Sick Momma

Pain + Insomnia = Painsomnia

2012-01-27T03:29:00.000-08:00

I take pain meds as rarely as I can manage.

And much of the time, I can manage my days without pain meds, relying mostly on distraction (even when the pain is bad enough that I can't concentrate on reading a book, I can watch a movie from a DVD borrowed from the library or find something on cable's On Demand menu to get outside of my own head for awhile) and/or ice. (Heat just makes my joints achier so I'm not a fan of it. But oh, how I love my ice packs!!)

Nights are harder, because once the lights are off and Scott is asleep (I so envy his ability to fall asleep quickly!), there's nothing to distract myself from the pain. And oh, does it make itself known. And that makes it hard to fall asleep, as I toss and turn trying to find a position that doesn't make my body complain loudly.

I guess it's a pretty common phenomenon. I mean, I know it wasn't unique to me, but I was surprised to learn on Twitter recently that there's even a name for it: Painsomnia. No, it's not a real medical term -- although I bet there is one for it -- but it's something that patients have nicknamed.

More often than I wish, I end up getting out of bed, where I sleep with five pillows helping to support various body parts on top of a four-inch-thick memory foam mattress pad, and heading downstairs to sleep on the couch that replaced my literally falling-to-pieces recliner. (The couch is awesome and reclines electronically at the push of a button!) Sleeping on the couch lets me avoid hip and shoulder pain from lying on my side in bed.

Sometimes, like tonight, even that doesn't work. So I do the internal debate on whether to take a pain pill or not. I'm not sure why I torture myself over it, other than a belief that pain meds work best when taken infrequently to keep my tolerance levels down. Then when I do take a pain pill, it reminds me of Ellie's birth, when I finally opted for an epidural after 16 hours of Pitocin and 36 hours after my water broke and I wondered aloud why I'd thought it was so important not to have one. (And about 8 hours after the epidural, Ellie was finally born!)

The other problem is that pain meds seem to act as a sort of stimulant for me; it's not that they make me feel full of energy so much as I just can't fall asleep. Which means I get to appreciate how well my pain levels are being controlled by the meds but I don't get the sleep that I want. (Which, oddly enough, also mimics my childbirth experience since I opted for the epidural mostly in hopes of getting a nap since Ellie was taking her sweet time in making an appearance. It didn't actually work for what I sought, which was sleep, but it sure made the labor/Pitocin pain disappear for awhile.)

So if I do take a pain pill late at night for the Painsomnia, then I end up contemplating taking an Ambien. But even though I've had both administered together while hospitalized, I'm too afraid of mixing those meds at home. Too many celebrity deaths where they point to the mix of prescription and non-prescription drugs as the cause add to my leeriness of taking a sleep aid and a pain pill at the same time.

Well, I'm definitely rambling here. Mostly my point was to share what I thought was a really cool word for a situation I've struggled to describe and explain. Thanks for letting me ramble. :)

(Not Even Close To) Wordless Wednesday

2012-01-18T20:13:00.000-08:00

Back in November, I posted asking for suggestions on what I could do with little bits of cool metallic fabric called "tissue lame" (and that last E needs an accent mark on it, but I have no clue on how to do that on Blogger!) that were too pretty to throw away.

My Aunt Marsha suggested I put them into fancy glass bottles, and well, it was following up on that suggestion that led me down the path to a crafty (supply) powder room:

Technically, I started with the plastic jars (from the cashews my husband gets at Costco) on the left, then the salsa bottle on the far right. But then I started looking at some of my other craft supplies and wondering why I was hiding them all away. So I decided to use the glass jar that Ellie had gotten some candy in a couple years ago for the holidays (William-Sonoma uses the cutest curvy bottles!) for some rhinestones. After all, they're so pretty, they ought to be on display.

Then I started looking for glass jars in a variety of places and finding that I had lots of stuff to display! The round jar, second from the right above, holds my felt "spaghetti," strips of felt that I glue on hair clips to cover the metal.

And, well, I had to expand past that one shelf:

An Appaloosa pony Ellie made at camp last summer guards the jewels.

On the top, I have beads, fancy rhinestone buttons, regular buttons, a tall jar of spools of thread, small jars of 15mm rhinestones, and a ginormous jar of different kinds of hair clips waiting to be transformed.

What do you think? I kind of like using my supplies as decor ... although I'm not sure how inconvenient it's going to be to have my thread collection up in that jar. We'll see! (Thanks, Aunt Marsha! :)

Meanwhile, the super secret project that created most of those snips of fabric that inspired all this? I made roughly 100 butterfly and dragonfly magnets for family members for holiday gifts:

Inspired by the kanzashi butterflies from Diane Gilleland's book Kanzashi in Bloom: 20 Simple Fold-and-Sew Projects to Wear and Give

Looking Back At 2011

2012-01-09T16:57:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if it's just my general foggy memory or if it's yet another side effect of my chronic illness, but I can barely remember what I had for dinner yesterday. I definitely barely remember what happened in 2011.

So I don't even really remember what I blogged about in 2011, much less which were my favorite posts. That's the challenge requested by Leslie of Getting Closer To Myself, who will host the next edition of the Patients For A Moment blog carnival. So here's my recap of the year that was.

Last January, in a post titled It's All About The Attitude -- Or Is It?, I wrote about how delighted I was about a New York Times article that cited studies showing that getting (and surviving) cancer were not affected by the patient's attitude. A kick-ass, conquer cancer attitude may help a patient deal emotionally with the treatments of the disease, but it won't raise that patient's likelihood of surviving it.

Also last January, I wrote a parenting post titled Judgement, about the snap judgments people make based on appearances, particularly when it comes to parents of young children. You can't tell from looking at people what they're dealing with.

In March, I had the pleasure of hosting Patients For A Moment on the topic of guilty pleasures. That had to be one of the most fun topics, both to write about and to read everyone else's contributions! Actually, I was lucky enough to host PFAM twice last year, and I was also rather pleased with the edition I hosted in November on finding inspiration on how to pull oneself out of the dark places that chronic illnesses sometimes leave us. (Ooh, and while I'm writing about PFAM, here's a plug: I'm going to be hosting next month so please check back in early February to see my topic! And Leslie is still looking for more hosts for the now monthly blog carnival; check out the responsibilities here and drop her an email if you're interested. It's a wonderful opportunity to bring new readers to your blog and for you to get multiple viewpoints on topics that are close to your heart.)

In May, I came "out of the closet" and shared the news that I had been approved (two months earlier) for Social Security Disability. It's funny, I still have a sense of shame about being on SSDI, and it's not something I volunteer, even when asked if I'm working. Or why I'm not. I also have a bit of guilt, that somehow, by claiming benefits I earned, I'm contributing to the money issues our federal government is facing. I know it's somewhat irrational, but c'est la vie. I console myself by counting all the ways it's helpful to my family for me to be able to contribute financially however small an amount. It makes it possible for us to add enrichment activities to Ellie's life (she just started gymnastics last week, and, as you may remember, is learning to compete as an "artistic" roller skater {essentially doing the same things a figure skater does in ice skates}) as well as to pay for housecleaners once or twice a month to ease the burden on my husband. Most importantly, we once again have some pad in our budget; we weren't running up debt or even living paycheck to paycheck as many families dealing with disabilities caused by chronic illness, but I feared we were one disaster away from ending up in those black holes.

In October, I wrote about The Invisibility of Invisibility Chronic Illness, as it struck home, once again, that the only people who truly grok what it's like are those who are either walking the walk themselves or watching a close loved one walk it.

I'm a bit chagrined that it took me over four years to find out how useful a very common tool is for those of us taking many, many medications. Who knew there was a reason they have all those pill dispensers at every pharmacy? :) Ok, it wasn't an earth shattering post, but boy has my pill dispenser changed my life. And if I ever make it back to the dollar store, I'm going to follow my friend Mo's lead and buy three more so I only have to refill it once a month!

Although I have doubts that I've learned the lesson well enough to prevent it in the future, I finally recognized a trend in my life with chronic illness: I make poor choices when approaching and even when I've crossed the line to Too Much. Over and over again, not just in 2011 but since I started blogging in 2007, I keep writing about how days or weeks or even months didn't go the way I'd planned: The lesson I seem to be having trouble learning is to pay attention to my body and stop, or at least slow down, when it's clear that I've overextended myself energy wise or am headed in that direction. Instead, it's almost like I decide subconsciously that, "Ooh! I'm clearly headed for being bed- and/or couch-bound again, so I better try to get as many things crossed off my list as possible before that happens! Hurry up! Do more, because you don't know when you'll be able to do XYZ again!" And actually, I'm feeling the effects of having done just yesterday exactly what I wrote about in that excerpt. Sigh.

Anyway, that's the year that was. Hope you enjoyed the trip down memory lane thanks to Blogger's archives of Sick Momma. Meanwhile, be sure to visit Getting Closer To Myself on or after January 15 to see everyone else's contribution to the blog carnival!
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And to my fellow bloggers, the deadline is midnight Jan. 12 if you'd like to participate; see the call for submissions for details.

Supporting Free in 2012

2012-01-03T20:06:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't a political post of some sort about freedom.

But I find a lot of inspiration, craft-wise and otherwise, from Diane Gilleland at Craftypod and so I'm taking up her challenge to not only support "free" in 2012, but to report on how I did it.

The idea is that we all enjoy and benefit from the many blogs we read and podcasts we listen to. But it takes time and energy to put together good blogs/podcasts/etc, and giving something back to those who provide free content helps them keep going forward. (Diane is much more eloquent than I am, so go read her post that I linked to in the previous paragraph.)

There are lots of ways to support Free, ranging from buying from someone's Etsy store, using their "donate" button, clicking on a flattr button, using a blogger's affiliate links and probably more varieties that aren't springing to mind.

In December, I used a variety of those methods:

When I bought Amazon giftcards for my nieces and nephew as Chanukah gifts, I used a favorite patient blogger's affiliate links. I try to never buy anything on Amazon without using someone's affiliate link since it doesn't add anything to my cost and I know no one's making a ton of money from blogging (with the exception of a handful of outliers).
I spent a lot of time in December reading various articles from the Craftypod archives about running a crafty business, so I decided to click on Diane's donate button and show her a little appreciation. I can't tell you how delighted I was when she sent me an email telling me I'd made her day. Supporting Free feels good! Certainly, her note back made my day.
I first learned about kanzashi flowers from video tutorials made by the folks at Joggles, which also helped me discover Diane Gilleland's book Kanzashi in Bloom. I'd always felt a little bit badly that they had expanded my world and I hadn't supported their business at all, so I've been looking for an opportunity to give them some of my business even though they aren't the discounters I usually patronize for craft supplies. I signed up for an online class they're offering later in January and also bought some paper supplies. It wasn't a lot of business to send their way, but I feel better for it anyway.

Since the vast majority of blogs I read, and therefore want to support, are either patient blogs or mommy deal blogs, the main way I tend to support Free is via affiliate links. But I'll be paying more attention in 2012 to what I do, and will try to share it with all of you every month or so. If you decide to support Free, I'd love it if you shared with me in comments how you are doing so.

Once upon a time, I had fantasies about earning money with my blog, but it has never panned out. I had Google ads on my blog for awhile, but never got paid because I don't think I ever "earned" more than a few bucks from them and therefore never hit the minimum for getting paid. Same with my Amazon affiliate links; I get monthly statements from them but have been carrying a balance of ~$6, not enough to hit the $10 threshold for getting an Amazon giftcard. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not complaining, nor is this a plea for money or for people to use my affiliate links to items on Amazon. I'm just intrigued with the idea of supporting, in however small a way I can manage, people who offer free content that I find valuable.

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-24T16:00:00.000-08:00

Whatever holidays you celebrate this season, I wish you much happiness!

So I've started at least half a dozen blog posts this month and, you may have noticed, haven't managed to get a single one finished and posted. Yet.

It hasn't been the December I was planning.

Life got very complicated when Scott suddenly developed a kidney stone late on Dec. 8. Suffice it to say that my husband, who almost never takes a sick day or admits to being anything other than "fine", has been home ever since. This week he had surgery to remove the 6mm stone that was stuck in his ureter. He was sent home with a stent that continues to cause more pain and bleeding, much less than when the stone pain had him white-knuckling it but significantly more than he had during the break between waves. With luck, he will return to work on Jan. 3.

So it's been a doozy of a month. It's a new role for me to be the "healthy" spouse and have to find meals to serve, pack Ellie's lunches and snacks and get her to school or camp each weekday. The cumulative effect is ... challenging. But we're making it through, and it was hugely helpful that Scott had some good days between onset and surgery. It was kind of like we took turns picking up each other's slack, which I think might be a good definition of marriage and parenting with chronic illnesses.

As a friend on Facebook said, it takes a village. We were blessed with good friends, including our next-door neighbor Rex, who took Scott to the ER shortly after he got home from work at 10:30 p.m. Dec. 8. When we asked, Scott and I both expected Rex to drop Scott off at the ER and head home, figuring it's easier to take a taxi home from the hospital than to the hospital (and I couldn't take him because I had to stay home with the sleeping Ellie); instead, Rex stayed with Scott the whole time until he was finally sent home around 5 a.m.

Another friend was kind enough to help out for Scott's surgery, which ended up occurring on Dec. 21, aka Ellie's 7th birthday. She took Ellie home from winter-break camp along with her daughters, then they took her out to dinner at Red Robin, where she got balloons and a birthday sundae. When it was looking like Scott's surgery would be so delayed that he might not get to leave the hospital until 9 p.m., she said not to worry about it because Ellie could just have a sleepover.

That friend was also kind enough to bring Ellie home from school that first day of Scott's kidney stone and another who, when I feared I wouldn't be able to get to school in time for pickup because Scott had ended up back in the ER, rearranged her family's plans so she could take Ellie home that day. There were many other local friends who expressed sympathy and offered help.

It really does take a village, and not just for rearing children!

And it was a good reminder for me that people are generally very happy to help out. They just don't know how to if they're not asked to do specific tasks. I always dread asking for help for myself, but I hope this experience will remind me that people often really like being able to do something. :)

Meanwhile, I hope all your holidays are happy, and that 2012 brings much joy, prosperity and good health to you and yours!

Crossing the NaBloPoMo & #NHBPM Finish Line

2011-11-30T21:14:00.000-08:00

Whew -- it's finally Nov. 30 and I am grateful to have made it to the end of NaBloPoMo without missing a single day of blogging. Most days, I seemed to barely get my post done before the day ended. (I always did like to work under deadline pressure!)

I'm grateful to everyone who read my blog each day, and those took the time to comment here or send me email about it.

It's not exactly a new lesson, but NaBloPoMo 2011 confirmed for me yet again that I can't handle daily blogging. My email inbox has over a thousand unread emails collected over the past month, and probably nearly as many emails that need(ed) some sort of response or action. I've mostly disappeared from Facebook.

On the other hand, I think NaBloPoMo reminded me that I like to blog, and the longer I go between posts, the harder it is to get back to blogging. Doing more blogging keeps me looking for inspiration for topics. I got an email yesterday with the topic for next week's edition of Patients For A Moment, and instead of telling myself I should think about trying to pick up the challenge of it, I just did it. And that felt good. :)

So once again I end NaBloPomo relieved I managed to finish out the month with a post a day and inspired to try to be a better blogger. (But not inspired to be a daily blogger! Oh no! :)

Anyway, thanks to all of you who have been through this with me!

This Is Why I Write

2011-11-29T21:19:00.000-08:00

Sharon over at Bed, Body & Beyond is hosting the next edition of the patient-centric blog carnival Patients For A Moment asks interested bloggers to examine the reasons they choose to blog.

My first response is that I write because I've always written and always intended to write. Somewhere, there are a bunch of gothic/horror short stories I wrote in my tween and early teen years after discovering H.P. Lovecraft. In junior high, we had to do career reports each year from sixth through eighth grade. When I couldn't find a good estimate for income for a fiction writer, which I was required to include in my career report, I chose journalism to focus on because, well, the statistics were easier to find. I didn't even intend to study journalism; it was just a much easier topic to research for those reports.

In high school, I was on the student paper in a variety of roles. It was a way to meet people as much as an extracurricular activity. I learned that reporting was a great excuse to satisfy my curiosity on just about any topic, because just about anything could be fodder for a story for the school paper. Seven years after I left my job at The Associated Press on maternity leave, I still use my background in journalism as an excuse to ask personal questions. :-)

I was essentially blogging without a blog starting right after my daughter was born. What started out as an email of a baby photo every day or two to family members developed into a weekly email blast with 50 or 60 recipients, and finally moved to a real blog format for it fairly soon after I started Sick Momma in 2007.

Writing has long been an emotional release valve for me, probably starting with the diary my brother and sister gave me for my ninth birthday. The highlights I thought worth writing about back in third grade including my math homework (which was very exciting! That was the first year I had a hardback textbook instead of a workbook and had real homework!) and complaining about the deep unfairness of not having cookies in the house because my dad was on a diet. :) Yep, I'm sure someday someone's going to want to make a movie based on that diary!

More importantly, writing is the way I process things; it often feels like a keyboard is an extension of my brain. As a reporter, I didn't always know exactly what my story was going to be when I sat down at my computer with my interview notes next to me. The best stories I ever did sort of wrote themselves. (If only they had edited themselves too ...)

Blogging about my health issues started as a way to track what was going on, both for my personal records as well as keeping my extended family updated on what was happening. I needed it as a way to keep straight the chronology of what happened and what my doctors were doing. I still do some of that, certainly.

But something funny happened along the way, and blogging became more about community than I'd ever imagined. I get emails sometimes from people thanking me for writing about something that hits home for them. I also get so much support from my readers.

Why else do I write? I write because I want to be a voice out in the ether of what it's like to be (relatively) healthy and then suddenly, literally overnight, get sick and be forced to change my life. It's something I didn't know was even possible before it happened to me, and since then I've found out how relatively common it actually is.

When I write, I can express all kinds of emotions that I don't talk about otherwise. It allows me to connect with people who live anywhere in the world. It's personal, but I can also separate from it and write with a reporter's dispassion if it's a little too close for comfort.

Possibly most important of all, writing gives my life a sense of normalcy. I've been writing pretty much as far back as I can remember, and even if I feel like my vocabulary has shrunk thanks to the thick layer of fatigue that has slowed my brain to molasses, it would be so much infinitely worse if I couldn't write at all.
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Sharon's deadline for PFAM submissions is Monday, Dec. 5; please go visit her blog and consider offering a post. Her edition will go live on her site on Wednesday, Dec. 7.

Day 28: Nearing The End!

2011-11-28T21:52:00.000-08:00

The thing I love about NaBloPoMo is that it spurs me to write more frequently than I sometimes manage. The thing I hate about NaBloPoMo is the pressure to produce something, anything, every single day, whether I've got something meaningful to say or not.

I had a relatively successful holiday weekend on my own and crossed a higher percentage of items off my While The Cats (Are) Away list than I expected:

Ordered holiday cards
Tackled an area that's needed to be cleaned up (the small space between my side of the bed and my nightstand had collected way too many things that had slipped down there, and since the space is tight, it wasn't getting vacuumed either so it was mega dusty down there).
Made significant progress on crafty holiday gifts (the problem being that the more I make, the better they come out and then I look at the early ones and declare them Not Good Enough, which makes it hard to feel like I'm ever done with them.
Got Ellie's teacher gifts prepped for her to do her part.
Made a dent in my laundry.
Did some holiday shopping online, including ordering a dress I hope will fit well and look good enough to wear to the school auction. (I'm a huge fan of Coldwater Creek but always thought their prices were too high; earlier this year, I discovered that they periodically have sales of 40-50 percent off everything, sometimes with free shipping; those prices make shopping in their clearance section really affordable. I've bought cardigans that were originally priced at over $150 for as little as $18.)
Did some reading, including speeding my way through the newly released sequel (Crossed) to a dystopian novel I'd really enjoyed (Matched by Ally Condie). Interesting, but not nearly as good as the first book (which seems to be typical in most trilogies that the middle book is rather mediocre compared to the first and last). Won't stop me from reading book #3 when it's released.

Plenty more things that need doing, especially since Ellie keeps reminding me that her birthday is just 23 days away, and that's coincidentally also the first day of Chanukah. Lots to do. And I'm kind of relieved to know that I won't have to find time and inspiration to blog daily starting in just a few days.

Meanwhile, a friend posted a YouTube video of what she says is her favorite Christmas song. I have to say that if there were more songs like this getting played in stores and on the radio, I might not get so grumpy about being inundated with Christmas music constantly for a month (or more!) in public places. I hope you like it too. :)

Chronic Illness Means Plenty of Meds

2011-11-27T19:55:00.000-08:00

Last month, I broke down and bought one of those pill dispenser thingies at the dollar store.

For ages, I'd thought that I didn't need one because I can remember which meds I take when. But several times, I'd find myself halfway through my morning or evening routines and find myself distracted and not sure which pill I had just swallowed. Or realize belatedly that I'd just taken my morning meds at bedtime.

So I decided to try one of those weekly pill dispensers. And discovered that I really like it! It's nice to not have to say "ow" as I open those child safety lids the pharmacy sends them home in. They're always particularly hard for me to open in the mornings when my hands are at their stiffest.

In fact, it's just so much easier that I sort of wish I could have a monthly one, although I suspect that would be too easy to get confused about what day it is. :)

An added benefit is that since I only need to get pills out of the pharmacy bottles once a week, I managed to clear them off my bathroom counter and it looks much neater. Decluttering is a Good Thing. And when we went to Chicago in October, I only brought prescription bottles for the meds that are considered controlled substances; it made for a much smaller bag of meds in my carry-on than I've had previously.

The only downside is that it's not at all childproof, particularly since I keep it on my bathroom counter. But I've had lots of conversations with Ellie about how medicine isn't candy, even if it looks like candy, and how she should never touch my medicine. I think she's probably old enough now that it's not an issue, but I worry a little anyway. It helps that she doesn't use my bathroom and is almost never in it.

What do you do with your medications, especially if there are young children visiting or living in your home?

Tis the Season to Shop

2011-11-26T18:30:00.000-08:00

I was never very into Black Friday shopping. I have vague memories of doing some of it in my teens with friends, but even though I love a bargain, it's been forever since I tolerated the crazy crowds and long lines. And since getting sick, it's a challenge to do any kind of shopping, even with a close-in parking place and an empty store.

I do most of my shopping online these days, and try to keep an eye on some of the deal sites for bargain hunting. I'm thrifty, even with limits on my ability to shop. :)

I was excited when Target decided to offer free shipping on all purchases made with their Redcard, on top of the 5 percent discount, even on sale prices. I actually bought soap online last week, with the advertised sale price and free shipping. Who knew? :)

I finally started using Ebates.com too, after reading about it in various deal blogs for ages, and got my first "big fat check" from them this week. The way it works is you go to their site to start your shopping and go to the store website you want via their link. The percentages of cash back you get vary by the store and sometimes by the day. There's always a "double deal" each day with double the usual percentage back for that store. For Black Friday, they had 500 stores with double their usual cash back. They send out checks four times a year, I guess, or you can sign up to get your money via Paypal.

The cool thing? You can even get cash back on a Groupon deal from Ebates. I'm not sure it gets any better than that! :) And every little bit I can save adds up, which is good. (If you're new to Ebates and decide to sign up, I'd be grateful if you used my referral link; but if you're not comfortable with that, you can always go directly to the site at Ebates.com.)

What tricks do you have for saving money? Have you done much shopping this weekend, either online or in the stores?

Meanwhile, if you're going to be shopping at Amazon, please consider using a blogger's link. (Mine, if you want, or someone else's.) You pay the same amount you'd pay anyway, and it helps support your favorite blog(ger)s. I try hard to remember to always go through someone else's Amazon links since if I'm spending money anyway, I might as well help out a friend or someone whose blog I admire. :) No one is getting rich off these affiliate links; I personally have never earned enough to actually receive money. But hope springs eternal, right? :)

Full disclosure: I receive no compensation for this post other than what I might get if you use my affiliate/referral links. I wrote this post because I know I appreciate the tips I get from other blogs like Chief Family Officer, Totally Target, Moms Need To Know and Moneywise Moms and figured it could be helpful to share some of what I've learned from them. It is not a paid or sponsored post in any way.

Things First Graders Say: The Poetry Edition

2011-11-25T21:21:00.000-08:00

I like so many of these that it's hard to choose a favorite. But I'm especially fond of Gili's: "Something that someone writes with some words." You can say that about so many things!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T22:36:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone who celebrates it had a good Thanksgiving!

So, I'm trying to come up with a creative name for an Etsy shop, where we'd sell a combination of hair candy and Scott's amazing woodworking.

Any ideas for a name that would encompass both? Some of the ideas we've been playing with (that I'm not even sure if they're available!) are Branches & Blooms, Twigs and Fibers, Stitches and Nails ... but none of them really resonate for us. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Have I shared any of his work here? If not, here are a few photos. (Aargh! Blogger won't let me add more than these two, but Scott does a wide variety of work on his lathe.)

We donated this segmented piece to our school's auction, which is coming up in December. The woods are naturally those colors; it's made of 721 pieces of maple, Oregon black walnut, bloodwood and purpleheart. Amazing work, isn't it?

It's part of a series of 8 that Scott made, but the only one that was carved.

Things First Graders Say -- The Thanksgiving Edition

2011-11-23T22:21:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure why Ellie doesn't have a quote, but I thought it was still amusing enough to share the comments that her teacher captured as the kids were asked what they knew about Thanksgiving.

I'm hoping these were the responses the kids made before they started learning about the holiday. :)

Meanwhile, I hope you and yours have a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow! (And for you Canadians, I hope your Thanksgiving last month was awesome, too!) (Hey, do Canadians traditionally eat turkey on the Canadian Thanksgiving, too?)

One of Those Days

2011-11-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

The rainy season has officially begun here in lovely western Oregon. And boy was it rainy today! It was coming down in torrents and way too many streets got flooded thanks to storm drains that were clogged with fallen leaves.

Can I just say I wanted to stay home today?

Instead, I went to visit my rheumatologist, whose office is way across town. If I get lucky, it's only about a 15 minute drive. But I didn't get lucky, and it was well over 45 minutes.

To be honest, I wish I'd gone with my first inclination, which was to call and reschedule. My hands have been hurting so much that I really dreaded the drive, but I thought hey, maybe going to see him when I'm having a lousy day will help clarify things for him.

Instead, it clarified things for me: I need to find a new rheumatologist, preferably on this side of town.

My rheumatologist has given up and just shrugs off anything new that I bring up. My hands have swollen knuckles? Eh, they've done x-rays of my hands and feet before that don't show any joint damage. No big deal. My fatigue is up? Probably just the time change.

Mind you, I don't know what I wanted him to do about it. But I felt patronized when he told me, yet again, to just "push through it" when fatigue and pain limit my functionality. Which would be nice, if I could actually manage to do it. But how could he think I haven't tried over the nearly 4.5 years since I got sick?

Sigh.

A Miscellaneous Kind of Monday

2011-11-21T17:59:00.000-08:00

It's been funny to watch Ellie deal with the daylight savings time change. On Sunday night, we ate at our favorite local Chinese restaurant. It was pitch black out, of course. Ellie, who was facing a window, said something like, "It's so late! I can't believe I'm up so late!" It was 6:15 p.m. :)

*******

Today was parent-teacher conferences at school. (The kids are out of school all Thanksgiving week here.) I also had more hair candy for the school auction to drop off that I was worried about getting organized and doing the paperwork for. Last night, I was busily sewing flowers on headbands since Scott had signed us up for an 11:15 a.m. slot, which is on the early side for me to be somewhere, especially on a Monday.

(An aside: Ellie wanted the lime green flower on a lime green headband so badly that she offered to pay for it out of her allowance. Which is huge, because most of the things she begs for, when we tell her she can buy it with her allowance, she declares that she doesn't want to spend her money on it! She offered me $4 for it, and I told her I'd have to think about it. It's a pretty big deal since she only gets $1 per week. I decided that I'd "match" her and we could bring the money into the school office next week as a cash donation. A teensy cash donation, but huge that it's coming from a first-grader!)

There's a rhinestone in the flower's center that doesn't really show but Ellie insisted was necessary. :)

Anyway, since I was worried about having time for the donation paperwork and also had to actually choose which flowers I was going to hold onto and which I'd be giving, I woke up too early (7:30 a.m.) and couldn't go back to sleep. Which has made for a very long day and will probably make tomorrow, when I have to be way across town at 10:40 a.m. for an appointment with my rheumatologist, rather challenging, too. It all kind of snowballs, and I'm very thankful I chose to stay home for the Thanksgiving weekend while Scott and Ellie visit his parents.

You can tell how tired I am because I haven't even gotten to the point on this anecdote yet. Anyway, we found out when we got to the school office that Ellie's first grade teacher wouldn't be there today. Her son, who's a freshman in college and allergic to dairy, apparently ate something with dairy in it yesterday and had an anaphylactic reaction. He tried taking Benedryl instead of using his Epi-pen and ended up in the hospital. Luckily, he's going to be fine, but how scary for a parent!! We'll be going back to meet with her next week; meanwhile, Ellie's Jewish and Hebrew studies teachers said she was doing really well. We were a bit surprised to hear how well she's doing in Hebrew especially; I guess I can stop worrying now that she might have forgotten everything over the summer when we failed to practice it with her. :)

*****

So more about next month's school auction: Little things add up. I was surprised to realize as I did the paperwork this morning that my donation of (relatively) inexpensive hair candy was totally up to about $300, if they're able to sell everything. (My hair clips, headbands and brooches will be sold as priced, not actually bid on, since it's silly to have people bidding on something with a list price of $6. :) That's not as insignificant as I thought my donations were going to be!

Here's what I took today:

Hard to capture headband details! The orange flowers are on a brown headband. The one on the right is purple with metallic embroidery; that flower was a funky fabric that has pink, blue and purple tones with little circular metal disks scattered through it. On the left, the lavender headband is scalloped, and that's a kanzashi folded flower made from scraps from fabric Ellie's grandmother made a dress for her from. (Yes, I made sure to keep some flowers from that fabric for Ellie!!)

I'm keeping this one for me:

I do like it a lot, but a big reason I'm keeping it is I got the headband at the dollar store and the fabric covering it is so thin that I fear sewing a flower to it was too much and it's going to start coming undone.

Well, that's about all for today! :) I think I'm headed to bed super early tonight. Like possibly right now.

Somewhat Random Links Worth Reading (IMHO)

2011-11-20T12:59:00.000-08:00

Well, I figure if I don't have anything in particular to say, I can at least share with you what I've been reading and found interesting and/or humorous. Of course, there's no guarantee you will find these things interesting, but it's worth a shot, right? :)

The Washington Post had an article this week on hospitals' embracing of complementary/alternative medicine, even if primarily as an additional revenue stream and way to attract patients away from other facilities.

An article on stalking tips seemed right on target when it quoted the woman leading a seminar on dissecting online dating profiles saying about one, "I hope no one here knows him" because I was recently browsing a crafting blog I sometimes follow and was surprised to find a local friend of mine in a photo at the top of a post offering a crafting challenge to do something with a unitard. It was a photo he'd posted on Flickr of himself in a halloween costume that she had (quite legally and with proper attribution) that she used to poke fun of unitards with. What are the odds?

A hilarious video poking fun of new iPhone's Siri at College Humor. Warning: Contains offensive language not appropriate for (most) offices or young children. I think I've watched four times, and it makes me laugh out loud each time. :)

An advice columnist essentially tells a non parent to stop judging today's parents by comparing them unfavorably with his rosy memories of his childhood. I'd personally expand the target to include parents of children an entire generation (i.e. 10 or more years) older than the children of the parent being criticized. Things change rapidly these days. My kid's not even seven yet, and I've lost touch with what parents of babies and toddlers have to deal with. (No one had an iPhone to entertain their kid with when my kid was a toddler.)

A better pain chart, which has been floating around the internet for ages but is always worth a look, especially if you've had to put a number on your pain anytime lately. I hate those damn charts. I need to remember to print this one and take it with me, especially if I ever end up at the ER again with anything approaching the pain I had with that gallbladder attack last year that the EMT thought was a panic attack.

Slate had a fascinating article about the hazards of doing medical research on lab rats that everyone should read. Turns out, those rodents in control groups are unhealthier in many ways than the ones getting experimented on. And can I just say that the guy who's publicizing the issue with medical research really looks like maybe he could use more than his single meal a day.

Do you have an Apple product with auto-correct? I do, and it can be embarrassing if I don't catch what the auto-correct decides I might mean to say on Facebook or Twitter. Apparently, I'm not the only with this issue, nor am I the only one who finds it funny when it happens to my friends. Check out this site, Damn You, Auto Correct!, but again, don't read it at work. And don't read it if you're likely to get offended by bad language.

So thanks to the small world of Facebook, when I reconnected with a former work colleague (who I haven't seen in, well, about a decade), I discovered she'd had a baby girl even though somehow, I'd always assumed she didn't want kids. Turned out, I didn't know her particularly well at all and I was probably just projecting because in those days, I didn't want kids. But I was curious about the husband I'd never met but occasionally heard about, and somehow found a link to his blog somewhere, which I started reading and found I loved his sense of humor and read all his archives. :) Luckily, at the time, their kid was only around a year old, give or take. Anyway, he apparently has a deal to write periodically for the TODAYMoms blog (i.e. a mom oriented blog affiliated with the Today Show, and he recently had a post there in defense of potty humor. Since I'm incredibly immature and giggle way too much at potty humor, I liked it. You might too. And yes, I have the books Everyone Poops
and The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts. I consider the former especially to be one of the greatest perks of parenthood since I'd never heard of the book before becoming a parent. :) And yes, I fear that my child appears to have inherited my mirth over everything potty related. But maybe she'll outgrow it, right?

Day 19 And Counting

2011-11-19T21:11:00.000-08:00

Nearly two-thirds of the way done with NaBloPoMo and #NHBPM, and wishing it were already December, if only that wouldn't make me late for way too many pre-holiday preparations. Remind me next October how much I whinged about this year's daily posting challenges, ok? :)

Ellie had a lovely time at her friend's birthday party tea party/slash spa day and came home with a bottle of lovely bath salts and a very glittery pink (foam) crown. :)

But during the 20 minutes or so she was home between skate practice and going to the party, I learned she was yet again having symptoms of a bladder infection, including having run to the bathroom several times during practice. Well, for accuracy's sake, she skated to the bathroom. (And I try hard not to imagine the mechanics of using the bathroom as a female while wearing roller skates, especially ones without toe stops.)

Sigh. Well, that hadn't been in our plans for the day. But that's life, right?

So I sent her off to the birthday with Scott, and then after they got back, we headed off to an urgent care to get a urine test done.

But that was only after I did the mental dance between the benefits of going, getting it out of the way so we could start the antibiotics sooner versus waiting until Sunday morning, calling her pediatrician's office at precisely 8:30 a.m. when they start answering the phones and getting one of the limited weekend slots they save. (They're open for patients 9a.m.-1p.m. on weekends.) I'd prefer to have her see her own pediatrician, or at least one of the docs from the same practice, but it would have meant that there was a good chance they wouldn't be able to go to skate practice on Sunday morning and Scott had already scheduled a coaching session for himself then.

So we went today and had to do the first-come, first-served wait. We arrived just before 3:30 p.m., and didn't walk out until 5:15 p.m. Could have been worse; I would have considered that a short visit if we'd gone to an ER! :) But it sure felt like forever.

It didn't help that I realized I was hungry when we got there, and of course hadn't brought snacks. And then I really got grumpy when, while collecting a urine sample, Ellie hadn't sat far enough back on the toilet so I ended up getting sprayed with urine that ricocheted off the edge of the toilet. (I might not have gotten so grumpy if I weren't hungry. Or if she hadn't thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world. But we've done these urine sample collections with her so many times over the past three or four years that it irritated me pretty badly that she'd done that, and my irritation lasted until my jeans were finally dry from it.)

(Somehow, I thought only boys ever peed on their moms. Especially once they were past infancy. It was a learning experience when Ellie was a baby and managed to spray urine in my face while I was changing a diaper, too. Who knew parenthood was so full of learning experiences? :)

Yeah, so that was my day. How was yours? Anyone pee on you? :)

Scott To The Rescue!

2011-11-18T22:53:00.000-08:00

I have a gift shelf, like many moms I know, of things I've picked up on sale here or there so I have something on hand for when Ellie gets invited to birthday parties and/or when I need a reward for her good behavior.

But somehow, even though they are things I think would make good gifts (I'm partial to board games and like to gift them, for instance), when faced with a party for a specific kid, everything on the gift shelf that isn't earmarked for my kid looks ... generic. Which I guess it is, since it was bought without a specific recipient in mind.

Last month, I grabbed something off the gift shelf for a party for one of Ellie's classmates who I knew well enough to know she'd love one of the Klutz books I'd bought for Ellie: Fairies: Petal People You Make Yourself.

Of course, when Ellie saw what she was giving Rose for her birthday, she cried because she wanted it. Of course. After all, I knew she'd love it, that's why I had bought it for her! She doesn't know, but I've bought another copy for her, which she'll get for Chanukah.

So tonight, I found myself standing in front of my gift shelf again. Ellie's going to a party tomorrow for a girl she met at daycare after I got sick, when they were 2.5. I'm not sure why I didn't look earlier, but I stood in front of the shelf late this afternoon and everything was either not girly enough (she's a very girly girl, even more so than Ellie!), something I thought was too likely she might already have, or too small a gift but not something that paired easily with anything else I had on the gift shelf.

Luckily, Scott had decided to take Ellie to Costco for dinner and the weekly shopping trip (we buy a lot of our produce there!), and when he called me to ask if there was anything he didn't have in his cart that I wanted, I told him I needed a favor and it was likely to be unpleasant. But he agreed to visit the toy aisles, something that's not much fun with Ellie because pretty much everything she sees, she exclaims, "I want that! Oh! I want that!" But he kept me on the phone so I could help choose the "right" gift, even though he had to repeatedly remind Ellie that their mission was to find a gift for her friend, not for herself.

And sure enough, he found the perfect gift for a little girl who's having a "spa day tea party" -- a selection of bath stuff with a Hello Kitty theme that was right in the price range I gave him. I topped it off with a flower hair clip I made that Ellie chose, and it's a lovely gift:

Doesn't the flower clip make a great "bow" for the present topper? :)

But it took at least 10 minutes of phone time to choose, and it saved me from having to make a trip out on a day I didn't make it out of my jammies and definitely didn't have the energy to go shopping. But what else could I have done if the stars hadn't aligned for Scott to be my designated shopper?

So today, I'm extra thankful for my awesome husband, who willingly tackled a task that wasn't exactly his cup of tea. :)

(I wish I was going to be able to go to this party tomorrow; it's a place I haven't heard of but it sounds very cool. You can see its website here if you're as curious as I was. I hope Ellie will pose for a photo after she's had her spa day! :)

Thankful Thursday

2011-11-17T22:34:00.000-08:00

With one week left until the (American) Thanksgiving, I figure it's past time to start thinking about what I'm thankful for, both the mundane and the exceptional.

I hope it goes without saying that I'm most thankful for friends and family, but I suppose it shouldn't go without saying, should it? I won't claim my kid is an angel, but she's smart, funny (both knowingly and unknowingly :), talented and interesting in the best possible way. And with a decade of marriage under my belt, I can honestly say that I married up. :)

Random other things I'm grateful for:

That we ended up at the school we were meant to be at, even though we didn't set out to consider it. Somewhat ironically, it took my getting comfortable with the idea of sending Ellie to a school that had "Episcopal" in its name for me to be comfortable sending her to a Jewish one. I love the community of parents at Ellie's school as well as the staff. The fact that she's getting a great Jewish foundation as well as a great secular education is just icing on the cake.
That I finally got approved for disability, which gives my family a little more financial wiggle room, a little more pad for our budget. Mind you, I'd rather have my health. I'd rather have fewer doctor visits, fewer medical bills, fewer prescription co-pays. I'd way rather be able to work, or at least be able to manage as a proper SAHM and not have to send my kid to an after-school program, which would save a considerable amount of money right there.
That I live in the age of the internet. I can only imagine how isolating it must have been to have to have a chronic illness 20 years ago. (And technically, if it weren't for the internet, I wouldn't have met my husband, even though our first meeting was in real space. But I never would have been at that party if it weren't for the internet. :) But thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, even when I'm too sick to leave home or even talk on the phone, I can get support from other people in similar straits. And that's huge in combating the isolation that's a natural result of debilitating chronic illnesses.
That even though I have been challenging to fully diagnose, my doctors have doubted that I have an illness, they have never accused me of malingering or exaggerating, they have never accused me of being a drug seeker. I hear way too often about other people with chronic illnesses who face all those barriers to decent health care.
That I've found a creative outlet that I can do in small doses and (generally) not cause myself to flare too badly. I love making my fabric flowers and it's kind of fun to play with the idea that Scott and I will open an Etsy shop and sell my hair candy and his woodturning.
The amazing fall colors the trees turn in Portland. We have a vine maple at the bottom of our driveway that is a glorious shade of red that I wouldn't have imagined could occur in nature if I didn't get to see it in my own front yard. Wow!

There's undoubtedly many more things I'm thankful for, including all the amazing people who read my blog! I started blogging thinking it wouldn't make a difference if no one read ever it, but y'know, it really does make a difference that people do read it. So thank you!!

Quiet Day At Home

2011-11-16T21:44:00.000-08:00

I try to volunteer in our school library on Wednesdays, but I just couldn't face it today so I had a quiet day at home instead.

(When I volunteer, I pretty much just sit at the main desk during the school librarian's lunch hour so that the middle schoolers have the library as an option during their recess. Which means the most physically strenuous part of the gig is getting myself dressed and to the school. If I check out three books to kids, it's a very busy day. :)

Didn't really get anything done, other than read some email, some news articles and not nearly enough blogs, and managed to burn my dinner to charcoal. But hey, I got the kitchen fan on quickly enough that I didn't set off our smoke alarms! :)

I seem to have refreshed my passion for shopping on eBay. It started innocently enough with looking for a few gymnastics leotards for Ellie, who had outgrown her old ones enough that she got red marks from the elastic when she wore one last Friday for a daylong gymnastics camp. Since I've got her signed up for three days during Thanksgiving week, I decided I needed to find her something new asap. When Target.com was out of appropriate leotards in her size, I started browsing eBay and nabbed a few.

The problem is, once I start browsing eBay, it's hard to stop! My "watch list" is six pages long with a wide variety of items divided almost equally between things for Ellie and rhinestone type buttons for the fabric flower centers. It's all SO tempting, but I keep trying to remind myself that I haven't used up all the ones I bought in my first shopping spree.

We're Halfway There

2011-11-15T22:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I've made it halfway through NaBloPoMo and #NHBPM, and that's something!

It has seemed harder this year, but I know I always struggle through it so it might just seem harder this year because I'm in the middle of it. Things always seem harder when one is in the middle of them.

But I'm dragging myself through more than I think I did last year this time. And I just can't seem to catch up. And then I remind myself of Flylady's mantra of "I don't want you to try to catch up; I just want you to jump in where we are."

And although I've given up on "flying" with Flylady, the advice to not try to catch up because, really, it simply leads to feeling overwhelmed is good advice.

Now if I were just better at feeling comfortable simply "jumping in" when and where I can. But it's always good to have goals, right?

And meanwhile, I can't get that Bon Jovi song out of my brain! :)

The Main Downsides To NaBloPoMo For Me

2011-11-14T22:39:00.000-08:00

The main downsides for me to daily blogging is that I can't keep up as much as I'd like with my favorite bloggers (not that I'm good at keeping up with everyone I'd like to keep up with when I'm not blogging either!) and I can't put as much time and thought into the posts I'd like.

On nights like tonight, I really just don't have anything to say. I don't even have any good, new photos to share with y'all.

So, um. I guess this is just one of those desperate-to-find-something-to-write-about posts that I occasionally resort to during the annual self-torture that is NaBloPoMo. :)

Hope your week is off to a good start!

A Library Love Letter

2011-11-13T23:28:00.000-08:00

I've loved the public library as long as I can remember.

I don't have many early childhood (i.e. preschool age) memories that are clear, but I remember half a dozen distinct trips to the public library from those years and I'm sure they're just a fraction of the visits we made.

By the time I was 9, I was riding my bike the mile or so from my house to the library. I probably would have done it sooner, but that's the age I officially learned how to cross the major four-lane street between home and the library. :)

Some of my happiest childhood memories involve the public library. And flash forward to right now, I'm still loving my public library, where I borrow books, music and movies on a regular basis, thanks to their outreach program for folks like me who are mostly (or fully) housebound.

But right now, I'm especially loving the service they started participating in earlier this year that allows me to legally download three songs per week per library card (and yes, I use my husband's and daughter's, which I was told was legal as long as they agreed to it) from a site called Freegal. I highly recommend checking with your library to see if they participate in this service too. It's awesome! :) I actually set a repeating alert on my ipod to remind me on Saturday nights that it's my last chance to download that week, and one on Mondays reminding I have more downloads available.

You add the free downloads of music I can keep forever to all the other services I can access from home, from e-books to digital movie downloads, and it's really amazing. I could never afford to buy all the library books I read, the library DVDs I watch, the music I'm legally downloading.

And I love that I live in a city that appreciates its libraries as much as I do! Multnomah County Library recently was awarded five stars by the Library Journal, one of only four in the nation in its category. More than 22.7 million items were circulated in fiscal 2010, a record high for any library in the nation serving fewer than a million residents.

It looks like we're going to have to vote next spring on funding for our library, and I'm hopeful that Portlanders will again choose to support a library funding measure. The current local option levy that provides 66 percent of the library's budget expires June 30.

Meanwhile, I hope you all had a good weekend and the coming week is kind to you.

-----
Eds. Note: In case this sounds like a sponsored post of some sort, I want to be clear that I was in no way compensated for this post, nor was I solicited in any way to write it. I was just downloading from Freegal and marveling over the many valuable services I get from my library. I guess it all boils to this: I'm just a girl who loves her library! :)

What A Day!

2011-11-12T22:38:00.000-08:00

Today was a doozy. But a good doozy!

Scott and Ellie competed in their first roller skating competition just across the state line in Vancouver, Wash., and did awesome! Scott came home with two firsts, and Ellie "tied" for third in her sole event. (Tied is in quotation marks because they gave every kid in that event an award. There was one first-place winner, one second-place winner, and all the rest of the kids got certificates saying they were in third place. They didn't have the score sheets posted yet when we left so I don't know how she really did point-wise.)

I'm most proud of both of them simply for participating in it. And I'm proud of myself for managing to get Ellie's hair in a bun (with a little help from Scott). :)

Boy, a little sparkly blue eye shadow really emphasized those eyes!

A matching scrunchie came with the dress we bought used last June.

Her scrunchie is bigger than her bun! :)

Sadly, I didn't get a decent photo of the two of them together in their skate outfits. I might have to re-stage it ...

More tomorrow! I'm beyond tired ...

Paying The Piper

2011-11-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I crafted more than I typically do in a single day.

(Although I was a little disappointed that my output wasn't higher for the amount of time I put into those felt flowers. Doing triple layers required exponentially more work than double layers to keep them rolled tightly and get them glued up, not to mention having to cut out a third more of the felt fringes.)

So this morning, I woke up with swollen, painful hands that hurt to grasp, flex and pretty much do anything besides letting them stay curled into claws.

Which means I'm not going to get out my glue gun and work on my satin flowers. Nor will I be making any kanzashi flowers today.

Ah well. It's yet another reality check that, even after nearly 4.5 years of this illness, I haven't mastered pacing myself.

Today is all about resting up to try to be as present as possible for my family over the weekend.

Hope all of you have a good weekend!

---------------

P.S. If you enjoy the blog carnival Patients For A Moment and want it to continue in 2012, please consider applying to host it at your blog. See here for how to apply. Leslie has extended the deadline, but please apply ASAP.