When I started blogging in this space, I had really grand plans for it. Then I got pregnant, and all of my good intentions were completely wiped out by the fact that I felt like I was mentally and physically fighting through quicksand (I did FAR less running and writing after I quit working than I had thought I would! And by less, I mean . . . almost none at all!) And then after I had Nathan, everything else took a backseat to adjusting to this tiny person who was suddenly in my house, and settling into a new routine with him.

I hope I don’t jinx anything by saying this (fingers crossed!) but at almost 8 months old, it feels like we’ve finally found one. It’s a fluctuating routine (he still throws me a curveball or two anytime I get too settled into or reliant upon a particular schedule) but I feel like Nathan and I are finally getting to know each other, and I can read him so much better these days. He is absolutely my favorite part of every single day, and I’m so incredibly lucky and blessed and thankful that I get to spend my time at home with him. (As a side note, I’d just like to say that it’s totally possible to adore your baby even if you hated being pregnant, and that it’s totally possible to grow into your love for your child even if you initially feel like you’re constantly caring for a needy blob instead of a human being. But I’ll probably elaborate on that another day, so if you take horrible offense to the statement, try to hold your tongue until I eventually explain it better!)

After months of hardly being able to leave the house and constantly collecting data on all of Nathan’s eating and sleeping habits, it has been incredibly freeing to be able to just do stuff again! But with our diapering stash taken care of, feeding issues worked out, and a nap schedule that I think is as established as we’re ever going to get, my brain needs a new project to focus on (I’m worried that if I don’t focus it in a specific direction, I’ll just keep trying to buy more cloth diapers! I’m the first to admit what a strange addiction it is, but for some reason, they are just so hard to resist!)

So I’ve made my blog my new project again! I’ve got a posting schedule that I’ve (so far!) been good about holding myself to, and I’ve returned to some of my original ambitions for the site. We’ll see if I can find a way to make it all work out, but I was really proud of myself today when I looked in my archives and realized that I’ve already posted more times this month than I have in any month since I got pregnant! I guess that it took 9 months to grow Nathan, and just about that same length of time to get my brain back to where it was before he was conceived! All that’s left now is to lose the rest of the baby weight, and I should be rid of my pregnancy body AND brain! Here’s hoping that it won’t take an additional 9 months to do so!

There are a lot of things I found odd or interesting about pregnancy, but one of the biggest surprises to me was that at some point during my childhood, the gestation of a baby changed from 9 months to 40 weeks. (It’s probably just semantics and based on when you start counting the weeks, but all the same, I found it confusing. Some books reference trimesters based on the old measurements and some on the new, and it was way less fun to try to follow along with what week I was in, because I couldn’t remember which system the book followed! Anyhow, I digress).  What I gleaned from most of them, though, was that 40 weeks is a full-term baby, but after 37 weeks the lungs should be fully functional and if you go into labor, nobody panics about it being “too soon”.

I started week 36 by calling my mom and telling her, “By this time next week, I’ll have a baby cooked enough that it could be born!” and when they told me at 36 weeks, 4 days gestation that the baby needed to come out NOW, I figured he was close enough to 37 weeks that we could just call him a ready-to-go baby. HAHAHAHAHA! (I’ve started thinking that everything about pregnancy was a giant life lesson for me, which basically boiled down to, “Just because this is the way you THINK it should be, it’s now going to be the OPPOSITE!” *insert evil laugh here*. But I digress again).

So no, Nathan was not a fully cooked baby, and even though he was short of 37 weeks by just a few days, he was technically a preemie (a late-term preemie, but that’s a mouthful that nobody ever says). And apparently I was wrong in thinking, “Eh, he’s close enough!” because I guess somewhere in those next few days were where he was supposed to learn all sorts of good stuff, like being able to keep his blood sugar high enough to have the energy to eat (hence the stay in the NICU, I’ll write about that one of these days!) and how to have really strong mouth muscles for sucking.

All of that meant that my dreams of lovingly breastfeeding my newborn baby did not exactly go as planned (there’s the universe, making fun of me again!) He latched and started breastfeeding in the recovery room, but his initial blood sugar level was low enough that supplementation was immediately needed. Since the nurse in the recovery room was AWESOME (I was told she was instrumental in helping my hospital become Baby Friendly) she was able to rig up an impromptu supplemental nursing system with a syringe and a tiny tube from some other device, so Nathan got formula through the tube while still breastfeeding (I’ve since seen many such devices, but at the time, she blew my mind with that thing!)

Once they transferred us to a post-partum room, I continued breastfeeding on demand, but his blood sugar levels were still too low. We didn’t have a McGyver style nurse this time, so the next best option was to try to get Nathan to take some formula from a tiny cup. He still wouldn’t take enough formula to get his blood sugar high enough, so they tracked down their nurse with the best feeding skills and had her give it a shot. No dice. That’s when he was transferred to the NICU for a glucose IV, and when I got started with the breast pump.

Once in the NICU, the rules for feeding were very strict. Nathan was fed every 3 hours, and had only 30 minutes to ingest a certain amount of food (I forget what the amount was, but we started at probably less than an ounce of formula and worked up to almost 2 before we could take him home). It was HARD to get him to eat that much food, because he kept trying to fall asleep! (I wish we’d taken a video of the process, but we were usually too stressed out by the time limit to do anything but encourage him to EAT EAT EAT! We’d be tickling his mouth with the bottle nipple, putting milk on his mouth, physically opening his mouth to put the nippled in it, squirting milk into his mouth, moving his limbs around, undressing him, rubbing his body to try to get him to wake up, changing his body position . . . it was rough!) I was allowed and encouraged to attempt breastfeeding, but since it typically took him AT LEAST 30 minutes to drink from the bottle, there wasn’t much time to spend trying to get him to latch (which he was TOTALLY CAPABLE OF DOING, but just refused to wake up for!) When he couldn’t keep up with the amount of food required, they placed an NG tube to get the calories directly into his stomach and bypass any effort on his part.

Nathan with his NG tube in place. Sleeping. Again

Between the IV and the NG tube, he had enough energy to FINALLY, SORT OF wake up once in a while, and they were able to slowly start weaning him off of those things as he proved he was capable of eating the traditional way. With the help of a lactation consultant, I was able to get Nathan to successfully breastfeed using a nipple shield, and after 2 weeks of pumping, breastfeeding, and then offering a bottle of pumped milk, he’d gained enough weight that I was given the green light to discontinue supplementation. (HALLELUJAH, that was a glorious day! The whole process took so long that by the time I finished pumping, I’d be setting an alarm to wake Nathan up again in 1-2 hours to start all over again. I WAS SO TIRED OF PUMPING!) He was still always a sleepy baby and nursing meant constantly trying to rouse him and remind him to keep eating, and he still needed the nipple shield to latch and eat consistently, but I was just so proud to finally be breastfeeding my baby!

Then I started taking the mini-pill for birth control, and while the documentation for the medication says nothing about it, I swear to you that thing killed my milk supply (it gave me horrible other side effects also, so I stopped it after a month and things were much better). Then Nathan started growing, and our nursing sessions just started getting longer and longer, to the point that I started enforcing a, “Mama needs to stretch, pee, and get more snacks” break once an hour, because on some days, there wasn’t an end in sight. He’d eat until he’d fall asleep at the breast, so I’d take him off, and he’d scream bloody murder until I let him nurse some more, and then he’d fall asleep, so I’d take him off, and he’d cry again. That would go on until he conked out for the night. Sometimes I’d take him off the breast and he’d be content, but he’d be so exhausted he’d fall asleep (only if you were holding him, though. He slept great at night, but during the day, forget about it!) He didn’t have much alert time during the day, because he was mostly eating and not taking naps on his own (wow, I’d already started to forget how awful that time period was! You really do forget the crappy parts eventually, I guess!) but I chalked that up to his being a preemie, and kept on trucking!

I eventually got around to making an appointment with lactation again to talk about weaning him off of the nipple shield, and that appointment went totally awry. The plan was to weigh Nathan, feed him, they would help troubleshoot his latching difficulties, and then weigh him again to see how much milk he drank. Nathan had been in the office two weeks prior for his well baby check up, and so when they weighed him again they noted that he had gained a grand total of . . . . 0. In two weeks, he hadn’t gained so much as an ounce (just to give an idea of scale, when we first brought him home, he was supposed to gain .5-1 ounce per day. In the first month, he’d wowed the nursing staff by averaging over an ounce a day. I don’t know what he was supposed to be gaining at this point, but it clearly wasn’t enough. Also, he had started off in the 5th percentile for weight, so he kind of needed to keep up that initial trend to even remain on the chart). So, that was troublesome.

They were able to help with the latch to some extent (he fed briefly without a shield before he started hurting me again, but they sent me home with some exercises to help him strengthen his sucking muscles and some tips for getting him to slowly wean off of the nipple shield) and after he’d done about 30 minutes on the first breast, they weighed him again and noted that he had gotten about 2 ounces of milk. I switched to the other breast for about another 30 minutes (where I showed them how with that side he had a tendency to bite and pull on my nipple, which is not the goal, and they diagnosed him with a high palate) and when they weighed him again he had gotten . . . no milk. He’d yanked and bitten and sucked on my nipple for half an hour, come off of my breast totally fine (he wasn’t crying or fussing or anything! In fact, he was trying to sleep!) and didn’t get ANYTHING to drink. So after an hour, he’d caused me a fair amount of pain and had 2 ounces to drink (and during the times at home that we’d offered him a bottle of expressed milk, he’d averaged about 4 ounces in a feeding. So we knew he could and did regularly eat more than that at once!) I left there with instructions to start waking him up at night to eat (so much for having a baby that slept through the night . . . ) and an appointment to come back for another weight check in 2 weeks.

Mostly, I left that appointment feeling like the world’s biggest failure. My day revolved around feeding my baby, and I put everything I had into doing so, but it clearly wasn’t even CLOSE to being enough. So, because I’m me, I tackled the problem with SCIENCE! And DATA! I made spreadsheets! (They were color-coded). I rented a baby scale from a lactation consultant, so I could monitor how much milk he got from each breast every time he ate, and see if that day had been a fluke, or was a consistent trend. I had pumped once a day on average to have a spare milk supply, but I started pumping more and tracking how much milk I produced so we could try to pinpoint the problem (was I not making enough milk? Was it really all my fault?) I also started offering him bottles of milk from my spare milk stash after breastfeeding, just in case that was the problem (was he still hungry but too annoyed with me to cry and let me know? Was breastfeeding too tiring? Was he burning more calories than he could ingest, like in the NICU? Was I doing him a disservice by allowing him to nurse for 1-2 hours on average?)

What I found was disheartening – on average, Nathan was getting 2-3 times more milk from one breast than the other, and on average he was getting less than 2 ounces (total) from an hour of breastfeeding. He was then eating 4-6 ounces from a bottle immediately after (which was approximately how much milk I could get from pumping, so that ruled out my milk source as a problem).

After a week of breastfeeding, weighing, bottle feeding, and pumping, we decided to cut out the breastfeeding. He still got breast milk, he just got it from an alternate source. At our follow up appointment 2 weeks later, he’d put on a total of 2 pounds. He was still less than 5th percentile for weight, but he was back on his previous growth track. And even better, once Nathan was only spending about 20 minutes eating (and eating so much more!) he transformed into an amazing little person! He cried and fussed less, he was alert more, he started smiling and looking at things and doing all of the developmentally appropriate stuff he’d been missing out on by staring at my chest for hours on end and then falling asleep! We’d been physically connected for the majority of each day, but I didn’t ever really get to spend TIME with my baby until I started feeding him from the bottle. My breast pump suddenly became my best friend instead of my nemesis.

I’m sure lactation would have been happy to help me troubleshoot why he wasn’t getting enough milk from the breast, or help me set up a supplemental nursing system, but to be honest, we just weren’t interested. For the first time in 3 months, we could feed the baby and then LEAVE THE HOUSE! (Previously he’d start crying and want to eat again an hour after finishing, so we were pretty tethered to the couch). We could DO STUFF as a family! He was GROWING! He was HAPPY! And he was DOING stuff instead of just crying and sleeping! (Which I know, some of that is attributed to just getting older, but I’m convinced his brain grew tremendously once he got more food in him!)

Looking at things! Playing! Laughing! Chatting! NOT EATING OR SLEEPING!

So for now, I’m back to the pump (I’m pumping as I write this, even!) I still put him to the breast on occasion just to make sure he remembers how to do it (perhaps I’ll change my mind and want to go back to exclusively breastfeeding at some point), but for now, I’m stuck in a weird place when asked if I breastfeed or bottlefeed my baby – who says that bottle feeding breast milk can’t be the best choice for me and my family?

Oh, the best laid plans . . .

When I was planning to leave work and stay at home during my pregnancy, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about the kind of structure I would impose on myself once I was no longer employed. As hard as I try to be comfortable with my decision to stop working, and as much as I love and stand behind that decision, I am still perpetually anxious about being judged for it. With that in mind, it was really important to me that I set up my day as though I still were a contributing member of society so that I couldn’t be accused of not doing anything besides sleeping, eating, and watching TV. After much introspection, I came up with what I thought was a realistic plan. I envisioned waking up every day at the same time my alarm would usually go off, and then allotting chunks of each day to reading, writing, exercising, and doing household chores and errands. I thought that would allow myself plenty of time to relax and enjoy what will probably be the only time of my life that I have completely to myself, and still accomplish the tasks that I thought would help make me the happiest, healthiest, pregnant version of myself.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

One month later, all I can do is laugh at the version of myself that really thought I’d be able to plan out my life in any fashion. One of the things I’ve learned, both from working with kids and from observing and listening to other moms, is that for as many lessons and skills an adult can try to teach a child, there are just as many times in life when it is our interaction with the child that ends up teaching us about ourselves (and of course, the lessons taught by children are usually far more insightful and personal than anything the adult could ever have offered the child).

I haven’t given birth to a baby yet (heck, I don’t even know what pronoun to use to refer to the baby, yet!) but I think that my little baby is already trying to teach me my very first lesson: having a child takes away your control of the world (and the sooner I come to terms with that, the better!) I honestly believed that I had made this epic first step in being a flexible and open-minded parent simply by letting go of my previous life, but as it turns out, I was still trying too hard to put things on my own terms. Even if the baby is still inside me, I’m not just “me” anymore, I’m an “us”. I’m a baby incubator, and my body is no longer my own. My body also, apparently, doesn’t appreciate my trying to dictate how it will behave.

For months now, I’ve been feeling like my brain doesn’t work. It can’t hold or process information as efficiently as it used to be able to, and  the horrible irony is that there is more going on in my brain than ever before! I’m having so many new and life-changing experiences and insights that are just begging to be put down on (metaphorical) paper, but I can’t seem to keep up with all of it. After a month of trying to at least organize them by topic in my head, I’ve given up. I’m hoping the seeds of really great posts will stick around in my head and come back some other time when I’m more lucid, but we’ll have to see. For now, I’m accepting that to a certain extent, between the hormones and the life changes, my thoughts are running wild on a crazy manic episode, and the part of me that is the listener and the recorder of all those thoughts simply cannot operate at that pace. Just the thought of trying to put it all into writing is exhausting (and trust me, getting just this much out will probably have me recovering on the couch for the rest of the day!)

Physically, while I’m still well intentioned when it comes to exercising and keeping the household running, the amount I can accomplish in any given time span is far less than I had anticipated. I can’t seem to pinpoint WHY exactly, because it’s not just the physical aches and pains and nausea, nor is it simply being tired. It’s just some ineffable thing that causes me to move slowly and need an inordinate amount of time to recover after any event or activity. I can’t for the life of me figure it out (so I’m really hoping some other previously pregnant woman has had time to reflect on it and can tell me how to explain it! Otherwise I’m going to start believing that I’m in my own little universe where time moves differently than it used to). I make lists and plans and break down what I hope to accomplish each day (and we’re not talking about lofty goals here. My list has things on it like, “add flight information to calendar,” “call bank,” and “email coworkers current contact info”) and then at the end of the day, I berate myself for not having accomplished those things. They’re such EASY tasks, and I feel like such a failure for not being able to simply sit down and get them all taken care of. I count being organized, efficient, and dependable as some of my key personality traits. What does it mean when I can’t harness any of those skills to run my own life? If you take those away from me, who does that make me?

A few weeks ago I mentioned not being able to get much accomplished to a friend who has been my work mentor for many years, and who is now also a mother and great source of information. She mentioned that there are days, both during pregnancy and after giving birth, when sometimes all you’ll be able to get done is a load of laundry. And maybe the next day you’ll do the laundry AND go to the grocery store, but then the day after that you might only be able to get through the laundry again. And you have to just get over it and be okay with that.

I’ve been ruminating on that for a little while now, because that’s the point where I’ve been stuck for the last month or so. I’m keenly aware of what I’m not getting done, but I’m NOT okay with it. I set arbitrary expectations for myself before I’d hardly started to experience pregnancy, and when I fell short of those, it caused me just as much stress and anxiety as I used to feel about going to work (and we all know how THAT ended up!)

I’ve always had issues with control and being able to plan, and while I’ve made a lot of progress, I clearly have a long ways to go. A few weeks ago I realized that I was being much harder on myself than I would be on anybody else I cared about, and that the only person who was stressing out every day about not meeting my goal was me. So I’ve started giving myself the advice I’d be giving anybody else, if the tables were turned.

You’re going through a lot right now, it’s okay to just let go and experience it without trying to control it.

Nobody cares about your stupid structure or plan for each day. Do what you can and then let the rest go.

You don’t blog for money, you do it for fun. If it’s not fun, then don’t do it.

You need to keep yourself and the baby healthy, but you’re still only human. Things either will or will not go wrong, no matter if you fit in a 30 minute walk each day. Do what you can today and then reassess tomorrow. You do what you can and that’s all anybody can ask of you.

Each day is going to be different than the one before it. There is no clear trend on a graph (in fact, there’s no graph!) Tackle each day and its joys and struggles as they come. It’s okay if you can’t anticipate what the next day will be like. You’ll figure that one out when you’ll get there. Just focus on today right now.

Just let it go.

I’m trying to follow my own advice, because I know in my heart it’s pretty wise stuff. I still keep my lists, but my goal now is to get one thing accomplished each day, and so far that has been an appropriate goal (I felt like Super Woman the day I managed to stop by the dry cleaners AND go to the bank AND buy groceries! Granted, the bank was inside the grocery store, and all I needed to do was deposit a check, but it was still three separate things that I managed to check off my list!)

I still have days where I worry about what other people think of me and stress because I didn’t get more done. But on those days I try to stop, give myself a mental hug, and remind myself that it’s okay to be kind to myself. Then I thank my baby for teaching me that lesson, and resume whatever it is I was doing with new love in my heart.

When I made the decision to quit my job at the end of the summer, I hadn’t gotten pregnant yet and I had a lot of worries related to what I should do next. Should I get a job? Would it even be ethical to start a new job, knowing beforehand that I could be quitting very soon? And if I were to start a new job, what would I do? Supposing I gave in to my desire to truly just stay at home, what should I do during the course of my day? It wouldn’t be very responsible to just sit around and catch up on TV shows for however long it took me to get pregnant, and I’m sure that would eventually get boring anyhow (though I’m not going to lie – I think at first, it would be awesome!)

And that’s that point at which I got stuck – after catching up on sleep and household chores, what would I do next? I’ve struggled for a really long time with not being able to “slow down”. I’m so used to having so much going on that I’m constantly in full throttle mode – I always have a thousand lists of things that need to get done and I can’t understand people who just SIT when there are so many tasks that need attending to. When my boss asked me what I was going to do instead of work, I think I surprised us both by answering, “Be happy”. But in all my life, I don’t think I’d ever honestly asked myself, “If I had no career, no kids, and no household tasks to attend to, what would I most like to do? What would make me happy?”

So when I thought about quitting work, that’s what I started thinking about. And I had a LOT of ideas, some of which just won’t be feasible right now but I will remind myself to do at a later date (I’d love to take some classes on wine tasting and maybe cooking, and I’d love to go back to school just to take the random classes that I loved the most when I was in college. Those options require money and a fully functioning brain, though, and I don’t have much of either of those right now!) But some of them were feasible, and surprised the heck out of me.

Apparently, the two biggest things I’d like to do are workout (I wanted to get into RUNNING, which is SO unlike me that I was both excited and scared of myself at the same time. For now I think I’m going to have to be satisfied with walking, and eventually, waddling, but someday I can pick up the pace again) and write more! I didn’t know that I wanted to do that! (I guess when you actually take the time to ask yourself questions as though you are a third person, you shouldn’t be too surprised by any answer you get in response!) When I was in elementary school I wanted to be a writer, but I’ve never been able to write poetry or pick a plot for a novel. But on a BLOG, oh boy, you mean there is a venue that allows (nay! Encourages!) me to share with the world all the random insights I come up with throughout the day? Holy cow, if that kind of writing is on the table, I have a TON of material to choose from! (None of it terribly marketable, but maybe that will manage to fall into place somewhere down the line as well).

Morning sickness has slightly dampened my enthusiasm for actually DOING either of those things right now, but hopefully within the next few weeks I’ll stop feeling so darn yucky and start putting together a loose schedule for how I’ll spend my days until the baby actually arrives!

So if, in just a couple of minutes, you ask me how I feel about my future, I may start freaking out about finances or dental insurance or something else along those lines. But as of right now (and I’d say, for the majority of the time) I’m feeling pretty good about things

Today’s post on ProBlogger was a challenge to create a link list to 7 particular kinds of blog posts (hence the name, The 7 Link Challenge!) It sounded like fun, so here is my contribution to the pool!


1) Your first post – Welcome To The World, New Baby Blog

This one was really hard for me because I made my first webpage when I was 13, and probably transitioned into blogging when I was about 18. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to any of that content I did go back to my old Xanga blog (2004! That was an eternity ago!) but my early posts were more like Facebook status updates than blog posts, so we’ll all have to be satisfied with my first post from this current blog

2) A post you enjoyed writing the most – Smart vs Wise – Making Decisions and Big Changes (An Announcement!)

The actual process of writing this one wasn’t fun, but I did enjoy writing it and being done with it. After ruminating privately for so long, I was simply happy to not have to keep everything a secret anymore. The unexpected blessing was how supportive everyone was. The writing process ended up being very insightful for me, as well.

3) A post which had a great discussion – I Don’t Understand Weddings

My blog is lacking in discussion (much to my dismay!) so this one was tough. This post probably got the lengthiest responses (and what will never cease to amaze me is that even in the comments on the post and that people left me on Facebook, there still wasn’t an absolute consensus. Everyone thinks they know the answer, but apparently some people are still wrong!) and even after all the comments I got, I still don’t understand weddings

4) A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written – The Reason I Never Say Never Anymore

This one makes me weepy every time I read it. Some people can use words so well that at a certain point, you stop reading and simply feel the essence of the post. That’s a powerful skill, and it really comes out here. I’m in awe of how effortless that transition from words to emotions is with that post.

5) Your most helpful post – Recipe Review – Homemade Laundry Detergent and Cheap Fabric Softener!

Not terribly exciting, but it is fun, interesting, and helps save money, so I think it qualifies!

6) A post with a title that you are proud of – How A Belly Kiss Almost Made Me Cry

This is an example of a simple moment that struck me hard, emotionally, so I came home, typed the experience up quickly, and then left for dinner without any expectations. For quite a while, though, it was the post on my site that had received the most traffic, which could have been because the emotion resonated with other people as well, or simply because it’s an intriguing title

7) A post that you wish more people had read – Let’s Get Nostalgic!

Come ON, people, this was some fun reminiscing! Who doesn’t like to play a good game of “Remember when . . . “? I’m still hoping somebody will contribute to that discussion, because it would be a BLAST!

I work with kids with autism, and describing what I do on a day to day basis can be tough to explain to people. I usually end up listing the diagnostic criteria and just saying that we work on correcting those deficits and excesses. The hardest thing, though, is trying to explain to other kids what I do, because launching into an explanation of the DSM-IV criteria won’t get either of us anywhere in our quest for understanding. (And anyone who has ever encountered an inquisitive child knows that you won’t be going anywhere until you’ve explained it to their satisfaction!)

So when I got an e-mail from a family member I’d recently visited asking how to explain autism and my job to her daughter, this is what I came up with:

Autism is such a spectrum disorder that I generally just say that I work with kids who need extra help learning stuff – some of them need help learning how to talk, some of them need help learning how to play with toys, and some of them need help learning how to make friends and fit in at school. (The trick is to explain it so that they don’t think they have autism if they are having trouble with kids at school). I also usually explain that those things are extra hard for kids with autism, so a lot of times they get really mad at me for making them work so hard, and then sometimes have temper tantrums or yell or throw things at me. Part of my job as their teacher is to help them learn how to do those things so that it won’t be hard anymore, but I also have to help them learn how to use their words and calm down when they are upset. So sometimes my job is really hard because kids are angry and don’t want to work, but sometimes it’s really fun because I get to go to the playground and hang out and play with toys.

That obviously is a super duper simplified explanation, but it’s the most comprehensive yet simple definition that I have come up with so far. So if you ever have the need to explain to a child what autism is or what someone who works with them does, feel free to use my definition (and let me know if you can improve it in any way!)

The Famous Dave’s near our house has a great Wednesday Wing night (25 cents each!!) in their bar area, so we go every week. The first few times we went it was just because it was a great deal, and therefore a fun and economical new date night. The service was actually kind of crummy at first, and then it got to be just decent.

However, after the first few weeks, the bartender started to recognize us and remember what we liked (we order the same thing every time, so it’s not THAT  hard to do!) Still, when we show up now:

• She comes over or asks us from behind the bar if we want our usual drinks (and, after noticing that J always eats the orange off of the rim of my beer, now brings him a beer with two oranges on it! How cool is that?) If she’s too busy to do it herself and someone else takes our drink order, she usually adds the extra oranges to the glasses before they are brought to us.
• She comes over and asks us for our order in case we want something different this time, but (when we get the same thing we always do) she anticipates the extra changes I will be making (an extra side of ranch and buffalo sauce) and makes sure the order is delivered correctly (if she’s not available and someone else delivers the order there’s always something incorrect or missing, so I know that she is the one catching the mistakes and making sure they are fixed before the food gets to me).
• She comes by at least once to see how we are doing and ask if we need anything else.
• She waits until J has been finished for a while and I’m almost finished with my wings (J eats incredibly quickly and I eat incredibly slowly. We’re an interesting couple, all around!) to come by and take our dessert order. (**I should note that at the bottom of the Famous Dave’s receipt is always an invitation to a phone survey, and if you do the survey you get a coupon for a free dessert. She knows that I always do the survey and that we’ll always get the free dessert when we come in!)
• The first time J and I ordered dessert from her (the brownie sundae, YUM!) we had asked her if the nuts could be taken off of the brownie, not for any health or allergy issue but just because J doesn’t particularly like them. She said that they are baked into the brownie, but she could have them cut off the top of the brownie and put it on the side separately. Months later (and we’ve never asked her to do it again) she still always remembers that J doesn’t like nuts and ensures that the part with the nuts is cut off and put on the plate off to the side. (One time a different server took our order and J forgot to say anything about the nuts. When the dessert was brought out, though, the nuts were on the side and the server said that the bartender had let her know how we would want the order placed, even though we forgot to ask).

Now when we go out on Wednesday, it’s because it’s our regular date night, a great deal, and a wonderful experience. That kind of attention to detail and the ability to anticipate what we’ll want without taking away our right to change our routine or order something different is priceless (and therefore reflected in the tip we leave!)

Most of the time when people remember servers or bartenders, it’s because we weren’t satisfied with them. Every once in a while it’s important to recognize that, just like in any profession, the majority of people will be average or below average, but that there are still some really EXCEPTIONAL employees out there. And those people deserve to be recognized, too. (I think that people who are awful are always noted, but when someone does their job flawlessly, nobody says anything about it. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT, PEOPLE! We all need it!)

I think appreciation for a job well done (in a restaurant, anyhow!) is usually reflected via the amount of tip that you leave, but some people deserve even more than that. One time we noticed a Round Table Pizza employee with a really great work ethic (he was probably about 16, and even though the place was pretty empty he kept finding things to clean, refill, or otherwise tidy up. He kept himself busy instead of standing around and gossiping with the other employees the entire time we were there). We left him a tip on the table (even though it’s not the kind of place you usually leave tips!) and J even asked the manager to come out so we could commend the boy.

I respond to those surveys from Famous Dave’s in order to get the free dessert, but I always make a point to mention what fantastic service we get, and I hope that is reflected positively upon our server. We had a new person helping us tonight, and it really made me appreciate even more the level of attention we usually get (I’m going to have to assume that the person tonight was actually a new employee, because otherwise the number of mistakes he made was pretty inexcusable). I’ve decided that the next time the manager walks around to see how everyone is doing, I’m going to make a point to bring up how much we love our usual server/bartender.

In the meantime, I’d just like to give a shout-out to Theresa K. from the Vista, CA Famous Dave’s, because she ROCKS! And while I’m at it, nameless girl who used to work at the Baskin-Robbins in Phoenix, AZ 2 years ago, the fact that you always remembered us and what we were going to order makes you someone that I still miss, even all this time (and miles away!) later.

A big thank you to all of you who take pride in your work and go the extra mile to make me happy. You are the reason I continue to visit your establishments – I can get food and drinks anywhere, but I return to your location because of you. Keep it up!

I’ve never had truly terrible acne but I’ve for sure had difficult times with my skin, and for the last five or six years I’ve been a dedicated Proactiv user (it really does work as well as the infomercials say!) However, with the smack-down I’ve put on our budget, I’ve been trying to find a way to slim down my skincare expenses by switching to cheaper and/or generic products. I didn’t want to change my whole skincare routine at once (confounding variables!) so I decided to change out one product at a time, wait to see how that works out, and then target a different product after that. I figured the toner would be the easiest thing to find a replacement for, so I kept using the rest of the products and started experimenting with other toners with similar ingredients.

After a few months of experimentation . . . DISASTER! My skin has been an angry mess (for me, anyhow. It’s certainly not as bad as it was when I was a teenager or anything, but it was definitely worse than usual). I switched back to my Proactiv toner for two days, and my skin is already calming down and looking happier (yes, skin can look happy!) My plan now is to stick with the toner and look for a face wash replacement. We’ll see how my skin reacts to that change

I think that the majority of the time, the generic is just as good as the brand name. Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal versus Golden Spooners (the kind that come in the bag instead of a box) are hardly distinguishable. Generic kidney beans are no better or worse than the name brand, and why should I pay more for fancy herbs and seasoning when it all comes from the same plant, anyhow?

However, there are those few things where the generics just can’t compare. Though I’ve been eating the generic for years (because it’s a lot cheaper!) Skippy peanut butter really is more delicious than the store brand. Some generic medications do NOT work as well as the brand name medications (both over the counter and prescription – I’ve learned this one the hard way!) Charmin toilet paper and Kleenex brand tissues are both IMMEASURABLY better than the generics (some body parts just can’t be tricked by substituting the store brand for name brand items!)

Unluckily for me and my weaning myself off of Proactiv experiment, my skin is one of those body parts that can’t be fooled! Oh well. My quest to be a tightwad will continue in other arenas, but I always love to save some time and avoid re-inventing the wheel when at all possible. What are some other items that I shouldn’t bother trying to cut corners on?

I was walking to my car last week with my keys in my hand, preparing to push the button to unlock the doors as I approached, when I started thinking about what life was like before car keys had buttons on them! Remember when you had to actually put the key in the door to unlock it???? *gasp*  That’s crazy talk!

Then I got into the car and, because it was dark and foggy out, I could see that the headlights were on. The car had turned them on for me, and when I got out of the car, I knew it would turn them off! It hasn’t been that many years since I’ve had a car with that technology, but I am now totally dependent upon it. When we get rental cars, I get confused when I remove the keys from the ignition and the car beeps at me. I’m supposed to turn a knob so the lights go off and the battery doesn’t die? What???

So that got me thinking about other Remember when . . . items!


Remember when scrunchies were the coolest things ever?

How would we have gotten through junior high without fabric and elastic to hold our super awesome hairstyles in place? (I’m being facetious, of course, because they didn’t do all that great a job at holding your hair in place! It was slippery fabric, whoever thought that was going to be effective in the first place?) Normal ponytail holders would have done the job much more efficiently, but they weren’t as much fun for the boys to steal and throw back and forth (in place of flirting, obviously). My friends and I (ahem, Becky) even made our own, because we were that super amazingly awesome


Remember when cool computer/video games were orange and pixelated?

Pharaoh’s Tomb

We used to spend HOURS playing these games that were so much fun, but looking back at them, wow. It’s hard to believe we were that enthralled by such simple graphics. (Although J found this game in his archives for me, and when he tried to play he kept walking into the arrows and dying! Apparently, even though the graphics were simple, the gameplay must have taken some level of skill). You also have to remember that at this time, just having color on the screen was a big deal, so that might also have contributed to why we were so impressed

Remember when Tivo/DVRs/Internet TV wasn’t an option?

There really was a time when, if you wanted to watch a TV show, you arranged your schedule so that you’d be on the couch at the appointed time in order to watch it. OR, if you were technologically savvy, you programmed your VCR (remember those?) to tape it so you could watch it later. If you missed it, TOO BAD! You were screwed, no second chances! You couldn’t go online to watch old episodes (the Internet? What was that?) And if you wanted to see two shows that were on at the same time, you switched back and forth during commercials and hoped you didn’t miss anything else. And do you even remember commercials?? You couldn’t fast-forward or skip them, you just had to sit there and watch them (or else you left the room to do the dishes or use the restroom, and then came running back when you heard the show come on). Watching TV was hard work!

Remember when you had to buy whole albums if you wanted to hear a song?

There was a day before iTunes, before Napster, and before mp3s, when if you wanted to hear a song, you had to buy the whole album! You would only know one song, but you paid for thirteen in order to get that one (so you really hoped that the other songs were at least halfway decent! One-hit wonders were the bane of our existence!) If buying the album wasn’t an option, then you had to tape it off of the radio! I would leave a tape in my boombox, and when I heard a song that I liked come on, I’d race over and hit record. Consequently, I had a whole bunch of tapes with random songs that were usually missing the very beginning and included bits of dialogue or other songs at the tail end.

Remember when nobody had cell phones?

My first cell phone

This is probably the biggest one, because cell phones have entirely changed the way we now live our lives. I was alive for it, but I have trouble remembering a time when you couldn’t call to say you were on your way somewhere, ask for directions when you missed a turn, or let someone know that you were going to be late. Particularly since I have to drive to clients’ homes for a living, I rely heavily on my cell phone for all of those things. What on earth did therapists do before there were cell phones??? And what did people play games on while they waited for doctor or dentist appointments? How did people get through the day without being able to check their email? And how did people get in touch during business hours without being able to text? I swear, we used to live in the dark ages!

Remember Lite-Brites?

I don’t remember them all that well either, though we did buy one at a garage sale when I was little. It was pretty fun until we poked holes in all the papers and then lost all the tiny pieces. So that didn’t make a huge impact on my life, but when I asked J for suggestions, his first two were, “LITE-BRITES! They were AWESOME!” and “playing in the street”. The former had better visual aids than the latter, so I went with that

After Lite-Brites, the ideas J and I came up with got pretty lame (it’s late, we’re tired) so that’s all we’ve got for now I’m sure I missed some good ones though, so help me out and let me know what you’re feeling nostalgic for!

Sometimes in life you can change the direction you’re going in without too much of a fight, and sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can muster some upward mobility again.

I think I’m mostly a “hit rock bottom first, and then really turn things around!” kind of girl. That phrase always brings to mind drug addiction and suicide, but I don’t mean it that way at all. Before you start worrying about me, let me give you an example that I think everyone can relate to – weight loss and body image.

I’d say that the way I feel about my body tends to ebb and flow from one day to the next; some days I’m convinced I look great, and others I’m convinced it would be an insult to the world to go outside in anything less than a muumuu. However, most valleys are followed relatively quickly by a peak, so I end up just going along with my life like always (i.e., I don’t change anything). But every so often, the valley just keeps on going, and it usually has such a gradual slope that it takes me a while to realize how unhappy with myself I am getting.

And then suddenly, BANG, ROCK BOTTOM! One minute I’m moping about the cellulite on my thighs that no swimsuit cover-up will actually be able to cover, and the next moment something clicks in my head and I go, “Wait, why am I spending this time hating myself? Why not do something about it?” And then I have this moment of absolute clarity when I am suddenly passionately and enthusiastically driven to make a change! I have no idea why it suddenly goes from, “I hate the way I look, I will never go out in public again without people laughing at how big my butt is”, to, “I’m going to join a gym and make a spreadsheet and then sign up again for Weight Watchers and there will be graphs and I can’t wait, I’m going to go start right now!”

I really have no idea why, for the life of me, I can’t just decide to whole-halfheartedly commit myself to a difficult task (and let’s be honest, change is always difficult!). I can make a decision to do something, but I usually end up with a split personality – half of me is saying, “You want to change your body, so get thee to the gym!” and the other half is saying, “I love me and J loves me and I’d really rather stay here with him and watch a movie tonight”. In the end, no matter if I go to the gym or not, half of me ends up cranky with the other half, which means I’m just cranky at me, and that just makes me cranky and annoying. So unless I have that big bang moment to really get me excited about the process, it just never works out. And that spark only shows up when I’m in the dark at the very bottom (where all the rocks are, which is why, of course, it’s called rock bottom).

And just for the record, before you start thinking I’m a crazy yo-yo dieter, I need to brag for a moment – every time I’ve made that change, I’ve followed through. (Okay, I’m technically off the wagon from the gym right now, but I’ve kept off 10 of the 14 pounds I’ve lost in the last year! That’s not a binge or crash diet, that’s a lifestyle change, and I’m quite proud of myself for that one). So while my moods may plummet and rebound at ridiculous speeds, my commitment to the lifestyle changes made during that moment when the dark changed to light doesn’t ricochet up and down like a bullet – it remains steady.

So, with that said, I’ll get back to “Why It Was Vitally Important That I Cut All My Hair Off”.

During my formative years (haha, look how old I am now, apparently! I have formative years!) I always spent a lot of time on my hair (a lot). And my makeup. And my clothes. And my shoes. And my earrings. (You get the point). But over the last few years, I stopped doing all those things (some of them slowly, and some of them very abruptly). I didn’t have time, emotional energy, or money. I traded in putting on mascara for an extra 5 minutes of sleep, and putting my hair in a pony-tail for another 30. I got used to buying the cheapest clothing items I could find and owning just enough of them so that I could make it through a work week without too many funny looks.

Before I realized it, what had started off as a time and money saver had become an enforced way of life. Even if I’d WANTED to wake up earlier and do my hair, I didn’t own any hair products anymore. My makeup was old, and I was out of practice using it. And so this last fall, I had one of those rock bottom moments.

I realized that I avoided looking in the mirror because I didn’t like what I saw there anymore (and this is after the weight loss, so it was something new and different this time). I didn’t think I was hideous, but I recognized that all I did everyday was roll out of bed and put in the minimum amount of effort in order to get by – smooth down the frizzies, powder away the shine, and make sure my clothing covered the necessary body parts. I didn’t put any effort into myself. I’d lost all of the items and skills that I used to use to make myself sparkle. Now, instead of looking like Carolyn, I just looked like a lump of blah. I used to stand out from the crowd in photos (or I thought I did, anyhow!) and now I either blended into the background or stood out because of my obvious lack of effort.

Now, I do think that I used to place too much emphasis on my appearance, so not all of the changes I had made were negative. I continue to be proud that I can now shower, get dressed, do my hair and makeup, and be out the door in less than an hour (at my peak, it took me 2-3 hours before I’d leave, even just to go to the grocery store!)

So when I had this moment of clarity, it was harder than usual to figure out what action I should take. If you feel fat, you should eat better and work out more. If you feel like blah, you should . . . ??? Well, there are a LOT of things I could have chosen to do, but I focused in on my trademark – my ponytail (I worked in Phoenix for almost 2 years, and I think there was only one person there who ever saw my hair down). When I woke up in the morning, I would put my hair in a ponytail, fix the frizzies, and that’s how it would stay for the rest of the day. At the end of the day I’d shower, put it in a ponytail again, and go to sleep. For very special occasions I would sometimes put in the effort to curl it and wear it down, but by that point I was out of practice and it just felt WEIRD having my hair in the way all the time! After an hour or two I just ended up annoyed and anxious to get it out of my face and into a ponytail again.

So at this point I did the only reasonable thing I could do – I made an appointment with a hairdresser, sat in the chair, and said, “I’m having a mid-mid-life crisis and need a big change” So we chopped it all off. And it was terrifying, because now people were going to be LOOKING at me when I went to work (you can’t hide that kind of change!) Therefore, even if I didn’t want to, I had to put in a little extra effort in the mornings because all eyes would be on me. Before I knew it, I was doing a little bit more each day. I was putting on a little bit of eyeliner before leaving the house. Then I was putting on little earrings (if I was going to be seeing clients that day who wouldn’t try to yank them out, anyhow!) Then I was putting on a little bit of eyeshadow, and then I realized that I looked funny wearing makeup and doing my hair and wearing my work clothes, so I splurged on a few tee-shirts and some shorts that fit nicely. Suddenly, I was a new woman!

It’s been 4 months now, and I’m not going to lie – I’m still trying to figure out what the heck I’m doing with my hair (I’ve always been good with makeup and clothes, but hair and I have never been able to understand each other). I had to buy all new styling tools and hair products and teach myself how to use everything again. In an attempt to combine effort AND ease, I am now determined to find the magic combination of hair products that will let my hair embrace it’s natural waviness without descending into chaos and messiness (it’s still a work in progress, we’ll leave it at that!) I have certainly not achieved hair nirvana, but that was never the goal I was working towards (though if anyone knows how to get there, please fill me in!). I was looking to break out of the rut I’d gotten myself into, and by making my hair short enough that I couldn’t put it in a ponytail even if I wanted to, I made sure I couldn’t revert to my old habits.

I still don’t spend that much time on my clothing or makeup in the morning, and I don’t always leave the house liking the way my hair has turned out, but I tell you what – I always leave the house having at least tried, in one way or another, to put forth some effort and take pride in my appearance.

And I feel good about myself for that.