Edmonton

Here are some photos we grabbed while in Edmonton for the Spina Bifida conference.  Didn't get much of Sterling because he was in the family day camp all day - having more fun than me I might add.

Certainly do love my kiddies!

 

On the project front

I have been doing a lot of projects lately and not so much blogging.  These are a few that I got the ambition up to take photos of this morning.  I have about 10 more that I just haven't photographed.  First of all, the best part of these projects are they they were free to me.  I had a bunch of white curtains that I have never done anything with.  They were these little numbers below from Ikea.  Kinda boring if you ask me.  Especially if your wall colour is a really really really light grey.

And I ended up with these after I took some leftover paint I had to add some interest.  (Please ignore half of everything in this photo because I haven't gotten around to changing the colours of stuff such as my side table, lamp shade and green pillows.)

 And these.  Pretty happy with how much they add to the space and all they took was about 4 hours of taping and painting to get the four sets of curtain panels taped and done.

On the not free front.  I did get a new sectional a few weeks ago.   I did however have a gigantic garage sale before we moved to our new place and this is what I bought with all the moola, well most of it:

I was able to sell our leather couch for 1/3 of the price of him and used half of my garage sale money for the rest.  The other half was used to purchase the paint for my house.  Wow, paint is expensive when you buy a ton.  So sadly, all my garage sale moola has now been spent.  

Do you like him?  I certainly do.  Imagine him with black legs instead of those pasty gams that he is sporting now.  I did paint them before i even assembled the sectional (which took me 4 hours all by myself, whew!)

 I cashed in all my airmiles for Rona dollars (gift certificates for a home improvement store for my American friends).  So everything that you see in the home renovation department that is about to come will be free!  Yay for airmiles!  Yes, I am cheap and yes everything that is going to be done in my house over the next year will be a ton of work, but you can't really beat free, can you?  Not to mention that I really do love DIY and all the such.  I purchased most of my house goods and just need to get the ambition to tackle these projects.  Some of my favourites to come:

Retiling the backsplash

Tackling the kitchen counters

Painting the kitchen cabinets

Wainscoting in the bathroom

Stencilling the bathroom walls

Painting all sorts of furniture (like 15 things)

Reading nook for Sterls bedroom

Plus some other surprises.

On the also free project front.  I whipped these little babies up from some leftover scrapbook paper in 30 minutes.  I am going to hang them in Emery's room and am totally in love.  It just took 5 pieces of 12" paper, some glue and a lot of folding.  CUTE!  I got this idea off pinterest (this is where 80% of my ideas come from these days and yes, I am totally addicted).

Had to share....so cute!

We went to Edmonton this last weekend (Thanksgiving weekend) to a Spina Bifida conference.  It was super informational, plus the kids always love playing in the hotel pool.  Although, I think they are trying to put the worry into all parents.  In every single session the doctors expressed how much physical pain the poor people with Spina Bifida have to endure and how to manage pain properly.  Basically everyone with Spina Bifida does and is going to have some form of chronic pain their whole lives.  Sterling does have chronic back pain (because of his spine surgery) and chronic headaches (because of his shunt and the pressure of the fluid in his head that isn't draining properly and also from the chiari malformation in his head).  Half a litre of spinal fluid goes through your body a day.  Sterling has a blockage in his brain from his spinal column and brain being pulled down into his neck.  This happened when his body was forming and the spine didn't close properly so the spine got stuck.  It started pulling on the rest of his spinal column which is connected to the brain and pulled it lower into his neck to create a blockage.  So in order to get the fluid flowing, they had to put a VP shunt into his brain to bypass the spine and go directly into his belly to drain when he goes to the bathroom.   Sometimes I just forget how much pain Sterling is in all the time because he just rarely complains of it.  What a tough little guy!  Basically, every morning he wakes up the first thing he says is "Mama, my zipper hurts, will you give it a rub?"  We call his scar running up the middle of his back his zipper and the scars to either side his buttons.  So every morning I give his back a rub right when he wakes up.  That is usually the extent of his complaining unless he has a super bad headache.  If I ask him, "Does your back hurt?", he always says yes.  The neurosurgery nurse said that a lot of people with shunts function with a permanent low grade headache and then have severe ones in between and never know what it feels like to be pain free.  

The most interesting things I learned were:

- That Sterling's whole body is perfectly formed, except for the one point in the spine where the connections aren't working properly.  So this means that all his nerves in his legs are bladder are properly formed, they are just broken connections at the spine so the body can't get signals to them.  (In China they are doing rerouting surgeries to move the connections to a part on the spine that is working, so the nerves can function).

-The average amount of shunts per lifetime is 4 (some people have 1 and others have over 30)

-Strong emotions, such as extreme joy, stress, sadness or happiness can equal pressure in the head with his shunt and make him have a really bad headache.  (So that explains him being grumpy after he plays with his friends).

-There isn't really many good options to treat bowel management yet (Poor Sterls!), so hopefully a new treatment is coming our way soon.

Sterling had a blast at the conference.  We sent him to the family camp there and he got to meet two other children his age in chairs like him!  Although, he didn't really seem to be too impressed that there were others in chairs like him.  The conference was in West Edmonton Mall and the family camp took him out on three separate trips into the mall.  They took him to build-a-bear where he picked his 4th bear from there, which happened to be a super ugly orange fleece owl that was naked.  All the other kids had clothes on theirs, but not Sterls!  THen they took all the kids bowling in the mall and lastly the they took them to touch spineless sea creatures.  He didn't even care when we went to pick him up that we were there.  Yup, fun!

What do you get?

What do you get when you add a plain white $40 ikea rug, tape and a can of leftover wall paint?  Well, you will see below.  I know this has been done a million times in the blog world, because that is where I got my idea.  But none-the-less here it is.

We bought this plain rug from ikea because it was cheap.  Plain and simple.

 I added some tape to mark out where I was going to paint.

Added some paint and tada!  A not so boring and plain rug.  Although, keep in mind the dark painted section in the back of this photo is going to go on the white part of the rug.  I love the white and grey but sadly in the few weeks that I have had this rug the white is disgusting from the two little midgets that I call my children.  Yup, maybe one day I will be able to use more white around the house.  And who doesn't like a classic chevron pattern rug?  I can't resist.  

And yes this post is really really late.  I can tell because I painted my walls the second week I moved into   my new house and this photo was taken before I painted.  OOps!  

 

A good end to summer.

The weekend before last has amazing weather.  So we made sure to have a last summer adventure before all the nasty weather started rolling in.  Went to Canmore and the weather was amazing!  It was 29 degrees Celsius.  Ahhhhh!  Took a bunch of photos of the kiddies.  Sterling is  now in the 'I don't want to pay attention in order to let you get any photos of me' stage.  Which is alright, but that is why there is a lack of photos of him.  

Grassi Lake, in all it's turing into fall glory.

This little girl is getting so big, despite the lack of hair!  She loves posing for the camera.  What a sweetie!

Her infamous stinky face.  

Sterls started doing  somersaults down the hill at the park in Canmore.  So much fun!

Tons of fun!  But sadly it is just making me miss summer more.  I love summer and I am really sad to see it go.  At least we let summer go out in the correct way.  Spent the morning at Grassi Lake and the afternoon in the river park in Canmore.  Then we had a picnic for dinner with the fam. (Ang and family, Stacy and family and Colin) in Bragg Creek.  Yup, love me some summer.  Now to get my fall on, including the Spina Bifida Conference in Edmonton.