Coburn Kids

I can hardly believe my little girl is 7 years old now! Well, Gena had a wonderful 2-part birthday. On Oct. 18th we decided to go down to Frightmares at Lagoon instead of having a full-blown birthday party for her. Adessa and her loved it!  You can check out some of the action below:

Adessa and Gena in a plane

Gena convincing Adessa that this ride will be fun. (Yes, that’s a look of terror on Adessa… but she did indeed have fun!)

On the swings!

Next I have some pics from Caden’s surgery.

Getting dressed in his surgery PJ’s

Playing in the waiting room before surgery

After surgery in his hospital room

Then we have the big day of Gena’s birthday. I have to give some explanation with these pictures though, there was a Halloween Carnival for the Jordan Child Development Center (Caden’s OT and Speech Pathologist) that we went to last night. So the girls were able to get dressed up in their costumes so here’s your sneak peek.  Just to give an explanation on these costumes too… *ahem* I told the girls they were going to do Halloween right this year.  (Plus, I really doubt next year I’ll be able to pick what they can do for Halloween now that Gena is getting older, so this was my last year to pick anything out.) Which means none of the all ready dozens of princess costumes they can wear any other day of the year in their dress up clothes, and just add to that collection.  (I sound so mean, but there has to be another mom out there who has dressed her daughter up for one-too-many princess parties like I have!) They still wanted to be pretty though so we compromised and did midnight fairies.  This is the result, and they LOVE IT!

Gena pulls off Goth a little too well….

And the pictures from her family birthday party are below, because we celebrated that right after the carnival:

Gena with her cake

Eating cake!  It was a Hannah Montana cake.

We got Gena her own set of scriptures with her name engraved on them. She went to bed last night reading them… it was enough to bring a tear to my eye! 

Caden is home from his surgery! The little boy is just amazing, I don’t think I can say that enough. He was very irritable the first few hours after his surgery, shaking his head furiously.  After a few hours we finally figured out why when we took of his no-no’s (arm restraints that prevent him from bending his arms) he had to itch his face like crazy! He’s really restless and a bit fussy, no crying though. He started throwing up and running a fever about 3 days afterward, scary but he’s doing much better. We are still piggybacking Tylenol and Ibuprofen for pain. He’s off his all liquid diet and we did baby food for the first time yesterday.  He did really well!

I’m very grateful for his g-tube right now because he’s refusing anything in his mouth.  He won’t let our hands near his mouth.  I tried to wet his lips because they were dry and he did NOT like that. I haven’t had a chance to see inside his mouth yet but just so that everyone knows he had his soft and hard palate closure, gumline repair, and a nasolabial fistula (where the rebuild the nasal floor).  A lot for such a little guy.

A huge thanks to my church though. I had 2 wonderful ladies from my ward stop by my house on Sunday night just to visit and say hi.  Some other members of my ward dropped off dinner on Monday and Tuesday for us as well. We’ve also had so many phone calls today asking about our little son and wondering how he’s doing from family, friends and people in my ward. I can’t express my gratitude enough for all the help and support those around us have been. THANK YOU!

In other news Daniel is losing his job.  As far as I understand it just came down to a numbers game at work, considering how much Daniel has done for his company and the years he’s been there it’s a blow. I can’t tell you how stressful this is because of Caden.  Health insurance is our biggest worry, having been through this before we can’t afford to do the outrageous COBRA payments (typically running over $1000+ a month), house payments and medical bills we still have. Unemployment certainly doesn’t pay enough and we can’t lapse in coverage since then Caden would be uninsurable or fall under pre-existing condition clauses. So we have to find a large company with good benefits quickly. If you know of anything at all, please shoot us an e-mail. Doesn’t have to be in Utah either, we can’t really expect to hold hope to stay here but we would like to try.

We’ll keep trucking on. Next week we have Caden’s eye appointment on Nov. 3rd to see what’s going on with his eyes. A follow-up with his plastic surgery on Nov. 5th, we also have Caden’s Occupational Therapist that day and his Speech Pathologist as well. Then we also have Caden’s pediatrician appointment on Nov. 6th. Later on the 6th we have Daniel’s mom coming in from Chicago for a visit too.  Busy weeks ahead!

This last Tuesday Caden had his hearing test through the Utah Department of Health’s Preemie Clinic. We are still showing moderate hearing loss on the low frequencies and mild in the high frequencies. The audiologist stated this could be because of the length that Caden wasn’t hearing and we are retesting after Christmas sometime and then we’ll start making decisions about hearing aids and so forth.

I talked with Caden’s Early Intervention OT and Speech and they felt we should be connected to PIP here in Utah so are contacting them for us.  It stands for Parent Infant Program and helps kids with hearing and vision problems, it’s through the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind. So another therapist/doctor for us to see.

Caden’s surgery is on Monday, no time set yet. Daniel and I are fighting with our insurance company on a number of issues, a saga I will not bore you with.

At this point, by the time Caden’s an adult I should have a medical degree by default!

I’ve been working on a new project, digital scrapbooking.  I’ve always seen and admired people who scrapbook but was never able to really get into it for a number of reasons.

1. Too expensive.  Stickers that cost $4, ribbons that cost $2, paper that can cost .50-$2.50
2. Requires too much space.  You need somewhere to store all of the materials.
3. Time.  Big one here; you have to print the pictures, cut them, buy the stickers and pages, assemble them, keep the materials organized, write on them, remember the dates, etc.

Props to those people who use this as their creative outlet, who love and adore this and find the time in their day to make this happen.  My sister does scrapbooking and does beautiful work. I’m an online person though, no surprise.  So I thought that there had to be a better solution for me, that was just as good, but never really knew what to look for.

Then my mom, my sister-in-law and I went to the “What a Women Wants” show at the South Towne Expo center (highly recommend it.) I came across these fabulous looking digital scrapbooking pages and asked how much their software was… $25 a pop.  Hmmm, expensive there too.  My sister-in-law told me that you can get them printed at Costco for $2.99 a page.  That wasn’t bad, so I went home thinking “there has to be something cheaper” and BOOM! found it.  Tons of sites that offer free digital scrapbooking images for nothing or next to nothing. These are high quality images, elements/ribbons/pages are done in 300 dpi resolution and are the 12×12 high quality graphics you need to make stellar quality images for printing.  So I tried a couple, uploaded them to Costco and had Daniel pick them up.

I had him print out 5 pages of them, so just over $16. Figured that was a good starting point and couldn’t wait for Daniel to get home so I could see if this was even worth it.  If it would be as high quality as I thought and something that I and my kids could be proud to show.  They turned out wonderful!  So, I’ve been working on the last 7 years of photos and there’s no need to print out the pictures, no cutting, no gluing, minimal cost involved.  The only thing you really need is an editing program like Photoshop (I bet even Paint) would work, some creativity, and a Costco membership thought I’m sure some other stores do them.  It’s just the perfect solution for someone like me.  You can see some of the pages I did below: