Merry Christmas!

Welcome to Texas

My foot was really bothering me a little while ago. It was sore to the touch and looked kind of bruised. I couldn't think how I bruised it, except that Sophie had stepped on my toe one night and it really hurt. After a week, I decided to take a closer look, and noticed that my toe was infected! I'll spare the gory details, but suffice it to say that there was no doubt it was infected.

I followed proper protocol and cleaned out the puss, disinfected the area and put a bandaid over it. I realized that Sophie probably wasn't the culprit. Then I remembered...

Lisa never actually saw the house that we bought until after we were under contract. Hard to believe she trusted me with that decision. When she flew to Texas with the kids the first week of October, our first order of business was to have her walk through the house.

While Lisa was walking through the kitchen, I was excited to show Sophie the playground out back.


I picked her up because there are quite a few cacti in the greenbelt, and I didn't want her to accidentally get pricked. So of course you know what happened next. I was so excited to show her the park that I didn't watch my footing and slipped and hit a cactus. Oh, and I was wearing sandals.

I was surprised that it didn't actually hurt at all. I removed all the spines I could see - they were small and hairlike - then I disinfected the area and quickly forgot all about it.

So back to my initial story. One week after cleaning my toe, it was still sore. When I checked closer, you guessed it, it was infected again. I decided this time I was going to get every last drop of puss out so that the infection wouldn't come back. After 2 or 3 squeezes, I discovered the culprit just by the base of the nail in my middle toe.


Apparently, I missed one BIG cactus spine that was totally embedded in my toe. Glad to know I carried it around for almost 3 weeks!

Welcome to Texas!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

In Nursery today, Sophie got her very own Christmas ornament. She was so thrilled to come home and hang it on our tree.


Those of you who know Sophie know that when she gets fixated on something, there's no stopping her. She wanted to keep decorating (notice the ripped paper she added to our tree).

First, we started down the right vein. She helped me decorate a wreath that Lisa got last night (nice reflection huh?).


Then she distributed some Christmas ornaments around the house.



Then she decorated with things she could find that were Christmas colors at least.


Then she finally settled for other things she associates with the season.



Yes, socks and gloves. The gloves are obvious, but we had to make a rule that she wear socks all the time now because our house is so drafty and cold. I did get some caulk this weekend so I plan on at least reducing the draftiness of a few windows this week.