Stuck in Work

I came to the basement to write this post hours ago when my husband was putting the children to bed.   I am getting to this post now, with my eyes focusing not so well, because I got “stuck” in work.  

It’s a common phenomenon that when you sit down at your desk, it’s easy to get sucked into all sorts of other things that need to get taken care of and the thing you came to the computer to do in the first place gets put further down the list.   That or you get attacked by the distraction monster.   “Ooo, an email from so-and-so about the thing I need to order online for my uncle for Christmas,” for instance.   You know, that kind of stuff.

I was distracted by medical insurance re-enrollment, emails about birthday parties, presents for the children for the holidays, catalogs, annual fund mailings, annual fund phonathon, annual fund coordination.

But I got things done.   Things have been accomplished and my to do items are less now than they were earlier, so that makes me happy.   I love having my list of things to do in order.

The Big Boy Update:  Today my son said something to me he’s never said before.  I have a feeling I’m going to hear this a lot more as he gets older:  “mom, can you download this app for me?”   I downloaded it and explained it was going to be an app that needed reading to understand and that’s why working on his sounds at school would be good so he could learn to read.    We’ll see if it’s made an impact on him.   For now, he’s hatching dragon eggs and building a dragon city in some app.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter wanted a cheese stick, saltine crackers and a knife to spread some Wow Butter.    It was a bit unconventional, but she seemed happy spreading Wow Butter for twenty minutes.

Fitness Update:  We ran six miles this morning in no rain, a tiny misting, a drizzle, rain, intermittent heavy rain, full-blown heavy rain.    My shoes were squishy and I was drenched when we got back in.   But it was a great run in seventy-degree weather.  

Missing Friends

We went to a wedding reception for good friends of ours tonight.   They got married several months ago, but tonight was the celebration they had with their family and friends.  It was a great event.  I loved the music, food, drinks and service.   And most of all, I enjoyed seeing friends.

One of the couples we saw were friends we had been closer to in years past but had drifted apart since we had had children and they had had their daughter.   I think after tonight we may get together more often as a group, children included, to share time together.

The other friend I was so glad to see was someone who I used to date, then he married a friend of ours.   They adopted and raised a child and then they later got divorced.   He now lives in an area close to Boston.    All that time and all those events and I miss him though as one of our friends.   Regardless of the fact that we dated many years ago, he is still one of our friends and the group of us miss him.    It was so nice to see him and catch up this evening.

Thanks for asking me to dance, Matt.   I had a fun time dancing with you, our friends and their children out on the dance floor tonight.

The Big Boy Update:  My son got a ninja toy from the dollar store yesterday.   He didn’t treat it gently and it broke.   We were able to fix it but I had a, “you get what you pay for” conversation with him about quality just in case.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  I wasn’t letting my daughter have candy, cookies or dessert for snack the other day.   She complained loudly, “I don’t get to eat anything, ever!”   I told her when she selected a healthy snack I would help her with something to eat.

The Guy I Almost Killed

Note the word ‘almost’ in the title.   All is well.   He didn’t die nor was he even maimed.   But it could have happened.   

This evening my husband had a meeting followed by a movie date with one of our neighbors husbands (who is as enthusiastic about going to the movies as I’m not.)   I took the children to dinner and then headed back to drop my daughter off for her play session with her therapist, Ms. Dhruti.    

It was as we were driving in the now early-evening darkness on a relatively big street that I yelled out, “oh my God!” and hit the brakes.   There was not one, but three people dashing across the multi-laned street from the strip mall to the apartment complex and they were entirely too close to the car as far as I was concerned.   

The children asked why I’d yelled and I explained that I almost hit someone with the car and that person would have been hurt very badly had I done so.   I told them I didn’t think I’d ever been that close to hitting someone and it had scared me.   Here’s the thing though: did I not see them when I should have?   Was I not paying attention?   I was upset at myself.    Yes, they were running in the middle of traffic, wearing dark clothing, in the dark, no where near a cross walk when the lights on either side of the area were green, but still, my job as a driver is to watch for hazards.

I was shaken.  Maybe I wasn’t that close.   It was likely the people (including the one that was quite close to my car) were making their own choice on how fast they needed to move to get out of the way and weren’t relying on me seeing them at all, but it didn’t feel like that on my end when they came into view from my headlights.  

We dropped off my daughter and then my son and I left, heading back in the direction I’d just come.   Shortly after driving through the intersection I saw another darkly dressed person crossing the road ahead of me.   Then half-way between the stop lights there were three people standing in the middle of the street on the divider, waiting for an opening to dash between cars.    

So it wasn’t just once and it’s not just one person making the deathly dash across that street.   Still, I’m going to be hyper-aware whenever I go through there again after tonight’s experience. 

The Big Boy Update:  I was in the process of telling my son he did not need to wear his rain boots today and he needed to change into his other shoes when he told me, “I get to choose what shoes I wear.”   I stopped, thought and said, “yes, you can make that choice.”   We discussed as long as he was not choosing inappropriately (such as wearing crocks to school) then he could make the choice now.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Ms. Dhruti.   My daughter has had only one “play date” with Ms. Dhruti, her play therapist, and already she feels like they’re long lost friends.   She has been asking when she could go play with Ms. Dhruti again and today was the day.   When she was done with her session, she told me all about the fun things they did in the play room at her office.   Next week my husband and I have a meeting with Ms. Dhruti to find out what she’s learned.    Sadly, we’ll be missing Ms. Dhruti for several weeks after that as she must return to India due to the death of one of her parents.  

Thin Versus Skinny

Is there a difference in meaning between those words to people?  Without looking them up, does one have the connotation of, “not overweight” while the other one conveys the thought of, ‘underweight’  I’m not altogether sure what the difference is to me, but I had an epiphany just now and decided to write about it here.  

This summer we were in New Jersey visiting my brother-in-law’s family for our annual summer vacation.  After dinner one night my husband and I went for a walk on the board walk and witnessed an unusual phenomenon.  There was a double rainbow visible off shore to the South.    We took a few pictures and kept walking.   Af few minutes later we realized there was also a rainbow visible at the other end of the arc, up the shore to the North.

We decided to take a picture using the panorama feature of the iPhone’s camera.   Just before taking the shot my husband said, “okay, do this” and then told me how to get in the picture more than once.   He started panning from the left and caught me in-frame.   As he panned right I ran around behind him and jumped into the picture mid-pan.   As he passed by me a second time I ran around him again and got into the picture at the double rainbow end.

The picture was great.   You could see all three sections of the rainbow and I magically had two siblings.    I had forgotten about the picture until yesterday when I found it looking for something else.   My husband said, “you should use that as your Facebook header photo.”   I thought about it but wasn’t sure, mostly because I’m Facebook shy and don’t post much and rarely put up pictures.

Tonight I brought up the picture again and had a thought about it.   As I was looking at the three versions of me I had the thought, “I look thin!”   This was a positive thought, because at about that time I had finished my weight loss plan and had hit my target weight.   I was running almost every day and I felt great.    I’ve always been fairly thin though.   It was at that point that I had a second thought which was, “will people think I’m skinny?”  

Is ‘skinny’ a negative term in our society today?

The Big Boy Update:  My daughter and I had plans after school today.   I asked my son if he wanted to help and he said no.   I told him he could play Mario 3D world (or Mario Maker) while we prepared her favor bags if he wanted to.   Afterwards when I told him he had to stop playing he wasn’t angry.  He didn’t get upset and he was very kind during dinner.   So it doesn’t seem all screen time makes him an angry monster.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I prepared her favor bags for her upcoming birthday party.   She wanted to stamp them, selected stamps and ink and placed the stamps quite accurately.   She then put one of each of the items we’d selected into each bag.   At the end she wasn’t sure we had enough in the white paper bags (we were using luminary paper bags) so she selected adding a piece of white chalk to each bag.   She said that would be “plenty” for each friend after the chalk was added.

Dreary Solar Day

My husband came home before lunch and called me, rather excited.   This was unusual because he’s one of those even keel people that rarely gets excited.   He told me, “the guy from the power company is here, finishing switching out or meter.”   This was good news.  I immediately understood my husband’s excitement when he said that.

We’ve gone through the entire process with getting solar installed at our home.   The last step is the turning on of the system.   It has to be planned, approved, inspected, installed, inspected again, filed for with the power company and then, finally, our meter is switched out to a bi-directional one so that we can both buy and sell electricity to the power company.  

It was finally happening—we could go up to the attic, turn on the breakers, rotate the switches and rap on the display panels (don’t ask me why, but you rap on them with a knuckle to turn them on) and fire the whole system up.    Exciting times.

Only it was overcast.  It was dreary.   It had been raining and the sky was in a bad temper.   But it was technically light outside because I could see how to get to the refrigerator from the living room, so some solar power was being generated.   We didn’t get over more than a kW at a time for the next few hours, but it’s something.    And we’re pretty excited about that something.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was unhappy today when he found out his sister and Madison had “messed up his bed.”  (They had been playing ‘Birthday Party’ and needed his blanket for the table cloth.)   He went out to the front porch where they were hammering nails into little pumpkins, told them what he thought about their messing up his bed and then knocked over their container of nails.   Note to the ladies:  don’t mess with his bed.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and son were playing some sort of game this morning.   My daughter told me my son was “a Credible Hulk.”  

Hide and Seek

We decided to play a game of hide and seek with the children after dinner tonight.   At their age they completely understand the point of the game, but they’re not very proficient at playing it in practice.

They know they’re supposed to count or run off and hide.   They understand the whole seeking process, but they don’t know how to do a thorough job of looking around an area.   They don’t think about where human-sized areas might be that would be good for hiding and most importantly, they give up and leave you hiding when they get bored.

So we helped them out tonight by playing in teams.   We had a great time.   The very last round they decided to play kids against parents.    We hid in the linen closet and were given away the entire time by the dog, who sat by the door and barked at them from time to time.  

My daughter came over and asked the dog, “where is your family?”   There was a one-sided conversation with the dog and then they left to go downstairs, yelling out, “what floor are you on?”   We whistled and they returned upstairs, talking to the dog when they arrived.    I gave us away because I was laughing too much inside the closet.  

Good times.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been busily circling all sorts of things in the catalogs that arrive daily by mail.   He and I had a conversation about the word “favorite” and the phrase, “the most.”  I asked him which one did he like the most?   He told me seven things he liked the most.   I asked him then which one of the transformer robot dinosaur things he’d circled was his favorite?  He explained that the red and the blue and the green and the yellow and the black ones were his favorite.    

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:    My daughter’s hunger is under control once again I think.   She’s gained a good bit of weight for her small size, but I think she’s stopped gaining and is now maintaining (I hope.)   She isn’t so food-driven anymore with the reduction in the oral prednisone.   She’s at a low dosage that will hopefully taper off and end soon.

The Fuzzy Sleeping Effect

This is about something that happens to me.   I don’t know how to title the post so I’ve given up and gotten a title that’s the closest match to what I experience.   Let’s start at the current state of things and say that I have nerve pain.   The pain is hard to isolate to one specific area because the source of pain stems from spinal cord damage in my neck and since all nerves below that point can be involved via the spinal column, a lot is up for grabs in the pain area.

Back to the pain though.   Neuralgia is a good word to use, but it’s generic and doesn’t offer much help really.   The pain I experience is largely focused around my neck, shoulders forearms and arms, in order of magnitude.   It’s similar, but different to the kind of pain you feel when you’re sick with the flu and your body is very, very angry every time you move as well as every time you stay still.  

I thought I was an old person for a while and then I decided to ask my doctor about Lyrica.   Lyrics helps.  It helps a lot.   People tell me it’s a “TERRIBLE HORRIBLE DRUG YOU ARE ADDICTED TO AND YOU SHOULD SUFFER INSTEAD OF USING IT” and then I get the other end of the spectrum where my medical doctors tell me it’s one of the most mild medications I could take for the symptoms I’m experiencing and they’re very glad it can control the pain without the use of narcotic alternatives.  

I really hate talking to people who are so self-righteous about how bad medications are for you when they, themselves, haven’t suffered from debilitating pain for years and are desperate for any relief or solution.   But that is another topic entirely and I am quite opinionated on the subject myself.

Let’s get back to the Lyrica.  Typically I take a dose at 4:15AM.   Why that hour?  Because at 5:15AM my alarm goes off a second time to get up an exercise.   If I’m in intolerable pain, the last thing I want to do is get out of bed.    But, if I’m comfortably sleeping and I only need get up and get clothes on, I can move forward with my day, starting with exercise in the dark.

There is this “fuzzy sleeping” thing that happens on occasion.   Usually I get up an hour after taking the Lyrica, but on rare occasions like today, I get to sleep in.  My in-laws were here and they fed the children breakfast.   I slept past the one hour mark from taking the Lyrica.   I had been awake during the time change period because my son had had a nightmare.   He and I had a talk in our bed and after he felt comfortable from talking the dream out, he wanted to go back to bed.    It was at that time I was in a lot of pain.   I wasn’t sure I could go to sleep because my shoulders and arms hurt so much.   But I fell asleep.

When I awoke several hours later, I was comfortable.   There was this mild fuzzy feeling in my arms and shoulders which I’m guessing is the calcium channel blocking effect from the Lyrica, and the pain was blocked.   Lyric isn’t a narcotic.  It’s not deleterious and it’s not something you notice when you’re up and moving around, but it does help.   This morning was one of those times when I realized how much it helps me cope with the damage I’m dealing with.  

The Big Boy Update:  My children are allowed to use the iPads on the weekends.   I came into the bathroom this afternoon to find my son on the bath mat, watching something on his iPad.   I was in there for a few minutes working on several things when I realized he was watching a documentary on Uranus and Neptune, targeted at young children, narrated by Bill Nye, The Science Guy.   I’m not sure how my son found the show, but I didn’t interrupt him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Right eye gone?   Today was a good eye day.   Things were looking up earlier.   But as of right now, after a game she wanted to play, I’m not sure the right eye is working at all and she’s having a hard time seeing things at all.    This morning on our bike ride she could see things from a distance.   My husband and I are so torn.   We want to be positive but when we see negative things like we see right now, as of ten minutes ago, our faith in her eyes healing is shaken.

Fitness Update:  Before the rain this morning my husband and I took the children on a bike ride with them on the backs of our bikes.   We did a loop of six miles, colored only by me losing control and dropping the back at the worst turn/hill on the route.   We were in the park and I needed a large amount of woods for the volume of my yelling.   I was SO mad.   I did everything right but my bike didn’t change gears quickly enough and I wasn’t able to recover when it did chunk into gear.   I’m blaming the bike, but dropping your child on the ground and then having to right a bike with a heavy child on the back who is unhappy is very stressful.   The bike seats are so well-designed.   She was completely safe the entire time.   We did the appropriate thing to handle the situation and talked it all out.   She’s fine with what happened and I feel better for talking it through with her.   She understands what happened and why I was so mad (I didn’t want to hurt her.)   Other than that, we got home in light rain and had a nice lunch together at home as a family.