Bedtime Conversation: 5 Year Old Edition

Sonic

Oksana: "I don't like when Sonic catches bugs. Well, I like when she catches OTHER bugs, but not when she catches moths." 


Me: "Why is that? You like moths?"


O: "Yeah. They're little and cute. Do you remember that one time when Sarah was over and she found a REALLY BIG moth?"


Me: "I sure do. It was big!"


O: "Yup. And part of it glowed red."


Me: "uhh... I... don't remember that part."

O: "it did! It was on the tail. Well not like a tail like Sonic has, but you know. Maybe that's it's butt."

Me: "Could be."

O: "And if it was a girl moth, it would have little boobs too."

Cecropia moth in our yard!
Not pictured: glowing red tail. Or tiny boobs.

Sarah and the giant moth.

Waking Up Is Hard To Do

I have a devil of a time waking up anymore. No matter when my morning comes, no matter how many hours of sleep I've gotten, it still feels like I'm drowning in sleep, swimming my way up through mud, trying to break through to the surface of wakefulness. I don't know what is causing it... I'm blaming general health issues, because it could be anything from my diabetes (high blood sugar) to my anxiety medications to my lack of activity to sinus infections to poor sleep to god knows what. It makes it REALLY hard to get moving for the first few hours of my day though, and I'm ready for it to change. I'm just a little befuddled because I don't know exactly HOW to make a change. There are a lot of health changes I need to make, that is, and it's a little overwhelming to know where to start. Especially when the house keeps screaming at me to clean it and just finish PURGING already!!

So I got a slow start today. Other than that, I spent a bunch of time working on Oksana's bedroom; it got a little messy around the holidays again, and of course, Casey started peeing on things again. I'm battling that crazy mess (AGAIN) right now. I'm also battling giant mounds of laundry, BAGS full of laundry, and a lot of that has cat pee on it too (because that's another thing she pees on if it's on the floor; dirty laundry). Which means that each load takes twice as long because I do extra rinses and vinegar washes on top of the regular washing.

A friend posted a great article on Facebook today: Why Lying Broken In A Pile On Your Bedroom Floor Is A Good Idea. It made me feel stronger, having read it. The author shares some insight gained from a Hindu goddess. Here's an excerpt:

"Akhilandeshvari:
“Ishvari” in Sanskrit means “goddess” or “female power,” and the “Akhilanda” means essentially “never not broken.” In other words, The Always Broken Goddess. Sanskrit is a tricky and amazing language, and I love that the double negative here means that she is broken right down to her name.
But this isn’t the kind of broken that indicates weakness and terror.
It’s the kind of broken that tears apart all the stuff that gets us stuck in toxic routines, repeating the same relationships and habits over and over, rather than diving into the scary process of trying something new and unfathomable.
Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.
The thing about going through sudden or scary or sad transitions (like a breakup) is that one of the things you lose is your future: your expectations of what the story of your life so far was going to become. When you lose that partner or that job or that person, your future dissolves in front of you.
And of course, this is terrifying.
But look, Akhilanda says, now you get to make a choice. In pieces, in a pile on the floor, with no idea how to go forward, your expectations of the future are meaningless. Your stories about the past do not apply. You are in flux, you are changing, you are flowing in a new way, and this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to become new again: to choose how you want to put yourself back together. Confusion can be an incredible teacher—how could you ever learn if you already had it all figured out?"

I highly recommend checking the whole thing out.

Other than that... I got pretty loopy / dizzy after I took my anxiety medication tonight (that happens sometimes) and ended the evening playing Skylanders with Oksana.

Speaking of anxiety. The Bloggess shared a post yesterday wherein she talking about her battles with depression and anxiety and admitted publicly for the first time that sometimes she self-harms. I'm really proud of her for talking about it and for standing up for herself and all the other people that fight their demons daily. I don't suffer from depression, and I don't self-harm, but I do suffer from GAD - generalized anxiety disorder. I was diagnosed about a year and a half ago. The symptoms had been creeping up on me for probably a couple of years before that, but I didn't recognize them. I had no real context for anxiety disorder. Sometimes it is hugely disabling, especially when other things in life are hard. It's harder to take action on many things in my life right now, for instance, when so many huge issues are crushing down on us right now. It's hard for me to explain to people why I don't just go get a job and make more money, because it's just not that simple for me. That's not all due to anxiety, but a large part of it is. I worry that people won't understand. I struggle with explaining my thoughts and feelings to people because without an understanding of how terrible anxiety can be to someone fighting it daily, I fear judgment. Scorn. Dismissal.

I fight anxiety every day. I take medications to help me deal with it. I see a therapist and a psychiatrist. These things have all helped immensely... but some days, life is still a huge battle.

Through it all, I do my best to figure out what I can do to make myself and my family happy. Sometimes that means compromises, BIG compromises. Even compromises on my own principles / morals at times. Because I'd rather be happy than right all the time.

My Girl Likes To Party All The Time, Party All The ZZZZZzzzzzz....

I have been nothing short of exhausted lately. Bone-tired, brain completely fried kind of tired. It just seems to keep getting worse, it's interfering with my ability to get anything other than 'basic tasks of the day' done (I do manage a few extras here and there, like the monster cake pops I made for my son's class the other day, but it's with extreme effort and sheer force of will).

There ain't no second chance against the thing with 40 eyes, girl.

What's the reason? I'm not entirely sure but I really think it's lack of quality sleep, and I think there are several things that have been affecting this. (Which makes it much harder to fix!)

Problem #1: My teeth hurt, and they tend to hurt more at night for some reason.
Solution: I get my permanent crown on February 4th, and I'm hoping that will fix this issue. In the meantime, I am turning to drugs. Advil manages to work most of the time, but usually when the pain gets worse the Advil doesn't help or it wears off in the middle of the night and the pain wakes me up, thus interrupting my sleep. I took Advil PM a couple times but we're out of that now, and we do have some Codeine left still. The problem with the drowsy drugs is that it's hard for me to wake up in the mornings, which I need to do in order to take care of my family. This leads to...

Problem #2: I am not a morning person. Even in the face of sheer exhaustion, as soon as the sun sets I am wide awake, and find it hard to go to bed or fall asleep any earlier than midnight. I have school-age kids so we're up early to get off to school five days a week, and don't usually get to sleep in TOO late on weekends either.
Solution: Go to bed earlier? Yeah, not gonna happen. I've tried this off and on my whole life. My body is just programmed to be up at night. I can't seem to help it. And I ENJOY it. I just don't enjoy the 'getting up in the mornings' part. It would be easier if the world would just start conforming to my schedule. I know I'm not the only night owl out there.

Problem #3: We recently moved into the basement and have been sleeping on the futon down there. It's a fairly decent futon mattress, but it's not the most comfortable thing in the world and I don't feel that I'm sleeping very well on it at all. Not only have I been increasingly more exhausted every day since we moved down there, but I also wake up every day with a new ache somewhere in my body. Back, shoulders, and neck seem to be the most affected. I'm pretty sure that this 'bed' is not at all good for me.
Solution: We've talked about several options, ranging from getting a new mattress to getting a foam memory topper. None of them are particularly cheap, and while some aren't terribly expensive either, we still have to save up for them. I'm starting to be so tired that I kind of just don't care though and am almost willing to just charge it. Which we're trying not to do, but when you're tired and delirious you don't always make the best decisions.

Problem #4: We just got two kittens. Nighttime is playtime! Wheeeee! They run over us, they jump, the mock fight and growl, they wake us up for petting and purring and love, they roll around in the (dry) bathtub and clunk into things. It's ridiculously adorable, but it also wakes us up about 50 times a night.
Solution: Kinda just have to wait this one out, I think. Eventually they'll grow out of it, and they'll be used to the house and the dogs enough where we will be willing to leave the door open and let them roam all over the place while we sleep. Right now, we just have to put up with this one. It's like having a baby, only instead of needing to feed it or change it, it runs all over the place and makes a bunch of noise.

We are wine botttleesssss!

I think the bed is the biggest problem. Being uncomfortable all night long, every night, is awful. So I think I will focus on solving that problem this weekend and see what a difference it makes. Because I'm really having trouble functioning lately. And I can't spend the rest of my life sitting around like a zombie, watching reruns of Roseanne.

But hey, I got new glasses, and I think they're pretty spiffy. So life's not all bad.

I Thrill When I Drill A Bicuspid

I had my first major dental work done last week. I grew up with fairly healthy teeth, yet somehow managed to develop a healthy fear of dentistry anyway. I never even had to have my wisdom teeth pulled because I DON'T HAVE ANY. I was born with no wisdom teeth! Since they only seem to cause problems for pretty much everyone, I can't help but feel I dodged a bullet with that little congenital defect.

So with healthy teeth and an unhealthy fear of people hurting me in my mouthal region, I pretty much avoid the dentist. As an adult, eventually the guilt of 'I should really be responsible and take better care of myself' creeps up on you, and finally in 2007 I decided, after AT LEAST ten years of having avoided them, that I really ought to visit the dentist. I had lost a tooth somewhere in that time period; I knew it was coming because I was also born missing that adult tooth (FIVE teeth congenitally missing! go me!), and my childhood dentist had warned us that the baby tooth would eventually wear out. They're just not made to last that long. So it did, in pieces, and it was gross, but it didn't hurt, and it seemed to have all fallen out, and the tooth is kind of on the side of my mouth so I figured I didn't really look like a gap-toothed crack whore or anything so why bother with an expensive repair (though I always thought it would be kind of awesome to get a gold tooth, and maybe someday I will; I'm classy like that).

Hi, my name is ChaCha; for $15 bucks I'll blow you in this port-a-potty.

But eventually I started to worry that maybe the RIGHT thing to do would be to have someone official check it out and just make sure all the pieces, you know, came out and whatnot, and maybe they should look at my other teeth too and tell me everything was OK. My husband happened to go to this great dentist in Roscoe Village (this was back when we lived in Chicago; it's Perfect Smile Dental Spa, if anyone local needs an awesome dentist! Tell them Kristi Dorson sent you! Dr. DeMars is great!). They tend to cater to dental wusses like me. They'll give you massages if you have to wait for your appointment, they're very nice, they have foot massagers in the waiting area, it's comfy and cozy and they'll give you laughing gas and goofy pills if you're very anxious about seeing the dentist, and they'll give you headphones to listen to the radio or watch movies if you prefer, and they're very thorough. Perfect for someone like me. So I went, they cleaned my teeth and fixed a tiny cavity (the first in my life) and gave me my first dose of laughing gas and it was actually kind of fun.

And then we moved an hour away and I didn't bother going back. The thought of trying to find another dentist, a local dentist, kind of terrified me, especially after dealing with such nice people who understood what it was like to fear the dentist. I just wanted them to move their offices to ME. Of course that wasn't going to happen, so I just didn't go. Then I was diagnosed with diabetes, and strongly encouraged to see my dentist (and EVERY OTHER MEDICAL SPECIALIST ON THE PLANET) twice a year because diabetes basically fucks up your entire body, and it tends to do it kind of silently at first so if you don't have an entire team of professionals working on your tired old carcass year round you just wake up one day and your foot is gangrenous and they need to amputate, and your liver is shot, and you're blind and your teeth have all fallen out, and then you die from kidney failure. My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades! Ahem.

So I still avoided the dentist for a couple years. This year I vowed to take better care of my health overall. Also, one of my back teeth cracked in half last month. I figure hey, they're probably not supposed to do that, are they? Whoops, time to go to the dentist. By this point I decided that if I was really happy at Perfect Smile, it was worth the damn one hour drive to go rather than deal with the anxiety of having to find a new, equally awesome dentist.

As it turns out, at no great surprise to me, cracked tooth=bad. It was a hair's breadth away from the nerve, so I was really lucky it didn't hurt like a bitch; possible root canal needed, definitely a crown. I also had two other cavities that needed fixing and some majorly swollen gums. Higher blood sugar levels from diabetes apparently leads to some KILLER gum disease. So they had lots of major work to do on me! I got some Super Valium to take before the appointment, and then they gave me more at the appointment, AND they gave me the happy gas, AND the radio headphones, so it was a pretty happy experience overall. Except now I have a temporary crown on the cracked tooth and I can't eat on that side of my mouth because it's really tender and keeps hurting when I chew and I'm taking lots of advil and wondering when it will STOP hurting. I get the permanent crown next Friday. I'm hoping that will be the end of my dental miseries for a while.

Taking better care of myself sucks. Or maybe it's diabeetus that sucks. Or maybe it's avoiding taking care of myself and then having to pay the piper when I finally give in and make the effort that sucks. Whatever; my mouth hurts and I'm grouchy.

Hey, let's end on a happy note! We got two new kitties last weekend! Here's a picture of Hannah stretching after one of her many naps.

(Sorry both my pictures are from my camera phone. I know they suck. I've become really lazy with my camera lately; that's another thing I need to work on this year.


Also, I probably should note that this is NOT a sponsored post or anything. That's probably obvious because I swore a lot and made jokes about prostitution. I just really love Perfect Smile and Dr. DeMars. AND the drugs they give me. I DO get a referral bonus if you go to them and say I sent you though. So you should do that.)