Back to School Times Four

I knew it was coming, that I could not escape it.  It was inevitable, but it still took my breath away and has me typing this at one in the morning.

This year, our youngest baby starts kindergarten.  For the very first time, in the history of sending our babies off to their first day of school, I will be coming home alone.  No little hand in mine, walking home together, collecting leaves and planning our day.  No little voice singing along to the radio as we drive the older kids to school.  No kids shows as background noise.  No little shadow following me around the house.

Just me.  And the fur babies.

Every single last piece of my heart will be leaving me at home by myself all day.  Just the thought has me sobbing and in tears.

For over fourteen years, my life has been my children.  I went on maternity leave with my eldest and once he was born, I never looked back.  My entire day centered around my babies, it’s all I’ve known for so long, I feel lost knowing this chapter of my life is closing.

Sara still feels like a little baby to me, not ready to be sent away all day.  She still says words that take us several minutes, to her great frustration, for us to understand.  She just barely turned 5 a little over a month ago, and already, she has been stamped as ready for school and will be starting her journey outside of our home.  Away from me.

This all feels greatly rushed, especially not being in our own home, still living in a rental house as our place is in the process of being put back together from the fire.  I feel cheated out of our last summer.  I had so many plans, so many dreams of the perfect summer vacation with my babies before school started.  I allowed our circumstances to steal that away from us.  Shame on me.

Already, the hectic school year schedule has started, with dance and marching band kicking off earlier this month.  The days are flying by, I am running out of summer, and there is nothing I can do.

So I cry.  And I type at 1 in the morning, trying to make some sense of my sadness until my brain is too tired, too exhausted to think one more sad thing, and I finally drift off to sleep.

Tomorrow, I will hold my babies.  I will kiss their sweet, chubby, little baby hands, and I will cherish every last glorious minute I have with them before the school year steals them away from me.

I don’t know how moms survive this.  It feels unbearable to me, watching my babies grow up so quickly right before my eyes.

We didn’t start the fire…..really!

Been a while, friends!  Just as I left you with my idea of video blogging PCOS related content, I up and vanished.  I have a really good reason, I promise!  We had a house fire and have been out of our home since mid April.

It all started on laundry day, with my very last load of laundry.  The dryer had just buzzed about 15 minutes earlier when I noticed a burning smell.  I happened to look outside the master bathroom window and saw smoke coming from the dryer vent.

Immediately, I ran downstairs to investigate.  The first thing I did was unplug the machine.  I noticed a very small amount of smoke coming from the left side of the dryer (we have or should I say had, a stackable unit, to help you visualize) so I opened the dryer door, still full of freshly washed and dried clothes.  I pulled out the lint basket, and could see flames inside of the machine.  (Side note, I am super OCD about emptying the lint after every single load, always, and we had even recently taken apart the whole dryer and vent to vacuum every little bit of dust and debris!)

I ran and grabbed a cup of water, throwing it on the flames, which seemed to do absolutely nothing, meanwhile the smoke was filling the laundry room.

The power ended up going out, so I used my cell phone to dial 911 as I rushed to get the dogs outside and then ran out onto the porch with Sara while we waited for help.  It was pouring down rain, I was soaked, and completely freaked out.  We had no shoes on, my cats were still in the house, and by the time the fire trucks arrived, our house was billowing smoke.

I called Abe frantically after calling 911, telling him what was happening, and ultimately hanging up on him as I rushed around trying to figure out what I should be doing.  When he later showed up, I was shocked, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that he would leave work, that’s how scrambled my brain was, trying to digest what was happening.

I hurt myself, running barefoot up a wet, grassy hill to secure the dogs for the firemen.  I heard and felt a big POP, and was suddenly in excruciating pain.  It turns out I tore my calf muscle, pretty badly, and was in an insane amount of pain for several weeks to follow.

The cats were rescued by the firemen, and Abe, who had to collect Brady and Katie.  Moriarty was all chill, and let the fireman carry him and bring him straight to me.

The fire broke the main water line, which the fire marshal says helped to put out the fire.  I knew we had a lot of damage, but I honestly expected to be back in the house within a week or two.  That is, until the contractor told us his estimate for finishing was 3-4 months.  *insert jaw dropping shock here*

The amount of things we lost is mind numbing.  Nearly all of our clothing, I mean everything for everyone of us!!  My craft room and Abe’s office were completely destroyed, nothing left.  The vast majority of the kids toys, all completely gone, lost to the fire and water damage.

The playroom where we spent so much time, where we recently renovated with new flooring and built ins, completely destroyed.

Handmade gifts that took hundreds of hours to make, the kids artwork, photos, books, collectibles from childhood and little keepsake memories, all gone.

But you know what wasn’t gone?  My family.  My kids, my furbabies, even our aquarium full of fish!!  We are all safe, and other than my torn calf muscle, all completely unharmed.

What a BLESSING!!!

Our friends, our neighbors and our amazing dance family took care of us when there was no one else there to help.  When I woke up in the hotel room, hearing one of my babies coughing and then began to cry because I had no medicine, nothing to give them, our dance family answered with cough drops and toys and clothes and toiletries.  I cannot count the tears of gratitude I have shed, being lifted up by all of our adopted family members, when we had no one to turn to and no answers.

Yes, we lost all of our “stuff”, but it turns out we were rich beyond measure and never even realized it.

We spent about 6 weeks in the hotel, before the insurance company found us temporary housing at a rental house near our home.  On the second night in the rental home, we found ourselves once again surrounded by firemen.

A carbon monoxide alarm starting going off, just as we were preparing to go to bed.  Thank goodness, because when the fire department came out, and the fire marshal assessed the home, he told us had we gone to bed that night, not knowing about the leak, we would have likely never woke up the next day.

Take a moment to digest that.

After walking away from a house fire unharmed and living in a hotel for 6 weeks, we nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning.  All of us, the children, the dogs, the cats, we all could have died.

Well, if we weren’t insanely thankful to be alive before, we certainly were now!!!

Can you imagine?!

So back to the hotel we went, for about 4 days, while the water heater, which was the cause for the leak, was replaced.

Having endured so much, and roughing it with so little, we got a letter in the mail from our insurance company.  What we had expected to be a reimbursement check, turned out to be a non-renewal notice.  The insurance company decided not to renew our policy, right smack dab in the middle of a huge claim!!  The house is demo’d and awaiting construction, and now we had to worry about finding coverage for our home that was unoccupied and destroyed.  Let me tell you, it is not possible.  The answer, is lender forced coverage which can cost 10 times as much for less coverage!

This is when I officially shut down and started having full blown panic/anxiety attacks.  We’re talking, not able to sleep, constant fear and stress, worried we will lose our house!  I started imagining having to rent a trailer, losing the perfect home that we loved and worked so hard for.  It was extremely painful, and excruciatingly traumatic on top of everything else.  Absolutely the straw that broke this camel’s back.

We immediately called our agent’s office, who was shocked that we got the letter in the first place.  They vowed straight away to “rattle cages” and find us answers.  This all sounded good, but weeks went by and time was running out.  I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t leaving the house, I was super depressed beyond words.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we got the amazing news that they were able to get our policy renewed…..for a higher premium and higher deductible.  But still, the amount of amazing, sweet relief this gave us…….immeasurable.

So here we still sit, in the rental home, no construction started yet, grrrrr, waiting for some good news and very cautiously able to breathe again, hoping to have nothing but good news and happiness in our future.

We usually have big birthdays for our kids, something I absolutely love to do, but have not been able to do with the two kids who had birthdays since all this madness started.  And we are gearing up to have a third birthday away from home, along with starting the new school year.

I had really hoped we would be home by now, I miss our beautiful home, I miss our veggie garden and spending the days outside swimming or playing or just relaxing on our own furniture surrounded by our familiar things.

I hope we have big news on construction soon, and maybe the contractors will surprise us and finish ahead of schedule.  I won’t nit pick and get into all the other problems we have had with various companies, etc during this experience, because in the end, it just doesn’t matter.  What matters is family, and we are all still present and accounted for.  We will embrace this adventure, and I’m sure we will speak about it often in the future.

In the meantime, hug your babies and furbabies and spouses, tell everyone you love that you love them, and just be happy.  Life is too short for misery, and you never know which day is your last.

Love and blessings!!  xoxoxoxo

An Update

I ended 2015 feeling super run down, my body was working against me to say the very least.  I spent so much time  being stressed and worried about situations out of my control that it spiraled several of my regular conditions into pure chaos.  My rosacea flared angrily, and my hormones were so out of whack, my PCOS symptoms were hugely aggravated.  In a nutshell, I was stressed to the max and my body was sending me every warning signal possible that something was very wrong.

Here we are, more than half way through February, and I feel like I still can’t seem to catch a break health wise.

I had accepted that I could not change the situations and people that were causing me stress, and made it a priority to focus on myself this year.  I started by doing a mental and physical detox which may or may not have helped to start a missing menstrual cycle that showed up nearly 6 months later that expected.

Let me tell you, this belated period was ridiculous beyond belief.  Heavy, full of huge clots, and lasting over three weeks.  I felt like I was literally bleeding to death, it was intense.  A few days into this miserable cycle, I came down with what I thought was a simple cold from the kids.

You know how it is, middle of winter, stuck inside, germs just seek you out.  But this cold kicked my butt big time!  The second week in, I completely lost my voice.  This isn’t unusual, I almost always lose my voice with a particularly nasty cold.  But then, it got worse.  The cold moved to my chest and I came down with bronchitis.  I was wheezing and coughing up grody gunk for weeks.  In fact, I am still tapering off of the cough and finally stopped wheezing within the past week or so.

My ears became painfully clogged and I could not hear out of them, my stuffy nose turned into a nasty, brain pounding sinus infection, and I just felt absolutely miserable for weeks and weeks.  So many tissues, so much vapor rub, so much yuck.

And here I sit, the night before the very first dance competition of the season, and I have a fresh new case of pink eye.  Yes.  Super contagious, super grotesque, super ain’t nobody got time for this, pink eye.

*le sigh*

It’s so ridiculous, I have to laugh or I’ll cry.

Yes, this will be the year of Angie!  Being sick and miserable with some ridiculous ailment for every single day of the year thus far!  Woo Hoo!!

Wah, wah, wah, whoa is me, I hear ya.

I absolutely refuse to let this define my year.  Perhaps this is just getting all the crap out of the way for all the good that is coming my way?  I won’t lie, in a meditative and raw kind of way, all of the bleeding and coughing up crap, etc was sort of like a physical, tangible proof of getting rid of all the toxic, bad energy from last year and a way of feeling the slate being wiped clean.  I mean, yeah, why not see the silver lining, right?

I am determined to fix myself, little by little this year.  Still working on fixing my annovulatory cycles to reclaim my fertility.  Not much can make you feel like less than a woman than losing your ability to conceive.  It sucks and it’s stupid and I am way over it.  I have just recently started drinking Yogi’s Women’s Moon Cycle tea, which contains several herbs that are often used and that I am familiar with for regulating cycles.  I am also taking Innositol, something that has promising results of PCOS issues, one of which happens to be ovulation.

In addition, I have been using sunflower oil for oil pulling, and taking a shot of raw apple cider vinegar with the mother every day for the health benefits.  By the way, if you research using raw apple cider vinegar with the mother and happen across any articles about vinegar eels, do not read about the critters.  They are harmless, but knowing they exist will induce major heebie jeebies.  Trust me on this, friends.

I will absolutely be updating with what, if anything helps with my PCOS symptoms.  Besides the supplements, I am also being more mindful, meditating, making fitness a priority, and taking a multi vitamin daily to fill in any gaps.  Right now, all I can tell you is that I have been sick or ailing with something every single day this year thus far and I am waaaaaay over it.

To happier, healthier days ahead, my friends!  Be well!

 

Back To School!

This year, my little Noey Bean starts kindergarten, and it is ripping out my heart!!  I’m not ready to send him out into the world, he is still so sweet and innocent and happy, it is terrifying me that it …

Burnt Out

I cannot begin to express my joy for the new year finally gracing us with her presence, my spirit is still happily spinning around and giggling at all the possibilities that this new beginning brings.  I can finally shake the water off my back and begin drying off, after a year of slowly drowning in sorrow and anxiety, feeling lost and hopeless…….it was dark and scary, but here I am, pruned skin slowly warming as the waterlog slowly evaporates.

*deep breath*

This air is sweet.  It is fresh and filled with hope, something that I lost so early in 2014.  Being overly optimistic can only carry you so far, so I learned.  I was tripped one too many times and that’s when the water got deeper, creeping into my nostrils, stealing my breath.

Once the water crept in, my footing lost, I couldn’t stop the murky waters from filling my lungs, very literally making it hard for me to breathe.  I found myself suddenly forgetting all other worries and stresses, consumed for my genuine inability to simply take a deep breath.  I felt I was suffocating, and the very idea gripped my chest like a vice, my heart pounding, wondering if it would burst from my rib cage…..  And then it would fade, my mind would cloud over with another tumbleweed of stress over car repairs, or unpaid bills and the mounting avalanche of debt rumbling in the background, always coming closer, always in the background, always a threat.

The phone became an alarm, a constant reminder that things were crumbling.  The moment it rang, my stomach knotted and my knees were weak.  The answering machine would catch the call for me, but the warning bell had sounded, and even if I enjoyed a solitary moment of rest, of mindless enjoyment in reading a story with my babies, or snuggling while watching a cartoon, it was that quickly stolen and murdered before my very eyes.

Enough became enough, and so the phone was simply unarmed.  I pulled the plug and was instantly filled with near maniacal laughter, tears of joy and relief streaming down my cheeks.  Was it the responsible thing to do?  Bury my head in the sand while my broken mind tried to come up with solutions to problems too complex for it to understand anymore?  No.  But I felt glimmers of sanity the moment the plug was pulled, and that began to lead to my very slow, and still in progress recovery.

I got so used to falling in 2014, that I stopped standing up again.  I crawled and only when there was absolutely no other option.  I began expecting the worst, and I was never disappointed.  When Desi got sick in August, it was devastating.  I honestly thought he was dying, and honest and truly, he certainly could have.  He had an abdominal obstruction, requiring hospitalization and a lot of money we absolutely did not have.  Part of my regular, everyday anxiety is a fear of something happening to my loved ones, so this left me depressed beyond comprehension.

Depression is bizarre to those who have never truly experienced it.  Until you feel it’s icy grip, you cannot possibly understand the power it has to completely shut down a person’s life.  I have tried to explain it, but words can’t even begin to touch the anguish and despair that it brings along in it’s bag of nasty tricks.

Strangely enough, it was when Abe started stressing out about money and bills that I was able to snap to my senses.  I am so familiar with the dark veil of depression that I always find myself overcompensating to make certain he never falls too deeply into it.

Every self help guru message, every happy go lucky mantra, any and all good things I could possibly come up with, I was showering Abe with.  It became an obsession, playing happy and tending to him, reassuring him, distracting him, whatever I could do to keep him from falling, from even stepping foot near that nasty cesspool that still gripped my soul.  This is around the time that we found out about donating plasma for money, something Abe did to fund Christmas for our babies.

I didn’t have the worry of the phone ringing non stop at all hours of the day, and the mail reminders are far fewer.  As Christmas drew closer, I could feel hope beginning to creep back into my mind, shining some much needed light around the cob webs and the tumbleweeds.  We had a very modest Christmas, but I had some cherished time spent with family that absolutely made the entire Christmas season for me.  Gifts are nothing.  My babies won’t look at this Christmas as “The One Where Santa Brought Us Cheap Toys.”  Instead they will remember visiting family, having our Christmas Eve get together, the nearly two weeks of vacation time Abe took so we could just spend the day watching Netflix, or playing board games, or just sitting and watching them play blissfully together.  It was magic, it was re energizing, and it was exactly what this mama needed so badly.

No matter what, we have each other.  That.  That, my friends, is what matters, and that is exactly what finally pulled me from the water.

I’m not “fixed”, but I’m doing better.  My vision is clearing, I can see who and what matters.  I am leaving 2014 with a long list of heartache, from Abe’s car accident and constant car repairs, mounting debts and rotten luck, to hearing about a family member being diagnosed with leukemia and even more family members so deep in the murky waters they contemplated suicide.  It’s dangerous on these shores, so I am relieved to see them behind me at this moment.

Writing this down, I can’t help but feel utterly nude before you.  I’ve shown you my cards, I’ve admitted to severe weakness.  So not my style.  But it’s real.  It’s scary, and it’s awful, but I know I am not alone.  Neither are you.  And it does get better.  It has to.  Otherwise, all of us wading in this nonsense will grow gills and become kickass merpeople and we shall rule the world.

Merry Christmas!

I can’t believe that already, in the blink of an eye, another Christmas is here, and quickly slipping through my fingers, soon to become a dreamy memory.

Next year at this time, we will have three babies in three different schools!  Not to mention homeschool pre-school lessons for Sara, before she starts school the following year.  I’m not ready for this!!

This year has not been kind to us.  It seems like we never really got back on our feet, every time we thought we were finally a step ahead, we would get knocked ten back.  It was rough.  I won’t lie, I suffered severe anxiety and depression this year, worried about putting groceries on the table at times, balancing bills and emergencies like car repairs and hospital bills.  We quickly realized we had bitten off more than we could chew and are still struggling for solutions, though I am praying that there is an end in sight.

I had planned a magical birthday party for Isabella, that had to get cancelled and completely revamped.  I had hoped to get her the American Girl doll of the year, Isabelle, the blonde haired, pink streak, ballerina!!  If ever there was a doll made just for my Bella, it was Isabelle!!  I planned on taking her to the American Girl store and getting her the doll then having a birthday lunch at the cafe.  I planned on it, but then life laughed and we improvised.  Reservations got cancelled, party was greatly downsized to a home made cake and inexpensive gifts, and as sad as I was, she was completely unphased.  She gushed over her simple cake and gifts and reminded me how lucky we are to just have each other.  (She did finally get the Isabelle doll for Christmas, thanks to her amazing daddy donating plasma and literally spending blood money to buy the silly thing!  A story for another day!)

Thinking we would just be able to scrape by and start getting back on our feet, we were then suddenly hit with a major health problem with Desi.  He had an abdominal obstruction which required hospitilization, fluids, several x rays, antibiotics, and oh yeah, a massive hospital bill.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Obviously, Desi is family and takes priority over non necessity bills.  Unfortunately, bill collectors like to get paid, and hassle the crap out of you if you can’t make their payments.  Yeah, so, multiply that anxiety by a thousand…..

As this year is quickly ending, the smell and promise of a fresh new start is intoxicating.  I have so many hopes and dreams for this new year, starting with conquering my severe anxiety and depression.  I know I am strong and powerful and capable of great things.  I have the ability to turn things around, see only the good in all situations, and to take that good and run with it.  I can’t and won’t let silliness interfere with what matters, and that, my friends, is exciting!

I hope that 2014 was far kinder to you than it was to me.  But if you had a rough go of it these past twelve months, then I hope that you have an amazing, life changing, happy and empowering 2015!!  Let’s make this our year!!  We are powerful and we can and will achieve greatness!  Kiss the negativity goodbye and inhale the promise of a new beginning!

This motivational message was brought to you by the self reflecting power of another Christmas come and gone far too fast!  Breathe it in, devour the moment, and live for your happiness.  Be happy and know that no matter what, you are loved.  ❤