Steroids and Pumpkins

As the fall weather once again kicks in, as does another wave of the cold season! I seem to have caught it first this time, but I'm sure Jonny's won't be too far off. So with the fridge filled with orange juice we're trying to get ourselves normal and healthy again. Unfortunately when I catch a cold, my asthma likes to jump into high gear. Plus with the cold, windy, rainy weather we've had all week...its usually a good mixture for nothing good. Friday evening we decided to venture out to a movie on base since we were both feeling well, but by the time we got home and I used my air flow meter the numbers were pretty low for my norm. So then began the rotation of steroid inhalers to open up the airways and get things back to normal. While the whole situation is always more annoying than anything else, with a baby on board it needs to be treated a bit more than a simple annoyance. My last baby appointment was to go over an "asthma plan". Basically my air flow needs to be tracked to ensure that the baby is always getting enough oxygen. I've never really had a big asthma issue so the concern is pretty minimal, however they say often times asthma gets worse during pregnancy, so keeping tabs is always better then not. So they sent me home with an peak flow meter that tracks how much air I'm getting and a paper with a plan I'm suppose to follow in case things are a bit irregular. Well with the weather and cold, things turned irregular. You go from "Green" to "Yellow" to "Red", and if you slip into "Yellow", if an hour of inhalers don't improve the situation, its time to take a trip to the Emergency Room. So at 11:30pm we get in the car and headed to the hospital. Thankfully there wasn't anyone else there so we got in very quickly and after doing the basics gave me a nebulizer for breathing treatment. Basically I sat there and inhaled a very concentrated dose of steroids for about 30 minutes. Funny enough, the taste reminded me of the Skate City fog machine. Thankfully the treatment helped open up my airways quite a bit, but did a number in making me feel lightheaded and loopy. Eventually (about 1:30am)they gave me some safe medications to take for the cold symptoms and sent us home to bed. Something we were very much looking forward to since we both had to be up for work that morning...Saturday morning as I was up and getting ready for work, I must say that the skin product I was most thankful for was my Mary Kay Soothing Eye Gel. My thought was that maybe if I didn't look like I'd only had a few hours of sleep, I wouldn't feel it. Needless to say I was grateful that the sleepy big bags under the eyes disappeared instantly so I could go about my day. A product I now feel I need to stock up on at some point in the coming months...may truly come in handy around the April time frame.
Today was a fun filled busy day as well. There is a local farm that hosts a large pumpkin patch every October. They have a lot of little things for the kids and of course, a field of pumpkins to choose from. So Jonny and I loaded up the dogs for a fun afternoon out and met my good friend Amy (and Aspen and Baileys best friend Hunter) for some fun at the patch.


We picked two huge pumpkins to carve this week and then a couple little pumpkins to do, well, I don't know what we'll do with them, but they sure are cute =) The dogs had an absolute blast as children flocked to the "pet the cute puppies" and smelling all the pumpkins and hay bales. Oh yeah, this week we've had a bit of a baby bump spring forward, as we were waiting in line for food a lady petting the dogs looked at us, smiled and said "So are you going to have an addition to the group next year then?" It's nice to know that I do in fact look pregnant and not just extra bloated these days.


She and her friend then began to tell us that they did the same thing last year. She was pregnant when they went last year, but this year were having fun with their babies in the patch and how they were looking forward to carving the pumpkins and watching the babies explore all the pumpkin "guts". Always something new to look forward to! So we got our pumpkins, ate our sausage rolls, and headed home as our day was not quite over!

Once a month myself and Angela, the other Fire Department Key Spouse, try to organize a station dinner. This month we paired it with sending our deployed guys some goody boxes. Unfortunately, we haven't had a lot of participation in the past with filling up the boxes, so we prepare for the worst which meant a complete baking morning for me. Trying to catch up on our lack of sleep from the night before, I slept in until about 10, then when Jonny got home from shift at 8 he took a 2-3 hour nap. So I decided to get up and get all the baking done first, then we'd go to the pumpkin patch in the afternoon before dinner. So after cleaning the kitchen (simply so I had room to make it all dirty again) pulled out all the chocolate chip cookie ingredients and got to mixing. Then moved on to the peanut butter cookies. I swear we had about 6 dozen cookies in the freezer when it was all said and done! Plus the cookies I had to prepare the dish we were taking for the dinner. I really don't know how I was able to bake all those cookies, package them up, get the chicken wings prepped and in the crock pot, and actually have time to shower and get ready for the day between 10:30 and 1pm. I think God gifted me with speed today and gave me the miracle of a consistent cooking oven for once! Two things that turned out to be very helpful in our cram-packed day! Dinner at the station was great, it's always fun to get together with the other families and meet the new ones. Plus doing the boxes and dinner at the same time turned out to be very beneficial as we filled up all the boxes we needed to fill and had help to package and wrap it all up! Thankfully a complete success, and we know those deployed will appreciate all the hand made cards from kids, cookies, goodies and toys from other fire dept. families. Of course we're exhausted as usual tonight, so time to curl up with some hot tea and watch a good old American t.v. show before bed. Happy Sunday everyone!