My happy little world that I have created

I have created this wonderful blogworld that I live in and that I am able to control. I can tell you about my messy house, but make sure to only post pictures of it when it is clean. I describe my girl's messy bedroom but conveniently leave it to your imaginations. I can assure you that it really is very messy, but in your minds you are thinking otherwise. And I love my blogworld. I like pretending that my house is always clean. I like it when you think that my house is always clean. I WISH that my house really was clean. I think I was pretty successful at keeping it fairly decent, until baby number three came into our lives. Now, I depend on my blogworld to keep me sane in all the mess. This works well until I receive comments both on my blog and in person, telling me that they wanted to see the girl's messy room. So for your viewing pleasure I give you Kylie and Sadie's room, less than 24 hours after the last pictures were taken.

I hope that you are all happy forcing me out of my happy little existence and back into reality.

One vs. the Other

Why does it take ten times as long to clean Kylie and Sadie's room as it does Brynlie's? The answer to this question lies in an examination of their rooms on a typical day.

In Brynlie's room you may find several toys, a stack of books, some dirty clothes, a couple of blankets, and maybe even a diaper or two.

In Kylie and Sadie's room there are clean clothes that haven't even been unfolded but were in the way of other clothes in the drawers, clean clothes that were worn for less than a minute, clean clothes that were only worn long enough for the wearer's mood to change, semi-clean clothes that were worn for only a few hours, semi-clean pants that had to be taken off when wearing a dress, dirty clothes that were worn to school, dirty clothes that are only dirty because something was spilled on them 5 minutes after they were put on, peed on panties hiding in the corner, panties that weren't "fresh" enough, socks that got wet when walking in the bathroom after bath time, socks that were no longer needed now that toes were warm, clean dress up clothes, dirty dress up clothes, clean church dresses that were only worn long enough for mom to yell at the wearer to take off the church dress, wrinkled church dresses that were bumped off the hanger while others dresses were pulled down, dirty church dresses that were worn while mom wasn't looking, dress up clothes that were pulled down from the bag of clothes that the girls were grounded from and wait...what it this? There is stuff UNDER all the clothes?!!

Murder? Really?

Kylie brought me her latest reading book from school tonight and this is what it was called...

I must have missed this lesson in school.

Christmas Tree

I made it almost 24 hours before Brynlie broke her first ornament!

Merrell Family Pictures

Kristi just posted several more family pictures from last month. Check them out here!

Brynlie's Quirks

Brynlie has discovered that she likes to sleep with her feet hanging out of her crib.

Miss Me?

I am sorry about the long absence...it has been a busy couple of weeks. Vince is working on making our computer faster so I had to save all of our pictures on discs so that he could wipe the computer clean and install more RAM. That was a much bigger chore than I thought it would be. But I am so glad that all of our pictures are now safely preserved on discs should our computer decide to fail us. (Tangent...a few years back my mom asked for some pictures of the girls for a scrapbook she was working on. I was lazy and thought it would be easier to put all our pictures on discs for her instead of going through them and finding ones for her. Less than a week after doing this our computer crashed and we lost everything. If she hadn't asked me for those pictures we would have lost ALL of them. And I would still be crying. Now go, and save your pictures right now!!! My blog will be here to read when you are done.)

My other reason for not blogging is because we have had a houseful of sick children, with Brynlie ending up in the instacare THREE times in one week, plus a visit to our pediatrician. Kylie got sick a couple of weeks ago and she never gets sick so I knew it was bad. A week later I was sure that Sadie and Brynlie were going to miss this bug when they both were up all night coughing. So much for them missing the bug. Sadie wasn't too terribly sick, but Brynlie started wheezing and had a hard time breathing. It escalated quickly enough that I had to run her to the instacare late Monday afternoon. Here she is waiting in the doctor's office. The picture isn't important, just listen to her trying to breathe!

After two treatments with the nebulizer and x-rays to make sure it wasn't in her lungs they sent us home saying I needed to see her pediatrician the next day or else come back to the instacare. I was also told to not hesitate to take her to the ER if it got bad during the night. I still haven't paid my $350 bill for her stitches so I really didn't like that idea. It didn't get better that evening and started to get worse. So, about 9:30 we took her back to the instacare and they gave her another nebulizer treatment. The next day we saw our pediatrician who was concerned that she wasn't better than she was after the treatments and steroids. He prescribed an inhaler and said to come back the next day if she wasn't doing better. Wednesday and Thursday she improved and I thought we were done until she woke up Friday morning wheezing again. By Friday afternoon I was getting worried and called her pediatrician to find him out of town until TUESDAY. Of course...so back to the instacare we went. The doctor explained that she has bronchiolitis, similar to bronchitis, but the congestion is in the bronchioles. It was caused by a virus, mostly likely RSV, and she just needs to get all that mucus to loosen up. For a baby this is difficult since they don't fully understand coughing yet, and because their bronchioles are very tiny and tight. She is still wheezing badly enough that I skipped church today, but is slowly improving. We are running the humidifier 24/7 and she is taking lots of steamy baths and showers. The first few days with the inhaler were awful. I would have to sit on top of her so that I could pin her arms to her sides while I held it over her mouth. Today she has started to accept that this has to happen and it will be over quickly so she usually will do it willingly for the first couple of breaths. I do have to hold her hands down for the last few, but we are making huge progress!