411 The Walters Bunch

Happy Birthday to my wonderful husband! You were my rock these past few months and I appreciate you so much!  I did pretty well this year. Normally, I stress about getting everything done in time for the holidays, but this year after the insane amounts of stress we had, I didn't. Nothing really seemed that important. My goal was not to put too much on anyone. In trying to keep stress to a minimum, we didn't even do Cookie, our elf on the shelf, this year. The kids and I have fun with her, but also know it's a lot of work to keep up with her and they were ok with missing one of our traditions for this year. Dealing with all of L's issues has been a little overwhelming for everyone and we really just need some downtime. L has pretty much ostracized herself from her siblings. They use to be so close and now they not only don't trust her, but don't know what to do around her. They kinda have parallel lives nows. However, it has strengthened A and T's bond and th

  My son the giant💗 Things have been very busy at our house. Not only are we getting ready for the holidays, but we have also had 5 basketball games a week plus practice and a newborn kitten who needs a bottle about every three hours, day and night. Even with A, L, and I trading off shifts, we are all still very tired. She is growing really well though. She has gone from about 4oz to 13oz now. Her eyes are open, her ears are up, and she can crawl, though she is pretty wobbly. We cannot wait until sometime in the next week or so when she gains the ability to go to the bathroom without us having to rub her with warm cotton balls. Noelle was a little more receptive to taking a Santa picture with T.  A is basically the kittens over protective mommy. She takes the baby, who we named Miracle, back and forth with her to work so she can bottle feed her there and check her weight. As worried as we were with Noelle meeting Maisy, I have to say that with this kitten Maisy couldn't care less.

  My son🤷💓 Last week with the down time was nice. We decorated the inside and outside for Christmas, got the majority of our holiday shopping done, and had time to plan some fun things for the upcoming weeks. We had kind of a crazy week with 5 basketball games, but luckily every single one of them was in my hometown, though a wreck on one of the days did make it take 30 minutes to go 10 miles. Since everything was pretty crazy around T's birthday we never really took him out with a friend to celebrate so this week we took him and a friend to the trampoline park, out for lunch, and then they just hung out at our house and played video games. T had such a good time! He doesn't have very many times a year that he is able to just hang out with friends, and basketball stuff DOESN'T count. These days everyone has so much going on that it is almost impossible to schedule time to just hang out with friends. In fact, T had to have fun during the day because we had basketball pract

  Happy Thanksgiving 🦃🍽️ Our Thanksgiving Day was wonderful! L and I had premade almost everything the day before so on Thanksgiving we had very little to prepare. It was mostly just cook everything.  We spent Thanksgiving doing everything we normally do on Thanksgiving. We got up and watched the parade. While the parade is on, we start warming everything to eat for lunch. After the parade is the dog show, which is the highlight of A's day. L doesn't care as much for the dog show, but enjoys making the gingerbread houses while we watch. This year she volunteered to assemble A's house since A can never do it. She just doesn't have the patience to hold it and wait for the walls to dry. A greatly enjoyed just getting to decorate the house this year without the headache of trying to assemble it. T gave up assembling gingerbread houses three years ago and now just decorates "gingerbread  house cookies", which basically means he lays each wall down flat, slaps som

  Happy 80th Birthday Dad! We love you 💗 This week has been a little crazy. Well, compared to the past couple of months it has been pretty tame, but we are really trying to get back to normal, or as close as now possible, but settling into a new routine is hard. We are having to arrange our lives for the next few weeks around L's outpatient therapy sessions and unfortunately the times keep changing. There was a COVID outbreak so they moved this entire weeks worth of sessions to online, which saves me 2.5 hours of driving a day, but means we have to watch her for four hours everyday on the computer while she is at class to make sure she doesn't contact her toxic friends or the crazy evil family. That means I have to stay inside and not do outside chores until she is done and T can keep an eye on her.  I am not sure how much it is really helping, but at least she has some structure to her day and appears to be eating better and has a more pleasant disposition.  T had two games t

We bought professional pumpkin carving tools this year! It was a lot of work and time consuming so we'll probably never use them again! We have been crazy busy dealing with the lifetime movie worthy antics of what has become our new insanely stressful life. We are hopeful that one part of our investigation will close this week and if we're lucky, which lets face it we are not this year, the other case will be wrapped up and indictments handed down with in the next 4-6 weeks, which sounds so far away, but I know it will get here. Justice with the law moves slowly, but it will come eventually. It's the waiting knowing you were so wronged that's the hard part. L is in outpatient therapy all day five days a week. I have no idea what happened, but she is a completely different person with only glimpses of the L we know. Sometimes I wish she had just been on drugs because then we would know what caused the change and be on the path to recovery. Since we have no idea what caus

Happy birthday to my first baby and my granddaughter!! After 2 weeks at an inpatient mental health facility (after being transferred there by medical transport from the emergency room while strapped to a gurney yelling and being combative), L has been released into our care, The kids are a little apprehensive about her being here since her behavior is so out of character and erratic. I can't blame them. We're on edge too. She has an outpatient group she is going to M-F from 9-3 for the next few weeks. Unfortunately, it's about 40 minutes from our house so just taking her and picking her up takes 2.5 hours.  As time goes by and we assist the detective in finding out what happened, we are more and more astounded by what is happening. This was planned. L was a pawn and she has been significantly groomed/ brainwashed. I can't talk too much about it, but there is a crazy family at our church(now former church) who I want to destroy. They are the epitome of evil and I cannot

6 years later and I FINALLY get ONE apple😂 We have been crazy busy and on an emotional rollercoaster ride this past month, but the last week has probably been the most difficult of all of our lives. We found L. I can't go into details because it might compromise the investigation, but a hospital called us when they became suspicious of the circumstances of her arrival. She is currently safe and in an inpatient mental health facility for the foreseeable future. I can say she was not taking illegal drugs or suicidal. She is there for other reasons. I cannot divulge anymore than that until everything has played out.  T has been busy trying to figure out what to carve into our pumpkins this year. He wants us to all carve the Simpsons. I think it might be neat so we'll probably do that. I can't wait to show you guys our finished product, but we won't actually do it until closer to Halloween. T is also working on perfecting his guitar music for his Christmas concert. All the

  Our Aunt treated us to dinner at the steak house.  We have been processing this quietly as family for the past few weeks. This is all we plan to say to anybody on the subject. Yes, she is NOT 18 yet. No, she did NOT have permission to leave (and selfishly did so while her little brother was at a cardiologist appointment). No, there was no big fight nor was she grounded or in trouble for anything. We have had a couple of issues with her since she joined, of all things, church choir almost 2 years ago. I think allowing her to be around public school kids was a mistake and I was never comfortable with it, but it's church choir it should be a good thing right? After an incident last year, I thought she was finally to a point where she was earning our trust back. I have ALWAYS told our kids how hard it is to earn trust, but they can lose it very easily. Anyways, T and I went to his cardiologist appointment and came home to find L gone. No note. All the pets locked up. We had no idea w