• Pain: 0/10
• Inconvenience: 3/10

Guess what! My nose is beginning to straighten out again! My lips and mouth are still out of proportion quite a bit, and their symmetry seems to be nonexistent at the moment, but I’m sure that will all be corrected in due time.

Yesterday, I had a soup-making party with a friend who lives close by. There were no recipes or structure of any kind involved, just pure cooking madness. We made 3 different flavors:

• Vegetable
• Taco hamburger
• Pork and mushroom

With a few different types of soup mix and numerous vegetables–celery, carrots, peppers, onions, mushrooms, potatoes and zucchini–it’s amazing the incredible scents you can generate. My house smelled like a restaurant, and I was definitely a fan. I think Glade needs to manufacture an air freshener with a homemade soup scent. They can rest assured I’d be a paying customer. I must admit, however, that I’ve never cried harder in all my life than when I was chopping through all those onions. Does anyone have any “stop-weeping-like-a-little-girl-while-chopping-onions” tips?

It’s a soup buffet!

Moving on from all this talk about food, I went and saw my little nephews and nieces a few days ago, and all they wanted me to do was read Winnie the Pooh books to them. It’s difficult to explain to children that you can’t keep reading to them because your face will swell up like a balloon. It just makes them want to start playing with balloons. And I thought my A.D.D. was bad.

I’m a vegetable chopping master.

And this just in: I had my first successful sneeze in over 6 weeks! It felt awesome! It’s been a little weird not sneezing for that long, but I no longer have to worry about snapping elastics and throwing my jaw out of whack, so sneezing is allowable. I’m still unsure of whether I’m able to blow my nose yet. That’ll be my first question when I go to my next appointment in 7 days. By the way, that’s the appointment where they’ll be removing my splint. So. Freaking. Excited.