I probably shouldn’t be working on this post right now.  My kids are getting ready for school, I should be helping, I should be getting ready right now.  But, I feel compelled to write my thoughts.  I have been thinking about this for a while.

There have been a significant amount of trials for many of my friends and community members in these past few months and it has brought me to my knees for them many days and nights.  I have watched friends and acquaintances deal with cancer, with passing of loved ones (both sudden and drawn out) and with life altering accidents. I have found myself in prayer and pondering often.   Mostly, I contemplate on my own mortality and the brief time this life truly affords.

And I am grateful that death is not the end of our existence.

I am grateful that death is just a passing– just a bridge from this life to the next.  We miss those who have left us and we mourn their light in our life, but we have hope that we will see them again.  We have hope that they find rest in the Lord.  We have hope.

What strikes me most profoundly is that none of us has any idea how much time we have left in this life.    Both of the people I know that have passed on in the past few weeks were either just older or just younger than my own parents– I ache for their children as I would ache if my parents left me right now.   My friend with cancer graduated high school a year after I did.  My friend whose husband was in a life altering accident has four kids just like I do.  These friends of mine have not died, and yet their daily comings and goings are now forever altered– their lives now split into two halves– before the cancer and after– before the accident and after. Before__________. After__________.

I don’t pretend to know what any of these people are going through or have gone through and I hope I don’t come across as arrogant or preachy. I have tremendous respect and am in awe for the people I see working through these hardships– they are all pillars of faith and examples to me of hope in Christ.  I mention these few individuals also because their journeys are recent– the past few years are sprinkled with similar hardships for many other friends and family members of mine, and I certainly don’t want to exclude my love and respect for them. 

I don’t know how much time the Lord has planned for me to be here on this earth.  My life right now is the "before".  I am living the part of my life that is "before" whatever curve ball God throws me that will set the course of my life differently than I had intended. I don’t know if next year I will get ill or if in 10 years my husband will get taken away, or my parents will pass before they see great grandchildren or if I will live long enough to move back in with my children and forget their names.  There is no certainty about the course of my life and yet I do not fear. 

I am not afraid, yet with everything that has happened lately, I keep wondering, what am I doing with my "before"?  Is what I am doing worthwhile?  Is it impacting others in a positive way? Will my "before" be so full of wonderful memories that when I hit the "after" I can say that I did all I wanted to do?  Or most of it? Or any of it?  Am I living my life so that when "after" comes I will be surrounded by friends and neighbors who love me?  Will I be lifted up in prayer by hundreds of people who  are mere acquaintances or who only know of me?  

I sure hope so.  I feel pressed to do better. 

I know God loves me.  I know He has a plan for me.  I know that trials come in this life as a way to draw us nearer to Him.  As a way to strengthen us.  In church on Sunday we were talking about the Atonement of Christ and one thing stood out to me that I guess I knew but hadn’t thought of recently.  It was the simple idea that God does not always take away our trials or our burdens– but that He can make them lighter.  He will lighten our load and walk with us and lift us up.  That simple idea gave me peace.  I love knowing that I do not have to go through hard things alone or unassisted.

God loves me.  He loves you.  He has a plan for each of us. 

I have joy in this.  I hope you do too.

To all my friends, community members and casual acquaintances– my heart goes out to you.  I pray that you reach to the One who knows your every pain and who can lift you better than anyone else.  You are stronger than you know, but He is stronger and He will help you if you let Him. I pray that your "after" becomes your new "before" and that is even more awesome than the first one.

"I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." Phillipians 4:13 

Sometimes I crack myself up.  Sugar lately has taken to taking photos of herself and embellishing them to look like animals and other things.  Well she has inspired me and I decided to make a few Valentines for the hubs. 

Voila!

This one, I might want to change the words.

This last one is an inside joke and perhaps inappropriate for the internet.  I laugh out loud every time I see it. 

Happy Valentine’s Day! 

Thursday was the 3rd and final day of the juice fast.  If day one could be described in a word, day three could be described with a new one:

Constipation.

Not enough fiber working through the system and probably not enough water either, though I drank much more than the previous day and was still peeing quite a bit.  My sister is also doing the juice fast and I found myself jealous every time she told me she had pooped. With my lack of ahem, movement, I decided to juice the lunch and then blend it with spinach and banana (banana covers a multitude of sins flavors).  I blended the ice in with it also and it made it a little frothy.  My afternoon juice was too fruit heavy and it soured my stomach again (though not as bad as the previous day) so I found myself eating another bowl of rice and deciding that I would be not making another juice, but eating a real dinner instead.

My dinner was a chicken broth based vegetable and orzo soup which was high in sodium but still high in vegetable.  I felt it kept with the spirit of the juice fast so I didn’t feel too bad about the cheat.  I did follow it with a chocolate truffle however, which was not in the spirit of the juice fast so much as the spirit of the I-have-been-looking-at-these-in-the-cabinet-for-three-days fast…  But I didn’t eat anything else the rest of the night, so I think I did pretty good.

Day 4….?

Woke up this morning and pooped.  In case you were wondering.

I actually felt like crap this morning (no pun intended), but that was probably more due to the Squish keeping me up more than anything. And also waking up to kids screaming at each other about who ate the last waffle.  I got up and had a juice actually.  Didn’t really know what else to eat.  I then went to the Maltby Cafe with friends for breakfast and ate heavy foods. My tastebuds were pleased, my tummy was not really, but I know it could have been much worse.  I was full and didn’t eat any of the kids’ mac and cheese lunch (or anything else) until the afternoon when I had a mean green juice. 

Conclusions?

This was a good experience for me.  It helped me learn a lot about the way that I eat.  It also helped me break the holiday sugar craving cycle that I had been on so it was super valuable if only for that.

Did I feel awful during the fast? Nope.  I know a lot of people have horrible, horrible emotional and physical symptoms on the first day or two or three of a juice fast.  I really didn’t.  I think is partly because I eased into the juice fast by drinking a juice a day for a couple days and also because I don’t drink coffee and had not "withdrawals" of any kind. It could have also been my tiny "cheats."

Did I feel extra awesome during the fast? I felt pretty good, but I wouldn’t say I felt dramatically different aside from the excessive need to pee. I really did feel better than I thought I would.  My depression was surprisingly in check save for the first night at dinner time.

Did I lose any weight?  I lost 3 pounds and considering I gained 5 over vacation, this was a victory and I actually don’t expect to immediately gain them back since I put them on so rapidly. (I know there’s a bunch of critics out there who will tell me it’s just water weight and it’s coming right back, but I am going to disagree here since I plan on easing back in to my regular foods.)

Would I do it again?

Not the same one.  I would definitely try the 5 day of juicing and eating fancy vegetables that I was originally considering.  I have enough emotional ties to chewing, I think I would be happier with that fast and less likely to cheat.  I also think I would be less constipated which was a problem.  I would also consider (and this is much more likely) juice fasting during the day and then eating dinner with my family, and since I sort of did that two of the days anyway, I think that would be very manageable for me.

Would I recommend it to someone else?

Yes.  Especially if you have a medical condition that you think might be related to or affected by your diet.  I really think I would encourage people to try the juicing and eating (only fruits and veggies though) track as opposed to only juice.  Unless you like Miralax in your juice.

Here are my suggestions if you are doing a juice fast or considering it.

1. Take it seriously when they say you should prepare first by juicing and eliminating all your crazy foods.  Taper down caffeine if you are a coffee drinker.  My sister was about ready to quit at 10 am on the first day because she had such a bad withdrawal headache.

2. Ginger covers a multitude of flavor mistakes. 

3. Get some straws and use a lot of ice, it makes it go down easier. 

4. Plan on going to the store for veggies a lot.  I kept running out of things.  Celery, kale and cucumber especially.

5. Don’t put fennel in your juice.  Not a lot anyway.  GROSS.  (OR red onion for that matter.)

6. If you are juicing beets, expect beet colored… everything.

All in all, good experience, worth trying.  I feel full of vitamins and am not having sugar cravings.  It was a good exercise in self control and I am now extra motivated to keep up with good eating! 

I woke up this morning with the immediate thought of, "there is no way I am doing this stinkin’ juice fast today.  I don’t even know why I am doing this."  Then I weighed myself.  Down a pound a half.  Strength to continue.

The morning went well.  I made the mistake of not drinking the cold water after the hot water and going straight for the juice.  I will tell you why this was a mistake later, but for the morning, I was able to teach my music classes without having to run to the bathroom in the middle of class and I didn’t get too hungry either.  Yesterday morning when I didn’t have any where to be, the morning dragged on forever.  This morning went well.

Lunch juice was pretty good.  Afternoon juice was a PROBLEM.

When you juice, you have to drink a lot of water.  This helps things ahem… keep moving.  I had one cup of hot water this morning and the rest of the time, mostly juice.  The afternoon juice had fennel in it (also known as sweet anise) and though I like fennel, the juice was nasty.  Fennel is supposed to aid in digestion and if you have stomach problems, fennel juice should help.  Well, let me tell you, fennel juice made my stomach do crazy things.  

Mostly it made my stomach hurt super bad.  *TMI ALERT* I wanted to poo but I couldn’t (not enough water) but I just had that churny-sloshy feeling in my tummy and was crampy and nauseated.  

So I ate.

Well that’s not true entirely.  First I drank 2 large glasses of water and then 45 minutes later when the pain had not subsided, I ate a bowl of rice.  And then I took a warm bath because it still hurt a little.  I felt better after that.  Ready for more juice!

And then I made the most delicious homemade pizza for my family.

And I cheated some more.

My dinner was mostly juice and I really only had the tiniest sliver of pizza.  It was my first homemade pizza (crust and everything!) and I really couldn’t not try it. So I had my little slice and I sipped my juice.  My tummy started getting funny again, so I ate another tiny sliver.  But that was really it.  I was surprised how satisfied I was with such a small amount, though it was probably more because I knew I shouldn’t have it than anything.

Finished my juice and ate an apple later.

I am back on the wagon tomorrow! 

Things I have learned today:

1. I have much more willpower than I thought.

2. Fennel Juice is a bad idea.

3. I am definitely making homemade pizza again when I am not on a juice fast.

4. Water is good for you, even when you don’t want to pee anymore. 

5. Once I drink my dinner juice, I have found I don’t have the post dinner munchies.  I really haven’t been too hungry and am surviving and feeling good on bedtime water and herbal tea.

I watched the documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead 6 months ago, was inspired and immediately bought a juicer.  I juiced for awhile and then stopped buying kale one day and the juicer has sat in the cupboard since then.  After all the crap holiday delights I have been consuming this season, I decided to dip my little toe in and try a 3 day juice fast.  I have wanted to for while and the time just seemed right. You can learn more about the program here.

There is a 5 day juicing program where you also eat vegetables, but I decided that as appealing as still eating was, that I could not handle preparing meals for my family and then a fancy vegetable meal for me.  3 days of only juice seemed manageable.

I am currently on day 2, but I want to describe to you what day 1 has been like.  Day 2 updates tomorrow and I will probably get you day 3 when it’s all over.

If I could describe day 1 in 1 word it would be this: Urination.

I started the morning with a cup of hot water, followed by cold water, followed by a juice.  And then I peed for the rest of the day.

Most of the juices are pretty good and even the baby likes to drink them.  A few of them she declared as "eew, yuck," and I have to agree.  It has been interesting to say the least and 75% of the time delicious.

After 24 hours of only juice (okay, and I ate a banana and a handful of tortilla chips) I learned a couple of things about myself and the way I treat food.  Here they are in no particular order:

1. I don’t always eat when I am hungry.  I haven’t felt super hungry or starving in the past 24 hours, but I have definitely wanted to eat which is not the same thing.

2. I eat when I am bored, or because it is there.  Just walking by the kitchen I want to nosh.  Not hungry, just looks good.

3. I have more of an emotional attachment to food than I thought.  I about near cried when I had to watch my family eat food at dinner time while I sipped my juice.  I loved the juice I was drinking and wasn’t particularly drawn to the food they had, but after about 5 minutes I  had to leave the room.  I wanted to go up in my room and scream.  This was probably the lowest part of the day.  I do love dinner and maybe that was why.

4. I like beets.

5. Beet juice turns your pee and poop the color of beets. 

6. I eat for pleasure.  I love food.  I love the textures, the tastes the smells.  Food is enjoyable to me and I look forward to it very much.  I spent much of the day fantasizing about all I was going to eat on Friday. 

Strengths of the day: handing my six year old one of my chocolate truffles that I was gifted from a student the previous day and not eating one. Also, I still managed to rock out in my 30 minute spin class.

Weakness of the day: the tortilla chips.  I ate maybe 5 or 6.  The salt was the best part. 

Conclusions after day 1:

Juice fasting is hard.  

It makes you pee.  

I can do it.  

I am never going to be someone who doesn’t eat for the enjoyment of it.   

I like some of these juices enough that I will make them after the fast.

I am going to buy more beets more often. 

It is seriously not my homework.  I try to do what the teachers want me to by encouraging my children to do their homework and I even help them when they need it, but it irritates me to a great degree to have to harp on my children all the time about doing their stinking work. When they get mad at me I remind them that it wasn’t me that gave them the homework, so they should be upset with their beloved teachers.  I am always the bad guy, the nag, the bossy one and it cheeses me off to no end.

It is after all, not MY homework.  

I don’t remember my mother ever nagging me or reminding me about doing homework.  Perhaps it was just because I was a straight A teacher pleaser, or maybe the embarrassment of not having it turned in or the dreaded poor grade was enough motivation enough.  (Maybe that is all the same thing….) Anyway, a couple of my kids don’t seem to give a froopty doo about any of that.  With my first grader we push a little bit, but in the end I feel like it’s first grade homework if she doesn’t turn it in, even the teacher has said it’s not biggie.  But FOURTH GRADE is a bigger deal.

Now I said I don’t remember being reminded by my mom to so my work.  I do however remember PROCRASTINATING.

This is something my fourth grader and I have in common. I can remember staying home from school (Mom let me) to do a book report on Paul Revere that I had put off for some time.  And by "put off" I mean I had not started in any way. I started and finished it in one day and ended up with a rocking grade on it.  What lesson did I learn?  That procrastination is lame and stressful, but if you play it right everything still works out.  Hmmm… probably not the lesson my mother intended for me to learn.

If you haven’t figured it out, I am not one of those parents who gets overly involved in their kids school work and school projects.  I did my projects many years ago, and I did them on my own and essentially I DID MY TIME.    This choice of mine to not intervene in my kids’ work results in my kids turning in projects that I sometimes shudder at, but that I can feel (somewhat) proud about because they did them independently without my help.  

Engineer is a fourth grader now and I feel like we’ve hit the big time.  He has monthly book reports and  poems to memorize (lucky for him he got my amazing short term memory memorization skills) in addition to his regular daily homework.  He has lately been finishing his books quite early, and instead of getting to the book report right away, he procrastinates (something he also got from me, yay!) so that we are up the night before it’s due finishing the projects.  His book report for December was due today.  Last night I asked him about it being finished and when he told me it was not, he burst into tears because he had left the book and the directions for the report at school.

I am so tired of this song and dance.

Awesome Parenting Follows.

I refused to get involved or take over or fix the problem.  Homework= not mine.  Homework=not my problem.  The son is of course my responsibility. It is my responsibility that he grow into a man who can take care of himself and who is proactive.  I asked which of his friends he could call to get the information.  I refused to make the phone calls for him. I was not the one who left the paper at school.  He cried and balked and I offered the alternative. 

"You don’t have to do it.  You can just go to school tomorrow with nothing to turn in and see how that feels."

He made the calls.  I was worried about it because he kind of is awful with the telephone, and he did leave some unintelligible messages.  But he finally got a hold of someone who gave him the directions, and then he sat down and did the work.  

In spite of the battle that ensued between us, I am thankful I held to my guns and made him take responsibility.  In the end I felt awesome about it and I hope he learned a lesson from the experience.   My next step in turning this boy into a man is teaching him phone etiquette and enunciation.  

Nah.  I’ll do that later. 

I am thinking about blogging more.  Maybe I just have too much time this week…

Anyway, this post is going to be short and sweet.  As most of my recent posts are it is about the Squish.

Squish is afraid of her own poop.  

Well, I should clarify, Squish is afraid of her own poop when it is floating in the bathtub chasing her.

What happens is this: Squish is naked in the bath having a good time.  At some point while bathing she uses her powers of excretion in the bath, and makes a poop (with any luck the poop is firm and not…. ummm… not firm).  The poo then floats around in the water where the Squish can see it, and the Squish screams bloody murder like the poop is a sewer rat come to eat her flesh.  The first time it happened I was sitting in the bathroom with her and I dunno (awesome parenting moment ahead) was playing on the iPad or something when I heard… the scream.  I actually knew immediately what had happened because I recognized… the scream.  I recognized it because all of my children have screamed the exact same way when their poop chased them in the tub.  It really is a scream of sheer terror. (If you are a parent of small children and this has not happened to you, it will.  If you are parent who claims it never happened to them, well, you probably have plenty of otherwise gross and entertaining stories.)  So anyway I leap up, rescue the baby from the poop, dry her off, etc.. scoop the poop and sanitize the tub. End of story.

It has happened more than once, but whatever, it goes down the same every time.  

But something more annoying has been happening with the Squish at bath time.   The fear of one’s poop in the tub to me seems like a pretty rational (while still being irrational) fear.  However, for my darling redhead this fear of poop has led to a much more sinister and frustrating fear. She has crossed over from fearing the poop to now fearing… wait for it….

…The Speck. 

I know! It has made bath time RI.DIC.U.LOUS.  I literally cannot make the tub clean enough to rid it of every infinitesimal speck that could potentially float in the water.  I am not kidding, a something the size of a pepper could be floating towards her and she screams and cries and panics until I come and scoop it up with a cup.  And it’s not like there is ever just one little speck in there. I have to repeat the process of speck removal many, many times before she calms down. (Maybe she’s afraid of the Whos.) One time I made the mistake of thinking that if I added bubbles she would not think about or see the specks.  That did not go over well AT ALL.

I am just hoping that these fears subside fairly soon because bathing her is sheer misery.  In the meantime, if my child smells really bad to you, be patient with her.  She is afraid of The Speck.  Eventually trivial things like fitting in, smelling good and having friends will hold meaning to her and she will care enough about personal hygiene to get over her fears and jump in.  For now she is more concerned about avoiding being attacked by specks and poops (and possibly specks of poop) to be worried about being clean in any way.  It’s okay though, because when she isn’t screaming, she really is quite adorable.

And stinky. 

“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ” 

― Elizabeth Stone 

 My heart is heavy.  My heart is sad.  My heart walks around in 4 little bodies, 3 of whom are elementary school students, one of whom is 6 years old.

Whenever someone loses a child– a friend, a stranger or in this case, many strangers– I find my emotions are a jumbled combination of empathetic grief, gratitude for my own non-loss and guilt about the fact that it happened to someone else.  I ask, "why did this happen to you?" and simultaneously, "why did this not happen to me?"  I grieve.  I grieve for the other person’s loss.  I internalize what it would be like if the loss was mine.  I imagine losing any one of those pieces of my heart and I just sob.  And then I feel a little guilty. And then I cry some more over the wonderful blessings that I have.

And then I try to rationalize why something like this would happen.  What did they do that I am doing differently?  What was different about their town? How could I keep this from happening to me?  What could have prevented this?

And then I feel guilty about those thoughts too. 

Some people say that God wasn’t there in that school that day.  They think that if He was there He would have prevented the tragedy. Some have even pompously said that God has been taken out of schools so He doesn’t want to go there.  People that say these things don’t know God at all.  Could He have prevented it?  Most definitely. Was He there that day? He was and He wept.  He wept over the choices of His Children, He mourned for the families of those whose lives were taken, and He welcomed those sweet babies home and wrapped His arms around them and loved them like He always has.

I put my heart on the school bus today like I do every weekday.  I prayed that God would keep my heart safe and watch over my kids just like I do every day though perhaps with a bit more emphasis. But I am not naive.  I have faith that no matter what happens everything will be fine, and I have faith that God can do great things, and I even have faith that my children will get off the bus today safe as they do every day.  But I know that when a piece of my heart walks around outside of my body, that I am vulnerable.  I am at risk.  It is unlikely that I will ever have to face what the parents at Sandy Hook Elementary faced Friday, and though I can’t be sure of that, I can refuse to let this event color my perception of the world we live in.  There is still a lot of good and there is still a lot of safety.  But I also know that I can’t keep my children from ever getting hurt. Like the father in finding Nemo I can’t say "I promise to not let anything ever happen to you," because as Dory so eloquently put it, "then nothing will ever happen to them."  I can’t stop other children from saying mean things, I can’t stop adults from correcting my children in ways I might not agree with, I can’t prevent nightmares, I can’t assure that their faith will never waver, I can’t prevent every slip and fall, and sometimes I can’t even prevent myself from saying things to my children that hurt them. I am vulnerable. I am not in control.  My heart walks outside of my body. 

But I refuse to live in fear. 

I will keep my faith.  I will teach my children to go out and be good in this world.  I will try to nurture their spirits so they never feel that the world would be a better place if they took their own life away from it.  I will hug and kiss my heart.  I will help them to feel safe. I will read more bedtime stories and make more cookies today.  

To the families who lost their children both big and small that day– you don’t know me and you will probably never read this.  I live halfway across the country and we have never met.  But I am praying for you.  I am crying for you.  I pray that you will feel God’s love.  I pray that you will feel his arms around you and find the strength to live even though part of your heart has moved beyond this life.  If I could give you anything I wanted, I would give your babies back.  I wish I could.  I know it’s what I would want if I were you. I don’t know you, but I am giving you my prayers.  I am giving you my tears.  I am giving you my own renewed effort to be a better parent, so that you and I can live in a world of love and light.

This happened a couple of weeks ago, and while I am SOOO over it, I figured I should write it down here in a blog for posterity…

So anyway.  Monday night (2 weeks ago, so I guess November 26) Spider comes into our room in the middle of the night and says she has a stomach ache.  Given our stupor and also the tendency around here, we mumbled something about going to the bathroom to poop and thought little of it.  Unbeknownst to us she then went and vomited on the floor a couple of times and went back to bed.   In the morning we discovered the puke (and by we I mean Charming) and declared it a no-school day for the 6 year old.

Fast forward a few hours.  The child has been lying around all day, will not eat anything, has not vomited again and suddenly declares at 3:30 in the afternoon that her stomach hurts, but it isn’t her stomach it is her "waist" and she gestures to her appendix area.  (I myself had been convinced of my own appendicitis only weeks earlier, so I was well aware of wear appendix pain occurs– I’m fine thanks for asking, just have a tendency to leap to the worst…) This seemed odd to me to say the least.  She clearly did not have food poisoning or the flu.  She looked pretty dang awful.

So call it mother’s instinct, divine inspiration or paranoia, I had the immediate notion to call the doctor and make an appointment.  This is always a tough call for me because I feel like I frequently waver on the border of "let’s ride this out, I am sure it’s nothing" and "this seems like it could be catastrophic."  It’s a fine line I ride.  I mean, we’re talking about the woman who’s midwife missed the birth of her child because I "didn’t want to bother them to drive out here if I wasn’t really in labor."  Buy lucky for us (again, something sparked me) I went with catastrophe and made the call.

Grabbed Sugar off the bus 15 minutes later and drove to the pediatrician who said we need to first check for a bladder infection and then if that got ruled out (it was) we would need to drive to Children’s Hospital so we could have Spider inspected? for appendicitis.

(Side note– do not take a 21 month old into the bathroom when you are trying to collect urine from a 6 year old girl.  There is a lot of butt poking, toilet papering, whining and crying. Avoid at all costs if you can.  I couldn’t so now I am just warning you.)

So, off to Children’s Hospital.  At this point, Spider miraculously recovers and I waver in my resolve.  But the instincts pushed me forward.  I called a friend to make sure Engineer was rescued from gymnastics class, I gave the 8 year old and the 21 month old butt poker to their Dad and we were off.  

Okay, here’s another side note story.  So Sugar, who is 8, wants earrings SOO bad.  We are telling her she has to wait until she’s 12 and she can not stand it.  The entire time we are at the pediatrician’s office she is just a STINK.  Won’t watch Squish while I take Spider to the bathroom, saying weird things to the doctor and just complaining up a storm.  As we are leaving the baby gets on the elevator and Sugar thinks she is going to lose her little sister.  It was fine we all get in the elevator and Sugar (who I swear is already got puberty hormones) just bursts into tears.  SOBBING.  I asked her if she was scared about Squish.  

"No, Yes.  I dunno.  I JUST WANT EARRINGS SO BAD!!!!  IT"S ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT."  

Chuckle at that if you will.  I kind of did.

Anyway.  We get to Children’s and when prompted, Spider does once again have pain and symptoms.  After watching Madagascar 1.33 times in the waiting room of the ER we are finally taken back. 3 hours after that (read 11 pm) after ultrasounds, an iv, blood work and a bunny from the ultrasound technician, the doctor walks in:

"It’s appendicitis.  So…  surgery.  The surgeon will come to speak with you shortly."  Turns on heels and exits.

It was kind of strange.  They had basically been telling me they were looking to make sure it wasn’t appendicitis and if it was there would be surgery, but it was a weird way to announce it.  I had been in the ER for 5 hours, away from home for 7 hours and hadn’t eaten for at least 8 hours.  I was by myself with my six year old and it was all I could do not to cry in front of her.

A short while later Spider (who is my little trooper) says to me, "Mommy, I am scared.  I need a tissue to wipe my tears."  Sweet thing had hardly a tear to wipe but we got a box anyway.

Charming at this point is en route.  Meanwhile they are wheeling my baby to get her anesthesia.  It was all kind of sudden and surreal.  They are giving her the  loopy "juice" in her iv and then they are just like, well we leave now and you stay here…  She wasn’t even that funny on the drugs either which was disappointing.  As my sister put it, "if they are going to drug up your kid they at least ought to let you stick around for comedy hour," but the most that they got out of her that I found amusing is when they asked her if her siblings were older or younger and she said older and then declared herself the youngest child.  Tell me how you really feel about your baby sister…

So yeah, Charming was not there when they wheeled her back, which he felt bad about and blamed himself for dawdling about it.  Can’t say I blame him, when I called to tell him the diagnosis he was asleep and didn’t answer the phone.  I actually had to call the neighbors and ask them to go tell him to wait by his phone for my call (my phone battery had died and I was using the hospital line).  But when he did get there I just hugged him and sobbed. (And I wasn’t just sobbing because I want earrings SO BAD).

I guess apendectomys are kind of a non-event in the medical world. That surgery is like less than an hour.  Spider went back around midnight, was in recovery for a bit and we were all tucked into our five star sofa sleeper by 2 am.  I CRASHED.  In the morning Spider was up to pee and she showed me her scar right away.  (Nothing cuter than a 6 year old in an open backed robe, by the way.)  She seemed really great and I knew it was all the pain meds.  Though she does have a high pain tolerance and she’s typically pretty stoic about stuff.

Children’s Hospital is pretty great though.  I opened the curtains that morning to a parking lot and my eyes immediately went ZOOM.  WALDO.  Waldo was in the parking lot.  You know, Where’s Waldo Waldo?  It gave me a chuckle.  Also got a chuckle when Spider asked if she could wear her underwear.  "It doesn’t feel very private or modest," she says.

So yeah, by the afternoon they sent us home with a lot of pain meds.  Though the first of her pain started when we had to leave and she cried more when they gave her the nasal flu shot than she did the entire time we’d been there. ( "It itches, wahhh.  No don’t do the other nostril!" ) They put her in a wheelchair and in her head she imagined what she would do with this wheel chair when we got home.  I know this because she said to me, "Mom, the short bus has way to put wheelchairs on it.  When we get home, I could still use this wheelchair AND ride the bus."

As we were leaving we saw these giraffe chairs in the lobby.  As we were waiting for Charming to go get the car, we had a lot of time to look at them. "Mommy, I want to sit on the giraffe chair." These are the words she said to me, and yet when I took her picture this is what she looked like:

I really don’t know what she was so peeved about.  I truly think it was a combination of the painkillers wearing off and also being cheesed off that she had to leave.  After all she was getting lots of one on one time with Mom and Dad and all the iPad use she could ask for.  Either way the picture made me laugh.

Also, this post would not be complete without me giving a shout out to everyone who jumped in and helped out by arranging childcare, sleeping at my house, bringing Charming to the hospital and bringing us dinner.  Carmen, Mike, Krissy, Dan, Kathryn, Tiffany and Keri-Ann (ever willing) you guys are the best.  Thanks a million.

You would think this would be a really obvious thing to most people.

It isn’t.

It is very possible that my now ten year old son will come to my blog in a few years and be so mortified that I wrote about this for the world to see that he disowns me.  But I am willing to take that risk.  For posterity.  Perhaps it will help some other parent with their ailing child.  Perhaps it will just be kind of funny.  That is worth the possible "I hate you mom" when he figures out my blog in a few years.  I do this for you people.

So Engineer has had chronic stomach aches for the past 6 months to maybe a year.  They were never SOO bad that he was like doubled over in pain or anything, so don’t judge me for not taking him in to the doctor sooner.  Kids get stomach aches.  I am awesome in other ways, so leave me alone.  Anyway, I finally did take him because I looked at his skinny arms and thought, "maybe he eats so little because his stomach hurts all the time…"

So I took him in.  Our doctor is awesome. She starts asking him questions about the frequency of his bowel movements and if they are hard, soft etc… He does by now, poop every day, but the way he’s describing it to her, (yes I poop once a day, the poops are small and hard…) I am thinking, "that seems like not enough poop…"

Turns out it wasn’t. 

Did you know they can x-ray a person to see how much poop is hanging out in there?

You know it’s bad when the doctor comes back to you and says, "actually he’s quite backed up."

There was a LOT of poop in there.  I know because I SAW the x-ray.  The poop was NOT where it was supposed to be.  As she is discussing it with me and the boy she says, "It’s okay Engineer, we just have to get the poop OUT."

My son grabs his stomach and starts backing away, "NOOOOOO!!!!"

"Oh no, not right now," she reassures him.  Though this was just as much of a reassurance to me as I was honestly also thinking they would do some kind of poop removal procedure. (Like what, I don’t know.  Enema?  Colon cleanse? Poop vacuum?)

"I don’t want the butt medicine!" he says (we’ve done glycerin suppositories around here, yes indeed.)

She then explains about the Miralax.  He is still pretty unsure and kind of upset.  Personally, I think he should be thrilled that he doesn’t have a gluten allergy or a milk allergy or something.  He’s just mad that this is about poop.  I finally had to tell him to put a lid on it because I couldn’t hear the instructions she was giving me about the Miralax over the sound of his sobbing.

But let me tell you there’s a reason they call it MIRALAX.  Because it is a friggin’ MIRACLE, people.  We’ve been keeping track of the poops since we started the ahem, regimen.  He’s pooped three times today.  THREE.  Three poops in one day is a lot better than one poop every three days.  He has been giving us descriptions of the poops also, and based on the descriptions given (length, circumference, softness) that kid was BACKED up. Seriously.  Seriously backed up. 

I’m surprised he could even walk.

The moral of the story is poop every day.  

And also, don’t have kids unless you are ready to deal with lot of sh poop.