My Ordinary Chaos

Gary had a trip for work to Chicago and I went with him. One of the guys he works with also made the trip and as it happens, I’ve known his wife for a few years because our children attended the same gymnastics classes. She went too. Day 1 started out a little rough but it did get better and ended up being a fun trip!

We had to drive from the town where we live to St. Louis to catch a flight to Chicago on Tuesday. I’ve been having some problems with ear infections and have had to keep going back on antibiotics. I had to start a new round Monday. I really didn’t want to go out of town (and FLY) with painful ears.

Tuesday morning we got all packed up and left the house with a couple of errands on the way to the airport. Our friends were riding with us so we needed to pick them up as well as drop off a prescription form at Gary’s doctors office. It was at this point, I realized I wasn’t going to react well to this antibiotic. I felt pretty sick by the time we reached the doctors office. Fortunately, my doctor is in the same office as Gary’s so I asked if he’d call in a prescription for anti-nausea medication to a nearby pharmacy. We could pick it up just as we left town.

He called it in and I quickly took the first dose. I made it an hour and a half to St. Peters, Missouri. We stopped for a quick lunch on the way to the airport. As we were pulling into Burger King, Gary was making jokes about “sliders” from the nearby White Castle. That was all it took. As soon as he parked the car, I opened the door and vomited all over the parking lot, the side of the car, my shirt and my shoes. Oh, we were also right in front of the drive through. On the bright side, maybe my lovely vomiting episode encouraged someone on a diet not to buy fast food?

Gary was trying to help me clean up and clean the side of the car up and he brought me some wet paper towels from the bathroom. I didn’t think I could face the odor of food (especially grease cooked food) and told him I thought I’d just stay in the car. He gave me the keys so I could at least turn on the a/c while I waited for them. I asked him to take one of the used paper towels to the trash can by the door to Burger King. He was afraid he’d accidentally get a little vomit on his hands (waah…) and wouldn’t do it. So I stood up and wobbled over to the trash can to throw it away. It was then that he convinced me to just go in and sit down. I said “ok” and started to open the Burger King door and he locked the car and closed the car door.

It was then that we realized the keys were still on the seat…..

So now we’re still a half hour away from the airport and the keys are locked in the car along with all our luggage. Gary borrowed BK’s phone book and was able to locate a locksmith. The man showed up within minutes and had our car unlocked within five minutes. He was quick, courteous and did a great job and as soon as I can find his receipt (I’ve looked for 10 minutes now) I’ll mention his business name >.>

We trekked on to the airport in quick order. The only remaining snag was my boarding pass not printing correctly. They wouldn’t let me through the first security check and I had to go back to ticketing and get a new boarding pass. Everything went smoothly after that.

We made it to the gate 20 minutes or so before boarding began. The flight went smoothly and we were touching down in Chicago after only a 45 minute flight. We tried to catch the El but apparently they’re doing maintenance or something in the segment between O’Hare and Rosemont station. So first we had to take a bus to Rosemont and then take the El downtown. It was my first ride on a subway…in fact really the first time I’ve ever used public transportation so it was a new experience for me. Don’t worry though. It wore off. I spent a lot of time on the El and the Chicago bus lines over the remainder of the stay ;-).

After reaching downtown, we walked 30 or 40 blocks….errr…well maybe it wasn’t quite that long. It certainly seemed like it after dragging our luggage the whole way though >.> We found our hotel and went to check in. Our friends were in front of us in line and somehow the clerk got the idea we were all checking into the same room, a room with one king sized bed. Whaaaa??? I’m trying not to think about the implications of that one. We got checked into TWO separate rooms and walked across the street to eat at O’Tooles. It was awesome food.

Thus ended the first day of our Chicago trip. Thank you again to my wonderful mother who took on the care of all four of our spawn…errr…children. She’s a saint (although a very tough one who doesn’t put up with nonsense) to do that! I love you mom!

Technically it’s only a week and a half but that seemed an obnoxiously long title for a post.

I started seriously making some lifestyle changes about two weeks ago.  That included changing eating habits and exercise habits.  It honestly hasn’t been as hard as I expected although the exercise is definitely an easier change than the eating.

I’m going to the gym five days a week.  I work on strength training two days and cardio 3 days.  Because of my hip issues, normal cardio workouts aren’t an option - yet.  Treadmill, bicycle and elliptical type machines as well as just normal walking/running outside result in so much hip pain that just walking around the house was awful.  The pool, however, is a different story.  I absolutely LOVE it.

On pool days, I do an hour aquasize class and then do another hour (at least) of swimming and other water exercise.  I’ve been really focusing on using the water resistance to strengthen the weaker side.  I’m amazed at how much I don’t want to get out of the pool.  My energy level is certainly increased from what it was 2 weeks ago.

The eating is double edged.  I’m trying to eat healthier options and eat only when I actually feel hungry.  After two hours in the pool however, I’m ready to eat the steering wheel in the car on the way home.  I didn’t realize how hungry swimming makes you and I’m having a hard time not going home and eating myself into a coma.  This week, I’m going to concentrate on eating slower so I don’t consume as much before feeling full.

On a positive note, I’m almost completely off soda of any kind.  I had been drinking diet but now it’s pretty much water.  I am craving salt.  I’m thinking the increase in water drinking probably has something to do with that.

That’s what it feels like here! We had awesome weather over the Independence Day weekend. It was so cool and humidity was low. No one wanted to be inside. It feels like we’re back in Missouri now though *grin* I think I broke into a sweat the moment I went out the door this morning. It’s hot, humid and there’s a thunderstorm brewing over the tops of the trees. After I put away groceries and get Ian settled on the couch after he gets home from school, I think I’ll lie down with him. This kind of weather makes me sleepy.

Isaac is doing well in gymnastics lately. I’m proud of him. It is a little scary from a parent’s perspective to see him flipping backward. One of the kids in his class came down wrong and landed on his neck. He didn’t break anything but you could tell it hurt. Isaac twisted his shoulder but it seemed to be better when we got home. He didn’t want ice for it. I probably should have made him ice it anyway. He’s doing so well I think we’re going to bump him up to twice a week lessons. He wants to do it so we’ll probably let him try it for a while.

Wyatt also asked to go back. I’d revoked his gymnastics privileges this spring because of his behavior. Other than the one incident at summer school, he’s done pretty well. I told him if he kept it up, he could start back in August.

As for me and my gym journey, I bought more sunscreen. Hour and a half in the pool yesterday without it = ouch… Yes, I really was that dumb

I’ve seen today how some people can set a goal for themselves and work very hard to achieve it.  Then progress is made toward that goal, and it’s interesting, encouraging and discouraging all at once to see how their success is received by others.  I have a friend who has worked hard to reach a goal and who is making steady progress toward that goal.  In a moment of celebration today in a group of friends, I was intrigued at the support some of them gave while others seemed to want to minimize that success.

Then, I felt a similar feeling when I was feeling satisfied with myself.  I’ve been working on my bad hip, trying to get it back to where I can do things like running again.  I am making good progress and had been feeling pretty pleased with myself and then I was visiting with some people who were talking about running marathons and began to feel like my progress was really rather pathetic when compared to them.  I caught myself feeling very discouraged, my bubble had been burst.

Then I realized I was sabotaging myself and now I’m just plain irritated at me.  So tomorrow I’m going to pack up my feelings of self-pity and be happy with me and my progress, not comparing it to others.  I met my goal and exceeded it.  I was supposed to be able to go 15 minutes at a time without having to stop and rest that hip and I made it the entire session, plus an additional 20 minutes for fun.

As for my friend, she knows how far she has come and I’m glad she can feel proud of her progress.  I’m amazed at times how some will pull together to support people and others will (either consciously or subconsciously) try to undermine their success.  It teaches me to try to always be the one who encourages and builds up others rather than allow my own uncertainty to cause me to undermine them.

Ok so it happened the day before Independence Day.  I was too tired to write after it was all over yesterday.  Every year,  Ian’s special ed summer program has a parade on the last school day before Independence Day.  I wanted to do this last year but wasn’t able to find the right colors of hair spray.  I found them later in the year and saved them for this year’s parade.

Tessa (one of our respite caregivers) cut Ian’s hair for us.  She’s in cosmetology school at the moment and she did a great job!  We mohawked it.  Then in the morning before school, we used a lot of hair gel, a lot of hair spray and the colored spray and made his mohawk red, white and blue for his parade.  He was a big hit!  Everyone loved it and he looked awesome :D  He was really proud *grin*

All of the kids enjoy being in their own parade so much, the excitement at school was palpable.  Teachers were putting the finishing touches on banners and wagons.  The summer school theme this year has been on famous Missourians.  Some of the children dressed up like Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder and other well known historical individuals from our state.  They were all very proud and walked very tall.

Here are some pictures of Ian’s hair!  He looks so grown up.  I’m not sure I’m ready for that!

I can’t wait!!

I’ve recently had it brought home to me how much I have taken for granted in the realm of hearing.  An online friend is in the process of preparing for cochlear implant surgery after a long, drawn out process of appeal after appeal to her insurance company.  It was finally approved and she’ll be hopefully receiving her implant very very soon!  You can read about her experience here.

Then when my eardrum ruptured 10 days ago, it took a while before I could put my finger on what felt “off” about myself.  I couldn’t hear a lot of sounds I was used to hearing.  When I drove Isaac to gymnastics class last night (during rush hour) I could not  hear the sounds of the cars in the oncoming lane passing me.  I could not hear the rush of the air conditioning blowing past my left ear but could  hear it from the right.  When I tried to visit with another parent who was sitting to my left, I could barely hear her and could not understand what she was saying over 50% of the time.  I felt bad having to constantly say  “What was that again?”

And then I feel thankful that I was born able to hear.  I didn’t realize how much texture sound adds to my life and I’m thankful that once my eardrum heals, I’ll be able to hear those sounds again.  I have a new appreciation for Jen and her journey toward being able to hear.  You’re in my prayers Jen!

Well, the DSL situation might be taken care of.  I’m really hoping and crossing my fingers that when 5:30 hits, we don’t go off the grid again.  After all the squalling I did, we had a tech out Sunday just after lunch.  He seemed to know what he was doing (unlike the other guy they kept sending out).  That other guy probably hates my guts at this point.

Then this morning another tech called and said he’d been given a work ticket to address our DSL problems.  First we can’t get anyone to do anything and now we’ve got lots of help lol.  It seems to be running fine so far.  Like I said, we’ll see what happens tonight.

Anyway - the best part of the day was Sunday afternoon and evening.

We went out to our friend Lynn’s house.  They have a nice bit of land with a fishing pond and a little island.  It was one of those rare Missouri summer days where humidity was low, the temperature was a balmy 72ish and the sky alternated between somewhat overcast to bright blue with white fluffy clouds.

We settled Ian under a big tree for the shade and set up the other three with fishing poles along the banks of the pond.

Daddy got his fishing time in too.  He sat there in that one spot for hours, flirting with a mysterious nibbler who hung around the island.  Finally he got up, set his pole down and walked back toward Ian and I.  I told him as soon as he walked away, he was going to get a bite and he did!  He turned around and ran back to his pole in time to reel in a catfish.  We all admired him before tossing him back.

Wyatt and Daddy bonding time: 

Isaac finally got his fish and Ian enjoyed looking at them.  I spent a lot of time basking under the tree next to Ian.  Aaaaaah for lazy Sunday afternoons!

After catching a few fish (and then returning them to their comfy pond), the kids put on life-jackets and spent some time paddling around the pond in a paddleboat.  Grace played with some bubbles and they all splashed around in the wading pool.

We had a campfire and cooked our beans in a pot on it.  We started to cook hot dogs too but it turned into “mom, hold mine over the fire for me while I go play” so the hot dogs ended up on the grill with the  hamburgers.  After supper, we put the kids through the tub and they changed into jammies.  They thought it was great fun to ride home in the car in their jammies … so fun that they fell asleep on the way home.

It was a wonderful, relaxing, lazy day in the (mostly) sun outside.  The biggest catch of the day was Wyatt’s catfish.  He was ever so proud!

The last few weeks have been interesting to say the least. About two weeks ago, I started getting a sore throat. I assume it’s one of the many cold viruses and treat it like a virus. As in - contrary to my paranoid husband’s annoying insistence, I refused to go to the doctor.

Several days later, my sinuses are completely clogged and I can’t hardly breahte. Then Sunday (of course it has to be on a weekend!) my ear started hurting and throbbing. I’m thinking - GREAT… ear infection. So I agreed to go to the doctor Monday. Sunday was miserable and I spent the day putting a heating pad against my ear. At one point, it finally popped and then felt better. I realize now that was probably my ear drum rupturing :p

Monday came and the doctor confirmed that I did have an ear infection (but in both ears) and the one was filled with pus. Gross. He put me on antibiotics and a pain killer. I felt muuuuch better. Very relaxed in fact. Nothing was blowing my cool - everything was groovy >.>

Then around midnight, I realized that every time I stood up, the walls and ceiling would tilt away from me and my legs were having lots of problems in the wobbly department. That’s when my face started itching. Soon my face was itching like crazy and so were both arms and my chest. In my foggy brain I remembered my allergic reaction to codeine and realized the feeling was similar. It wasn’t an opiate based pain killer though but apparently I found another pain medicine I can’t take.

After two days, the vomiting had cleared up and I was feeling pretty much back to normal.

Starting at the beginning of June, our DSL service keeps dropping. Interestingly (is that a word?) it drops at about the SAME time every night. 5:30ish (give or take about 20 minutes) every night - there goes the DSL. Sometimes I can power cycle the modem and get it back at blazing speeds of about 1-300k >.> Sometimes I can’t get it back at all. Most of the time we can get it back at the speed we’re paying for (3M) the next morning.

It’s not acceptable to me that I pay for a service that is not accessible to me for 12 hours out of the average day - or accessible at a rate I could get from paying dialup fees instead of high speed DSL ones. Anyway, I got sick of calling in and getting tech support to come out so they could look at my box (at 9am when it was working anyway) and say “Nope, can’t find a problem. Must be ok.” and then leaving. Thinking back, I should have called them every single night it went down and had them come out every single time. I just got tired of it and didn’t call for a few weeks.

So I called after I started feeling better. The next morning we not only didn’t have DSL, we didn’t have a phone line, period. No dial tone. I called about that too. Customer service told me there was an open ticket to work on DSL for our account and that sometimes when they worked on DSL, the phone line went down too and not to worry about it, it would come back up when they got done fixing the DSL.

9:30 that night: still no phone and no DSL. I called back in and was informed that the tech had been there, fixed the problem and closed out the ticket saying everything showed normal outside the house and that HE HAD TALKED TO ME. I was flabbergasted. I had not heard or seen anyone from the provider at all that day… They put in a new repair ticket.

This morning I called customer service and told them I wanted my bill reduced by 50%. I think that’s fair since I’m not getting service for 12 hours of the day on the DSL side. Not to mention I hadn’t even had phone service for 24 hours and counting at that point. The snotty Customer (dis)Service girl informed me rather hautily that she’d give me $2 off my bill for being out of phone service for 24 hours.

TWO DOLLARS? I’m not an aggressive mean person but I was thoroughly disgusted. I didn’t say it but I had some really good ideas on where she could put that $2. We put in another trouble ticket.

Finally this afternoon the phone came back on and the DSL followed shortly after. The tech said something was messed up at the central office. Whatever. This was the same guy that said he’d fixed it yesterday and talked to me - the liar. I don’t know what was wrong and don’t care, I was just glad it had been fixed.

In the back of my mind though - I was thinking “We’ll see what happens when 5:30 rolls around tonight.” Sure enough, not long after I started writing this draft, DSL dropped about about 5:15. I was able to get it back up about a half hour later at the blazing speed of 300k. *rolls eyes*  So there’s another ticket issued for tomorrow.  I guess I’ll be putting their number on speed dial and placing a daily call between 5 and 6pm until they finally fix it.  I already had it on a sticker on my monitor!

Other noteworthy events.  Wyatt came home saying his name got drawn for the weekly prize at summer school and he picked a Wii gaming system.  I really hope that’s actually what happened!  Elvis finally caught that mouse we’ve all been after for the last week.  He had him trapped next to a basket of books in the living room so I grabbed him by the tail, carried him outside and flung him into the cul de sac.  He apparently didn’t survive the flight…or maybe it was the landing.  I still can’t believe I grabbed a mouse by the tail.  I’ve germ-x’d my hands and soaped and rinsed and germ-x’d again and still feel filthy.  I wish I could fill the bathtub with germ-x and soak in it *shudder*  When I was little and a mouse would run past my Grandmother in the kitchen, she would whisk her foot out and step on it.  I can’t believe she was that fast.  I can’t believe she smooshed mice on the kitchen floor with her foot.  *more shudders*  Oh well, at least he’s gone.  Hopefully he didn’t leave any friends behind.

Last night we had a picnic in the front yard.  We put up our little portable tent/gazebo to provide some shade and put a blanket under it.  We grilled burgers and hot dogs and baked potatoes and ate outside.  It was fun right up until we went to move Ian’s wheelchair back a little to get his face out of the sun.  Oreo (the little puppy) was UNDER the chair and the wheel started to run over his paw.  He started yelping and we got the chair off him but we were really scared his front leg was broken.  Every time he tried to walk on it he just collapsed.  It was so sad.  We made a tiny splint out of gauze and a popsickle stick but he promptly chewed it off.  An  hour or so later though he was able to put some weight on it and by 8pm he was walking on it.  Whew!  We think he’s mostly, if not all Border collie.

I haven’t heard anything from ManPower, the company that was supposed to contact me to get all the paperwork going to go back to work.  In my conversation with HR, I’m supposed to start on this coming Tuesday however when I emailed the guy who has been my contact at the job site, he hadn’t even been notified they’d offered me a job OR negotiated a start date with me.  We’ll see what happens.