The Cat Is In Disgrace

Remind me why we have a cat, again?  I keep forgetting.

Picture this:  Adored Wife is making cookies, using sweetened condensed milk with pink food coloring as frosting.  She leaves the kitchen for a minute and comes back to find Oscar up on the counter, in kitty heaven, having eaten about half the frosting.

He is not allowed on the counter and knows he is not allowed on the counter.  She swats his furry behind and throws him outside.

(For those of you who may not know, cats tend to love dairy products, but dairy products are not good for a cat's digestion.  This fact will become relevant very shortly in the story.  Like, say, in the next paragraph.)

Sometime later, she lets him back in.  He promptly goes down the hall and upchucks bright pink barf in front of our bedroom.

He was outside for an HOUR.  He couldn't have done that outside?

Much scrubbing later, and the carpet is still slightly rose-colored......

It's a good thing he's cute.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Managing Time

Proverbs 3:6 tells us to follow and acknowledge God in all our ways and He will direct our steps.

 We think about this verse a lot when we're trying to keep our day straight,  This isn't unique to our slightly-abnormal family, but we have a lot going on.  Wedding plans, three different job schedules, doctor appointments and more doctor appointments and more doctor appointments, school, sports, household chores, church and theater, social life, paying bills and doing taxes and calling insurance companies and other sundry administrative matters, juggling vehicles, aging parents, trips and hobbies and dates and whatnot.  Also, Adored Wife, the primary household manager, has limited amounts of energy and "feeling wellness" and has to budget her time accordingly.

Frankly, there have been more than a few occasions when things have slipped through the cracks.  And yet, the house is still standing and the cat's still alive and there's still food in the refrigerator, so it can't have been all that bad.

I probably ought to look this up, but some historical figure said that he had so much to do today he just had to spend extra time in prayer.

The theory goes like this:  "I have time today to do everything God wants me to do.  I don't necessarily have time today to do everything God wants me to do PLUS everything that I personally think ought to get done."

If we commit ourselves to following Him prayerfully and obediently then He will direct our use of managing time and resources, and everything will turn out for the best.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Skipping a Concert

Apparently normal people go out to concerts and movies and restaurants and public social things on a pretty regular basis.  At least, so we've heard.

It's a bit different for us.  One, finances are just a little tight.  We're very blessed, certainly--we eat regularly, we have a roof over our heads, and I don't have to worry this month about paying the light bill.  There are lots of people who can't say these things; we're very fortunate.  But if something major breaks on a car or something like that we'll have to shuffle some things around, and we kind of have to pick and choose the luxuries a little.  No complaints, but "going out" is not something we can affored to do on a frequent basis.

Two, I don't much enjoy crowds.  I'm almost pure introvert and, while I'm not at the level of neurotically avoiding social gatherings, they're not on my fun list.  I hear people on the radio getting excited about going to big concerts and meeting celebrities and people at church talking about these things like they're something to look forward to, and it just doesn't light my fire.  I get that extroverts are wired that way, but I have a hard time seeing things from their perspective.  So, no, I don't tend to seek out concerts.

Three, Adored Wife deals with chronic pain, and she has a limited amount of "up time" before she has to go lie down.  Otherwise, she probably WOULD enjoy concerts more.

So we don't do a lot of concerts.  But we had tickets to go see one because we'd given some money to a local charity and they were putting on a benefit concert.  We believe in the charity and consider it well worth supporting.  But it wasn't a band we were all that excited about--nothing wrong with them, we just weren't particular fans.  But we'd planned to go to the concert because, after all, we had tickets.  And I could have chosen to enjoy myself; I'm good at finding fun where fun is to be had.

But AW brought up that she wasn't interested enough in the band to spend her limited "up time" on them, and I hadn't been enthusiastic about it in the first place.  So we gave the tickets away to a local couple, and they enjoyed the concert.  We also had a gift certificate to a nearby steakhouse, so we went there and had an excellent meal and then walked around the mall a little until AW had exhausted her up time, and then we went home, very satisfied with the evening.

A good time was had by all.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Easter With the Family

Happy week after Easter, friends, and hope this finds everybody well.

Nothing special today, just reporting that this past weekend was very full and more than a little tiring but it all went well.

Graphics Magician was still recovering from a three-day field trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with the eighth graders from his trip.  They had a lot of fun and didn't really get much sleep.  Saturday was the Easter Egg hunt at church and I spent most of the day either setting up for it or helping run it.  Saturday was also Social Hurricane's birthday, and we had a little get-together that evening for some family and friends.  (Graphics Magician, with permission, went to his room with his pizza.  There wasn't anybody else at the party his age and he was still exhausted.)

Easter Sunday, sunrise service, breakfast at the church, Sunday School and celebration, then Adored Wife's parents and a young man who's a family friend joined us mid-afternoon and stayed through a pretty substantial supper.  AW was pretty well worn out by the end of it, but triumphantly so.

Monday Basement Artist and I went to work, SH was off work and GM was off school, and AW slept in a little then got back onto the wedding planning and chores.

A joyously packed weekend.

Christ the Lord is risen, He is risen indeed.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Graphics Magician Picks Up the Bruises

The girls were ten and eight when Graphics Magician was born.  We've always said that ten years' of experience as the parents of daughters wasn't the SLIGHTEST preparation for having a son.

It's still true.  And, if anything, getting even truer.

It's not that the girls weren't challenging as adolescents.  We had drama, we had mood swings, we had romantic issues and angst and emotional issues.

But, man, we didn't have anywhere nearly this much sheer self-destructive dumb stuff.

Inflamed growth plate in the heel.  Sprained lower back.  Bump on the head.  Bruises and contusions and scrapes and scratches.  Pretty much all from sheer full-speed-aheadedness.  Tussling with friends turns rough, continuing to sprint when your foot already hurts, trying to acrobatically maneuver through the house without looking where you're going.  Leaping and jumping and flipping and moving, moving, moving.

I approve, actually, and I'm glad he's a boy doing boyish things.  Of course, none of his injuries bother him much when he wants to play with his friends, but when it's time to get out of bed in the morning to go to school he's all of a sudden in too much pain to move.

It'd be nice to have one day, just for a change of pace, when he didn't manage to carelessly wreak mayhem on himself.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Living a Full Life

When you deal with chronic health issues, there are simply things you are never going to get to do.

That's okay.  I heard a motivational speaker years ago, and I wish I remembered his name, who'd been in a devastating and crippling auto accident.  He said something to the effect of, "before my accident I could do a thousand different things.  Afterwards I could do five hundred things.  I chose to focus on the five hundred things I could still do than to worry about the things I'd lost."

I love that attitude, and I'd like to salute Adored Wife who largely exemplifies it.  She can't do any real lifting, she can't be on her feet or in a chair for long periods of time, she has to build any kind of activity around "will I be able to lie down for fifteen minutes every hour or so."  She also has memory issues and has to structure her whole life around copious note-taking.  She also has anomic aphasia and prosopagnosia (the inability to find the right word, and face-blindness) which give her some troubles interacting with people.  Plus occasional tics and twitches.  Plus anxiety and panic attacks.  Few other odds and ends here and there.

As you might imagine, there are any number of activities that are simply not options for AW.  There are things that, purely and simply, she's never going to be able to do.

And yet, she has a very full life.  Photographer, highly involved mother, active on social media, great at planning and organizing events and activities, excellent cook, involved in church activities, directs, produces, and manages facilities at the local community theater, keeps up with family, interested and informed about politics, history, and world events, and participates in a few online communities.

She chooses to focus on the things she CAN do, and finds her life pretty full as a result of it.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Friends With MS

Happy Monday, friends, and hope this finds everybody well.

Regular readers of this blog will know that it's mostly about the trials and tribulations my immediate family (with our various physical, neurological, and emotional issues) deals with.  But I wouldn't want you to think that we're unconcerned about the challenges other people face.

I'm thinking at the moment about multiple sclerosis.  It's a terrible condition; you can find lots more information about it at this website.

It's not a common condition, but we know two ladies in our church who deal with it, both with humor, perseverance, and faith.  One friend, who I'll call "Lots of Dogs Lady," has as a part of her every-morning routine an inventory of her physical state before she gets out of bed.  "Can I talk this morning?  Can my hands grip?  Are my legs going to hold me up when I get out of bed?"

For LODL, fortunately the answer is usually "yes."  But sometimes the answer is "no," and it's going to be a difficult day.  And maybe it's going to be a difficult couple of days, or a difficult week, until the nervous system reboots itself and she'll be getting along on a walker and having a difficult time with simple chores and trouble carrying on a conversation and all sorts of fun things.  Most of the time LODL is actually in pretty good shape, all things considered.  But she can't take that capacity for granted.  Any day could become a bad day, and she's had to build her life around that uncertainty.

The other lady, who I'll call "Montana Mom," has had a fairly mild case of MS for several years.  She's had some scary vision issues from time to time, but physically she's been pretty fortunate.  A few weeks ago she had a flare-up, and it's not easing up so far.  Muscle weakness, mumbling and slurred speech, balance problems, double vision.

And at this stage MM doesn't know if this is going to get better.  Are things going to snap back to semi-normal next week? Or is this what the rest of her life is going to look like?  She's keeping her spirits up, but it has to be terrifying.

You might pray for the both of these ladies, and for others dealing with similar circumstances.

Thanks, friends,  Hope all's well, and God bless.