Happy New Year!

Well, 2008 is finally here and the hoopla of the holidays is over. I spent all day taking down my Christmas decorations and beginning to get my house back to normal.

My health finally feels like it’s getting back to normal as well – today is the first day that I haven’t been in pain since pretty much Thanksgiving (maybe my body was protesting the hectic holiday season up until now – not really sure).

I mentioned that I went to the E/R a few weeks ago…it appears that I am having some kidney issues. I have some stones and cysts on my kidneys that appeared on a CT scan I had while at the hospital. I also have had blood in my urine consistently during this whole medical issue (too much info, I know – but I thought that someone else reading this may be going through the same thing!). I also have some sort of growth on my adrenal gland – they are actually quite common and are usually not a problem.

So up until pretty much today, I have been in a great deal of pain, especially in my lower back. I haven’t been able to sleep or pretty much do anything other than just wait for the pain to go away. And for a type A personality like me, IT’S DRIVING ME NUTS!!!!

After my visit to the E/R, I saw a urologist. Now, for those who have never been to a urologist, you don’t know what you’re missing! Let me set the scene…in the waiting room it was just me…….and about 15 men between the ages of 65-95. I walked into the examining room (after two hours in the waiting room – apparently, this is a normal thing at the urologist. Oh – and I had to see the nurse practitioner because the doctors had no available appointments until FEBRUARY!) and all over the room were large diagrams of the prostate and the male anatomy. That must be how a man feels when he goes with his wife to the OB/GYN!

Anyway…the nurse practitioner (who looked to be about Andrew’s age) wanted me to have another CT scan with I/V contrast to get a better picture of exactly what’s going on. And that’s what I did yesterday – what a great way to spend New Year’s Eve.

But the good news is that today I feel a little better. Not sure why, but I’m just glad that I do. I’ll post when I get the results of all my tests.

So enough about that – I also wanted to try something new on my blog this year. I saw on Bridget Maloney’s blog (thanks for the idea, Bridget – hope you’re doing well!) the idea of taking one photo every day for a year. Just some random photo for the day – people I’ve met, things I’ve done, places I’ve gone…or just the mundane – what’s in my purse, what I had for lunch…just a little photo journal for the year. There may or may not be much journaling along with the photo – it will depend on what it is and how much time I have, I guess.

So here’s my photo for today:

And here’s the story – after taking down all the decorations (a tradition for me – I always take them down on New Year’s Day…there’s a story that goes along with that – maybe I’ll share that in another post), Emily insisted that we make a gingerbread house today. She received a gingerbread house kit for Christmas we just hadn’t had a chance to make it.

So…I dragged out the electric mixer and we whipped up the icing. This is not the first gingerbread house I’ve made from a kit – and every time I do, I run into the same problem (yet I’m not smart enough to think ahead to do something to actually FIX the problem) – the icing always turns out too thick and dries too fast. So while Mike was holding up the walls and roof with both hands and possibly a foot, I abandoned the pastry bag that came with the kit (I was squeezing it so hard, I thought it was going to explode and we’d have icing all over the kitchen) and scrambled to get the icing on the walls any way I could. I started with a knife, but the pressure caused the walls to collapse. Then I moved on to just spreading it with my fingers, but more of the icing stuck to my fingers than to the walls.

After about 30 minutes of this, we managed to get a house that could kind of stand up on its own. Then we just took the remaining icing and slopped it on the roof so poor Emily could at least stick some candies on. And that she did. You can see our poorly constructed house in the photo.

The other thing you can see in the photo is that as poor as our gingerbread house construction skills were, Emily was just as happy licking the icing (dried to a cement-like consistency at this point) from the bowl as she would have been with a house that looked like the one on the box. Thanks, Emily, for saying that our house looked (and tasted) good!