2012-The Year That Flew By!

Here we are at the beginning of 2013 and it seems like I was just here in 2012. I cannot believe how quickly this past year went by! Here is a quick recap of our year. I am going to try to be better about updating on here this year. I have fallen woefully behind in pictures and updates on all of us! January 2012-Made a decision to leave my practice of 5 years and join a new practice in west Fort Worth. I was worried about adding a commute to my already busy schedule but the job has been well worth the extra car time. I am finally in a practice where I feel fulfilled professionally and am able to grow and learn constantly! It's been very exciting! February 2012-Had emergency eye surgery for a retinal detachment. They were able to save my vision and I can still practice dentistry! I now have to wear loupes to practice but I would have had to go to those eventually anyway. I will have to have cataract surgery on my right eye at some point but not yet! The only other differences I notice are an increased sensitivity to light and I have to use a scope when I shoot a rifle at any great distance. May 2012-Went to San Antonio with my office for the annual TDA convention. Got to spend some quality time with one of my closest girl friends! Lily started her first ballet/tap/tumbling class and loves every minute of it! She is constantly showing me her toe taps and ballet feet. July 2012-Made our summer trip home with everyone coming to town. There are 3 families in Midland that I grew up with. We have done holidays together forever and we all make it home twice a year to catch up and have fun. We are getting to be quite the group as all of us "kids" are getting married and having families of our own. I also got to make a trip to Phoenix for a seminar in Cerec and got to spend time with my parents, brother and sister-in-law and Aunt and Uncle August 2012-Joshua started Kindergarten! With his late birthday, he's one of the oldest kids in the class and loves it! We also had him screened for ADHD this fall. Eric has ADD and Joshua has shown some of the same tendencies for years. He does appear to have it mildly and we are working with him on routines, organizational skills and focus drills to help him cope. They seem to be doing the trick for now and we will continue to monitor him closely. I'm praying that he grows out of it but you just never know. September 2012-Joshua turned 6! He is such a fun kid. He's a sweet, sensitive, goofy, smart boy. He makes me laugh daily with his silly antics. Joshua begged to play piano all spring and summer so we signed him up in the fall through his school. He has had a great time with it and doesn't give me too much flack about practicing. He's always loved music and this has been a good outlet for him. It has also helped with his concentration and goal setting. Fall was a blur of Tball, dance, pumpkin patches, school carnivals and costume parties. We a ton of fun and it feels like everything moved in fast forward! December 2012-Lily turned 3! She is a feisty little girl and keeps us on our toes. She's also incredibly bright. She carries on conversations like a 4-5 year old. She knows most of her letters by sight, all of her shapes and colors. Counts to 100 with very minimal help and loves to tell her brother to "stop antagonizing me!" It's never a dull moment around here with these two! We spent Christmas in Midland with my family this year and the kids got an invitation from Grandma to stay for an extra week. They had a blast and Eric and I got a wonderful break! I think we've seen more movies in the week they were gone than we've seen in the past year or two! We got to go out for New Year's Eve and even made it to midnight for a change. 2013 is shaping up to be a great year! My boss is building a brand new office and we hope to be in by the end of the month. It's going to be spectacular! I have set several goals for the year and am going to do my best to get them all accomplished. I have made a pretty good start by cleaning out the kids' rooms while they were gone. I plan on taking the house room by room on my Fridays off to clean out the clutter and stuff that we no longer use. I also have grand plans to repaint. We painted when we moved in almost 7 years ago. Two kids and a houseful of animals means that it could use some sprucing up! Eric's really excited about those plans... We have a big trip planned with my parents in May that everyone is excited about. We are going on a Disney land/sea adventure. We'll spend 3 days in Disney World and 4 nights on the Disney Cruise line. We've done this same sort of trip before without kids and look forward to sharing the experience with them. We took Joshua to Disneyland right before he turned 3 and he loved every minute of it. He has Lily amped up to a fair degree and she can't wait to meet all the princesses! I'll end this with some recent pictures.

Where Oh Where Has This Year Gone?

My goodness time has been flying by lately. While I was waiting for some videos to upload into my iMovie app tonight, I started looking at the last 12 months worth of pictures and am amazed at how much my kiddos have grown. I don't really feel like I've ever caught up with this year. Being down for over a month at the beginning of the year really takes its toll! I am happy to report that 6 months out from surgery, I am doing fantastically well. I have had no scarring and no loss of vision in any area that's pertinent to my daily function or my career. I have a slight deficit in the periphery of my right eye near my nose and my other eye more than compensates for it. I am able to practice dentistry without any problems. I am still LOVING my new job. I am finally able to do the kinds of dentistry that I've always wanted to do. I have gone to several training courses over the past few months and feel like I am finally catching up with technology in my field. My boss is in the process of building a larger place for us to move into by the end of the year and it's fun to see that process as well. This summer was filled with camps, classes and short vacations. Joshua attended an art camp at his school, a young botanist camp at the Botanical Research Institue of Texas and spent countless hours in the pool. He took private swim lessons this summer and went from a kid that wouldn't let go of the wall last summer to a kid that will jump off the diving board and swim the length of the pool. I am thrilled! He also likes to dive underwater with me to touch the bottom in the 10 foot end of the pool. So thankful for the wonderful teacher he had this summer! Joshua also hit another major milestone this summer. He spent 2 weeks in Midland with Grandma and Grandpa Robinson by himself! He had a blast and wasn't homesick in the least. He is already talking about the next time he gets to go out there alone. I think SKYPE helped out with the homesickness issue and the fact that my parents had him so busy he never had a chance to dwell on it. Lily wasn't overly amused at being left behind but she got some good girl time with me to do things that Joshua would never go for if he'd been here. Miss Lily started a dance class this summer and is absolutely hooked. She's my dare devil and has absolutely NO FEAR. Unfortunately, she's also a little on the clumsy side so she ends up bruised in several places. I have been looking for some sort of outlet for all this energy but she's too young for most programs. I found a little dance class that is right next door to her school that had a summer class for 2.5-3 year olds. She LOVED it. They do tap, ballet and tumbling and it is so cute! Tap seems to be her favorite but I think it's mainly the deliciously loud shoes! I got to sit in and watch the final class of the summer and was impressed by all that she had learned. She was the youngest in the class but seemed to have no trouble keeping up. We have signed on for the year and I am looking forward to the little recital in the spring! School started on August 8 for Joshua. It seems so early but I love the early release in May. We are able to hit vacation spots before they become crazy crowded. With his late birthday, Joshua just started Kindergarten. He loves it so far. He turns 6 next week but the cut off for Texas is September 1. He had a wonderful time in Pre-K last year at the same school and we can't wait to see what this year brings!

And the "Eyes" have it...

What a month this has been! I wrote last about my awesome new job and how well it was going. Well 3 weeks into the new job things went all upside down and backward! My job is still great...I just havent been to work in the past month due to emergency eye surgery that I had to have on Valentine's Day!

My parents had come into town for the weekend to see the kids. We hadn't seen them since Christmas, so we had done some catching up and fun stuff over the weekend. With my new work schedule, my parents come in on Friday and were going to leave on Tuesday to spend my day off with me on Monday. I had a routine eye exam scheduled late Monday afternoon to get my contact prescription renewed. I had asked my parents to pick Joshua up from school and I would get Lily on the way home from my appointment. Well, that never happened.

I am VERY thankful to have a thorough optometrist. She has and recommends a retinal scan once a year. I am horribly near sighted and have been since puberty. My contact prescription has been the same for the past three years though. I have also had a small flash of light that would go off in my right eye from time to time but every time they dilated my eyes and did the scan it was normal. I had been told that due to the degree of correction needed on my eyes, that this would happen and we would monitor it. My scan came back looking vastly different on my right eye this time, and they sent me directly to a retinal specialist that evening. I had surgery first thing the next morning.

Apparently I had been living with a partial retinal detachment in my right eye for about 4-6 months. I didn't have any pain or loss of vision. Everything seemed to be fine in that eye. In fact, with my contacts in my vision was 20/20. The shape of my eyes makes my retina very thin and it tore a small hole in one spot. It had been there long enough that I had accumulated fluid under my retina and that was causing more of it to detach. Long story short, they had to put a band around my eye to relieve some of the pressure on the thin retinal tissues, then made incisions and drained all the vitreous out so they could laser my retina back into place. After all that, they placed a large bubble of gas in my eye to hold everything in place until the lasering could scar in. Some fluid was left under my retina because it was very gel like and they would have caused more damage to get it all out. The first two days post op, I had to lay or sit face down. I am NOT a stomach sleeper and this was tough! We rented a chair with a bed attachment to help out (think massage chair minus the masseuse) and it proved to be a life saver. After the first two days, I had to lay on my left side exclusively. I had to sleep with pillows behind me so I wouldn't roll over and the whole nine yards. After two weeks, the main area where the tear was had healed beautifully but I had an area on the left that hadn't healed due to the fluid that they had to leave under the retina at the time of surgery. This area needed to be relasered and they could do that in office. Sounds easy, right? Not so much! I had to have a shot IN MY EYE. I still cringe at the thought. Oh the HORROR of it all. I have never expected to dab my eyes and come back with blood on the kleenex but that's what I got for about 20 minutes after the injection. The lasering itself was uncomfortable to. It felt like pulsing bursts of a really bad migraine coming on and everything was a hideous shade of neon pink for 15 minutes after they finished. I then had to lay on my right side for 10 days for that to scar in.

I was finally released to be up and moving on Monday (almost 1 month after my original surgery). I still have the gas bubble in my eye and cant' see very well. It is shrinking, so at the moment I have a line through the middle of my vision. With glasses on, I can see some detail above the line. Below the line, it's like looking through thick aquarium glass. It bothers me to walk in crowds because I can't really see anyone coming up on my right side. Night vision is also off due to the glare and odd reflection of lights off the bubble. I can't even really describe what I see and don't see at this time. The gas bubble should be gone in another 4 weeks or so and then I can be fitted with a new contact prescription for that eye. They're not done with me yet, though. Since they took all the vitreous humor out of my eye, I have a cataract forming on the lens. So in 3 -4 months I get to have cataract surgery at the age of 34. They are planning on burning my prescription into the new lens so my vision will be corrected for the most part. I think Lasik would have been easier! The important thing is, they saved my vision! I was perilously close to losing it based on what the surgeon has told me. SCARY!! It's a Valentine's Day I will never forget....

New Year, New Beginnings

Things have been all topsy turvy in the Millner household since the holidays. It actually all started in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have been unhappy at my job for quite some time. I was in a very stagnant place. The other dentist that I worked for had a very set routine and didn't want to learn anything new...PERIOD. I have known since before Lily was born that I had no future with the practice. The office manager (owner's wife) is never going to be able to cede enough of her control over the office for a true partnership to happen. I have stayed in the location for several reasons. First and foremost, it's convenient. I am 10 minutes from home and 10 minutes from both kids' schools. I am able to drop everything and go pick up the kids if they need me (mainly because I'm not busy but I'll get to that in a second) and it's usually not a problem to shuffle patients around if one of us is sick. Second, I hate confrontation and am not always wild about change and the unknown! Also, when I came back from maternity leave with Lily, the economy had bottomed out and there wasn't anywhere to go. It's still slow in a lot of areas. I guess teeth tend to get the back burner when money is tight, and many have lost their dental insurance.

Anyway, there were some very frustrating and disturbing trends going on in the office over the past year. I can overlook one or two instances but it was becoming more and more common. My schedule would suffer so the owner could be busy. If I was busy, it was because I was cleaning teeth. NOT what I really went to school for. I had also taken a class on Enteral Conscious Sedation back in March of last year and am still waiting on them to order the equipment so I can put said certificate to good use! So everything came to a head shortly after Thanksgiving and I called a dental broker to see what was out there.

Within a few hours of sending my resume to the broker I had a dentist in Fort Worth contact me about a position with her practice. I have spent the past 6 weeks meeting with her, doing working interviews and ironing out all of the parts of a new contract. I signed the contract last Monday and gave my notice on Tuesday! I am very excited about my change of venue. The practice I am going to is cutting edge and they are willing to teach and mentor me! It's certainly not convenient but I think the pros outweigh the cons in the long run. The only big change to our normal schedule will be Joshua going to after school care three days a week and he's excited about it. His best buddy goes to after school care so the two of them will have more playtime together. I finished working at the other office last Thursday and decided to take a week to myself and recharge. I start this Thursday and am spending the next few days organizing closets and getting our new schedule figured out!

Happy 2nd Birthday, Lily!

My sweet baby girl turned two on Friday! I just love watching how much she grows and changes every day. She has such a BIG personality for such a little munchkin and she certainly knows how to light up a room. Our weekend didn't go quite as planned but we got everything in eventually. We didn't end up doing very much on Friday (her actual birthday). Eric had his firm party that night, so the kiddos spent the evening with Grandma and Grandpa Millner. She got cupcakes at school and I think there was cake at Grandma's house too. The original plan was for the party to be at our house Saturday evening, but Lily started throwing up Saturday afternoon. Poor thing was miserable and we didn't want to expose anyone else. Luckily it seemed to pass quickly and so far the rest of us are clear. We did manage a smaller gathering on Sunday when Lily had been vomit free for 24 hours and no one else had come down with it.

It's hard having Lily's birthday right on top of Christmas. Last year we felt like so many things got lost in the jumble of her birthday on top of the holiday. There were toys that never got played with just simply due to the mass influx of everything all at once. This year we decided to get Lily clothes (she is already a clothes horse) and a toddler bedding set. Our crib converts to a toddler bed and eventually out to a full size bed. Lily is just slightly obsessed with Minnie Mouse and I found a cute bedding set that will blend with the decor already in her room. Since we switched to a big girl bed, we also had to get rid of the pacifier. Both of my kids have taken one only for naps and bedtime and oral development dictates that they disappear at 2. So far she has done well with the transition. We've made such a big deal out of the BIG girl bed and how big girls don't sleep with pacifiers that she seems to be transitioning just fine. We'll see if that holds true as the week progresses!

By far the biggest hit of the birthday weekend was a princess play tent from Grandma and Grandpa Millner. She LOVES it and spends so much time crawling in and out. The cat has also taken quite a shine to the tent. It's his new hidey hole for pouncing anyone that dares walk past!


Big girl in her big girl bed. I think she needs more Minnie's!










Opening family presents on Saturday once she started feeling better.

I guess I'm an every other month poster...

Does anyone else feel like life is perpetually on fast forward? Every time I turn around and think about updating the blog I look at the date of my last post and it's been almost 2 months! I guess that's what happens when you have two kids and work 4 days a week. Add a t-ball schedule, Bible study schedule and family into all of that and life seems to fly by.

September started off with a bang in our house. Joshua's birthday (also shared with his cousin Mason) comes at the end of a very busy birthday filled August in our family. We haven't combined the boys parties since they were tiny as they go to different schools and have different friends. Their birthday weekend is always filled with parties with family and friends and is enough to wear anybody out! This year, we had the added stress of Eric having surgery the day before the party. He had a cyst come up in his neck right above his collarbone back in March. It showed up on the heals of a nasty bought of strep and a raging sinus infection so I thought it might have been a swollen node from all the drainage. I told him to keep an eye on it and let me know if it didn't go away in a couple of weeks. He never mentioned it again and I forgot about it for the most part. He brought it to my attention again in June when we got away for our trip. It was still there and looked larger to me. That coupled with some very rapid weight loss raised a lot of red flags and I nagged him until he finally took himself to the doctor to get it looked at. As a side note, what is it with men and going to the doctor? Anyway, a round of blood work and CT to rule out Hodgkins ensued since there is a family history. All of that came back ok but we still didn't know what it was. We went to an ENT for a needle biopsy and they drained 16 cc of fluid out of it. The biopsy came back clean but the cyst filled with fluid less than 12 hours after it was drained. So, the first available surgery date they had just happened to be the Friday before Joshua's already scheduled party. The next available date was 6 weeks later...so we took it. We didn't really discuss the surgery with Joshua until a few days before and didn't go into any detail until the night before. I just happened to overhear Eric describing what they were going to do to him and realized that he didn't realize what was really going to happen. He thought it would be IV sedation like his wisdom teeth. I had to explain (12 hours before surgery) that it was actually general anesthesia! I have never seen my poor husband look so much like a deer in the headlights. He hadn't thought to ask the questions during his pre-op visits and I figured he knew what going to a surgery center meant. I guess I take my medical knowledge for granted in theses situations. Anyway, Eric's surgery went very well. The cyst turned out to be a branchial cleft cyst in an unusual location and Eric is healing nicely. He even went to the party and the t-ball game the next day. The worst part of all of it was the no lifting for 2 weeks post surgery. Lily did NOT understand that situation at all and made her displeasure well known.

By the time Eric was back to full strength, September was gone and we were off and running with October. I love October. We have a pumpkin farm across the street from our church so it's become a family tradition to visit the pumpkin patch, go through the corn maze, eat fresh made kettle corn and buy a pumpkin or two for carving later in the month. I also had the challenge of hunting down TWO costumes for Joshua this year. Joshua informed me in June that he wanted to be an astronaut for Halloween. I thought that sounded like a pretty go idea since he wants to be an astronaut. I started looking at costumes and realized we had a problem, most of them were heavy, thick AND expensive! We ended up compromising on the orange flight suit and it's a good thing we did since it was still 75 degrees out while we were trick or treating. Joshua's school does Reformation Day instead of Halloween and they could dress as a character from the Bible or a animal created by God. I was quickly informed that Joshua wanted to be an alligator. It is almost impossible to find an alligator costume for an older child. I could find them for infants just about anywhere. I finally found a good costume for a decent price online and it all turned out well. Miss Lily was Minnie Mouse and LOVED the whole trick or treating experience. After every house she would look at me and say "Mommy, I got candy!!!". Too cute! We also went to the Dallas Arboretum for the first time in the fall. We usually hit the bloom festival in the spring so we decided to see how it looked in the fall. They also had a really neat Cinderella pumpkin village this year and the kids loved it.







Joshua played t-ball for his third season. His team from the spring stayed together for the most part and moved up to the 6 and under league. It's still t-ball but they can get thrown out and they start to keep score. Joshua still loves the game and his coach is amazing. He has tons of patients with the boys and really teaches the to play for the love of the game which can be hard to find these days. Joshua will play again in the spring and is already looking forward to it. I don't know what I'll do when Lily gets old enough to join in on the fun. It's hard enough doing practice twice a week and a game every Saturday with just one.

Joshua is also about to have another first experience and I'm not sure I'm ready! His school is out for the entire week of Thanksgiving. Lily's is open and Eric and I obviously have to work most of the week. So, my parents are headed into town for the weekend and will take Joshua home with them. It's our year to be in Midland for Thanksgiving, so we'll join them Wednesday evening. I'm not sure who's more excited, Joshua or my Mom. She has a trip to the planetarium and the Confederate Air Force Museum planned as well as baking and all sorts of other activities. It's going to be so strange to just have Lily in the house for a couple nights before we join everyone else for the holiday. It'll be great for Joshua. He's been feeling very much the older brother plagued by a little sister lately. I think he's craving some alone time and special attention! I think it'll be the first step to many Midland visits for summer vacations and so on.

Happy 5th Birthday!

My sweet boy turned 5 today. How can this be? It feels like I brought him home from the hospital yesterday. Time seems to be passing far too quickly. Joshua is a funny, caring, inquisitive, goofy boy. He asks more questions than anyone else I know and I am often at a loss to explain things to him in a way that he can understand. I know I'm not the only one that he stymies..grandparents, teachers... This kid has a never ending thirst for knowledge and asks about things that I'm sure most other kids his age never think about. He LOVES baseball, enjoys vacuuming the house for me and is very interested in helping me cook. He can crack eggs with the best of them!

One recent big change is a new school. Joshua was admitted to Covenant Christian Academy this year and he loves it! The transformation I've seen in him this last month has been wonderful. He's so much more confident and truly loves going to school each day. I can't wait to see what else this year holds for him. The have language classes twice a week (right now it's German), art class, music class, PE and library time in addition to all the regular stuff they do in the classroom with the main teacher. His teacher is amazing and such a blessing. I think we are in for an exciting year!






Joshua's main request for his birthday this year was a lizard. I'm not even sure where he came up with the idea, but he's been hounding us for months! Every trip to the library results in lizard care books and stories that involve reptiles in some way. Eric and I discussed it at some length and decided that he was indeed old enough to take care of something "on his own." We picked a Green Anole lizard to start with, mostly because they are inexpensive, easy to find and relatively easy to care for. Also, green is Joshua's favorite color as he will tell anyone that will listen. So we are proud to introduce Verde to the menagerie...