Easter 2023

Happy Easter! It's kind of nice to use the whole weekend to celebrate Easter. The kids woke up early on Saturday morning for their Easter baskets. They had asked that we hide them really hard this year so I did exactly that. After a while Addie finally asked us to tell her where it was. 

After the baskets we headed over to the church for our ward's Easter brunch and egg hunt. It was really well put together. There was so much food and they even had a cool Easter walk where you pass by rooms that all depict a day of the week leading up to the day Jesus rose from the dead. It was neat. They even had live chickens in the first room representing sacrificial animals that you can buy as an offering.

Today we were actually on time for church. This does not happen often with our family. The kids sang a song with the primary and did a great job. Church was only an hour long so we headed back home and I snapped some pictures of the kids in their new Easter outfits. They then played in the backyard for quite some time with bubbles. 

After lunch the twins went down for a nap and the rest of us died some eggs. We usually try to do this tradition on Saturday but we had signed up to feed the sister missionaries last night so we didn't have a whole lot of time between playing outside and getting our house all ready. The kids did great with dyeing eggs. The twins ended up not napping like they were supposed to so we finally brought them out when we were almost done.

Last year we had started a new tradition by making resurrection rolls. It's where you put a marshmallow (representing Jesus Christ) into a crescent roll (representing the tomb) after putting it in a spice mixture and then baking them. When they come out of the oven you cut one open to show that the marshmallow is now gone and that Jesus was no longer in the tomb when they looked inside. I think we made fifteen of them and only two of them actually came out looking the way they were supposed to but they all tasted amazing. It's so easy and such a nice way to incorporate more of the true meaning behind why we celebrate Easter.

Just like she did with the twin's birthday Addie wanted to be in charge with decorating the house with Easter decorations. She cut out little eggs and placed them everywhere in the house. She also made a banner and taped it onto the wall. I love that she also loves holidays. One day I can't wait for us to actually own decorations for each holiday but for now it's really fun to watch Addie be creative with it. It also inspired Grant to cut out his own little Easter eggs and he then had me help him tape them all over his room. He said the one on his ceiling fan was his favorite.

Cough?!?

I feel like it's barely been a week since we got all of the kids feeling healthy again. Last night on April's Fool's day we put all of the kids to bed without a worry in the air that one of them would end up spending hours at the hospital. I wish it was a late April's Fool's joke but it wasn't. It ended up being really scary for Danny and I. We woke up at just after midnight at 12:40am to an awful sound. It was Hudson in our kitchen trying to walk to our room and he couldn't breathe. He was trying so hard to catch a breathe. He finally let out a scream and then went right back to awful awful gasps. He was having a really hard time talking so Danny and I were so lost in how to help him or what to do. We had been dead asleep a minute prior and we were trying to figure out what was going on. We had Hudson in front of us who looked like he could not breathe. We quickly took him into our bathroom and turned the shower on so that we can get some moisture in the air and turn the bathroom humid. It seemed to help and he was able to calm down and take some breaths in. It was truly terrifying. I didn't know if we needed to get an ambulance here because it was clear he was still having a really hard time breathing. He was able to cough some gunk out which helped his airways open up more but these were not good sounding coughs. I don't even know how to adequately describe this situation which I wish I did because it would have been really helpful later on. Hudson told us his chest really hurt and that he felt like he was dying. To hear your six year old son say he's dying and full heartedly believe it is so sad. It's heartbreaking. The steam from the shower really seemed to help but we did not feel comfortable just sending him back to bed. Hudson said he was scared he wasn't going to breathe again and said he didn't want to sound like a walrus again (those coughs were really bad). The chest pains were also still there and really strong for him. We couldn't get Hudson to stand up (he was curled up in a ball on our bathroom floor by this point). He said it hurt too bad to walk and he just kept holding onto his chest. We have never seen him like this before. I carried him into the van and drove him straight to the hospital. The lobby was completely empty and the lady at the front desk quickly got us a room when she saw me carrying him in. I didn't even have to fill out a whole bunch of paperwork when she heard him saying his chest hurt. A nurse took his vitals and then quickly got us a room for him to be in. Hudson was wheelchaired into that room but by that point he was taking some small steps again. He told the nurse that his coughs made him sound like a walrus and that made the nurse laugh. The doctor came in and checked him out but wasn't too concerned because Hudson was breathing just fine by that point and his lungs even sounded good. He was trying to get an idea of why we were there but I guess I didn't explain it that great because he got hung up on the coughing detail. He asked if Hudson could just be doing this as a behavioral issue. It was 2:30am and maybe that didn't help because I was on little sleep but I tried to explain how really scary the moment was for all of us and he didn't seem to think it was. It was really frustrating for me as his mom to feel like I wasn't getting the answers to what was going on with Hudson. The nurse was awesome and saw how Hudson was in pain but the doctor didn't see that by the time he came in. He ordered a breathing treatment for him which was nice because that really helped but then we didn't see the doctor or anyone in fact for hours. I had gone to sleep just before midnight and was up forty minutes later with Hudson so sleep was nonexistent but I just wanted to make sure we got Hudson some help. He really felt like he was dying and I knew he had experienced some deep pain and fear when he was trying to get to our room for help. After hours of no one coming back into our room I snuck out into the hall to see if I could find anyone. It was almost 5am by this point and we just wanted to go back home. Hudson was trying to sleep and whatever it was that happened seemed like it wasn't going to happen again so we just wanted to go home. I finally am able to find someone and tell them that we want to leave to get some sleep. It turns out that a trauma came in and it required everyone they had. I don't know what the situation was or asked what kind of trauma because I just wanted to get my boy back home before all his siblings would be awake in two hours. The doctor's team discharged us and sent us home with papers on coughing. Seriously. Coughing. I was sleep deprived and very much concerned for my boy but when I saw those papers I was just annoyed. I didn't let them know that I was annoyed though. But why would a mom of five bring in her kid for five hours in the middle of the night because of coughing?? I told Danny that if Hudson ever has that happen to him again that we will have to record it which almost feels heartless to pull out your camera phone when your kid feels like he is dying but I don't ever want anyone to not take this seriously especially if something really was wrong with him. I'm telling myself that maybe I just didn't explain it that well because I still don't know how to explain what that moment looked and felt like but it was terrible. Bad enough that we almost called an ambulance. So if it does happen again and I have a video recording of it this is why. Let's just pray that it never comes to that though. We were able to nap today and recover from the night that we had and hopefully it's just a one time thing. 🤞