new

there are 49 pages i could fill with words to describe the last two weeks of my life but that's drawn out and long.

easton had a parasite. had. that means he is 100% normal. his pain scale went from a 5-6 everyday to a 3 within two hours of the medication. by 48 hours, he was a 0. i won't go in to the details of how it came to light or how we figured it out, but it was one of the hardest parenting situation i have had to watch. i have never seen a body so tortured. and then at the same time, it was a miracle. and no doctor can explain it to us nor has anyone been able to identify what type of parasite it was (the lab tried for a week) but it doesn't matter. eosinophils spike when you have an intestinal infection, prednisone makes that number go down, hence why we thought we were making headway with the course of action. the crazy diet? most likely unnecessary. the steroids that made him so ill and changed his physical appearance, probably unnecessary. the faith and testimony that are under all of us after learning patience, love, trust, becoming a strong family, they were all necessary.

healthy easton had a lot of words and information build up in his body for five months and now it is spilling out at a rapid speed. we have established a no talking rule after 8pm. my head is tired.

ella started a chinese immersion program. ella now hates the chinese people, language, food, dragons, and life in general. it was a chain of miraculous events that she was able to get into the program and i felt a jolt and overwhelming rush of heaven sent energy that ella mckay needs to know mandarin chinese. but i have spent the last two weeks on my knees watching my confident, happy, little girl turn into an angry asian hating gal. scott and i had a moment where we talked for hours, and cried and talked some more about it. we knelt to pray that night and he looked at me and said," what's our decision? we need to make the decision and pray that it's the right one." i told him that what she was supposed to do had been conveyed to me, we need to pray that her heart will soften and that her tongue will be loosed and that the anger will be replaced with love."

the next morning, she walked in her classroom. we didn't have to hang out in the car crying to find her courage for an hour. she gave me the thumbs up after one minute which meant she earned two points. we have a large poster up on our board called the chinese loving chart. there are no more sparkly things left in the town. we own them all and ella earns them with the points she accumulates for our chinese loving chart. she gives out cards with her name and number on them so that she can make some new friends because a new school is scary. and, those cards are worth one point each if she passes them out. we have had no phone calls yet, but this week, i can feel it, it will happen. and yesterday during sacrament meeting, my father in law snatched up her paper she was drawing. it was a picture of a girl with all chinese characters above it. not only does it make me happy, but those characters are so dang pretty, i feel like she is an artist. and also, this language immersion program has made me change my mind about punishing a kid under 5 years old. because one day i had to ask her chinese teacher something and the thing is, they don't speak english.  and so i didn't understand anything she was telling me and my cheeks got hot and i wanted to spit, cry, hit and scream. so now i understand the behavior of all children everywhere and it is merely a language situation and never will i get upset with a kid under five for not doing what i say lickety split.

also, my daughter grayce, she turned 12. and she is suddenly a woman and she is confident and wore a duck dynasty shirt the first day of seventh grade, bypassing all of the other fancy shirts we bought. and it reminds me of the time in second grade she wrote a song in duck for the talent show (she has a killer duck call that comes from her mouth) and when the teacher asked her to translate it in english, she did. and it reminds me that she has more confidence in herself than i ever did. she makes no apologies, watch out. she also started wearing make up and suddenly, the dynamics around here have changed. because when i went to back to school night with her and she introduced herself, her teachers asked who her parents were. most likely, they taught scott and i and their cheeks turned red because they were teaching second generations.  and because i feel mostly like i have not been able to give my other kids sufficient attention with the running back and forth to health institutions, i threw her a nice birthday bash. we had a delicious dinner, a fantastic two tier yellow cake i made, and we did facials, nails, and watched pee-wee's big adventure. i told all 14 girls that this was cinema at its finest and large marge was the pioneer for special effects in movies today. they weren't as impressed as i had hoped for but it was a fantastic night.

my new normal includes all day with a two year old who is turning three soon and only goes on the potty when he wants a starburst. and because of the aforementioned language thing, i am just fine with that. i am not lonely enough to beg scott mckay to take his baby locks off his baby door yet but it will probably come sooner than later. and also, something fantastic has happened to rowan. he now will watch tv. this is miraculous on many levels because it's consuming him and yesterday he saw the number eight and said out loud that he wants the number eight. and PBS is taking right over for me and his mind sponges up every little bit of information. because when easton was three, he went to pre-school.  at the 3/4 mark of the year, his teacher told me he just wasn't getting the whole letter and numbers thing and that we should watch the letter factory. he watched it for 4 days straight. the next month he read the stop sign. by years end, the teacher told me he was the top scorer on the kindergarten entrance exam. and so, i will embrace the learning from those shows.

last friday, we had the most fantastic experience. my little baby brother decided last year that he might want to play football. the boys in my family have an athletic build and have done well with sports. well, that mr. kyle decided that he would play football this year too. only weber high school hasn't won a football game for 23 games straight which means two years. and so, we all didn't have too high of expectations in the community. they got a new coach and there were high hopes.  we trucked down to west high last friday night. this is where very large football players live on the west side in salt lake city. my mutha texted fear into all of us as she got there before us. text:very large players, kyle might be a rag doll at the end. scared.
shoot. we wondered if this was the kind of carnage small children should watch as we had hyped them up to see uncle kyle play football. wouldn't you know, that kyle mcfarlane, turns out he can play football against thugs after all. he played the entire game and we were all yelling from the stands mostly in shock and disbelief every time he kicked the ball or his name was read over the loud speaker. except for the fact that west high kept calling him kyle mcfarley which turns out okay as we have quite an affinity for the farley's in general. but there was one thing he did that scott had to narrate to all of us naeive family members called a fumble. i don't know how it happened as this was the first football game i have ever watched in it's entirety, but somehow there was a large pile of thugs on top of my brother and the folks in the stands were yelling, he's not letting it go, i think weber got it. that little brother of mine was under that whole entire pile of thugs and it's a real crowd pleaser if you can still hang onto the ball of a lot a fellas are on top of you. and scott mckay commented on the way home how kyle played offense and defense and how he never even played football until last year.  it kind of makes me real proud of how athletic he is and how experience doesn't matter if you have a listening ear and a drive to do hard things. and to top it all off, they won. those boys killed it and it was announced at church podiums across the valley yesterday. and all of these things happened in two weeks, which is why i say - NEW.