"Brace" Yourself for a Heck of a Week!

This has been one heck of a week. Ups and downs. And more downs.

First off, here's Em with her new braces. She was really excited for them-- she thought they'd be cool. As a former brace-face, I tried to warn her that all that tooth-bling is actually quite painful, but, like most things, that's something you find out the hard way, I guess.

She didn't think they were so awesome the next morning.

Here's the kids at Zoo Lights. This was a blast-- Hogle Zoo really does a pretty good light show. We had a lot of fun-- except for the 10 minutes or so when we lost Michael and Payton. Mom's second worst nightmare.
Here's a picture from our Temple Square jaunt. Anyone notice less and less lights there every year?

So for the mom's first worst nightmare. Yesterday was a hectic up-and-down day all by itself, but by the end of the night, we had everything all ready for a fun day today. Layne and I finally got to bed about 11:00 or so and were watching a show about 9/11. As I was watching, I was thinking about all of those poor people and how when they woke up, they had no idea what was in store.

Thinking thoughts like that never goes well for me. Just then, Mike walked into my room and said that phrase we all dread,

"Mom, I barfed."

Man, did he. And he kept puking every 15 minutes or so all night. Essentially, for the second time in a month, Layne and I stayed up the entire night, although I'd take Black Friday a hundred times over a night of puking kid.

Needless to say, our traditional plans of going to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performance and to Little America for brunch went out the window. Layne took the two non-sick kids and I stayed home with Michael.

He wasn't feeling so bad at first, so we actually had an enjoyable morning reading Christmas stories.

That is, of course, until he stood up, passed out, then went stiff and started to shake. Emergency room, here we come. (Why is that always on a Sunday?)

He was severely dehydrated and they had to put in an i.v. to get him some fluids and anti-nausea meds. They also did a scan to rule out appendicitis. They gave him a c.d. with the scans of his guts, which he thought was cool.

I don't know what this means for the rest of the week, but scary stuff with your kids always puts things in perspective, you know?