Wednesday 12-3-08

Sorry, I got nothing.  Been sick since Saturday & the boys have it now too.  I’ll have plenty to say when I feel better!

One Year Later

One year ago yesterday, our family had our first visit to the ER.  K got his head sliced open on a fountain, and it required a total of 9 stitches to close it up.  (Story and pictures here)

Today, K’s head bears this scar as a reminder:

You can barely see the little white line.  I can see it, because I should have said something that day.  I knew that sprinkler was going to be trouble.  I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, and so I kept my mouth shut and hoped for the best.  And K bears the visible scar, but I have the one inside that tells me I failed to protect my child.

Sick

K has diarrhea pretty badly today.

Sigh.

R is furious with me because I called them both out of school (no way was I making K go out in the chilly rainy weather today)

Good thing I bought a lot of bananas the other day. I’ve got K in pull-ups today to minimize the damage. Pushing lots of fluids, and he’s eating as he can/wants to. He won’t touch rice or applesauce, but bananas and toast we can do.

And, just to make my day complete, N called on the way to work, and the Beast appears to be crapping out too. (Pun fully intended)

How did I get here from there?

On a rainy day I think too much. When I have a glass of soda in the evening, and can’t sleep as a result, I think too much. And my friend Kelly’s post touching on how hard she found it when her kids were infants is what I’ve been thinking about.

I am just the opposite from Kelly. The infant days were easy for me. The decisions were simple. The consequences of a wrong decision were not so dire. Lack of sleep didn’t bother me none — I’ve always gotten by with not-enough-sleep, and to be completely honest N was as helpful and involved a dad as I could have ever wished for. He was running his own business, and he was here. All the time. Taking breaks, helping out, keeping me from feeling overwhelmed. Keeping me from ever needing to do it all, totally alone. From the moment they let us leave the hospital (and I just could.not.believe that they were letting us walk out of there with this perfect, beautiful, helpless baby — surely they know that I’ve never done this before. They’re going to stop us any second, right? Right? Wrong. No one chased us down as we left saying “Wait! There’s been a mistake! You can’t take him home with you!” Nope. They checked that we had a carseat installed and knew how to use it, they packed up our free diaper bag and formula samples, and sent the three of us on our merry way.

But then we got home, and settled in, and things weren’t so bad. Feeding the baby – breast or formula? Start out with breast, start supplementing with formula when it became necessary. Either way, the baby was fed. When to start solids? The pediatrician wanted R to start at 4 months because he was underweight. We followed the professional advice. Peas or carrots? Whatever. There was nothing life-altering in the decisions I had to make. K came along and they let us take him home, too. As R got older, the choices started to get harder, but not much. How old to start preschool? Which preschool to choose? Which class?

Last year came the first of the potentially life-altering decisions. Should we start him in Kindergarten or hold him out an extra year. I agonized over the right thing to do. N and I spoke to his teachers, discussed it with each other, consulted friends. In the end we decided to wait, and seeing the improvement he made this year has confirmed to us that we did the right thing. But this will follow him for his entire school career. He’s starting at six when the norm is still five. He’ll be older when he graduates high school. What if he resents us for that, later? We just hope for the best.

When the boys were infants, I knew the right things to do. Now, as they get older, I’m finding myself less and less sure. I’m finding myself yelling and yelling and uselessly yelling the same things over and over and over again, a broken record going “clean your toys up, get dressed, no you can’t watch TV right now, no you can’t bring that toy to school, WOULD YOU PLEASE GET DRESSED ALREADY I TOLD YOU TWENTY MINUTES AGO AND NOW YOU ARE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL!!!!” I’m stuck in this cycle of telling and yelling and they don’t hear a thing I say anymore. And even as I yell I know in some part of my mind that it is ineffective, that I am out of control, and worst of all I am hearing my mother’s voice in mine and HATING it.

N tells me to get down with them and make cleaning up fun. He has a knack for knowing what to say so they listen, for making it a game to clean up, for keeping his cool and keeping them interested, for being the fun one. Me? Not so much. I think I could build a mommy-bot, a robot that looks just like me and program phrases into it like “no running in the house” and “don’t climb on the furniture” and “go use the potty”, and set them to repeat at intervals and they wouldn’t notice the difference. I’m not really a get-down-and-play kind of person, most of the time. I’ll play games with them, but one or two rounds and I’m done. Their imaginations leave me confused and exhausted. They become superheroes with strange and incomprehensible powers, or ninjas, or exotic animals and they playact games with rules that leave me mystified, dumbly slipping into my mantra of “no fighting with each other”.  There’s another phrase to program into my mommy-bot.

I’m not quite sure when I forgot how to behave with my children.  Was it in the bout of depression that started around the time of my pregnancy with K? Was it when I went back to work full time for a year? I guess it was a gradual thing, exacerbated by both of those situations.

But it hurts to be out as a family and all both of them want is Daddy. I try to hold their hands and all they want is to break away from me and run to him.  The worst of it all, is I don’t blame them.  I wouldn’t want to hang out with me either.  I’m not the fun one.  I used to be fun…I really did.  I need to relearn fun-ness, because I miss laughing with my little boys.

Not-So-Wordless Wednesday 3-19-08

Aarrggh.  I haven’t been in the mood to talk in what feels like weeks.  So it figures I get the urge to post on a Wednesday, of all days.

I’ve been feeling tired, blah, annoyed, dull & pretty much useless for a while.  My creative juices have not been flowing.  They haven’t even been dripping.  I have managed to get some of the important things done, like making sure the kids get fed & clothed and all that good stuff, and we got through C’s baby shower and THAT was nice.   I finally got to meet C’s mom, and although she has already left the state again, I am looking forward to meeting her again soon, since she’ll be back once the babies are born.  Pic #1…C and I at the shower:

Doesn’t she look FABULOUS?!  I cannot believe she has two little boys hiding in there!

The boys are on spring break this week, and I was careful to set up a couple of playdates and activities for them.  One thing we got to do was the egg hunt at church.  Naturally, the weather was miserable so it was indoors, but the boys had lots of fun:

Then these are from a while ago, from one of the few nice days we’ve had this year:

The crocuses are proof that spring has to be on its way, right?  I have some daffys about to bloom, too.  And as soon as it is nice enough I am really hoping to get outside and do some real gardening this year.  The boys are getting big enough to help, even just a little, or at the least to play together without running out into the street whilst I work.

I think Easter being so early this year is also throwing me off.  Everything is just knocking me for a loop this year, and it’s coming one thing on top of the next.  The DST change, and early Easter, and crappy weather, and being on edge about N’s job, and being so sick…it’s all just dogpiling right on top of me.

But I’m also super-excited about C’s babies, and looking forward to doing some gardening, and working on my photography.  K’s birthday is coming up too, and he decided on a Backyardigans theme while we were out shopping for supplies.  We got a stick-the-bowtie on Pablo game, and we’re doing a Pablo pinata.  Of course, nothing can ever go completely right and Giant doesn’t have Backyardigans theme cake kits.  So I need to try another store, or, failing that, order a cake kit online.

Oooh, and we registered for the Con in April, and I’m pretty sure the beach camping trip is going to actually happen this year.  So that is exciting too!

Yippy Skippy

N has it now.  The death cold from Hell that I have finally gotten over, he now has in full force.  Ugh.

Apparently this thing has an incubation period like an elephant’s.  So, I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time for the boys, too.

Sigh.

At least we had a good time today…got together with J and G and W.  Went to Friendly’s for ice cream (Thanks JK for the ice cream cone coupons!!), wandered the mall a bit, came back and the boys played together very nicely.  No pics today, although I should probably have taken one of R when he dressed himself this morning…in K’s construction-orange pants & red & grey shirt.

So here’s a flower.  Because I want spring.

pointless filler

I’m still sick.  Haven’t been out of the house besides dropping off/picking up the boys from school and one run to Target for over a week now.

I’m sick of these walls and totally uninspired.

Feeling vaguely better

Yesterday kicked me in the ass, big time. I’m feeling much better today, thank goodness. And it looks like book club is going to be rescheduled, again, because the weather is gonna suck. This is good, because N is working his butt off this week for his deadline, and hopefully this will get him the job for real. I’ve still got waaaayyy too much to do for his birthday this week, too.

Daily picture later. I’m not feeling so much better that I have any ideas for one yet.

Oh, and in between medicated dozes yesterday, I finished Twilight. AWESOME book. On to New Moon. The boys were pretty much on their own for most of the day, it was one of those “watch whatever you want on TV today” kind of days. Thank God they are so good at entertaining each other.

Head packed full of crap, literally and figuratively.  The mucus in nostrils-having a traffic jam-or a hell of a party.  Eyes throbbing, bones aching.  Can’t sleep, can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t stop thinking.  Tossing and turning, hurts to move, hurts to lay still.

Honey?

Mmmmphh.

Would you go to the store?  I need drugs.

24 hour CVS Pharmacy is my new church. Advil is my (temporary) savior.

Blessed sleep.

Until the kids wake up, coughing and crying that something is stuck in their noses.

*sob*

Disappointments and New Plans

So today turned into a bust. From planning to hit the Chinese buffet for lunch and get together with some friends afterwards, to having NOTHING fun to do all the livelong day. With the cold turn in the weather, it made today a pretty dreary day for me overall. But when the mail arrived after lunch (hot dogs. NO substitute for yummy Chinese food!) I had a nice treat, a new issue of Wonder Time to read! So I set the boys up with their “homework”, got a cuppa tea, and got to relax with my magazine for a bit while the boys worked.

And tonight, we game. That’s always a good time