This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Ok, so I’ve been a very bad blogger for the past 3 months and haven’t written a thing. But that doesn’t mean that I have been doing nothing, quite the contrary.  I had just started a new job when I last wrote and a month after that last entry I started training for my new position of apprentice dog groomer.  The training for that was very fast paced and managed to fly through that without a hiccup.

I am now an apprentice dog groomer, have been for the past month, so if any of you need your dog groomed, please feel free to bring it into the store and I’ll make your beloved pet look like a million dollars.  Of course feel free to leave a generous tip to reflect just how awesome I made your pup look. *grin*

Next week I take time out of my hectic dog grooming schedule and take Devlin into the hospital for a procedure where they will be inserting a feeding tube into his stomach using image guided therapy, a needle and a suture.  I guess if I said that I have mixed feelings regarding this, that would be putting it lightly.  My feelings tend to shift from feeling positive about this, knowing that this procedure will allow Devlin to get all the extra calories he needs, it will be way easier to keep him hydrated and hopefully he’ll begin to put weight on and then in the next heartbeat  I’m ready to collapse into a puddle of mess on the floor.  Weeping and terrified because my baby is going to be in the hospital, he’s going to be sedated or anesthetized and have a HOLE punched into his STOMACH! There are risks of infection, risks of all sorts of terrible things that could happen that I just don’t want to get into and of course there will be a horrible 3 day or more long hospital stay while they ensure that there’s no infection, that his tummy is healed and then they get to figure out the right formula for him.
And all through that I get to stay by his bedside and try to amuse my very cranky curmudgeon of a son. *joy*

Christmas was a hoot.  I loved the time with my kids and New Years was awesome, I spent it with friends and family and had a really good time.

Today I went to Ceilidh’s school and spoke with her careers class about the joys, pitfalls and all the other fun stuff that goes along with being a dog groomer, although the entire time I was speaking to them I kept thinking that I’ve only been doing this grooming thing for a few months, I’ve been a stay at home Mom for much longer than that, shouldn’t I be telling them all the joys and pitfalls that go along with staying at home with your children until you lose all sense of you and start to live just for the little fruit of your womb.
Oh wait, I never had that problem.  Oh well.

I started a Reading Challenge over at Goodreads for 2012 where I will be reading 150 books by year-end.  Of course at this time my Goodreads account is taking much joy at informing me that I am at this point 5 books or 3% behind in my reading challenge.  Of course when you take into account that my first book was actually about 1500 pages long, it should really probably count for at least 2 or 3 books right there.
So my next book that I am dying to read is actually 400 pages long, so before I jump into that I’m catching up with some light reading of books that are only 200 pages long, Tina Fey’s Bossypants for starters, which let me tell you had me laughing out loud in more than a few chapters and I really did enjoy reading it.

Also let me inform you that at this time in my life I am really on the verge of hating all teenagers and their snappish, self-centered way of thinking that the world revolves around them and that if you don’t side them once out of every five times then suddenly you hate them and never take their side on anything.  Oh and lets not forget my personal favorite damning statement from the mouths of teens ‘You’ve ruined my life’ to which I reply with glee ‘Good, then I’m doing something right!’

I also hate video game consuls which may work well in households with a TV in rec room where the kids can hide away while other people can watch TV without fighting over some stupid game that was just released and if they don’t get to play it with their friends they’ll be laughed at by their friends and they’ll be shunned worse than the elephant man. Yup, I hate those stupid games, a lot!

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

I sneak  into the kitchen, open the fridge and there I find a multi-pack of Snickers-Peanut Butter sitting in the butter area and I’m in luck because that pack of 4 bars is  open and 2 Snickers are missing already.

So I grab that pack and try to quietly pull out a Snickers Bar because I don’t actually own the pack, my Mom bought it to share, but really I feel like it’s for my brother and he won’t begrudge me a single Snickers bar, but if Ceilidh hears the crinkle of the wrapper, well I’m sure Rob would be upset if he went to get his Snickers and found that they were all gone.

So I try to slide a Snickers from the pack and come to the realization that my food is being very problematic.  For some insane reason the people who make those multi-packs of Snickers-Peanut Butter Bars decided to be cruel and tape those bars together, because sealing them up in a package just isn’t enough.
So I’m wrestling with the crinkling sound making plastic wrapped package of Snickers, trying to quietly break the tape which I suspect was made of adamantium or some dirivitive of it because that stupid little thin piece of sticky tape was damn hard to snap.  But snap it I did, put that crinkle sound making package back into the fridge and scurried off with my prize without being detected by my daughter.

But I’m still left with the puzzle as to why those damn manufacturers felt the need to super glue my Snickers bar into a perfectly good sealed package?
Why gods? Why??

“I don’t know how you do it?”
“I don’t think I could have handled something like that!”
These are the things said to me by people when they discover that I am a mother to a special needs person, and while I understand that they don’t mean any harm with these statements, I really just want to shake them until their brains fall out of their heads when they stand there ignorantly smiling at me and thinking that they are complimenting me, when really they are putting my son down.

“I don’t know how you do it?” Well first off, do I really have a choice?  I mean, can I just wave some magical wand and suddenly have a son that’s able to communicate his innermost thoughts to me, able to walk or even run, experience friendship, be able to use a bathroom and not rely on me for putting every drop of liquid or spoonful of food into his stomach.  No, it won’t ever happen and I’m fine with that.  But when they say that they don’t know how I do it, they are saying that my son is a burden, they don’t see past his inability to care for himself.  They don’t see his smiles, they don’t hear his infectious laughter.  The don’t see how happy he is and how happy he makes me.  Yes, it is a lot more work to raise my son than it would be another boy his age who didn’t have his issues, but there is more to him than just the extra work.

“I don’t think I could have handled something like that!” Because again, like you have a choice.  You carry that child around inside you for 9 months, you feel him kick and spin and you dream about what his life will be like, you pick names and wonder if he’ll look more like you or your husband.  Then he’s born, and sometimes you know right away something is different about that child, but in our case he came out and my life was wonderful.
I held him in my arms, I took him home and made all the kissy faces and cooing noises one makes when loving your newborn child.  Then a month passes, and another and suddenly you’re realizing that this wonderful little baby that you love with all of your heart just doesn’t seem to be doing the same things his older brother and sister did when they were his age.  And it’s not until he’s 13 months old that you’re told that you really shouldn’t expect him to be able to ever do any of those things that you just took for granted that he would one day accomplish.
So, at that point what do you do? You love this child, have loved this child for close to 2 years, inside and outside of the womb.  So what do you do? You accept what you’ve been told and go on with your life, adjusting your dreams and goals so that they’re adapted for what he’ll realistically be able to do.
He’s not some monster that someone has to handle, he’s not something that you have to tolerate.  He’s a little boy that you’ve held in your arms, and sung to sleep and loved more than you could ever imagine.
He’s not something to be ‘handled‘ and I resent you when you make it sound like he’s just horrible.

“You’re so good with him!” Because you think that I’m the kind of person who would reject or neglect my child because of a medical diagnosis?  Did you always think that I was such a bitch?

I can’t make up a blue print for Talking to a Parent of Special Needs Children, because just as each child is unique and different, so to is each parent.  I can say that instead of making it seem like we’re working our asses off to deal with these burdensome children, when you meet a woman on the street with a regular child you just tell her what a delight her child is.  Why can’t you see the smiles and joy and comment on that.
Tell  me how happy my son is, what a wonderful smile he has.
This past weekend a woman said to me ‘Wow, his teeth are good. Not messed up at all, at least he’s got that!” and I was stunned.  “Do you brush his teeth?”
Of course not, I’m trying to get his teeth to rot out of his head so that way he’ll really be messed up when it comes to eating.   C’mon, what kind of mother do you take me for?

Ok, so it’s been over 2 weeks since I got that elliptical machine and I’d love to say that I’ve been on that sucker every single day, working and sweating and hopefully losing some of the weight that I built up over the years.  Sadly I can’t make that claim because somehow Satan lost control of the weather in Hades and it managed to escape and make its way here, to Toronto.

All last week I sat and looked at that blue piece of exercise equipment and thought to myself “Are you using this massive heat wave as an excuse to get out of working out, or would you truly be insane to try to work out right now?” and my answer came back, “If you workout in this heat, you’ll either die or pass out and you’ll definitely be listed as one of the Crazies!” so I did my best to eat right, avoid exerting myself too hard, since I don’t have AC in the house and once the mercury in the thermometer dropped to a comfortable level I worked myself back onto that darn machine.

But something even better has happened to me in the way of the ‘Get Up Off of Your Ass and Get Moving’ Department and that is the fact that this week I’ve been heading to the local swimming pool.  Sure I’ve been lugging the kids with me and I haven’t been able to swim laps like I’d wish, but I’ve discovered that I still have a pretty strong stroke and that if I did start to swim laps the way that I wished, I’d most likely have a coronary in the middle of the pool, or something like it.
I’ve still got the skill, but my heart isn’t up to it, yet.  That being said, I’m going to go and swim at a pace that won’t kill me and I know that I’ll eventually work up to the rapid lap swimming pace that I want to be at and that I still have the skill to accomplish.

As a small child I was a member of the local swimming club, which meant that on an almost daily basis I was at that pool, swimming laps for 2 hours every day.  My strokes were worked on, critiqued and I was made to correct them until I was as good a swimmer as any fish in the ocean.  On top of that I went to every single public swim and dragged my Mom and Dad to as many Family Swims as I could manage.  I took swimming lessons during the summer months, so on the whole, in the summer I think I spent about 5 or 6 hours in the pool every day.  It’s no wonder I had a killer front crawl!

So now I’m back in the water, and it feels so good.  Today I burned off about 600 calories in just 60 minutes.  The resistance of the water is going to make my muscles tone up at an awesome pace and on the whole, I’ll love it.

And the best part is that I’ve managed to drag my husband along with me and he’s getting into the ‘swim of things’ as well.