Nap Time

My older kids, Bekah and Jeremy, don't nap as a general rule. On rare occasions, when they are whiny and cranky and overly emotional, I implore them to nap with me. 

It usually means a very late bedtime (it did tonight), so I only use it as a last resort. 

I have been honest in this blog about my struggle with depression. It's something that's waiting in the wings at all times, an understudy always scheming to throw over the principle actor. 

In my darkest moments, when all seems lost and a permanent exit seems the only viable option, days like today serve to pull me back from the door. 

We all got into my bed today (after rearranging the covers). Bekah snuggled up to me but Jeremy tried to wedge himself between me and her. She was not having it. The only solution was for me to sleep in the middle, flanked by each of them. 

Lying there between them I felt so loved. I see their faces light up when I enter the room. They fight over themselves to sit on my lap, to get my attention, to snuggle with me. It's enough, in those dark moments, to pry the icy hand of depression off of my forearm. 

I know it's different for everyone struggling with depression. I know my relationship with my kids will change. I know they will seem to want me less. I hope that the depression will grip me less in the coming years, though I know I'll fight it for a long time to come. 

In the meantime, I will continue to build memories with them that will make the icy grip less paralyzing. 

A Quickie, For Momentum

I have nine minutes before Conan O'Brien starts his monologue. I am going to be brief and to the point. I am exhausted! I started working with a personal trainer a few weeks ago. I have known her for quite some time (10+ years), but we lost touch with each other for a few years in there.

Enter Facebook and it allowed us to reconnect. I was also pleased to see that she had become a personal trainer. Having known her for a while I knew she had a passion for fitness and for helping people. Not having seen her in person for a while, I was curious to see how she had transformed.

Mind you, in my opinion she was at a healthy weight the last time I saw her. Her appearance, though, had changed dramatically. When I saw her at my assessment in December, she looked improved but not even really physically. There was more tone to her muscles but really she seemed calm and sure of herself.

She's always been hilarious and relatable, so I knew that working with her was going to be awesome. Obviously, I am still far away from where I want to be. I am doing my best to break up the 100 pounds I have left to lose into more manageable segments. 100 seems like such a big number but I was struggling to make it past the next 10-pound mark.

I have to say, I am excited to work with Kate not because of how I want to look physically but because of how I want to feel mentally. I have been thin before and I was a mess. I was insecure, picked on myself all the time and never felt settled. I would be happy to lose only 90 pounds if I could feel the way Kate looks. I know it seems goofy, to go to a trainer because she seems so peaceful, but that's what it is. I want to be healthy but not at the expense of my mental health.

Today I had a victory. Kate typed up a circuit for me. It was tough to do when I saw her Saturday. I knew it would be tough to do at home, with three little people "helping" me. My goal was to complete the circuit twice.

I'm happy to report that I did just that. I'm happier still that I didn't do it perfectly (I had to attend to requests for help between most exercises) but I didn't dwell on how quickly I did it. I chose to be happy that I completed it all, full reps. It was a good thing.

I'm excited to keep working with Kate. If I get brave, I'll post some before and after pics. Tomorrow morning is my weekly weigh-in. I'm a bit nervous as I tend to gain every third week or so, but I'm going to rest in knowing I did a lot of things right this week.

Oops, I hear Conan's band playing him in. Gotta go.

Takin' Care of Business

This will be very brief. Tuesday was a disaster. I couldn't manage to do anything completely well. Spent too much money on crappy food. Didn't do everything on my to-do list.

I have had lots of days like that. In the past, I have chucked the whole day and just gone crazy--crazy eating, crazy ignoring my body, crazy with anger, crazy in general.

I didn't do that. Instead, I did what I could to salvage the evening. I ate the soup I had mustered the energy to make before meeting with my church basement peeps. I made a batch of bread (running out of bread led to the undesirable Burger King purchase), worked out and ran through the circuit I did with my trainer on Saturday.

Then, I addressed the invites for Bekah's birthday party.

But the coup de gras was that I sat down with a fat file of medical bills and organized them into an Excel spreadsheet. It has all of the information about dates of service, how much is owed, account numbers, payment addresses, etc.

It is a grim picture, but nonetheless I am going to start making phone calls. This list has balances on it that go back to when Doug was born (almost 3 years ago). I am going to see whether the balances are correct or not. Then I am going to start at the top and slowly but surely pay them off one by one. If I have to do it $20/time, I will do it. Any extra money I make will go towards paying this down.

It may take a while. The total is unconfirmed and so I don't feel comfortable sharing it right now. It's a doozy but I don't feel guilty. It's not a number that was accrued from crazy vacations or expensive handbags. It's the cost of trying to keep a family of four healthy while our insurance plan slowly got worse. There is no recourse for medical debt, at least not for us (a bulk of this debt was accrued after our bankruptcy was discharged in 2011). I will spare my readers the political commentary, but these bills have already been negotiated down and they are still unbearable. I know all the tips and tricks and have employed them, save for one bill. I am going to get on the phone and work my magic.

Going forward, our insurance plan actually improved this year. We have a lower deductible, higher coinsurance, a healthy amount in our FSA. Back in 2011, when most of these charges were incurred, we had no FSA, a high deductible, low coinsurance (our responsibility was higher) and our insurance switched that year on 3/1/2011. Any expenses incurred before that didn't apply to our deductible. It was heinous but it was 2011 and we were grateful that Brian had a job and benefits.

I am hopeful that I can pay this off before my 40th birthday--that's almost 4 years away. I am praying that it's much sooner than that. I am optimistic that any medical bills we incur this year will be discharged right away and that will allow us to leave 2014 free of 2014 medical debt. Then it's just a matter of continuing to address our old debts.

Keep us in your prayers!

Packing it Up

I am a Christmas junkie, so I like to start celebrating early and keep celebrating for a long time. I'm not sure what my record is, but it's not unusual for the tree and decorations to be kept up for months on end.

This past year was an exception, as noted in a previous entry. A combination of stress, lack of energy and lack of motivation converged to make sure I didn't decorate as much or with as much gusto as I do normally.

Last year, we had the tree down just after Christmas. It was sad but it helped to make the transition from holiday to winter. This year, things were a bit different. Doug has added a degree of difficulty to completing any task around the house. I am going to say it's his age that makes it happen. He is busy (always has been), but he's also starting to want to be around me all the time.

I also didn't feel like hauling all of the boxes back into the house. They sat for a bit when we first retrieved them in December. We live in a nice-sized house, but there is not extra room for a collection of boxes in my kitchen/family room area. It starts to wear on my harmony, building to a crescendo of full-blown crankiness.

I wanted to avoid having boxes sitting around but then not being able to replace them in the garage tout suite. I also wanted to avoid having to fight against Doug's helping hand. Today actually went better than I was expecting. We got home from church and were able to dismantle things before 2 o'clock. This meant I was going to be able to take a nap. I have been trying to cut down on naps lately, but the kids have been conspiring against me.

For reasons I don't understand, they have developed a phobia about their bedroom. My parents generously bought Bekah a bed frame and mattress and Jeremy a mattress (he had a bedframe that a friend donated). This was something they had been angling for for quite a while. Brian and I had hoped to purchase a mattress for Jeremy but a series of financial missteps meant we weren't able to fulfill the request.

They had previously been sleeping on toddler beds. A word to the wise, don't purchase a toddler bed unless it's solidly constructed. Ours were metal and plastic and couldn't withstand the beatings inflicted by my kids. As the beds' condition deteriorated, I made a decision to get rid of the beds. This also included a lamp and a dresser. Before a month ago, my kids were sleeping on crib mattresses on the floor.

(It's funny, I was feeling guilty about this until I just remembered that they destroyed their toddler beds. Now I remember giving them warnings that would happen. This assuages any guilt that it took so long to restore them to proper beds.)

Anyhoo, before the new beds arrived, they were regularly making appearances in our bed. We are pretty firm in our house that everyone sleeps in their own beds. I love my children but need at least 6-8 hours to recover and recharge my batteries. They tend to try and make entry in the wee hours, when I have recently fallen asleep and can't redirect them to their room.

I felt confident that the new beds would nip this behavior in the bud. I was wrong.

Most recently, Brian and I came up to bed last night to find Bekah and Jeremy asleep at the top of the stairs, on the floor, with their pillows and blankets. The light was blazing in their bedroom (it always is, they are newly afraid of the dark), the light was blazing in the hallway, but otherwise there seemed to be no explanation. This is after we gave them an ultimatum about bedtime around 11 o'clock.

I fell asleep not too long after that. I was awakened, suddenly and without warning, by Jeremy saying, "Mommy, let us in!" (I forgot to mention that we lock our door as a way to prevent them from entering our room extraneously). This was at 2 o'clock in the morning. I had fallen asleep maybe a half-hour before. The tone of his voice woke me up with a jolt of adrenaline. I was sure that death was imminent, he was bleeding from an orifice or that there was a zombie attack in the neighborhood.

In fact, none of these were happening. I was greeted by a generic "Mommy, we're scared of our room." The combination of adrenaline and sleep deprivation didn't work in their favor. I barked at them to get in their room. I told them that they shouldn't be afraid of their room. I pointed out that the blazing light was supposed to help them not be scared.

Meanwhile, I wanted them to go to the bathroom. We have made the leap to no pull-ups at night and yet we take them to the bathroom around 10:30 PM, when we are going to bed ourselves. In the melee of admonishments, Doug was awakened. This brought more wrath. I settled them back into bed (for added fun Bekah had had an accident and needed to be changed) and went to rock Doug back to sleep.

The only child I've ever been good at rocking back to sleep has been Jeremy. I was always good at rocking him back to sleep and successfully transferring him back into his crib. The other two have been a different story. Doug is usually the toughest to soothe back to sleep and also the toughest to transition. I have tried taking him into our bed but that usually signals party time to him, so I've stopped trying.

In the period of time I got him to sleep the other kids fell asleep. I exited Doug's room (which prompted him to wake up) and ran downstairs to use the bathroom. Our powder room downstairs has magical qualities. If you close the door and put on the exhaust fan, it's like nothing is happening outside the door. I usually escape there to calm down during tantrums (my own or the kid's).

Once I determined he was mostly calmed down I snuck back to my room and got in bed. I would have loved to fall immediately to sleep but the combination of adrenaline and anger prevented that. I did finally fall asleep but knew it was going to be a long day.

Of course, the kids were still up at 7 AM, bursting into our room fairly cheerfully. I not only didn't match their enthusiasm, I didn't greet them at all. We directed them downstairs and I tried, unsuccessfully, to grab a few more zzzzs.

All of this meant I was desperate to take a nap today. I was afraid that the dismantling of Christmas would interfere with a nap. I was pleasantly surprised that it went quickly and my lovely DH was willing to finish up with some things while I retreated upstairs.

Needless to say, it's no wonder that there are many things on my to-do list that take much longer than necessary to complete. I sometimes label myself lazy but chronic sleep deprivation makes me happy that any work is completed in my house at all.

'Twas the Night Before Payday

There are nights that hold lots of promise and then there's the night before payday. Tonight, the night before payday, holds a lot of anxiety for my husband and myself. It's a new year and we have a new medical plan. This means good changes (in terms of coverage) and bad changes (in terms of take-home pay). 

We persist in hanging on by the thinnest of threads to our home. Brian carries the heavy burden of our home on his back everyday. It is tough to watch someone you love work so hard to provide for their family. It's even tougher when that person feels like driving back and forth from Northbrook every day is just spinning his wheels. 

Yes, I have implemented some major budget changes. I feel hopeful that this year is full of promise. I feel like I'm turning the page onto a new book, one that's full of hope and not destruction. We've almost been in our home for six years and we only really have enjoyed living here for a year and a half. The rest of the time we have fought and clawed to hold onto it. 

I've written many times about how just when it seemed darkest, something showed up and pulled us back from the brink. I generally feel good about the things that are happening but the night before payday, those feelings are dwarfed by anxiety, worry and despair. 

I am not sure what is going to happen or not happen in the next year. I hope that God continues to reveal Himself. I hope that my faith allows me to see Him in all situations. I hope that whatever happens my kids will also see God and come to understand Him better. 

I am a bit tired of writing about this topic. I hope that writing about it helps some of my readers know how to pray for us. Maybe it gives someone a shot in the arm to keep fighting. It has done that for me. 

Mo' Money Blues

I have never been good with money. Like ever. I hate shopping but somehow I never have money. It's one of the most pathetic things about me. 

Brian and I don't live with a lot of financial margins. We don't have any savings. We don't use credit cards. We have a lot of medical expenses. We eat a lot of minimally processed food-this translates to higher grocery bills. 

Most of the arguments Brian and I have are about money, or rather my lack of ability to manage it well. It's one of the things that most discourages me about myself. 

We really had it out just before Christmas. There was a miscommunication and so even though I made some money selling cinnamon rolls, it didn't end up translating as extra money. It turned out okay but felt like a major defeat. 

I have heard a lot about different budgeting philosophies. Once upon a time, I did a great job of tracking my daily expenses. It didn't translate to a budget, but I was able to see where my money was going. 

At one time, I dug myself out of a considerable amount of debt. I know that I'm capable of living beneath my means. I know that I am able to say no to myself when I want things. I took this latest failure as a personal challenge. 

Though I don't have a credit card, I use my debit card. Previous to a couple of weeks ago, I was writing down all of my transactions and subtracting that from my overall budget number. The problem was the lack of a framework. The number on the sheet would say I had $100 left. Woohoo! Except that really, that was supposed to be gas and grocery money. 

There were many times when I exceeded my number, when I only had $20 to spend on groceries, when I wasn't sure how I was going to put has in my car. I just got fed up with the whole thing. 

I decided to stop using my debit card. I withdrew the total amount of money I was allotted and distributed the cash into envelopes. One was for gas, one was for groceries, one was for eating out...you get the idea. 

Two weeks later, things are going pretty well. It's two days before payday and I still have $100 left, sitting in wait. I am starting with my personal trainer on Saturday and I'm not in a panic. I have money allotted for the next time I have to buy wheat berries. Most importantly, I have $50 set aside for savings. 

It is not a perfect system. I still have to tweak it here and there. At the same time, there is a peace about doing it this way. I don't have to worry that I've not tracked an expense or that I've overspent. I don't have to make $20 stretch to cover a week's worth of groceries. 

It is tough, though. I forgot my list when I stopped at Jewel on Sunday. This meant that I forgot to buy popcorn and forgot to set money aside to buy coffee. I haven't had coffee since Sunday and the kids are jonesing for popcorn. 

I will go shopping Thursday morning. I already have a plan for the money. I am excited to execute the plan. I am working toward saving $1000 this year. 

I'll keep you posted about how it goes!

Read it, Baby, One More Time

I'm feeling lazy that the subject of the cold weather is going to creep into this entry. It's what is right in front of me, so I feel like I'm doing nothing more than hitting low-hanging fruit. I'm 35, so I missed out on the huge blizzard of '78. I was around but not aware. 

I grew up in the Chicago and surrounding area, though. I am no stranger to cold weather and snow. I regularly drove around during snowstorms as a teenager and never saw a blizzard as more than a blip on my way to retrieve junk food from 7-11. 

The cold, however, is new for me. I remember several winters growing up where the mercury plunged, though none as severely as it has over the past few days. 

What's more, I handled the cold as most teenagers would-with my coat flapping in the wind and no hat or scarf. I was not responsible for little people or their warmth or well-being. Being out in the cold was not dangerous. Today, it was. 

I watched my dogs come back inside late this afternoon and their limbs were not cooperating. They had already become semi-frozen in just a matter of minutes. The kids, Brian and I visited a friend's house today and the walk from the van to the house was painful. 

Hanging over all of this is that Christmas break is extending further and further past my point of comfort. I don't have a lot of indoor activities for the kids. I've never developed a cache of arts and craft supplies, I hate Play Doh and I'm not wealthy enough to visit Monkey Joe's randomly. 

That leaves two activities. Movies and books. For a long time, our movie-viewing was handicapped by my inability to return materials on-time to our library. I have long had a poor history of getting books back when they are due. Typically, I have fines somewhere. Even now, I am using Bekah's library card because I have $12.35 in fines on my own. 

I try to develop goals and resolutions before NYE. I started around Thanksgiving by visiting the library to check out The Empire Strikes Back. We are huge fans in our house and yet we don't own it. I decided to go on a Saturday. I usually only have one child in tow (and not the wanderer, Doug). This means I have more freedom and less urgency. I checked out World War Z as well. 

On the subsequent Saturday, I visited again to return the movie and te book. A book by Kathy Reichs was in the best seller section and caught my eye. I checked out the first book in her Temperance Brennan series. (FYI, I am now in the first quarter of the sixth book in the series. She has got me hooked.)

Then I ventured into the basement. Usually I only visit when I am rereading the Harry Potter series. That day, I stopped at the librarian's desk. I was on a mission. 

You see, I have a dirty little secret. I am an avid reader but up until a month ago, I didn't regularly (on purpose) read with my kids. I know. I can hear the gasps through cyberspace. She who reads FB statuses with a red pen in her hand is not imparting love of books to her brood. 

It's not that I didn't want to read to my kids. I love my kids, I love to read. My problem is boredom. I know it's important to read and retread books to my kids. It's just that reading the same book 100 times makes my brain hurt. I have knowingly banished books that I just couldn't go on reading. 

I need variety and I need compelling stories. There have been books that have been banished for lack of a storyline, for unbelievable characters, for awful dialogue, etc. I hate books based on TV shows. Again, I know it's about my kids and what they find interesting. I just can't read garbage over and over again. 

The librarian took me over to the early reader section and gave me an introduction to how they work. She pointed out ones that she liked, ones that my kids might like, etc. There were so many!! They were not just about Star Wars and Legos (though some were). There were ones that pertained to Jeremy (My Loose Tooth), ones that Bekah could try to read (Mig the Pig, Jen the Hen), ones that I remembered (Owl at Home, Frog and Toad Together). It was like Christmas morning two weeks early. 

I checked out 15 early reader books and started, that day, carving out time for reading. We took some time off because of Bekah's illness and Christmas. The beauty is that my parents, both educators, are avid readers and huge advocates of reading out loud. They see the kids twice a week and read to the kids at least an hour both times they see them. So even though I missed a few days, they were not without reading. 

And then there's me. I had gone through kind of a reading drought. I struggle to find new books to read that fall within a narrow interest, aren't too sappy (no Nicholas Sparks, Maeve Binchy or the like), are not written by a high-school dropout and have some character development. I tend to find an author that I like and read their entire series. I had done so with Jonathan Kellerman, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell (although I started reading Blowfly and never got past the first page--it felt like a different person had written it and I never have gone back to her), Faye Kellerman, Michael Connolly (I'll probably tear into his Harry Bosch series more when I'm through with Ms Reichs), etc. I read Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Companies Hooked Us this past summer. It was a brief foray into non-fiction. 

So really, my kids haven't been seeing me with my nose in a book (or in my Kindle) very consistently. I know they need to see me reading. I just have struggled, with my library delinquency, to find sufficient material. 

Now that I've started to rehabilitate myself, I'm feeling great. Jeremy especially loves to snuggle (the closer the better) and get lost in a good book. I don't mind re-reading stories about Frog and Toad, about a silly owl or a Papa mouse who tells silly tales. I love seeing Jeremy gain proficiency in reading My Loose Tooth, in asking for reading time, in being okay with setting electronic devices aside. 

I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

A Prolonged Absence

I never know how to explain an extended absence in my writing. I didn't intend for the past couple of months to get away from me. I had hoped that my discipline would outlast the stress of the holidays. 

Alas, for me the stress started before the holidays. I was consumed with a meeting I was going to run. It was promising to be stressful and it delivered on the promise. Once that was over, then the stress of the holidays kicked in. 

Typically, I am pretty over-the-top with the holidays. I haul everything out the day after Thanksgiving, deck out the house, play Christmas music at top volume and generally geek out. 

I didn't have the energy to do all of what I wanted to do. The one thing I did with gusto was bake. There is something therapeutic for me about baking. I baked dozens of cookies, participated in a cookie exchange and gave a bunch away to friends. 

I got a lot of compliments on my cookies and my cinnamon rolls. I did brisk business selling my cinnamon rolls, which was great for a little extra pocket money. 

Brian and I stopped exchanging gifts when our finances tooke a nosedive. I have always been okay with that arrangement. The kids get the gifts, from Santa, and that is a present enough for me. 

We were richly blessed by a church this year. We received numerous gift cards and toys for the kids. It meant we didn't have to spend any of our own money on gifts. I was blown away by this church's generosity. They never met us--we were connected with them through Options and Advocacy (the group that coordinates Doug's therapy). 

It was fun wrapping gifts and watching the kids open them. The mood was dampened by illness, though. Bekah, who never falls ill, came down with a fever that lasted almost a week. It made it tough to get the things done I had planned to get done. She wanted to be no further than 5 feet away from me. 

I tried to stay in the moment and shift my expectations, but the Titanic can't turn on a dime. It is tough to be that person for someone all the time. I wasn't always the best version of myself. 

And so here we are. I'm not one for resolutions but I do have plans for this year. I went to a cash-only/envelope system for my expenses. I hired a personal trainer. I have a goal to save $1K this year. There are other goals banging around in my head, but I feel like the ones I've laid out are enough for now. 

I am hopeful that my blog entries will be more consistent, but I'm going to show myself grace if they're not.