Meet Hank

This is Hank. He is a 4ish lb bass that Caleb caught at the farm pond in Hickman. He has brought him home to live in our pond now. We don't have fish for Hank to eat so we have to buy minnows at the bait shop to feed him each week. This might be our most interesting pet selection yet!

 

Caleb and his Golf Balls

Caleb has started working at Hidden Valley Golf Course this year. He has really been enjoying it! He helps do a little of everything. He cleans carts, works in the pro shop, assists the grounds keeper, picks up range balls etc. They have also been nice enough to let him golf there for free on his days off and before or after his shifts. He came home with an entire basket full of golf balls that he had found in the rough. He cleaned a bunch of them up sell and to use for golf. We continue to have an abundance of golf balls everywhere in our house. I had to laugh when he came home with all these golf balls because this is about the most Steve Mattern thing he could ever do. Dad used to wade into the pond and pick up balls and he never passed up the opportunity to pick up a ball. He would say it's like leaving money. 

 

Lucy's ACL surgery

Lucy has been limping around for about a month now. She is a herding dog and likes to make tight turns to cut Scout off when they are chasing each other. I had taken her to the vet, and they said she needed to be on dog rest so that she didn't tear the ACL the whole way. We were outside one day, and Lucy took off chasing Scout even though we were yelling at her to stop. She made a tight corner and yelped and came limping back up to the porch. From that point on she wouldn't put any weight on that foot. After another vet visit to confirm what we already knew, she was scheduled for ACL surgery. 

Lucy is not a fan of the vet, strangers, being left alone or kennels. We knew this was going to be a rough day for her. I picked her up at 5pm and she was still pretty out of it. She seemed really disoriented and unsteady. I felt bad for her!

When we got her home, she just wanted to lay in our room where she felt safe. She was supposed to keep a cone on so she couldn't lick her incision, but she couldn't get comfortable with it on, so we took turns babysitting her.

She had the best babysitters ever!

She was supposed to be on kennel rest for 6 weeks. If you know Lucy at all you know that this was impossible. For one, she freaks out in a kennel and two she is super active and loves to be outside. We compromised by blocking her in a small area of our bedroom where Scout couldn't get her riled up. We would take turns sitting outside with her in the sun to make her happy. The first couple weeks were a little rough but from there she started doing better. It took almost 12 weeks before she would put weight on that leg. 

 

Pond Vs Pool

The kids have enjoyed swimming in the pond this year. I really like sitting down by the pond in the hammock, but I don't have any desire to get in. Robb, the kids and the dogs swim in it all the time. The water is fairly clear but that means you can see all the fish in it too. 

 

Home Improvement Projects and ER visits

Steph and Lester had been working on a design for a pergola with Robb. When they got the design finalized it was time to make this happen. We went to Norfolk for the weekend to get a really good start on it. Lester had a couple of other people helping and Bryce and Caleb helped some too. Like any project it took longer than they thought but after a weekend of 15+ hour days the pergola was done and ready for Steph's decorating touches to make it look homey. Just like all home projects, it never goes as quick as you thought. Most home improvement projects also involve someone hurting themselves somehow. This time it was Caleb. He was putting a 4x4 through the saw when he got what you would typically say was a sliver in the underside of his wrist. The only thing was that this thing was no little silver, it was more like a hunk of wood stuck in his wrist. We went inside and cleaned it up and attempted to remove it with every type of tweezers Steph had on hand. I was digging fairly deep and was making no progress. Robb tried, my dad tried and even Caleb tried. We had no luck so Caleb and I headed to Urgent Care for what we thought would be a quick injection of numbing so they could get deep enough to remove this thing. Nothing is ever as easy as it seems, the PA wouldn't even attempt to remove it and said he needed to see the hand surgeon on Monday. Both Caleb and I thought this was a little extreme and we had no intention on staying in Norfolk until Monday. We left it alone for the night and decided we would see how it looked in the morning. Caleb woke up to a sore, swollen and red hand. Him and I headed back to Lincoln and went to the ER there to get it removed. The doctor we saw there was older and more experienced, and he was totally fine with numbing it and then making a fairly deep cut to get the thing out. He also gave Caleb antibiotics for any potential infection. It really should have ended there but as the week went on Caleb had red streaks going up his arm and a big knot at the site. I thought maybe there was still more wood stuck in there deeper. The pediatrician started him on stronger antibiotics, and we made an appt for the Lincoln hand surgeon to see him. It all turned out ok, but it was a lot for a stupid sliver. Poor Caleb!

 

Getting Beat up on the Court

Abby has been playing on the NE Junior Club team this spring. Her and Claire are on the same team, so she has enjoyed that. Robb always tells her to be aggressive on the court and from the looks of her after this weekend she did that. She has been wearing a wrist brace from hutting her wrist while diving and her knees look like we beat her. She has become a great little server and is enjoying this team even though Robb and I would say the coaching is pretty subpar for the price.

 

Poor Life Choices for Scout

While we were gone for the afternoon, Baby Scout learned a new trick. She learned to jump up on Abby's bed. This isn't a huge problem, except the bed used to be a safe place to put stuff to keep it away from her. Abby had her Easter basket on the bed and came back to find that her entire package of Cadbury Mini Eggs were gone and the bag looked like a wild racoon had opened it. The culprit was this cute little ball of fur that is not supposed to eat chocolate. After calling the vet to see how big of a problem this was, we found out that she needed to come in to get her stomach pumped. Poor baby was regretting her choices later. When they brought her back out to me, she looked incredibly sad and slept the rest of the night. I don't think puking up the chocolate was as fun as eating it!

 

New job

This new job post is becoming an every year thing, which is not something that I am terribly proud of. I like being a nurse but trying to find a nursing job that meshes well with our life and gives me the time I need with my family has proved to be very difficult to find. The last year I have been doing home health through Ambassador Home Health. While it was an ok company to work for, the management was not experienced enough at what they were doing to expand and get as big as they were. We were understaffed and didn't have enough resources to offer our patients. Don't get me wrong, I really loved some of the patients that I saw. I would see them week after week and really get to know them but at the same time I usually didn't feel like I was making a long-term difference. They need more than just home health once a week for 6 months. I felt like I had added 15 kids to my brain to worry about at any given time. Did he have enough O2 to get through the weekend? Was her wound getting septic and would she call or go in before it was too late? Was he going to fall again? Did he have enough food to get through the weekend? Would they be safe in the house with their drug addict child there? There were so many things that I worried about on an almost constant basis. Home Health gave me the flexibility in my schedule that was nice, but it was never set up to be a part time job. I couldn't just decide 2 days a week not to work. Not to mention, the charting was a complete nightmare. For every 1-hour appt I had I had at least 30 min of charting to do, and that wasn't counting calling doctors, getting new orders, picking up meds, or ordering supplies. They were really starting to crack down on us charting at the home, which that right there tells me that they had no idea what home health entailed. Some of the homes I went into weren't safe, had horrible living conditions, smokey, full of cat pee, bed bugs etc. I didn't spend any extra time there than I needed to do my job. 

That is where my DOSC friends came in really handy. We had all left as a group when they completely screwed us over during Covid. Ashley and I had both went to different home health jobs, Shawna had gone to the imaging center and Sara had gone to another outpatient surgery center. After talking with Sara, I knew that outpatient surgery was the schedule and the job that I wanted. Ashley had recently switched to this too so the gang would be back together. Both Sara and Ashley spoke to the manager to get a position opened up for me. They told her that she was going to regret it if I found another job and she missed this opportunity. Talk about having the best friends ever! I applied at NE Surgery Center and did a zoom interview and excepted a part time position that week. I had to give Home Health a month's notice and I felt bad because Sara Boden was my nurse manager and friend, but she was very understanding. I started at NE Surgery center after Easter and have really enjoyed it so far. It was slightly awkward starting there because my entire family had Covid, so on my first day and the rest of that week I had to check into employee health for a Covid test before I could go to work. So far, I have really enjoyed it and the nurses there all seem great to work with.

Easter Quarantine Style

We decided that we needed to keep our Covid germs to ourselves this year and we stayed home for Easter. A holiday is never the same without extended family around, but we made the best of it. We watched the church service from our church on the comfort of our couch. All the kids pitched in to help with the meal and we had a huge egg hunt. I don't even know how many eggs Robb and I hide but it was about 100. The meal might have been a little dessert heavy because everyone had a request for that, but it was delicious. Robb showed us all up by making a KeyLime cheesecake that was amazing. How have we been married this long, and I had no idea that he could make phenomenal cheesecake.

 

Just a Girl that Loves Dogs

 Emmy takes a bit after me in being a complete animal lover. It is so fun to watch her with the dogs. She truly loves them!