The other day, Mercer came home from daycare in an outfit I had forgotten about -- guess it's been there for awhile and they changed him into it b/c he messed up his other outfit? It was the inspiration for this photo. He's wearing a farm outfit (tractors, cows, barns, and frogs. frogs? yup - they're on there.) We thought it was fitting to take his picture in our little garden. We have been watching this HUGE tomato grow over the past month. It's been sitting on the vine completely green for several weeks, but finally turned red. It's almost the size of Mercer's head!! We've already "harvested" a number of the cute little yellow & red striped ones too.

We love this time of year - we go through a lot of Boboli whole wheat crusts and make all sorts of tomato tarts and pizzas. This one was mighty tasty... some yellow pear shaped tomatoes from a neighbor's garden magically appeared on our doorstep. We slathered pesto on a crust, combined the yellow tomatoes with some of our little yellow & red ones for color... and voila! yum!

Life seemed to be slowing down and getting a little more simplified this week (compared to last week) - however - we were thrown a curve ball this morning. I had HORRIBLE cramps, fever, chills, and vomiting. Thank goodness all of this happened before Todd left for work -- so he took over Mercer duties and we made the decision to go to the hospital because something was definitely wrong. We were there for 6 1/2 hours (ugh) and I got a morphine drip for the pain and fluids through an IV b/c I was really dehydrated. I had a number of sonograms done and they found something -- but didn't tell me 'til 3 hours later what it was. That was torture. Luckily, all it was -- a cyst that had ruptured. I was SO relieved. But - upon reading the discharge papers / learning a little more about cysts - it could've been very serious & caused a lot of damage internally. I was lucky that it didn't. I have a follow-up appointment next week to investigate (hopefully) "why" this happened. Think it has something to do with hormones.... super strong ones (yes - my hormones have been very strong since Mercer's been home with us. crazy, huh?)

I took a 3 hour nap when we got home this afternoon (guess the morphine was wearing off?) ... and am still letting Todd deal with little M. I hope to feel up to hanging out with him & holding him tomorrow.