2 Progress on the Basement

The plan was for Nate to do the chalking, fill all the nail holes, and paint the basement this winter while he was ‘slow’ and staying home being Mr. Mom. Well, Nate wasn’t all that slow over the winter (thank goodness), so nothing happened. With the baby coming soon, we really need to get the big girls settled into a bedroom upstairs, so we hired a painter.

Before the painter could come, we had to empty out 9 years worth of dumping in the basement. Nate asked if I wanted to have a garage sale…no thanks! Most of the stuff wasn’t worth much, so I just loaded it up and took it to DI. There was just enough room in the car for Kylie and I. It was packed front to back, floor to ceiling. I have to say it felt GREAT getting ride of all that stuff.

Even though it seemed like we got rid of a lot, the majority of the stuff had to stay. We packed the one finished room downstairs to the tip top, including a stack of 3 sets of box springs/mattresses, the tread mill, and all my sewing/crafting/scrapbooking ‘crap’. The majority of the toys, boxes of baby clothes, and all the baby paraphernalia (crib, bassinet, high chair, car seat, swing, bouncer, ect.) went to the garage. The Vroom car is roughing it outside till it can all find a new home in the finished basement.

As of tonight, this is what it looks like (see below). Everything is white, but tomorrow the paint will go on the walls. I’m going with the same neutral color upstairs, but a shade darker. I’m excited to see how it will look all done. Yesterday I picked out several carpet samples and I want to figure out the winner. If you are into these things (I’m no decorator LOL) come on over and help me out.

Family room furniture might be a ways off, but I’m excited to double our home size. Mostly I’m eager to get the girls relocated and set up the nursery. This baby will be here in 6-9 weeks and I’m getting that nesting feeling.

1 Allie Hula Hooping

Allie has been in love with Hula Hoops for a while.
She FINALLY got on for her birthday.
I didn't think she could do it, but once again she proved how coordinated and dedicated she is.

1 Allie riding her NEW, BIG bike

0 Allie turns FIVE YEARS OLD!

Saturday morning: Daddy took them to Smithfield’s “Health Days” parade

Saturday mid-day: Family goes to the “Health Days Celebration”

The girls got to ride a few rides and we ate fry bread with honey butter after walking through the booths.

Sunday evening: Cake with Ice Cream and opening presents with the Schwartz clan

(Mika, Kai, Koji, Keiko, Allie, Kylie, Alyiah)

Oh, and Alyiah announced she is also going to be a BIG sister (Dec 11th-ish!)

Allie’s BIG gift was an upgraded bike. She went from a 12 incher to a whopping 18 incher!

Now she can keep up with all the kids in the neighborhood… even all the boys.

0 Girls on a mini-Fair ride

1 Allie’s Mother’s Day card to me

In primary on Mother’s day, the young women were in charge so all the ladies could go to relief society. Here is the card that that Allie brought home to me. It was a fill-in the blank and still makes me laugh!

I love when my mother: helps with chores.

I love my mother because: she makes me work.

My Mother like’s to: make cookies.

My Mother is happy when: she takes a nap.

The funniest thing I ever did with my mother was: jumped on the roof.

My Mother is sad when: my sister takes my toys.

The funniest thing I ever saw my mother do was: get into the dishwasher.

The color my mom likes best is: red.

If I could give my mother anything, I’d give her: a flower.

The first thing my mother does when she wakes up is: wake up my dad.

I like when my mother: cleans the house :for me.

I like to: do the chores for my mother.

My Mother’s favorite food is: pizza.

My mother does not like to eat: macaroni.

My mother works at: my house.

The color of my Mother’s hair is: brown & curly.

My mother is 20 years old.

My mother’s shoe size is: 15.

0 Play & Sleep

The ‘Snap ‘n Style’ Dolls Allie got for Christmas a few years back are still some of the most played with toys. Kylie has re-discovered them lately.

How would be to sleep like a kid again?

2 I was the lead statistician on this study!!!

Click HERE and HERE to see what we found.

I also heard it made the front page of the Salt Lake Trib: HERE

If you're like me, you're lazy, so here's what the first link says:

If spouse has dementia, your risk rises, too

Stress of caregiving may be to blame for 6-fold increase, researchers say

By Linda Carroll

msnbc.com contributor

updated 6:19 a.m. MT, Thurs., May 6, 2010

Being married to someone with dementia may sharply increase your own risk of developing the condition, a new study shows.

Utah researchers found that seniors had six times the risk of developing dementia if they lived with a spouse who had been diagnosed with the condition, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. And the increased risk was substantially higher for husbands than for wives.

“The good news is that most of the spouses did not develop dementia,” said the study’s lead author, Maria Norton, an associate professor in the department of Family, Consumer and Human Development at Utah State University, in Logan. “But this does alert us to the increased risk for some of them. We need to be taking care of the caregiver and finding ways to maximize the positives of care giving.”

The study followed 1,221 couples for 12 years. All 2,442 study volunteers were at least 65 years old and free of dementia at the outset. By the end of the study, 255 of the seniors had developed dementias, two-thirds of which were Alzheimer’s disease.

Though the study did not explicitly ask whether spouses had taken on the role of caregiver, Norton says it’s safe to assume they did.

She and her colleagues were so surprised by their findings that they ran their numbers again, this time accounting for the spouses’ ages, genders and whether they had a form of the APOE gene that raises the risk for Alzheimer’s disease. In their new analysis, they also factored in socio-economic status, which can be a surrogate for shared environmental risk factors, such as access to medical care, diet and exercise.

The number barely budged: having a spouse with dementia still resulted in a six-fold increased risk of developing the condition. And the news was far worse for men: increase was almost 12-fold, as compared to a four-fold increase in women.

Norton and her colleagues don’t yet know what is at the root of the hike in risk. It’s entirely possible that there are environmental factors that we don’t yet know about, Norton said. “Controlling for economic status is not the same as controlling for the 5,000 things that people can share,” she said.

Finding the reason for the increased risk of dementia will be the focus for future research.

“We need more studies to determine how much of this association is due to caregiver stress and how much of it might be due to a shared environment,” she said. “It’s possible that we’ll find that there is something that the caregivers who developed dementia had in common, such as a particular personality trait or their coping styles. Or, maybe it isn’t as much about the caregiver so much as it is about the spouse who gets dementia first: how rapidly they decline, whether they have delusions. Not all dementias are the same. Some might be more stressful to the caregiver.”

An expert unaffiliated with the new study called the finding “compelling,” but not necessarily surprising.

“Caregiving is very stressful,” said Dr. Gary W. Small, director of the University of California-Los Angeles, Center on Aging and director of the Geriatric Psychiatry Division at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Studies have shown that caregivers for dementia patients have a high risk for major clinical depression. And there has been a study that showed that people who are prone to stress are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s.”

Other research has shown that stress can damage a part of the brain that is involved with memory. “Studies have shown that lab animals under stress have fewer cells in the hippocampus,” Small said. “And when human volunteers are injected with the stress hormone cortisol, they end up with a temporary impairment of memory.”

Small suspects that the husbands had a higher risk of dementia than the wives because men are not as used to taking on the role of caregiver as women in our society. “That finding is consistent with the sex specific roles that people still tend to take on in marriage,” he explained.

© 2010 msnbc.com.