Surviving the summer

I have been having a really hard week. Actually, it is turning out to be a really hard summer. I feel like I am burning the candle at both ends and this week it is hitting me very hard. I feel completely worn out. When I wake up in the morning, and it is getting harder and harder to do that because the fatigue is catching up with me and the adrenaline is dissipating, I have noticed that I have dark circles under my eyes. I have not ever noticed that before. I don't think it is due to turning 37 a month ago.

Here is an example of what my days are like and probably what accounts for the matched set of "eye luggage":

5:30am My alarm goes off...I hit the snooze...It's a reflex.
5:39 It goes off again....
5:48 And again...I smack the alarm one more time
5:57 I blearily look at the clock....and I realize that I have to get up NOW...Did I shower last night?? I can't remember...better jump in, just to be safe.

6:15 I am drying my hair, taking my vitamins and medication and using my Sonic Care tooth brush...and I think about my friend the dentist and about my mother-in-law who gave me this wonderful tool!

6:20 I begin to wake up my kids, starting with Princess because she is the hardest. I yank down her covers and tickle her feet, she mumbles and pulls the covers over her head, I move on to the boys room....I start to tickle them and rub their backs, pick out clothes

6:35 Did I put on my makeup? Where are my shoes? Did I pack a lunch? Princess is still not out of bed...BB is muttering at me and I attempt to get him to take his medication but to no avail..so I grab him a glass of milk and his pill box and figure I will try again when I get to the sitter's. PH is not out of bed, so I grab his ankles and pull him to the ladder once he is down on the floor, I pull his PJ's off and put a clean shirt on...I do the same with Peanut...Princess is finally out bed

6:45 Peanut can't find his shoes, complains he is cold and "too tired" to walk out to the car. Do I have everything? Keys, planner, lunch? Medicine and milk for BB?

6:50 I count heads in the car, someone is missing...I go searching and PH is now asleep on BB's bed, so I shoo him down the stairs, trip over the cat as she winds around my legs... her food dish is completely empty and she has no water. The kittens wake up, and I now trip over them

7:00 We are finally on the road but traffic is already backing up and I will have to cut across town and I know that I am going to be late. I have to drive 25 minutes West to the sitter.

7:25 Arrive at sitter's. Get BB to swallow his ADHD med and amazingly the huge fish oil
capsule. But Peanut refuses to get out of the car because he is too tired. So, I drag him out
and carry him up the walk...give out hugs and kisses and hop back in the car

7:40 I'm stuck in traffic...now I have a minimum of 30 minutes to get back to the East...I will
be late...again.

8:15 I arrive at the government center...but I remember it is Monday and I can't park in the employee parking because it is Jury duty day...so I have to park over by the jail and walk.

8:30 I arrive at my desk. Rats...I'm a half hour late. It's only Monday. The rest of my day is a mixture of client appointments, meetings, scheduling more appointments, writing case notes and treatment plans.

4:30pm I walk to my car...did I park at the jail...or did I move it to the street?

4:40 Stuck in traffic again...more construction work and no matter what road I take across, some part is being worked on and it gets worse every day.

5:30 I am late picking up the kids. Now I begin to drive home, through more traffic.

6:20 Arrive home...cats EVERYWHERE...no food, no water, dishes in the sink...time to make dinner...who's turn is it on the computer?

7:30 Sit down for dinner, but no one likes what I made. Clean it up. I'm too tired to do anything
but there is laundry to fold, dishes to do and the kids want to go swimming.

9:00 Send everyone to bed but the boys begin their nightly ritual of chatter, arguments, swinging from the bunk bed and running to the bathroom or needing "one more thing"

11:00 I can't stay up any longer, two boys are STILL awake, I'm sure they will get into who knows what the instant they realize I am asleep...I will have to take that chance.

And repeat, 4 more days til the weekend.

I can't believe it is going to be July next week but part of me is glad because it means that 2/3 of the summer is already over and in 2 months, they will be going back to school. I will have 4 kids in school...no shuttling of anyone to daycare. I can leave for work in the morning and head straight to work...I can come straight home at night and I may actually get home at 5:15.

I am working on a better bedtime ritual with my kids in order to help them settle down better. It's slightly better although they are still not falling asleep real early, but they are quieter. My mom suggested to them that I create a positive aspect to bedtime rather than so much negatives associated with it. So, tonight, we started reading the first book in the Chronicles of Narnia. Peanut fell asleep next to me and I had to carry him to bed. The other two boys are still awake and talking but they are talking softly. I am going to count it a small victory.

I am counting down the days til the 4th of July. I like the parades and the fireworks but I am mostly looking forward to sleeping in later and not racing back and forth across 694. But I don't know if I can hold out til then . I feel like I am basically dead on my feet and walking around in a fog.

Add to this the pressure I sometimes feel, or maybe it is just guilt, that I don't have my kids involved in sports or music lessons. I feel torn apart as it is. This week alone, I had something going on every evening. Its Thursday and this is the first evening all week where we actually sat down as a family to eat a meal together. I know that this is not good for me and it is not good for my kids. But the guilty feelings still sit there and I wonder if I am depriving them of something, if there is something else they could be experiencing that would be good for them, that will help them expand their horizons, or teach them a skill or increase their social skills. I don't have a need to live out my own Little League fantasies through my kids. I was not in to sports at all as a child. I think I grew up basically normal. But I also have a child who has ADHD and struggles with making friends, stuggles with issues of confidence and personal value. I have a daughter who has shown both interest and some athletic abilities. Am I holding her back because I feel too tired?

The other part of me is saying to myself that I can't do everything. I am one person. I am one parent. I work a full-time job and come home and have to care for 4 children. It's a very full plate. Adding more and more on top of that is not only unreasonable, it's bordering on insanity. If I feel burned out now with no activities, it will only get worse.

So, maybe I should reframe things a little. My kids are having a very different summer than they have had before. I decided to allow my daughter to babysit her brother's one day a week, for money. I also decided to start an allowance that is contingent upon some very basic things being done around the house. I have each child assigned a set of "helper jobs" and they rotate each week. I have specific tasks for them according to their ability.

Already I am seeing my daughter blooming in her level of responsibility. She is so gentle with her brothers and being less bossy with them. She is keeping a notebook of her earnings. I decided I would teach them some things about money from the beginning that I never learned and to this day, I struggle with. So, from their allowance and her babysitting money, 10% goes to tithe at church, 10% is saved in their piggy bank (until they get $10 and can start a savings account) and then the rest they are free to spend.

Tonight, I was showing my daughter how she can add up her earnings, a quick way to figure out 10% and then how to figure out what she will have left. She was tickled that she had made an estimated guess and was very close. It's practical math. The boys want to find other ways to earn money so they were trying to give kids in the neighborhood wagon rides for either a nickel or a quarter a minute. They also want to sell Lemonade but I told them that they will need to use their own money to pay for their lemonade start-up product, and not the lemonade I buy for dinner.

My Mom and Dad have a craft show business but both of them are having some issues with their health. My Dad is getting a hip replacement in September and my Mom had a total knee replacement over a year ago...so setting up and taking down is going to be difficult for them. But now that I have these children who are big enough to help and have gotten a taste for working for pay, my parents are going to hire them for their craft shows to help them with their set-ups and take downs.

It's more real world than being the next David Beckam, Tiger Woods or Kobe Bryant.

Oh My Aching Ear

I have this fear that I am going to develop a condition called Meneire's disease in which the inner ear becomes so badly damaged that the body loses some equilibrium, experiences vertigo to the point of vomiting and then hearing loss. My Grandmother has it and is virtually deaf in one ear.

Over the past few weeks, I have been stumbling a lot and bumping into things. I am already a self-proclaimed klutz with another irrational fear that I will one day fall backwards down the stairs. It has no basis in reality, thus the irrational fear. Or perhaps I will trip over my own feet and land in some precarious position in front of many people, no doubt while wearing a skirt, and not only bruise my body but also my pride.

Earlier this week, I was with a client and I got up from his kitchen table and stumbled and landed on my ankle oddly. He asked if I was alright. I told him, "I'm fine. Just not graceful." He chuckled. But I felt that fear rise up in me.

Further compounding my fear of this disease is a problem with my ear that has gotten worse. My right ear has been ringing and feeling sort of stuffed. It feels like it is constantly in a state of needing to pop but nothing I do works. I have tried to tip my head in various odd angles to see if I got water in it. No help. I try to plug my nose and blow out. Nothing. I have ridden the elevator to the top floor and down hoping that the rapid change in pressure would help. Nada.

Today my hearing is affected. Things sound muffled on that side and sometimes I get an echo from music which is very annoying. Certain noises add more pressure to my ear and while I wouldn't describe it as pain, I am experiencing discomfort beyond annoyance. So I called the doctor.

She thinks I have clogged Eustachian tubes from excessive nasal congestion and because of it, my ear cannot equalize the pressure. She prescribed a nasal corticosteroid but said if it doesn't get better in a few weeks, I will need to see an ENT. But the nasal spray may take several days to begin to have an effect. It is supposed to decrease the swelling of mucous membranes in my sinuses.

All I know is that at the moment, noise is really starting to bother me. I can't tolerate it. I'm sitting upstairs, the kids are downstairs watching TV and I can hear it echoing in my ear from hear. It is making me very cranky. Some of my children speak very softly so I am having to ask them to speak up but the louder the volume, the greater the pressure on my ear so not only can I not hear what they are saying but it is hurting my head to try and listen to them.

I did my nasal spray. I will follow the doctor's recommendations and pray that this eases up soon and that I am not developing Meneire's and will not have to go to the ENT. I would probably have to get another CT scan. It could be an annual event. I may be a rare individual who is intimately acquainted with the internal structure of her head. And since I had an MRI last summer, I also know what my brain looks like.

For once, I sort of wish I could suffer in silence. It would be welcome relief at this point.

Kitten Decision '08

It's a tough night for my Princess. The votes for which kitten we will keep were cast. The winner is the black female named Shadow and not her favorite brown and grey tabby "Princess". It really is a tough decision because we have grown to love them all. They each have unique personalities. It will be hard to let them go.

Princess is taking it especially hard. She was crying at bedtime and explained it to me that she just wishes we could keep them all and that perhaps if we still lived in our house in Forest Lake, we would be able to keep them all. I told her we probably would have been able to keep two kittens but after a while, 6 cats is a lot to manage so we would not keep 6 cats either way.

My personal favorite was not even in the running. He is the black male that Peanut named King. My only consolation for my daughter's broken heart is that we can take our time and make sure that each kitten goes to a good home and perhaps ask the new owners if they will send us a picture every once in a while and let us know how they are doing. She also asked me if we can take lots of pictures of the kittens while we have them here. Of course we can do that.

I really felt for her and realized that my heart is breaking too.

It's hard not to laugh

Peanut is having a tough lesson tonight. He decided he did not want to eat what I made for dinner because "it smells bad". That is his opinion. I'm trying to round out the repertoire of Mac-n-cheese, tacos and spaghetti, so tonight it was stroganoff (with a little help from the Glove Guy). So, I told him if he didn't want to eat, then he could march upstairs and go to bed and take his "stinky" attitude with him...Notice how I tied that in with his comment? Very clever.

Later on, he was fussing and crying out the window. It was pitiful. I began to sort laundry outside his room and he asked me, "Mom, could I go live with Grandma and Grandpa?"

Why do you want to do that?

P: Because you are being too bossy.

Actually, dear Peanut, I think I have just begun to be just bossy enough with you!!

I have finished cutting my teeth...

I believe that I have jumped the final hurdle in my transition to a full-fledged community mental health nurse. I have been working at this job for a year and 3 months. Today, I was fired by my first client. The other case managers have told stories about being fired by their clients but I have sat, sadly, on the sidelines, wondering if I should congratulate myself for having escaped this event or should I consider that I have not yet been fully embraced into the fold of my field.

To be honest, I was not at all surprised that this client fired me. She has been unhappy since the day we met and I have been unable to do anything good in her eyes since that day. She finds fault with everything I do...I'm not on time, even if I call to say that I am behind schedule. She gets paranoid about her medications and makes phone call after phone call putting everyone in a panic about it. I have walked out of every visit feeling like I must be an absolute idiot who is completely inept at my job.

Yesterday, I was scheduled to see her at 3pm but one of my early appointments needed a lot of time to talk things through. She suffers from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and is hitting an anniversary of her trauma. This lead to a back up into my next appointment and then into the appointment with this client who fired me. I called to tell her I would be about half an hour late. Apparently, I was 5 minutes too late from that because by the time I got to her apartment, she refused to answer the door.

When I got to work this morning, she left me a harsh message telling me that it was now past 3:30, her daughter set up her meds and there would be no need for me to come out ever again. Or in other words, I was fired. I called her case manager who was not surprised and felt she was probably next in line to be fired too. That made me feel better. And I really was not feeling all that bad.

I told my supervisor about it and she said, "Well, how do you feel about that?" And I told her that I felt OK. I didn't take it personally because she had never been happy with me and it was bound to happen sooner or later. Then I said, "Now this means I am really a part of the team. I'm not sitting on the bench."

There is a part of me that does struggle a bit because I want to be liked. I want my clients to like me and to have a good relationship with them. I don't want them to feel annoyed with me or end the therapeutic relationship on a sour note. However, from a personal standpoint, I have come a long way because I have thickened up my skin and I don't feel like it was a real personal thing. It happens. It's part of the job. I can't and won't make everyone happy all of the time.

Later in the day, another client of mine "paid" me with a mini Snicker's and a diet Coke. Clearly, I am not a bad nurse to all my clients.

Lego Party...My place...2:30am...Shhhhh

To say that my boys are Lego Fanatics is an understatement. They have compiled a wish list of items they would like to add to their growing collection of Legos. They want all the Indiana Jones sets, the Spongebob collection and the Starwars collection but they also like the castles with the knights and catapults.

I just shake my head because what it means for me is more pieces to step on in the middle of the night when I am walking down the stairs and at times I need a shovel to get to the couch because they insist that they must spread out all the legos in order to find the pieces they need. I don't disagree with them on that point. My bone of contention is that they don't then put them back in the box. Then there are the Lego battles over who has more "guys" and poor Peanut who never has the little Lego people to play with because his brothers need them all for their elaborate Storm trooper battles, only they don't have many actual storm troopers so other figures get recruited into battle, not unlike the real military!

I do love to watch them focus on what they are building and listen to their stories as they narrate the scenes they are building. Peanut likes to build airplanes with "Mote Controls" and then make them do stunts or crash into the couch. It is one of the things that makes Legos one of the best toys ever invented because it really does fuel the imagination and creativity abounds.

However, some times I would like there to be a little LESS creativity and imagination abounding. Or at least to have better hours.

Last night, BB and P-He4 tried to convince me that "building with legos helps us fall asleep". Right..and I was also born yesterday and just fell off the turnip truck. Try again...Turn out the light and go to sleep.

Every time I turned away from their view, they switched their light on and were back at it again, building and building. I quit counting how many times I turned off the light. I finally went to bed because I could not keep my eyes open another minute. I figured sleep would win eventually and I would find them in a heap on the floor with legos tightly grasped in each hand and the imprints of little round dots on their cheeks. I decided I could live with it. It's summer.

At some point during the night, I woke up because of an odd noise or a light going on in the bathroom. I looked at the clock and saw that it was 2:57...AM!!!
BOYS! It is too late to be up playing with legos. Get in bed and go to sleep.

I clumsily stumbled back to bed. My alarm blared at 5:30. I ignored it until I couldn't any longer. When it was time to wake up my kids and get them ready to leave for the babysitter, I noticed that there was one boy missing. I went down stairs and found him sprawled on the couch. On the dining room table, he had opened two large cans of peaches. But what I could not figure out was why there were 3 spoons?

When I woke up P-He4, I said to him, "I bet you are really tired after your late night Lego Party."

He answered, "It wasn't a party."

I love the concrete thinking of children. But I beg to differ. It was a party. There was more than one in attendance. They had entertainment. And they had food. And they did it behind their mother's back. Sounds like a party to me. A very benign party. And a kind of party I can live with.

But I will tell you...there are some very tired boys at my house today!

Protected

I witnessed something absolutely amazing today. It was scary too but when it was all said and done, I could do nothing but sit back and praise the Lord, for He is good.

I took my kids to church today, like I do every Sunday. MN Teen Challenge came to do the service so it was a full house. My parents and I decided to sit off in this room with a TV instead of try to find a seat in the sanctuary. I think this was the first of several Divine Interventions.

My kids went to Sunday School and then suddenly, the door opened and my friend Tricia motioned for me to come out. She looked frantic so I was immediately afraid something had happened to one of my kids. Instead what she told me just about dropped the floor from beneath me almost as much. She told me that NY had just walked in to church. She then told me that she would go to the Sunday school room and tell the leader to keep my kids there until I came for them and no one else.

I walked back to my seat and whispered in my Mom's ear what was going on and then collapsed into my chair, shaking and uncertain what I should do. I did the only thing I knew I could do for certain and that was to pray. I asked for protection for me, and for my kids. I asked that if I did have to meet him, that I would not be alone.

When Tricia came back to tell me that my kids were OK and taken care of, I had tears rolling down my cheeks and she just hugged me and wiped a tear off my cheek. I thanked her again and went back to sit down. I tried to listen to the service and the music. I did really enjoy the songs that were sung. They hit me right where I was.

A while later, two male friends of mine came in to tell me that they had seen NY out in the parking lot and then driving around the church. For a while he was at the video store across the street. They walked over to the store and he quickly got in his car and drove off. This really scared me because I knew for certain that he had come to my church looking for me. It wasn't about worshiping God. He was trying to find me.

Jon asked me if I would like the police called and that perhaps if there was an officer in the parking lot, I would feel safer. He said, "You should not have to come to church and feel afraid." I agreed. My Dad went out and watched for NY as well. I talked with a dispatcher and gave her a description of his car and of him. She told me that an officer would be arriving soon but if he were to enter the building to go ahead and call 911.

I told my story to a police officer. My Dad was with me, for moral support as well as to verify his intimidation and threats. I also had one of the pastor's with me as well. Sometime during the midst of all of this, the tears stopped and the fear subsided and a peace that I can't explain filled me. I felt the Lord speak to me and tell me, "He is just a man but I am God. You are OK."

By the time I left church, he was gone. The police officer suggested to me that I get an order for No Contact. I think that is a very good idea. But I also know that no piece of paper will protect me the way that my heavenly Father protects me and did protect me today.