Savor the Moment

So many things lead to this point in time. Tonight/tomorrow we are expecting snow.  Yes, snow in April.  Not only are we expecting snow, but we are expecting accumulation of several inches.  Last weekend we were outside spraying each other with the garden hose!  Last weekend I rode my bike on the trail.  Monday just past, it was in the 90s for the Boston Marathon.  Tomorrow, parts of PA and NY are going to get over a foot of snow.  I am thankful I spent most of last weekend outdoors.  Just as my title says, savor the moment.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Exercise.  Many of us take it for granted.   Many of us don’t do it.  We always say we will.  But we never seem to start or if we do, we don’t continue. There is always tomorrow, or is there?  My hip is continuing to get worse.  I am still able to get about and I could still probably run or cycle but the payback pain isn’t worth it.  We walked for 3 hours with the kids at the mall on Saturday.  Today I struggled to walk around the supermarket.  For those who keep saying they will start tomorrow, my advice to you is start today and enjoy every moment of it.  I had hoped to train for my third marathon this summer and perhaps get a couple of short distance triathlons in.  Now I am wondering if I will be spending my summer recovering from surgery.  For those who can, savor the moment.

And how am I doing with the spring cleaning?  I devoured a bottle of wine on Friday night.  Not very pleased with myself for doing this but one slip up in about 3 weeks is pretty good.  I fought the temptation to refill my Ambien prescription today.  I have no reason to do this.  I don’t seem to need it right now and it wreaks havoc with my short-term memory.  It makes me sleep like a baby though!  Migraines/headaches have been responding well to Zomig and nothing has escalated to the point of requiring intervention from a health care provider.  This is good news.  Perhaps I am finally outgrowing my migraines!

Tomorrow it is back into the battle zone at work, but I do actually practice what I preach.  We had a fabulous weekend with the kids, even though the weather was miserable.  Littlest one fell asleep before 10 PM tonight which is a miracle!  Now I am going to savor some moments of responsibility-free time.

A Little Bit of Anxiety

Over the winter, I did what many less serious triathletes and runners do, I cross-trained. I am definitely a fair-weather runner/cyclist. I also find it difficult to find those daylight hours for exercising outdoors during the school semester. Say hello to Zumba. I had fun. I sweated. I laughed. I groaned. I made new friends. Fast forward a few weeks of only going once a week and I discovered a new pain in my right hip. Now hip pain isn’t new to me. I have had ongoing issues with my hips since about 2005. But it was always “bursitis”. Two primary care docs and two orthopedic/sports docs said so. So I went with the flow. Cortisone injections did seem to help for a few days. Voltarin pills got me through my first marathon. But I digress. This Zumba-induced pain was new and it was different enough from over-use injuries that plague most distance athletes, that I sought medical attention once again. I was referred to a family practice doctor who specializes in sports medicine. He promptly referred me to an athletic trainer for exercises. I thought this was a bit odd but went with the flow once again. It didn’t take me long to figure out that this wasn’t helping. I sent out a call to my friends on Facebook and was hooked up with a PT who specializes in this type of thing. She saw me FOR FREE! Wow. When the heck does that ever happen? So I offered to teach a class for her if she needed me to. And I have always said that I have nothing to trade!

Long story short, my insurance company finally authorized me to visit an out-of-network orthopedic surgeon. This is just such good news that you are probably wondering what is up with the title of this post. Well, put your hand up if you have ever had an MRA of the hip, or anywhere really. They take a big long needle and insert it into your hip joint and inject dye. Then they stick you in the MRI machine for about half an hour. I am not so concerned about being in the MRI. It is the long pointy thing they want to jab into my joint. I am feeling a bit sick just thinking about it. I cannot sleep just thinking about it (and this explains why I am up blogging instead of sleeping at 12:30 PM when I need to be up at 6 AM in the morning). So there it is. My little bit of anxiety.

Life in the Fast Lane

Long time, no blog.  This isn’t an unusual phenomenon for me.  I have these wonderful intentions to write daily but life just gets in the way.  Take for instance, the fact that both kids got strep throat.  Before they had even finished their course of antibiotics, dear child number 1 wakes up with horrendous croup.  Several days later, dear child number 2 wakes up with even worse croup.  A day later, dear mom wakes up with a rotten sore throat.  And so it goes.

Work has been steady and ever challenging.  But this is a good thing.  I haven’t been as stressed as in previous weeks which means that I haven’t felt the need to self-medicate.  In fact, tonight, for the first time since, well, I am not sure, I would have to read back through my posts to see when the last drink I had was, I had some wine.  I bought a bottle (after much deliberation) to have with dinner.  I had one glass of wine with dinner and a second after dinner.  It was a very drawn out process though and it left me without any buzz whatsoever!  I had no desire to keep drinking to seek that buzz either.  This is a major breakthrough for me.  I wasn’t sure if I’d be capable of sensible drinking again and this gives me great hope.

Along with my sore throat, I have had really nasty headaches and so I have had to dig into the migraine meds the past two mornings.  But they did their thing – one pill each morning of the weekend – and I have managed to have a reasonable weekend.  I even wiped the cobwebs from my bike and went out for a ride on Saturday morning.  It has been a very long time since I have been on the bike.  It will be quite some time before I can sit on the seat again!  My hip pulled up sore after the ride and I continue to chase down a specialist who can give me a firm diagnosis for the source of pain.  Because the weather was relatively nice this weekend, I managed to get out into the garden to dig up weeds and plant new plants.  In a couple more weeks, I will head to the nursery to buy some seedlings.

I love to watch things grow.  Gardening is something that my boys can help me with too.  Last year, they each planted a gerbera daisy plant.  My older son delighted in watching it flower all summer.  I love gerberas so I plan to do this again this year.  They don’t seem to have much interest in vegetable gardening just yet!

Well that is about the sum of my life over the past few weeks.  I am proud of myself for not hitting the bottle and I am not feeling guilty for enjoying a drink tonight.  I never intended to quit drinking altogether, although there have been times when I wondered if I would need to.  I am still trying to figure out how to spend enough time with the kids in addition to working, keeping a clean house, and exercising.  Exercising has somewhat fallen by the wayside due to the hip pain, but the house still needs to be cleaned, meals to be cooked etc.  I wonder if working moms ever truly figure this out?  If so, please let me know how you do it!

Recent Travels

As the school year winds down, I find myself dreaming of vacations.  Of course, I cannot take any real vacations this summer since I well and truly overdrew the vacation purse over the past 6 months.  Fortunately, my last trip home was for a happy event.  This is where I witnessed someone close to me get married:

Only my husband and I went on this trip.  It is difficult to make the decision to travel without the children.  However, when each child costs over $1000 to fly to my homeland, it is difficult to justify.  We did take them late last year and my older son has been twice now.  It is unfortunate that it is so expensive to travel, but at least there are many things for us to see and do in the US.

Today is Saturday and although cold, it is a beautiful sunny morning.  Makes the ever so glad that I did not succumb to the desire to buy a bottle of wine last night.  This reduced alcohol thing is working out ok, even if I do have some fairly strong cravings at times.  I have had a dull headache for the past few days but that too is bearable.  We took the kids to see The Lorax last night and it was delightful.  Tonight, hubby and I will go to The Hunger Games.  We are not big movie buffs.  In fact, the only movie my husband and I have seen together at a cinema since we have been married is Race Across the Sky (I think that is what it was called – the Leadville Mountain Bike race?).  With two kids and no family to watch them, movie nights become expensive.  We have found a great sitter, which is lucky, be every time we need a sitter, we are spending at least $100 for the whole evening.  I guess one might argue that you cannot put a price on sanity, but sometimes I find it hard to justify paying a sitter.

And somehow I am back to the balancing of family and life again.  I keep hearing how important “me” time is or “couples time”.  And I totally agree.  My husband and I have quite a strained relationship and kids haven’t made it easier.  But stressing about money also puts strain on a relationship so where is the balance here?  Add to the fact that the kids are at daycare all day, and you might come to the correct conclusion that we don’t want to spend time away from them in the evenings.

I know you are hearing lots of complaints from me, but keep in mind that this is my outlet.  It is healthier to vent here than at home.  I tend to fall into a vicious circle – get stressed, drink too much, take too much migraine medicine and cannot sleep.  Take sleeping pills, brain gets foggy, coping abilities decline, stress increases…  and so on.  It has been nice to have a less clouded brain as of late.  The stress is still there and sleep doesn’t come as easily as I’d like, but I feel more motivated to do things well when I am a little more “sharp”.  For me, these things come in cycles.  With one month of the academic year left, I know I have three months of down time ahead of me.  While I will be expected to work, work takes on a different meaning over the summer.  The boys will still be in daycare, which sounds cruel but they get to do all sorts of fun stuff in the summer – like go to the local pool every week.  They get to do more stuff than they would if they were home with me (because technically, I am still working – gotta love a 12 month contract at a teaching institution).  But I will have the luxury of taking them late and picking them up early.  They can have the day off if I want to stay home with them for the day.  Yes, summers are my saving grace, my mental health care. I cannot wait!

And Time Goes By

Do you want to know how many blogs I have started?  Hmmm, I think this might be the 4th.  One of them actually got a lot of mileage but it was a private blog with lots of photos for my family and friends on the other side of the world.  I don’t even remember how to log in to it, and to be honest, it doesn’t feel the same now that my mother is no longer here to read it 😦

Enough of that for now!  This week has been a true test of my grit.  Both of the kids came down with strep throat, this being the busiest time of the year for my husband and me having various teaching commitments and various other meetings.  However, we survived the ordeal and both of us walked away tired and with moderately sore throats.  The good thing to come out of this is that I haven’t had so much as a craving for a drink since the weekend.  I wish I could say I have been headache and hip pain-free.  No such luck. A couple of Zomig and the rest of my Lortab later and my headache is mostly gone but the hip remains a literal thorn in my side.  Tomorrow is an exciting day as I get to visit with a friend of a friend who happens to be a Physical Therapist who specializes in, you guessed it, hip problems!  And she is doing this as a favor, as in, for free!  I don’t ever get stuff for free so this is a very exciting prospect.  I feel a bit guilty as I actually have a referral to see a PT, but, as seems to be happening more frequently these days, I don’t know where it is!

Let’s talk about mothering for a bit.  I have been at it for over 5 years now and I don’t feel as though I am any better at it.  It is just plain, hard work! My biggest problem is guilt.  I feel guilty that the boys are in daycare all day and I feel guilty when I do non-work stuff on work time.  I never feel as though I am giving my all to both of these important facets of my life.  I give even less to my husband but he is wonderfully non-demanding and he is excellent with the kids.  I sometimes wonder how different things would be if we’d had girls instead of boys.  Would I be better at playing with them?  I grew up with two brothers so I thought I’d have no trouble with boys, yet, I just find it difficult to want to play with cars and to even play hide and seek.  Come to think of it, I hated cars as a kids and never wanted to play hide and seek with my brothers.  My boys NEVER, EVER stop!  We have trouble getting them to bed at night, we have trouble slowing them down enough to eat dinner and we have trouble getting them moving for daycare in the morning.  Weekends are totally exhausting to me and I feel guilty for being this way.  I know it must get easier at some point.  Am I a bad mom for wanting to have me time? The only real me time that I get is when I am working!  And at 10 – 11 PM at night if I happen to be lucky enough to get the boys down that early!  With the little guy rarely sleeping through the night (he is 3 by the way), and me getting up around 6 AM most days, I am just plain tired all the time!  My mother-in-law is coming in to town this weekend – THANK GOODNESS.  This means downtime for me. I love having her visit and so do the boys!

Well, since tonight is a night when the kids decided to cooperate at bed time, I should take advantage and get my butt up into bed. Buenas noches.

Weekend Roundup

The weekend has been and gone.  A bottle of wine, 2 days of migraine, 2 Zomigs and 2 Lortabs later, I would say that I made poor choices this weekend.  Although I did not drink excessively, I should have known I was exposed to enough triggers to set off the head.  Hormones and thunderstorms.  Doesn’t get much better than that.  I guess Friday night was almost to excess, but Saturday night was one glass (or perhaps 1.5 because it was a fairly large glass!).  At any rate, on Saturday morning I just took the Zomig.  No worries.  Unfortunately, the virus that invaded the day before was kicking my butt for most of the day.  I finally got my kids off to sleep when the younger one woke up crying hard.  Turns out that he had vomited all over his bed 😦  And he had a fever.  Poor little fellow. So, cut a long story short, spent and hour or so in the middle of the night bathing child and doing laundry.  Since the little guy refused to sleep anywhere other than his bed, I had to work pretty hard to get that horrible vomit smell out.  I don’t know what it is about vomit but I think it is the nastiest smell ever!

I didn’t end up getting much sleep Saturday night and much to my dismay, awoke with another migraine.  This one was worse than the previous day’s so I hit it up with both a Zomig and two Lortabs.  Did the job.  We all went shopping together (McD’s, B&N, PetCo and grocery).  Spent afternoon finishing some housework and finally, managed to get out into the yard to see if my lavender had survived the winter.  I had planted three different varieties and one of them didn’t make it.  I think the other two have but it is still a bit early to tell.

A boring post from me tonight.  I am feeling rather uninspired!  Probably the lack of sleep and the NyQuil!  Goodnight bloggers.