30.5.10

Back to Normal

Whew! With Doug being gone for the past two weeks, I couldn't even think about updating my blog. That uses more brain power than I had at the end of each day! But now he is back and all is well at the Peeler House.

I'm very (very) excited to announce that the kids and I will all be going to BSF next year. I signed us up a couple of weeks ago and I can't wait for September! I love BSF for my own spiritual growth and I remember Lila learning so much the one year that she was in it before. Now, for one year only, we will all three be able to go to the same class and we'll all be studying the book of Isaiah!

The daytime women's classes have kids' classes for 2-year-olds through Kindergarten. Once Lila hits 6 years old, I'll have to beg Doug or Irene to go to an evening class because that's where they have classes for school-aged kids... Meh. I'll deal with that when the time comes!

I keep thinking this weekend is over, but it's not. We'll have Doug home with us tomorrow too! He and Lila are planning to paint the playroom. They bought the paint today and it's a color somewhere between burnt orange and brick red. I'll take photos.

12.5.10

Have I mentioned lately just how very crazy I am?

Warning: What follows in this post might convince you that I am a few bricks shy of a load (or whatever your favorite euphemism is). This is why I generally keep this kind of information to myself. Today, I decided to share with the world in the hope that someone else I know is as crazy as me!

This past week has slipped by far too quickly. Doug's business trip looms on the horizon and my level of anxiety continues to increase. As my anxiety increases, I become more forgetful, hence my going 9 days without a post (as well as any typos or grammatical errors that might be contained in this one. I also went several days without taking my medication. It was not intentional. I just plain forgot.

If you've never taken antidepressants, then you might not know that just forgetting to take them for several days is really not a good thing. For example, there are physical side effects. The first one to pop up for me is extreme dizziness, although that was not too bad this time. Then I begin to have mood swings. That is, I have them more often than usual and the swings are much more extreme. Then the really interesting things begin to happen.

I'm now at the point where little neuroses and symptoms of my illness start popping back up. ** These are things that I might not have even noticed were absent... until they came back. For example, my fear of having a psychotic break is coming back. (i could write an entire post on that one! i just did a web search to see if there's a name for that particular phobia and just reading the links that came up freaked me out!)

There's also my obsessive (or is it compulsive?) checking. Best example: I set the alarm before I go upstairs to bed every night. The alarm pad is in the laundry room. The cats like to explore the laundry room and I have this fear of accidentally locking one of them in there overnight. So, on a normal night, I go into the laundry room and set the alarm, do a quick kitty check, close the door and go on to bed.

On a "crazy night", I can't seem to convince myself that there's no cat in there. I look carefully in the room, then I look for all of the cats out of the room. Sometimes, even when the door to the laundry room is shut and I can see all three cats in front of me, I still feel uneasy and have to make myself walk away and go to bed.

This afternoon, I took the cake (i alluded to this on Facebook) by having an anxiety attack over having someone else touch the laundry. Doug had done a load of laundry while I was gone in the morning and I came home to find him folding it. This, in itself, was wonderful! And it would have been nothing but wonderful if he had gone ahead and put the clothes away too.

What happened, however, was that he left the clothes on the couch and went to get some work done while I could watch the kids. I went to finish the job and I just froze. The stacks were not lined up correctly and there were mixed items in some of the stacks and the towels weren't folded just the way that I do it and and and... I literally had to walk away and calm down because my heart was starting to race and I couldn't think straight.

I was finally able to deal by going over there and moving things into the appropriate stacks and re-folding the towels. I did this a few minutes at a time because I would quickly begin feeling overwhelmed.

Wow. No wonder I don't usually share these kinds of things with people. :o)~

**Note (for those of you who are concerned) - I have taken my medication for the past two days and will continue to do so. It just takes awhile for it to get fully back into my system. In the meantime, I get to view myself as a lab specimen.

3.5.10

No! No! No!

We had a fabulous weekend in Dallas! We had a big adventure on Saturday that started with the Dallas World Aquarium, which is just about the coolest thing ever. It's more like an indoor jungle than an aquarium and it's beautiful! I almost fainted over a pair of manatees they had there. I wanted to hug them so bad I could have burst! The kids enjoyed it too, especially once we got a snack into them.

From there, we took a horse-drawn carriage ride around downtown. Even if you've done this before, I'll bet you never went to a drive-through ATM in a carriage! Lila was beside herself over getting to ride in a "one-horse open carriage!" This was definitely her favorite part of the weekend. Eli really enjoyed it too, although we had no idea how much he enjoyed it until we tried to drag him away from the horse.

He pretty much screamed all through the two-block walk to Spaghetti Warehouse, and for half of the time we were there. I finally got him to chill out a little bit, but he was a pill for the rest of the weekend. I think the boy just got WAY overstimulated. Breakfast with Grandma and Grandad the next morning involved some more screaming, as well as our drive home. (see video)