Barnmaven

Planning ahead

NOW when the number of my years

is all fulfilled, And I

From sedentary life shall rouse me up to die,

Bury me low and let me lie

Under the wide and starry sky.

Joying to live, I joyed to die.

Bury me low and let me lie.

                    ~Robert Louis Stevenson

 

On the days I'm actually in the mood to hear what's going on in the outside world (its an election seasion, mostly I'm not) I tend to listen to NPR's Northwest stations on the way to and from work.  Sometimes I have to throw in a CD or switch to a music station if its early morning and I'm having a hard time waking up or if its the way home and the soothing voice of Robert Seigel starts causing me to nod off at the wheel.  One of my doctors told me once that an attribute of unmedicated ADHD is  tendency to be extremely sleepy in the afternoons.  That was a BINGO! moment for me, as I had been having terrible trouble driving home from work on a daily basis.  Once I started medication it got much better, but I still have days when I'm a little overtired and driving home is a crapshoot.  But I digress.  Again.  I know, you're so surprised!

So a couple of weeks ago Diane Rehms did a segment on aging and preparing for end of life issues.  One of the guests kept talking about a program called Five Wishes.  Its basically a living will but with extras, like telling your survivors what you'd like them to say when people ask how you wanted to be remembered, picking songs or passages you'd like at your services or if you even want services, along with standard advance directives.  In most states, signed by the proper witnesses, it stands as a legal document. 

Its not easy to talk about death and dying, not for most people.  I don't mind it, but my parents have been very open for years about their wishes for end of life issues.  Mom keeps a folder with all the pertinent instructions and information on where all the necessary documents are located.   Other people aren't so comfortable about planning for or talking about what will happen if they get ill or very old or die suddenly.  I suppose most people don't often like to think about the fact that we're going to die someday.  Its the great unknown, isn't it?  It will happen to everyone, but we don't know how or when and we don't know for sure what happens after.  We might believe certain things about what happens when we die, but there's no clear information to be found about exactly how that goes down.  Is there a test?  A door greeter?  Is there really a Rainbow Bridge and will there be a Noah's Ark of all the animals I've ever loved waiting there for me?  Who's scooping all the poop up there in the meantime? 

I do know that I'm not afraid to die, per se, but I'm afraid of dying while my children are still young.  And because my children are still young and because I only recently remarried and I don't have a current will and my advance directive is about twenty years out of date, I really dug into what the folks on the radio were saying.  SG and I talked some about what we would want to happen after Ken died, but we never went ahead and put anything on paper.

When my brother died, it was completely unexpected.  I can't remember ever talking to him about what he wanted done when that time came, it just wasn't something we thought about.  We talked about what we knew our parents wanted, but it never occurred to either of us that we might not outlive our parents.  Because he'd never had those conversations with anyone and because he didn't have any advance directives, his death was exponentially more difficult, especially for my niece and nephews. They are young adults, and my niece was in the position of having to make a lot of decisions without really knowing for certain what her dad would have wanted.  She also had to deal with the pressure of making these decisions with a lot of different people telling her what they thought she ought to do.  Its a position I would never want to be in, and its a position I don't ever want to put anyone else in.

I kind of forgot about the Five Wishes site for several days, but at some point I had a chance to actually use my laptop at home and I checked out the information there.  I was planning to sit down with SG at the next opportunity to talk about the end of life planning and the need for us to outline our wishes and probably get wills made.  And then...

(This is where the hair on my arms starts to tingle a little bit)

...the doorbell rang.  The dogs freaked out, so it took a few seconds to shove them into their crates.  I opened the door and there was a very nice looking older blond lady standing on my stoop, holding a clipboard and carrying a casual looking briefcase.  She introduced herself and as it turns out, she is a sales representative for a local funeral home. 

COINCIDENCE?  Does this stuff ever happen to you?  Isn't it really spooky when it does?

It wasn't really a good time to have her come in and sit down with us (kids rampant, house messy, in the middle of things), but we made an appointment, and she came back a few days later.  We talked for a good hour or so, and she left us with some materials.  One of the materials is a pamphlet we keep even if we decide not to do any pre-planning, where we write down all of our important information, things we or our families would need to know if when we die.

I'm not planning on dying anytime soon, and neither is SG, of course.  Most of us aren't.  But this is a one way trip, boys and girls.  Making plans isn't something we are doing for ourselves.  Its something we are doing for each other and for our children and our families and friends.  When my spirit no longer lives in my body, what happens to my body won't matter to me.  It will matter, though, to the people I love.  And so we plan ahead, hoping that those plans won't be needed for many years to come, but having some peace about knowing that they are made just in case.

(No, SG, I'm NOT having your body shot into space on a rocket.  Stop asking me.)

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/justintron/6245250507/

 

Finis.

Small moments

Aunt Becky's post at Mommy Wants Vodka today got me thinking.  I commented on her post that I think both the biggest things we do and the smallest carry equal measure of importance.  Then I started remembering.

I read an article in Prevention a month or two ago that discussed how we do some of our best thinking in the shower.  And why not?  We are warm, comfortable, relaxed.  As we go about the routine motions, soaping, scrubbing, rinsing, things we could do with our eyes closed or in our sleep (and we often do, or at least I do) our minds are free to roam at will.  Drawing this thought out into greater context, there are a thousand things we do every day that lead our minds to larger places.  Thoughts that change the directions of our lives. 

It was a summer day nearly eight years ago.  My daughter was in the high chair alternating between eating little bits of ham and peas and throwing them on the floor for the dogs.  I was cleaning the counter and putting dishes away and singing to the song on the radio.  Landslide.  And as I sang the verses, relaxed and lost in my mundane tasks, the words I was singing lodged in my mind and changed my life.  But time makes you bolder, children get older.  I'm getting older too.  And from that moment in time, the idea of my son was born.  

It was a stormy day in the early spring.  I was working from home, tired after an overnight call with the software developers in India as we released the latest patch.  The rain was banging on the windows of my room and my mind was everywhere but thinking about the emails I was reading, filing, deleting, answering.  For once, instead of deleting the weekly email I'd been receiving from the logistics job site for literally years now, I accidentally clicked it open.  And I saw my job.  The one I have now.  The one I would have never known existed except for that small thing, that I opened the email instead of routinely deleting it as I had hundreds of times before.

I was tired after a long day at work and I didn't really feel like doing anything but stay home, but I'd been invited to go out to a birthday party, a party for someone I didn't know at the home of other people I had also never met.  I considered begging off, or at least convincing my date to come over for a movie instead.  I looked at myself in the mirror and decided it wouldn't hurt me a bit to put on a little makeup and a nice sweater and just go meet some new people.  I just didn't realize that one of those new people would be the man I fell in love with.

It was a sunny day in July, the morning after a big holiday.  I'd stayed up late, was tired and not in a hurry to go to work, but I wanted to enjoy the ride in.  This way I thought, or that way?  A random choice, and of course if you read my post from Tuesday you know the rest.

Small flashes of time that change our lives forever.  For the better, for the worse.  A chance meeting with the person who ends up being The One.  The choice to take one path over another on your daily walk, or to read something you normally would not.  A million small moments, added together, that make up the most momentous events in our lives.

Sometimes it has seemed to me as those moments occurred that I recognized them as the lifequakes they were, and other times they have taken me completely by surprise.  I'll sit amidst the boxes and wreckage of my life's latest Big Thing and started following the threads backward until I find the moment and wonder how things would be different without that small piece of time.

What was your small moment?  Where did it lead you? 

I do this because

I blog because there are words exploding in my head and I must put them somewhere.

I blog because there are no words at all and maybe if I start writing they will come.

I blog because I want you to know who I am.

I blog because I want to be someone I’m not and I want you to like that person.

I blog so that all of the people who were once in my life and left me behind will see all that they missed.

I blog so that all the people who are still in my life will know sometimes what I’m thinking even if I can’t say it to them; so that the people who might be thinking of being in my life will understand what they’re getting into and run while there’s still time.

I blog because I want to write well and I don’t, and in the hopes that the practice of the writing itself will help me to write better.

I blog because I really wanted to write a book and it won’t come out of me.

I blog because I want to share stories of hope and experience with the parents of other children like mine.

I blog because I hope those other parents will give me some hope to cling to.

I blog because I feel alone and I think you might feel that way too, so that when you read my words we might feel less alone together.

I blog because I’d rather be alone because sometimes being with other people is scary.

I blog because something funny happened and I have to tell you about it.

I blog because I want to turn something awful into something funny so that maybe when you laugh about it I will be able to also.

I blog so that if you only know me in one part of my life, you’ll see that I’m not the person you think I am.

I blog because I think if you know me and you don’t like me that maybe if I share a little of myself with you, you’ll change your mind.

I blog because I want you to think I’m smart and strong.

I blog because I want you to understand that I’m insecure and afraid.

I blog because when I look back on the things I wrote a week or a month or a year ago, sometimes I don’t recognize the woman who wrote those things and I realize my that I know both more and less about myself than I think I do.

I blog so that someday when I forget what I know, or need to remember what I didn’t know, I can come back and be reminded.

Don't move, he's holding scissors

April 24, 2007.

I remember this date, because its the day before I boarded a plane with my mother-in-law and my children to fly West to begin a new life.  J and his dad had already left a couple of days earlier in our minivan with the dogs.  The kids and I would fly to Seattle, spend a night at my parents, then drive to Eastern Washington to our rental house. 

I'd spent the last couple of days having farewell drinks with just about everyone I could fit in (I think my liver is still mad at me for it, too).  The day before we were to leave I decided at the last minute to go get some highlights and get my layers evened out.  There's nothing like a good haircut to give you confidence on the first day of your new career, right?  Right. 

I walked into the [famous department store styling salon] at the Ocean County Mall without an appointment, as usual, guaranteeing myself the lowliest of the stylists.  I'd never really had a bad cut there before, I had no reason to believe today would be any different.

After a few minutes of waiting and idly perusing the magazine stacks, an elderly gentleman came out from the back and read my name off the checklist.  I had a brief moment of thinking perhaps he was the [famouse department store] Salon equivalent of the Wal-Mart Greeter.  Maybe he was just going to wash my hair for the stylist?  No.  He WAS the stylist.  Dude was eighty years old if he was a day, but I've never been shy about meeting new people and I was determined to enjoy my haircut, so I took my seat in the chair with an air of optimism and innocence.

I love old people.  Really, really love them.  Two of my favorite things about singing in my church choir are Perry and Cora-Jane, our director and his wife.  They don't know it but I often fantasize that they are my real-life grandparents, I love them that much.  Although most won't admit it, we make assumptions about people based on their age.  Don't we?  Of course we do.  What do we usually assume about the elderly?

"Sweet."

"Cute."

'Harmless."

"Oh, such a dear person."

Hmmph.  What a crock of doodle. 

It all started off well.  I told him I wanted some red highlights here and there throughout the crown of my head and I needed my layers evened out. Simple, yes? 

As we looked at color samples and we started the chit-chat that you usually have with a new stylist, things like "Where are you from?" and "How long have you worked here?" and "You're not going to ruin my hair, are you?"  I learned that he was had been a widower for a few years after a long, happy marriage, that he had a grown son who he was close with, no grandchildren.  How sweet, I thought.  We talked about my husband and my kids, and we started swapping stories.

As he began to put the foil in my hair and put the paste on, he started to tell me about how hard it was to start dating again after so many years.  I commiserated, dating isn't easy for young people, it must really be hard for you.  I noticed he was being a little heavy-handed with the color, but I was too afraid to be rude to an old person to speak up.  How bad could it be? 

After I'd been under the dryer for the prerequisite length of time, he rinsed out the color and started to cut.  As he was cutting my hair he started to tell me about a woman he'd been dating recently.

She apparently was a lady who came in to the salon weekly for her regular style and set with another stylist, and he thought she was rather nice looking.  He asked her out to lunch.  He said at first she seemed reluctant to go, but after a few weeks she relented and agreed to have go out with him.  They had their first date and he really liked her. He wanted to ask her out again, except...she stopped coming in to the salon.  I felt so bad for him, his first dating venture after becoming a widower and here this mean old bitch was breaking his heart.  "Well that was awfully rude of her," I said.  "Exactly," he said.  But what he did next?  He asked her regular stylist if she'd heard from her, and when the stylist said no, he played it off like he was worried about her, maybe something had happened, and did she have a phone number to contact her?  No, but the stylist had her last NAME. 

And he went on to tell me how he looked her up in the phone book and got her address and phone number and he called her and asked her out again and she said "no."  So he started driving by her HOUSE.  And he noticed she had a gentleman friend, which he figured out because sometimes there was a car there that wasn't HERS. And that he had called her a few more times but she stopped answering the phone so he thought she might have that Caller ID thingie-ma-bob, so he was going to ask his son if he could borrow his phone to try and see if she would take his calls then.  And as he's telling me this, he's getting clearly more agitated by the recital, and he's cutting more and more of my hair, except I'm afraid to say anything because apparently my hairdresser is a scary STALKER and he's holding scissors.  Scissors!  And all I can hear is the blood roaring in my ears and Freddy Krueger's nails scraping along the wall.

By the end of the ordeal, I'd lost a good three inches of length, and my red "highlights" were a lot more like "fire engine red hair ALL OVER."  And I was too scared to say anything critical to him.  "There, look at it in the mirror!  Doesn't it look nice?"  "Great," I mumbled, "It looks great.  I need to go now."  I paid and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

Lessons learned:

a) Old people are not necessarily nice people

b) Make an appointment next time. 

c) Don't ever give the salon your phone number. Or your last name. Just say that you'll call THEM when you need an appointment.

d) You don't really need a new haircut to start a new job.  Odds are you'll end up looking like somebody totally different than the person they hired and when you show up for your first day of work your new boss will do a double-take and say, "Wow, that's REALLY, um, RED." 

Naked

When people make fun of disabilities or kids who look different, I turn into two people.  On the surface, my superpowers flare and I become Barnmaven, Defender of the Innocent, Crusader Against Injustice and Ignorant asshattery.   I swoop through the air in my bright pink cape, using my Acid Tongue to serve a Verbal Lashing on the evil perpetrator.  Justice served, I fly back to my telephone booth, magically transform back into Barnmaven the Mom and regular old human being, and then I crawl into my closet and I shed a tear or two.

The tears are from the other person I become when I witness cruelty.  I become the Girl With the Braces.

Thanks to congenital deformities to my lower spine and right hip in conjunction with a C-curve scoliosis, I move a little funny.  Not so much now, but when I was little it was really bad.  After I started walking, my toes pointed straight in toward one another. Straight in.  Not pigeontoed.

Throughout my childhood years, I suffered a combination of leg braces and physical therapy to help my bones move the right way and to strengthen the right muscles so that I could walk more like a normal person.  The braces and the funny red shoes they came with I have almost no memory of, but I remember the physical therapy, using sandbag weights to build muscles and crying because it was so hard.  My right foot, the one with the malformed hip socket, still turns in when I'm not trying to make it go straight, and because of the scoliosis, I give new meaning to the phrase "Baby's Got Back."   

I suspect this has a good deal to do with both my desperate need to be liked (I wanted to feel normal) and my deep-seated distrust of people (they made fun of me - a lot).   Questions I heard in grade school and beyond:  "Why does your butt stick out like that?"  "How come you walk so funny?"   One particular incident in sixth grade, a group of older, junior high aged girls approached me, ready to make fun.  They were laughing.  "You know your butt sticks out?" one girl asked, challenging me.  I turned bright red and looked at the ground.  "I have scoliosis," I mumbled in embarrassment.  "What's that?"  "Its something that makes my back curve the wrong way.  Its better now, I used to wear braces for it."  "Oh.  Wow.  Hey, you guys, leave her alone.  She has a DISEASE." 

In my twenties I remember a guy at a bar that I knew only superficially walking up to me and saying "You know, you'd be a really pretty girl if your butt wasn't so big."  "You'd be a halfway attractive guy if your IQ wasn't so small."

I was lucky.  I outgrew my braces, my differences are mostly under the surface now, unless you're looking for them.  The emotional scars are deeper and longer lasting.  And it is time for me to start letting go of them.

Putting pictures of myself on my blog is excruciating.  Its not only that I know you're looking at the bags under my eyes, the deep lines next to my mouth and the fact that my mouth is crooked and my right eyebrow higher than my left.  And yes, I have  hammer chin.  And I would like you all to not notice those things and think instead that I am pretty.  But what is deeper and worse is that I am sure you can look at my pictures and see my funny leg and my butt sticking out and also the remaining weight from my babies that I keep losing and gaining and losing and gaining.   

But today is Bloggers Without Makeup day.  And so.  Without further adieu, here I am.  Late to the party, as usual. 

Part of me knows that there is a way to overcome my fears of being exposed, and that way is not to continue to think that I am successfully hiding my flaws.  That way is to bring them out into the sunlight.  The people that see them and run away, good riddance.  The people that make mean comments about them, so sad that they remain hopelessly shuttered behind their lack of intelligence and class.  The people that I want to know, the people that I think I can let in a little, they are the people who see me and don't care about those superficial things. 

Which kind are you? 

Resistance is futile

I've never been a girly-girl.  From the time I was small, I preferred pants to dresses.  My mother would often torture me by dressing me in them anyway, of course.  Sometimes she would buy patterns and make us matching mother/daughter clothes.  Ugh.  Torture.  I didn't like Barbies either; I liked Breyer horses, and Barbie was useless because her legs would break off at the hip when you tried to force her to sit on the horse.  The few Barbies that I did have ended up being one-legged and inevitably discarded on the floor of my closet.

And shoes?  Hated them. When I was in first grade my mom bought me two pairs of shoes - a pair of saddle shoes for school and a pair of Keds to play in.  I LOATHED those saddle shoes.  I begged and pleaded to wear my tennis shoes, my pretty blue Keds with the white laces and the blue tab behind the heel.  Lovely, comfortable tennis shoes.   But my mother, being unreasonable and perhaps overly parental, insisted that I wear the saddle shoes to school.  I was so indignant about being forced to dress like a girl that I ran away from home.  For real.  All the way to my friend Kirsten's house, a twenty block ride on my bicycle across a very busy four-lane main road.  Over shoes!

As I grew up and got real live horses and played sports in high school, my distaste for "girly" stuff only deepened.  Of course I put on a dress for Prom and all that stuff.  But most of my life was lived either in shorts and high-tops or in jeans and cowboy boots.  And that's always been my style.  Once I grew up, I realized the value of looking like a girl (boys seem to appreciate it) and so some skirts and dresses inevitably found their way into my closet.  The problem is that I always seem to gravitate toward the somber.  People would ask me what my favorite color is.  "Black."  "Really?  Just black?"  "Yes.  Black."  All my early business suits were either black or navy blue, with a white blouse.  Even now, I tend to buy clothes in solid colors.  I've extended the palette to brown and sometimes even a fairly pale pink, but still.  Mostly black.  Mostly solid. 

Then I had a daughter.   A daughter who loves pink best in the whole world.  Who has a room painted pink, because she wants one.  And whose favorite pair of shoes is a hot pink pair of converse with clear sequins sewn on.  Without fail, every choice of clothing she is offered, she gravitates toward the pink like a moth to the patio bulb.  And she LOVES Barbies. For years I have watched her, head cocked to the side, eyebrows raised, wondering how this pink-shrouded pink-loving pinkity pink PINK girl came sliding out of MY womb.  What I didn't notice was the effect all of this pink frilly stuff was having on me.

It started with great subtlety.  One day I was getting a (rare) pedicure.  I always get either "french" style toe painting or occasionally, if I'm feeling brazen, fire engine red.  But one day, for no reason whatsoever (or so I thought), I walked in for my appointment and when my eyes landed on hot pink, I grabbed it.  And later on I looked at my hot pink toes and I thought to myself how really pretty they looked.  A year or so later, after a lavender pedicure and a mauve toe job, I picked pink again.  And I realized once again how very much I liked it.  I might have even loved it, a teeny little bit.  And then I was shopping for clothes and I saw this bright pink tank top, and I bought it.  And when I put it on?  I LIKED it.  Somewhere along the line, my daughter waved her magic pink fairy wand and invisible tendrils of Pink Lovewound their way into the fibers of my brain, where they seeded themselves, grew roots, and started to branch out and leaf.

On the day before Mother's Day, I was out shopping for clothes with my mom when I realized it.  I looked up, looked around, and laughed.  "Hey Mom.  You know what?  You know what my favorite color is?" 

She looked at me the way you look at your dog when it suddenly starts walking into the wall over and over again for no apparent reason.

"Pink, Mom.  My favorite color is PINK.  Can you believe it?  Me?  Pink!"  And then I let her buy me a new dress.

Don't laugh.  It happened to me.  It can happen to you.

You will be assimilated. 

Sunday Scatology

**Don't say you haven't been warned.  If you're put off by discussions of poop, don't read another word.**

We sort of skipped church today.  Little Man coughed all the way there, so I just sat in on my confirmation class, then we headed home before he could cough all over the rest of the congregation and their children.

It has been a beautiful day, sunny, started off slightly chill but has warmed up throughout the day.  Perfect day to catch up on yard work. 

Every parent, at the arrival of their first child, is thrust (often reluctantly) into the role of scatologist.  Poop is a fact of life for everyone, but it plays a monumental role for parents of babies and not-yet-potty-trained toddlers.  If you've got animals, you deal with it constantly as well.  If you're me?  Your life is pretty much full of shit all the time.  Litter boxes here are cleaned daily, stalls weekly, back yard poop-scooped every couple of days.  Thank God the kids know how to handle their own bodily functions now.  (I was so relieved to see the end of diapers.  Both of my children were late bloomers in the potty-training department.  In fact, I had to tell Little Man that little boys aren't allowed to turn four until they can use the potty, so if he wanted to celebrate his fourth birthday he'd better get with the program.  Changing babies never bothered me, but changing toddlers...blech.  When things start resembling something that might come out of an adult, its time to either get them out of the pull-ups or start making them clean up their own mess.)

You can tell a lot about a person or an animal by what they excrete.  You can tell if they're eating too much or too little, if they're eating the right things.  You can tell if they're adequately hydrated.  With  horses you can even tell if they might have dental issues based on how well and evenly the hay or grass is ground by their molars.  Its rather fascinating when you get right down to it.  At the winery we have lots of coyotes and foxes around, as well as badgers and deer.  You can tell when the rodent population gets scarce, because when we're on our vineyard walks at lunchtime we can see the grapes start showing up in the coyote piles.

With the dogs, I can tell what non-food items they've been into when I scoop the yard.  Today was no exception.  I saw crayons, ribbon, bits of plastic toys (Roscoe destroys about ninety percent of the toys that come in the Happy Meals), some (ahem) feminine products (the boxer goes after feminine hygiene products like a junkie chases the needle), and even what appeared to be some blue painter's tape.   Nothing too out of the ordinary for this household.  (Once I had a lab mix with an underwear fetish.  She would get into the laundry and dig out panties, then chew them up.  One time on a walk in the local park, she actually crapped out a pair of green lace thong panties, right in front of several people.  Yeah.  Totally NOT EMBARRASSING.  I HAVE NO IDEA WHO THOSE BELONGED TO.  >.>  That same dog also survived chowing down a Gillette disposable razor.  When I realized she'd eaten it, I called the vet, who advised feeding her heavily to put lots of other product in the system that might help to surround the edges of the blade.  I still have the xray he took of her intestines.  You can see the razor blade clear and stark as the day.  I shudder to think about what could have happened, but eventually she passed it.  It was a relief to have it out of her, plus I was glad to be able to stop rummaging through piles of feces in search of it.)

Cleaning the yard today wasn't as bad as it has been in the past.  I recently started giving the dogs a diet of half raw and half dry food.  The amount they're pooping has been cut nearly in half.  The amount of poop a dog (or anyone, for that matter) creates is directly proportional to the amount of waste products in their diet.  Low-end dog food, which are mostly fillers, give you dogs that create a large amount of poo.  We had a neighbor back in NJ who had a big rottweiler.  Occasionally he would poop in my front yard, and from the looks of it, that dog must have been eating 10 square meals a day.  I've seen smaller piles come out of HORSES for heaven's sake. 

The higher quality food you feed, the less the animal produces in waste matter.  For dry dog foods, I look for anything that has actual meat products as the first ingredient.  The ingredients are listed in order of largest percentage to smallest percentage contained in the food.  Even some of the so-called "premium" dog foods have corn meal or corn fillers as the FIRST ingredient on the ingredients list. Corn is not a natural food for a carnivorous animal to eat, and some vets and researchers attribute the high incidence of renal failure in otherwise healthy dogs and cats to an excess of grains in the diet.  The really high-grade food is also high-dollar, though, and out of my budget.  I look for dog food in the middle price range that lists its primary ingredient as meat or meat by-products.  Recently at the Fred Meyer grocery store (they're a Kroger chain) I was happily surprised to also find a reasonably priced raw food.  By feeding my guys half raw I can afford to incorporate it in their diet for about $8 a week.  The biggest benefit, of course, is that I know I'm helping them to stay healthy longer by feeding them what their system is designed to eat.  I'm not going to complain about the OTHER side benefit either -- smaller poop.  It makes it easier to spot the underwear.

Routine

Some of you may know that I have ADHD.  For those of you who have known me for a long time, pre-diagnosis, I'm sure a big light bulb just popped on in your head and you said "Oh my GOD...so many things now make sense!" 

I was diagnosed when my daughter was.  She was four and we asked the school district where she would be going to kindy to start an IEP.  They sent us to a psychiatrist, a pediatric neurologist, school psychologist, and then conducted a battery of cognitive tests.  The psychiatrist had us fill out a sixteen page evaluation for every member of the immediate family.  Even for Connor, who was one at the time.  Try filling out sixteen pages of questions on the behaviors and personality of your one year old.  Come on!  Its fun! 

When we took our stack of self-evals to the doctor to view, he interviewed each of us separately, then interviewed each of us with Aeryn.  When he sat down with Chidl A and I together, he looked at me and said "You realize she has ADHD, don't you?"  I had a lot of theories about what was going on with her at the time, but it had never occurred to me that this might be one of her issues.  "Really?" I said in astonishment.  "Her activity level seems so normal to me."  Yes, normal.  The kid who was right at that moment upside down on the couch next to me, who moments before had gone dashing down the hall, grabbed ten things off the psychiatrist's desk, crawled UNDER the couch, sat ON the couch and then turned herself over so her knees hung over the top.  (Go right ahead and laugh.  I bet you have blind spots too! Never mind that mine's the size of, oh, South America!)   He then opened my evaluation and said "Of course it would seem normal to YOU.  You have it too."

I've tried different things since then, including Focalin XR (meh), Daytrana (just plug me into a light socket and see how bitchy I can get), nothing at all for a while, and more recently Adderall.  I was doing OK without meds, but one of the less fun aspects of ADHD is severe irritability.  When you have two kids who also have it, as well as other issues, irritability is something that is completely counterproductive for good parenting.  In the best interests of my family, I will remain medicated for the time being.

For those of you who don't know ADHD meds, what they are is basically speed.  In fact, the generic name for Adderall is "Amphetamine."  When we started with our new pediatrician after our move, one of the questions he asked me was if I had ever tried speed in my younger years.  I said that I had tried various kinds of illicit substances, but that speed had never been one of them.  "Oh, darn" was his response, which made me laugh because he's about the straightest arrow you ever met.  "I didn't think that was something to be disappointed about," I replied.  He told me that a person with ADHD who tried speed doesn't get "high."  They get CALM.  And not reacting to speed in a hyper fashion is a fairly decent indicator of ADHD.

So Adderall is lovely, it helps me think and not react, it helps my life go along more smoothly than I deserve for it to.  It helps me, when my bipolar child is in a mania-induced rage, to not lose my shit and duct tape her to the wall just to keep her from hurting herself or others.  My biggest problem, as is my problem with almost everything else in my life, is actually REMEMBERING to take it.  And most days that's a really REALLY big challenge.

Mornings are tough around here.  I touched on that in my hair post a couple of days ago.  Four days a week I have to get two kids and myself out the door by 6:30 am, and feed dogs, cats, horses and chickens as well.  "I don't know how you do it" is something I hear frequently.  Considering the ADHD maybe its a miracle.  The truth is, I don't do it very well sometimes.  Some days its sheer willpower.  Some days I call my carpool friends and tell them to leave without me.  But for the most part, it happens.

It took me months to perfect a routine, but I do have one.  Its the only way I can function in most areas of my life.  Every professional we've talked to about ADHD says the same thing:   The most important thing you can do if you or your child has ADHD is to create an extremely structured environment.  The problem with that is if you have ADHD yourself, its the "creating a structure" part that's hard.  Once you have it, though, it is a welcome relief.

I get up at 4:30.  Start coffee and make lunches for me and the kids, clean litterbox, put food in cat bowls.  By 5 am, pour coffee and eat breakfast.  At 5:15 its time to dress for work, do hair and makeup. 5:30:  Wake kids.  Feed kids.  Dispense medication for Aeryn and myself.  (This is the hardest part of the day, because it usually takes the kids anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes to actually get out of bed)  6:15 AM:   Feed dogs.  Ask kids to get dressed.  Take dogs outside for potty, let out the chickens, give hay and water to the horses.  Go back in, crate the dogs, do last check to see if we've forgotten anything important, herd kids into the car and leave.  Usually we make it out the door by 6:38, 6:30 being the goal. 

This routine works really well as long as I follow it TO THE LETTER and ON THE CLOCK.  One day I decided I would shower when I woke up and I was across the blue bridge and almost to the vanpool lot when I realized I hadn't fed my horses.  Other days I've left my laptop bag sitting by the door or failed to close the garage or lock the front door.    

Having ADHD sucks sometimes.  Like when I forget to close gates.  Its bad enough if you have dogs, but when you have horses?  Not closing gates is serious business.   Impulsivity is a big issue.  I can't tell you how many times something has "seemed like a good idea at the time" only to find I've left another swath of destruction in my wake.   I leave the milk on the counter overnight after having gotten it out for tea.  I've thrown away more food items that require refrigeration because they never make it back to the fridge (by the way, does Country Crock margarine go bad?  Because I left it out last night and now I'm not sure if its safe to eat).  I forget birthdays, anniversaries, appointments and deadlines.  I learned over the years to live my life by a complex system of calendars, diaries, to-do lists and reminders.  Sticky notes are my friend.  I don't know how I survived in the pre-PC age.  Lotus Notes calendar alarms are the only reason I make it to meetings and why I am able to not double-book myself.  I almost never remember to take my garbage can to the curb on Thursday mornings, thank God for my neighbor across the street, who has pulled it down for me more times than I've done it myself.  I keep meaning to do something nice for him, but of course I forget to.  >.<  Business meetings are hard to stay focused at.  I doodle a lot; recent research in the last year or two showed that doodling is actually a GOOD thing and that it helps the doodler to keep attentive to what is being said.  All I have to say is that I must have good instincts, because I seem to have figured out on my own a lot of the techniques for coping with the disorder that the professionals would have given me if I had asked for their help.

When I remember to take the Adderall its like I'm a whole different person, at least I feel that way.  My thoughts stay in my head  instead of racing around the track and chasing every shiny object they see.  I can go into a room and actually do the thing I came to do instead of doing ten other things and ending up halfway across the house having forgotten what I was trying to accomplish in the first place.  I can read something required for work without falling asleep.  I don't fall asleep driving home from work.  I talk slower, and I don't talk over people or finish their sentences as much.  I'm more focused and centered.  And yet, I'm used to being that other person too.

There are upsides to ADHD, I always have lots to do and think about.  Life is never dull.  The ability to hyperfocus has always given me the ability to deeply enjoy reading and to be a good data analyst.  I am one of the few people I know who can drink a pot of coffee before bedtime and still fall asleep.    I can multitask like nobody's business, and if I put my mind to it I can do in one day what it would take a non-ADHD person three days to finish.   I'm always one project away from nirvana. 

I hope that my awareness and my life lessons will help me pass along the skills I've gained to my children.  I can't undo the fact that I've passed along some really undesirable genetic traits to them, but I hope can use what I know to be a better mom. 

OK, now I feel guilty

God, I feel like an ass.

I posted not too long about about the Duggar family having their 19th baby.  You can read it here if you truly wish to be treated to my sarcastic and dry sense of humor.

While I want to state for the record that I still think this sort of celebrity multiple-birthing thing is really weird and a little icky, I also would like to ask that everyone send up prayers, thoughts, wishes, or whatever it is that works in your particular corner of the spiritual world on behalf of the Duggar's latest arrival.

Michelle Duggar had an emergency C section, and Josie Brooklyn arrived in this world at 25 weeks gestation, weighing just 1 pound, 6 ounces.  Statistically, she has a fair chance of surviving - about 82% according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.  For those of you that hadn't followed the news, Michelle was airlifted to a hospital in Little Rock, AR on Monday with contractions that were being caused by a diseased gallbladder.  The news channels all report mom and baby are in good shape.

Regardless of what I believe about the Duggars' choices in reproductive frequency, I truly hope little Josie thrives.  That's an awfully tiny baby to be out in this big, cold world.

My youngest nephew was born about 4 weeks after my daughter, at 28 weeks gestation.  He was, if I remember correctly, about 4.5 lbs.  Compared to the 11 pounds my daughter had reached at just four weeks of age, little J felt light as a baby bird when I got to pick him up out of his hospital crib.  Like many preemies, he has had some developmental delays, but when I say that this kid is healthy and thriving I am not yanking your chain.  My little Amazonian Princess is in about the 97th percentile for her age in height, and J gives her a run for her money.  We spent a week visiting with that side of the family in July, and by the size of him, you'd never know what a teensy weensy little guy he was when he first arrived.

I hope the same success for little Miss Josie Brooklyn Duggar.  I also wish her parents would stop reproducing, if only for the sake of the 19 children they now have. 

But what do the CONSERVATIONISTS think?

Clicking through headlines on CNN today I came across the following gem:

Note the final bullet point on the story highlights.  Isn't it good to know that CONVERSATIONALISTS aren't concerned about the environmental impact? 

CNN.  The most trusted name in news.  <<<<<SNORK!>>>>>