photo albums

Many of you know that I've been using a certain online photo service for years. We generally get our Christmas cards printed there, and I've created countless photo albums over the years.

In fact, for Rose's birthday each year, I've started a new album, worked on it slowly throughout the year, then printed it as a birthday gift (more for myself than for her, if I'm being really honest!), before starting the new one for the next year every April.

Well, a few months ago they "upgraded" their website and lost NINE MONTHS of my work on her age-3-to-4 album. ARGH!!!! I debated starting all over again, but not only did they lose the formatting of my photos into the albums, but they also lost about 75% of my photos themselves. As a result, redoing all that work would take countless hours of sorting through the hundreds of pictures on my hard drive, picking which ones to include, uploading them, and then reformatting them into a new album. Ugh.

So, after much internal strife, I finally decided to just let go of this project.  Sigh.

As life gets busier and I keep working on finding balance, I am continually evaluating what brings me joy vs. what I think I "should" be doing.  And I realized that these albums definitely brought me joy when she was a baby, but at this point in my life I think I could get similar joy from simply keeping this blog up to date.

Easier, and with similarly joyful results? Sounds like a win all around!

Hopefully this means you can look forward to more frequent updates from me :)

annual birthday questions

Rose is 4!! (2016)


Favorite color:  pink
Favorite toy/game:  playing Kristoff or Prince Hans
Favorite food:  mac and cheese
Favorite drink:  milk
Favorite movie:  Sleeping Beauty
Favorite TV show:  the car one
Favorite song:  Jasmine ("A Whole New World")
Favorite book:  Anna and Elsa
Favorite outfit:  my twirly dress I have on now
Best friend:  Eden
Favorite holiday:  my birthday
What I take to bed each night:   pajamas
When I grow up, I want to be:   a princess
I'm afraid to:  bears and alligators and dinosaurs
I'm proud of:   Daddy
Something I do really well:   watch a movie
This makes me happy:   when I have love around me
This makes me sad: when someone hits me or bites me or pinches me or kicks me
Favorite time of day:  playing with Eden
Dream vacation:   to the princesses! (i.e., Disneyland)
Favorite thing to do with Mommy:  play Candyland
Favorite thing to do with Daddy: play Candyland again!

(age 3 - 2015)

beautiful vs. fancy

I'm sure you all aware at this point how very much Rose loves princesses right now -- collecting the dolls, dressing up like a princess, acting out scenes that involve princesses, etc.  Mike and I have both been grudgingly accepting of this form of dramatic play (and hopeful that it's time-limited!), but we've also been trying to stress that it's more important to be kind, generous, smart (etc.) too.

It hasn't been sinking in too well, unfortunately.

Recently Rose has decided that she is ONLY "beautiful" when she is dressed up like a princess, which has been upsetting to us. (Perhaps it has something to do with the adulation from friends and strangers -- "look how beautiful you are!!" -- when she is all dressed up??) We keep trying to tell her that she is always beautiful, because being beautiful is not about the clothes we wear, but it's about the kind of person we are. And because she is kind and generous and smart (etc) that means she is always beautiful.  But every time, she would insist "NO!" and state that she is only beautiful in a princess dress. UGH.

This aisle is my nemesis at Target.

Maybe it was too advanced of a concept for a three-year-old??


But then we FINALLY hit on the apparent solution:  we now tell her that she looks FANCY when she is dressed up like a princess, and tell her that she is beautiful (kind, generous, smart, etc.) at regular intervals no matter how she is dressed.


Hooray!! It seems to be working. So please do us a favor and tell Rose she looks "fancy" when she is dressed up and "beautiful" when she is being a beautiful person. :)

back amidst the living

It's been about a month since I last blogged, which has to be a record of some sort for me. But the good news is that I haven't been blogging much because I've been working hard at getting myself better. I've now "graduated" from therapy (again), I'm doing a lot more self care (yay for baths, books, and fun walks/lunches with friends!), and I've been working with my boss to make things better at work.

Not bad for a month's work!

Here's a few highlights from the past several weeks...

My parents came to visit one weekend:

Rose has gotten super into collecting money, so now she constantly asks for "special" chores (as opposed to her usual chores) so she can earn extra dollars or coins. Mostly she buys dolls for herself, but she also does a pretty good job of putting some money in her piggy bank "for college."

Two of her friends have had birthday parties at this giant warehouse with huge bouncy houses and slides (Pump It Up), and Rose thinks this place is the most amazing thing ever! (Too bad it was outside of our budget for her party that's coming up.) A brilliant idea for whoever originally came up with it, as I'm sure they're raking in money hand over fist.

And, of course, Easter!

On that note, I'm off to read some more of my latest novel before bed. Have a great week!

mourning

The pain of losing Lucy and Mac seems to come and go. It times I think I've come to a place of acceptance and even gratitude that they are no longer in any pain, but other times the pain of missing them completely takes my breath away.

My parents sent us these beautiful flowers today. Receiving them was bittersweet - we basically haven't been able to have flowers in the house for the past 13 years, since both cats would eat them all and then throw them up. So I welcome the beauty of the flowers (and appreciate that I won't have to wipe up cat puke any more) but it also makes me miss them so much!!

I even caught myself thinking at one point, "oh, I need to cut that ribbon off the vase, otherwise Mac will eat the ribbon and throw it up later." I can go from realizing the cats are gone and thus the flowers are on display, to a split second later thinking I need to keep the ribbon out of his reach?! I'm just having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that they really are gone.

There have been a million other times that it has caught me off guard:
-when I came into the house after work yesterday and automatically lifted my foot to keep a cat from running out the door while it was open
-when we had pizza for dinner last night and didn't have to close the kitchen door to prevent Lucy from eating it
-when I didn't have to shake the can of treats to get Mac out of Rose's room at bedtime
-when no one came to sit on my lap as I was reading yesterday afternoon
-when I was able to leave an unwrapped stick of butter out in the kitchen while I took a break from baking in order to help Rose with something
-when I rolled over in bed last night and realized I didn't have to worry about accidentally kicking a cat at the foot of the bed
-when I wasn't awoken by hangry cat meows after I slept in a bit this morning
-when I dropped a dollop of yogurt on the floor while baking and realized that no cats would lick it up for me
-when we didn't have any cats circling us, demanding the scraps of our fish dinner tonight

I could go on and on. I miss them terribly.

I've been coping by spending lots of time with my family.   Rose, Mike and I have enveloped ourselves in baking, artwork, and family excursions these past couple days. We'll get through this together.

consecutive heartbreak

Tuesday, February 24th:
Mac had barely eaten for at least 24 hours. His corneal ulcer looked TERRIBLE. He had been in hiding all day while we were at work, then after Rose went to bed he came out to sit with me while I was reading in bed. Normally he sits on my lap (or even under the covers with me), but today he stayed down at the foot of the bed. Mike came up to talk to me for a few minutes, and I cried my eyes out about how depressed I was feeling. (Long story, but my depression is back. I'm working my way out of it again.) He convinced me to do some meditation, so I started on that. After about 20 minutes, I realized that Mac had been licking his bum for the entire time that I had been meditating. I gently pulled up his tail, and there was something seriously wrong down there. I rushed him to the Emergency Veterinary Clinic. He was clearly in pain, leaking fecal liquid, and obviously miserable. It's a horrible feeling to see your beloved cat in such extreme misery and to feel so helpless. After evaluation, the verdict was that he had an impacted anal gland that had ruptured and become infected. Oh, poor Mac!  We were faced with the prospect of a major surgery to repair that, plus the possible removal of his eye. It was a horrible, horrible decision to have to make, but Mike and I eventually decided that it would be best to let him go. He was always a kitten at heart, and his quality of life was no longer adequate as it had been declining for months - neither of us could remember the last time that we had seen "crazy Mac time" and we used to be able to set our watches to his antics. He is SO sensitive to medications, so the prospect of multiple anesthesias and pain meds was just too much to consider for him.

I said goodbye and helped him transition to a place where he can chase mice, eat bananas, walk on the counters, and enjoy being a scheister to his heart's content. He lived a good life, and he is so deeply missed.






After getting home around 10pm, I had a bit of time to mourn with Mike. But then his sister Anne contacted us because she needed a ride to the hospital. (Her story is here.) Thankfully my boss let me plan for a mental health day to recover from Mac's death and Anne's illness.


Thursday, February 25th:
I got home from the ER around 5am, slept for a couple hours, and then got up around 8:30 to spend the day with Mike and Rose. We mourned as a family, remembering the good times we had with Mac.   Lucy sat on my lap while Mike and Rose finished the movie they had started earlier in the day. It was heartwrenching to spend time with Lucy while knowing that Mac was gone. Then the three of us went to the Science Museum for a couple hours in order to get our minds off our grief. (It was only somewhat effective. We were quite the scene, with intermittent crying spells that popped up for each of us.) When we got back, Rose and I took a brief nap while Mike visited Anne at the hospital. Around 4pm, shortly after Rose and I had finished our snack, Lucy got up from the cat bed (in front of the heater) where she had been sleeping, and she couldn't move her hind legs! She dragged herself to the rug in our entryway, lost control of her bladder function, and started panting in distress. I called Mike in a panic to tell him to hurry home, called our vet in a panic, and quickly notified the emergency vet that we were on our way. Once we arrived, they immediately took her back for preliminary treatment. The vet came in quickly and notified us that the prognosis was grim: Lucy likely had an underlying heart condition (symptom-less in cats) that caused a clot to break free and had totally blocked all blood flow to her hind quarters. She was in pain, would likely never get function back, and even if she did she was looking at a likely recurrence due to the underlying heart condition. The vet basically urged us to make the most humane decision, letting her go. Less than 24 hours after saying goodbye to Mac, I also had to help Lucy make the same transition over the rainbow bridge.  I imagine her sitting in the sun ever more, warm and peaceful.

 

 I don't know why Mac's time had come, and I can only suspect that Lucy ailed from a broken heart.  My heart now feels broken as well.  They were such wonderful cats. I hope their lives were as happy as we tried to help them to be. They certainly brought immeasurable joy to us and will be forever missed.
.

RIP Mac 9/1/04 - 2/24/16
RIP Lucy 5/1/03 - 2/25/16

California - day 4 (back to home)

The end of our journey was finally here. We, yet again, woke at the crack of dawn. I felt marginally better, but woke frequently to Rose coughing. (It should have been sufficient foreshadowing of her illness to come, but optimistic me thought we could still get back to school/work the next day. Ha!)

We spent much of the morning packing and playing.

Rose and I also walked ~two blocks to the neighborhood playground. It was a gorgeous vista with the mountains in the background and the valley in the foreground, but I had already packed my phone and camera so we didn't get any photos. On the way back to Mitra's house, Rose said: "Mommy, I want to live here." I told her that she could decide to live wherever she wants when she's a grown-up. She responded, "Mommy, when I grow up, if you're still alive, let's live here with Mitra." Uhh...

After Mitra got home from dropping Liam off at kindergarten, we took off for one last sight-seeing spot before heading to the airport. Inspiration Point!

So aptly named! I wish we could have spent a few hours there exploring, but sadly we only had a few minutes :(

The end of a great mommy-daughter vacation!

The flight home was relatively uneventful, at least until the last 30 min. As soon as we started our descent to MSP, Rose decided she HAD to have the tray table DOWN and there was absolutely no reasoning with her. I'm talking full-scale, total preschooler meltdown. It was brutal. Apparently the lack of sleep, change in cabin pressure, and impending illness all combined for an epic showdown of 3-year-old force.  Felt like the longest 30 min of my life! The judgment stares from my fellow passengers were seared into my soul. Remind me to never judge a fellow mom dealing with an unruly kid on a plane ride! Ever!

Check out those "tired eyes" early in the flight!

But eventually we landed, Rose was able to put the tray table down, and all was well in the world again. We rode the moving walkways to the tram, took the tram to the train, rode the train to my car, and finally took the car back home. Home at last!

As I should have predicted, Rose slept poorly with that terrible cough, and woke in the middle of the night with a raging fever. But two days of naps, movies, and smoothies later, we are both well again!

All in all, it was an amazing mommy-daughter vacation.  Next time we'll build in more rest/relaxation time, but I don't regret a second of our fabulous journey.  Rose is such an awesome kid, and I'm so glad I could share all these "firsts" (plane ride, ocean beach, Disney) with her. If only Mike could have joined us, but I guess that just means we'll have to go back again with him next time! :)