Tagged again!

Four or more places I have lived~
Germany
Maryland
Hawaii
Washington
Four or more places I have been on vacation~
Maui
Italy
Austria
Switzerland
Four or more jobs I have had~
GNC
Lifeguard
Water Aerobics Instructor
Substitute Teacher (Yeah!!)
Four or more foods I like~ (more like types of food)
Indian
Thai
Mexican
Homemade stuff
Four or more hobbies~

Wow...I don't have a lot of hobbies!

Four or more things people probably don't know about me~
I'm incredibly cheap. I can't stand paying too much for anything. I get a certain amount of money reimbursed from our insurance while staying in Seattle and I still can't pay full price when I go to the grocery store.
I get super motion sick. Charlie and I did a shark adventure tour in Hawaii and I couldn't even pull myself away from the edge of the boat I was throwing up so much. I had to watch the sharks swim from the side of the deck where I lost all of my breakfast and some of my dinner from the night before! I threw up over thirty times!! Not exaggerating. It was still cool to see the sharks, but I have never been so sick in my entire life.
I don't like going anywhere alone. I have a small aversion to it for some reason. I'm not agoraphobic or anything, just prefer to have company. Especially at night or going on a jog where I can't have my cell phone. I've watched way too many CSIs ' to go out at night alone.
I love sports but I'm not especially great at any of them. Which is kind of embarrassing considering my degree is exercise and sport science. But I do love sports of all kinds.
Four things I would do If I were a billionaire~
Buy me and everyone of my family members a dream home. Build a couple homes in Europe too.
Fund research for cancer and rare diseases.
Open a shelter for homeless where they could go to build skills and develop an education.
Start some kind of organization for foster kids. I don't really know what, but I just think there are a lot of kids who need a good home and there aren't a lot of good homes anymore.

Scarlet Update

I'm a little behind in blogging. Sorry about that. Things have been going well so far outside the hospital. It's been so much fun staying at the Ronald McDonald house. We had Grandma Debbie come and stay for a little while, then Charlie came again and now my sister Anni is here with me. Scarlet's clinic visits have been going well. She has a new attending physician, Dr. Carpenter, well, we've had him before. He is an expert on graft vs. host disease which is comforting if she starts to have anymore skin rashes, etc. Her skin has been clear and she only throws up occasionally now-still keeping our fingers crossed that she will stay that way.have to give her her GCSF shot...looks like weekly but is really as needed. Fortunately, it is a little insulin needle now and not one of the big needles I used to poke her with. She does really well with it. She is still on a handful of medicines and her IV meds as well. I used to run her IV meds 2xs, morning and night and now just morning with a hydration bag before and after her foscarnate. They decided to switch because she is accumulating a lot of phosphates and they don't want to strain her kidneys. She still has CMV, but the copies are low. Hopefully they won't rise with only one anti-viral dose a day.
She had to have a blood transfusion again on Sunday which meant an all day clinic visit at Children's. Her platelet counts have been staying up on their own now and it looks like she won't need another platelet transfusion, hopefully ever. Yesterday was day +50, which means only 50 more days left and we can leave.
Charlie is still busy working on the house. He's still got a lot to do.
I'm posting some shots of Charlie and Scarlet while we were still in the hospital. They are pretty cute.

Little Froggie

I wish I could say bathtime was as fun now as it was in the hospital. We no longer have the cart with the baby tub on it. I now have to bend over the bathtub like every other mom in America. I noticed I have some bruising on my rib cage frm leaning over the edge. I must be doing something wrong. There has to be an easier way to give baby a bath without being in pain the whole time. Ok, so if you know of one...then it is your moral obligation to pass on the secret of easy bathing. : )
It has been fun seeing Scarlet start to play with bath toys. She has two little rubber duckies from Halloween, a vampire and a frankenstein duckie. Pretty funny. These are pictures of her in her froggie towel. So stinkin cute!

Tagged!

I was tagged a little while ago and am just getting around to filling it out...

1- I'm afraid of the dark and I can't sleep alone. Even before I got married I would have my sister sleep in bed with me or somewhere very nearby. I thought by now I would be over it, but no. When my sisters were here a few weekends ago we played sardines in the dark in the ghost basement and my little 8 year old niece had to hold my hand the whole time!!

2- I just realized I have chronic allergies. I still can't believe I never realized that my nose never stops running. It didn't occur to me until Scarlet was diagnosed and I became more aware of everyone sniffling and realized that I never stop. I started taking some claritin and it makes me super wired and feel not hungry for most of the day...very cool. J/K I stopped taking it regularly and just deal with the symptoms...it apparently never bothered me before.

3- I think I have a mild form of ADD. I can barely make it through a conversation without zoning and thinking about something else. It isn't until someone poses a question to me that I wake up and realize I missed all of the important stuff they just said. Which has been a real challenge for me with all this Scarlet stuff. I freaked out in the beginning because I was terrified of missing something...I've been doing pretty good, just have to focus more. The upside to this is that I don't have a gossiping problem because I have trouble focusing and my memory is pretty bad anyway. Your secret is safe with me, I think, I can't remember. : )

4- I have a hard time writing emails it used to be just letters, but now it is both. I love reading them, but I hate writing back. I would much rather talk on the phone.

5- I hate scary movies. I get so scared. I couldn't sleep for days after watching the Ring. I watched a lot of scary movies as a kid and I think that is where the can't sleep alone and fear of the dark stems from.

6- I really enjoy cooking and baking. After watching the food network religiously for the last 6 months I am inspired to start learning new, healthy, recipes. I made a really good zucchini, onion, tomato bruschetta the other night...yummo! : )

Hospital No More

I did it again!! Sorry, we actually got discharged from the Hospital on Sunday. We're now staying at the Ronald Mc Donald house nearby. It was really hard the first day and night. I cried a lot. I've been on my own trying to remember her med schedule, IV schedule, feedings, etc. Plus, we had basically just bagged everything at the hospital to bring over and I was trying to make sense of everything and balance her stuff. Pretty crazy. But, the second day was better, once I got a routine going everything has been a lot smoother. We now have to go to clinic visits twice a week...which is actually deceiving because she still has to go in randomly for blood draws and whatever else they want me to do. For example, we spent 8 hours at the clinic today for her IVIG infusion which she will get once week. It takes about 5 hours. We had some good napping today! Altogether though, I love being out of the hospital. It is so nice to be able to eat decent foor again. I've been watching the food network for the last five months...Ramen just doesn't cut it anymore. Scarlet is doing really well. She had some signs of the GVHD and it has pretty much cleared up. They are talking tube feedings again, I'm still fighting it really trying to get Scarlet to eat more. She did really good today, hopefully she'll keep it up.

By the way...sorry about the sideways pic... : )

Happy Halloween!

What a fun day! Scarlet was a monkey for Halloween, if you couldn't tell. Some people kept calling her a bear. We had so much fun at the Halloween party the hospital had. Lots of people donate things like books, etc to the unit. So there were a lot of treasures...among some good candy, I scored a Bobby Brown lip gloss...very cool. All the nurses dressed up as butterflies...with the exception of a few. Everyone loves Scarlet there because she was the youngest bone marrow transplant kid and is just so stinkin cute. The two people holding her are the PA's that took care of her for the last month. Natalie is so much fun. They all rotate months and we've been lucky enough to have had Natalie for a couple of them. Rabbi is the other guy and he is from...somewhere in the Middle East. He's always saying he loves Scaaaaalet...I'm not making fun of his accent or anything, just the way he says it is pretty funny. Super nice guy. We have a pumpkin, but it never got carved. It's pretty big too...I'm thinking it's time to learn how to make pumpkin stuff from a real pumpkin. I hope you fellow bloggers post some pics of your Halloween. It's so fun seeing all the different costumes!