Here Lately...

Whew, I have been one busy girl here lately. I'll start with our adventures over the Christmas holiday.

Sunday the week of Christmas, my family and I went on our annual trip to Honor Heights park in Muskogee. We always go and eat at El Chico's and then drive through the park to look at the Christmas lights. It's a guaranteed good time :) Unfortunately on Sunday, the cough I had been fighting started getting much worse. My sister listened to my chest and heard a wheeze so we called my doctor (who is also our friend) and had her call in a steroid for me.

Monday at work, I kept having coughing fits, and the doctor I work for thought I might have pertusis (or whooping cough). So I got a swab jammed up my nose to find out. She also wanted me to start an antibiotic right away b/c if it was pertusis, it is very contagious and we have babies that come in that are not yet vaccinated against it. So Monday night, I waited at WalMart for an hour and a half on my prescriptions. I kept having coughing fits and people were looking at me like I had the plague! It was not a fun evening.

Tuesday was pretty uneventful, and I did start feeling a little better. Wednesday, bad weather started moving into town, and it got cold and snowy. I went to our church's Christmas candle light service, and coughed my way through praise and worship :)

Thursday was Christmas eve, and I had to work half a day but we got to close the office about 11am. I went straight home and Drew and I started the normally 2 hour journey to Ada. Because of the snow and ice, it took us close to 3 hours, but we made it safely thanks to my husbands wonderful driving skills. (I'm kissing up here, you'll see why later.) We spent Thursday afternoon/evening with Drew's dad, and then stayed the night and woke up at his mom's house. We spent the morning and lunch with her, and headed home about 2pm to see my family Friday night. We went down through Stroud and got on I-40 to go home, which is usually a good route. My dad called and told us a semi had wrecked on I-40 so we needed to exit at Kellyville, which is before our normal exit, but can still get us home. About 4 miles before the Kellyville exit, traffic came to a dead stop. We turned off the car and sat for over an hour. We had Hank with us, so we took him for a little walk in the freezing cold, where he tried to lift his leg on every tire around. The problem, we found out later, is that a semi had jack-knifed and was sitting across both lanes of traffic and was in a position where he couldn't move out of the way. So we were all waiting on a tow truck to come save the day. We did eventually get home, unload the car, and go to my parents for Christmas.

Saturday was the entire Carner family Christmas at my parent's house. It was quite an adventure getting there. We were going to take my car, which is a little SUV, but does not have 4-wheel drive. We backed out of the driveway, and as we started to try and drive up our street, we slid about 3 houses back. We were stuck. A little while later, our neighbors helped us get the car back into our driveway, and we were going to drive the Jeep instead. It hadn't been driven in a while, so Drew had to work on it for a little bit to get it running. It didn't have insurance or a current tag, and Drew was convinced he was getting arrested for driving it. It started over heating two different times on our normally 20 minute drive and we had to pull over to let it cool down. We then had to stop at WalMart, who had apparently not yet cleared their parking lot, and almost got into 3 different wrecks while in the parking lot. After we got what we needed, we headed back out. 3 hours after beginning our journey, we finally made it. Needless to say, we were both a little irritated. But Christmas was great and we had a lot of fun.

Sunday, we decided to not even chance the roads and had my dad come pick us up for our next-to-the-last Christmas. We went to my aunt Kathy's house to celebrate with my mom's family. My cousin has a 2 year old little boy name Jaden, and Drew and I spent most of our time playing with the new toys he got from Santa. You should have seen Drew playing with Jaden's linkin' logs, he was so serious and all about it, it was too cute. Sunday night Drew and I were tired from all the traveling and excitement, so we just hung out at home and went to bed early.

Monday was our last Christmas celebration with my aunt Kemo and Katie. We went to mom and dad's, ate pizza for dinner, watched National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (another tradition) and openend presents. We love Kemo and Katie and hanging out with them is always a good time.

Tuesday and Wednesday were, thankfully, pretty uneventful. Thursday was New Year's Eve, and my third and final wreck of 2009. We had been using my dad's Jeep due to the lack of tag on ours. The weather and roads were finally pretty clear, so we were returning the Jeep on our way to my cousin's house for the New Year's festivities. Drew drove the Jeep to Glenpool, and I followed him in my car. Mistake #1- after dropping off the Jeep, I just said I would drive since I was already in the driver seat of my car. We were pulling out of Keifer when I hit the black ice. Mistake #2- turning into the spin like I have always been told. My car started spinning left, so I turned the wheel left. But, because the other lane of traffic was dry, this turned out to not be such a good idea. When my car hit the dry pavement in the other lane, it turned us around so that we were facing opposite of our original direction. Then we hit the grass. Mistake #3- keeping on the brakes. We slid sideways down the hill straight for a ravine bordered by trees. I grabbed Drew's arm and said "What do I do?" His response- "Just stand still." What? That in no way helps me! We stopped about 4 feet from the tree line. It is by the grace of God and His grace alone that neither of us nor my car were damaged in any way. If I had had new tires on my car (which I need) chances are, when I hit the dry pavement, the new tires wouldn't have slid like mine did and we would have flipped. It had finally warmed up the past couple of days which caused a lot of the snow to melt and the ground to be very muddy. If we hadn't have the mud, we would have hit frozen ground, and instead of sliding down the ditch, we probably would have flipped. The back end of my car came around more than 180 degrees so we were kinda sliding down the hill at an angle. If we would have been perfectly sideways, we probably would have flipped. So as scary as it was, God saved us, no doubt about it. We called my dad and he brought chains and was able to hook up to us from the road and pull us out. We went on to the New Year's Eve party and had a good time, even if I did fall asleep on the couch at about 1:30am :) My new year's resolution? No car wrecks in 2010.

The rest of the weekend went by just fine, until Sunday night. I got a call at about 9pm that my aunt and uncles German foreign exchange student had taken her own life in their driveway. I was in shock. Janne (pronounced Yanna) was the sweetest girl and none of us had any idea how unhappy she was. Drew and I offered to keep our little cousins, ages 6 and 3, to help out in any way we could. We had a "No Boys Allowed, Girls Club" sleepover. Those girls have way more stamina than me and we were up until 4am. We had a fun night, but it wasn't enough to erase the reality that Janne was gone. My aunt and uncle are really strugling through this, and it breaks my heart to see them hurt. My aunt ended up having a stress induced heart attack Tuesday night from all of this. Yesterday (Wednesday) was her memorial service. Two of her teachers spoke, one of her friends spoke, and a letter my aunt and uncle wrote her as if it were the summer after she left was read. It was very sad, but helped us forget the tragedy as we listened to their funny stories about Janne. It is hearbreaking, and will take time for my aunt and uncle to recover, and I continue to pray (and ask you to join me) for peace and comfort for both family and Janne's family back in Germany.

Lastly for this post, I have decided to take a study course for the MCAT. It starts next week and is every Tuesday and Thursday with some Friday's and Saturday's thrown in until April 6th. So I'm hoping I survive the class and that it raises my MCAT score because the school has told me it's the one thing keeping me out. Wish me luck!