Grand Schemes and Other Plans

I’m not enjoying this

January 27, 2010

As part of my New Years resolution to reclaim my formerly stylish self, I decided to finally get serious about losing some weight. It seemed like a good first step to feel better about myself, as well as to get back into my formerly stylish clothes.

So I went to Costco and bought myself a scale (which have been forbidden in my house for years), printed up some monthly calendars to track my progress, and got to work.

My first day I walked on the treadmill for 30 minutes and then couldn’t walk anymore for the next two days.

It was unbelievably discouraging to discover exactly how out of shape I was, and really REALLY tempting to just stop right there and get used to being that way. But I knew I couldn’t let myself be satisfied with such a low level of ability. So I switched my thinking entirely. Now instead of “working out,” I’m doing physical therapy. Weight loss stopped being the goal for a while, physical ability became much more important.

Imagine my delight when I’d step on the scale every morning and it said I weighed about half a pound less than the day before. After two weeks it said I lost nearly ten pounds! I thought that finally, after a whole life of unsuccessful exercise and lack of athletic ability, things were actually coming together. I was doing it. Until the next day when it told me I gained 20 pounds. And then when I stepped off and stepped back on it told me I had gained another 2. The whole thing was scale error. I will not lie. I bawled like a pouting child.

I have to keep reminding myself what this poor body has been through. Surgeries, hormones, medications, traumatic birth. In a six month span of treatment (that didn’t include a pregnancy) I lost 30 pounds and then gained 50. Not that I know about these kinds of things, but I can’t imagine that my metabolism is functioning optimally.

After a solid month of exercise every day, I have lost one pound. But it certainly doesn’t take me two days to recover from a walk anymore, so that’s what I’m trying to hang on to.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Grand Schemes and Other Plans

Trying to peace out

January 21, 2010

It’s been pouring rain here all week. Pouring like it’s time to build an ark. And rain is my cryptonite. In that it makes me want to drop all my plans, grab a blanket and a kitty and hit the couch listening to the wind and rain. When it rains so rarely around here, this is a reasonable indulgence, but a week of couch time is a bit much.

I started feeling guilty about this yesterday, and then I realized that I needed to take advantage of it while I had it. So I absolved myself of guilt and pulled out a puzzle. I spent the whole of Atti’s nap time listening to a podcast and putting together little pieces while watching the rain on the window. It was awesome.

The last few weeks have been crazy overscheduled, but in ways where I wouldn’t want to give anything up. Friends and family in town, entertaining, doctors visits for Atti and for me, along with his usual rounds of therapy. There’s some new responsibilities on the horizon that are going to take a tremendous amount of my time and energy (no I’m not pregnant), and then we got the phone call saying that Atti’s been accepted into the therapeutic horse riding program. So now he’ll have therapy four times a week.

That’s when the panic attacks started.

It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ve been dealing with anxiety since I was a teenager, and while I’m not currently medicated, I have a huge selection of coping mechanisms to keep things humming. That’s actually how I picked up crosstitching, actually. To ease my troubled mind.

But it also means that I need to be aware of when I need a literal mental health day, and to jump on the opportunities when I can claim them. Yesterday I found myself with a couple free hours, so I forced myself to chill out with a puzzle instead of doing the dishes. Today Atti had a cough and runny nose so I backed out of playgroup, my sister is on her way out of town and the next guest hasn’t made it to me yet, so I’m going to take my chance while it’s here. Today I think I’ll read a book. And listen to the rain.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Grand Schemes and Other Plans

Something to Help

January 19, 2010

I have to confess, I’ve been avoiding the Haitian earthquake. I’ve been dealing with some anxiety issues in my own life and it felt like if I even opened that door, if I even let myself become aware of just how much suffering is happening there, it would be the last straw and I would just fall to pieces.

Like most of us, I imagine, I don’t have millions of dollars or medical expertise, so my only option is to say prayers and give my meager contribution to a good charity. And then sit back holding my breath and hoping these people get help. But I found something. I found something I can do, and hopefully you’ll help too, that can make an actual tangible difference to change the lives of five orphaned children and reunite a family.

I’ve known my friend Lindsay Crapo since college. We were roommates and close friends. She has always been a singularly loving and devoted person, loyal and actively compassionate – not just feeling for others, but motivated to do something to make it better. She and her husband Trevor, a marriage and family therapist, have been married for ten years and have three biological children.

But they also have five children in Haiti.

Lindsay and Trevor have been working with an orphanage in Haiti for the last three years. They travel down several times a year and volunteer wherever they can while they wait for all the red tape to clear before they could take their children home. International adoption is always complicated, but it seems especially complicated in Haiti. Lindsay and Trevor have already been through the courts. These children bear their last name. But they still have to wait until the government allows them to leave, which they hadn’t been willing to do for a very long time.

The orphanage where the Crapo’s children are living was in Port-Au-Prince the epicenter of last week’s earthquake that is being called one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. Lindsay has been posting facebook status updates whenever she gets word. All her children are safe, much of the staff is safe, but there has been tremendous loss of loved ones, and still more great need. It is expected that the earthquake has created as many as 1,000,000 new orphans.

With this crisis, the government has expedited the immigration of these completed adoptions.These five children, ranging in age from 1 year old to 16, that Lindsay has been waiting for should be cleared to come home at any moment. When this happens, she will at most have only a few days to arrange travel and healthcare. It’s more likely that she will only have hours. For the first time in all these years of her efforts, Lindsay is asking for help. She needs to raise thousands of dollars immediately. She has to be prepared at a moments notice to pay for seven plane tickets from Port-Au-Prince to Florida. From there she’ll eventually have to travel to her home in Idaho, but she also needs to be prepared to stay in Florida long enough for her children to receive medical care. She doesn’t know exactly what condition her children will be in and at the very least they will most likely be dealing with dehydration.

I know we all have to be wary of giving money to anyone who asks, but I can testify that this is a worthy cause. Lindsay is my real life friend, and these children will be so blessed to be in her home. You can read more about her at her blog On the Wings of Miracles.

Lindsay’s also been featured in some local news. There are print stories here and here, and you can watch this video.

At her blog is also a donation button. I know times are so hard right now, but please consider donating. Any amount you can give makes a difference to this family. Please give what you can and then give thanks for the health and safety of your loved ones. And then please spread the word.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans

Discovery

January 8, 2010

During our epic eight year battle with infertility, I would regularly make little bargains with God in a last ditch desperate attempt to make things work. “God? If you give me a baby, I’ll stop swearing at other drivers.” “God? If I get a baby I’ll donate all my Christmas presents to Goodwill.” “God? If it works this time, I promise I’ll give a penny more often than I take a penny.” But the one thing I could never bring myself to bargain over was the potential ability of my child. Never once was I ever even tempted to say, “God? You can give me a baby with whatever challenge you’ve got. I’m willing. I just want a baby.” Never once. I was so terrified at the thought of raising a child with special needs, so sure I did not possess the mix of tenderness and patience and ferociousness it requires, that in all my fruitless bargaining I never even hinted at the offer.

I had known a few of those moms over the years, and I would marvel at their capabilities. I’ve known families that adopted child after child with profound needs, sacrificing wealth and worldly ambition to nurture these little spirits. Their lives seemed holy to me. I was sure that these were a special type of people, gifted with benevolence that the rest of us mortals could never obtain. They seemed like saints.

Despite all my fear and the certainty I had about my own limitations, my own calling into the Sisterhood of the Special Needs came. My son Atticus was born at 28 weeks via emergency C-section, spent 3 months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and a couple months into his hospital stay the doctors found some brain damage that resulted in Cerebral Palsy.

If my life were a movie, this is the part where I would go out walking through a late night rainstorm, railing at the heavens and cursing the God I believed in. But nothing so cathartically dramatic was available, so my husband Jared and I spent two days catatonic in front of the television, the floor littered with Cheese-It crumbs and Ho-Ho wrappers as we tried to eat our feelings. Once we found the strength to leave the couch and wash the orange dust off our hands, we made our way back to Atti’s bedside to discover that he looked exactly the same as he did before the diagnosis. He was still our teeny little super guy. He was still the hard won little blessing that we had rejoiced over before. He now just carried this label that left everything else up in the air. I was overwhelmed with love for him, but the visions I had of my future were terrifying. I had no idea how I could be the mom a kid like this would need.

Suddenly I found myself in this club of sainted women, only I was a bundle of neurosis with a short temper and serious self-doubt. But since I was still in the club whether I wanted to be or not, it meant that you didn’t have to be some paragon of virtue to belong, which meant that those women I had always admired weren’t some rare breed of perfection but regular old women who were just doing amazing things. And since I was just a regular old woman, maybe I could get there too. This realization gave me the faith I needed to straighten my shoulders, take a deep breath, and get to work.

It’s been nearly two years since he was born, and we’ve spent three or four days a week shuttling between doctors and therapists of every stripe. Every few months Atti accomplishes a new skill on his way towards independence. His progress is slow, so slow that if you didn’t know what you were looking at you’d think he was stagnant, but it is progress nonetheless. We have become cheerleaders for every independent movement, recognizing how many muscles and systems have to coordinate just to eat, and thrilled on a day when he poops. He’s growing into such a motivated and stubborn little kid, I think he’s going to prove the doctors wrong with a smirk on his face.

My journey into motherhood was so very arduous, on the surface it probably seems to bear little resemblance to the majority of mothers out there. I still find myself choosing to say “when Atti was born,” instead of “when I gave birth” because that emergency trip into the operating room and then three months away from my baby seems to have almost nothing to do with the typical experience. But I think my experience carries what is true for every mother, just compressed.

Motherhood seems to carry those moments for everyone – moments when you are convinced you don’t have it in you, moments when you feel at the absolute limit of your capabilities and you’re still being asked for more. It’s easy to put moms like me in our own category of saintly special cases, but it’s just not true. Getting this diagnosis did not come with a special gift basket of great character traits. When my worst fears were realized and I was forced to confront what I was going to do, I didn’t do anything more or less than most mothers do daily, I discovered more in me than I thought was there, and I did what my child needed.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Atticus, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, Matters of Faith, The Good Life

Word of the Year

January 7, 2010

I have wandered far away from my roots in the scrapbooking world. That’s where I’ve spent the most time employed as a crafter, but for a long complicated list of reasons I wound up largely leaving it behind. I’m so woefully out of step I actually had to ask some old scrapbooking friends what the best papertrimmer was when mine finally gave up the ghost during this year’s card making. Embarrassing.

Despite my absence, even I follow Ali Edwards. She was huge even before I ventured off the scrapbooking path and it seems like her influence has only grown. She’s seriously inspiring.

Every year she has a tradition where she picks her Word of the Year. A word that she carries with her throughout the year, allowing it to influence how she thinks, interacts, spends her time. I’m normally so up in my own head, obsessing about what’s in front of me and what else I want to do, that it really takes an awful lot for someone else’s plans to sink in, but when I first came across this last year it really left a mark.

2009 was a watershed year for me in a lot of ways. I had so many experiences, dropped in front of me like breadcrumbs, that led to my vision opening up and allowed me to let go of a lot of the obstacles I’d created for myself. Too many to even recount, and the impact it’s had on me is so profound I don’t know if I can even really begin to discuss it without a whole lot of tortured purple prose. I guess I can sum it up by saying that in 2009 I got over myself and realized that what I want for my life isn’t some magical concoction, just work.

So my word for 2010 is Begin.

My whole life I’ve wanted to be a writer. That’s what got me to start this blog five long years ago, but I’ve been so terrified of failure. I’ll get an idea for a big project but stall out because I worry about the results of success. I am a cart before the horse thinker. So this year I’m going to stop it. I’m sure I won’t be able to stop my obsessive mind from running through every scenario of success or failure and everything in between, but this year I won’t let it stop me.

I’m going to take a deep breath, ignore the hum in my head, and just. Begin.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans

500th post and year in review

December 31, 2009

I made a whole lot of stuff this year. I didn’t complete all my crafty goals, but I came close enough to feel pretty durn proud of myself. I’ve always had a tendency to overextend myself, I’ve gotten pretty used to it by now. Plus, I made a whole bunch of things that I didn’t exactly foresee last January. I really loved having a written list of things I wanted to accomplish. It satisfied the OCD in me to have any kind of a list, but it was also a way of quieting those crazy-making voices reminding me incessantly of the projects running through my head. I’ve got a whole new list just waiting to be written up for 2010.

And to satisfy all you adoptive internet Aunties….the year of Atti.

Looking through this mosaic, I can pinpoint the exact moment he went from baby to boy. Oh my sweet little lamb. How I have managed to avoid gobbling him up is just a mystery to me.

I feel like I should do something totally massive for my 500th post, but I don’t really have anything up my sleeve. I’m still lolling around in the blissful aftermath of the holidays. Long days lounging in my jammies and working on projects I don’t normally have time to devote to.

This year has been a big deal for me, full of all kinds of new opportunities and paths I see stretching out before me. It’s hard to really describe because there aren’t really concrete things I can point to, just a lot of good friends, supportive readers, and great experiences that made me realize the things I want to accomplish aren’t so insurmountable after all.

Happy New Year

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, The Good Life

Mynah bird

December 7, 2009

I’ve been working hard on Christmas stuff and I’m doing fairly well. Christmas shopping is done, Christmas making not so much. But I’ll get to that later this week.

Today is my birthday – 31 years old. I was thinking about doing a big introspective post about how great this year was and how it really changed everything for me, but I think I’ll save that for New Years. For today I want to give you the gift of adorableness that I get to live with every day.

Atti’s a little bit speech delayed as a result of his disability, but you wouldn’t know it based on how much jibber jabber comes out of this little guy all day. He’s got the T and K sounds down, so everything he says includes those, but it’s pretty funny how everything he loves most – kitties, kisses and tickles – can be expressed with just that much skill.

This one is my favorite. I don’t know where he picked this up, it just sprung naturally out of his little positive spirit. It is the best thing ever to be mid conversation and have Atti back me up with one of his emphatic Yeah!’s. He’s very agreeable.

He always says it just like that too – full bodied. Like he’s ready to provide the muscle behind whatever scheme I’ve got going that day.

This kid is pretty darn great.

Filed Under: Atticus, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

5 years

November 13, 2009

As of today I’ve been pecking away in this space for five years. It feels like it couldn’t only be five years. I’ve lived lifetimes since then!

I started this blog just after we left New Hampshire and moved to California. I hadn’t found a home in our new location, I was so very sick, and I felt this need to communicate with someone. I’ve also always felt ….haunted, maybe?…. by the need to write, but so terrified by how much I wanted to be good at it that I barely wrote anything at all. I found myself at this moment in my life where everything I was doing wrapped up, and I was left with this wide open future and no idea what I wanted to do with myself, or was even capable of doing. I didn’t have kids, I didn’t have much of a career, and the broadness of my open life was almost claustrophobic.

2005 was a trying and yet wonderful time. We were so desperate to have a baby, but by then that wasn’t even the central issue anymore. I was so sick, and we had no health insurance to make that change. I spent my days on pain pills, and if I did one thing in my day – cooked dinner, put the slipcovers on the couches, took a shower – that was a productive day. The posts back then were few and far between, and I think that’s because I was in too much pain to put thoughts together, but also because I was surrounded by some of the greatest friends ever. There were so many people who took such great care of us then.

By 2006, health insurance kicked in and we started trying to get me healthy. That sucked, and I am loathe to think about it too much. It was a really tough time. But this is the year that I really started to discover myself. This was when I did most of the work on my craft book that didn’t go anywhere but was tremendously educational for me. This was when I started to appreciate how essential creation is to my identity and accepted that no vision of my future could be complete without it.

Of course, as soon as I realized what I needed to be happy in my life without children, children became a possibility. Doesn’t it always work that way? Again, looking back my first reaction is always, “Boy, what a hard year.” A move away from beloved friends, miscarriage of a hard won pregnancy, failing to make a place in my new community, a fire threatening our beloved home, but then, also, beauty. Finding healing in the hard work of my hands, getting pregnant with Atti and staying that way, communing with this new little life in me.

2008 was the year everything changed for us. In the very best ways, even though it came at such a cost. Nearly two years later I can’t really even write about that time when Atti was in the hospital, or the fear I’ve had to learn to walk with as we work towards his future. It’s so terrifying and heartbreaking to think back on, but it was just so wonderful to have him, none of it seemed to matter.

I think that is the biggest gift that blogging has given me. I look at the big events of all these years and when you add it all up, I should be in the red. I shouldn’t be joyous when I’m dealing with miscarriages and moves and prolonged chronic illness. The life that I’ve been given is ridiculous and hard and even sometimes ugly in the big picture. But somehow, it doesn’t really feel that way. I have a record of all the little tender mercies, all the oases of beauty that sustain me, all the loving kindnesses of supportive readers, and when you add it all up it so outweighs the big hard things that I am happy. Truly, profoundly, almost unbearably happy.

I can’t thank you guys enough for being here through it all with me.

Filed Under: Are you kidding me?, Grand Schemes and Other Plans, mama musings, Mushy Love Stuff, The Good Life

A case of the crazies

November 9, 2009

My little miracle baby will be two years old in February. I kind of can’t handle it. I am so in love with this little kid, I want four more just like him. Which of course is kind of a problem.

The story is long and tortuous, so for all the readers who haven’t been here since the beginning, I’ll give you a nutshell version. I have endometriosis, Bear has male factor infertility, between the two of us we have a less than 5% chance of conceiving. Atti took us eight years, multiple surgeries, drugs, miscarriages, blah blah blah blah. The thought of opening that door again makes me physically sick, but the chance of reward is so. very. great. *

We’ve actually been trying for baby #2 since before Atticus even made it home from the hospital. With my condition, time is not my friend, and the chances of another pregnancy are much greater the closer you are to the last one. Of course things haven’t worked out that way and it might just be for the best, I kind of can’t even imagine how I would handle a newborn and Atticus at the same time. It would be like having twins except one was four times the size of the other one. It might make sense, but it still doesn’t do much to quell the panic I feel when I think about not getting to have another baby.

* Let me just say here for the benefit of any new readers. NOBODY SAY “JUST ADOPT”! I have many many friends who are foster parents and adoptive parents. There is no such thing as “just” adopting. How you get your family is a very personal thing and varies by a MILLION different variables. This is the way that we need to pursue right now. Thank you for your concern, and rant over.

I was kind of ignoring making any really proactive efforts, raising my baby, happy in my marriage, hoping and hoping and hoping that nature would take it’s course**, when finally my disease just wouldn’t let me live in denial any longer. The pain gets pretty darn intense. Like, can’t function, need to stay in bed because you have no strength in your legs but the pain is too much to stay still so you wander from room to room clinging to walls. Like, I was trying to describe the pain to Bear and he said it sounded like when he had a kidney stone. That kind of cuts through any attempts to pretend that things are just going to work out.

** HA! Yeah right!

I went to the doctor last month all geared up for a fight. Again, nutshell for new readers – I have a long unpleasant history with doctors who don’t take women’s pain issues seriously. Including being forced to see a psychiatrist who promptly told me to get a new doctor and have a nice life. So even though I have a folder full of medical records including pictures of my diseased organs, I haven’t really had reason to believe that I’m going to walk in and find someone who’s going to help me out. On my first visit I would have rated this new doctor about 75% good news, but since then I’d have to bump him up to 85% dream come true. Of course, I haven’t had to ask for pain pills yet, so that might make a difference.

After a little bit, but only a very little bit, of arm twisting, he put me on the medication that has proven the most effective in the past, plus he put me on a new medication that makes almost all the side effects go away. It’s been pretty awesome. The last time I did a course of this drug therapy I gained 40 pounds, was a total crank monster, and had night sweats and hot flashes that rivaled all my 50+ year old lady friends. This time, none of that.

Except on the first couple of days after the shot. I get one shot a month and for the few days after that I am just ridiculous. RIDICULOUS! Saturday night I made Bear put all the dinner preparations in the fridge and go to the store to get me chips and salsa and green olives. And then I spent all day yesterday crying. I’d sit there sobbing and saying, “I know this is totally unwarranted, I recognize I’m being irrational, but I can’t he-he-help it! :sob:” I cried because Bear wrote an email I really liked. I cried because my favorite podcast is having a live show. I cried because Atti cried.

I just keep reminding Bear that living with me in this state should make him extremely grateful I’m so even keel when left to my own devices. I never feel like I get enough praise when I get through a regular bout of PMS without him noticing. Maybe now he’ll see the way things could be and buy me presents of appreciation.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, infertility is evil, mama musings

The big Wrapup

October 31, 2009

Whew.

There were times when I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

I’ve had this ridiculously awful cough, a drink a jar of cough syrup a day, give yourself a headache from all the hacking, try not to breath to hard or else you’ll start again, kind of cough, for a month now. I’m am looking forward to nothing more than taking a couple days off and working on something I feel like working on, without any holiday deadlines attached.

But knowing me, that won’t last long. I’ve already got ideas going for Christmas.

I’m sorry these pictures are so awful. Winter light is hard for all of us, but my house especially tends toward tomb-like this time of year. No windows on the front of the house makes it cooler in the summer, but also really really dark. Plus everywhere a tree goes is a corner, so even darker.

I think as the years go on I’ll find some great scraggly Charlie Brown Christmas trees and spray paint one silver and the other acid green, but for this year I just couldn’t justify buying more trees when I’ve got so many in the garage already, so I just had to make do with what I had.

I also really should have taken pictures earlier in the month. Our little boy cat Gizmo has taken both of these trees apart so many times all the ornaments gradually made their way further and further up to the top of the tree.

Thank you all so much for playing along with me. Thanks to all of you who bought patterns and played along in the giveaways. This has been a whole lot of work, but so much fun. I’m obviously out of my mind doing so much all at once, but I just couldn’t help it. You gotta follow the ideas where they lead, right?

Hope you all have a wicked good Halloween, and no one loses a filling on any caramel apples.

Filed Under: Grand Schemes and Other Plans, Over the Top Halloween, Stuff I Make, The Good Life