Emails to my little ones

When Soni turned 2, I decided that I wanted to start an email address "for him" that I could write to. (I took the idea from a google commercial I saw a while ago.) I haven't been great about scrapbooking or baby booking, but in today's digital world, it's easy to send a quick email. So I created MyTaisoni@gmail.com, and I've sent him several emails about things he does, things he'll probably like to remember, things about him that touch my heart, etc. When he's an adult I'll tell him about it and give him the password so he can read notes from me throughout his life. Maybe when he goes on his mission or gets married. I wish I had started even younger, but I think it will still be something he/we can look back on with a smile later in life. I plan to do the same with the rest of our kids too.

Toddler Talk

Taisoni is putting together a lot of small sentences lately. It's cute to hear the things he's thinking come out of this mouth.

When he falls or gets hurt or anything like that, we usually ask him, "Are you okay?" and he now replies, "Uh-huh. I otay." Taiyo got sick this weekend and when he coughed, Soni would ask, "You otay Dad?" in a very sweet voice, often accompanied by a soft stroke on the cheek.

He also has bath toys in various shapes that stick to the walls of the tub, and one day while playing with them, he picked up one in the shape of a triangle (which he pronounces more like "terrinal"). Instead of sticking to the wall, it fell, and Soni said, "Whoa! You otay terrinal?"

I've been looking forward for a long time to the time when he'll be old enough to say what he wants to say, but still has a toddler mind so funny things come out. He's getting close! As he does start to say some "darnedest things" I'll post about them!

Bye-Bye Tonsils! (And adenoids! And snoring!)

Since Taisoni was about 10 months old or so, he has been a bad snorer, and it seemed to get even worse as he got older. Sometimes I would watch him sleep and I would see his chest dipping in as he tried to breathe, but no air was going in, and then suddenly he would gasp and stir in his sleep. Other times he would be able to get air in, but it sounded like his airway was very small and it was quite noisy.

July 15 he had his tonsils removed at Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City. I had been reading horror stories online about how awful the recovery has been for other moms of toddlers who had their tonsils removed. I wasn’t initially too worried about the whole procedure, until I read those experiences online. I braced myself.

The technique used was a fairly new one called "coblation." It does not use high heat, it does less damage to the healthy surrounding tissue, and has shown significantly better recoveries in clinical studies than the normal laser technique.

Dr Bryan Tagge has performed hundreds, probably thousands, of tonsillectomies, and he finished the procedure in about 10 minutes, if that. He was very cheerful and comforting throughout the whole process. He did also say after the surgery that Soni’s tonsils were about “as big as they get,” and in the 10 years he has been doing this, they were definitely in the top 10% size-wise, and he was very optimistic about the change we would see in his sleeping.

I got to go back and see Soni first. While he was still trying to come out of the anesthesia he was crying and looked as if he was in pain. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, just moaned and cried softly. I held him and rocked him to sleep and waited for an overnight room to be available for us. His oxygen levels were not staying as high as the nurses would like, so we held an oxygen mask near his face as he slept. Once we were set up in a room, Taiyo and my mom came back. Soni slept for about 4 hours total, and then woke up a bit confused at first, but soon became happy. My dad, Erin, and Everett also came to visit, and Soni was excited to see them there. He watched a DVD, played with toys, made animal noises, and laughed. He drank apple juice, and ate 3 cups of jello and a cup of mac-n-cheese. He even said a couple of words that he had never said before, which surprised me.

That night Taiyo and I stayed with him in the hospital, and he remained hooked up to the oxygen and heart rate monitors so the nurses could monitor him. A few times during the night his oxygen levels dipped, but they resolved themselves each time, so the next morning we were given the go-ahead to go home. Once home, Soni was like his normal self already-- if anything a little more vocal than he used to be. We kept him on his pain meds without breaks for the first few days. Then we began to stretch out the doses, particularly at night, since I did not want to wake him at night more than necessary, and he (thankfully) did not seem to be in pain when he woke up in the mornings, which had been one of my concerns.

Throughout the week things kept going smoothly. He has said “owie” or acted like it hurt probably 3 times total, but each time we gave him some meds and he was back to normal within 10 minutes. He has had no problem eating or drinking. We are now 12 days post-op, and we’re slowly starting to let him eat some “hard” things in small pieces because he wants to eat and has not acted like anything hurts him. By Friday I’ll feel like we’re completely in the clear as far as complications go. I’ll still be cautious a little longer, but I’m really not worried. I feel so blessed that the recovery has gone soooo smoothly. 95% of the time these past 12 days you wouldn't have even had a clue that he had had surgery so recently.

And the results are like night and day, just as the doctor said they would be. I never used to be able to sleep with Soni in the same bed, because he would snore so loudly, and he would be restless, kicking me or flopping his arm into my face, etc… But last night when he came into my room at 4:45 am, I let him in bed with me, expecting to take him back to his room once he fell asleep. But next thing I knew, my morning alarm was going off and I was actually surprised to see Soni beside me because I had forgotten that he was there! He was sooo quiet and not restless at all. His breathing was so peaceful. There has been another unexpected benefit too-- he immediately (same day of surgery even) started saying new words that he had never said before, and putting together a few small sentences. I don't know if that's a coincidence, but I suspect that the opened airway and increased room in his throat has actually widened the scope of sounds he could figure out how to make. I admit that it could be a coincidence, but I feel pretty strongly that the tonsillectomy had an effect. The surgery was 100% worth it.

I took a couple of short videos of him sleeping a few months before the surgery, showing a couple of the ways he would breath, and soon I will take another of the way he sleeps now, and put them together as a sort of “before and after” display. I’m so grateful for the way everything went! I wouldn't trade our experience! I’m grateful for modern technology, good doctors, and family who is willing to take time out of their lives to help us through a process that could have been worse that it was!

It smells like...

Yesterday I was going to make some cinnamon rolls to take to family. In a hurry, I made the dough, let it rise, and then quickly grabbed brown sugar and cinnamon to spread on the dough. Instead of measuring I just sprinkled on some sugar and cinnamon, and started to spread it around. Quickly I noticed that it seemed a little too red... I got nervous, thinking I overdid it big time on the cinnamon... I added more brown sugar to try to counteract the cinnamon flavor, and finished rolling and cutting the rolls. I put them in the oven, but was still nervous about the cinnamon... After 10 minutes in the oven, the rolls didn't look right. The dough still looked gooey, and there was red liquid oozing out the bottoms. I panicked and thought, "this does not look right."

The next thought that crossed my mind was, "It smells like chimmies." That's a weird thought, I thought. You don't put cinnamon in chimmies.

Then it suddenly dawned on me.

I had another container in my cupboard that looks very similar to the cinnamon.... CHILI POWDER. Ding ding ding! Sure enough, I had made chili powder rolls.

In my defense, they DO look similar. Granted, the color is not exactly the same when you see them side-by-side, but alone at a quick glance, it could easily pass as cinnamon. If I had simply looked at the label, I would have noticed that it was not cinnamon, but-- okay I don't have an excuse for not looking at the label. :)

I was going to take a picture of the chili powder rolls, but Taiyo threw them away before I got to it, so you'll just have to imagine. Other than the red color they were actually kind of pretty! Hehe... So quickly I pulled out the ingredients and stared over from scratch. Fortunately, the correct cinnamon rolls came out FABULOUS. :)

Contemplating Identity

"Soni, where's Mommy?"

---Soni points to Mommy---

"Where's Daddy?"

---Soni points to Daddy---

"Where's Soni boy?"

---He pauses, looks up at the family photo on the wall for a minute with a look of contemplation on his face, and then points to himself in the picture.---

My New Job

So about 7 weeks ago we moved to Utah. The job I got is with Western Governor's University.

"The best relatively cheap university you've never heard of."

-Time Magazine

(If you're interested, you can read the whole article here.) My position is a new one here at WGU. It's not even the position I applied for! I applied for a coordinating-type job posted on their website, but during my interview, they brought up my background and we discussed a little bit about my real interest to eventually get into a more analytical type position within the company when one comes available. Several weeks later I got a phone call saying that they are in fact creating a "statistical analyst" position and would like to go ahead and offer it to me. I was super excited and agreed to move to Utah just after Christmas.

Because WGU is an online school, we provide students with online "courses of study" (essentially, hyped-up syllabi) with links to various online "learning resources" with which they can learn what they need to learn. WGU pays for a lot of these resources, but until now, no one has been really monitoring these costs. So my job is to monitor the Learning Resource costs. My role has evolved into a sort of liaison between the LR department and the Accounting department. I am happy and I enjoy getting to work with numbers and create reports for the CFO, although I don't quite get to use as many statistical analyses like I would like to be able to. My goal is still to move into the Institutional Research department eventually. They get to work with fun stuff like student survey data and do statistical calculations with lots of variables. :)

So for anyone who has asked me, "What university do you work for again??" this is it. I had never heard of WGU before either, but the more I have gotten to know about it, the more I like it. It's really a great school and I'm even thinking about getting an MBA here soon. Oh, and at our company-wide conference last week, the school mascot was announced:

The NiteOwls.

Boo-ya! :)

T is for Tonga

(WARNING: LOTS OF PICTURES AHEAD)

Last year we had the opportunity to go to Tonga. If we were going to make the trip, we wanted to stay a while to make it worth the expense, and since we had the availability at the time to go for a whole month, we decided to jump on it. So the last week of June we packed our bags (maxed out our luggage allowances), and hopped on a plan to Cali, then connected to Samoa. When we landed in Samoa we took stairs down directly from the plane to the ground and then walked into the airport waiting room, where we spent the next couple of hours before boarding again to continue to Tongatapu. On the main island Taiyo’s auntie picked us up and drove us to the domestic airport. The international airport in Tonga had one rotating luggage line but was still really small. The domestic airports are even smaller! There’s a little room with a desk where you can go get your tickets and check your luggage, and then when it’s time to board you go outside to the landing area and take stairs up into the tiny plane.

Taisoni was generally really good for the whole trip up to this point, but by the time we boarded a plane for the 4^th time to go from Tongatapu to Vava’u he had had enough and let us know. Luckily that flight was short. We were so excited to land in Vava’u and see all of Taiyo’s family waiting there for us! We said our hellos and then they drove us to their house in the village Tu’anekivale. They had reserved a bedroom in the house just for us. At first I felt bad for intruding, but I came to realize that even when we’re not there, the bedrooms (and beds) often go unused because almost everyone prefers to sleep together on the floor in the living room or kitchen.

Throughout our 4 weeks on the island, we visited places on the island, including my favorite beach, ‘Ene’io, hiked up a mountain to overlook the island, harvested peanuts, spent a lot of time in Sina’s store, and I experienced Tongan cooking and ways of life. Soni was spoiled and he had a wonderful time discovering a love of fresh coconut and the island life.

We even planned the trip around Soni’s first birthday so we could celebrate with the family there. It was a big party! People from the whole village came and we had TONS of food. Party preparations started 24 hours in advance. Unfortunately, half way through the party, the powerlines decided they couldn’t handle the party strain anymore and the power went out, so the party was cut a little short. But shortly after we followed up with a dance at the village church. It was definitely a memorable birthday party! And Soni looked so cute in his formal Tongan wear!

It was sad to leave. There were a lot of tears that day. We had left a lot of things that we had brought with us there for the family, but we were also taking home several goodies and keepsakes. Unfortunately the beautiful turtle shell we were bringing home was confiscated in California. L But the officer let us at least take a picture of it . It was a great trip and even though Taisoni probably won’t remember it as he gets older, we have lots of stories and pictures. We miss our family in the islands. I'm grateful for a loving in-law family who welcomes me with open arms and loves my little family as much as we love them. I hope we will be able to visit again multiple times in the future as our family grows!