Happy Hallie & less than Marvelous Mommy

My Hallie girl. I swear she is always so so happy!!! So full of life & so fun. There's not much that upsets her & just being with us makes her so happy & content. She smiles these HUGE heart melting smiles and gives kisses all the time. Don't get me wrong, she can throw a pretty good princess fit if she doesn't get her way but that's not very often. Usually all it takes to make her happy is some food (she's now a VERY good eater and doesn't like to be left out of anyone's eating) or being held. She is still very big on being held by the people she loves. 

These are just a few of her smiley pictures. I literally have hundreds on my phone. I take so many each day cause she just doesn't stop being happy and making huge cheesy faces that never fail to brighten my day! You are such a ray of light my sweet girl. Love love love you!!! 

Now on to me....the less than marvelous mommy! I have not been doing so great recently. A few weeks back I got very very dizzy. It wasn't like the "I stood up too fast" dizzy. It was like "I'm on a tilt-a-whirl that I cannot get off of"! It got increasingly bad to where I couldn't drive, I couldn't even really be on my feet for more than a few minutes before I would need to hold on to things to steady myself and standing upright would make me feel so off balanced that I got nauseous and sick to my stomach. I went to the Dr. to make sure it had nothing to do with my pregnancy and it was decided that it definitely didn't and that it was more than likely some type of ear problem. I was set up to go see an ENT and given some anti-vertigo meds and antibiotics until I could get in with the ENT. Well the meds did absolutely nothing to help me and the spinning got to an awful point where I was falling over just standing up, I couldn't do anything in my normal life and besides that I was scared to death of what this could be!!! So 1 night (on the weekend of course) I had ben take me to the ER. If for no other reason than my peace of mind, I needed to go and by george I wanted to get off that blasted tilt-a-whirl!! They did a bunch of tests on me, labs, CT scan, all of it and ruled out the really scary stuff and came back with that I had labrynthitis. What the hey is that you might ask?? Well it's a virus of the inner ear that messes with the inner ear's ability to interpret the signals from your body to your brain. Who knew the inner ear was so important? But it is very important for the body & the brain to communicate with each other and so when the inner ear gets a virus, apparently you get to go on the tilt-a-whirl. At least that's the way I understood it. Being that it's a virus, it's not responsive to antibiotics and it just has to work its way out of your body and being the little devil it is it can take 2+ weeks to do that. The good news is that they were able to give me these little patches behind the ears which basically block the inner ear. They cut off the inner ear's signals so that your body & brain circumvent the inner ear in order to talk to each other. So bizarre and somewhat fascinating. The patches DO work though and I had relief within 24 hours of putting them on. They had to be changed every 3 days and I could tell when they were running out, almost 72 hours to the dot. But after almost 3 weeks now I think the virus is mostly gone. I'm done with my prescription for the patches and while I still get dizzy occasionally it's nothing like before and it was worst when we were traveling but I'm thinking other factors were probably involved there also. Craziest sickness ever and definitely one of the more scary ones I've ever dealt with. Once I found out what it was I felt a LOT better emotionally about it but lemme tell ya, when your world starts spinning out of control and you have trouble just walking, You start to think the worst! Scary stuff! 

So anyways the crazy labrynthitis coupled with the pregnancy exhaustion that has hit me like a mack truck here recently has made me feel not so hot :( But enough of the less than marvelous mommy...gotta get my game face on! Lots of happenings to get to!

I'll be catching up on our summer fun here shortly and I gotta get all our pics uploaded from our awesome week at the beach! It was truly AWESOME for our family of 4 this year and I'm so excited to get to all the pics of aiden & hallie in the waves. Such cutie patootie's they were!! Stay tuned! We'll be fun again here soon, I promise! Well the kids are always fun, even when mommy's lacking :)