House of Barney

About nine months ago a dear friend of mine commented that I hadn’t posted our traditional, year-end family-life review. Until she mentioned it I hadn’t even thought of posting anything. That would be because 2017 hit us like a truck. :]

It started off good enough. I jumped into my yearly health goal with gusto, lost 10 pounds, and radically improved my diet and exercise habits. Kyle decided to run for Logan city mayor, on top of pushing his business forward (where he managed to attract a couple of clients.) I decided to quit my job. And then things got a little rocky.

First, around the end of July, we got a match for our adoption. We were thrilled! But after reviewing the medical records, we didn’t feel equipped to cope with all the life-long medical concerns of the individual involved. Making that decision was really tough for us. Then Kyle’s biggest client left him, and we decided it was time for him to work for somebody else for a while, maybe building up the business on the side until it was more stable. So we started that lovely process of applying. And applying… and applying some more.

In the meantime, Kyle campaigned. And guys, I was super proud of how well he did. There is no doubt about it, he rocked every debate. (If you’d like to see the debate or read some of the comments about it, check it out here. The mayoral candidates are introduced about 55 minutes in.) Unfortunately, in the end he didn’t make it past the primaries. I think a part of him was relieved that it was over. A big part of the reason he ran was to make the powers-that-be address the issues we care most about (mostly traffic and city planning issues.) He was widely successful there. If he hadn’t been in those debates the problems on our main street would not have even come up. By the end, the mayoral candidates had debated constantly on the topic, and even some of the the city council candidates had taken up the issue with determination. But it is always uncomfortable to try something (especially something so public) and fail.

On top of that experience, about a week before Halloween, I “sprained” my ankle. At least, I thought it was a sprain. I knew it wasn’t broken. But I couldn’t walk. At first I was literally crawling around the house. It seemed to improve, and I was hopeful, but I also started having odd episodes that unnerved me. I later discovered that I hadn’t just sprained my ankle. I had torn straight through two of my ligaments and a little bit of my peroneal tendon. My ankle joint was so unstable that my tendon would not stay in place. It dislocated everyday, multiple times (those were the episodes I mentioned.) So, I couldn’t walk or stand for more than an hour a day. I could walk on uneven ground. I couldn’t go down stairs. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t sleep on my left side. I couldn’t put on my shoes… I could go on, but I think you got the point.

By the end of 2017 I had finally found a doctor that knew what to do for me (I went through 3 before that.) I had an MRI scheduled and faced a surgery to repair my tendon and ligaments, and to dig a trench in the bone behind my ankle to keep my tendon in place in the future. (Most people are born with that dip in their bone, but, lucky me, I wasn’t.) Kyle had sent out more than 50 applications. He had interviewed at least 3 time with 6 different employers, but he still hadn’t received any offers.

SOOOO now you know why I hadn’t even thought about posting a review of our year. I couldn’t bare to sit at my computer, let alone stand up and walk to it. Plus, I knew anything I wrote would end on a pretty dark note. So, now, a year later, I can tell you the rest of the story!

The year started off really great when Kyle got a job. This was a big relief. He has a bachelors and masters, but his experience working in that field was negative. He didn’t want to go back there, and he could hardly find a job that paid enough to make it feasible for our family anyway. So he wanted to change career paths and go into software development, but he had no formal education in that arena, and most of his portfolio was built while he worked for himself. In this sense, any job offer in software development would have been a huge blessing. But the blessings didn’t stop there. The job was in Providence, Utah (about 10 minutes from our apartment) and thus would not require us to move. This was a big deal because, as I mentioned before, I couldn’t walk. Of the many jobs he’d applied for, less than 10 were even in Utah. The new job also started about a week before my surgery, which meant that Kyle was able to be home all the time for 3 of the 4 months that I was incapacitated. So I suppose that even the 6 month delay before Kyle’s offer came through ended up being a blessing for us.

And while I’m in the midst of counting blessings, I better list a few more. What a miracle modern medicine is. If I had suffered the same injury at any other point in the history of the Earth I would have been crippled for the rest of my life. And how glad I am that both of my kids are old enough to get around without being carried. In fact, William learned to make lunch for himself and his sister, and do several other jobs for me while I was trapped on the couch. One morning I woke up to find him switching out my ice pack for a fresh one, and bringing me the bottle of Ibuprofen. Pretty remarkable for a little 4-year-old boy.

Anyway, after Kyle’s job offer came through lots of things began falling into place. Kyle and I had both submitted designs to different computer program design competitions and both of us won first place (Kyle’s and Ashley’s). I was notified that I won first place on the day of my surgery, which must have been a pretty lucky day, because my surgery went well too. We decided that we wanted to build a house, and in the weeks right before Kyle’s new job began we were able to find a builder and get all of our selections completed.

Within 6 months of beginning his new job, Kyle was promoted to be his development team’s lead developer. The company had been acquired, and things seemed to be going south, but thanks to the promotion, he was able to land a new job as a senior developer at Malouf. He just started this new position at the beginning of November. And that my friends, is how my husband  jumped from a self-taught developer to a senior developer in 10 months.

As I said before, my surgery went well. I was in a non-weight-baring cast for 3 weeks and a boot for three weeks after that, and then I started physical therapy. Turns out when you don’t walk for 5 months you need a LOT of therapy. It has all gone smoothly, however, and I’m happy to report that my ankles are now the same size and the same color. The doctor said not to worry too much about weakness or pain until after the 1-year anniversary of my surgery. I still have a little recovery left, but I’m very much on track.

We moved into our new house at the end of October and we are so excited to be here. We ended up around the corner from my parent’s house, and everybody is really happy about that.

William started kindergarten at the same charter school that his uncle attends. He loves school (mostly recess) and excels in his quarterly dramatic poem recitations. (Humpty Dumpty was a huge hit.) Genna is 3, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She loves to play with her brother and her uncle, and has developed a very warrior-princess personality. She does her best to do everything her brother does, including poem recitation. The two of them are on a solemn quest to destroy our new house as fast as their destructive imaginations can carry them.

I haven’t done much work on gospelprompt.com since my ankle was injured. I’ve written a couple blogs and organized a few new courses, but none of it has been posted. I

hope to  recommence

my work there soon. My sister-in-law and I

have started a new blog together called

Domestic Velocity, geared towards making home-life more adventurous. We have only been working on it for a month or so. Check it out if you have a moment.

Kyle and I are so glad to be ending this year on a happier, and less stressful note. We are so glad for all the friends and family that cheered us on and helped us out last year. We hope you all have a marvelous Christmas season.

Love,

Ashley, Kyle, Will, and Genna

I love our house. I love almost everything about our house. Some people might think that it’s too small, but I think it’s the perfect size: big enough to hold what you need with a little creativity. 

I was at Home Depot today, looking for space-saving stuff when I came across a display of plastic shelving units on sale. They had one set up, and I could see that it was sturdy enough and the right size for a project I’ve had in mind. It was time to organize the storage closet. 

For some time now our storage closet has been the dumping ground for project leftovers, luggage, storage bins, and boxes… A LOT of boxes. Things had gotten a little out of hand. Our storage closet looked like something straight out of the show, “Hoarders”.

  
See what I mean? No excuses. It got this bad. 

  
The room is so small and the mound of stuff so big that I couldn’t actually photograph it all in one shot. Pathetic. 

But, never fear guys, the situation has been handled. Thanks to my cheap storage container there is peace in the storage closet once more. 

Okay, so it’s still just a mound of junk, but it is an organized mound of junk. Next stop, the mast bedroom closet!

We had a wonderful summer packed full of fun things.

I enjoyed the end of a healthy pregnancy.

 
Kyle and I finished the paperwork for our up-and-coming adoption.

  
We grew a garden that was largely neglected due to the fact that I was pregnant, but still managed to produce tomatillos, tomatoes, pumpkins, teeny-tiny onions, potatoes, a bunch of blueberries, one peach,

  
one apricot, and the biggest blackberries I’ve ever seen.

  
We planned and planned and didn’t finish putting in a fence.

And most of all we sat back and let William entertain us. Two-year-olds are so very entertaining.

  
We watched him run his bubble lawnmower (known to him as the “bubble truck”) into the ground. I think he put several hundred miles on that thing before it got sand in it and stopped blowing bubbles properly.

  
We watched him play with cars. Everyday. All day. Lining cars up here, lining cars up there.

  
We watched him discover the glory of bounce houses. He now asks us to take him to the bounce house regularly.

  
We’ve watched him learn to play games, and start to take risks… sometimes leading to injury.

  
  
We’ve watched him gravitate towards books. We’ve gone to the library at least once a week, and I think he’s come to the special place where he knows how to treat a library book… at least when Mama’s in the room.

  
We took him swimming for the first time, and we went swimming at the neighbors a couple of times. Here he is at Libby’s swimming birthday party. He was lovin’ on a cupcake.

  
We went to the park. Here he is, ready to catch me at the bottom of the slide.

  
We’ve watched him imitate our every move. Most recently this includes expanding his vocabulary to include “shoot,” “gosh,” and “Holy Cow.” It also includes wearing our shoes, and getting dressed up in a tie just like daddy’s for church.

  
  
  
We’ve potty trained. I was surprised to see what an exciting and joyful experience this can be in the eyes of a child. I guess all children enjoy growing up.

Today is the day Baby Genevieve was supposed to be born. Due October 11th. A fitting day to post about the day she was actually born, no?

By 36 weeks I was dilated to a 3 and thinned, just like my pregnancy with William. And just like last time the doctor said, “We’ll see if you can make it to the next appointment.”

But this time, see, I was one child wiser.

Last time I soaked up all that talk and let it make the next three weeks drag onnnnn anddddd onnnnnnnnnn andddddddd onnnnnnnnnn. This time I wasn’t going to let that happen. I smiled and shrugged and thought to myself, “I’m not due for 3 weeks.”

Guess the joke’s on me.

Less than a week later I woke up at 1:45 a.m. to my water breaking. I hadn’t finished packing my hospital bag. I had no plans set for what Kyle and I would do with our two-year-old when I went into labor. So I wasted an hour pacing around our house trying to get a hold of my parents, picking up crap I knew we’d need, and trying to think in between contractions about what to do with my son. Unfortunately, my contractions were so close together there wasn’t much time for thinking. Finally, we just packed William and everything else up in the car and took it all with us to the hospital. Lucky for us, William is a golden two-year-old and also happened to wake up in a really good mood.

We arrived at the hospital a little before three. The nurses at the front desk must have been able to tell that I was really, super in labor because they skipped pretty much all of the check in stuff except my name and birthday. Boy was I glad.

They got me into a hospital room, gown, and bed, and by that point I was at a 5+. The nurse suggested I get an epidural right away  if I wanted one, since my contractions were already so close together that I’d already have to hold perfectly still through one while the epidural was placed. I concurred. At this point I was having pretty awesome contractions, but they were still small enough I knew I could hold still. At this point the nurses started trying to contact my doctor.

As soon as the epidural was placed I could feel it starting to work in one of my feet and they had me lay down on the other side to encourage it to go numb as well. Literally as soon as I laid down I was broadsided by the absolute worst contraction I had ever felt. Holy cow it hurt. Apparently I had basically jumped from a 5 to a 10. Up till this point the nurses were still rather frantically trying to get a hold of my doctor. To my relief, once the nurse in my room declared me complete the nurse at the desk said the doctor was on his way. He made it to my delivery room a few minutes later, about 4 a.m., and 15 minutes after that the baby had arrived. My epidural kicked in full force right before he arrived (thank heaven). I was med-free long enough to feel the legendary “urge to push” before going wonderfully numb, but I didn’t have to go through the bone-crunching pain of delivery itself.

Throughout this whole episode William sat happily on the couch in the delivery room, eating goldfish, coloring in his coloring book, and generally being his happy, content, little self. As they wheeled me out of labor and delivery he tried to hijack my hospital bed and take me for a spin down the hall. All the nurses were charmed to death and commented that he had done remarkably well. I guess that is the upside of delivering a baby in an hour… nobody has time to get into much trouble.

Genevieve was born healthy. She cried and cried afterward and I got to hold her right away. That was something I didn’t get after William’s delivery. I’m not sure what exactly made the doctors worry about William once he was born, but I don’t remember him crying for more than a minute, and they had to whisk him off to the NICU pretty quickly. I was happy to hear the cries. William wasn’t so sure that it was a good thing. For days afterward anytime someone would ask him about his new sister he would say, “She’s soooo sad!”

On top of that, I also had an amazingly fast recovery. I spent the next day in the hospital watching “Say Yes to the Dress” with my brand new baby girl. I went home half a day early. I didn’t want to spend another night away from Kyle. I was sore for a couple days, but after a week I was pretty much back to normal.

Baby Genna has been a gem. She gets fussy from about 11-1 at night, but otherwise she is happy, a good sleeper, and a good eater. She was born with a ton of grayish-blonde hair that the nurses all swooned over. My sister got to meet her first niece before reporting to the MTC. And, most importantly, Genevieve was healthy enough to come home with me. I got all my wishes.

Note for next time: Don’t dawdle on the way to the hospital. Looks like this is going to be more of a sprint and less of a marathon in the future.