I'll bet you thought I was going to talk about a place my kids have created, where they squirrel themselves away to be by themselves and at peace. However, I am talking about myself, and my bedroom. Lately it's been just a wee bit stressful around here. If I didn't know better (and I don't, by the way), I'd say it's been a spiritual attack zone level one around here. (And that doesn't refer to some secret code, it's just my way of saying that we've had enough dark forces at work in our lives for quite a while, thanks.)
Today we got knocked with more zingers. First, Hubby's employer wanted him to travel again next week. Uh, no. Chiefly because Hubby is presenting the master's thesis that his company paid for a week from today, and it's sort of important that he be at home to finish it up, yes? Yes, they agreed, that is important...what about the week after that. Hubby said, "Well, that is Thanksgiving, and frankly I have family commitments that I wouldn't be able to easily move...plus I'd spend a day flying there and a day flying back, for a total of two days working...it doesn't make much sense." Yes, they agreed, that would be silly. As yet unmentioned is the prospect of the week following, so I am waiting for that little shoe to drop.
And, I was urgently messaged on Google by my mother-in-law to tell me that she couldn't get in touch with DH, and to please let him know right away that his sister (my SIL) was in the hospital with a suspected blood clot in her LUNG. OH boy. This is my SIL who had a miscarriage this summer while we were there visiting, so the poor woman has had her plentiful share of doctors and hospitals already this year. And, she is severely anemic, something that she also had when she was pregnant. Er, shouldn't that ring some alarm bells with some M.D. over there? Hmmm, we have a patient who has been severely anemic for nine months, perhaps something serious is going on??? Pardon me while I thank God for our sue-happy society which at least makes doctors afraid for their heinies if they miss something, thus ensuring they will run every test known to man (and believe me I know the downside of becoming a lab pincushion, having been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt myself several times). Over in Ireland it's apparently a shrug and wait-and-see kind of approach. Yeah. CT scan confirmed a blood clot and now she is in the hospital overnight, shot up in the tummy with fun meds to help the clot dissolve, and can anticipate being on blood thinners for the next six months. She is THIRTY NINE, people! And HEALTHY! This should not be happening to a healthy 39 year old woman and mother of two and lovely person, I might add. So now we wait to find out what the heck is going on that she is so anemic and her body is throwing out clots.
And, on top of all that joy, a very good friend of ours from church has also been hospitalized today for head pain. She has battled migraines and tension headaches for years, but apparently they can't control the pain with meds and she has some inflammation in her neck or something. She and her husband are waiting for the doctors to explain exactly what the heck they are doing to her, what tests they are running and why, etc. And she was dehydrated and had 2 bags of IV fluids. So a total mystery going on there, and who knows how long they are going to keep her in the hospital or what they think might be going on. So not bueno.
So I have been spending a lot of time lately in my hidey hole, namely, our bedroom. I am glad we made a semi-high priority of decorating it as a peaceful, serene room when we moved in, because I am really using it as a sanctuary nowadays. I have spent more time in our bedroom in the past three weeks than I usually spend in there in three months. My favorite version of "Pride and Prejudice" has been playing almost non-stop, and I have re-read the book and Pamela Aidan's Darcy series a few times too. It is just soothing to my nerves right now, something which I sorely need.
And now, if you will excuse me, I think there is a soulful Colin Firth calling my name, along with a big mug of tea and some sudoku puzzles, beckoning from the comfort of my bed. I don't know if I will come out again, so if you don't hear from me, assume I am enshrouded in bed and loudly singing "La la la!" to myself.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Delusion of Child Messes
When you become a parent, somehow you think that you are going to find better ways to do everything. You will do a better job of introducing your kids to healthy foods. You will get them to voluntarily pick up their rooms. You will avoid the annoying toys and the extremely messy/dirty activities, or manage to contain them. You are sure you can do all of this and remain sane.
Play Doh will be kept in separate colors so it won't turn into the perennial gray green that every tub of playdoh at daycare or church becomes two seconds after it is opened. YOUR children will only play with it on a designated table only, and you will not let it get tracked or moved all over the house. You say to yourself, "Well, if I buy this cute little sandpit with a cover, the kids won't get sand everywhere and it will stay dry." You even splurge for the extra high walls to prevent sand creeping onto your lawn. What you don't think about is the fact that instead of worrying about sand escaping at will as your children play, you should be worrying about how much will make its way into your house in the form of sandy hands, bodies, and clothing.
Well, I'm here to vouch for the fact that it's just not possible to avoid or even contain messes. Even if you try to avoid messy toys or games, your kids will find them by themselves. And even when you think you have a toy that is contained to a certain season, think again! I thought with our sand table being put away for the winter, our children would be forced to amuse themselves with the plethora of fall leaves and sticks on the lawn, and all the cool creatures crawling around in the leaf litter. Well, I was partly right. They did entertain themselves with that for about half an hour, then they went back to their (wet) Jeep and other stuff by the house. Fine. I was occupied raking leaves from our 100 ft plus big leaf maple, so as long as they weren't killing each other, I was happy. Then I heard the scream and crying, and saw from my decent distance away that my son had a dirty face. I thought it was dirt. Yeah. No, it was play sand...wet play sand at that. DD had shoved/thrown it in his face. When I asked her why she did that, she said, "I wanted a sand fight." *ahem*
One time-out for DD, shower for DS (remember that bit about clothing with sand? Well, add in a cloth DIAPER full of sand), clean clothes, and chill-out nursing session later, and everyone is happy again. Except that I had to sweep up tons of sand from my bedroom and bathroom floor, and I haven't finished rinsing the sand down the sink drain or shower drain yet. I had to change my clothes after wrestling DS out of his, so yet another laundry load is in the wash.
And that Play Doh? Well, after holding out for nearly four years and insisting that DD only play with one color at a time, I finally threw caution to the wind while DH was gone last week and let the kids play with five colors at once. And you know what, it was okay. They don't mind the gray green, and they had a blast with their rainbow Play Doh while it lasted. And really it didn't matter what color it was, I still had about a bazillion dried out pieces to vacuum and sweep up after they were done. I guess I've just realized that childhood is supposed to be messy...I can try to keep it contained most of the time, but I wouldn't want to have a spotless house if it meant my kids didn't enjoy their toys and their messes. Have dustpan, will parent!
Play Doh will be kept in separate colors so it won't turn into the perennial gray green that every tub of playdoh at daycare or church becomes two seconds after it is opened. YOUR children will only play with it on a designated table only, and you will not let it get tracked or moved all over the house. You say to yourself, "Well, if I buy this cute little sandpit with a cover, the kids won't get sand everywhere and it will stay dry." You even splurge for the extra high walls to prevent sand creeping onto your lawn. What you don't think about is the fact that instead of worrying about sand escaping at will as your children play, you should be worrying about how much will make its way into your house in the form of sandy hands, bodies, and clothing.
Well, I'm here to vouch for the fact that it's just not possible to avoid or even contain messes. Even if you try to avoid messy toys or games, your kids will find them by themselves. And even when you think you have a toy that is contained to a certain season, think again! I thought with our sand table being put away for the winter, our children would be forced to amuse themselves with the plethora of fall leaves and sticks on the lawn, and all the cool creatures crawling around in the leaf litter. Well, I was partly right. They did entertain themselves with that for about half an hour, then they went back to their (wet) Jeep and other stuff by the house. Fine. I was occupied raking leaves from our 100 ft plus big leaf maple, so as long as they weren't killing each other, I was happy. Then I heard the scream and crying, and saw from my decent distance away that my son had a dirty face. I thought it was dirt. Yeah. No, it was play sand...wet play sand at that. DD had shoved/thrown it in his face. When I asked her why she did that, she said, "I wanted a sand fight." *ahem*
One time-out for DD, shower for DS (remember that bit about clothing with sand? Well, add in a cloth DIAPER full of sand), clean clothes, and chill-out nursing session later, and everyone is happy again. Except that I had to sweep up tons of sand from my bedroom and bathroom floor, and I haven't finished rinsing the sand down the sink drain or shower drain yet. I had to change my clothes after wrestling DS out of his, so yet another laundry load is in the wash.
And that Play Doh? Well, after holding out for nearly four years and insisting that DD only play with one color at a time, I finally threw caution to the wind while DH was gone last week and let the kids play with five colors at once. And you know what, it was okay. They don't mind the gray green, and they had a blast with their rainbow Play Doh while it lasted. And really it didn't matter what color it was, I still had about a bazillion dried out pieces to vacuum and sweep up after they were done. I guess I've just realized that childhood is supposed to be messy...I can try to keep it contained most of the time, but I wouldn't want to have a spotless house if it meant my kids didn't enjoy their toys and their messes. Have dustpan, will parent!
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Slothfulness Here I Come
I've been pretty quiet on here for the past few weeks, as you've probably (hopefully) noticed. It has not been just the product of my insane amount of multi-tasking, but also the result of my DH's work trips to Memphis for the past two weeks. He gets home today and I am pooped! I don't know how families with a parent who travels a lot actually accomplish anything. I have fed myself and the children fast food or convenience food for about one meal per day. I quickly exhausted leftovers in the freezer and at dinnertime I am especially vulnerable to convenience. I have had enough take-out pizza and fast food chicken nuggets to last me for a while, I think.
It is perhaps a good thing that I was not allowed to be so slothful as to never tidy up the house while DH has been gone. He has been home for the weekends and pitched in to get the kids to tidy up their toys and such, but in addition I have had babysitters in the house on my teaching days, and I have had friends over for playdates to keep a bit of fresh perspective and sanity. Nothing like having a Navy wife over, whose husband is currently on a multi-month deployment, to make me stop carping about my terrible luck having a husband who has to be gone for nearly two whole weeks!
However, it is a lot of work being "on" all the time for children. Evenings are the most dreadful, because I am tired after dealing with them all day, and there is still a lot of work involved in getting dinner on the table, getting into PJs, getting teeth brushed and getting both of them put to bed, solo. I have been very cranky, and it shows. That is the time of day when they are most likely to be missing Daddy and cry for him (and having a cranky Mommy putting them to bed doesn't help, I imagine).
So, that has me feeling pretty beat. And I had to deal with some other issues, too, in DH's absence. The night before he left, we had a clog in our sewer line that backed up sewage into our shower stall, new bathtub, and hole for the kids' bathroom toilet that is currently plugged up with a towel. Yeah. Suffice it to say, cleaning up sewage from our bathroom shower, new tub, and not completely laid tile floor in the other bathroom, SUCKED. Did I mention that this was at about 9:30 pm? And DH was leaving the next day? DH got to stand out in the dark and cold with the rooter guy while he dug up our septic and snaked back from there. That's how we found out that our septic needed to be pumped. Oh joy. So I had to schedule that (for the day I was teaching, don't you know) and also had to play phone tag with three friends trying to get a babysitter, due to people having jury duty (maybe), a husband's heart stress test (cancelled, as it turned out) and a mother-in-law arriving on Friday. Yipper, I like knowing I HAVE to go to work without having someone definitively in place to watch my kids until the morning of. Totally non-stressful!
On top of that, I have been plagued with technological devils too. My laptop hard drive died, just went tttthhhhpppppttt!! at me and refused to be seen when I booted up the computer. A pain in the ass, to be sure, but ordinarily not a super huge deal. Except we are only 3 weeks into this quarter, I was out of the habit of emailing my grade file to myself (not teaching for the whole summer will do that to you), and I hadn't emailed my grades to myself. Guess what that means? Sending it off to a data recovery service, with an expected pricepoint of $500 and counting to get that file I have to have. Oh, joy. I hope they can get that file for me, or I am going to be facing some unpleasant alternatives. Thank you, I needed that new pilfering of our already depleted emergency fund. *sigh* And, my online moms' group which I have been participating in since 2004, has to move websites and that has resulted in confusion and basically a total non-participation by everyone, because no one knows which of the new sites we are actually committing to using, and since no one is posting on the original site, we haven't even had a proper discussion about it. I suspect this is in large part due to the fact that once we tried to move to their new partner site, the original site came up with a message that took up the whole screen and appeared (at least to me) as if they had already taken down our old site. Ugh. It's just a PITA, and I have been too busy to keep up with any discussions that are taking place across three different websites. Sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth!!
And my husband is in the final two weeks of his thesis writing for his master's degree. This would be the master's degree he started years ago, and only has to complete the thesis in order to receive it. The degree that his company has paid for. And now he is up against the clock because the school changed their requirements and this is the absolute last chance to squeak through with his old class requirements. And he's hemming and hawing to me about what he's actually, you know, WRITTEN, which makes me worry hugely about whether he is going to finish it in time. November 19th, and he is either done or he fails. Yeah. I am not happy about him waiting this long to do it. Seriously, he started this master's way before children. He even participated in the graduation ceremony, that his parents flew over from Ireland specifically to attend...even though he wasn't technically finished. Am I a bit steamed about him not doing it before? You think? Yepper. Believe me, he knows this. He also knows I have little sympathy for him, since he was a serious pain in my ass when I was writing my dissertation, so many, many moons ago. I got it done by getting up at 4 AM and writing until I burned out, for many weeks. So I am not a sympathetic ear, and hearing him prevaricate about whether he's going to actually finish, well, it pisses me off not a little. And that means that even though it's not my employer, it's not my degree, and it's not my thesis, I am sweating it out right along with him.
So I am very much looking forward to imitating a three toed sloth and not bestirring myself for anything over the next few days. I need a break, badly, from all of this crap. I need to go to Barnes & Noble, plop my butt down on a comfy chair, and read a book from start to finish without worrying once about my children, house, hard drive, unfinished bathroom, budget, my husband's job, thesis, or what have you. Whether or not this is actually going to be possible remains to be seen (thesis deadline? Yeah). I might just have to get a babysitter, boot my DH out of the house with his papers & laptop to go hibernate at Starbucks and WRITE THAT THESIS MISTER NO MORE EXCUSES! while I hie myself to Barnes & Noble and the quiet of a nice book. Now if I can just work the budget out sans my Quicken files to find the money to pay her...
It is perhaps a good thing that I was not allowed to be so slothful as to never tidy up the house while DH has been gone. He has been home for the weekends and pitched in to get the kids to tidy up their toys and such, but in addition I have had babysitters in the house on my teaching days, and I have had friends over for playdates to keep a bit of fresh perspective and sanity. Nothing like having a Navy wife over, whose husband is currently on a multi-month deployment, to make me stop carping about my terrible luck having a husband who has to be gone for nearly two whole weeks!
However, it is a lot of work being "on" all the time for children. Evenings are the most dreadful, because I am tired after dealing with them all day, and there is still a lot of work involved in getting dinner on the table, getting into PJs, getting teeth brushed and getting both of them put to bed, solo. I have been very cranky, and it shows. That is the time of day when they are most likely to be missing Daddy and cry for him (and having a cranky Mommy putting them to bed doesn't help, I imagine).
So, that has me feeling pretty beat. And I had to deal with some other issues, too, in DH's absence. The night before he left, we had a clog in our sewer line that backed up sewage into our shower stall, new bathtub, and hole for the kids' bathroom toilet that is currently plugged up with a towel. Yeah. Suffice it to say, cleaning up sewage from our bathroom shower, new tub, and not completely laid tile floor in the other bathroom, SUCKED. Did I mention that this was at about 9:30 pm? And DH was leaving the next day? DH got to stand out in the dark and cold with the rooter guy while he dug up our septic and snaked back from there. That's how we found out that our septic needed to be pumped. Oh joy. So I had to schedule that (for the day I was teaching, don't you know) and also had to play phone tag with three friends trying to get a babysitter, due to people having jury duty (maybe), a husband's heart stress test (cancelled, as it turned out) and a mother-in-law arriving on Friday. Yipper, I like knowing I HAVE to go to work without having someone definitively in place to watch my kids until the morning of. Totally non-stressful!
On top of that, I have been plagued with technological devils too. My laptop hard drive died, just went tttthhhhpppppttt!! at me and refused to be seen when I booted up the computer. A pain in the ass, to be sure, but ordinarily not a super huge deal. Except we are only 3 weeks into this quarter, I was out of the habit of emailing my grade file to myself (not teaching for the whole summer will do that to you), and I hadn't emailed my grades to myself. Guess what that means? Sending it off to a data recovery service, with an expected pricepoint of $500 and counting to get that file I have to have. Oh, joy. I hope they can get that file for me, or I am going to be facing some unpleasant alternatives. Thank you, I needed that new pilfering of our already depleted emergency fund. *sigh* And, my online moms' group which I have been participating in since 2004, has to move websites and that has resulted in confusion and basically a total non-participation by everyone, because no one knows which of the new sites we are actually committing to using, and since no one is posting on the original site, we haven't even had a proper discussion about it. I suspect this is in large part due to the fact that once we tried to move to their new partner site, the original site came up with a message that took up the whole screen and appeared (at least to me) as if they had already taken down our old site. Ugh. It's just a PITA, and I have been too busy to keep up with any discussions that are taking place across three different websites. Sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth!!
And my husband is in the final two weeks of his thesis writing for his master's degree. This would be the master's degree he started years ago, and only has to complete the thesis in order to receive it. The degree that his company has paid for. And now he is up against the clock because the school changed their requirements and this is the absolute last chance to squeak through with his old class requirements. And he's hemming and hawing to me about what he's actually, you know, WRITTEN, which makes me worry hugely about whether he is going to finish it in time. November 19th, and he is either done or he fails. Yeah. I am not happy about him waiting this long to do it. Seriously, he started this master's way before children. He even participated in the graduation ceremony, that his parents flew over from Ireland specifically to attend...even though he wasn't technically finished. Am I a bit steamed about him not doing it before? You think? Yepper. Believe me, he knows this. He also knows I have little sympathy for him, since he was a serious pain in my ass when I was writing my dissertation, so many, many moons ago. I got it done by getting up at 4 AM and writing until I burned out, for many weeks. So I am not a sympathetic ear, and hearing him prevaricate about whether he's going to actually finish, well, it pisses me off not a little. And that means that even though it's not my employer, it's not my degree, and it's not my thesis, I am sweating it out right along with him.
So I am very much looking forward to imitating a three toed sloth and not bestirring myself for anything over the next few days. I need a break, badly, from all of this crap. I need to go to Barnes & Noble, plop my butt down on a comfy chair, and read a book from start to finish without worrying once about my children, house, hard drive, unfinished bathroom, budget, my husband's job, thesis, or what have you. Whether or not this is actually going to be possible remains to be seen (thesis deadline? Yeah). I might just have to get a babysitter, boot my DH out of the house with his papers & laptop to go hibernate at Starbucks and WRITE THAT THESIS MISTER NO MORE EXCUSES! while I hie myself to Barnes & Noble and the quiet of a nice book. Now if I can just work the budget out sans my Quicken files to find the money to pay her...
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