January

January has been a bit of a stressful month. Christian started in on the suspension system on the Jeep. He is adding a small lift to it since he has to replace most of the pieces anyway. He has been running into a lot of problems with rusty bolts breaking off. There is a lot of cleaning involved as it was a total mess but now he has to add cutting and drilling out rusty broken bolts to the mix, re-tapping the bolt holes, cleaning all the old hardware if they are still useable and chasing all the threads with a die.

He's had to stop a certain part of his project every couple of days to get new parts and/or tools to get it to work. He thought that it would take about a week or so, but coming home every day and putting in long hours in the garage fighting with all this stuff has been hard and now it is near the end of the month and still incomplete. He is very frustrated. It was pretty fun for him the first couple of weeks but the problems that keep coming up is getting old fast.
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Emily is having loads of fun on her school soccer team.

Her coach runs them hard though, so she comes home sore a lot. It's only a problem if he does it to them the day before a game. She would normally belly-ache about it but since she loves it so much, she just sucks it up and works through it. 

I usually try to go to most of her home games but I think I have missed half of them this year for one reason or another. I know I missed some because of bad weather. They have to play through the bad weather but my attendance is definitely optional! I missed another one because my car battery died. I had to give myself a jump start to take the kids to school and then again to pick up Caitlyn after school. Christian went with me to get a new battery during the game.

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Christian's dad ended up in the hospital. It gave us a real scare. He had some kind of flash edema. His lungs filled up and he could not breath. Turns out that the real reason for the edema was that he was having problems with his heart. They gave him some medication to keep it from happening again and scheduled him for open heart surgery next month.

We were going to skip Chinese New Year this year because of what was going on, but a couple of days before we were going to go, Christian's school had a bit of a health scare. One of the teachers in his department got hospitalized for viral meningitis. They said it was highly contagious and they sent in some health official to evaluate the campus for a possible outbreak. Christian was not about to risk any additional complications to his Dad's health by possibly exposing him to anything like that so he quarantined himself away for the next week as much as was possible.

The girls and I decided to risk it and at least visit with my family for the New Year celebration. Emily brought along a friend. She's an adopted Chinese girl, so we wanted her to share our day with her. 

We made are usual traditional dumplings and ate all day. We were actually supposed to make more things but my mom lost some of her recipes and by the time we got that sorted out, we were too tired to do any more and decided to just make dinner and call it a day. It sucks getting old. Of course, they kids got their red envelopes at the end of the evening, so they always look forward to that. Everyone prepared some token envelopes for Emily's friend which was really nice of them.

We brought back a few things for Christian, but it's never really the same. It is definitely something you need to eat fresh.