Out of Commission!!!

Well, the sick germs have been visiting our house. Moses had the flu for most of the weekend, and I've been fighting off a bad cold. We're doing everything we can to get better before we leave for Guatemala late Friday night!! We both stayed home yesterday to rest, pop vitamins, drink plenty of orange juice and try to recuperate. Little did we know that sleep was not in the cards for us late last night.... around 6:00pm, I started having pain on my left side. Dismissed it as it subsided by about 7:30 or 8:00. Took my cold pills at 10:00 and hit the sack... by midnight, I was awakened by severe pain. I tried to take a hot bath to see if the pain would subside, but no success. Called the answering service for my doctor and was advised to go to the Emergency Room. As it was 1:00 in the morning, I didn't want all of us to spend a couple of hours at the hospital just sitting and waiting. I decided to drive myself and let Moses stay home with Max. By the time I got to the hospital, the pain was excruciating. Once I was finally in a room and they gave me some pain medication, I was feeling sleepy and calmed. A CT scan confirmed our suspicions.... KIDNEY STONES! This is the second time I've had kidney stones, and probably won't be the last. I have yet to pass the one that's causing problems right now... and I have many more in both kidneys. I have my Dad to thank for this... he has chronic kidney stones (honestly, he's probably had a total of 200+ kidney stones either passed or removed). I'm all doped up on pain meds right now, so I'm pretty much laying around waiting until the meds start to wear off and I can take the next ones. Tomorrow, I'll go to see a Nephrologist about what can be done to pass this stone (before we leave for Guatemala), as well as preventing future occurrences. I must say, the pain is definitely something I don't want to go through again, but I don't look forward to the potential that I'll have to eliminate CHOCOLATE from my diet to prevent future stones!!!!

So, other than our health issues, things are going well. No progress on the adoption (at least none that we are aware of). We are pretty much packed and ready to leave this weekend for another week with Lili. We've also been blessed with our recent ability to communicate with our foster family via the internet and the web camera. We've received three emails this week with photos of Lili, and we've talked live on instant messenger and watched Lili on the webcamera a couple of times as well! I'm attaching a couple of pictures of Lili that we've received.... she's getting so big!