Trach it Easy

   I had to go through some old posts to see if I already used this title, but when I did a photo shoot a few years ago of Emma wearing some cute "trach it easy" elephant pajamas in the front yard of our house in Orlando, it was for Trach Awareness Week in 2019, which was the title I used, so this title was still available! Hooray!

  There is an awesome website called StomaStoma.com that sells all these cute shirts of different animals with trachs or G-tubes and oxygen tanks. As I just mentioned, Emma already had the elephant chilling in the hammock with a trach and oxygen tank, and the following year or so I got her a "sprinter" shirt which has a lung wearing tennis shoes running a race! How creative! I had always wanted to get her the Halloween shirt of a spider with a trach that says "trach or treat", but would forget every year until the end of September and by then I felt like it was too late. I finally remembered a few weeks ago and got back on the website. And ended up with four extra shirts in the "shopping cart", whoops, two which were for me and Michael! It's for a good cause and parents need to represent too, am I right!? ;)

   Michael and Emma were such sweeties over the weekend (August 6th), doing this photo shoot with/for me in our new shirts. It was really hot outside, even in the shade, with very minimal breeze. Emma, of course, was fine sprinting, but between each set of pictures, we sat in the car for about ten minutes with the air conditioner blasting, and plugged her back in to the ventilator to give her a "breathing break". The pictures turned out so good, I especially love the ones of Emma on Michael's shoulders. I told him we have to get those printed in an 8x10 (or bigger) and framed in the new house! And maybe one of me and Emma too. :)

   Just in case you can't clearly read it, Michael's shirt says "Trach it Easy", hence the title. ;) You'll see me wearing the same shirt in pink. And Emma is wearing her Sprinter shirt in these first photos, but that one isn't new. I just never posted her wearing that shirt last time I took a bunch of pictures of her in it (March 2021).. Okay, fine! I'll add a couple of them later in this post.

   Outfit change for Mommy and Emma pictures! Now Emma is wearing one of her new shirts, where a giraffe has a trach, ventilator, and a G-tube, just like her! I thought it would be a cute shirt to wear next time we take her to the zoo as well. You'll see a close up of the shirt after our pictures together.

   I got this picture of Emma in the car during one of the A/C blasting breaks with her hair all over the place. She was holding the sodium chloride bullets while I suctioned her trach. This past week she has been helping me with all of the suctioning steps, including pulling the tubing away from the catheter after I'm done, and putting the mouth suction piece back on (so the liquid doesn't drip out- gross).

   Here are some outtakes, which include a fun visit from Emma's new friend, Jiminy Crickey! I don't think she saw him, but she could feel him crawling on her head and tried to brush him off. He crawled on her hand, but she never looked down to see him. Michael picked him up, off of her hand, and put him on the tree. Later, we saw his twin brother crawling in the grass where they were sitting and Michael let him explore. If you scroll back up to the picture of Emma by herself outside in the Sprinter shirt, you can kind of see the grasshopper on the ground to the right, coming for her! Haha.

   And while I was holding Emma, Michael got these other outtakes.. I promise she was laughing, but it just makes me think about when you tell your best friend how much you don't want to go on a really high/fast roller coaster, but somehow she drags you on it anyway, and then you hit that first drop...!!

    I had one more new trach shirt for her to wear, and Michael told me we could go ahead and get it done while we were there, but I knew he and Emma were hot and tired, even though Emma wasn't crabby. And I didn't need to get the pictures done that day. I'm not getting paid to write this blog or anything (such a shame- especially times like now when I'm staying up until 4am writing posts and blasting out at least three per week)! It's all just for fun, she sighed disappointingly, so I told him we could go home.

   We were able to take these pictures of the last shirt this evening since it was one of the few "hurricane season" days that it didn't rain!

   I thought it would be so great if Michael and I wore these shirts to the art show with Michael's mom in November. She says she has to wait and find out if she is going to be invited again this year, and they don't tell her until about a month in advance (beginning of October hopefully). Even if she doesn't, I think we are still planning to go visit his family. But I don't see why the art show company wouldn't invite her again. Her paintings are so good and beautiful, and she keeps learning new things to improve on them every year! Plus the more people selling their items (Michael says it's more like a farmer's market) means more people coming in to their company that weekend too! "Win/win/win, we all win." Michael also has low self esteem about his amazing projects. God wouldn't give us talents that aren't any good. Perhaps Words of Affirmations is low on their Love Language list, and high on mine. I know my scrapbooks are awesome! ;)

   So, back on theme with Emma's "it helps me breathe" shirt, it has been about a month since Michael challenged me to stop texting. Not 100% since I told him that I was going to keep texting our parents, since I send them pictures and updates of Emma all the time. But I did stop responding to my friends' texts for a while. After a few days, I did have to tell them about the challenge so they knew I wasn't dead (that's how much I normally text). Within the first day, Michael and I instantly became closer because he was the one I was giving all of my attention to. That was the main point of the challenge. For a long time -years!- he had been feeling so ignored and unimportant in my life. He said he always felt like #7 or 8 after all my other friends because texting them was always my priority over talking to him when he got home from work. And he already spends 95% of his day alone at work here.

   At one point a few weeks ago, I felt like the lack of texting really began to feel like a mental breath of fresh air. I had more peace or something? Less weight and responsibility on my shoulders? I feel like I have been a lot happier. It seems weird (or a bit sad and guilty) that not talking to my best friends would make me happier, but that's how I feel. Sorry everybody.. Because now Michael and I are back in another "Honeymoon phase", talking about the future of our marriage and our life together; flirting as if we are dating again, and we love it so much! The other day before we left for Emma's physical therapy session, I was fluffing my hair and Michael was standing in the doorway, just watching me with a dreamy little smile on his face. He used to mention a lot about how he wished we could take Emma and move into the middle of the woods somewhere, without any cell phone reception, so I would be forced to talk to him and then we'd have a good marriage. So I guess we are finally "living in the woods"! I mean, this has been our backyard all summer:

   "A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."
          -- Mignon McLaughlin

   Now, as promised in the beginning, here are a few pictures from when Emma first got the Sprinter shirt. This was in mid-March 2021, three months before she turned four years old. So cuuute! :)