Spring update
21 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in family
I haven’t posted anything in a long, long time. We’ve been busy, and a lot of things have changed around here.
My daughter will be going to public school next year. We gave homeschooling, and then online public school, a good try, but it just isn’t for us, at least not right now. I work too many hours and too many weird shifts to be able to get her out and about to all the social opportunities I was hoping to give her. Working fewer hours isn’t an option, unless we wanted to do without little luxuries like food and health insurance. And homeschooling with a busy two-year-old underfoot often meant that he didn’t get his needs well met. The local public school is highly rated, has small class sizes, and the people I know with kids there are happy with the school. I may take her out again at some point when she’s older, but I’m hoping she does well there.
My son is just about old enough to age out of early intervention. He’s made leaps and bounds in development the past two or three months. His developmental therapist says that his main issue from here on out is practice, practice, practice with his articulation, rather than struggling to get him to communicate verbally at all, which is where we were 6 or 8 months ago. I’m waiting to hear back from the school system regarding getting him assessed for the developmental preschool. If he can get into it for the speech issue, yay, free preschool! If not, I’ll probably wait until next year to enroll him. I’m definitely planning to enroll him in at least one year of preschool, though. I think it was a big mistake when I decided not to put my daughter into it. There were lots of little social rules that she didn’t learn until this year at her church activity, and she was really embarrassed to be the only one who didn’t understand things like standing in lines and waiting until the teacher told her to do certain things.
And we’re also going to have a third child this summer, right before the school year starts, which is all the more reason why getting my kids both into school seems like such a lovely idea. 
So, that’s where we’re at. I hope to be updating here more often, now that I’m not working a bunch of extra hours like I did over the winter.
Old dog
15 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in family
We may have a new dog! A huge (his head comes to my waist) neutered male black lab showed up two days ago, and shows no signs of leaving. At first, I thought he belonged to the farmer family down the road, until I looked at him up close. I think he’s an old dog, since he has a lot of white fur on his face.
I suspect that he if he was dumped off by someone, it might be related to the local animal shelter closing in a few weeks and no longer taking animals. My husband and I heard about it on the radio, and talked about maybe going to get a dog or cat from the shelter before they euthanize all the animals that are left, but decided against it. But then, the very next day, this dog showed up. So maybe we’re just meant to have a dog anyway. He obviously used to be a house dog: any time that I open the back door, he tries to nose his big furry self past me and into the house.
I hope he sticks around. He’s great with the kids, and I feel safer living out here in the sticks with a nice big dog around.
Perfect family blogs
20 Apr 2011 1 Comment
in family
Sometimes I really enjoy reading those mama-blogs where they’re all gushy about remodeling, homeschooling (strictly Waldorf, of course, no plastics or characters here!), homemade clothing, homemade diapers, brown eggs from the backyard, carefully selected wildflowers in a cracked vase.
Lots of visually appealing photos on those blogs.
But sometimes I kind of want to jump into the photos and, I dunno, throw some plastic Legos on the kitchen table, or maybe an empty Mountain Dew can that daddy forgot to throw in the recycling bin before mama started shooting pictures of The Perfect Country Kitchen. Maybe accidentally-on-purpose bump the Perfect Vintage Bowl and spill the all-natural Easter egg dye across the Perfect Vintage Tablecloth.
It makes me wonder what would happen if one of the kids did or said anything mainstream. Like, would the mother’s smooth smile falter a bit if the 8-year-old asked, “Who is He-Man?” or “What is plastic, Mama?”
I don’t say this to be mean. I say this because, when people only present the shiny side of their lives on their mama-blogs, it makes them seem like cardboard cutouts.
———————————————————————————————-
Here is the shiny side of my life:
Yesterday, my children splashed in puddles in the gravel driveway and squealed with delight.
My daughter found four perfect morel mushrooms right by the sandbox, amid the pink petals from the flowering crab apple tree.
I pulled my children in a wagon in the woods so we could look for more mushrooms and peek over the edge at the overflowing muddy creek.
After supper, my daughter and her cousin played Dinosaurs for an hour.
My daughter made my son belly laugh so hard that he rolled off the couch.
All true.
And here’s the grainier side:
She made him belly laugh so hard by blowing up a balloon (artificial, tsk, tsk) and splatting the slobbery air into his face, over and over.
While my son napped, my daughter played a computer game for over an hour and I addressed birthday invitations.
She asked me to tell her a story during her bath, and I snapped at her and said, “No, I’m too busy.”
My daughter ate Gogurt for a bedtime snack.
I didn’t wash the dishes yesterday. I let them pile in the sink.
My son wore disposable diapers, ALL DAY LONG, SHAMELESSLY.
See? Not very shiny, but definitely more real.
28 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
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I hate night shift. I like the shift diff and the quiet-ness of it, but it’s not worth the measly couple extra bucks per hour for the amount that it messes things up. Everything outside of work I mean. My schedule is perpetually screwed up, as is the kids’, which inevitable screws up my husband’s schedule too since he stays up to put my son to bed each night, and then gets up early for work.
I waste so much more time on my days off when I work nights. Like today- I know I’m scheduled to work tonight, so I’m still in my sweats at almost noon, the kids are still running around in a pajamas, the TV is on, and I have yet to do any housework. I’m just wasting time and not productive at all. It’s one thing to do two or three 12′s in a row like this, and then have a normal schedule for a while again. The annoying thing is, for the next couple weeks, my schedule is work one or two shifts, off two or three days, work one or two, off a couple days. And then there’s the irritability that comes with staying with staying up till 8 am one day and then trying to be on a normal schedule the next day. As in, I’m a really crappy mom when I’m perpetually sleep deprived and when my sleep schedule is bouncing back and forth multiple times in the space of a week. So I/we never have time to really recover and feel normal and do normal family stuff.
Blah. I’m really hoping I get called off tonight, because then I could have a fairly normal week the rest of the week.
I wish I could afford to not work at all, or work a lot less than I do anyway.
Long week
14 Mar 2011 Leave a Comment
This is looking to be a looooong week. M will be working out of town all week for the second time this year. I’m not quite as scared going into it this time, since I know that we’ve survived this before. The fact that I have to work two days this week may actually make the week easier than last time, when I was home alone with the kids the entire five days. I have a recertification class at work, and I’m tempted to leave my older child with my mom overnight in between my two workdays, since she is always begging to stay there.
Hitting the ground running with a large dose of morning coffee. Today I need to pick up my medical records from my old healthcare provider in the city, run to the store for some groceries and printer paper, and run by work to get my study manual for my class. Then when we get home tonight, I need to remember to print off the 65-page pretest for the class (eek). Last time I took this class, I was fresh out of college. I think I have some major studying ahead of me this week in order to prepare myself.
I caught M right as he was heading out the door this morning and said goodbye. He had left a note on the board with some helpful hints to get me through the week. The last line reads, : “When it seems like the kid whiney/cry-ey level is a too crazy level, hot chocolate or popcorn can make a world of difference.” Wise words.
The WAHM thing
08 Feb 2011 Leave a Comment
I’m starting to get the hang of the content writing gig. I find that, if I take 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there throughout the day to work on an article, I can do one a day while home with the kids, without neglecting them any more than I normally do in the course of a day. I recently was accepted to write health articles for a related site, which is awesome since-
1) they pay more, and
2) that means writing about things I actually have a background in, rather than trying to BS my way through something that I know little or nothing about, like titling a trailer or military rules.
I looked at the other articles on the site and noticed that most of them use only two references, as opposed to the 4 or 5 that my obsessiveness compels me to use. Considering that this isn’t exactly a journal article or anything, I think 2 or 3 is quite reasonable. I think I will be able to speed up my writing if I use only the minimum number of sources from now on. If I can get to the point where I’m writing 8 or 10 articles per week, that would go a long way toward replacing the income from when I was working a lot more shifts. I need to start writing more for the residual income site too, but it’s hard to motivate myself, since that sight doesn’t have the immediate gratification factor of a Paypal deposit the next week. I guess I need to set some goals there, because I know that once I get some more articles on that site, I will start seeing some small paychecks each month from there too.
I only worked 4 shifts in the entire month of January, and from here on out, I am only scheduled for about 12 hours most weeks, which in reality means that I will only be working maybe 3 shifts a month or less, due to the frequent call-offs for per diem nurses. I was feeling insecure about the whole thing the other day, and then I started thinking about the fact that I will be able to avoid working my kids’ birthdays, only one holiday a year, I can work the bare minimum during times that I know I need to be home more. I am so happy to be back to a schedule that puts my kids first, rather than expecting them to accomodate having two parents working opposite shifts. Yuck. Chaos all around and not good for any of us.
I called the other day to see how much we still owe on our car loan. It’s still a decent chunk, but it’s paid down enough that I might just pay the whole thing off next month, and get it over with. Emptying out half of my savings is a bit scary, especially since our income has dropped, but I really want to get it paid off. Fleeing from debt with gazelle intensity and all that.
Snow days
03 Feb 2011 Leave a Comment
in family
Stuck in the house, overeating, with my family.
Need to make some money to make up for being called off two nights ago. But not feeling too motivated to do any writing. So, sitting around wasting time instead. Really have no excuse for not getting something done, since my husband is stranded at home too, and has been almost all week.
Oh- wait. Just remembered that my sweet little toddler kept me from sleeping more than 5 hours last night. So, no wonder this cup of coffee in my hand has yet to make much of an impact on my alertness level.
I remember how amazing I felt for the year or so after getting Jubilee night-weaned. Oh it felt so good to get 7 or 8 or even 6 hours of sleep each night- just having uninterrupted sleep is such a luxury. It’s amazing how much I can get done in a day, when I’ve had a full night’s sleep. I really shouldn’t be so hard on myself- being up half the night with a child really is hard work… But I’m still hoping that this second coffee and a shower will get me jump-started, at least for a little while.
All. Right.
Just had a request for help cleaning the new hamster’s cage. So I guess break time is over for now.
25 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
in family
I have been off work for 3 weeks now. I go back tomorrow, but I still don’t wanna go, even after all that time off! But the bank account says that I need to work, so I guess I have no choice. I’m so excited to be back to Per Diem soon though. I signed up for only 12-18 hours per week on the next schedule. I may get called off more than I used to, because they just made a new rule that per diem nurses are to get called off before benefitted people. Which is fine with me, as long as I get to work a few shifts a month, I think we’ll be okay. I’d really rather be home anyway.
The work at home gig seems fairly promising. I was able to be accepted to write health articles, which pay a bit more, so now all but one of my pending articles are health-related. So if I end up being called off more than I would like, I may be able to fill in the gaps with the content mill articles. Not super respectable work, but I’m okay with that. It sure beats cleaning toilets or serving cranky customers, like I did for a living back in the day!
I feel so, so blessed to have two healthy kids. It’s scary, how many things have gone wrong in the family this past week. Two of our closest friends, who were our camping buddies back before they had their first child, just had their second baby. He is very, very sick with a rare, random kind of illness. The truly awful thing is that their first baby was lost to an even more rare illness, after premature delivery and only an hour or so of life outside the womb.
It’s like lightning striking twice, and it seems so, so unfair for this to happen to them. The little one seems to be rallying and stabilizing at this point, but it’s still a very serious thing and he is still intubated at this point, although he’s slowly weaning off the vent. I hope and pray more than anything that they get to take him home, whole and healthy. They’ve already buried one child, and they deserve to have no more problems, ever again, after all the pain they have been through these past few years. They fought so hard, in the weeks before she was born, to save their first, flying cross-country to try to find someone who could treat her in utero, but it just didn’t happen. It makes me sick to see them going through this, especially when I see (at my job) parents who are blessed with healthy babies and can’t be bothered to appreciate what they have and take good care of them. Instead they do stupid things like driving drunk with their kids in the car, or chew fentanyl patches while pregnant, screwing up their baby’s adrenal glands for life. Only to protest and play the victim when CPS takes the kids away (if us nurses can get CPS to even care, which is pretty tough to do in my county). I shouldn’t judge, I know, but it’s so hard to see these kinds of contrasts and not feel the unfairness of life. Argh.
Some things in this life I just don’t understand.
Going solo, and writing
14 Jan 2011 Leave a Comment
Today is Day Five of M’s out-of-town trip for work. I guess business trip is the wrong word, as that makes me picture him wearing a business suit, something I have never seen him wear. Work trip.
Having him out of town makes me really appreciate him all the more, that’s for sure… funny how that works! Despite working many more hours than I do, he definitely pulls his share on the domestic front as well. M cooks dinner about 75% of the time, in addition to maybe 25% of dishes and laundry. He takes care of all of my son’s baths and bedtimes, and often he will save me from a two a.m. nursing session by walking the little guy back to sleep. He’s quite the useful fellow, all around. Oh, and there’s just the thing of having another adult in the house in the evening and morning, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to do things like showers. Today, I only managed to shower by unloading the kids for a few minutes on my mother-in-law, who happens to be on vacation from work this week.
True, there are less dishes and laundry to do with one less adult in the house, but overall I have to say I miss the guy, and not just his cooking and child-care abilities. 
It doesn’t help that I missed his phone call last night, and the message that he left was completely useless, with no hints regarding what day he expects to get home. (“Hi, it’s me, I’ll try again later.”)
I’m a little superstitious about saying anything, but M’s business is doing soooo much better than they were last year at this time. Last year at this time, I was calling my boss asking for all the extra hours I could get, and looking into applying for WIC. This year, I have just dropped back to per diem status, in order to minimize how many hours I am away, because it has picked up lately to the point where we can almost not juggle my working more than one shift a week anymore. Which is absolutely fine by me, as I’d rather be here all the time anyway!
I’m started some freelance copywriting lately for a couple of websites, and I hope to get good enough and fast enough that I can eventually pull in grocery money with that. It’s going to take some time and organization to get to that point, but I have high hopes for it as a way to transition out of hospital nursing. I’ll probably start putting some inbound links on this blog when I get around to it, linking to my articles. It’s going to take some work, so I need to get organized and set some concrete goals.
Right now, my goals are one article per week for one site, and two a week for the other. Obviously this week it is going to be harder than usual to meet those goals- it’s two am, and this is the longest uninterrupted alone time I’ve had all week, and I most definitely do not feel like researching for an article at the moment! The kids’ schedules make it hard to get much done without another adult in the house: My daughter typically stays up till after ten pm and sleeps till about nine am. My son, who winds up in my bed during the wee hours, wakes up when my alarm clock goes off, and if I don’t set an alarm, I never wake up until he is right there poking his little fingers in my eyelids. And once they’re both awake, the only way to get time interrupted is to turn on the boob tube, and I feel like we rely on that waaay too much as it is. So yeah, if I’m going to seriously do the work at home thing, I will definitely have to make use of other adults as babysitters.
But that’s all a matter for another day, as getting anything done other than survival is purely theoretical tonight! Off to bed, so maybe I can sleep before the first episode of night waking!
Tired
25 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in family
Really, really glad that this is my last week of craziness. I don’t officially go to PRN until end of January, but January will be pretty sparse, since I have two weeks’ vacation right smack in the middle of it. I’m starting to feel a bit more comfortable at work, and not feeling so resentful about having to work, but that doesn’t mean I want to be so exhausted all the time that I can’t be the kind of mom I want to be to my kids.
I’m hoping that next year I will have enough control over my schedule that I can avoid working around the holidays, and have the focus be on my family rather than on being tired.
Things have been sooo much better on the work front with M’s job. To the point where it appears that, if things continue on this way, we would be better off having me be a sahm. I’m not counting on it continuing exactly like this, but I wouldn’t complain if they continue staying this busy.
