With our weather yesterday hovering in the -40′s, I wasn’t up to creating some 3 or 4 course meal. Nope, instead, I made soup. Healthy, hearty, chicken vegetable soup. I also whipped up some cheese buns (they tasted like those lovely fresh buns that you get at Red Lobster….mmmmmm….). It was good. It was a MEAL.

Now tell me that’s not a meal!

PS:  The recipe for those cheese buns can be found here.  They were so good!  Stay tuned to my fanpage for more tidbits that I find and post there!

Not me.  Although I can appreciate the beauty of them, they would never be worn (in case you haven’t guessed, I’m not that kind of woman)

These however, make my heart a pitter-patter.

And I’m going to post a link to ones that would be the ones I’d wear around the house (you never know when you’re going to have to dash outside)… These shoes make my heart smile.

Now…off to dream of Dr. Seuss Chuck Taylor’s and do homework.  *le sigh*

It turns out that the eye was weak (duh) – and thus, the other eye was working harder to make up for it.  The doctor said that if there was no improvement glasses were likely necessary.

I put it out of my mind…we went on with life and I forgot about the whole thing – until I got that letter in the mail reminding us that we needed to come in for that follow-up.  Adam was excited (you get a toy when you’re done the exam) – and I was truly expecting a “he’s fine!”

Instead I got – “yeah…he’s definitely farsighted.”  So now he’s getting glasses for what I’m told will hopefully just be a few years.  In this time, the glasses are supposed to help strengthen his eyes and then he shouldn’t have to wear them anymore.

So – we shopped for glasses.  We looked at Spiderman ones, Superman ones, plastic frames, metal frames…finally he settled on some Batman glasses…and was thrilled to bits.  We walked around the mall for a bit until they were ready.  Then, when they were adjusted and it was time for us to go home, he was so happy “Mom, I can see!”

And me….well, I feel like crap.  How could I have not known the kid couldn’t see?   These are fairly strong lenses (uh…that’s according to my own non-eyeglass-educated opinion).  I feel like I’ve somehow failed him.

But – enough for my pity party.

So – here’s the main reason for me writing this post – Moms of children with glasses, how do you get them to keep them on?

For the most part, I think that because he can see better with them, he wears them.  But every now and then, he wants them off.  He can’t lay down to watch tv.  He can’t bend over to play with the toys on the floor (I think it’s just that he feels like they’re going to fall off because they certainly aren’t moving much!)  Then there’s the occasional fit that he throws…and he’ll take them off and toss them across the room.

Anyone have any advice??

These are the kind of things I do when I'm tired. Those are almond teeth. Fun stuff.

I suffered my first ever bout of insomnia – don’t get me wrong, I’ve had many sleepless nights; late night parties, late night homework sessions, a really good book, and of course – babies.  However, last night there was no reason for me to by lying awake.  Well, Adam started it…

He’d had a night mare…padded into my room and crawled in next to me.  I spent the next while trying to get comfortable as he dug his toes into my thighs and head-butted me continually.  Somehow, miraculously, I fell asleep…and the next thing I knew, I heard a tremendous thump followed by Adam’s wail.  Yup, he fell out of bed…and judging by the way he landed, he must have done a little summersault out of the bed.  I picked him up – soothed him a bit and placed him back into his own bed.

When I crawled back into my own bed I had a little film reel playing over all the scenarios about how he could have possibly fallen out of the bed; head at my night stand, feet resting on my closet door, thumb still in his mouth…and it set me right into a fit of the giggles.  No matter how I tossed and turned, I had images of his tumbles going through my mind and I’d fight to keep the laughter at bay so I didn’t wake Mr. Delusional and confirm his suspicions of my waning sanity.

Instead, I got up, grabbed my book, and sat down to read.  I finished my book.  I puttered around the house and cleaned off my counter tops, ran my dishwasher – put a load of laundry in the wash…I tackled my ironing, fed the bird…and with nothing left to do that didn’t require great amounts of noise, I decided to watch some of the shows that I’ve built up on my PVR.

Finally, the rest of the house woke up.  Then I tackled the vacuuming, washed the bathrooms, mopped the floor…attempted to nap when Adam did, but never was able to sleep.  I decided to pull out the furniture polish and at least get the shine on in the house.

That’s when Iman says to me, “Mom, who’s coming over?”

*confusion* “What do you mean?  No one’s coming over.”

“Well, why are you cleaning then?  You only clean under the coffee table when we have company.”

Ouch!  I think I need to reassess my housekeeping skills!

I started this day by getting the major things out of the way for my dinner — I prepared and seasoned the meat and stuck it in the oven to slowly cook through the day.  I fed the kids their breakfast and did a little light  housework before I left for the mosque.  Classes go from 1130 – 330…so by the time I was done, it was a mad dash back home where I was to finish preparing my brother’s birthday dinner, clean the house like a madwoman and make it all look like I was cool, calm and collected.

On our way from the mosque, Adam pretended to fall asleep.  It’s quite the ritual with our family.  He’ll “nod off” and then Mr. Delusional will say something like “uh-oh, did we forget Adam at the store?” and he’ll giggle and then shout “boo!” and we pretend to be shocked….so – we played this game until we got home, where I dashed into the house saying that I wanted to get right to the cleaning.  Mr. D looked at me and said “Are you gonna get Adam?” and I said “You grab him please…I need to get to this stuff.”  And I went straight to scrubbing my bathrooms…

In the meantime – Mr. Delusional unbuckled Adam and then went to shoveling the snow from the driveway and sidewalks.  He came back to the car checked inside and found no Adam…so he shut the door, locked it …and came in.  By then I was just finishing in the bathroom and had moved on to mopping the floors.  Mr. D and I passed by one another…Iman and Isaac wandered around… and it was quiet…strangely quiet.

“Did you bring Adam in from the car?”  I asked.

Mr. D looked at me like I’m nuts and said “Yeah..I left him in the car.” (yes…we’re sarcastic people!)

But it was so quiet…so I thought maybe he really was tired and had gone to bed for a nap….but he wasn’t there either.  I went down to the basement to put away my mop bucket assuming I’d find him there.  Nope…not to be seen.

“okay, seriously, did you bring Adam in from the car?  He’s not downstairs or in his bed.”

“what?  I thought he followed the kids in!”

Then, we both look out the window to the garage where we see the car, flashers on…and a sad little face behind the wheel.  Mr. D rushed out to rescue him…soothed Adam’s poor wounded little soul and brought him back in.  It turns out that Adam was trying to play a trick on daddy and had hidden in the third row seating where he couldn’t be seen.  Mr. D came to check and Adam thought it was going to be great fun to pop up and surprise him…but he was too slow.  He didn’t pop up until daddy had closed the garage door.  He cried, he tried honking the horn, he tried shouting.  He got scared, he got mad…and he took out his anger by leaving teeth marks in the steering wheel.

All in all, it was less than 10 minutes that he was “gone” — and the truth is, he was very safe inside our car, inside our garage….but dude…what a lesson to learn…and thank God it turned out this way and not the other thousands of way the situation could have gone (and have been playing out in my mind ever since)

“Oh you should have seen Johnny today!  He took his first steps!” *squeals in excitement*

“Yeah, well, my Suzie was walking at 6 months.” *gleams with pride*

“Well, I got you both beat.  My Billy was making his own bottles at 8 weeks.  What a relief it was to not have to get up in the middle of the night and deal with that.”

Okay, I exaggerate…but only slightly.  We all do it, what can I say?

Anyhow – today, my Genius of a child picked up the remote.  He’s recently learned how to change the channel to his little kiddy shows.  This time, however, he pressed some magical combination of buttons that took him to the PVR’s factory reset page.  While on this page, he adjusted the captioning.  Then, when I looked up from whatever it was I was doing (I can’t remember, the sheer joy at seeing my child perform such amazing tricks has made me suffer from selective amnesia).  Anyhow – I look up and I see this sort of command prompt look to the television.  “What did you do?!” I ask, and snatch the remote from his precious hands.

“I just pressed the inside button!”

“eek! We need daddy to come fix this.”

Mr. Delusional comes along and some how manages to exit from the screen.  Now we have captioning flashing across the screen.  This annoys the heck out of me.  I’ll happily watch a show with captioning when I’m someplace that I can’t actually hear the show.  But it drives me nuts to have the words that I’m hearing coming at a different time than the words that I’m reading.  It truly drives me right bat poop crazy.

So…for the last 2 1/2 hours, Mr. Delusional has been searching through internet sites, flipping through the manual, attempting different buttons…and getting nowhere.

If only Adam could find that “inside button” again.

Well – I’m here to bust that myth.  It will never happen.  Ever.  Anyone who tries to tell you that their kids never fight, disobey or make you want to lock yourself in the bathroom to regain your sanity…well, plain and simple – they’re lying.

So, I’m here to tell you how things went down today.  I do this because I love you (actually, I do this because by writing I find that I’m able to release my stress and pent up emotions that I wouldn’t normally let out)

For the last few days (okay, months) my lovely and adorable Adam has been giving me a really hard time.  I don’t want to go into it, but let’s all just say a quick prayer of thanks that the child is cute.  He may not have survived if he wasn’t.  Anyhow – today was surprisingly issue free in regards to him.  I didn’t have to pry him off of any daycare children (uh…my daycare moms may want to pretend they didn’t read that), I didn’t have to threaten to send him to his room, and I didn’t even have to go down to the level of threatening to cut up his beloved blankie into 1000 pieces…or burn it (depends on my mood which threat I give).

No, this time it was the older two.  God only knows which one “started” it – but they’ve both been pestering and nagging at each other for a while now.  Earlier in the week, I even found one child doing the Homer Simpson Choke Hold on the other (I’ll leave it up to your imaginations to guess who was chokee and choker) Yeah, it’s been fun.

Today, however, they decided to gang up and pick on Adam.  Now – I’m certainly not saying that I have a favorite child by any means…I don’t rush to protect one child over the other (I think it’s actually a good thing to let children attempt to solve their own problems, it teaches self-reliance)  However, Adam has this scream…words cannot describe it.  Ever since he was born, he’s had this scream that just makes your eardrums burst.  No word of a lie here – the night he was born, the nurses sneaked into my room and took my newly born bundle to be bathed.  Then, he started crying.  And by crying, I mean wailing blood-curdling screams.  Those, naturally, woke me.  I toddled over to the nursing station and watched them bathe him.  A woman in labor came walking down the hallway with the support of her husband…I smiled sympathetically at her, she returned it.  Her husband passed by, and I heard him say “I hope ours doesn’t sound like that!”  Yeah…he’s that bad.

Anyhow, I digress.  The game today was “Let’s Play Some Stupid Game That Sounds Like Lots of Fun and Not Let Adam in the Room”  This resulted in Adam sitting outside of the door, banging it with his fists, drumming it with his feet, and yes….screaming that blood curdling scream at the top of his lungs.

When I couldn’t stand it any more (which was probably something like 0.08 seconds) I barreled through that door which apparently really scared my kids.  Then…they saw my glaring face.  Suddenly, there was silence.  We waited for Mr. Delusional to come home in complete and utter silence.  When he got home, I put out our supper, ate and announced “Mommy’s going to go shopping.  When I come back, I’m going to take my laptop to my room.  If anyone comes to that door they will regret it.”

And I left.

Yeah.  Great Mom Moment right there.  Right now, I’m doing the best I can to keep it together without having a major blowup.  I should probably take a bath, go for a walk, or meditate.  But…well, I’m a mom and I simply have too much crap to do.

Once we’d picked them up and piled back into the car, I remembered that I needed to pick up some sour cream for our dinner tonight (burritos, yum!)  So, I we headed over to the grocery store to grab some sour cream…and a few other groceries.  We get in our usual store – and discover that the entire thing has been re-arranged.  So, our quick dash-in-dash-out turned into an isle by isle search for the few items that we needed.   When we finally got everything, I headed over to the checkout lane where Adam spied the wall of gum.

“I want some gum!” he shouted.

I don’t do “I wants” – it’s just not my thing.  Call me old fashioned, but I expect my children to ask my politely for things…using the word PLEASE.  I said to him, “No, honey, we already bought some candy canes.” (they’re for cookie toppings that I’m making… honest!)

That’s when Adam starts screaming.  I’m not talking crying loudly…I”m talking put-burning-embers-under-your-eyelids screaming.

“I WANT GUM! I WANT GUM!” *scream nearly high & loud enough to break glass* “I WANT GUM!”

At this point, I’m thanking God that I had enough items to make it into the express checkout.  About the time that everyone’s ears started bleeding, the cashier began ringing through my items…I’m trying to get Adam to bring it down to a Gilbert Gottfried volume level and I realize that the cashier is trying to talk to me.

“Do you have your Savings Card?”

I try to comprehend what she’s saying, all the while, attempting to avoid the thrashing arms and feet of my sweet innocent babe.  ”uh….my Savings Card?  Oh…no I don’t have it with me,” and I turn to try to calm Adam again while I search desperately for my bank card to pay.

I turn back towards the cashier, bank card in hand, and she’s smiling sweetly at me with an open Savings Card application and a pen.

Folks, I tried.  I really did.  I tried so hard to be nice and not say anything rude…I just couldn’t help it.  What I really wanted to say is “No thanks, I’m dealing with a tantrum right now” …. but what came out instead was something entirely different.

“Are you freaking kidding me??!!”  I ask incredulously, “You want me to stand here and fill out this form NOW?”  Meanwhile, Adam is still screaming at the top of his lungs that he wants gum and is trying to wiggle his way out of the shopping cart that I chained him to like a wild animal safely buckled him into.

“Uh…um…oh…well….”

“Just let me pay for this stuff and leave.  Now.”

She jumped like I’d pinched her, quickly gave me my total and swiped my card.  Once it was approved, she ripped off my receipt and then circled a section under my total.  “This is what you would have saved if you had taken the time to apply for the card.”

You don’t even want to know what I imagined doing at that moment.  Needless to say, it wasn’t pleasant.

I don’t get it…there’s a time for everything.  I think that when my child is in the middle of freak out mode, that’s NOT the time.

In fact, they are so fabulous that Adam wants one.  That’s right…he wants one.  As he sat there snuggling with a tiny cousin, he began asking first me, then Mr. Delusional…and finally his uncle if he could take one home.

We laughed it off and said “What are you going to do with a baby?”

“I will share my blanky and we can watch Jimmy Fallon together”

Awe…how sweet…my three year old wants to watch Jimmy Fallon with his newborn cousin. We got our little giggle out of that and thought it was over.

Then, it was time for the babies to go home.  Adam wrapped his arms around that little baby and wasn’t letting go.  It took all my strength to get the little baby free so that my brother-in-law could rescue him.  That’s when Adam wrapped his legs around him, crying and screaming the whole time. “You have TWO babies, why can’t you give us one!  You have TWO!!”

Of course, NOW he’s into sharing, why can’t he do this with his brother and sister??

So – where have I been?  Well – I’ve been here, but not.  You see, I have this problem called procrastination.  I’m sure that there are some of you who can relate to this.  I put off things.  Usually it’s putting off with things I don’t want to do (like…oh…cleaning) but this time it was getting my prescription refilled.  ”What prescription?” you ask.   Well I have something called Hypothyroidism.  What that means is that my thyroid, which is a gland found somewhere in the throat (I’m a child care provider, not a doctor!) – this gland simply doesn’t produce enough thyroid “juice” for my body to function well.  When I first learned about this, I did a little research(as my mother, some of her sisters, and my grandfather all have it and she told me to get it checked).  My google search found me this page and my jaw nearly dropped when I got down to the list of symptoms.  I could have checked off just about every single one of them.  Just off the top of my head, I’ll list off the ones that bothered me the most:

• constipation
• hypothermia
• extreme fatigue
• feeling run down/lethargic
• shedding hair like a cat in spring
• dry skin
• joint pain
• moodiness
• difficulty concentrating
• forgetfulness
• ZERO sex drive
• tinnitus
• eye sensitivity/dryness
• (there are more…but well – you get the point)

And all this time, my (old) doctor never checked me for this because I didn’t have the “big” symptom – I wasn’t overweight.  When I argued and made him give me the test anyhow – he was shocked at my results.  He literally said “I don’t know how you’re able to still walk around!”  Yeah.  It was that bad.  But – nearly 8 years later, and I’ve been on my synthroid all this time and have been relatively good with a few minor tweaks that are needed with time.

However, about…oh… 4 months ago, I went to pick up my synthroid and the pharmacist said to me, “This is your last refill, don’t forget to make an appointment to get another prescription.”  And I thought to myself…well, duh…I’ll do that later.

Famous last words.  I kept “doing it later” for weeks….weeks turned into months.  I ran out of my pills and kept meaning to make that appointment tomorrow.  It just never happened.  Then I started getting moody and blamed it on stress.  I started getting cold and blamed it on the changing season.  I started gaining weight and blamed it on stuffing my face.  Not once did I stop to think about my missing pills.

Then…then I stopped caring.  My kids were fighting, so what?  My school work wasn’t done, big deal.  My house was a disaster, who cares?  I didn’t realize it, but I was walking a precarious line over the deep, dark pit of depression.  Suddenly, without even knowing it, I was in the middle of that pit and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, or how I was planning to get out.  I just wandered there in the dark, silently.

You see – I didn’t have the kind of depression where you sit in the corner and cry.  I didn’t have suicidal thoughts.  I didn’t mope about and not shower and watch sad movies all day.  What happened to me was that my emotions, my feelings…my soul… everything  just turned off.  As if someone had flicked a switch – I was gone.  I was simply a shell.  A body walking around.  Lead arms holding my children.  Some part of me willing myself to feel something, but I had nothing.

It wasn’t until I read a blog post by Allie of Hyperbole and a Half that I realized that I was even in a depression.  I thought I was just a horrible, evil person who’s heart had shriveled up and died.  Instead, I read that post and thought “Holy sh*t, that’s what’s wrong with me!”  

I confided in a few of my best friends, asked them for their love, support and prayers – and even though they’re miles and miles and miles away – they helped me get through it.  They hassled me about making that appointment.  I finally did it.  I got into that doctor’s office and when he asked “what can I do for you today?” I broke down and sobbed and told him my life story for the past few months.  It’s terrifying for someone like me, a person who likes to be in control of her emotions and hates showing weakness (crying) in front of ANYONE to do what I did.  But I had to let him know how low I had sunk.  He smiled wrote me a new prescription, ordered a blood test and told me I’d be better soon.

And what do you know…a few weeks after that visit and with new, stronger meds coursing through my body…a ray of sunlight in my life.  My soul is starting to stir and stretch out after it’s many months of captivity.  I’m starting to feel again, and I can’t even begin to describe how great that is.