My Momma's Surgery

For those of you that don't know, my mother had surgery yesterday. She has had problems with her left shoulder since I was 5 and we got in a car wreck. She messed up her shoulder pretty bad, had to have surgery on it. Recently though, it has been hurting her terrible. She is in tears most of the day from the pain. Her left thumb and first finger were also numb constantly. The doctors told her she had a bulging disk pressing a nerve that was causing the pain, or something like that.

Anyway, they went in yesterday and put in a cadaver bone and cleaned some stuff up in there. They went in through the front of her neck. The surgeon came out afterward and showed my dad and I pictures of the x-rays with the new bone and the screws in her neck.

Today, she is tired, but her fingers are no longer numb from what she can tell. That is a great sign. She isn't in much pain, just sore from how they had her laying on the surgery table (it was a 3 hour surgery).

My beautiful momma, waiting to go into surgery.

The staff here at Oklahoma Spine Hospital has been awesome. Incredibly friendly. AND I took some pictures yesterday before she went in. :)

She has tiny veins, so this was a pain to get in.

My concerned dad.

Her chart.

Again, concerned Dad. 

She is doing great. Should be out tonight or tomorrow. Hopefully this surgery will provide the relief they are saying it should. Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers!

UPDATE: She went home this evening. She is doing ok, just tired. So glad it went so well for her. Love my mom!

Shay

Hannah's Barbie House

We asked Hannah (our 4 year old) what she wanted to ask Santa for, for Christmas. Her answer? Fourteen story Barbie house. Thats a little extravagant... but Bill and I decided a new Barbie house would be a great "big" gift from Santa for her. I started looking at the Barbie houses available to buy. None of them were very big, and they were all pretty lame. Just saying. So, when google or amazon fails, I go to my next best tool - Pinterest.

On pinterest, I saw this:

This one wasn't nearly as large as I wanted, but I thought it was a great idea. Using an old piece of furniture and turning it into a barbie house with storage. I decided I wanted to go larger. On my FIRST thrift store trip to find something, I came across this gem,

which, by the way, was the ONLY piece of furniture in the entire thrift store. It was meant to be!

So here it is as after I took the doors off, and started painting it.

  I didn't have a definite plan, just a basic idea of what I wanted to do with it. My mom helped a lot. She hepled with the painting, the ideas, found the flooring, and the trim we ended up using. She is where I get my craftiness from!

We put a base coat on some of the rooms, and put some of the Barbie furniture in to make sure it was going to look good. So let me just skip to the finished product...

And there it is, the finished product. We used real carpet in the bedroom and office, vinyl sticky flooring tiles in the ballroom, bathroom, and kitchen. Used a smaller wooden trim form Lowes on all the edges to give it that finished look. The nice guy at Lowes gave us some samples of the green grass turf, which I used on the outdoor area. And I velcroed some little push lights to the ceilings, so I can change out the batteries. 

Hannah woke up to this on Christmas morning, looked at it, and started jumping up and down. She loves it. Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!