Dear Family,
I’m alive! And I’m not mad at anyone in the family! The only reason I haven’t written is because I’ve been super sick and stayed too late at my own pity party. But thank you, Aunt Jean, for calling to check on me. :0)
So this is what happened: my gallbladder went out on me, but even though my symptoms all pointed to that, every time I went to the doctor they said it was normal. Our family doctor did a blood test and said everything came back normal. Then one Sat the pain was so bad I asked Ryan to take me to the ER. They did an ultrasound and a CT and even looked for kidney stones. They sent me home with some pain medicine and said everything looked normal. But I felt decidedly un-normal inside. I finally had a hidascan (?) done and guess what. I don’t have any gallstones but my gallbladder was functioning at a low percent. So about 11 weeks ago I had my gallbladder and my appendix removed. (Nothing was wrong with the appendix. The surgeon who took out my gallbladder offered it as an extra because “that thing’s just a ticking time bomb anyway.”)
I’m starting to feel better, but recovering from the surgery is taking me a lot longer than I thought it would. :0( It’s been 11 weeks since the surgery and I only started riding my bike about a month ago and just started running this week. I still have swelly belly and swelly face and feel very ugly. But that happened to me when I had my hysterectomy too so I’m hoping it’s just a surgery side effect and not that I’ve actually gotten fat in the past 3 months that I haven’t been running. Ryan says he’ll still love me even if I get fat. :0)
We’ve had a pretty good summer though in spite of leaky gallbladders. We went to Boise to help Tammy and her family move into their new house, which, btw, is SO cute! Ryan and I have been talking about moving next year and seeing Tammy and Jeremy’s house has us itching to go sooner. Jared got some great cousin time and we all got reacquainted with Tammy’s darling kids. Seriously. They look like pixies. :0) Tammy and Jeremy also came down last weekend and the highlight of that was the sister date Connie, Tammy, and I took Sat night. We ate at Bombay House in Provo and stayed out late talking, talking, talking.
Ryan and I decided Jared needed something non-sports this summer (but not in place of track club or soccer) and signed up for a program called Bright Ideas. It’s a 2 week thing the school district’s gifted services program puts on. He loved it!! The flier said they’d be studying opposites this year and I’m not sure how much of that they actually did. But I do know they did all the fun, hands on stuff you do at school. Lots of experiments like seeing who could protect a raw egg the best and keep it from breaking when they threw it off the roof. I’ve never seen Jared so excited about anything as he was about this. Looks like maybe we have more of a mathlete than an athlete on our hands.
I got pulled over for speeding on our way to Bright Ideas one morning. I really did think the speed limit was 45. It wasn’t. It was 25. But the cop was really nice and let me off with a warning. Then about 3 weeks later I was taking Jared to track club, speeding again, and the same cop pulled me over! When he got to my car he asked, “have I pulled you over here before? You look really familiar.” I wanted to say, “well, not here, but you pulled me over by Sego Lily a few weeks ago.” Instead all that came out was, “um, no, not here………” I got a ticket that time and Jared learned a lot about traffic laws. Now he always asks me how fast I’m going and what the speed limit is and then says I should slow down.
Before getting sick, or really in the middle of it, I ran in the Ragnar Zion Trail race down in Zion Nat’l Park. Since we’d be camping I brought Jared and Ryan with and we made a little family trip out of it. My Burt cousins and some of our friends made up our 8 woman team. We even had a shirt that Connie and Adelyne helped to design. It was lots of fun. My favorite part was driving through the park and hearing Jared’s excitement that “we’re in a NATIONAL park!” We’re going to Yellowstone this weekend for our 1st ever Keller Family Reunion and he’s so excited to go to yet another NATIONAL park and to see volcanoes.
Our 1999 Honda Civic (that we bought new) is limping along lately. It has 198,000 and all of a sudden this car that’s never give us trouble is falling apart all over the place. Last week the muffler broke and when we took it in we found out that the pipe connecting to the car had broken away, one of the flyways for the belts was busted, one of the engine mounts had broken off, and the belts needed to be replaced. Then while the guy was working on it he broke off the thing for opening the hood of the car (but he replaced that for free). It cost us about $700 to get everything fixed (thank goodness for savings!).
Then Monday night the Civic died and wouldn’t start. We thought it was the starter and maybe Ryan could fix it himself. He looked it up in our repair book, then he watched a how to video on YouTube, and then asked if I wouldn’t mind if we took it to another mechanic. We took it in this morning. We thought we’d have to tow it there with the Subaru and a tow rope, but it started! Turns out all these pieces (I want to say they’re teeth) inside the starter motor have broken off and for some reason that meant the mechanic had to pull the whole transmission down which means emptying it and filling it again. So it’s going to be another $1000 to fix the Civic! Ack! It’s a lot but we decided to fix it.
This means that I’ve been driving Ryan to and from work a lot because I’ve needed the car at home. I am REALLY glad I don’t have to commute everyday! This was another learning opportunity for Jared. He learned that Rush Hour doesn’t mean everyone is driving really fast. Hopefully we get the car back tomorrow and Ryan live out his dream of driving it into the ground.
Last weekend we got together with one of our friends from the German house. Her name is Thira, she’s from Austria, and her whole family speaks German and English too. There’s another couple in her ward that’s half German. The dad’s from the northern part of Germany and the mom is American but served in Germany. We all met at Thira’s house and the plan was for us all to speak only in German so the kids could have other kids to practice with. It didn’t work. The kids opted not to speak at all. So we put on a German movie for them and the adults had fun talking to each other in German.
After the movie we bribed the kids with Oreo smoothies. All they had to do was answer ONE question in German. The only one who did it was Jared! Not only that, but Thira used a word he didn’t know, he asked her what that meant. : ) Now we have a new brilliant plan. Thira and I will get together with our kids and just let them play and maybe they’ll become friends. One thing I found really interesting was this: Thira and Howie (Thira’s husband, a radiologist like Uncle John) have a daughter with Down Syndrome. Mika’s 5 and she can understand and speak German and English just as well as anyone. I got to see Thira and her kids a couple days later when one of our other roommates was visiting from VA. I ended up talking to Mika a lot in German and she decided she liked me and talked to me in a mix of German and English. I thought that was really cool.
I just watched the family reunion video that Reid posted. It cheered me up so much watching that! I belong to such a great family. Now just you wait for 2015 when the cousins are in charge. I think the aunts will see that they’ve taught us well.
Love,
Sherry, Ryan, and Jared
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