Crawling back.

I'm getting better, a little bit every day. I finished my antibiotics on Monday and all the little spots from the fever blisters on my chest are fading. I still have a horrible hacking cough which I read can take up to 6 weeks to go away, and Darren says I make these weird grunting noises in my sleep now. I know it's true because it's woken me up a couple of times - I don't know what to make of that.

Frances got thrush from nursing while I was taking the Biaxin. I gave her some prescription stuff to knock out the worst of it but didn't finish it because it seems so nasty so now we are eating a lot of yogurt and I've been taking acidophilus. I'm sure we'll be back in balance soon.

Let's see. What else has been going on. Oh! Well, we got a lot of snow, which is totally weird for this time of year. We don't usually get it until late January. It's still on the ground but starting to melt now. We had all kinds of adventures around here with that going on. Jackson had a great time playing in it. He had one snow day on Monday - all the schools were closed.

Here's a picture of our back yard:


And some of Jackson:




This is the nephew of Our Neighbors of the Holy Shit What a Pile of Crap. The jacket Jackson is wearing in the picture is now in the garbage after this boy spilled kerosene on it from the tiki torch still in our neighbor's yard left over from the summer. Totally sucks, it was his school coat. I ordered a new one for him from Land's End - love that company.


Here's Frannie inside where it's warm:


School is going well. The front lobby is decorated for Christmas with artwork from Jackson's class and the 1st and 2nd graders. There's a tree too covered with hand-painted ornaments, and the hallway is cluttered with charity baskets full of donations for needy families.

The kids got to wear their regular home clothes to school today and the little girl who Jackson especially likes said that he looked handsome! He told me this while he was changing for his swim class today. Only 3 more lessons with his current instructor, then she goes off to study for her massage therapist license. We'll miss her!

Jackson will graduate his lessons with her at a level 5, but he'll have to stick with private lessons because the group level 5 classes are full of 10 year olds. He can't even join the group classes at level 1 because you have to be six and he's only just turned five in October. I need to bring the video camera next week to get some more recent footage of how well he's doing. He got a lane all to himself today and got some good practice in on his frog kick. He can front crawl the entire length of the big pool and turn right around and do the back crawl all the way back.

Anyway, I guess that's all for now. When I first got pneumonia I said to my cousin, "Boy this sure sucks ass but I'd rather have pneumonia than food poisoning!" She has had both and agreed with me, but now I have to take that back. When I had food poisoning I really just wished I would die, but then it only lasts 3 or 4 days and it's done. The effects of pneumonia just go on and on and on and on and on ......