Coburn Kids

After a whirlwind couple of days, Daniel and I are back from our house-hunting trip to Chicago and have decided on a home!  Which was a heart wrenching experience trying to choose one as the original house we decided on we changed at the last minute.  We just didn’t feel comfortable and the one we eventually picked just kept popping into our minds so we decided it would be best not to ignore that feeling.

The kids had fun staying with Grandma and Grandpa and 4 days really is my limit of spending time away from my kids I found out.  I was dying to get back and be with them! We got all our paperwork for the new house signed today, checks sent off and now just have to worry about packing and selling our current home.  I have pics below of our new house.  The girls rooms are really cute, one of them is bright pink (for Gena), and the other is flowers (Adessa) and then Caden’s room was a guest room but it’s done in Maroon and Gold:

Daniel and I leave today for Chicago and we’ve been working like mad on our house! We met with the real estate agent on Tues. so we’re all set to start that process going.  So this week I’ve been taking pictures of the house and getting it ready to be sold.  One of the challenges in selling an empty house, as we will be doing, is it’s so hard for a buyer to picture what the house will look like with furniture.  So Daniel and I decided it would be best to do the house pictures before everything gets packed up.  I have to get a better picture of the outside now that the trim, mulch and everything else is done.  As well as to include the garage.  Just waiting for a nice sunny day! Figured it couldn’t hurt to put our house up here as well, who knows who might see it!

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Beautiful rambler home, 3 beds, 2 baths, priced to sell quickly
4318 Silent Rain Drive, South Jordan, UT 84095

$294,500

Rambler/Ranch style, stucco exterior. Built in 2005 with open flowing floor plan. Kitchen-Great Room combo, warm neutral colors. Stainless Steel appliances, island in kitchen, Corian counter tops, upgraded cabinets, pantry, recessed lighting throughout. Master suite has walk-in closet, double sinks and garden tub. New carpet throughout. Huge open basement with 2100 unfinished sq. ft., total square footage @ 4200. Attached 2 car garage w/ opener. Walk to Temple, churches and elementary school. HOA covers amenities such as gym, boat rides, basketball/volleyball courts, park/playground, swimming pool, lake, community events and more! Minutes from movie theaters, grocery stores, shopping and restaurants. Buyer/agent to verify all info.

Things have been crazy!  Daniel and I have been have been working like mad on so many projects.  We’ve gotten the front yard in shape, I bought and painted some trim for the garden area, we pulled weeds, laid mulch, pruned and more. We were set to start on the backyard then it snowed for a few days so we moved inside.

We’ve gotten the paperwork from Gena’s school, and her last day was yesterday.  She was off track starting this week. We’ve arranged for Adessa to have her VIP day at preschool and her last day is April 8th.

April 2nd-5th Daniel and I will be out in Illinois to search for housing, because April 11th we pack the truck and April 13th we move!  Crazy, I know. We’ve all ready contacted the properties we are interested in, setting up dates to see the home. Flights/hotels/rental car are all done and covered. Moving truck ordered.  My Mom is going to be able to drive out with us, which is fabulous (thank you mom!).  My Dad is flying out that Thursday we move to help.  Then they will both fly home on Sunday.

We’ve got the carpet ordered for this house, have started spring cleaning all the toys, clothes, and more. I got Caden’s last Dr.’s appointment scheduled for April 6th. We’ve started pawning off the furniture we can’t bring with us as well!

Everything is happening fast but I love it. I thrive in this fast paced planning stage, I go “control freak” on everyone.  Okay, maybe not lovely for my family who has to deal with me but I’m thorough and I know I have all the bases covered… I swear!!

The Draper Temple dedication is now done and over with. Daniel and I brought the kids and went with my parents to walk through the temple a few weeks back. Gena and Adessa were so thrilled to go! They loved it. They asked lots of questions and were just generally enthused to see it and how beautiful it was. My Mom and Dad also came up this last Sunday to watch the kids so that Daniel and I could go to the dedicatory services for it. Again, wonderful and so special. We were there an hour before it began in our Stake Center and still sat in the overflow, but that hour before was so quiet and peaceful. I forget sometimes with 3 kids running around how valuable and precious that much quiet time can be! So I sat and meditated on life, on my children, on the gospel and about my wonderful husband.

In extremely exciting news, after 5 months we now have an official job offer and we’ve accepted! It is out of state but we are blessed because we will get to be near family still, which is invaluable to us. So come mid-April we are packing up the family and headed to Chicago, IL. Daniel has a great new job with Sears and I can’t tell you how grateful and enthused we are about it. The fact that we will have good health insurance again also brings a smile.

Of course, the coordination of the move wipes that smile right off!! I have to now get in place all of Caden’s new doctors and reschedule all his upcoming appointments. We’ll be able to do his Swallow Study here in Salt Lake but his ophthalmology, cardiology, ENT, GI doctor, geneticist, therapists, preemie clinic, cleft clinic, and all other appointments we had upcoming here now have to be redone. Which is a very daunting task. Not to mention getting Gena into her new school and all the fun moving things such as utilities and the like. I’m up for it though.

It’s exciting and scary to move all at the same time. You get comfortable in a place after a few years. You settle in, everything becomes familiar. There’s a pattern and a rhythm that life develops. Then you have to uproot and everything is new, different, and you feel out of place for a bit. I’m teaching the girls that this is a new adventure for us. One chapter of our lives closing and a new one beginning. It’s hard to leave so much behind though. Family, friends, a fantastic ward who has helped us out in ways I can’t even begin to thank them. The mountains… I’ll miss the mountains. But we have new experiences and opportunities before us and I acknowledge and realize just how lucky we are to get this great job offer. Times are hard and scary, so to have that bit of stability back in our lives is something I am grateful for.

Not much to report.

Job search continues, it’s been 5 months! Hard to believe. For updates on the states, since my mind has melted with the sheer number of companies and people: North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Utah, Washington and Texas are the contenders right now.

Caden continues to learn more signs. No new sounds yet, still just Ha, Ga, Ge and… that’s about it.

Parent/Teacher conference for Gena went well. Her only struggle is handwriting, but she is a full year younger then the other kids.

Adessa loves preschool, loves her teacher, loves her friends. Though she is mad at her preschool best friend Peyton for telling on her because she wasn’t sharing. Preschool drama, I love it.

Today is Daniel’s birthday!  Happy Birthday hun’. He’s not here with us, he left for Illinois on Tuesday and was able to surprise his family.  Which was very exciting and they took him out for a birthday dinner. Then he went straight from there to Ohio on job interviews. The poor guy gets to spend about 6 hours on a plane on his birthday with layovers and the like.  WAHOO! I thought that Wile E. Coyote kind of captured how Daniel must feel right now, so it was perfect for this blog post. 

We have weekend plans though for his birthday so hopefully that will make up for today! Happy 38th birthday babe.

Happy

34th

Birthday

to my

Big

Brother

Ryan!!

Hope you have fun.

We found out early this week that Daniel’s previous employer, who our COBRA is through, is switching their insurance plan to a $7000 deductible Feb 1st, no-copay’s. We were never sent any papers on it, we actually found out by chance. It’s basically the cheapest plan you can have and still tell your employees that “you provide health insurance”.  With Daniel unemployed we certainly can’t afford this.

So we’ve been on the phone all day with every government and state health plan out there.  CHIP, since we have COBRA no matter how poor it is, won’t cover my children.  If we drop COBRA then it’s still a 90 day waiting period and Daniel and I are out of luck. Medicaid, we make too much.  Utah HIPP, we can’t get coverage because there’s a 6 month waiting period until any of Caden’s pre-existing conditions (which is basically everything) are covered.

So I’ve started canceling Caden’s doctor’s appointments.  His Cleft Team appointment coming up, that took an entire 18 months to get, we are going to even though this is going to cost us hundreds of dollars. His eye appointment coming up first of Feb., canceled.  His immunizations on Feb. 12th, canceled.  I’ve heard that the health department can do these for free, it should be noted though that a week ago in the Salt Lake Tribune our legislators are looking at cutting the Utah Health Department.

So I sit back and ponder about the other families going through this.  There are many. Such as the two-year-old Colorado girl who was told by her insurance company that she had reached her lifetime maximum and was being dropped.  Medicaid would not cover them because they made too much.  The special medicaid they were under because of their child’s extreme medical problems was also dropping her because she had to go to Nebraska for a transplant.  The transplant is only done in 4 hospitals in this country and CO wasn’t one of them. So these parents, who have the unimaginable task of being there for their medically fragile child now have to fight with the government, fight with the state of CO to just have them cover the life-saving medical care their child needs. Only because of the media coverage they were able to get did the state of CO step up and reinstate her health insurance.  What of those other families that don’t get their story on the news?

Sure we can write letters to our congressmen, our legislators, but it doesn’t become personal for them. Most people with health coverage that have never had to endure or fight with their insurance companies can’t understand the situation. I used to be one of them, I can’t fault them. I always thought that since I paid my taxes, since I had health insurance I would never be affected by this. It’s just a passing thought when you see stories like this in the newspaper. As it should be really, because there are only so many causes, only so many situations that you can handle at one moment.

So what’s a family to do? I’m actually not bitter or angry about any of this, rather disappointed… a little frustrated.  It’s not myself or my family that I feel sorry for in all this, it’s the other families that I know who are going through this.  Hard working, middle-class people who are trying to navigate the waters of insurance bureaucracy alone, who feel failed by the system and at the same time have the intense burden of also worrying about the health of their loved one.  Their child, their husband, their friend.

So, today is my birthday.  The big 3 – 0.  Daniel was great this weekend and we went out to dinner and to Desert Star for a play.  I got a brand new coat, as I’ve been desperately in need of one from my husband and lovely kids.

In other news, Caden is running a high fever again.  Not sure why though, he’ll act fine one minute then kind of dazed and sick the next.  He doesn’t seem to have a sinus or eye infection again, could be an ear infection but he usually pulls on his ears when that happens.  Kind of a mystery.

I should really know better then to have ever uttered the words “we’re done with surgeries for a while”.  I’ll back up a bit, so today was another Preemie Clinic appointment for Caden. It was for his eyes. I believe I explained a few months back that we were going to have to watch one of Caden’s eyes (his left) because the blood vessels in there were too tight. This is from his ROP (retinopathy of prematurity) which was pretty significant at a Stage 3, because of this there is scarring in his eye.  We were borderline surgery but his eyes didn’t get worse so thought we were in the clear.  The glasses never came as a big surprise but for some reason when I heard Dr. Larson (opthamologist) talk about his tight blood vessels a few months back all I thought was that if it got worse we’d have to have a stronger eyeglass prescription.  Thinking it through now, the scarring the ROP caused wouldn’t mean a stronger eyeglass prescription but surgery.  We certainly don’t want his retina to detach, worse case scenario.  So Caden will have to be followed every 3 months for… I have no idea how long.  If it does get worse then there will be surgery. It’s just a waiting game, same as everything else.  So I was a bit taken aback by the talk of “surgery”.  Only because I had thought that I wouldn’t hear that word for a few years.

Caden is doing wonderful though.  He’s pulling to a stand and cruising along the couch, no independent steps yet but it’s only a matter of time!  We are really laying on the sign language for Caden right now to try to get him to communicate with us.  Feb. 1st Caden is 18 months old and for sounds we have Ga and Ha.  No pointing or waving yet but hey, I’m not complaining because the little sounds he does make are the cutest in the world when he does it! He’s a social little guy, loves to smile and is such a stinker when it comes to feeding himself.  If it’s dry like a cracker or bread he’ll pick it up and put it in his mouth himself, but if it’s wet or mushy, say pears or cooked carrots, he won’t touch them. It’s also interesting that he won’t eat anything from our fingers.  It has to be on a spoon.  The drinking still escapes him, the poor boy has no idea what to do with a sippy cup whether it’s holding it or how to drink from it.  He just sits there with his mouth gaping open waiting for me to pour it in.  It’s really quite funny.

The job search still continues, we’ve added 2 in Florida and Pennsylvania to the list now.  I do apologize as yes we have Illinois in there as well and I forgot to mention it.  I’ve had someone ask me why so many states but really… the interview process is long and tedious and until we have an offer we won’t stop applying for jobs.  We’ve been talking to some companies since early Nov. and with the holidays it just made the whole thing even more drawn out.  Soon we hope, soon.

And a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my little nephew Jacob who turned 5 yesterday.  It’s exciting that Adessa and my nephew will be in Kindergarten at the same time this upcoming school year.  I always wanted cousins the same age as me but they were all much older. I also consider 5 to be a big birthday, because they are suddenly too old to be “toddlers” now.  I just consider it a crossing-over point where they are now big kids.