Yes, I'm Still Alive...but Barely

Hi All!
Yes, I'm still alive and bloggin'! I can't believe it's been this long since I logged in last, but then a lot has happened since Thanksgiving and I've been REALLY busy! Right after Thanksgiving, all the girls got sick, including the baby who at the time was only about 5 weeks old and WAY too young for over the counter meds. Actually, she developed an ear infection as a secondary to the cold she had the previous week. Fortunatly for us, it was one of the RARE ear infections that is NOT accompanied by a high fever. In fact, she never ran a fever at all. Praise God! For those of you with small kiddies, you are probably aware that for some reason it appears to be mandatory to run spinal taps on all babies who present with a fever under 8 weeks old to rule out spinal meninjitis and other nasties such as blood poisoning. We went through that with "Little Sister" - the two year old - when she was a baby and it was heartwrenching. Anyway, after they all recovered from their colds, of course it was Christmas. Alan had to work the entire time which means that I had to play the "elf" and do most of "Santa's" work for him. PLUS my entire family get-together was at MY HOME, so I was up for two days cooking and literally ended up going 36 hours with no sleep. After that I slept for about 20 hours straight. Then, a couple of weeks after that, my computer died. SOooo I'm just now up and running again. New computer....new wireless keyboard and mouse...new DSL service. NO MORE DIALUP!!!! HURRAY!!! I will close by stating that I missed you all and have been trying to catch up a bit on your blogs as well.