Elflingsmama's Sanity Keeper

I got a call back from the Volunteer Coordinator at the Wyandotte Animal Shelter today. She suggested bringing Justin in at 5:30 Tuesday and they'll get him started (sounds like they have something in mind other than collecting donations!). Unfortunately, it's Tuesday: chorus night; and I have to go because I have some items that I promised to people so they're expecting me. She said she'd pass my info on to the other coordinator and between the two of them they'll get Justin some volunteer hours :) She also said she'd send and email right away but I haven't gotten it. It's possible, however, that it's the email server's fault...sometimes it forgets to give me my mail over the weekend. Either way, someone will be in tomorrow evening so I can hopefully set something up for him maybe Saturday.

It's amazing me how much he wants to do this. Justin has asked me several times if I've talked to the shelter; showing me that he really is interested :)

I find it ironic that I can be almost finished with a round of Augmentin for my sinus infection and have an infection start on my finger. It's nothing serious and I've been putting neosporin on it today so it'll clear up in another day or so; but I still find it a bit perplexing.

Justin recieved a community outreach project today where he's supposed to do 3 hours of service and then do a little report about his experience. I offered him a few suggestions that came to my mind, like helping me sort, bag, and deliver the mountain of donatables in the basement, but he wasn't real interested. Then I saw the weekly spot in the paper about cats at the Wyandotte Animal Shelter and I thought, "Aha!" When I asked Justin if he wanted to do something related to the animal shelter his eyes lit up and he immediately agreed. He even said he would clean cages if they let him!

Tomorrow I'll call the shelter and see what they can allow him to do for them. I'm sure they have regulations about the age of volunteers and such, but you know, if they would let him do anything in actual contact with the animals he would be in heaven. If the shelter can't accommodate Justin's offer of service due to his age then I may be able to get him to round up item donations for them from our family and neighbors. Barring that....roane and bangping, you may be getting a call to see if he can help out with your menagerie for a day. I'm sure you have a couple of dogs who wouldn't mind a walk or a brushing :P

I saw the ENT today and discovered that I have an adnoid infection. He's very mild mannered and unassuming so it can be difficult to tell just how bad things are sometimes. Today he gave me a strong impression that this is bad. He found pus all over the outside of the adnoids; I'm assuming it's due to overflow from the inside? He seemed pretty concerned. And worried about how he could've missed them being infected before. He's looked in my nose several times with a camera and never once noticed them infected like this. So now the question is: is this a one time thing or a recurring thing? I'm now on Augmentin and I go back to see him in 1 month. He said he has one more antibiotic he could try but if they aren't cleared up, I'll need to get them removed. Yay, more surgery.

After hearing about all the aches and pains I have going on that just will not go away, Jason realized that I needed to have my feet looked at. Turns out he was right. I went to a podiatrist today and found out that my left foot has a neuroma. This refers to an inflammed nerve in the foot, usually under the last two toes of your foot. In my case it's been caused by an old tendon injury that for some reason has caused a nerve to be rubbed or pinched after all these years. For now the treatment is custom orthotics and physical therapy along with some prescription strength Aleve to cut down the inflammation.

I'm hoping that fixing this will also relieve much of the tension and soreness in my back and the pulling I get in my knees. If not, then it may be time to seriously consider a chiropractor as well to figure out what's knotting my back up so badly.

My sinuses and other soft tissue inside my head are going crazy. I'm seriously thinking I have a sinus infection and have had it since August or September. The last two weeks have been pretty miserable. My air passages are blocked and Jason says I've been snoring again. It feels like the tissue is swollen behind the bridge of my nose. It really isn't a surprise that the last month or so I've been sleepier, much like it was just before my surgery :( I see my Ear Nose and Throat doctor tomorrow so I'll see what he says.

We had a new coach come in today for a special choreography session and wow is she awesome. First off, she's an earthy sort of person with flyaway hair and no makeup (not usually the look of a sweet adeline). secondly, I think she sees chorus choreo in her head like a writer sees a novel unfold and shares her ideas with us passionately. Third, she set things up so the choreo is completely stress-free. Without giving everything away, we will be dressed as newsies so she's helping us characterize the boys that we will be portraying. As such, a passle of boys aren't able to do anything with precision, so the choreo embraces that. This means that if you make a mistake, it's OK because kids will always make mistakes. She created a package for us that will take the audience on an emotional rollercoaster, and we learned it all today! I kid you not, we've got the whole package blocked and mostly memorized in one day, it's that easy and fun.

Jason has sinuses going crazy and my ears are so swollen inside my head aches even through medicine, but I went today. I'm really glad I did. While I was tired and hurting, today really was fun and didn't feel like work. Now I'm ready to collapse for the night and pray that I can make it to rehearsal on Tuesday to help cement the choreography in my head.

roane came out for the weekend and we had a wonderful time! It's been much too long since we've visited with each other. The boys couldn't wait for her to arrive on Friday, asking me pretty much every 15 minutes when she would be here. When she did get here, they literally bombarded her with their efforts to keep her attention. It was deafening yet heartwarming as they tried to share with her all sorts of things that are important to them. Luckily, they settled down immensely overnight and allowed me to sleep in until 10am, which is good since we adults stayed up until stupid o'clock playing Wizard 101.

We made bread, chatted a bit, and played the weekend away and it was a very welcome therapeutic time for all of us :)

I visited Merlin and Rosemary today and took my camera with me! These are two of roane and bangping's bottle babies. They are now around 5 months old :)









Just to add to the cuteness, here is a picture of Simon (also rescued by our resident kitten fostering team) who is now 13 months old and Blue who was feral but now is a most loving kitty. Blue is now 6 months old :)



This last one is Little Boy Blue, only he's not so little anymore! Look at that tail! I swear his tail is a mile long. One of his favorite games is to chase his tail, and he always catches it!

I wonder what it is about Fall that calls boys outside. Right now the boys are running around in very vocal and active abandon with two friends; yelling, chasing each other, being altogether more active than they were the entire summer. It feels so right to hear them out there :)

When J and I first moved into his grandma's house, we had the only open stretch of front yard on the block (not having a driveway will do that) and the neighborhood boys would come play football. Justin was only 1 at the time and LOVED watching the older boys run and tackle each other. We really liked listening to them play; it sounded much like what I'm hearing now :)

I'm sitting here listening to the boys play with a friend: lots of running and yelling and having a good time. And then I hear Justin call out, "You guys are the digestive system. You poop me out!"

After maybe an hour of wearing my slippers this morning the tendon in my knee flared up. Now, my slippers have a nonskid hard sole, but that means little on hardwood floors and apparently the resulting scuffing of my feet has irritated the tendon/ligament that I had issues with last winter. It's been months since it's caused me any sort of pain and I rather prefer it that way!

So, I need to be careful which shoes I wear and should either wear said shoes around the house (not gonna happen) or find slippers that won't skid at all on the floor. Or suffer chilly feet. I'm not liking this getting old stuff.

Jason saw him and we just HAD to get a picture!

We took the boys to the RenFest today for the first time since Ryan was a baby. I was really looking forward to sharing the experience with the boys; but Jason and I eventually realized that we want to come back sans kids so we can see the shows. Even when we went before we had kids we didn't go to many of the shows or missed many of the ones we wanted to see. We also saw some fabulous art through the doors of some of the shops that we'd like to take time to peruse.

The boys were really shy at first; even Justin was literally hanging on me as we walked by the shops. Ryan and Michael were glued to the wagon Jason was pulling, giving some ripe material for teasing and jokes from the Festival personnel. Some bowed to the little guys calling them royalty as they were pulled in their coach :P But it was the fire-eater, Dr. Inferno, who broke the boys out of their shells.

This guy's show certainly wasn't a headliner, but he was funny and bantered easily with the audience. And was upstaged by a caterpillar. When he started his show, a fuzzy black and orange caterpillar distracted him as it crawled on a t-shirt hanging on a wall near the stage. As he tried to continue his show, the caterpillar just kept on it's merry way and eventually the guy picked it up and set it on the other side of the wood fence. He joked about the upstaging caterpillar, kept his show going, and then had to pause again to place the caterpillar over the fence. He did this at least one more time. By this time it was a running (crawling?) gag that had everyone busting a gut. It was even funnier when the caterpillar started walking across the stage in front of Dr. Inferno. But he took it all in stride and improv-d seamlessly with the determined little guy. Jason said he bet the guy was wishing he could add the caterpillar to his show :P

We left the Faire around 1ish and headed to Great Lakes Crossing Mall in Auburn Hills. It was on the way home and Justin has been begging us to go play on the food in the Food Court. They have a play area with giant picnic food as climbing structures. It's really cool; and Justin periodically asks us to go back. It's an hour drive so we don't get to take them often. Anyway, we let them run around for a couple hours and ate dinner while there.

All in all, a very nice family day :)

I got one of my migraine-like allergy headaches last night. I really should talk to my ENT about it, again. Actually, I'm not sure I've mentioned the recurring headaches to him at all. I think we got caught up in the surgery and post-op stuff and I just never brought it up. I've told him about membranes in my head swelling; I say it's my ears because it's easier to describe, but really it's more my eustacian tubes and/or other tissues deeper inside. That just seems to stump him. So far the best we can do are allergy shots; and believe me they have done WONDERS over the 3 years I've been getting them.

I went all day today with the headache peeking around the edges. Some psuedoephedrine helped keep it at bay, but then suddenly at like 5:30 this evening, WHAM! full on migraine level headache again. Tylenol and Motrin don't seem to touch it, and the psuedoephedrine I took a couple hours ago doesn't seem to be helping much. It's obvious to me that SOMETHING hits the air in the early evening and some days it's heavier than others. I have no clue what, and there are so many things I'm allergic to these days that I have no prayer of figuring it out.

I'm feeling a bit sick at the moment. I was petting Rascal while reading to Justin and Ryan tonight and discovered he had a scabby mat behind one ear. I cleaned it up, got the hair off the wound, and was hit by a nasty smell. It doesn't look infected; no angry red colors or grossly swollen parts, so I'm hoping what I smell is open wound and the resultant beginning of infection. I smothered it in some neosporin and am desperately hoping that oral antibiotics won't be needed. I'll keep an eye on it as it hopefully begins to heal.

The other day I noticed a large scrape on Simon's tail and have been attempting to put neosporin on it to help it heal. Simon can be a wily bugger when it comes to doctoring.

I don't know what to do with these two. Everyone gets along with everyone else, it's just these two and it's been going on for almost a year now. Sometimes it's just growling and posturing, but sometimes it gets more vicious. At this point I have no idea why. I'm suspecting it's a personality conflict as opposed to a dominance kind of thing, but I just don't know. Rascal will walk guardedly and act like he's scared around Simon, but will totally put him in his place when it comes to a showdown. Simon seems to almost go out of his way to antagonize Rascal, but it could simply be that he's enough of a kitten still to just want to play with the old curmudgeon (or get a kick out of getting his gander up). In an all out fight they're pretty evenly matched even though Rascal outweighs Simon by at least 5 lbs.

Rascal has the entire upstairs to himself. He chose it when Simon moved in and we've accommodated him. There are two litter boxes for him and Raja to use. We still feed him downstairs with the other cats, mostly because he craves human contact and I want to entice him to come down. If Simon isn't in sight, Rascal's at ease and will eat and hang around for petting so I don't think we're making it too hard on him (I hope!). I've been impatiently waiting for these two to work it out and I'm afraid it's just not gonna happen :(

Today was Justin's first day of 3rd grade. He has the teacher he wanted and most of the kids who were in his class last year are in his class this year. I tried to get him to talk about his (half) day, but he was more interested in being goofy. He mentioned that they were allowed to bring a snack and water bottle today (I forgot the water and didn't pack a snack because I wasn't sure 3rd grade got a snack time). So I used that opening to ask him if his teacher said anything about healthy snacks and he said, "Yes, but I forget what she said."

Sigh. It's gonna be one of those years....again.

Ryan knocked our socks off again with his grasp on counting. He recieved a pile of $5 bills in a birthday card and immediately counted them off, correctly, to 25! This is my kindergartener, people; they don't even teach counting by 5s in kindergarten!

To celebrate, I took a picture of my big 5 yr old boy holding our "Little" Boy Blue. As you can see, just as bangping and roane teach their fosters to fear, we teach our kittens not to eat and to stay small.

Ryan just shocked my socks off! He's been showing a natural grasp of adding over the past few weeks. The other day I asked him what 2+2 was and such and he just kept getting the answers right. When I asked him 8-4 he told me 12 (Justin has trouble remembering that 8+4=12!) ; he doesn't quite grasp subtracting yet. The funny thing is, I then asked him 1+4 and he told me, "Mama, don't give me anymore 1s, they're too easy."

Anyway, so just now he's sitting on Jason's lap watching him play Peggle and J was explaining that the level he was on had 45 pegs. Justin said, "yeah, that's 10 more than the last level." Then Ryan piped up with, "Yeah, and if there were 75 pegs then it would be 30 more! When I exclaimed that he was right, he kept going to 85 and 95 and 105. Kindergarten age kids don't usually count in 10s, much less leap while counting like that. That's a skill they perfect in 2nd grade!

I just flipped through the pictures on FB from my high school 20th reunion. Jason flat out didn't want to go, and I kinda did but not enough to "make" Jason go with me. Going through the pictures I noticed two things: 1) Hardly any of the people there were ones I wanted to catch up with, and 2) nearly everyone has gained as much weight as Jason and me. I note that not to be mean but as a societal comment. The fact that almost everyone seems to have gained as much weight as J and I have can't just be due to "middle age spread." Just something to think on for another time and topic.

I noticed one exciting thing: a girl we all KNEW would make it big as a rock singer had her picture taken with a CD, with her on the cover! I'm going to look her up and see what I can find about that :)

All in all, I'm not sorry I missed the reunion. It looks like it was just as I supposed: lots of people I barely remember. There were lots of names I didn't recognize, which surprises me because I thought I was at least familiar with everyone. At least I'm back in contact with people I DID want to reconnect with thanks to FB :)