Cousins, Cheillitis, and cutbacks...

This has been an action packed week. Jared's Cousin Sara and her husband Jon have been in town this week. They live in MI and I wish they lived closer cause we have a lot of fun with them. It is especially fun now that Sara is pregnant and will have a little one almost exactly 1 year younger than Caden. Anyway! They rented a house about 10 min away from ours on a lake. We had them over for dinner at our house on Tuesday night. I made Black bean enchiladas and angel food cake with fruit & blueberry syrup. (I will post the recipe at the end of the post.)

We also went to the house that they were staying in on Saturday and had pizza and salad and root beer floats! Yum! Their dog Blazer (a short haired pointer) jumped through the screen window on the back porch that evening in hopes of a very large white FL bird that had come extremely close to the porch. It was quite funny! It was so nice out and we had a good time talking about babies and basketball; two subjects that between J and I, we have a pretty good knowledge of.

So amidst all the festivities I have been dealing with a lip problem. Since Christmas, my lips have been very dry, and it had just gotten worse and worse. I NEVER get chapped lips because I ALWAYS have lipgloss on...ALWAYS! So this problem was driving me crazy! Anyways, it went from dry lips to dry with little sandpapery patches of bumps, to itchy and blotchy, to swollen, to cracks in the corners. It had gotten so bad that when I would eat the corners would re-open and bleed. SO I made an appointment with a Dermatologist for the first time in my life. I went on Thursday morning. Going to the dermatologist is kind of weird in my opinion, because they just look at you. The guy didn't touch me or anything. Just kinda stared at my "Fungus lips" as Jared has been calling them! So he said I have Cheilitis which is basically inflammation of the lips. He said it probably started with dry lips and then bacteria got in and they became infected. He prescribed me two creams: Hydro cortisone and Muiproicin and by the next day they were almost back to normal. Now they are basically %100...just a little dry.

One more lovely piece of news that we received this week was that our school district, which J and I both work for, will be dealing with a $40-$50 million budget shortfall this year, meaning "cutbacks" aka "somebody is losing their job"...Though no definitive decisions as to who will be cut have been made, I am a little nervous. For one, both of us have only been in this school district for 3 years. Both of us had years of experience in other FL counties (4 years for J and 2 for me elsewhere) prior to moving to the county we are currently teaching in. Second of all I teach music. There is always talk of cutting music. So now we wait, nervously.

On a much lighter note, here are some more recent pictures of my precious little C!