Mister MiracleGro

Tags

babies, family, hearing loss, immunizations, kids, parenting

Today was Thor’s 6 month checkup, which came a couple of weeks late because we had to reschedule it. The doctor seemed rather pleased with him, and even joked that we must be feeding him MiracleGro instead of formula. She swears he grows by leaps and bounds every time she sees him. I can completely see why she says that. Thor is 30 inches tall and 18 1/2 pounds now at 6 1/2 months old, which is off the charts on their growth chart. Most babies don’t grow as big has he has until they are at least a year old.

She also seemed happy with his development so far, she gave him some tummy time and watched him roll around and reach for everything. She said to help him practice sitting up a little more, and to give him lots of time on the floor on a blanket so he could start working on scooting and crawling.

On a side note, she’s referring us to a genetics doctor, not because she thinks anything is wrong with him presently, but because we have discovered that the cause of my husband’s deafness may be a congenital defect. As Thor gets a little bigger he will have to be screened for the same inner ear defect, for which sadly there is no treatment or cure. Thankfully it’s only at most a 50/50 shot of him having it at most, and if he does it just means he will likely slowly lose his hearing as he gets older, when it will happen, or to what extent, there’s no way to tell.

This condition can also be aggravated by head trauma, so sadly no contact sports for our little tough guy until we know for sure what we are dealing with. Unfortunately at the present time he is still far too young to even be properly screened for the condition. His hearing for now is extremely good, so the doctor can’t see doing the tests until he is old enough to understand what is happening, not to mention he is still small enough that he may still be far too little for the scans to see clearly.

So far so good though, now we just have to get through the post-immunization grumpiness. Thankfully he won’t need any more shots until he is a year old. That enough is reason to celebrate in my opinion.

Please Help Find Nichole

Reblogged from M.S. Fowle:

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UPDATE: Last night, May 20th, the body of Nichole Kristine Cable was found just miles from her home. Continue to keep Nichole and her family in your hearts, pray even if you've never prayed before. The perpetrator is still out there somewhere. As more information becomes available, I will update you all accordingly.

Thank you so much for your support.

Read more… 582 more words

Please share this, lets all help find her. Sadly with technology today, she could be anyone's daughter.

How to Miss a Childhood

Tags

family, kids, parenting

How to Miss a Childhood.

I am reblogging this cause I think it is a very important message. I know I have made a lot of mistakes like this in the past. Thankfully each new day is a chance to start over, and do things better.

Writer’s block

Tags

Boredom, writing, NaNoWriMo, writer's block, imagination

Yes this has been me as of late, well, minus the viking helmet. As much of a plan as I may have for one story or another, the words and sometimes the motivation seems to evaporate before I get it written down on paper.

When did writing become so hard? I remember a time when I was young and it used to be so easy. I used to have a million ideas, and I would wake up in the middle of the night and write all sorts of things that couldn’t wait until morning. I guess I have no idea where my enthusiasm went, probably drowned out by my now adult life, and my seemingly never ending ungodly stress level.

Sometimes I worry my writing won’t be good enough. No one close to me ever seems to want to read it anymore, not that they ever read it to begin with. I’ve had a printed copy of my second novel sitting here on the book shelf and year and a half now, and even my hubby hasn’t given it so much as a second glance.

Several years ago my friend Penny would have been standing next to my printer with her hands out waiting for the next chapter. She died from cancer a few years ago, and finishing a project since then is so much harder, especially without my one person fan club, and her encouragement. That’s one of only a very long list of things I still miss about her, and always will.

Penny didn’t just passively read what I had written, but loved to give me her input, encouraging things she believed would make what I had written even better. I think all of us need that sometimes. We need to hear not only what needs fixing, and what we can do to make improvements, but also what is good and going right. In other words, this is what works, and these are the things that would make it even better.

Sometimes I get so caught up in believing it all has to be perfect the first time, that it completely stops my momentum. I get discouraged believing no one will ever want to read it, no matter how much love and hard work I put into telling the story. I ask myself what I do it all for.

The answer is, it’s because I have to…

If the story doesn’t get told, it is wasted. What good are all the infinite worlds inside your head, if you are the only one that ever journeys into them? I keep trying to remind myself of these things, and keep edging forward, even if baby steps. I don’t want to believe I have an irretrievable imagination. Even if the old ideas won’t return, or seem childish now through older eyes, I hope I haven’t ceased to invent new ideas, new universes, and those that reside in them.

I don’t think my mind would be happy at all, limited to just one world.

Falling apart

Tags

depression, grief, loss, memorial, sadness

The last few weeks have been rough, and this last week especially. A lot has been going on, and there is so much weighing on me, so much worry, sadness, and frustration. It made it nearly impossible to want to work on the book, or to even write here, but tonight I am making myself at least write a blog post. It’s time I wrote something.

A lot of the worries are the usual ones, mostly a matter of money, but those aren’t the only things as of late. I’m dealing with not being able to find a ride to my daughter’s high school graduation, as badly as I want to be there. No amount of asking nicely, or offers of gas money has been adequate to persuade anyone. People make me feel like a loser for even asking. I can use greyhound to get half an hour away from there, but there’s no public transportation that can get me any closer. You’d be amazed how many people think you are worthless just because you can’t afford a car of your own.

As badly as that is weighing on me, it hasn’t helped that I found out one of my best friends for almost the last 20 years has passed away. It apparently happened months ago, and no one bothered to call and let me know he had passed, or that he was even getting in that bad of shape. I was in town a couple of weeks before he passed on, if I’d known I would have liked to have gone and seen him one last time, but sadly I didn’t get to.

I could have called and asked, long before I did, but honestly I had been dreading it. It may seem odd, but I kept telling myself that has long as I didn’t hear otherwise, Jimbo was still there. It’s hard to imagine that I will go back to town to visit, and I won’t be able to call him, and see him a short time later riding up on his bike wearing one of his old flannel shirts, playing with one random gadget or another. He’d pull more anime dvds out of his backpack and ask me if I wanted to split a pizza, and sit and talk until I’d be half falling asleep on him and have to ask him to finish the movies off at home.

That’s just who he was, strange, harmless, in a world of his own, but at the same time as caring and wonderful as he was introverted and shy. He was a hermit, but adopted my daughter and I as a surrogate family. She adored him from the time she was a small baby clear up until the end. He’d do anything for her, much more than her own father had ever done, even if it was just sitting on the floor with her watching cartoons, or remembering her birthday by bringing her some of the oddest presents under the sun.

Nothing I say right now could be enough. It’s all just words trying to relate, what really can’t be put into words. Someday soon it will hit me for real. I’ll sit and fall apart, but the world will keep turning, just a lot lonelier without him there.

When it rains it pours

Tags

NaNoWriMo, rants, writing

So far I am not doing well this year for Camp NaNoWriMo, at least not where word count is concerned. I think my personal life is conspiring against me to keep me from getting much of anything done. Isn’t that usually how it works?

I have only one chapter of my novel written so far, but at least I am semi-happy with it. I have an idea of where the story needs to go for a change, but my biggest thing is finding the time to actually sit down and put words on paper. It wouldn’t be such an issue if there weren’t so many important things that were pressing in my life right now. Doctors need to be seen, appointments need to be kept, and babies need to be tended to, even if it means you are too exhausted to write a coherent sentence once you have them to sleep.

You don’t need to see the screen or the keyboard, the cat believes looking at him is infinitely more interesting…

Sorry no updates until now, pardon me while I return to fighting the cat for custody of my keyboard. You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog surfing.

Protected: Chapter One

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NaNoWriMo, writing

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Blogger Awards

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awards

Thank you all of those who have given me blogger awards over the last several days. Please understand it may be several days to come yet before I have time to get around to doing the posts about them. Between grumpy baby, appointments and being a little under the weather the last couple of days, I am not getting much done lately. Over the next couple of weeks I have a novel to plan and a lot of work to do for an online graphics project I am working on with my husband. I will try to squeeze the posts in around those. You might even find em squeezed in an abbreviated post all together.

Please don’t mistake my not hopping right to it for lack of appreciation. I at least wanted to make a short post to thank you all, and at least let you all know that I do truly appreciate the gesture, even if I don’t have time at the moment to post accordingly.

Hearing myself think

Tags

babies, family, kids, life, mom, motherhood, parenting

The after shot crabbiness is still in full swing. The swelling on his leg from the shot is going down, and all the other symptoms seem to have vanished but this fussiness. He was like this for awhile after last time, and I can’t remember how long it took to clear up then. I just hope it goes away soon. My nerves are frazzled.

It seems any little thing can send him into a crying spell, putting him down for even a second, walking out of the room, me trying to eat anything, all of them seem to induce tantrums. It’s all John and I can do to keep him in a good mood even for a few minutes at a time. We can’t even have a conversation when he is fussing because John’s hearing is too bad for him to hear anything over him.

I know as much as we parents love our kids to pieces, it’s days like these last few days that really put our patience and sanity to the test. Sometimes nothing you do seems to work, or only works for a minute and you are back to square one all over again. His diaper is clean and dry, he’s been fed, he’s being held, what more could he want? We seem to keep going in the same circles over and over again trying to figure it out.

I can’t even come close to pretending I am one of those people with those perfect looking lives you see on a lot of parenting blogs, I won’t even pretend to be. I get frustrated and frazzled with the best of people with motherhood on days like today. But I also love my son more than anything, and that alone, is what makes all this worth it.

I know better days are coming…please come soon…

Tomorrow would be nice…

Unhappy Campers

Tags

babies, family, kids, life, parenting

It’s been a very long day today. The day started off nice enough, the weather was somewhat warm, and it was nice and dry at least the first half of the day. Unfortunately today happened to be Thor’s four month checkup at the doctor’s, and that means, you guessed it, more shots.

He did ok with them at the time, he cried a bit in the office afterward, but promptly fell asleep as soon as we put him back into the stoller to leave. He seemed mostly okay until mid evening just about the time the tylenol was starting to wear off, and then he started getting really grumpy. I am not sure if it’s the shots, or just his usual evening fussiness with the not feeling well from shots on top of it. I am thinking both.

I think getting him his shots is almost as rough on me as it is on him. I know they are necessary, but I always feel so awful having to put him through things that I know hurt and are scary for him. I worry, my husband says, far too much. Maybe I do. All I want is a healthy happy baby. I just really hate to see him cry that way. You’d think it would get easier with him being the fourth baby, but it doesn’t. It’s still hard.

Thor is going to grow up in a completely different world than my older kids did. There are family members my older kids loved that he will never get to see. Sometimes it’s sad to think about it, but he is never going to know what it is like to have a grandpa. He won’t have siblings or even cousins close to his age to grow up with. Sometimes I worry things will be too lonely for him. Part of me doesn’t know if I want any more children, but there’s a small part of me that doesn’t want Thor to grow up all by himself. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have another baby, but the thought of going through yet another pregnancy in my forties really scares me.

I know I can’t always fix everything for him. I can’t shield him from every hurt and disappointment he will face in life, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t some small part of me that wants to. I think all parents have that desire inside them. I just hope that I can balance my need to protect him, with giving him the room he is going to need to grow. I want to be loving and not smothering. I want to help him grow strong and not hold him back from the hard things he will need to do for himself, on his own, to help him grow.

You’d think I’d have the answers by now but I don’t. My past mistakes have taught me more of what not to do, than what I should do now. There’s not magic book of instructions to give us all the answers. I guess we all just have to do the best we can, and hope in the end it’s enough.