P.A., I thought she was totally awesome. I love people who shoot straight with me, I don't want any beating around the bush. Here are my three main question and a synopsis of her answers:

1. Why these bad headaches now? Headache or Migraine is a disease just like Type 1 Diabetes or high blood pressure. You have had this disease all along, your body just decided it was time for it to show up big time.

2. Will I take this medicine for the rest of my life? Yes. Most likely, again Migraine is a disease just like you would keep taking blood pressure or insulin you will most likely keep taking meds for your disease indefinitely.

3. Will I ever be able to drink a Diet Coke again? Don't tell Dr. Herzog I told you this but yes, you will once your medicine gets your headaches more controlled. :)

And you know I feel really peaceful about what she had to say. I think it was because I've seen improvement in the last few weeks and with an increase in my medicine it can only get better. As long as I don't have any unrealistic expectations about these headaches just disappearing, that it's really out of my control, it's a disease not something I am or am not doing that is making my head hurt, I feel OK about taking a couple of pills a day to keep from hurting. I still believe God can heal. I'm still on the Headache diet, I'm OK with that too. It's not going to be forever, I can do anything for a little while.

Trip to Abilene

The kids and I took a Spring Break trip to Abilene last week, Mere, Blake, Robin, Linda and Reegan met us there! We took the kids to the park, went shopping, visited, the kids rode big wheel tricycles. They were completely worn out by the end of the day. Reegan was so cute with her curly hair and wanting to be a big girl like Laine. Bowen was just Bowen, most of his time was spent making sure Blake didn't get his toys (he is such a toot).

Happy, Happy, Happy!!!

As you can see Laine lost her first tooth over Spring Break! She still looks in the mirror and exclaims how excited she is that she lost her first tooth! I think it made her look even cuter if I do say so myself...

Happy Birthday Baby! Or Jonathan sure is Old now!

Today marks 36 years for Jonathan Ryan, that means in 8 days I will be 34. We celebrated last night at Central Market with Meredith, Ryan and Blake and our friends the Reinkes. I surprised Jonathan with a totally cool leather ithacus (fish, is that even the right word?) bracelet from James Avery, it's a man's bracelet I promise! Today we had Birthday lunch at Jason's Deli and will end up having cupcakes with our small group tonight at View 242 worship.

To further celebrate my favorite husband here are some things I love about him:

he can always make me laugh

he smells good

he has made some major sacrifices for our family

he is a great player with our kids

his spirituality has grown leaps and bounds and not just up, out of the box too! I love that!

he's not scared of hard work

he thinks I'm hot

we have the same views on the importance of family

As you can see I have a pretty great guy!

I have lots of stuff to post about! We had a great Spring Break!

Just a couple of Random things:

1. Since I've changed my diet I've become more aware of extra "stuff" that is put into our food. Now I'm now going to go all health nutty on you but in addition to my current diet changes I've decided to switch to Organic Milk. I felt God talking to me the other day about what is going into my kids' bodies and one thing I can switch is milk.

2. Today in church we were sitting down singing a song about standing in front of God. I can't remember which one it was now, but my natural inclination is when you sing about standing in Awe or rising up is to actually stand or rise...that's what I did. I didn't even think twice about it. I happen to glance around, I am the only one in the auditorium standing up. Come on people, you are worshiping GOD! The song is saying STAND, finally, on the second round some others joined me. I wasn't embarrassed, just amazed that no one else felt the urge to worship like the song said.

Putting our best foot forward

Let me start off by saying, this Spring Break is already better than last year by about 1,ooo% since we're not at home with Bowen helping him recover from having his tonsils and adenoids removed. I think poking myself in the eye would be a better Spring Break than that.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from the district that the Stars were doing a Teacher Appreciation night and we could get tickets half price, awesome, I got my order in for the cheap seats of course. I received conformation from the guy that handles the special events that my tickets would be at Will Call and gave me a reference number in case my tickets weren't there at the window.

Fast Forward to last night. We rode the train over to Dallas got to the AA center extra early and made our way over to Will Call to get our tickets. Of course we went the wrong way and it took us forever to get over there. I walked to the window and gave the lady my ID and my name. She didn't have my tickets. Thankfully, I had my handy dandy reference number. She left with it and was gone for a few minutes. I wasn't worried, I just didn't know what the hold up was. All of a sudden she walks up with my tickets, and we were on our way! I looked at the tickets and this is what I saw:

OK section 220. Right. So we head to section 220, we notice that we're on the floor that has the really nice seats on it, and we show our tickets to a employee who points us off in a general direction. We see we're by the box seats and we conclude we are definitely in the WRONG place. So we take the escalator up a level and walk down a ways and go back down to see if we can get to section 220, the cheap seats because we totally don't belong with the nice seat people. Well we wind up right where we were the first time. That's when I take a closer look at our tickets:

DO you see the price tag on that ticket? Do you ????? That is exactly $100 more than I paid for it. And there were three more of those ! People pay that much for tickets! So we really were in the right place. In situations like that, my motto is just pretend like you know what you're doing. So we marched through the fancy restaurant. We found our black curtain, the nice lady held it open for us. We found our seats, they had programs on them already. We even had our own waitress. It was too much fun!

Sensitive

Today I had one of those days where I spent most of the day dusting feelings off my shoulder. Normally, I don't have issues with hurting feeling and needing to deflect them. But today was one of those days. A comment about the clothes I wear to school for my job mixed with my jewelry, actually a whole conversation about me and my clothes and my jewelry. My jewelry is cute, my clothes are what I wear for my job, I put them together and make them cute. And it wasn't even a bad or mean spirited comment, it just hit me the wrong way. Then it was feeling weird at a baby shower at a cross town school. Then it was thinking about some changes happening at my school and how it was making some people feel worried. And people who did not ask me about my ENT appointment that I had yesterday even though I had probably talked about it way too much in the days before. All this stuff usually rolls right off my back but today it stuck and hurt my feelings. I don't like having hurt feelings.

Speaking of my ENT appointment, it was not what I was hoping for. I was hoping for a quick fix! I was hoping the Doctor would look at the CT scan and exclaim "jeez, look at that HUGE cyst! We must remove that thing at once and your headaches will be gone for good!" Instead, the cyst was wimpy and as an added bonus I have a deviated septum! Oh JOY! So the dude only added to my list of issues, I don't think that's allowed at this point, subtracting only please.

Besides all that downer stuff, my head has really felt lots better the last few days! That really makes me happy! Getting my hair cut tomorrow makes me happy and my birthday coming up in a couple of weeks also makes me happy! So. I'm done with hurt feeling I just needed to get that out and over with...Oh and Spring Break makes me EXTRA happy.

Weekend in Big J

We had a great weekend in Jasper, they always go by too quickly though! As usual, Jonathan and Justin stirred up some fun by making a sled out of plywood, an old plastic pool and a rug. A sled not to be used in snow obvoisely but to be pulled behind a 4 wheeler of course!



I had a great time talking to Leslie about wedding stuff, I'm SO happy to have someone to hang out with and talk to when we go down to visit now, it's super great! Leslie told me I I needed to step it up on the blogging (not in those words so much, but you know) so here I am!



I got my MRI results back on Thursday! I know it took for-ever. My biggest fear was that they were going to call after that much time and say, "Ms. Williams, everything on your MRI looks great, no problems, we'll see you at your follow up appoinment". Because that would mean my head would be hurting for some nebulous reason still. That, however, was not the case. It seems I have a Maxillary Retention Cyst. It's a cyst in one of my sinuses that COULD be causing my headaches. I'm going to an ENT on Wednesday to get a CT scan and meet with the Doctor to see if that might be the case. If it is then I might have sinus surgery and my headaches might be cured! I'm feeling really hopeful...



I will leave you with some pictures from the 4 wheeling adventure:


NEVER MIND! STUPID BLOGGER WON'T LET ME UPLOAD PICTURES AAACK

Haircut City!

BEFORE:

ANOTHER BEFORE: note the dazed and spaced look in Bowen's eyes in all these pictures, he's not even taking any medicine right now.

DURING: Jonathan has been cutting his own hair for about 8 years now. Bowen looked like a ragmuffin and I was tired of paying too much money for a so-so hair cut just so he could watch TV while they were chopping his locks. Voila, home haircut!

AFTER: Now, he's stylin'! Still looking spacy, not on meds.

BTW, if you live near a Papas Burgers, right now Tuesday nights they have the basic Papas burger 1/2 price! Our whole family ate there tonight for less than $15!!!