Our house has four fireplaces.

They’re all the original Victorian fireplaces and they’re for decoration only. They’re blocked off, which makes me sad. I would love a cozy fire!

In the homeschool room (actually a dining room) the fireplace had this hideous strip of hot pink foam board about six inches wide and the length of the fireplace stuffed across the chimney hole where the smoke would go up, blocking it closed.

You could see the pink foam board if you sit down anywhere in the room. It was so ugly and I hated staring at it! I’m trying to create a homeschool room with nice atmosphere and that hot pink board was driving me crazy.

Clearly it couldn’t stay there in my pretty fireplace.

I will just pop it out and replace it with a strip of cardboard from a moving box, I thought. We have plenty of thick moving boxes. That won’t stand out like hot pink!

It will be simple, I thought.

I sat down in front of the fireplace and gave that ugly pink board a little tug.

It popped right out, no problem. It was just a thin flimsy piece of foam board.

Success!!

I tossed it aside and peered up into the chimney, out of curiosity.

Then…

I’m still not exactly sure what happened. Either I breathed too much into the chimney, or there was some kind of secret air vacuum created by removing that foam board, or…I just…have no clue.

As I was peering upward merrily exploring the interior of a 1903 Victorian fireplace an entire mountain of ashes exploded from the chimney all over me, all over the room, in a cloud of unforgiving black creosote and soot.

There was a moment of silence during which I was confused, and then I was stunned when I realized what had happened.

Does this chimney not follow the laws of physics? How was this worn, flappy piece of foam board holding in 110 years of ash?

DID THESE PEOPLE NEVER CLEAN OUT THEIR CHIMNEY BETWEEN 1903 AND 2014?!?

What the…?!?

I coughed and backed away. It took a full five minutes for the air to clear enough to even see the fireplace.

Have you ever seen that episode of Call the Midwife where a chimney rains ashes all over the entire room in the middle of a birth? (I looked for it on YouTube to put here, but I couldn’t find it.) It was exactly like that scene, except I wasn’t giving birth thankfully.

I didn’t know what to do.

How do you proceed when a literal ton of ashes has just exploded into your house?

I picked up a small flower pot sitting nearby and began pitifully scooping ashes into it. Ok that was like trying to drain a lake with a bucket…

I left footprints through the house as I ran into the kitchen to get the trash can. I put a big black garbage bag in it, the outdoor kind, and carried it into the homeschool room to the scene of the disaster.

I spent a considerable amount of time scooping up ashes into this tiny flower pot and dumping them in the trash can. Then I tried to vacuum some up, but my vacuum cleaner hopelessly clogged in under a minute.

Eventually I uncovered the floor around the fireplace. An end was in sight!

Oh, but…no.

Another silent gush of ashes rained down without warning, just as much as the first time.

I had visions of my dead body being forever preserved in the homeschool room on the floor, like one of the people who died at Pompeii.

Is this actually happening?

Am I in a remake of I Love Lucy? I wondered

I scooped ashes until the big black trash bag was full to the top. Then, leaving a thin coating of ashes in the room, I scooped up my (now black) baby and trailed upstairs to the claw foot tub for some emergency bathing.

I have to finish cleaning up the ashes in that room tonight after the kids go to sleep because the piano movers are bringing our piano from the cabin at 9 in the morning tomorrow. Where they are putting it is currently the site of a volcanic eruption. I think there’s even ash on the ridiculously high Victorian ceiling.

Help. Me.

My perfect six month old boy!

He’s so close to crawling. He can pull up to stand! He can scoot himself backwards on a slick floor, and he’s almost able to go from belly to sitting back up. Mobility should be happening any day. I’m scared!

Henry loves to hammer, and bang, and throw. He cries hysterically when you take things away, like the iPhone or cords. He loves strangers, he’s the most social charming boy ever! And he has one bottom tooth now. The second isn’t far behind. He loves riding in his car on walks outside and through the house. He sits up so steadily and holds onto the steering wheel.

He eats anything he can grab. Dirt, toys, everything goes to his mouth! He’s had a few tiny tastes of applesauce. He liked it, but gagged some so we’ll wait a bit longer. He’s still working on his pincher grasp.

Henry is just so adorable, squishy, and cuddly. I can hardly stand it!

I have many things to update about here.  We no longer live in the cabin.  We had no home for about a month, and I had to give away all of my chickens and ducks. We live downtown near Tyler’s work now because we couldn’t find another farm to rent in a hurry.

Soon I’m going to copy and paste a big back log of entries from my private blog. I’m waiting to get things all settled with the landlords of the cabin.  Let’s just say it’s not ending well.

The new place is fun, but it’s hard to get used to living downtown. There’s no privacy, it’s loud and busy compared to my gorgeous dead end gravel road.

At least the new place has good light…

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital is the friendliest, easy to navigate hospital I have ever been to. We were quite impressed!

They are so organized and helpful. There are even security guards standing by the elevators that only allow people with passes from the front desk to go up onto the floors.

The entire hospital was incredibly clean too. Everything in it was child friendly!

It was hard seeing so many sick kids there. My heart hurt. I saw multiple young children with cancer, bald and frail. Babies with tubes and somber parents holding them. Why? Oh, I am so blessed with three healthy children.

First we had to get Henry’s head x-rayed. Henry is a very cheerful baby. He absolutely loved smiling and cooing at every single person he saw in the busy hospital. He liked the x-ray techs quite a bit. They took three x-rays and he only cried at the last one because he was annoyed that he had to lay flat on the table for another minute.

After that we saw Dr. Stephenson, the neurosurgeon. He was very kind and patient. I’m so glad we waited for an appointment with him. I could tell right away why he was so highly recommended.

Dr. Stephenson said Henry’s metopic suture, the one that goes down the forehead, is already fused. It’s supposed to begin fusing at six months. Henry’s is closed at six months old. That’s what’s causing the ridge in his forehead and the point at the top of his head.

The good news is that Henry still has a nice rounded forehead. That means his brain is still able to grow normally. If the closed suture was causing any serious damage then his head would take on a triangle shape when looking at it from the top down.

Since his head is still rounded the metopic ridge is only a cosmetic issue. The doctor said it should smooth out as his head grows. No surgery needed for that!

The crookedness of his head is caused by positional plagiocephaly. One ear is moved forward farther than the other ear, one side of the forehead bulges causing the eye on that side to bulge, and one part of the head is flatter than the other.

The doctor thinks this was caused by the torticollis and C1 vertebrae being out of place from birth. The chiropractor was able to correct the out of place vertebrae when Henry was twelve weeks old, and his torticollis is gone now. (!!!)

Dr. Stephenson said the plagiocephaly sometimes requires a helmet to fix the head shape, but he thinks that Henry’s head will improve on its own. Henry’s head shape has been drastically improving over the past month. The doctor said that the forehead bulge should flatten out over the next couple of years and eventually he will look completely normal!

On Henry’s head x-rays we saw that his eye sockets are actually both the same size. One eye looks smaller than the other on his face, but apparently that’s just due to the bulging forehead from the plagiocephaly. Once the bulging side of his forehead goes back down then the eye on that side will look normal sized because it is normal sized.

The neurosurgeon said we could get out of his office and never come back. Henry is a giant healthy boy! At six months old he’s 20 pounds, 28 inches long, and his head size is in the 88th percentile. He’s wearing 12 and 18 month clothes right now.

Overall good news. We’re so relieved!!

Tyler is texting his mom to tell her. Check out how big Henry’s hands are! They are like bear paws. His feet are huge also.

Henry turned 16 weeks old on Monday. That’s four months. The doctor told me to wait until his four month well baby visit to reassess his head shape for a neurosurgeon referral.

I’ve been so worried about his head. I tried to schedule his well baby check up for sooner, but they didn’t have any openings. Instead I made a sick visit appointment to discuss it with the pediatrician.

I’ve known for months now that his head isn’t right. I stare at it all day, every day. I kiss him and pray that I will wake up and find his head is miraculously straight, no longer lopsided. But that hasn’t happened.

The pediatrician thinks Henry may have craniosynostosis.

He said he can feel the sutures, but he isn’t sure if they are fusing closed too quickly or what is happening. Henry also has a metopic ridge, which is a bony ridge from the suture that runs from the soft spot down the forehead to the bridge of the nose. In some cases it causes a ridge and there is no worry, in other cases the ridge is from the suture fusing wrong.

The pediatrician was sad and serious. I’ve never seen him sad before. He always wears huge goofy oversized glasses, plastic neon colored ones. He always makes jokes and laughs. You never want to be the parent that makes the pediatrician pat your arm in sympathy and reassure you that your boy will probably be fine.

The cheerful secretaries at the front desk were somber during check out. They marked Henry’s neurosurgeon referral as “urgent” and gave me instructions to call the children’s hospital today to be sure they are processing it.

I called this morning and it’s being processed. It’s in review by the triage team. I guess they have a team who looks at each child’s info and then decides how soon they should get an appointment and what tests need to be performed prior to the appointment or during the same visit.

I’m expecting Henry will need a CT scan. I want him to have one. I want to know 100% for sure if he has craniosynostosis or if he just has positional plagiocephaly. Plagiocephaly typically just requires a helmet to correct it. Craniosynostosis is surgery to break apart the fused skull bones so that the brain can grow properly.

My poor sweet boy.

The surgery is so rough. I don’t want him to go through that.

The hospital is three hours away from where we live. He’ll be going to Cincinnati Childen’s Hospital. The University of Kentucky is about 45 minutes from here, but everyone I’ve talked to who has kids with special needs says that the clinic is dirty and the hospital is not so awesome. Henry is going to the best hospital I can reasonably get to.

I hope they call to make the appointment soon. The wait is killing me. I just need to know. In some cases the unknown is worse than actually facing the problem head on. (No pun intended.) Know what I mean? I can drive myself crazy wondering and waiting. If they say he has craniosynostosis I will cry (again) and then I’ll know, and I’ll prepare for the surgery and recovery.

All of this makes my belly hurt.

Here are some pictures from recently. I can’t remember which ones I’ve posted before.

I think this was the week before Halloween:

Kitten is obsessed with the faucet in the bathroom.

Henry dressed in cute clothes. I feel like he’s so much bigger than this now, even though it was just a few weeks ago! And you can see his torticollis here. His head was stuck in that position. Thank goodness that’s fixed mostly.

This was the Saturday morning before Halloween. We woke up and looked outside to see frost. Apparently the first frost of the year out here is, well, amazing. Oddly when we drove 45 minutes into the city there was almost no frost at all.

Ada got her first hair cut. These are the best “before” pictures I could get from her.

Making applesauce with the apples we bought at the Amish produce auction:

My chubby boy!

Checking out his hands.

Trick or Treating the Tuesday before Halloween at the library.

I loved this kid’s R2D2 costume, so I took a clandestine photo of it.

Thomas the Train was downright creepy!

 I don’t have time to update as much as I’d like thanks to kids keeping me busy and our insanely slow internet out here. I do manage to post to Instagram often though. You can find me under the name Pepper44.

We had to carve our pumpkin without Tyler this year since he was at work. We didn’t have time to do it beforehand, and we were running out of days before Halloween!

I decided to try using the drill. It went…ok.

Rosie designed the pumpkin and I carved it. This is when the drill ran out of batteries before we did the last whiskers.

All lit up!

Our town changed trick or treating to the 1st of November since we had scary storms on Halloween night. The wind from the storms was awful, it trashed my yard and my bunny pen. Everything outside blew away and we spent some time in the middle of the night huddled in the center of the cabin while debris slammed into the walls outside. Terrifying!

For Halloween Ada chose Minnie Mouse and Rosie was Merida from Brave. Henry didn’t bother to dress up, he just wore a first Halloween outfit.

Dry ice my mom brought home from work to show the girls:

My sister from Star Trek.

My Mom.

My sister with the girls. (We went trick or treating at my parents’ house since we live out in the country.)

Henry was not impressed by the grass…!

My in-laws came over with my BIL’s daughter Lauren. She went trick or treating with the girls. I think they had fun!

Trying to get one good picture is a fail, but I love all the outtakes.

Henry with my MIL.

Walking off to trick or treat with the in-laws.