thankful for my noisemakers

my friend maggi who took our family pictures (and the picture on my profile) sent me an email to look at a blog of a little girl she took pictures for.

i cried and cried.

and then i thanked the Man Upstairs for my wonderful noisemakers and for their health.

some of these little special people who come into this life and bless those around them for such a short amount of time i believe, is because they are so darn awesome that they only need to be here for that long.

go take a gander at their blog give them some caring words and then go call or hug your kids.

little miss alyssa june 2006-august 15th 2008

alyssa passed away on friday morning after battling cancer. she was only three months older than my little katie and was the most adorable, cutest, yummiest little girl you could ever see. she could wrap anyone around her finger in minutes with her charm. these past months have been so hard as a community to watch this wonderful little girl and her family go through so much pain. we are so blessed to of known her, we are so blessed to know her family she left behind. we are all sad that she moved on from this life, but we are also rejoicing that she no longer is in pain and is now with our Heavenly Father. please say a little prayer for her brothers and sister, mom and dad and all her family members that don't get to see her on a daily basis anymore, but that someday will be reunited with her in heaven and be wrapped around her little finger once again.

my laundry pile has exploded

monkeys swinging from vines and landing in mud...
building volcano's with actual "water lava" explosions...( i swear they are going to have some AWESOME memories growing up together) this is what the boys did all day yesterday. oh and making a mountain of dirty laundry that had to be hosed off before it went into my laundry machine...they did this while katie did...
this. she never left my side. every time i stood up she would leave her picnic blanket and come hang out on my chair and she would then start to "sew" things. today has been a little bit more of a challenge...katie has decided to get the flu, so yes that makes for EVEN MORE laundry...i think i'm up to 5 loads sitting in my bedroom waiting to be folded. thankfully the boys decided to NOT put on any clothes and just play in the mud in their underwear...while i nurse the little one, and the boys build cities and volcano's made out of mud...i have little time to sew. only bits and pieces here and there while she sleeps, and in between laundry loads. we didn't go to church with katie tossing her cookies every half an hour, and these news reports are starting to take their toll on me. i'm thinking i need not to read what's going on in Afghanistan these days...it rattles my nerves too much. so today sucked. but tomorrow's another day. i'll draw for winners of the charm packs and the scraps tonight and post in the morning the winners. tomorrow's another day, another day closer to bringing my husband home, a day closer to not being apart, a day closer to less anxiety for his well being. i just have to do one day at a time, sometimes just one hour at a time, and unfortunately even sometimes one minute at a time.

no wamies, no wamies....please nooo wamies

every morning i wake up and think "why can't it be saturday?" every monday i wake up and sigh, and say to my self "just so-n-so more days till school is out" every day i send out my 8 year old out my front door, i wonder "how's today going to be like?" every time the phone rings i cringe, and when i see that it's not the public schools # i instantly relax. even if it's a telemarketer, that's better than a phone call from school. bacause a phone call from school usually means bad things, and it means i'm going to drag my butt over two streets with the three kids remaining at home, carry katie, have kyle hang on my leg, and have ryan look at me like "what did he do now?" you know we all worry, it's a natural thing to worry, its actually a good thing to worry. if we didn't worry, we would be walking in front of cars not caring, or we would stand too close to cliffs and might fall down. but when worry turns to constant, and it starts damaging your personal life, the lives of those around you, and basically becomes a problem, it is then called anxiety. now dont get me wrong some kind of anxiety is good, just like worrying about some things, having anxiety over certain incidents is a good thing too. but when it starts impeding your life, and you are not allowed to do day to day tasks, it becomes a problem. same thing with sadness, happiness, imaginations, anything that the mind does is there for a reason, to morn, to bring joy, to create, to learn, bring caution, to help you function day to day...but when any one of these basic functions become "extreme" they start to impede daily life, and it becomes a problem. nate's always been a high strung full of life little boy, always ready for the next thing to happen. there were no markers a long the way for what we are dealing with now. which is why i have had a hard time giving what he's going through a NAME. the things that he's going through right now seem to correlate with a spectrum disorder, called pdd or as most people know it aspergers. it's in the same family as autism. and while nate is doing some of the things that are on the list for diagnosis for aspergers, he doesn't do some of the others. life goes on, but i cannot sit here and pretend that there isn't something different going on with my oldest. so for the time being we're calling it this, a spectrum disorder. and after the same diagnosis from two different specialists, nurology tests, and constant wondering of what am i doing wrong. i've done the denial, done the mourning, done the anger, and now i'm trying to make sure that i can be the best parent for this child who is having some major difficulties fitting in. and like i said havn't we all had times when we don't fit in, do something we weren't suppose to cause we didn't think it through? yes, we are human, but when these issues become a greater issue, and start impeding your life, and the lives of those around you, you must address it. and this my friends is what i'm doing. reading up on ways to help him, fighting the school to see him differently because of the diagnosis, trying to teach those that interact with him on a daily basis (including myself) that he not "wrong" he's just sees things in different ways or sometimes DOESN'T see things the same way. is it easy? no way. is it going to get easier? i don't know, i can only hope with my coaching i can help him. am i going to be able to make a differnce? i sure hope so. will this be forever? as time goes on and with coaching he will get closer and closer to knowing. am i sad? yeah, who wants to see their kid suffer? what does this mean for his future? nothing really, i mean it's not going to stop him from being a doctor, garbage man, computer programer, artist, lawyer, or whatever he decides he loves to do. can't wait to see what life throws at me next. like a pregnant goat, that would be hilarious....

a note from alyssa's mom

this is posted at carepages.com and when you sign in it's under "alyssasjourney" but i thought i would post it cause so many of the prayers were from you guys too. all i have to say is that this little girl and her family is going through A LOT.

1 March 09, 2008 at 04:39 PM MDT
Dear Family and Friends, We wanted to begin this web page to let you all know how Alyssa is doing and to keep in touch with you better. Alyssa was diagnosed with cancer called neuroblastoma. She has a solid mass tumor in the back part of her abdominal cavity that goes from her pelvis up to the middle of her chest. This cancer grows from the adrenal gland on top of her right kidney and follows the sympathetic nerves up her spinal column. We have gone through the staging process, which tells the tumor's make-up and what its cells are behaving like. It also tells how far advanced it is and where all it has spread in Alyssa's little body. The results have told us that she is in Stage IV and is High-Risk. It also is into her bone marrow as well as a little bit of bone disease. This being the case, we have to fight it pretty aggressively. But three days are behind us. We hope to finish two more days of the chemo and depending on how she's doing at that point, we'll get to bring her home and take care of her while her blood builds back up. Neuroblastoma, being from the adrenal gland, has caused Alyssa to have extremely high blood pressure, as well as no appetite. Her blood pressures have been as high as 150's over 119 and one time it was 163 over 119. Not good pressure at all, but we have monitored it well and she has had to have as much as three blood pressure medications. However we cheered today, because they just took her pressure and it was 118 over 69! We were so excited. She also had to have a blood transfusion yesterday, March 8. That may have contributed to the lowered blood pressure. We are so amazed and humbled and grateful to all of you for your prayers, phone calls, gifts, cards encouraging words and financial generosity. We thank you for putting Alyssa's name on the prayer rolls in as many as five different temples. We also are grateful for that which has been done to help our other kids through this hard time in their lives. We have certainly felt the strength of so much faith and prayer exercised in our behalf. We are so blessed to have you all encircling us during this stunning (for lack of words to describe it!) thing that has come into our lives. We express gratitude and testimony for the gospel of Jesus Christ and the complete anchor it is for us through this. We know Heavenly Father loves Alyssa and is aware of what we are going through. We know that our Savior knows what we are feeling. We trust Alyssa to be in Their hands and exert all of our faith and constant prayers for Their hand in her treatment and healing. Please accept our heartfelt thanks for all you do, for the goodness in your own lives and your care and concern for us. Hopefully this will help keep in touch and that it will be helpful to you to know how Alyssa's doing. We love you all, Love, the Chappells

Alyssa's quilt

here's the matching pillow i finished it last night! it actually looks like her! (fabrics all picked out by felicia)

well here it is the quilt for alyssa. i really have to say that felicia is amazing as a quilter (she has her own buisness as a machine quilter). we started it and finished the top yesturday and she finished it today, i'm making a little stitchery pillow (with ribbon) with coordinating fabric so that it can hang off the hospital bed or on her door it will say little princess. we're so excited to get to give this to her, she's the most adorable little girl! there is also a huge county garage sale and all money made will be donated to the family. i tell you ladies, this area is in the middle of nowhere but they sure do take care of eachother! thank you for the prayers!

your prayers are needed

everywhere we have lived there have been special women that have come into my life, most of you are a product of that, and some are wonderful women i've never met face to face, but from the bottom of my heart THANK YOU for your friendships they mean the WORLD to me. being the special women that i know you are i need to ask for a special request. your prayers for this wonderful little girl not yet two years old. her mom is a wonderful woman just like all of you, she loves her children and her youngest Alissa, has just been diagnosed with cancer. they cannot operate on her tumor because it has grown around her spine and one of her intestines, she's going to go through kemo (sp?), and they hope this will help shrink the tumor. another wonderful woman and myself are making a quilt for her today, so i'll be gone for a while, doing that, we hope to have it for her when her aunt goes up to primary childrens on friday. please keep alissa and her family in your prayers, i'll be getting her blog and post it as soon as i can. i'm sure the family wont mind all the prayers out there. really makes me count my wonderful blessings of waking up to the same ol same ol of our house, and makes me really think of what an amazing little girl (and family!) this is to of taken on this huge thing in such an early stage in her life.

Up to Primary Children's Hospital we go

Up to this point I've kind of kept a closed lip on some of the things that Nate's been going through. But seeing that i'm using this as a Journal and kind of scrapbooking (niether of which I'm really good at) I thought that I would start adding this "adventure". Last July we started to hear rumors that Jake would be getting deployed, while fishing Nate accidently got a fishhook stuck in his hand while picking up rocks and throwing them into the lake (really deep that Jake had to push it through to the other side) and a week later had a propane tank explode while camping and Nate miracously walked away with burns on only his right hand and singed hair. I mention this because it was after these three incidents that Nate started to have involuntary twitches, starting out as just a shoulder shrug, and when school started in mid August it had gotten so bad that it looked like he was having seizures, he couldnt control his body and was having a difficult time even trying to take a drink from a cup. You could imagine how hard it's been to make friends at a new school . All they know about Nate is that he's the new kid who can't sit in his chair and who's arms and legs flail about all day long. To put frosting on the cake for the kid, he's got a few boys in the other class that have been bullying him. (once I found out about them I rose HELL and made sure that those kids parents were called and told what they were saying to my son) We've been trying to figure stuff out, and trying to see what works, so far we've been doing the token system (Nate refused to do any work at school, and homework was a nightmare) and it's made a huge difference in his wanting to do his work to get rewards, but we are still puzzled over the "tics" and we want to make sure he's not having seizures. He's on some medicines that have helped "calm" them down, but it's like putting a bandaid to leaky faucet, the problem is still there. So up to Primarys we go. We will be going to a neurologist just to make sure its not something on that end, and if it is well, we will at least be in going in the first steps in the right direction to helping him.