MayDay

 

How to emerge from this - I hesitate to call it "lost" time?  Stuck on an island like in LOST?  No black smoke monster here, unless you count my mood from time-to-time.  Limbo?  Ten months of trying to sell our home of twelve years, and I expected to be settled by now.  Instead we are in temporary housing.  It eases Daniel's way as he finishes school, and yet leaves all of us suspended.

So many things to weigh.  Towns with schools we like, have limited choices we can afford.  Many of the things we can afford come with lots of work needed.  Scoot out further there are nice towns/schools/houses, and H winds up with a monster commute to work.  We can't seem to make things line up.

Home is so much more than the structure you live in, or the location.  If anything, this sojourn back to apartment living with kids in tow has helped remind me of that.  Yet I feel as if I'm casting about...  trying to find our place.  Still holding my candle up in the darkness.

Funkity, Funk, Funk...

So, I can only partially blame Miss Zoot.  She's one of my favorite, really real bloggers, who I had the privilege to meet at a Blogher conference a number of years back...  She started the earworm with "Funky Cold Medina..." and a post about landing in a funk, working your way out, coping skills...  and me, I've been humming "Funkytown!" ever since.  So now that you're thanking me for the dueling earworms...

My reality is that I've been feeling funky for awhile.  So much so that I've hesitated writing here as I haven't much liked the stress running through my head/life, much less putting it to paper (or at least down here for all to see).  Ten months of trying, showing, selling our condo put a stress on all our lives.  Not an easy task while running a family with two kids.  Two failed offers, and finally a taker - who would only buy if she could move in at the end of February - no ifs, ands or buts.  And so commenced the packing and moving, frantic and in the snow, to...  where?  Despite our best efforts, we are struggling with where do we go from here?  The right town?  School system?  At least an OK commute for H?  What can we really afford?

We found some temporary housing that is serving its' purpose for now.  But with the idea that it's temporary, we strive to not unpack completely - and so the chaos continues.  I stress, and I have trouble sleeping.  In between I hug my kids tight and try to keep life spinning as normally as possible for them.  Other than Daniel's school schedule, and H's 12-hour workdays our schedule is all over the map.  Suggestions for coping with a 2.5 year old in tow?  Other than my obsessive re-watching of Big Bang Theory?

Oh, to be 2 Again...

Where can I bottle the confidence of a two year old?  Ethan wakes in the morning asking for "D" cereal and his cup of milk.  Unfortunately for Mommy he seriously discovered the candy this Halloween season.  My insistence of:  We'll eat lunch first, and you can have a piece for dessert...  is met with "NO!  No lunch."  He'll enter the room and turn off the television for you.  He turns into a baby yoga master of epic proportions if he really doesn't want to be buckled in a car seat.  Today he spent part of the afternoon in a winter coat riding his "schlow-schlow" (big wheel) out on the deck since he simply had to, even though it was 46 degrees out.  The toddler negotiations are rampant around here these days.

And yet, I can't help but admire my boy's confidence in the rightness of his world.  And hope to take a page from his playbook for myself from time to time.

Busy, Busy

Where is the summer going?  Somehow July just got crammed with busyness - the Fourth led to a week of Cub Scout Adventure Day Camp.  Daniel had a blast outdoors all day getting to try stuff like archery and BB's... and get a little braver about his swimming.  Directly following camp we spent 9 days to and from visiting Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Andy in Wisconsin.  Always lovely and relaxing, if only it weren't bookended by 2 days each way of hard driving.  Upon our return we began vacation bible school.  That was capped by a weekend of "family camp" with the cub scouts.  (In the rain.)

I just looked it up.  School starts August 29th.  Eeps!  I need some serene lake time for an eensy bit longer.

Testing the water...

Ah, me.  Absent again.  It has been a rough winter, with two kids and two adults seemingly cycling from one illness to the next.  I've felt closed off.  Constricted.  All about the putting out of the fires and not about the savoring the bits of life.  It's a vicious circle - as I've pulled in, I can feel my self-talk gremlins speaking up.  You've got nothing to write about...  nothing to talk about...  nothing to do but complain...

And so I don't write, and I don't get to feel creative, and the tides pull me under one more time.

This needs to change.  Daniel is almost out of school for the summer.  I want this to be a summer of fun, for me and all three of my boys.

Weaving

Somehow, I didn't anticipate leaving this space for so long.  The end of 2011 and the ushering in of 2012 seemed to be determined to kick my behind.  The croup/hospital stay morphed into a round of colds for everyone.  Getting better led us into a round of a nasty stomach virus for all four of us one by one.  And I started allowing some of my gremlins to creep in.  Mired in illnesses and the day-to day dealings with them I started wondering if I had anything to say.  My voice felt whiny and complainy and "poor me"-ish.  I didn't like listening to myself, let alone put such stuff out there for others to have to deal with.  This naturally led to my perfectionist gremlin rearing his pointy little head.  If I couldn't write perfectly then it just wasn't happening.  Frozen.

We've been finishing out January of 2012 with all of us coming out of yet another nasty cold.  And rather than the balance that I used to try to achieve, I'm struggling with the varied threads of my life.  Sister, daughter, wife, mother...  aiming to weave the bits into the creative soul I'm reaching out to become.

Most certainly not for cookie...

So.  Late in the evening of my last post, Ethan woke coughing and gagging and pretty upset.  His chest and belly had him looking like he was sucking hard, trying to get air and H and I went - not into panic mode, but call it "crisis mode" of what do we do here?  We tried a hot and steamy bathroom, but nothing seemed to be keeping the situation from spiraling further.  Leaving H home with Daniel I bundled Ethan into the car and off we went to the ER.

Anyone who has dealt with croup will probably guess that the cold night air calmed things a bit, but I was still plenty worried and continued my journey.  Frustration set in almost immediately with my little local hospital as they trundled me through their admittance procedure - even though it was Ethan and I in a completely empty waiting room.  We were finally ushered back, and after Ethan was diagnosed we were started on blowby oxygen, rescemic epinephrine and steroids.  It was around 4:30am when he still wasn't responding well to the treatments that it was decided to transport us to Bigger Hospital via ambulance.  EMTs strapped a car seat to a gurney, Ethan to the car seat, and off we went.  It's still a vivid memory of my teeny kid looking wide-eyed around at this commotion all for him....  and his little voice saying "Cuck?" (Truck?) as he looked out at the ambulance.

They settled us as best we could be settled at Bigger Hospital.  Any way you go about it, though, it's hard on a 16 month old to be getting Xrays, monitors, IVs (3 pokes there), steroid shots...  and he absolutely hated the most common treatment of the epinephrine being blown in his face.  Each treatment he'd get temporarily better, then worse again.  None of us expected a case of croup to result in a 5-day hospitalization.  Most everyone helped us make the most of a bad and unexpected situation.  I thank God for those who looked after my little boy with such care.  And I learned to appreciate those who gave a little extra TLC to an exhausted Mama trying to look after her boy...  the kind nurse who ran to the cafeteria for me to make sure that I had something to eat, who made sure to ask if I needed anything at all.

After 5 days Ethan finally had a night of not needing any breathing "treatments" and we were allowed to go home.  We've all been dealing with congestion and cold symptoms but nothing like the problems that we were having that sent us to the hospital.  Here's to getting back on track for the start of a healthier winter.