A little guilty feeling!

Everything started last Friday. When I picked Adriana up from school, my mom was with me so she was super excited. The kids all went over to my mom's house while I had to take my dog up to the vet for her monthly allergy infection she gets. When I came back my mom offered to take all of us out to eat since Chris was out of town hunting for the weekend. Of course I took her up on it, who could pass up a free dinner for my family! So while we were eating, Adriana started complaining that her head was hurting. Thinking she just had a headache, I gave her some tylenol thinking it would help. Later that night I picked up my nephew and headed to the DJ skate at the Rec Plex with my older two kids while my mom and dad watched Joey. The kids had a blast then I picked up Joey and headed to get ice cream before dropping my nephew off at home. Adriana started saying she was really cold. I just assumed it was from the ice cream and ice skating so I gave her a blanket to cover herself up. I get home and the three of my kids are passed out in the car. I carrying them each in and notice Adriana is feeling a little warm to me. I wake her up to take her temperature and she has a 100 degree temp and says her head still hurts. She usually gets a bad headache the night before she gets strep so this is what I'm thinking she is going to have. I call my sister up and give her the warning and hope that Jacob doesn't get it too. I give Adriana some motrin and rub her back until she is back to sleep. The next morning I wake up getting ready to call the doctor for Adriana. Well the fever broke and she is fine again. So we stay home most of the day and begin putting up some Christmas decorations around the inside of the house as well as lights on the deck (I don't want my neighbors to think I'm completely crazy so I hold off on putting the lights on the front of the house). Sunday rolls around and she is still acting fine so we are about to head out for her last soccer game when Chris calls and says its downpouring in Troy so the game is probably cancelled. We decide not to go and later get the call that they still had the game but quit early because the girls were soaked and freezing cold (glad I didn't head out there!). Monday comes around and Adriana says her throat is huring in the morning. I take her temperature and she has no fever. I assume its sore from the dry air in the house and send her off to school. Monday night she has the chills again and I find her rolled up in a ball with her blanket covering her whole body including her head. I pull the blanket off and she is feeling warm again to me. I take her temperature and she has a 99.5 degree temp. I keep her home from school on Tuesday and end up taking Joey to the doctor for his sinus infection that he has. Adriana is acting fine all day and never has another temperature nor shows any sign of being sick at all. Through out the week she spends many nights coughing a lot and complains every once in awhile about her throat hurting. I send her to school the rest of the week since she has not temperature and nothing that seems to make me think she needs to stay home. Well last night I started in with the same symptoms. My head starts hurting really bad, not a migraine but a very annoying, painful headache. Then I wake up in the night freezing cold and unable to warm myself back up. I take my temperature and I have a 100 degree temp. I've been coughing a bunch too and have a bad sore throat. I mention this to my sister and she told me that these were the symptoms of the swine flu. I look up the symptoms for it and sure enough......fever, headache, sore throat, cough, aches, chills, and runny nose. Adriana had all of the symptoms yet I sent her to school and soccer practice on Wed. I talked to the nurse at the doctors office this morning and she said that is sounds like she probably did have it. Being worried about the younger two, I asked what I should do if they get it. The nurse said that most kids bounce back quickly and handle it pretty much like Adriana did. They are not contagious once they are fever free for 24 hours so that answered my worries about Thanksgiving since this is the first year it will be at my house. But I still felt very guilty about Adriana! If she did indead have the swine flu she handled it like a champ! Just hoping she didn't spread it to any of the kiddos at school!

Congrats!

I want to send out a special congratulations to my little brother and his wife who are pregnant with their first baby and due June 1st! I am so excited to be an aunt again and cannot wait to meet the newest member of our family! Congrats again Jenny and Kevin, I know you will be great parents!

Successful hunting weekend!

Chris,my brother, my cousin, and my little cousin all headed up to our farm for another weekend of hunting. It turned out to be quite successful for Chris. He shot an 8 point buck early Sat. morning and a doe on Sunday morning. My little cousin, Colton, also shot a very nice 8 point buck that he was getting mounted.
Chris was able to come home early on Sunday to process up his meat (he does it himself and saves us lots of money!). I told him he had to do it at his parents house because I can't stand the site of the deer being cut up. So of course Andrew had to go with him and Chris said he stood by him the whole time helping him cut up the meat. I guess I will have another generation of hunters in my family!
It was funny too on Sat. listening to Adriana explain to my parents why it is important for Daddy to go deer hunting. I guess he has been working on her awhile ;-)
So we have lots of meat to get us through the winter. I'm not a big fan of deer meat, but I do have lots of recipes I make where I can't taste the deer meat. Plus I remember how very low fat deer meat is compared to other meat and that helps out! So if you come over to my house this winter and eat any meat, you may want to ask what it is first.......just kidding!

Another good shopping trip!

I knew I had to go back to my thyroid doctor for a checkup and I would get a new prescription so I saved the $10 gift card for a new prescription coupon. Well I went in today and filled my 3 month supply for $10 and used the $10 gift card coupon. I don't usually buy my kids movies as we rent them from the library for free, but I happened to have a $10 off coupon for the movie up so I decided to go ahead and get it. Well the combo set came with the blu ray disk, the regular disk, and a journal (which Adriana has been wanting so she can start writing in it) for $19.99. So I decided to get it. I brought the movie up and gave them the $10 off coupon then used the $10 gift card I just got from my other coupon. The final price was $.73! Man I love coupon shopping!

Awesome shopping trip!

I always do my shopping after I get off work on Wednesday night so I can get a head start on the $10 off coupon Thursday at Shop n Save. This week was the best trip I have had. I went in very tired at 1:30am but armed with lots of coupons. So my lack of sleep made up for it all when I saved $75.76 and only spend a whopping $.85! I saved 99%!!!!!! This is what makes coupons all worth it! I had to take a picture to prove it as I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it! So here is the picture to prove my awesome trip! Now if it worked this good every week we would be doing awesome!

Happy Halloween!

I'm finally getting caught up on my Halloween pictures. We started Halloween getting dressed up and heading down to New Town St. Charles for a parade and trick or treating a little early.
Here is the three kids before heading out.

Adriana picked Tinkerbell to be this year. I think her blond hair made her the perfect fairy!
Andrew wanted to be Bumblebee Transformer. Not sure how he even knows about this guy since we have never seen a transformer movie before.

Joey was Mickey Mouse which has been a hand me down for several kids. He'll have to wait for next year to pick out his own costume, but he was very excited to be "me mouse" as he calls it.Here are the boys riding through New Town on the wagon. This is much easier than carrying them.That night we went trick or treating through the neigborhood. All the kids were super excited but the boys were really shy when the people would talk to them so they would never say trick or treat but Adriana was very into it and would tell jokes and everything.

Here is a picture of the kids walking up to a neighbors house.They only lasted about a half hour trick or treating then we headed home to hand out candy. I think the kids enjoyed this a lot more and were so excited every time someone came to our house.

After the kids spent the whole day eating nothing but candy, it came time to set all the candy out for the Halloween fairy to make into a special toy for each of the kids. This is the best way to get rid of all the extra candy that mamma would eat up ;-)

Halloween party at Andrew's school!

Thursday before Halloween Andrew's class had a Halloween party at school. Andrew was so excited about this that we left vacation early to make sure he made it to the party. All the moms came and helped out and we had a great party for the kids!
Here is Andrew and his buddy, Andrew, making each other into mummies.

Andrew and Andrew patiently waiting in line for their turn at the game.Andrew making his cookie.Andrew eating all the yummy food the moms brought!Here is the whole class eating their snack.Adriana got to come along too and help out with the kids. She really enjoyed being the big helper plus she got to dress up too!