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Sunday, April 10, 2005

bye-bye, Snickers (and Special Dark and big bowls of Rocky Road and...)

T has hypoglycemia, specifically reactive hypoglycemia, or if you want to get really technical, he has "nonhypoglycemic hypoglycemia", since when he goes in for a 3-hour glucose screen, even though he's very nearly comatose about fifteen minutes after the glucose hits his system and he stays that way for the entire three hours, nothing shows up in his bloodwork. For quite some time, maybe two or three years, he's noticed that if he eats sweets, especially on an empty stomach, he gets a) very tired, sometimes to the point of literally HAVING to go to sleep b) a thudding headache in his temples and c) extremely irritable. Nowadays if he even eats, say, not-sugared but not-whole-grain breakfast cereal, he is in bad shape. Yesterday he had cake with lunch and spent the afternoon unconscious on the couch, and the rest of the weekend was not a whole heck of a lot better for him. When all this mess surrounding my medical issues is all cleared up, he's going to see a new doctor; meanwhile, since his symptoms match reactive hypoglycemia exactly, we're going to assume this is what he has and act accordingly, and see if all symptoms clear up.

Which, frankly, is not going to be a whole lot of fun.

Well, there is that aspect that's kind of fun, wherein I get to be all methodical and make lists of possible foods to eat and create SIX MEALS A DAY from them. But let's face it, a man who can ordinarily eat nearly an entire single batch of waffles in one sitting is not going to like having one-inch cubes of cheese become a regular part of his diet. My favorite teenaged-boys-eating-horror-story is: when T was in high school and then in the Navy, he would frequently buy a pound of sharp cheddar cheese and a quart of chocolate milk, and that was a meal. Or he and a friend would go buy a dozen donuts. Each. For breakfast. He doesn't do that anymore, of course, but still, it's a big step from where he is to where he'll be from now on: looking at a dinner plate with, for example, two six-inch whole-wheat tortillas holding a total of two ounces of meat and some vegetables. But hey, lettuce is a free food! As is celery! So he should be really happy about those, at least. I mean, come on. Lettuce and celery! Who needs cheesecake when you have those?

I'll sign off with two pictures. This evening at almost exactly five o'clock the whole family started in at the same time with the "I'm HUNGRY" thing, looking at me as if they expected me to pull a roast turkey and all the trimmings out of thin air or some such thing. I told them I'd make dinner but first I asked them if, just to humor me, they could do an actual baby-birds-in-the-nest imitation, to send me into a kitchen with a smile. And they did.

And then here's a picture of me, coloring with C. Did you know that Crayola manufactures a crayon called "purple mountain's majesty"? Anyone who can tell me why that made me send a tersely-worded email to Crayola gets a free signed first edition of my first book: The Essential Guide to Grammar Snobbery.

That's just the working title, of course.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

frazzly

Today we (the kids and I) had to go to the valley to go shopping. On the drive home, LT (who's far less anxious than he used to be, but who still always worries if one of his parents seems unhappy or sick) asked me if I'd had an OK day, because I seemed a little frazzly. He was certainly right. Here's why.

First, picture a Chatty Cathy-type doll. Very cute, about 45 inches tall, goldeny kind of hair and eyes, freckles. Are you picturing?

OK, now her "chatty" switch is stuck ON, got it?

And she is being SO contrary and confrontational, and she never stops asking for things she wants or arguing when you tell her no until you either punish her or blow your top a bit and yell at her, and even when she's not doing this she is JUST. CONSTANTLY. TALKING.

Now picture spending hours teaching this doll school, or riding with her in the car, or taking her through a series of stores, or cooking her dinner, or reading her a bedtime story, or all of the above, and you have my day.

The worst part is that, in the midst of my frustration, there's a lot of guilt. First, there's guilt that I could ever be annoyed with someone whom I love so wholeheartedly. And then I feel guilty that I don't pay better attention to her -- you know how you swore you would never EVER tune out ANYTHING your kids said, you would hang on every word, until they learned to talk fluently, that is? yeah -- until the annoyance threshold is breached and then I act irritated with her. It's not that we have no pleasant interactions. It's not that I don't completely and totally adore her, because I do. It's just that instead of stopping her demands/arguments right away and being consistent, I start tuning her out and wait until I am seriously irritated before I deal with the situation. It's something I need to work on, and it's a recipe for disaster on a day like today. Or at least, it's a recipe for being "frazzly".

In other news, I am finally working on a transcription job I've been waiting on for two weeks. The guy who hired me for it first gave me the audio files in the wrong format, and then couldn't find the CF card with the correct files, and then got the flu, so it's taken this long to actually have files I can work with. I started transcribing tonight and I'm taking a break right now so that I don't get a life-threatening case of carpal tunnel syndrome. (you are forbidden to notice that I am, um, typing right now. I've BEEN taking a break, I really have.) It's amazing to watch how the Lord provides; last week we got smacked with $320 in extra bills out of a blue sky, and some odds and ends of broken stuff needed fixing, and we had no idea how we'd pay for any of it. Then a guy bought a car part from T -- T had not advertised it for sale, it was just sitting in his garage unwanted -- and then I did a résumé for a guy (who was in my first-grade class) and he paid double my usual rate, and now this job finally came through, and we're going to have enough and to spare. God is truly "able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all we ask or think." yay. :)

Monday, March 21, 2005

Our neighbors

I've mentioned our neighbors in my photo blog (they're the ones with the gorgeous tulips). They're these little old Christian ladies who have lived together their entire adult lives, who ran a Christian camp for kids until just a few years ago. They used to shuttle my dad (and T's dad too) back and forth to Sunday school when they were kids, this is how long these ladies have been loving the Lord and spreading Him around as much as they can. Anyway. One of the ladies has become quite infirm, and needs live-in care. This past weekend the live-in carer apparently went on a drug binge (!!!) and failed to show up from Friday through this morning, when she showed up long enough to quit and grab her stuff, not even willing to help her former patient out of bed. So this weekend T and I have been filling in for the absent nurse in the morning and evening, getting Miss Ruth up from her chair, into the wheelchair, onto the commode, up from the commode, and into her bed in the evenings, and reversing the procedure in the mornings. We do the heavy work while Miss Jan, who is about the size and weight of LT, helps Miss Ruth with the more intimate aspects of her care. It has been quite an experience. (This morning I did the morning procedure without T, since he was at work). We walk away each time with our muscles aching, stretching our backs, so unspeakably grateful for the freedom to simply hop out of bed and go about our day without giving a thought to how we'll do it, pondering the kind of friendship that says: I will offer you my emotional support and friendly affection as long as you need it. I will trust you with my physical and financial well-being. And when we get old, and you can't take care of yourself, I will stand beside you and take care of you and stand up for you and help you in what should be very private moments, and I will strive to keep your dignity intact, and I will do this as long as it takes.

That is agape if I ever saw it. May God grant me the grace to love -- my friends, my family, my husband, my children -- like that.

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Happy Birthday Family :)

Yesterday was our eleventh wedding anniversary. My parents came by and gave us a gift and offered to watch the kids while we went to spend it, but we decided instead to get dinner for the whole family and have a little "party" at home. We'd been thinking and talking all day about how our wedding anniversary, yeah, it celebrates the day we got married, and the first time we -- um, nevermind -- and the fact that there was NO MORE KISSING GOODNIGHT AND SAYING GOODBYE -- this was a biggie at the time. But the thing we kept thinking about yesterday was how our wedding marked the formal beginning of our family, of the entity that has grown and changed and become the center of our earthly lives and given us so, SO much joy. We spent a lot of time thanking God for the fact that His way of doing things is such a happy way. So it seemed fitting that our celebration wouldn't just involve T and me, but the whole gleeful group of us.

Do we rot the teeth out of your head with sweetness, or what.

Today we went to my parents' so that T could help my dad fix, um, I think the fuel pump in Mom and Dad's van. But it could have been some other thingamajiggy, I'm not sure. Meanwhile I went for a long walk (a very long walk, to quote the Musgroves in Persuasion), because I had of course brought [holy chord] The Nikon, and by golly I wanted to use it. Apparently I should have remembered the How Long And Which Direction rule, because everyone got kind of freaked out at how long I was gone, and went out searching for me, wondering if maybe I'd had an episode of tachycardia and was lying curled into the fetal position in the mud beside the road in the rain, or something. Which of course I hadn't, I was just, um, taking, er...

one hundred and sixty three pictures.

That takes a while. In fact, it's rather remarkable that it only took me two hours and three and a half miles, isn't it? Don't you think?
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Monday, March 14, 2005

jam, man, jam

You might be a homeschooler if:

• Your eight-year-old son gets in an argument with his sister and you overhear him saying, "Well, so be it. If that's the way you want to be..."
• The "carrot on the stick" at the end of the schoolday (for you AND the kids) is the promise of getting to make a soil/sand/soil parfait in a jar, and add worms, to see what happens.
• Your children know far more about Jane Austen and astronomy than they do about Pokemon or Saturday-morning cartoons.
• Your child sees a TV commercial for the first time at the age of five and asks you to make it stop.
• Your kids love Ramona Quimby, but they can't identify with her because she spends so much time at school.
• Your child asks you to turn off your music while he does his math, as it is "a great distraction."
• You leave the children with your husband to go to the doctor and run errands, and continually look around you, freaking out because you can't help feeling you've forgotten them somewhere.
• You no longer even know what kind of shoes are "cool".
• You forget that most people can't just take off for a family vacation without waiting for a school holiday.
• You're so used to people thinking you're some kind of freak that you don't even think about it anymore.

P.S. Kristen, I bet you thought I wouldn't do it.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

Finisher Prize

Spent much of today playing with C while T and LT played Civilization III (we stayed home from church not because we are heathen rebels but because we are all sick with the same crud I've had for about a week now. Fun times.). One thing we did was a horse race. It's a complicated sort of thing -- the horses move forward in turns; for each turn, the horse's owner rolls two dice, subtracts the smaller number from the larger, and the horse moves forward the resulting number of spaces -- a "space" being a board-width on our hardwood floor. Observe my sneakiness, slipping in math like that, as if it were zucchini in a meatloaf. Anyway. C wanted to use this dollhouse stable as a finish line, and I couldn't figure out why at first:

One of the more difficult small decisions of motherhood, made over and over on the road from "accume-see" and "bop-ooo" onward: When does cuteness have to give way to correctness? Not here, not yet, anyway.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

we really know how to throw a party

(I thought about putting this entry in the photo blog, since it is rather image-intensive, but since it's more of a daily-life entry, and the photos are, um, not artistic in the slightest, I stuck it here. Sorry about the hugeness of it.)

One night maybe six years ago when T was going to be away overnight visiting a friend, I decided that I would do a lot of fun girly stuff to make his absence more endurable (up until he got a job in telecom with its requisite two-week overtime stints in fire season, we had only very rarely been apart overnight). I rented chick movies -- this was the first time I watched "You've Got Mail", which turned out later to become one of T's favorites, but oh well -- and bought Doritos (which T hates) and made myself meatloaf (ditto), and I stayed up as late as I could make myself so that I wouldn't have to lie in bed waiting to go to sleep without him. (shut up, that is NOT pathetic.) Anyway. Somehow this developed into a tradition wherein when Daddy is gone, the kids and I throw a "party". That sounds really bad, I realize that, but we're not celebrating his absence -- we're more taking our minds off it. Tonight T is at a men's retreat, so here, courtesy of The New Nikon and the fact that I'm feeling a lot better than I was, is a look into the debauchery that the mice get up to while the cat's away.

This is not for the faint of heart.

(OK, maybe it is.)

First we all played a good game of pretend. The kids had torches (flashlights) and were exploring a ruin of a castle (our house, with all the lights turned off). I was the queen, who inexplicably was still alive inside this ruin. Adventure ensued.

observe my stately mantle (made from, um, a waterproof crib sheet. C was the costume designer for this production). And if you look really closely you can see the brown paper crown on my head. (LT took this picture. He is suitably aware of the honor and trust I bestowed upon him in allowing him to use The Nikon.)


LT then made a map of an imaginary country. I am unclear as to whether this map represents the country over which I reigned. I'll have to ask him tomorrow.



Then C made cookies, almost entirely by herself, from a mix she'd been given, um, for her birthday. In September.

it's a good thing these were just for family. C still needs practice at not licking the spoon.


the finished project

Part of a traditional party is the freedom to stay up as late as we want. When the kids can't keep their eyes open any longer, they make a tent in the front room and go to sleep in it.

The sheet down the middle divides it into a room for each of them. Do you notice that their legs have to go between the chair legs? Why again is this fun??

So there you have it -- a virtual tour of our wild, wild life. I'd better hope T doesn't read this one.
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Thursday, March 10, 2005

The H word

I think pretty much every mother has this happen at some point.

Today C is just being, well, a little pill, in lots of little five-year-old ways. This is not so uncommon a thing as to really bother me, or to even be worth noting. She's distractable when it comes to schoolwork, she is obstinate about wanting enchiladas for breakfast even though I've told her those are for lunch, she continually interrupted me while I was doing my Bible reading, etc. She's being suitably punished when she needs it. The kicker, though, came when I told her to go change out of her pajamas into daytime clothes. She got as far as taking off her pajamas (and throwing them on the living-room floor), and selecting play clothes from her stack on the coffee table and carrying them into her room, but she kept coming out of her room to play, still naked. I would remind her (decreasingly gently) that she was supposed to be getting dressed, until finally I tapped her on the bottom and sent her sternly to her room to get dressed or get restriction (THE BIGGIE). On her way to her room, she muttered, "I hate you, Mommy."

Whoa.

I: "What did you say?"
She: "Nothing."
LT: "She gets over it."
I: "What? Gets over what?"
LT: "She says it sometimes. Then she kind of gets used to you again."
I: [thinking, !!!! this happens, what, often? Don't know whether to get angry or cry, so do neither, just sit and stare at the computer screen]
LT: "It'll be OK."
C: "I was joking..."

Now, like I said, I know this happens to pretty much every parent at some point. I just remember, you know, being a little older than five when I threw the "H" word at my mom. More like, I dunno, fifteen.

In the end, when she came out (dressed) and hugged me and said she really does like me, I told her that it's OK to be angry with Mommy, it's part of growing up and having to do things you don't want to do. But it's never OK to say mean things just to hurt someone, even when you're angry, and that means Mommy too.

I feel like I should have handled it far better than that. I just am not at all sure how.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Well, it could be worse...

So far today I have:

• Been awakened at 7:50 by the sun hitting the wall in my white bedroom. (I love this, it's the best way in the world to wake up)
• Been summoned to LT's room at 7:51 because he had a bloody nose. (again.)
• CLEANED MY ROOM. Big letters because it was a BIG job. With the kids sitting on my bed much of the time, doing schoolwork and/or reading. (and yes, I made a movie)
• Read Matthew 20-22 (including the parable of the vineyard workers, which, if I had to choose ONE, would be the parable which finds the most daily application in my life. What's yours?) while eating peanut butter toast and drinking a glass of milk for breakfast.
• Taken my asterisk-asterisk-asterisk iron pill. And hence, burped several different flavors of rust.
• Listened to LT sob for the past half hour because -- CRUEL mom/teacher that I am -- I told him that I love his story (about, um, a deer that got sick when it ate a mole, hey, he's an eight-year-old boy, what do you expect?), but he needs to rewrite it neatly.

As you can see, the tenor of my day has gone sloooowly downhill. Here's hoping this trend reverses before I reach the run-for-the-hills-waving-my-arms-wildly stage...

Tuesday, March 01, 2005

The kind of morning moms dream of

Well, some kind of moms, anyway.

The community chorus* had a rehearsal with the high school choruses this morning, since we are performing with them for a couple of songs at their concert this Thursday. I took the kids with me (obviously), and sat them in a couple of auditorium chairs with their schoolwork while I stood with a bunch of girls who were BABIES when I was their age and practiced singing. And here's the good part: those two angels (they're angels this morning, anyway ;) sat there quietly for the entire hour and did their work without giving me even a single smidge of regret for having had to bring them.

I'm writing this down so that the next time I feel like I am useless as a parent and my kids will have me in the asylum within fifteen minutes, I can read it, and hope. ;-)

*I don't get out much. The community chorus and church and Awana and Bible study, that's pretty much it. The chorus is the only one of those things that I do on my own, without the rest of the family, so it is pretty much the extent of my adult social exposure. So you'll probably hear about it a lot. Maybe I should put a picture of it in the sidebar.

By the way, I've been doing my reading every day. (pats self on back). I am using a modified version of a through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan that divides the days up into The Law, History, Prophecy, etc. Instead of going from one section to the other on successive days, though, I'm reading a book from one section, and then going on to a book from another, so as to have more context. It will still work out to take a year. That's if I don't slack. Which I may well do.

I'm also planning to put up a post about chapter summaries soon, probably when I actually start working on mine for the next study.

motherhood Archives | Page 4 of 7

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