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August 20, 2002
Hello again!
13 and 3/4 months...
Man, did things get hectic over here.
A couple of weeks ago I felt a huge blow. One of the lady's I work with, a very kind, smart, role model of a lady, was in the office on Friday and over the weekend at the hospital with abdominal pain. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and sentenced to at best, fighting a very strong, difficult fight. She has a thirteen year old daughter. Most of us were shocked quiet. They had to be wrong. Her? Impossible! Everybody else called their ob-gyn's for an appointment. I've done enough research now to qualify as knowledgeable on ovarian cancer. I knew it was one of the worst, that generally speaking, by the time you recognise a symptom, it is too late, the silent killer. But what I didn't know is that it's not detected by a pap test. Just another reminder in the need to take care of ourselves. Eat well, exercise, rest and stay up to date on your checkups. She did everything but see her doctor, a visit that could have prescribed a very different outcome. For what it's worth, I said a bunch of prayers and made so many wishes. Why can't it be that everyone's ok. Always.
And then bad news hits again. I'm torn about writing about it but it had such an impact on me. I have the best aunts in the world. They're seriously funny, incredibly kind and very strong women. Fightin'Irish and nothing but. I didn't grow up with them but I know I have a lot of them in me. You've heard a lot about Dee Dee, without her I'd be lost. The other one had, in my mind, the perfect life. Married young for 35 years with the perfect family, successful husband, perfect house, beautiful things and friends around the world. One day I would be her. Then from out of nowhere he decided he wanted out, it was time to trade her in for a younger life. I was stunned and so sad for her. You think life is going one way and then POOF it changes.
I figure you're been around long enough now to know life in my world is busy. Generally speaking, I move forward well and manage to juggle it all decently. But somehow every few months or season I start to unravel. Little tasks feel huge, I start feeling guilty and I get in a panic when someone tries to put a demand on me. A simple "do you want to come over for supper tomorrow" is just too big a decision to make at that moment. So last week I started that downhill slide. Most of it has to be working mother syndrom, not that I have a clue what it even is, I know I have it. I'm not a control freak but I need to have some semblance of control. I fall short of self discipline so I function better with structure. A friend bought me a great book I heard about on Oprah, ‘Organizing from the Inside Out' by Julie Morgenstern. She says being organized has less to do with the way an environment looks than how effectively it functions and that it's a simple skill that anyone can learn. It was an amazing book till I skipped a chapter and fell off the wagon. She started with a diaper bag, is there anyone out there who wants to start it with me? Oprah guaranteed freedom.
My hat, my shoes, my eye lashes even, go off to Moms who stay at home because I know it's an incredible amount of work. It takes dedication, organization and patience out to here. When I'm at home it feels like I get nothing done, we use a million dishes and most of the time I don't have a chance to eat even. But having done both, in MY opinion (obviously I want to tread carefully here), it's still a little rougher going to work. I still have fifteen loads of laundry a week, I still have a house to clean, meals to make, a family to feed, baths to give, games to play, things to teach and errands to run and I've got to get all four of us out the door by 7:15 every morning with everything we need to get through the day. Even though I'm at work and my focus is my work, I'm sidelined all over the place with my family. Calls to their babysitters, planning meals, activities and appointments, even choreographing pickups takes a good chunk of my time. When I started my descent, I had three baskets of ironing and food in the fridge still in the grocery bags. The floors were a nightmare of their own, covered in a hazy film (Remo ignored the instructions and diluted Pledge for floors) with sticky patches and sand piles everywhere, the entire playroom was covered in a gazillion sparkles and foam and foil cutouts from the craft bin. And I mean covered. I keep thinking it's bugs.
We had a birthday party or a barbeque every Saturday and Sunday for six weeks, which meant gifts had to be bought and wrapped. My dining room looked like Santa's workshop. There were weeks worth of newspapers piled up all over the place and most of the mail hadn't been opened. Everyday someone would call to see what we were doing and I'd say not much, come over. Come over! Was I out of my freaking mind?
My life needed an overhaul or I was going to wind up shooting myself in the head. Way back, one of my friends at work told me about the Flylady website. I signed up because it was going to revolutionize my life. When they sent me twelve e-mails an hour I signed myself off, fast. But one thing that sticks in my head is that everything else may be chaos in your life, but you have to make sure you have a clean kitchen sink. I'm taking that as you just need to start somewhere. That's all I had to do. I can't be alone in this, are there more of you out there? Do you take on too much and feel like things are out of control?
One thing I'm good at is moving forward, what I need to learn is how to slow down the pace of it. Clean my sink. I cleared out my e-mails. I had close to four hundred of them and it took two hours to bring it down to none. They're gone and I don't miss them. Remo and I came up with a plan for the house. We'd do a bit every day, a final blitz Friday night and our weekend would be free. In theory it works well, the reality is we still need some elbow grease on the weekend. On Sunday morning I took a few hours and ironed almost everything. That's one thing I have to let slide, I iron all our t-shirts even. It used to be my Thursday night past time, I'd watch all the shows and iron up a storm. The problem is it never ends and there's clothes in those baskets we've outgrown or don't even wear. While a part of me wants to blow off ironing and let us out wrinkled, most of me knows I'll never feel good about it. I think it's one of my many vices and would probably take hypnosis to conquer. You're going to say I make my own problems and I have to admit you're right but I still can't cope without crease lines.
For years I've been taking the train to work. It gave me a good hour a day for me, I could read the newspaper or internet printouts, magazines even. Then one day I missed my train so I had to drive in. Slowly, slowly it was getting convenient to miss my train everyday. The benefit is that I can go home without a sprint for the train but parking at $10 a day adds up. Add on the lunch I buy every day and I get expensive. The provincial government here allows for subsidised day care, all children are eligible for it but because spaces are limited, there's often a waiting list. We were lucky because Annabelle had some spots available and Brandan got one. We pay quite a bit more for Andree to take care of Kaillan but she's exactly what I wanted. A warm woman who had nobody else but my baby she could cuddle all day long. On Friday, Annabelle called to say she had a spot for Kaillan. If I wanted it, I had to grab it now. Without hesitation, I said no because I felt Kaillan is better off with Andree. When I talked about it with Remo he had a different, I hesitate to say, male point of view. Hey Al, it's perfect! It would be better for us to have the kids together. Kaillan is social, she'd love it there, we wouldn't have two drop offs, with the money we would save I could get a monthly parking spot downtown, we could pay someone to do all the house cleaning, we could afford to make life easier. I called Andree to make sure she was planning on sticking with us for the long haul, so I wouldn't lose the spot otherwise, and she was very clear. Pure and simple, she'd kill me if I took her girl away from her. The best cleaning team in the world doesn't compare with a safe protector for my child AND she loves her like crazy.
Just when you think I'm over my head with two children, I start talk of a third. In my last Babies Today entry I started a poll on the subject. Had I known it would be so much fun, I'd have done it sooner. Thanks so much to all of you who stepped forward with an opinion, you've given me so much to think about. I sway back and forth on the issue still, Dr. Bray is really the swing vote and I'll see him next week. As soon as I've landed his two cents worth, I'll put all your comments together and post an entry.
Grownup night came and went. Sixteen of us went to Triple X and then out for Szechuan. Obviously the men picked the movie and in fairness it was good even if it was a little far fetched at times. I'm a sucker for a chick flick, a nice happy love story. It was pretty strange heading out without the kids and they were a little sensitive when we made our escape. It was nice for us to feel young and fun and we're already planning another escapade this fall. Brandan keeps asking when we're going on ‘acation' again, I'm hoping we can take off somewhere for a weekend even. Summers over and I feel like we didn't do anything summery.
BIG crisis went down one weekend there. Both my kids had a hard time taking a bottle, I think because of how my nursing gear works. Picture a busted water mane shooting everywhere. The only nipple they would take was a Gerber Nuk fast-flow nipple on a Playtex disposable bottle. One of the nurses recommended it and saved my sanity. Anyways, I had four nipples at my house that were starting to get sticky so I bought replacement ones and threw them out. Threw them in the garbage that went far away with the garbage truck. I boiled up the nipples and Kaillan flipped out. They were medium and not fast flow. To a rational person, you use the medium and suck harder. There may be some rational thirteen month olds out there but mine is not one of them. Andree, who had four bottles, was away at a wedding. I spent Friday night and ALL day Saturday combing EVERY Walmart, every grocery store, ToysRUs, Zellers and drug store I could find in the phone book. Because of the french-english language problem (it's not easy to describe nipples when it's not your first language), I went on several wild goose chases for nothing. I called Gerber and they just gave me the name of all the stores I had just been in, it was hard to hear them over Kaillan's wailing, but they suggested trying a few other models. Trust me, I bought everything and it only infuriated Kaillan more. She wavered between full blown temper tantrums and soft sobbing. It broke my heart and I can't explain how awful it felt when we finally decided we might as well cut the bottle now. Cold turkey. By the third day she was ok again. We had just recently started her on homo milk and she could knock back a bottle in three minutes, straws and sippy cups meant she was taking in less milk. I went and bought Similac again, it's those skinny little arms, she needs the calories.
For the only funny story I can remember this week you need a little history on us. Before the kids we used to sleep deep. So once, when Remo went into a coma at night, I painted his toenails a lovely deep shade of red. He woke up in the morning, put his feet on the floor and stopped breathing when he thought someone had cut off his toes. When you're a little nearsighted it looks like blood. He came home late from playing hockey one night with McDonalds. Brandan was brand new and I was flaked out. He said I sat up, ate a big mac and french fries and went back to sleep without saying a word. The following week he came home and woke me up in a panic state. "Al, where's the baby?". The baby was in the bassinette the whole time but I spent fifteen minutes making up places where he could be. The living room, the family room, his room, the stroller. I kept repeating the same places over and over and never once got nervous. One time we were driving home from a barbeque, I was in another one of those meltdown phases where the housework and laundry was out of control. I was nagging and it was ricocheting off him so I gave up, looked out the window and fell asleep. His payback came at two in the morning when I woke up in the car in front of my dark house. He didn't even park in the garage!
The nerve!
It doesn't matter what we're doing at night, Remo and I always go to sleep at night at the same time. So the other night we were watching CNN and it was the same news over and over and I called it a night. Remo was coming up right after me but I was asleep before he got there. Because the city was doing the curbs for our house we had to park on the street, so Remo came up and told me someone was trying to steal something from the back of his truck. What??? I fumbled for my glasses and ran to the window determined to catch them. I couldn't really focus on anything so I went back to bed. I was concentrating so hard on what they could have stolen and racking my brain to figure out if I had anything in my van. Brandan fell off the bed so Remo went to settle him again. When he came back to the room I was nose to window trying with everything in me to see the culprits, hunched over because I could focus better. I spent half the night at the window. The alarm went off five seconds later and Remo tried to explain what happened but he was laughing so hard I couldn't understand him. He made it all up. Creep.
My girlfriend Claudia FINALLY had her baby. The plan was that the night she would have the baby, her five year old, Sabrina, would sleep over. The kids were furious because we had so many false alarms and I was so grateful when it was for real. Kaillan and I picked up Sabrina from her day care and we stopped to pick up dessert to celebrate. Sabrina didn't care about the details she was completely preoccupied with the mess in my car, she's never seen a mess like that in her whole life (I told you things were bad!). We got to my house and her parents called. Sabrina got on the phone, asked if the baby got out, could she stay at Brandan's and gave the phone back to me. I knew her parents were disappointed by her reaction so on the way to the hospital I tried to pump her up about her baby brother and how special they both were. She only wanted to know if I liked her new shoes. The baby is gorgeous and looks exactly like his sister. Never in my life have I seen a just born baby look so much like anybody. Welcome to the world little Gabriel. Gabi and Sabbi. Cute, eh?
Want to know about my toddler? Kaillan learned her nose, my nose, finger up the nose. She added baby (in french and english) and bird to her vocabulary. She swallows most of her food without chewing and it comes out in much the same package. I have no doubts as to what Kaillan eats. Dr. Kugelmass said it's very normal for babies' digestive tracts to still be immature, but I have a problem with her swallowing pieces of steak without chewing. Oh! I had a big scare when I found a strange bump on the back of her head because it wasn't like a bang-bump. I thought it was a lymph node and hated the "see also" references in my medical book so I took her to the doctor. They could tell right away that it wasn't a cancerous node and was just an antibody reaction to an invasion of some kind. She didn't have a cold, although she had a big canker sore in her mouth (likely caused by the stress of the bottle, poor little sweetheart), they suggested maybe it was a reaction to a mosquito bite. I immediately asked about West Nile virus because they found some dead crows near us that were infected with it. No, she doesn't have West Nile. My neighbours are from Connecticut and shrug off the whole thing. They say it's been around for a long time and the chances of being affected are one in a million but still I worry. What was the point of putting mosquitos on this earth anyways?
Holy smokes, will I ever shut up? It's a pleasure doing business with you, but I have to run.
Till next time (and you'll probably STILL be reading this!),
Allisun
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