Why we love Cars underwear

Blake likes Cars. Mator, Lightning McQueen, Doc, even Chick who is "mean" - if you don't know the characters you should get to, because someday you too will have a child who is borderline obsessed - and the information will come in handy. So, for Christmas Blake received 3 more pairs of Cars underwear - making his grand total 6 pairs. Now we have a daily fashion show where he tries each one on and comes running out "I wear Mator, Queen, Cars unnerwear!" While cute and amusing, not so much when he gets out of bed at night, takes his diaper off, and decides it is fashion show time.

How much can we really take

So, 10 days after Ryan's arrival, things were beginning to settle in, when Thanksgiving day Jason came down with what appeared to be the flu. Unfortunately, it became worse instead of better, and after 3 weeks was finally diagnosed as Adult Onset Still's Disease - a disease so rare most physicians haven't seen it and only 1 in 650,000 people have it. It is a agravating and debilitating autoimmune disease with no cure and not so great treatment options, while not fatal, it is still to be seen what kind of changes our life encounter due to its progression.

Jason had yet to start his trial treatment drug, but has been on corticosteroids for the past 3 weeks with marked but not full improvement.

What used to be simple tasks such as opening a water bottle have become difficult due to the joint inflammation and destruction that this form of rheumatoid arthritis initiates.

We have high hopes that this will be his only encounter with a flare and that the disease will go into remission forever . . . their is no way of knowing its course or the severity of its future symptoms . . . therefore our future plans are in a jumble as we don't know Jason's future workability.

This is only the beginning . . .

I start this journal in the attempt to add humor to an everyday life that can easily send a person to the aslyum. Five weeks ago our lives took a major change - we added another two year old to the family - our nephew Ryan, whom we hadn't met before. Before this, life was a daily fight with Blake to stop torturing Ella, Barron to stop dancing in the kitchen, and F'er to go away :) Things have changed. Now I fight with Blake to stop torturing Ryan, Ryan to stop biting Blake, Ella to leave the boys food alone, Barron to clean up ALL the crumbs from the boys and not just what looks best, and F'er and Milo to eat their food and BE QUIET! I had seriously misconstrued the difficulty of having not just 3 children under 3, but one of them not raised primarily by our family. The personality differences are astounding and difficult, because Blake and Ella had known nothing but our family and our way of life, they have similar temperments. Ryan spent his first two years with his mom and dad and must adapt to our lifestyle and idiosyncracies. Things are starting to smooth out in that arena and I assume that fighting will just be a part of daily life . . . oh, good.