And we thought there wouldn't be anything to blog

Well, we must admit that when we started this blog we thought for sure that we'd have nothing to blog about. While that may be true in the future, that certainly isn't true for this last week.

The most obvious post needs to be about our first Thanksgiving in Maryland. Well, it sucked. We still don't have a table set up, so even if we had gone to the effort to make a Thanksgiving dinner it would have been eaten off our laps. As it turns out, Thesha and Tyler had some Ramen noodles and Tag went to the local gas station and got a turkey sandwich. We're hoping to make next year a bit more festive.

But that was just the first day of the Thanksgiving vacation. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday made Thursday seem like a dream. Tyler started getting a fever on Friday and he woke up at 3:30 in the morning on Saturday with a fever of 104. We had been giving him Tylenol and Motrin, but he was still burning up. We tried to explain to Tyler that there were other ways to get the 'find a pediatrician' task to move up on our To Do list.

Without a local doctor to call, we ended up calling our doctor's office back in Utah and they told us to take him to the hospital. So Saturday morning we strolled into the local emergency room as directed by the Utah nurse and the GPS lady. That's right, we weren't even sure where the local hospital was yet. They doubled up his Tylenol, looked in his ears, even took a chest x-ray but everything turned out to be negative. Once his fever broke we went home and took a family nap. We did go out and do some shopping on Saturday and he was ok, but still not great. Thankfully we were able to call the local branch president and had a member come over and help us give Tyler a blessing. If nothing else, we gave thanks this Thanksgiving for good members of the church who take time out of their vacation to come and help strangers in need.

Unfortunately we weren't out of the woods just yet. On Sunday morning at 5:00 Tyler's fever was back up to 103.6 and now he was puking. So back to the emergency room we went. The doctor looked him over again, they gave him a catheder to get a urine sample (always a blast on 3 hours sleep), and doubled up the Tylenol once again. The official diagnosis... "He doesn't really look sick. He looks like he feels like crap, but he doesn't look sick, sick." Yeah, that's a direct quote from the doctor. I think the same could have been said of all of us as well because we all looked and felt like crap, Tyler was just the only one with a fever. In fact, the information sheet that they gave us when we checked out said that we should call the doctor if we notice a "stiff neck, confusion, marked irritability, or sluggishness." We had to re-read that section to assure ourselves that it was only if we noticed these symptoms in TYLER that we should call the doctor because after just a few hours sleep over a two day period, all of these symptoms pretty much described both Tag & Thesha to a T.

Thankfully by Sunday evening Tyler was doing much better and by Monday he was well below 100 degrees and smiling and laughing like the Tyler we all know and love. We're hoping that he'll stay healthy because this week we'll be moving into our permanent apartment. Yes, we'll finally be in a permanent residence - and not a moment too soon. We made arrangements to stay in a microscopic apartment while we built a home, but on our trip out here we found out that our builder had filed for Ch. 11 Bankruptcy. They tried to assure us that it was just a restructuring filing, but after living in North East, MD for a week and a half we started to have second thoughts about whether or not this was really where we wanted to settle down. With all these doubts, and since we still haven't sold our house, we decided the wise thing to do would be to move into a better apartment for a year or so, then reassess where we really wanted to settle down. Plus by then we should have (hopefully) sold our house so we could just move right in rather than have to do a bunch of contingency agreements while we wait for our current house to sell.

Thankfully the apartment complex worked with us to find a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment that won't be too expensive and won't charge us for breaking a lease agreement. I can't tell you how excited we are to finally have our own bed to sleep in rather than the foam pad we've been sleeping on for the last two weeks. My guess is that the new place will likely be the subject of our next blog.

And we thought there wouldn't be anything to blog about.

Snack Time

Here's just a quick post to share a piece of our life. Tyler is learning new words all the time with the latest one coming during snack time. Tyler loves getting his favorite snack, a "na-na."

The Choate's jump in to the world of blogging

After resisting the blog-o-sphere for years, we've finally realized that with the move to MD we need to jump onto the blogging band wagon. Our intentions are to make blogging a routine part of our family night activities, but our lives aren't that exciting so don't get too excited.

Tonight's family night was simply setting up the blog. We'll have stories to share soon - especially regarding the move out to Maryland. For now we're still just trying to get set up - both with the blog as well as in every day life. We're down to just a few boxes left to unpack and Tyler seems to finally be settling in. Other than that, we're just trying to figure out what it's like to be a Baltimore Ravens fan - not that the Ravens are making that very easy this year.

We'll keep the blogs coming. For now, take a minute or two to respond to our Poll of the most useless item dropped off. By way of background, we're living in a temporary apartment and when they packed up our stuff back in Utah we had to tell them what we wanted dropped off at the apartment and what we wanted sent to storage. Of course, there's a lot of stuff that didn't show up (none of Thesha's shoes, for example) but then there was a bunch of stuff that did show up that really should have gone to storage - especially since we only got half the item. Thanks for participating!