Craziness and Weird

Well I feel like I am finally making an appearance back in the normal world from the crazy one I have felt like I was in the last few weeks! Our house is getting back to our regular routine, which is so nice! Right at the beginning of the years (almost a month ago-I am so slow!) while Ryan was out of town, Ilene came down with the chicken pox.  Luckily since she is still so young it was a fairly mild case as chicken pox goes.  The poor thing was miserable, so itchy, and just achy and clingy.  I tried every lotion/bath/remedy I had ever heard of for itching and really nothing helped that much except Benadryl Allergy so I will forever be thankful for that!  Her case didn't last that long (5-6 days) and we were good to go-except I got super achy, dizzy, and just felt awful! Luckily that only lasted 24 hours and the next day I felt great-until my hands started itching ridiculously bad.  I would wake up from the itching and try everything I could think of, but the only thing that would work is to put my hands in freezing water until they were numb enough that I couldn't feel the itching-awesome.  Then I would go back to sleep until they warmed up enough that I could feel them again and I would start the process over again.  So that morning I called the doctor, went in, and they gave me a steroid cream to use and told me to take Benadryl.  Well the dosage was supposed to work 4-6 hours and it would maybe work 1 1/2 before my hands were out of control again.  My brother told me to go to a family practice dr so I went back in and he wasn't sure if I had caught Chicken Pox (since I had them as a kid) or if I had a viral rash or what was going on so he put me on an anti-viral because the rash was starting to spread up my arms and on my legs (although they were still in spot stage but not itchy yet thankfully).  That really really helped and although that night was a similar routine of freezing my hands, by the next morning I was starting to be slightly better :).  By Friday the itching was totally bearable and by Friday night/Saturday morning I was completely itch free.  This all worked out great because Alli had a UTi on Friday afternoon so we got to make another 2 hour trip hanging out in the little prison cubicle waiting for the doctor to come in and confirm what I had already deduced and irritably give us a presciption.  Seriously I was very unimpressed, our beloved pediatrician just moved so I went to someone else in his practice, but sadly this doctor is majorly lacking in the "relating to kids" department! My girls had been soo good the entire time playing, but he must have had a really bad day :(.   Anyway, the next day was the 3 on 3 tournament Ryan and I had been working on in literally all of our spare time.  A few months ago we started a non-profit organization to help underprivileged youth be able to participate in sports (ampathletics.org if you want more info).  We did the Salem Days 3 on 3 bball tourney in August and it went well so we decided it was a go and started getting everything filed.  The Sports Marketing Class at the high school needed to do an event for their final project.  So their teacher-Mr. Daley (Who I was lucky enough to go to school with, he is a great guy!) asked if we would help them put it together since they have never done an event before.  They were willing to donate all of the proceeds from the event to our charity and we had been wanting to do another event sometime around now anyway so it worked well to work together.  Ryan went in to their class most class periods in December to try to get everything arranged and between their class work, Ryan working his butt off, and whatever I could do to arrange things from home we were able to put together a pretty dang good tournament! We had 10 courts-6 for the adult brackets, 4 for kids/high school

We had 28 adult team, 15 high school, and 8 kids (12 and under).  The prizes were awesome-Ryan totally killed it getting sponsors to donate stuff and we had over $2,000 worth of prizes to raffle off/give to winners.  The shirts were awesome again and truly everyone seemed really pleased with their experience :).  That afternoon getting everyone checked in was madness due to some help not showing up when they were supposed to, but after that it was smooth sailing-although still crazy.  So after the two weeks we had leading up to the tournament and then the tournament and primary stuff that all had to be done at the same time of course we really had to take a week to recoop and try to get my house and life back to normal.  Our girls were awesome helpers and we were lucky to have so much help with them with everything going on!  The amazing part of it is that we raised over $5,000 and since all the help/time is volunteered that all goes straight to making it so kids can participate in baseball/softball/soccer/basketball.  We should be able to fund at least 100 kids to participate so we are pretty excited about that.  Anyway I just wanted to record some of the craziness that has been going on around here because I know I will want to look back on it and read about it later.  And my hands have gone from red "scar" spots to now scaly/peeling any place it was itchy.  It started on my fingertips and has followed the patterns down my fingers and now it is the palms of my hands.  Totally weird to have small chunks of flaky skin come off... Ryan just tells me what a piece of work I am as I had multiple follow up appointments because the main doctor was out of town and there was some miscommunication.  But the blood work came back that my antibodies were high enough they could rule out chicken pox and the spreading pattern wasn't consistent with shingles so it is just some random viral rash :).  Another weird thing is earlier this week I took our girls on a walk, but since it has been cold our garage keypad hasn't been working consistently and one of our neighbors had their garage broken into a week or so ago so I didn't want to leave anything unlocked.  So I took the garage door opener out of the car, closed everything up and off we went to take a neighbor some cookies.  Well we ended up visiting her outside and the girls were playing in the inch of snow left from last weekend's snowstorm.  Alli needed something from inside so I opened the garage, and since we were back I put it back in the car.  We decided to go say hi to our elderly neighbor across the street and I knew it would be a quick visit since it was getting cold outside so I left everything and we walked over.  Well we came back a few minutes later, went inside and got dinner going etc.  The next day I took Alli to her dance class and the garage door opener wasn't in the car.  I thought I must have taken it with us to our neighbor's and then put it inside so I figured I would find it when we got home (and ALL of our counters-bathrooms, kitchens, dressers, nightstands etc. had been completely cleaned and organized on Tuesday which doesn't usually happen all at the same time for me :) so I knew it would be super easy to find since I thought I had just set it there).  Well we came home from dance and Ryan came home for lunch and decided to take my car to get washed so he asked about the garage door opener and I told him it was in our house and I would find it that afternoon.  Well he gets home and asks where it was I told him I hadn't found it yet-starting to get slightly nervous that I had really lost it in our house somehow! Well it is 9:30 Wednesday night, both girls are asleep (when Ryan is usually at his bball game) and I walk into the kitchen for something.  I realize I hear our garage door going up (ours are LOUD!).  This was such an odd feeling because I knew it was my door, we weren't expecting anyone, and we have a missing opener to that door.  I tell Ryan, he runs out through the garage but can't see anyone.  So apparently in the few minutes we had gone to our neighbor across the street someone came into the garage, got in the car, found the opener and stole it! It is kind of unnerving thinking someone was looking through my car or sitting where I sit in the car! I am thankful nothing else was taken and that it was so simple as just the garage door opener which is easily replaced, we changed the frequencies, took off the exterior keypad and life goes on.  I have since found out that in a different part of our neighborhood 2 people have had gas siphoned and a few other odd things.  I called the police non-emergency number and they seemed glad because none of the other happenings had been reported, I had just been intending to "add ours to the list" so they were aware of everything going on.  Anyway so don't just lock your cars, take your openers into your house too!