The Mom Blah Blah Blog

As Lent began again today I was reminded of last years lent and it dawned on me the difference between this year and last. Last year at this time I was just starting up my Lenten journey of giving up negative self talk. I was in a bad place. I was feeling very heavy, ugly, unlovable, lonely and pretty much worthless. Obviously I was very down on myself but lent was just the opportunity I needed to push me into positive change. I will not say that I'm perfect now. I still have my days where I forget how far I have come and that change isn't instantaneous. Over all though I would say that this year I am in a MUCH better place. The first thing that needed changing was my attitude. It was all or nothing with me. I was either perfect or pathetic. Lent caused me to realize how hard I was being on myself. I decided to cut me some slack. It made all the difference. I was then able to make other positive changes without the pressure to make everything right, right now. Wi...

This morning in a rare moment of getting along and being kind to one another I awoke to hear Trinity "reading" a book to her brother over the gate in his door. It's a book we have read many, many times so for the most part it is memorization she is spouting but she is learning to read and loving it. The other day when I went into her room to get her up for school I found her propped up in bed, book in hand with a look of concentration on her face. Along with reading comes writing and at school they are doing letter books. They cut out a little picture of something that starts with a certain letter and write their own sentence with that word in it. It's one of my favorite school projects. I love to see the phonetic spelling that comes out of the brain of a 5 year old and trying to decipher what words she was aiming for. The book that came home yesterday was "the H book". The sentences within were, i hav a heart, i hav a hand, dad uoses a h...

Today I feel like the bride of Frankenstein. I had a follow up appointment yesterday where they checked to see how I'm healing (it's going well) and they cut off the knots on the stitches. They are dissolvable however it makes me wonder about the little bits of broken down plastic that will be traveling around in my blood stream. To remove the knots they took some of the tape off of the incision and I am now getting a slightly clearer look at the mess of scars that will be covering my torso. At this point it looks.... ugly. Dark scabby lines and bumps where skin is meeting skin it's only seen from afar. I know that thinks will settle down, the bumps will smooth out and the scabs will slough off but for the moment I feel a bit like a patchwork quilt of pieces stitched together. Maybe because I am.

There seems to be quite a buzz going on out there. A buzz about a book. The Hunger Games Trilogy is everywhere I look. Take my daughter to ballet, someone is reading it. Checking Facebook, someone is asking if they have read it or if they have a copy to lend. Checking the library, no copies available until who knows when. Talking to friends they are also reading it. This all stands to reason I should be reading these books as well. Am I though? Not yet. I have gotten myself caught up in the Song of Ice and Fire series and am a little over half way through book 5. I am not really a fan of reading more than one book at a time. When I do that I tend to get caught up in one more strongly than the other and don't end up enjoying either as much as I could. I would say that I would try and quickly finish up the one I'm reading but that is not so simple a task. This book is well over 1,000 pages and I am not the fastest reader. I have been spending almost every spare min...

Recovery is coming along nicely and the pain has diminished to the point that I only am taking one pill at night to help with sleeping. It's been rather uncomfortable for this usual side sleeper to make the adjustment to sleeping only on my back. The first few days I also needed to be propped up and couldn't continue that past 2 or 3 nights tops. I have had one follow up appointment now and the Dr. says I'm healing well. So far have I noticed a difference? Yes. I have noticed it's easier to keep my shoulders back and stand straight. I believe he removed about 2 lbs of weight (from weighing the morning of surgery and the morning after) so that has helped me to not slouch as much so far. I do still find myself hunching a bit out of habit but it's not as frequent or as uncomfortable to adjust. There are some things that have surprised me already. I am finding they are not as in the way as before. Subtle adjustments to the space around me that mean I'm no...

Surgery does mean pain of recovery so along with the gauze and handy dandy curved throw up container they discharged me with I also received a prescription. I'm not really one to take many medications. Usually when I go to the Dr. he looks for drug free options for me. This is not because I have a dislike of drugs or that I think there is anything wrong with taking them. It's just that they don't really seem to work that well for me. I don't tend to have the same results as other people do. This might be a intrinsic value given to my by the genes of my mother who can take insanely strong migraine medication to almost no effect but it got me thinking about the chemical differences between one person and the next. I have been pretty sure for quite a while now that other people must feel a lot different than I do from taking drugs or even from drinking and smoking. When I looked up the side effects of the drugs I was given for my recovery there was warnings at every...