Gracie.  The kitty slut.  So in need of belly scratches she let the toddler pet her. A lot.

Cat toys.  Playing with focal depths.

My dad. Who looks more and more like his dad every day.

Curly girl.  She ran all over downtown trying to blow bubbles.

This is my dad’s cat Kiki.  She has 13 toes on her front feet.  this one is an iPhone picture, but I couldn’t not add it.  The girls fell in love with the cats.

Awhile back on Instagram, Wendy made some comment to the effect of me being a fashionable person who takes pictures of themselves.  I got a little defensive, because yes, I take pictures of myself, but I hardly think of myself as fashionable.  I made me really think about why I take the pictures.

I realized that it started as me not having a mirror at home, and wanting to see how I looked.  Then it was easy to share them.  I didn’t used to dress like this.  Take those pictures up there and imagine in in loose fitting khakis and polo shirts.  So yes, I guess in comparison, fashionable.

While I’m not a believer that it takes a suit to be more professional, but I do think that caring about how you look, and liking how you look, changing your overall mood, and that a better mood makes for a better employee.  So since I wanted to show that I cared, I started trying to really focus on dressing better.  I had hoped it would come with a weight loss, but the fact that it hasn’t, hasn’t really mattered.

The reality of all of this, I really like who I am right now.  I like where I am at in my life.  There are things that I want to change, things that I want to improve (the state of my house) but when you get right down to it, I LIKE me.

It is a hard thing to balance though.  I like me, but I know that my weight and my health are a real risk to me.

So I signed up for a 10K at the end of August.  I’m not sure how I’m going to pull it off

I find myself listening to other kids, eavesdropping like a creep, trying to determine if I hear M talk like that.  I squirm when other kids announce my presence at after school care, wanting just for a moment to see if she does what everyone else does.  Constantly on alert to try to figure out how others perceive her quirky behaviors.  I just want to be done with this part.  I hate surprises.  I love to be prepared, to have through through in my head the 37 different scenarios about how things are going to go down, trying to craft what to say in each one.  I want to know whats next, to know what the plan is so that we can move on to the fixing phase.

I know its not that simple however.  M is not broken.  There is nothing to fix.  There is only understanding and acceptance.  There is learning to work with things instead of fighting with them.  It is the Aikido of parenting.  I know this, because we’ve already seen so much progress.  She needs quiet to finish her work, less distractions.  She needs warning for transitions.  She needs time alone to play.  She needs less things, less options, to come to a decision.  She needs a neat room, she needs help cleaning it, organizing her room like her thoughts is impossible.  It requires shepherding.  It requires resilience. Knowing when to stand firm, to stand your ground and not let the differences be the excuses.

I know I haven’t been the best parent to her lately.  I know it, and it hurts.  I have to to remind myself constantly to remember that she is not what is going on now.  She is such a beautiful and wonderful kid.  I want to see her get through this, so everyone can see that and not just the quirky behaviors.  Everyone, including me.

Secret, I love shoveling snow.  It is one of my favorite things to do.  I don’t mean shoveling it in a rush so you can get out the door to work.  I mean the kind of shoveling that you do when it is late at night, or early in the morning, when there is no one else around.  I live in a huge city, next to a busy street, but when I am shoveling at night, it is peaceful.  The zen of it really.  It is methodical, relaxing, and a work out.

Tonight I shoveled after we caught the edge of a big storm.  We don’t seem to have any of our own, we just get the edges of them.  I took my time, got every little bit I could, trying to get the most exercise out of the deal.  I shoveled the back sidewalk even though we don’t use it for anything but taking out the garbage right now.  I shoveled the stairs, even the front ones we don’t use.  I shoveled to find a little peace.

I am struggling and I don’t seem to know why.  Perhaps it is the stress of M’s upcoming psych evals.  Perhaps it is her being sick, not eating well, still being sick, and clearly struggling with her emotional well being.  Perhaps it is work, and my upcoming trip.  Whatever it is, I needed the snow.  I needed to find a little relaxation in the scraping of plastic and metal on concrete, throw left, then throw right, balance in the mundane.

I am trying, and failing only part of the time, to eat healthier.  It turns out that I can pack a great breakfast/lunch for work, but I still get the munchies in the afternoon and if I don’t pack something for that, I will eat all the things.  For the record, credit card usable vending machines and a “healthy workplace initiative” do not go together.

So, I went shopping, bought a bunch of healthy snacks, packed them up to go to work, and then had a kid get sick.  I have yet to see if they help, and here we are the weekend already, so I won’t find out until next week.  I got baked cracker type things, some portioned jell-o type things, and I made baked apple chips.  The apple chips were amazing.  I got the general recipe off of the Weight Watchers site, then bastardized it to my will.  So far I’ve made them twice, an at least double recipe, that fills my oven, and I have zero left.  Everyone except A gobbles them up.  Recipe below:

• Apples, cored, sliced 1/8 in thick (I use my mandolin, proving it was worth it repeatedly even though it has to live in the basement)
• Place apples on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper
• Spring with a cinnamon and sugar mix, with some ground cardamom thrown in for good measure.  Use good cinnamon, totally makes a difference. Go easy on the sugar, or skip it if you are using sweeter apple varieties.
• Bake at 200 degrees for two hours until crispy and starting to brown

Now I’m trying to figure out what other fruit/veggies I can turn in to chips.

—————————————————–

It has been silly cold here again.  I have to say, I sort of love it.  This is Minnesota after all.  I live here by choice, having tried out at least three other places before returning.  You just smile, bundle up, and accept it.  Bitching is best left alone, seeing as, in the words of many Scandinavian bachelor farmer Minnesotans, “It could be worse”.  That isn’t saying however that you shouldn’t bundle up in bright shiny colors.

Personally, I wouldn’t be making it through the winter without the recycled cashmere cowl my sister-in-law got me last year.  I don’t know why I lived without cashmere as long as I did.  Silly me.  I wonder if the thrift stores are too picked over to still find sweaters to recycle… hm.

My hair is growing out nicely I think.  I may be due for some more shaping, but it is getting its curl back.  I will miss the pixie.  I could have kept that hair for a long time, but alas, my mother has to go and ruin things like it seems she does so much.  Turns out your husband is not a fan of you and your mother looking too much alike.  She got the same haircut as me, so I grow out the pixie.  Looking for headband suggestions though.  I can’t seem to figure out a way to sort through the “giant flower on baby” headbands on Etsy to find mature but funky ones for myself.  We are nearly to that stage of the grow out and I am getting desperate.

I’m so not kidding about my house being on the track to hoarders.  I wish, so desperately, that I was.  I guess though, it all makes sense.  Cluttered head, cluttered house.  I haven’t seen the floor of my laundry room since we got the new washer and dryer.  I am stymied the whole kids grow and no longer need clothes thing.  The too small clothes wallow in a giant pile (along with my too small/too large clothes) on a table in the laundry area.

I keep wishing for day off without kids.  Just a day I tell myself, then it will all be better.  I will magically undo months, years of crap in a single day.  It never happens.  There are other things to eat up my days.  Sick kids, sick me.  It never happens.  And really, who am I kidding.  This is going to take more than a day.  So instead I feel defeated before I even begin, I sit on the couch, read things on my phone, already having given up.  (oh crap, I do sound like an episode of hoarders don’t I)

So, just like lunches, like eating healthier I am trying to take it in small bites.  A box, two boxes, a bag, a day.  Bedtimes run long, with no time for the gym, but I can still “lose” something.  A box, two boxes, a bag, every day.

————————————————————-

There is a pint of Hagen Daz in my freezer.  It has been there for almost two weeks.  It is there to prove a point.  I will not let food rule me.  I will not let myself give up.  Some days I forget it is there.  Not today.

For a month, maybe a month and a half, I ate uncontrollably.  I had gone months without losing any weight, though really, that was my fault for not tracking, even though I was working out regularly.  Then someone got the flu.  Then Thanksgiving, then someone else, then me.  Excuses really.  I just felt out of control.  I binged.  I ate “all of the things.”

I can look back now and go “damn, I was really fucking stressed out”, but at the time, I just looked at myself and said “you fucking idiot, you slob, where is your goddamn self control”, none of which actually helped the situation.

Now, I’m less stressed.  Now I can eat semi normally.  I feel better, but the commitment to working out and eating better, well, there is room for improvement.

This whole ADHD realization thing has made me realize that routine will save my soul.  So, I am on a mission for routine, and with it control.  I get it now, why people who struggle with addiction need to hand things over to a higher power.  Sometimes, you just need to let go.  Realize you can’t pull it off wholly on your own.  I need routine to be my higher power.  I need routine so that I can regain control of the things that will never fit into a schedule.  Gain control by losing free will, or something like that.

So, goals, routines, verbalizing so that I can make sure I’ve thought it all out.  (well, not verbal, verbal, because internets and I will never video blog)

• Make ahead veggies in portions for lunches for the week.
• Make ahead fruits for the week.
• Do laundry and have a laundry day for each family member.
• Get rid of clothes, keep a smaller wardrobe, but take better care of it
• Organize my desk
• Throw away paper clutter
• Shop only with a list
• Lay out clothes for toddler & me the night before (no more last minute laundry)
• Pack purse/computer bag the night before
• Keep breakfast foods stocked in the house for less eating out
• Wake up earlier
• Go to bed earlier
• Get a pill container for meds, like a cute old lady
• Work out three times a week, start doing crunches/pushups/planks at home.

I feel like I should make myself a sticker chart, where the prize at the end is something from Etsy/Pinterest.

OK, so here is the deal.  I want to blog, I do, but I’m tired and burnt out, and my house is a mess and I am like three steps from a hoarders intervention because I keep buying new clothes because the toddler rubs her greasy messy face on them & ruins them, but I don’t have time to get rid of the old ones, and if I had lost weight I could wear the old ones, but lets be honest, I haven’t worked out since before Thanksgiving week when everyone got the stomach flu, then everyone got a cold, then everyone got another fucking cold, then we moved a whole building worth of people at work and last weekend was the first two days off in a row I’ve had, and even at that it involved ANOTHER sick kid (who gets man colds it seems), and did I mention the need for a clutter intervention?

I fucking love run on sentences.  Seriously, because that is how my brain actually functions.  Like one giant sort of slightly related, maybe a non sequitur thrown in for good measure, run on sentence.  Of all of the things to come out of the ongoing “does she or who the hell were we kidding, yes she does” thing with M is that I am pretty sure I have ADHD.  I am more like my oldest daughter than either one of us will ever completely admit to, especially when she gets to be a teen.  I am smart, wicked smart, and it hides my failings really well, but I see them.  My cracks show.  The less sleep I get, the more I taken on, the more they show.  I’ve been struggling to get to “the next level” in so many things in my life, and while it is not an excuse, it explains why I just. keep. failing.  Not for lack of desire, or smarts, but because my mental glitch, combined with the non stop, never ending reality of being a grown up, gets in the way.  I swear, I try.  I am not lazy.  Promise.

So now, for me, it becomes a game, of sorts.  Trying to figure out how to explain it all, to get myself help, to cure some bad habits.  To convince the powers that be that despite a successful career, a great family, a loving husband, that yes, I really do need help.  Because, one of the days, the cracks are going to grow, and I will lose the control I fight to maintain every day.  Every time I think about it I get a little PTSD moment to my one lone inpatient psych stay.  The one where the attending didn’t believe that I could be a successful, six figure earning, 22 year old, who also committed herself to an inpatient psych ward in NYC because she was suicidal. Yeah, that little flashback was tons of fun.

All of this of course while I sort through the paperwork, the piles and piles of paperwork, and navigate the bureaucracy of our education system, and advocate for my daughter who is just. like. me.  And go to therapy for me, and taken on new fun stuff at work, and try to maintain my focus through the first class I’ve taken in years, and deal with a toddler who still will not sleep on her own.

More than my dry skin is cracking around here.

So, blogging, yeah.  Where do I find the time? Is it really important for me? How do I find a community when it seems like the writing, the blogging, is diluted in the “branding”.  I can’t even search food blogs for good ideas any more, so polluted with other crap is the “blogosphere”.  I’m not begging for comments (but I don’t mind them, lets be realistic, if I didn’t care this would be in a word document on my computer), but is it worth it? I need opinions, ideas, some encouragement that “branding” has not won.

I want to start the reverse of our appointment with the psychologist.  The one where they ask you to explain all of the challenges your kids faces, then end with her strengths and what you like best about them.

M is amazing.  She is bright, so bright.  I have shied away from discussing it, knowing that some people are over hearing everyone tell you how smart their kid is.   She is though, smart, gifted smart.  She is compassionate, and caring, and silly.  She loves joking, and snuggles and her little sister.  I love, we love her, dearly.

She is also, in the most basic of terms, a bit of an odd duck.  I can explain to the doctor all of her little quirks and realize what she is doing at 5, started at birth.  She needed a special set of circumstances (upper palate stimulation) to suck on a boob, or a bottle.  She needed us to hold her to help her fall asleep (pressure on the arms, less stimulation, not more), at a minimum holding her hand.  She needed schedules to kept, dinner to happen on time, bed time to never be pushed too late.  She needed time to adjust to new settings.  At the holidays when my nieces could go with the flow and be charming hours past bedtime, she would be a wreck.  I could spot the point where she tipped and always hurry us out before anyone would see it get as bad as I knew it could.  She’s never been a good one for transitions either.  They take time, warnings, understanding.  I’m unsure if it is just her needing to check out when the stimulation gets to be too much, but her focus, isn’t always there.  It manifests itself in fidgets and hyper focus.  Engagement with her matters.  Paying attention is easy if it is new, if she’s mastered it, not so much.  Noise makes a situation, no matter how interesting, hard for her to focus on.

She is lucky.  She has been surrounded by people that love her and care about her (people I am totally showering with all I can afford this year).  At daycare they knew her.  There were challenges, but also accommodations and understanding of who she was.  It was never a big deal.  I knew, even if I didn’t admit it, that school would be a big change, and if my suspicions were true, there would be trouble.

However, the other shoe has dropped, we know now that if we want her to be successful in school, to enjoy it, she needs to get help now.  Not to change her, she is wonderful just the way she is.  To help her understand herself and find her own ways to deal with the realities of school and life. We met with a psychologist last week, an initial meeting predicated by some issues that have come up at school, and her after school program.  The details are not pertinent, so I won’t share.

I think I always knew that this day was coming.  I’ve been on edge about the possibility, vigilant, always questioning her caregivers about her behavior, her comparison to age appropriate behavior.   It is most likely my genetics that bring this one to the table.  I have a family history of ADHD. I have a family history of what would now be considered the autism spectrum.  I wanted so bad to be wrong, but there is relief in being right.

So now, the next step, is her meeting with the psychologist we met last week.  There are evaluations, and testing, and more understanding.  Already, understanding what is possibly going on in her head, has helped us approach her differently.  We are learning how to use her strengths, and where to forgive her when we know she is fighting against her instincts and losing.

I debated not publishing this.  However, I’ve made it through nearly every other parenting struggle with the assistance of my community.  To ignore that it is there with help for me now, would be wrong.  It would be isolating, letting me do the kind of living in my own head that we are trying to help her avoid.

So, give me your special needs blogs.  Give me your ideas.  I don’t want to hear anything about vaccinations, but give me ideas about diet, and ways to make this easier on her.  I doubt we will escape without a diagnosis, but we’re still not sure what it will be.  When we know, I’ll share as much as I can.  For the next person.