1st Winter in 2 Years!

The Winter of 2011 was pretty much non-existent. Except for a little blip in March I believe, we had nuttin. Poor Jared got a sled for Christmas and didn't even us it.
But 2012? It looks like this winter might be different. (Let's hope that I didn't just curse things by typing that out loud!) We've already had two cold snaps, and this is out 2nd snowstorm, and this one dropped enough to enable the kids to play outside in it pretty much all day. With daddy's help, Ellie built this snow family. It was great snowman snow. Just the right amount of sticky.
You don't have to look too closely at the lawn to see we didn't get to leaves raked up....that is what happens when all the leaves are still on the trees until the wind preceding the snow blows in and blows them all off. If any of you have figured out how to rake leaves up with the wind blowing, send me your tips! Until I get that figured out, I'll keep my fingers crossed for one last warm up to get this snow melted so I can rake the leaves up!

Mt. Vesuvius

Now this is something that must be preserved for posterity on the ol' blog.

Jared has been complaining of mouth pain since Saturday. Wake him up in the night pain. Send him home from church an hour early pain.

When he came home from church we did finally see some swelling on his hard palate right behind his front teeth. Still not sure what in the heck is going on though.

Once we got up Monday morning at a respectable time and could focus enough to see what was going on, we were greeted with a swollen top lip, swollen gums around his front teeth, and a beauty of a huge bump behind his teeth. Great. All pointing to an abscess.

We got him to the dentist and she confirmed that, and got us an appointment with an endodontist for possible root canals of his two front teeth?!!! Aaaahh! He's 9! My poor kid.

Behold the glory of a very painful abscess. About 15 minutes after this picture was taken, it relieved itself by...well....sort-of...bursting. All sorts of lovely stuff escaped. I have a pretty strong stomach, but that was kinda gross and I was longing for some gloves on my hands when I was helping to get it out of his mouth...

He feels much better tonight. Combination of the decreased pressure from getting the gunk out, and a couple of doses of antibiotics. Wish that was all it would take to get him better.

PS- Out dentist is pretty sure this is a result of his run-in with a golf club that broke off the bottom third of his two front teeth almost 14 months ago. I guess infection can still set in that far out from trauma to the teeth. That is going to prove to be one expensive & well earned Cub Scout golf belt loop...