Happy 50th Birthday Toni!

This week we celebrated Toni's 50th birthday! Considering she had just turned 29 right before we met, the fact that we're celebrating her 50th birthday is unbelievable. We had a great day celebrating. We took her to Demo's Greek for lunch and then went to the mall and spent time together. Later in the day we went to Sea World and walked around for a while and enjoyed the Halloween party. Yesterday we continued celebrating by going to the pumpkin patch. We hadn't gone out there in a couple years because of Covid and it was nice to get back out. After that, we went to the community park in the neighborhood and setup the projector and watched Casper. Several of Caitlin and Emma's friends from school were there and they seemed to have fun playing, watching the movie and having pizza. I hope with it getting darker earlier that we'll be able to start watching movies in the back yard soon. The other thing to report this week is that Caitlin got her braces off! I think she looks beautiful with or without them. Surprisingly, she wasn't very excited to be getting them off. She said she liked having them. We'll see if she changes her mind as time goes on. I am glad we were able to have fun for Toni's birthday and I look forward to celebrating many more with her. 

 

Sad News...

 This morning I got up only to see a post that broke my heart. My friend Mike's mom Jean had passed away. I've known Mike for nearly 40 years now. His mother was like a second Mother to me growing up. I'm glad that I was able to see her and her husband several years ago on a couple trips we had taken back in 2003 and 2005. The pictures this week are from the 2003 trip. We had a great visit with them going to lunch and driving around visiting the Air Force Base I grew up on. A couple of years ago, Jean got on Facebook and I really enjoyed seeing her posts. She looked like she was enjoying her life and that always made me smile. Even though I hadn't seen her in a long time, I will still miss her. I have great memories of her.

This week I was on call and thankfully everything was quiet for the most part with the exception of Friday night. Toni and the girls went to Sea World on Friday and they had a great time. Toni is recovering ok from her surgery. She still has pain but is at least improving. 

Recovering

 

This week Toni continued her recovery. She's still having pain but at least she seems to be improving a little bit every day. She stayed home all week and worked from home a couple of days. She's going to go back to work tomorrow and she has her first followup appointment with the Doctor. Yesterday I mowed the lawn and then we power washed part of the back patio. It came out nice and I hope we can finish it off soon. This week Emma also got into wrist watches. Specifically Casio watches. She bought herself a Casio calculator watch. I've always loved digital Casio's and it's cool to share it with her. This week I'm on call but hopefully it'll be quiet. 

Gallbladder Surgery

 

This week was a busy one. On Tuesday we went to see the Specialist for Toni and got everything setup for surgery. Thursday morning we got up around 4:15 and took Toni to the surgery center around 6:00AM. The surgery went smooth and there were no issues. The Doctor said there was a stone around the size of his thumbnail! Toni got checked out and we were home around noon. She's doing ok but what having a good amount of pain. She's moving around ok now but may not go back to work for a couple more days. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers! It's crazy to me how quickly this last week changed everything. We went from going along happily to having surgery in less than a week. It's been crazy and makes me want to appreciate the good times even more. Hopefully this week Toni will continue to improve and she'll be feeling good by her birthday! 

Tonipalooza!

 

So "Tonipalooza" otherwise known as the month long birthday celebration for Toni isn't off to the best of starts. On Saturday Toni had some quality time with the girls watching movies and then spent some time at Sea World together. They had a great day together. I was tired from the week before and spent the day catching up on sleep. Then came Sunday... At around 6:00 Toni woke me up saying that she was having bad pains in her stomach. She had taken some heartburn medicine but it hadn't made a difference. I took her to the Texas Medclinic and they checked her over and decided that where the pain was, it was probably her gallbladder. They gave her a shot for the pain which didn't help much and scheduled a scan for her at an imaging center. We went to the imaging place a few hours later and then on the way home the Doctor called back and said that the scans showed that her gallbladder is "full of stones". She's going to call her Doctor today and schedule to have it removed. The one positive for her was that the pushing they did during the scan must have moved the stones enough that they stopped hurting her. This week should be busy as we're hoping she can get in for surgery soon. This is definitely not how we wanted to end her 40's.. Needless to say, there are going to be a lot of changes around here. We're going to change how we eat and definitely start getting more exercise. We started last night by me making lobster tail for the first time. I had never cooked it or even eaten it before but it came out really good and tasted great! Hopefully next week's post I'll have good news about Toni's health. Take care everyone!