She Is O.K!

Thank You Lord, and thank you all for your prayers! Jessica is totally and completely healthy and she has nothing to be worried about in the future...the doctors gave her a clean bill of health.

Life has been fairly routine for us lately, beside my trip to Moab to care for Jess, we have just been living life and working, etc...I did do a little work for my Cousin Emily's real estate appraisal company and that was really fun. I had to drive way up into the mountains near here and take some pictures of some one's house for them to use in a refinance. And I get paid! : ) That's the best part! Byhaving me take care of it, I saved some one down in Fruita having to drive six hours, round trip, to get there...it was only an hour for me, plus it was a gorgeous drive.

Anyhoo, there is nothing too exciting going on around here, sorry. : ) Although, Ari and I are talking about saving up to travel to Greece again next Oct! : ) I totally and completely hope and pray that it works out that we can go, even if it's not next year, we would both be delighted if it was any time in the future! Once we actually traveled out of the country and made it somewhere, we realized that it is VERY do-able, we CAN make it happen again, we just have to make it happen. Plus, we already have our passports and everything that we need for over-seas trips, so it should just be our air-fare and spending money because Ari's mom Alice already has a place lined up for us to stay, for free, again! She totally rocks!

So, that is all from our neck of the woods. I trust that you all are doing well. I love you and miss you. Thank you Tammie and Robin for your sweet comments you left me on my last post...you made me feel great, my heart melted a little, thanks.

Love, Kristen

She made it! ; )

Thank all of you for your prayers...not only did the docter remove her gal bladder, but he did a little exploritory surgery and found a tumor in her appendex, I guess the whole appendex was the tumor, so the surgeon removed that and he also found a lot of endometriosis growing on the outside of her overy, uterus and tubes, so he removed that as well. The surgery took a lot longer and instead of having it just be a "day surgery", she is now on day two in the hosp...with hopes of coming home tonight, but only if they are able to control her pain level. So far she is still needing shots of demerol i.v. This morning she is giving just the pills a try to see if they will work for her. I am so proud of her and how brave she has been about this whole thing! I spent the night in the hospt. with her last night and now I am at their house to get a little rest. My sister is so polite she actually feels badly asking for her pain meds when she really needs them. I am really glad that I could be there to be her advocate. I sure know what she is going through and how hard it is to tell the drs and nurses what you need, so it was great, I took care of all of that for her so she didn't have to feel badly, she could simply blame her over-protective sister! : )

Please pray that the biopsy/lab results on the tumor are the best possible thing that they could be. Right now her surgeon doesn't know enough to know whether or not she will be needing another surgery, or even if it is cancer. I think that we are all pretty secure in God's perfect ways and that things will be o.k. No one is panicing or really even worrying yet. But all the same, please pray. Please also remember Rob in your prayers. He is really worn out being strong for Jessie and worrying when he's alone.

Thanks again everyone, it really means a lot to me and to my family that we have so many people praying. I KNOW that it makes a palpible difference. I could honestly feel the prayers when I had my surgeries, you can feel the peace and the trust in God is there because there is so much grace for everything. Jessica keeps saying that she can tell that she is being prayed for by a lot of people, so she says thank you too!

Enough for now, I really need to get a few hour's sleep! I think that I slept about one and a half hours all night last night, in a hopital chair that "folds out" into a "bed". Yeah, I'm not too sure what constitutes a bed anymore, but it worked. Mostly the sleeplessness was due to caring for my sister. I can actually and honestly say that I enjoyed my time with her. I really was a gift to me to be on the other end of the spectrum for once, giving the care...I completely spoiled her, but she deserved every bit of it. I was thinking that some one could make that their business if they wanted to...just to accompany people to the hospital and be with them during their post-op care to make sure that they have all the warm blanket and bendy straws and ordering the pain meds just ahead of the time they are needed, so that they will get to the patient right when they need it. I bet some one could make a ton of money doing something like that. Perhaps I shouldn't post my idea on a public blog site, some one might steal my idea and make MY millions! Hee, hee! I am loopy-tired so I am signing off now.

Much love and thanks for all of your prayers.

P.S. To people like my mother, who are horrified to see all of my miss-spelled words; I am certain that this entry is chalk-full of them, but I am exhasted, and I don't care...so, that's it and that's all! Love Ya!

Shout-Out to My Peeps!

Yo! Wazzup? Ok, enough of THAT, it's not even slightly cute or funny...well, maybe the shout-out to my peeps was, but then I should have stopped. Sorry. : )

So, here goes; Happy Birthday to the following:

~December 4, Rob turns 34! (my brother in law)

~December 28, Mia/Michlien turns 24! (Ari's little Sister, Andrew's mom)

~December 31, Tenae turns 14! (downstair's neighbor's daughter)

~January 7, Andrew turns 4! (our nephew on Ari's side)

~January 9, Olivia turns 2! (Emily's baby)

~January 11, Christy turns 29! : ) hee-hee! (downstair's neighbor)

~January 14, Sierra turns 10! (downstair's neighbor's youngest daughter)

~January 16, Dad turns ??, and Jessica turns 35! (Yes, Dad and sis have same b-day.
He's around 63, I think!) How awful is THAT?! : ) Some daughter I am! : )

~January 19, Pastor Craig Schlesinger turns ??

~January 22, Jason J.turns 14!

~January 30, Leah S. turns ??!

So, Happy Birthday, one and all! I love you each dearly and I am very and truely glad that you were born. You do make this world a better place by being in it, and being in my life. So thank you for being who you are, you are doing a great job at it! : ) Have a wonderful birthday and the best year of your life yet! Continue asking God about your purpose/destiny, your future, your hope and your calling. Continue seeking Him and acknowledging Him in all of your ways.
"Trust in the Lord withall your heart and lean not on your own understanding: In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths. (Prov. 3:5) Words to live by!

(If you think that my January is full, you should see my calendar, in basically the month of November. I seriously have 13 birthdays from Sept. 29 through Dec. 1! That basically boils down to 33 days, in which I celebrate the birth of my dearest friends evey 2.7 days! : ) Mind you, these are not mere acquaintances, these are major peeps in my life! I have quite a run in May too!) It's great to have so many wonderful lives to celebrate! : )

Boy and I'm Cheese-tastic tonight! % ) this is supposed to be a smiley face with googly eyes, did it work? O.k., chock one up to the amazing cheesiness that is me tonight, but I just tried to check the spelling of the word "googly", as in; "the muppet's have googly eyes", and it wasn't in the dictionary! What's up with that?! Isn't google a word? If it isn't a word, I don't know if this is the kind of World I can go on living in. Who would want to live in a World where the word googly isn't real? I am going to have to think long and hard about where I am to go from here...rock bottom. : ) Perhaps I should confirm that the word isn't in my dictionary simply because I have an older pocket dictionary that, most likely has been abridged...but then this would mean that the "Abridgers" didn't think that the word "google" didn't NEED to be in their little book, and who wants that? Not me, not me I tell ya'.

O.k., Bed time for Frances! I am far too loopy-tired to continue embarrasing myself in blog-land, though it would be terribly easy to do. But I won't, I am getting off now. I hope that you are all doing well, and please PLEASE read on to my next entry "Please Pray". My sister Jessica is having Surgery tomorrow, the 19th, to have her Gal Bladder taken out...Please pray for peace and safety and healing, but do read on for more details, and some more entertainment from my tired and sleep depraved mind!

TTFN! Kristen

Please Pray

My sister Jessica is having surgery tomorrow, Thursday the 19th to have her Gal Bladder removed. (By the way, Happy Birthday Pastor Craig Schlesinger) It is a minor surgery as far a surgeries go, but they still have to put her under a gerneral anesthesia and cut her abdomen open an inch or so. She gets to go home the same day provided everything goes well, which it should. I am driving down to Moab, UT first thing tomorrow morning, in a snow storm,(more on that later,) to be with her and Rob for the next couple of days...I finally get to be the one caring for the post-surgical patient rather than BEING the one cared for! : ) I know that might sound a bit twisted to some of you, but I have had five major surgeries as an adult and countless minor ones, (seriously, I lost count around 35?) So when I am excited to be the one taking care, it is only because now I get to give back a little bit of all the love and compassion my dear friends and family have given to me.

Please keep Jessica in your prayers this weekend too. This is her very first surgery, and though she is being quite brave about the whole thing, I know that it is a scary thing to have to place your physical life into some stranger's hands for several hours...you are completely out of control of everything...breathing, whether or not you wake up, even going to the bathroom! : ) That was probably the hardest thing for me the first time, and everytime since...trusting a complete stranger to breathe for me and to give me the right amounts of meds to get me to sleep and then to wake me up! Yuck. And, bless her heart, she is more worried about Rob than herself. Pray for the basic physical stuff, but also for a great peace and rest in Jesus. Another thing to pray for is that she is a very self-motivated person and I am worried about her pushing herself to do too much too soon, so if you remember, please pray for that. Thank you for caring about the things that I care about. Thank you for your prayers, they really do make a HUGE difference.

Otherwise, things are going well here on the home front. We are expecting up to a foot or more of snow in the next 24 hours, and lots of strong wind...it should be fun and exciting! A foot in one day is a lot, especially for around here...usually, we get several inches at a time, but the snow here is so light and fluffy and the flakes are so tiny that you could fit about ten of them inside this ~ 0! Plus with the wind, it usually gets blown thinly from the flat ground into giant drifts. Last winter I got out a magnifying glass and looked at the snow flakes and they were absolutely amazing! They are ALL perfect, delicate, tiny little snowflakes that look much more beautiful than Swarafsky could every dream of douplicating! God does such amazing things around us every day, and so much of the time I take it for granted. What part of the snowflake phenominon is not a miracle? Honestly? What part of the human body and how it functions is not a miracle? God is still very amazing to me, and I pray that He always will be. I NEVER want to become so familiar that I lose the intimacy I have with Him.

Well, I have been all over the board tonight, haven't I?! : ) Thank you for listening, thank you for praying, and thank you for loving me the way that you do. You all mean a lot to me and I am so grateful for these blogs, they are such a gift...without them I would have a much more difficult time keeping up with you all and staying in relationship with you. My heart really needs friends, it gets so lonely up here. Sure I have my guinea pig and my cat, and a wonderful, understanding, loving and supportive husband, but you know what I mean. : ) I need you all, or perhaps I should say that your friendships mean very much to me. I was fortunate and blessed most of my life to be surrounded by amazing, character-filled, caring and quality people. Now I see that people like you all are extremely rare gifts and even more, you are all so special and rare that I have yet, in my 3 years in CO, met anyone who could hold a candle to any one of you that reads this blog, honestly. Remember to treasure your family and friends, they may just be the best ones you will ever have. Sniff. I miss you guys!

All my love, Kristen Fairlight Eddy

O.k., last one for now...Here is Aunty Jessie with Hannah and baby Olivia, our cousin Emily's beautiful baby, on Christmas day! P.S. Emily made Olivia's dress from scratch, all by herself! I am so impressed by that, it was lovely and well made. Hannah is wearing the favorite dress that she has had for the last five or so years...really, I had bought her one in purple when she was twoish, and one for Danika and Katelynne when they were five and sevenish, so they passed their dresses on to H, and she has had basically the same dress for a long time, it's a good thing that it is one of her favorites! : )

Here he had fallen asleep inside of Ari's "duty" Belt, it's his holster belt with all of his "toys' on it...anyway, I thought that it was too cute to pass up, so I took this pic...I tried to fix his red-eye problem, but I think this might even look worse than the original! : ) In real life Jack has very bright bluy eyes, just for the record, I do not have a devil cat! : ) 

Comfy! Jack has turned up in the stangest places for his naps lately...he actually blends in a little bit here, I wonder if he knows it and is trying to camoflage himself? : ) 

Here is a pic with one of Ari's best friends Joseph, some of you may remember him as one of Ari's groomsmen...anyhoo, he came up for Thanksgiving and stayed a week with us. It was really nice to have the company. We get a little lonely up here from time to time.  

Wow, I finally got this to work through the Hello instead of the "blogthis!" I am so happy to have it all working the way that I wanted it to! That being said, this is right after Ari and I got our tree up and decorated a few weeks before Christmas...don'tcha just love my outfit?! Half dressy, half p.j.s! We have been putting off taking the tree out because it had gotten so incredibly dry that we were going to have pineneedles EVERYWHERE, and that's what we did today...Yup, they were worse than I had imagined! : ) I had to go downstairs to the two floors below us and sweep up the pineneedles that had fallen down to them, it really wasn't pretty. We probably had two trash bags full of needles and small branches, no joke! 

My loves!

Here they are enjoying their stocking-stuffer lollipops that we brought back for them from Disneyland...you know the ones...they are either Mickey heads or Whinnie the Pooh... : ) They were thrilled, I don't think their parents were quite as enthusiastic about all the sugar and sticky fingers though. But hey! What are aunts and uncles for if they can't spoil their neices and nephews once in a while?! : ) 

What a Guy!

What can I say? He's a great guy, he kept those antlers on all through out our Christmas dinner with friends and family! I must say that the kids love having some one around who look so grown up, be just as fun and silly as they are! Ari, you totally rock! 

Hannah & Caleb opening Christmas stockings!

I absolutely love these two little people! It was such a great time to get to know them each a little bit better and to see how they have grown and developed toward becoming the young lady and young man that God has created them to be. I am so proud of these two, I love them and miss them so very much. 

Happy New Year!

I must apologize for not keeping up on our blog...things have been a bit topsy-tervy as of late with the holiday's, travel, visitors, etc... By the way, I got to have my Brother Seth and his wife Tess, and my neice Hannah and nephew Caleb come up and visit us this week! It was such a blast getting to show the kids all of the snow and the giant mountians that surround us and to take them on the gondola down the mountain into town. I think that was probably the highlight of our day together. The kids loved it! The gondola is like a large ski lift, only it is completely enclosed and it is free. It takes about 15 minutes to make the trip from our parking lot G. station down into Telluride's G. Station with one switch in the middle of Mt. Village, which is kinda the hub for all of the ski lifts, the resorts, etc...

Mom brought everybody up for the day, it was great to see her too, we all took the gondola down into town and walked around a little. I showed them my favorite shops, one of which just so happens to be a toy store, so of course we had to let Hannah and Caleb pick out a little something from there. Then we went over to Ari's office, aka the police station where Uncle Ari gave them the grand tour and showed them all the cool things inside his police vehicle. (it's not a car, it's an SUV, but somehow that sounds weird to say, so I go with vehicle, as if you cared!) : )

Anyhoo, this was really the high-light of the past month for me to have my family get to see where we live, etc...the kids absolutely LOVED Lou lou, our guinea pig, and they would hardly put her down long enough to eat their lunches! I kept telling them that her bladder has a timer on it of about 15 minutes, so they were pretty good about giving her little "potty breaks" and we avoided all accidents! I love those kids so very much, I can not believe how quickly they are growing up, and what wonderful people they are becoming. My only wish would be that I were able to spend more time with them, but I am very happy for what I got!


Alrighty, I guess that's all for now...Here's a quick up-date; Ari and I are still not sure about the whole moving on thing, still waiting on the Lord, putting in some applications, praying and waiting...so as soon as we know something, you will too. At this point we have just over a year until his retirement is fully vested, simply put, we get 100% of the funds matched by the city. (Each paycheck we put in 12% to our retirement and they match it 100%, but if we leave after one year, we get only 25% of the matched money, two years; 50%, three years; 75%...you get the picture.) So, all that being said, maybe we will wait it out for a few more months and see...who knows? Well, God does, but He's not telling! : )

Love you all, and Happy New Year, New Beginnings and many New Adventures!