A jaw surgery update and Little boys love Christmas lights!

Right now, I hear a baby crying in the hallway of the hotel we are staying in.  The kids are sleeping soundly in the adjoined room next door and Jon and I have settled down ourselves for the night!  Tomorrow we will embark on making the drive out of town to my grandpa's beautiful land where we will be celebrating Thanksgiving with dear family and play outside in the crisp mountainous air and the most anticipated play with Max, the dog (which is quite humerus because my kids are 100% afraid of all dogs they ever run across, but for whatever reason, Max is different.  Silly kids!)  I am content.

So today marks 8 weeks!  The time has gone by so fast.  The joy of being home and regaining my strength with my littles nearby has been peppered here and there by the frustration of a liquid/puree diet and a still mostly numb chin and teeth, however healing has been much easier among the business of school schedules of  2 and a two year old!

Some small achievements:

I'm not sure how many millimeters I can open at this point, but I'm able to fit 9 tongue depressors stacked between my teeth.  That is a stretch from the four I began with! (It's my gauge at home to make sure I'm making progress with all of my stretching).

Feeling has just begun to come back into my chin.  It's not the relief I was expecting, though!  The nerves on my chin, when touched (or blown on by the wind), sends pain through the roots of my bottom teeth.  My skin feels like skin when it's "waking up" from being "asleep," but on steroids.  I'm wishing it along quickly to get full feeling again and get past the sensitivity.

The screw in my upper gums is driving me crazy, but I've been informed that I'll get this thing (all 1 inch of it) taken out in January (along with the hook in my bottom gums).

Swelling is down, but I still have some remaining, which I knew would probably be the case.

Finally, 8 weeks, is a special milestone!  I was given permission to eat soft foods (scrambled eggs, overcooked noodles, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie... Hello Thanksgiving!  Woo!) and probably as exciting, I am allowed to sleep on my side again!  Ah, such RELIEF!  My first Gerber-graduate type meal meal was Perkins' pancakes.  SO, so good! (I'll note, though, that chewing didn't just come to me like I was expecting.  It sounds ridiculous, but it was actually pretty hard.  My muscles have remained pretty dormant for the past eight weeks and being located a little differently now made it hard work to "chew" (if I could call it that) pancakes.)

I don't have any real recent pictures of myself except the one you see in the header of my blog (taken a few weeks ago), but I'll get Jon to take one of me soon so I have some more comparison of the changes.

Now, onto the joy of Christmas.

The usual:  Lights, Christmas trees, ornaments, and decorations always fill the couple of days before we leave for Thanksgiving.  This year was no exception as we all hung up the ornaments with the usual clump of ornaments hanging on the bottom branches placed there by the little hands.  This is the memory I carry most of Christmas when I was little, including a lot of fight scenes between my sister and I.  Ha!  I love that we are creating traditions.

The greatest excitement was shown in squeals turned to silence as colored lights were hung in the kids bedroom on their beds.  They became mesmerized. 

 
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the beautiful ceremony I was able to see of my sister-in-law and my two beautiful nieces.  Erin has been digging into the Bible, fellowship, and being the light of Jesus to her girls.  She stood in front of her church Saturday and dedicated McKenna and Peyton to Jesus, vowing to be held accountable for bringing them up in the love of Christ along with our vow to hold her up in prayer and support her.  It was actually really special because her girls are old enough to understand, to see their mom making this commitment, to see the importance it is to Erin and to see the support they have within their church and family.  It was beautiful.  I was thankful to be there with our family.

Well, I'm off to SLEEP ON MY SIDE!  Oh, and also enjoy the hostess cupcake Jon just went out to get for me.  Ummm, yes, cupcakes are SOFT!  :)

Good night!  I hope your day tomorrow is filled with the joy of family and friends and much to give thanks for.   Happy Thanksgiving!  :)