Stumbling Through

Last Sunday as I was dilating Lilly's tushy, I started crying with her.  I've been bottling up my emotions since we were in the hospital with her when she was first born.  It has been easier to shove my feelings to the background rather than cope with them or talk about them.  After all, what kind of Supermom would I be if I actually had feelings?  I finally told Nick what a hard time I was having emotionally dealing with everything that has come from having a child with (thankfully) temporary special needs.  On Wednesday Lilly and I went back to STL to visit with her surgeon and see where we were at.  I did NOT get the news I was hoping to hear.  Her scar tissue on the back side of her bum hole wasn't as stretchy as he wanted to see it.  So...now I get to do dilations 3 times per day instead of once and I now use the largest size I was using PLUS the next 2 sizes bigger.  UUUGGGHHH!!!  How I HATE torturing my baby!

I was upset Wednesday but kind of numb still.  Thursday it started sinking in.  I got out of bed when Maddy and Daegan pulled me out around 10 only to move to the couch and lay there until Lilly started crying close to noon.  That was when I finally got up for the day.  I stretched her tushy, fed her, got her back to sleep and finally fed the big kids.  I got Daegan down for his nap and pretty much sat around until he got up, then we went outside and took a nice long 2 mile walk.  I felt like I needed the sunshine to keep what little sanity I had left.  It did do me some good.  Once we made it back home, I loaded the kids up and went to get my fixed flat tire put back on my van, deposit a check and get gas in the van.  When we got home, we grabbed Nick, headed to my parents' and I dropped the fam off so I could go workout.  It was fabulous and made me feel better.

Yesterday I again did not get up until Daegan forced me out of bed and we sat on the couch until Lilly again demanded my attention.  Maddy had spent the night with my parents and was having a G-Dad day, so we didn't have to worry about her.  I sat on the couch feeling sorry for myself for a while and my sis-in-law called and helped me feel a bit better.  We were seriously separated at birth.  We identify with each other so well!  After Daegan woke up from his nap I loaded the kids up and we went to Target.  I needed to return a broken picture frame and I was feeling the need for some retail therapy.  It helped a bit.  Nick called as we were leaving and I finally lost it.  I had been suppressing the tears all day and they finally won. 

I was feeling so overwhelmed.  By everything with Lilly and wondering if me stretching her tushy will have long-term psychological impacts, by our messy house that I couldn't find the motivation to clean, by my older kids being demanding of me when I have no more emotional reserves left, and by my husband not helping me enough - or in any way really.  I was feeling like a married single parent.  It may sound counterintuitive, but it's a real thing.  When you're married, but still doing everything yourself. 

When I got home, Nick took Lilly and her stretching materials and did it for me.  Relief doesn't begin to describe my feelings at that moment.  His contribution to the stretching up to that point had been him holding her legs the very first time I did it 5 weeks ago and saying it was too much for him to handle.  Really?!  I'm the one who has to shove the dilators in there!!  He also asked if I minded if he stayed home while I went to my parents' and he would clean the house and do the dishes for me.  There was the husband I needed!  Probably would have shown up sooner if I hadn't expected him to read my mind!  I came to my parents' house and Mom was asleep.  When she woke up, both Daegan and I were crying.  We ended up having some great conversations and I cried A LOT!!!  I cried again on my way home while on the phone with Nick telling me we are a team and in this together.  I needed that all so much and learned maybe it's not such a good idea to try to be Supermom and not talk about my feelings.  I was borderline suicidal yesterday (thankfully I know my kids need me way too much for that nonsense) and today though I'm still not myself, I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel even if I can't see it yet.  No tunnel goes on forever. 

I talked to my best friend Amber this morning and she made me feel better too.  She gets to the same point I do with marriage.  We both discussed how we need to do a better job communicating our needs instead of waiting until we're so fed up that we explode.  Good thing we're doing "Anger to Intimacy" in our small group and it deals a lot with better communication skills as well as "stuffing" feelings.  It will definitely do both of us some good and already has.  I can't wait for next Tuesday and our next small group.  In the meantime, I will focus on the little joys in my day and find moments of happiness where I can.

Time After Time

I am constantly amazed how quickly time passes. I remember sitting in elementary school staring at the clock thinking how slowly time moved. When I would comment to my mom about it, she would tell me it goes faster as you get older - she was so right (she usually is). On Monday Maddy turned FOUR! Another year and a half and I will be sending her off to kindergarten! It doesn't seem possible. My youngest neice will be ONE tomorrow, Daegan will be TWO in 10 days, my youngest nephew will be ONE in 5 weeks and Lilly was 5 months on Monday. I know where the inspiration for the song Don't Blink came from!

While Lilly and I were in STL for 11 days, I watched A LOT of Cake Boss. So I decided to try my hand at fondant icing on Maddy's birthday cake. I expected it to be much harder than it was. It turned out great! I'm going to do it again for Daegan's cake to make sure my success wasn't just beginner's luck. For Maddy I baked a heart-shaped red velvet cake, frosted with buttercream and covered with lavender fondant with pink cookie cutter shapes on top (a couple hearts, an X and an O). For Daegan I think I'll do a baseball. Probably chocolate with buttercream and white fondant. I'm still so proud of myself! For their party this weekend I'm going to do a giant red velvet cupcake and a bunch of little cupcakes. I'm so excited! Can't wait to see everybody! I'm getting hungry with all this cake talk! The baking begins again tomorrow! Giant cupcake, here I come!

Snowy Day Fun?

Lilly and I got to come home after 11 days in the hospital.  It was such a relief to be back home surrounded by our family and our things.  Maddy is still being clingy 5 days later and Daegan is finally beginning to forgive me.  He completely ignored me for a full 5 minutes when I first got home.  He was hugging and poking Lilly and seemed to not care Mommy was home.  It was adorable how excited he was to have Lilly back home.  I was glad to be home for about a day.  The kids were still reeling from not having Mommy for about a week so they were being crazy which was making me ready to leave again since I had gotten to see and hug them.  Now that they are settling back in, I am truly glad to be back home with my entire family.

Monday we were buckling down bracing for the "blizzard" that was supposed to be the biggest snow storm in 18 years.  Yeah, right.  We didn't even get 6 inches!  What a letdown!  Now my brother 4 hours north got a blizzard.  Nearly 2 feet of snow with drifts up to 4 feet!  At least we got enough to play in.  And, of course, it shut the entire area down for a couple days.  Cbin fever hasn't set in too bad yet.  Though it has only been two days.  Check with me again in another two and I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune.  It has both helped and hindered that we came to my parents' house to get snowed in.  The kids have enjoyed having different things to play with and a fireplace to entertain them but bedtime has been a challenge for Daegan as he just recently got good at going to sleep in his own bed at home.  The last 2 nights it has been around 1am before I've gotten him to fall asleep.  Ugh!

The question of the day today?  What to do for entertainment this afternoon?  It's way too cold to go play outside!  Windchills in the negative temps!  Maybe we'll make cookies.  We'll have to get a little creative since my parents are on Atkins and don't keep sugar or chocolate chips on hand.  I bet we can handle it though.

Quiet Time

My parents came to rescue Maddy and Daegan from the hospital today. The kids were fed up. Mom and Dave were very excited to see and get to cuddle Lilly. While they were here, I realized Nick had spent almost half of his vacation time for the year already and we still have one more surgery and 11 months left in this year. He took my suggestion (I don't think I demanded) and went home with my parents. He will go to work while Lilly and I play the waiting game up here in St. Louis. I am relieved to have some uninterrupted "me" time and time just Lilly and I. I never get time to myself so this is a treat! I'm not certain what I'm going to do with myself. I'm sure I will figure it out though.

I've been feeling quite melancholy lately. I can't put my finger on it. Eating didn't help but it really never does. Losing a little weight on Atkins rejeuvenated me but didn't take the sad away. Exercising this week has helped. I have put in nearly 14 1/2 miles on the elliptical this week in the last 4 days. I have decided the elliptical is definitely for me. My 5 miles last night was perfect - a little under an hour, pushed it without overdoing it, and was spent without feeling dead. I slept great as a result. Even with Lilly having a roommate with obnoxious parents overnight. So glad they're gone today - as much fun as it was listening to him snore and her having the tv on ALL night. Geez! Hopefully continuing to lose weight will help with my melancholy feelings. I guess we'll find out!

I hope this quiet time does me some good. I need my batteries recharged. I should get some good rest and some good time for self-reflection. I just wish the hospital had workout facilities for parents. I do some pretty good thinking while I'm exercising, plus I have the time and am on a role. Maybe I'll jaunt over to the hotel this evening and see if the room key still works to get me in to the workout facility over there even though we checked out today. Wouldn't that be nice?!

Let's get to the bottom of this

Literally! Lilly had surgery on her bum yesterday. Everything went smoothly and she now has a bum hole! Of course we won't put it to work for a couple more months, but we now have two surgeries down and only one more to go! She is doing so well - what a trooper! She hasn't had any morphine since right after surgery yesterday and only Tylenol here and there. When I got to her this morning, she was awake and relatively happy, all things considered. It was nice to see her beautiful eyes. We have even gotten a few smiles out of her! I missed seeing those dimples. Hopefully we will be home this time next week and she will be all cooing and smiles again. Happy healing!

I was a wreck the day before the surgery. It's a good thing I hadn't gone grocery shopping recently so there was no food in the house or I would have spent the day nervous-eating. I did do the appropriate thing last night instead of eating to try to help my stress, I went and exercised. I did 2.65 miles on the elliptical in 35 minutes. Not too shabby. Then I did some leg presses, leg extensions, some free weights, then 350 crunches. It did the trick and I felt a sense of accomplishment which was nice. I'm thinking I'll go workout again tonight before coming back to Lilly's room where I will spend the night now since she can breastfeed ad lib again. Maybe soon they will move this spare bed out of Lilly's room so we will have some more room to spread out. We get a little crowded with 5 of us in here. Kind of looking forward to my time later tonight with just Lilly and I.

Weighty Issues

Another pound down today has me excited!  I've now lost just over 6 pounds since my Saturday morning weigh in.  And yes, I know it's best to only weigh once a week, but I can't seem to help it.  I've always been horrible about it.  I guess I just need a reason to start the morning by beating myself up.  At least each morning this week has brought good news.  I still struggle with looking at the weight loss in increments as opposed to the big picture.  At first, I'm excited I'm down 6 pounds.  Then, I think, I still have 45-55 I want to lose.  At that point, I'm a little disheartened.  But if I keep losing at this rate, I will be at my goal weight in less than 2 months which would be fabulous!  Another 15 pounds and I will be rewarding myself with a super cute Mizzou shirt I found at Walmart for $13.  I wanted to buy it the other day, but it's not a neccessity and then I realized it would be something nice to visualize for a weight loss milestone.  An additional motivator as if not being fat isn't motivation enough.  I'll be so excited when I can look in the mirror or at a picture of myself (recently taken) and not be disgusted.  I know they're harsh words, but seriously!  I was already overweight going into my last pregnancy and really let myself go.  I gained more weight this last pregnancy that any of my others.  Hopefully that means once I've accomplished my goals, I can look at how far I will have come and never put myself in such a position again.  I feel like I'm at the bottom of Mount Everest looking up. 

Hopefully a better self image will also lessen my feelings of depression.  Some days I would like nothing more than to lay in bed in and out of sleep all day.  It's a good thing I have 2 older kids who make me get out of bed.  If it were just Lilly and I, I really would stay in bed all day sometimes.  I guess we'll find out.  At least I'm not as irritable anymore as I was while pregnant and only on half the dosage of my anti-depressant I'm on now.  Sad is better than sad AND irritable.

Well, now that I've brought down anyone reading this to where I am, I think I'll end on that note.  Things ARE getting better...a day at a time.  Funny, I think that's an alcoholic's mantra...a day at a time.  I guess I was addicted to food - more specifically carbs and sugars.  No more!  I have the power!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Yesterday was an interesting day.  After helping out at Gymboree on Black Friday, I decided to stay on and help out when they have new lines once a month.  Last night was my first new line experience since leaving the company a year and a half ago.  Of course it had snowed the night before and most area schools were out.  It stopped snowing for a while during the day yesterday and started again a couple of hours before I needed to leave the house.  I left in Hubby's 4 wheel drive vehicle, took it slow, and made it no problem leaving it in 2 wheel drive the whole way.  New line went great!  I had a blast just getting out, socializing with some of the gals I used to work with and just being able to work and not answer any questions.  I worked in the Newborn department at the back of the store so I had no concept of the weather then entire time.  We finished and I was leaving the store at 10:15pm.  It had been snowing the whole time.

My mom text messaged me right as I was getting bag-checked to leave so I called her while I walked out to the truck.  I talked to her while I scraped the small layer of ice and the snow on top of that off the windshield.  Someone she knew had been in a car accident and she wanted me to be very careful.  I was planning on it.  I went all the way up the hill out of the mall to the main road through town.  Not 100 yards down the road, I started sliding and going sideways.  YIKES!  I corrected and went ahead and put it in 4 high.  Best to be safe than sorry and I didn't foresee myself going any faster than 25-30mph anyway.  I made it 2 miles away from my house with no problems.

At that point, a pick-up was sitting at the bottom of a large hill and a guy on a 4-wheeler was sitting next to it.  He started flashing his light at me so I began to slow down and slid to a stop to find out what was up.  He told me the giant curving downhill portion of the road that followed the hill I was getting ready to ascend was blocked off because of a couple accidents and it was a sheet of ice.  He said he could give me a ride home if I needed it.  While all of that was very nice of him, I just wasn't sure how I felt about some strange guy giving me a ride home especially when Hubby was going to need his truck to get to work in the morning.  The nice 4-wheeler guy said he would go up and talk to the firefighter that was up by the accident to see what the current conditions were like and he would come back and let me know.

I went ahead and ascended the hill and got to the last spot you can stop before the point of no return on the giant curving downhill part.  I called Hubby and asked what I should do.  There were already two pickups parked where I pulled over and I didn't really feel like our truck would safely fit parked there without blocking people or potentially getting hit by someone coming down the road later.  What to do, what to do.  There was a road right across from where I was parked that bypasses the giant curving downhill part but parts of it were steeper and curvier, though it was also a rougher road which could help with traction.  Plus, not having been driven, it wouldn't have the packed down iciness the main road had.  Feasible?  I had driven it once in my old car and felt like I was off-roading and the road would swallow my car at any moment.  I knew it wouldn't swallow the truck, but still.  At this point, it was that or leave the truck somewhere semi-precarious, walk home and make Hubby walk to it in the morning.  No sign of the 4-wheeler guy and the clock was ticking.  Let's do it!

I got turned around and started up that hill.  Made it to the top.  Now there's a pretty good little hill with a turn at the bottom.  Sliding, sliding, holding my breath...and made it!  Now down another more gradual hill; at least it's straight.  Here comes the bottom and the road turns 90 degrees...sliding, sliding, sliding, sliding, stop.  Now I'm too close to the road sign and edge of the road to get turned.  Reverse, forward, reverse, forward, slide, reverse, forward, slide.  After an I don't know how many point turn, I had done it.  I switched to 4 low, put it in 1st and crawled down this relatively steep hill.  Nearly 90 turn at the bottom, no problem.  Here comes another steep hill but now I'm on gravel and the road is horrible rutted from heavy rain.  Thank you for some traction!  Made it to the bottom of that  part no problem, had a couple more flat corners to take and what's that?  A stop sign!  Civilization!  And it's the stop sign to the road that leads to my turn about 100 yards down!  I can almost smell my kids!  (Maybe they need baths ;)  )

I got turned off the main road onto the side road and saw 5 sets of footprints from people who had walked home.  I was so glad I was more fortunate than these folks in that I hadn't had to walk and had made it safely through the worst part of our road home.  About halfway down that road I saw a guy walking.  I felt bad for him so I stopped and offerred him a ride.  Normally I wouldn't have even considered offerring someone walking down the road a ride, but I figured I was pretty safe in assuming his vehicle was stranded somewhere and he was just trying to make it home.  He accepted and lived about 1/4 past my house so I went ahead and dropped him off at his house and then came back to ours.  I did a good deed for someone and didn't get hurt or ripped off because of it!  Yea!

I got up our steep driveway and got parked without sliding backward like we had the night before.  I turned on the interior lights to locate my bags I had thrown in the back when I picked the guy up.  I got my stuff and came running in the house to see my family.  D-man was so excited!  He kept saying Mama.  It was adorable.  It took me an hour and 25 minutes to make a drive that earlier in the evening had taken me just under 40 minutes.  Apparently I was so excited to be home, I forgot to turn off the interior lights so Hubby's truck was dead this morning.  Nice.  And he had slept in and was already late for work.  What a start to his day!  Oops!  At least he understood.  One of our neighbors gave him a jump and he was off.

Oh, last night ranks right up there with one of two of the worst driving experiences I have ever had in the snow.  Though the other one was mostly ice so I don't know if that counts.  Come to think of it, the other one was trying to make it home from Gymboree as well.  Hmmmm.  Well, I'm just happy to be alive today and still have our truck on the road and in tact.  It's a good day!