Veteran’s day Wednesday – day four

Since I haven’t been getting up on time even relatively and I was up late watching nonsense (okay, Grey’s isn’t nonsense), I set my phone alarm too so I would have THREE alarms. I got up 8 minutes earlier than yesterday. That 8 minutes was filled with whiny children upset that it was a holiday but they weren’t able to stay home and I wasn’t able to stay home and yeah, dude, I get it. I’d like to stay home too. But you get to go skating. Your life is rough.

I ate a honeycrisp on the drive to work and did manage to get there on time, which is a miracle though.

(I have not perfected the art of the car selfie)

My work morning was pretty productive and I went to lunch a little late. I sat outside at Jimmy John’s and read Carry On (which incidentally is taking me for-ev-er to get through) and pretended I didn’t have anywhere else I needed to be. It was lovely.

After I came back to reality, I got gas and stopped at Starbucks for a dirty chai and headed back to the grindstone. My phone tried to make me sad that I wasn’t going home midday.

I did take a minute to make an appointment. I’ve been making one appointment a day this week. Monday, my mammogram. Tuesday, hair appointment. Wednesday, cat’s nails trimmed. Stay tuned for dermatology and dental appointments. Slowly but surely I’m becoming a grown up. We’ll see if it lasts.

At four I left and took work home, however in my rush out the door I left my laptop at work so no work from home for me!

I helped the kids work on their turkey disguises instead – Henry’s is Darth Vader and Spencer’s is a volcano. S’s was due Thursday so he needed to finish, but Henry’s isn’t due until next week so we let the painted light saber dry and will finish tomorrow. I tried to straighten out the lines on the lightsaber for him so it didn’t look so much like a bloody sword.

Then I made dinner while the kids and C all played video games on different consoles – H played Super Mario Wii, S played an MLB game on the PS3 and C started playing the new Fallout on his computer. I had wine and Grey’s Anatomy and all these ingredients to make into shrimp and grits. We all play to our strengths.

After dinner Henry read to me and conned me into reading some to him too, and then after the kids went to bed I decided to take a bath and read my book some more. Baz finally showed up and it’s been much more compelling. I never take baths, ever, but it was really relaxing and nice. Francine decided she wanted to know what this was all about too.

And then! Bed, more reading and sleep at 10:30p. I’m *almost* getting enough sleep!

Rain Rain Go Away – Tuesday, day three

A week in the life of moi.

Tuesday began as most of my days begin – with me waking up late and struggling to get out the door while getting everything done that I need to get done. No need for a shower so I was reasonable okay, and I started a pork roast in the slow cooker before heading out. It was still raining. Rain rain rain. It rained all night too. Dreary and sad.

Work is from 7:15a to 4pm. I brought work home Monday night and didn’t do it, so that was first on the agenda. I decided to listen to Christmas music while I worked to get me in a happy mood. Yay Christmas! With headphones so my coworkers don’t want to kill me. My manager brought in bagels so I munched on a cheese bagel at the same time. I had a meeting at 9am but it got pushed to after lunch so I had my 10am meeting and then ran to the mall for some kid clothes shopping.

The sun came out. It is glorious.

I can’t seem to make up my mind at all so this may or may not end up being the shirts we use for family pictures in a few weeks but it’s a start. I also found PJ bottoms and a necklace for me and didn’t leave the one store I parked at. Score.

Since I had bagel(s) for breakfast, I ate what I brought for breakfast, for lunch. Two hardboiled eggs and a honeycrisp apple, and a Dr. P because I’m out of La Croix. Ho hum.

The afternoon passed pretty quickly with work and a 2:30pm meeting, and I was productive enough that I didn’t feel the need to bring home work. I only get it done at home about 10% of the time, but I often feel compelled to bring some home to be more productive. Working on that life/work balance thing.

It’s a very good thing I didn’t bring work home because there was no way it was getting done. I swung by the bank after picking up the kids from daycare to get money – I decided to donate the money Spencer’s baseball team needs for umpire fees for the upcoming tournament, and then headed home. It was a good thing I started that roast because we had very little time between getting home and going to the ball field.

Got home at 5pm, cooked up some green beans and corn and had dinner on the table at 5:15pm.

C took Spencer to the game and I was to follow a half hour later. I decided to use that time to clean out one set of cabinets in the kitchen and get rid of a bunch of things. I think the espresso maker needs to go and so does the sausage stuffer – we haven’t made espresso in 8 years and never have used the sausage stuffer. Adios, clutter!

I rarely go to the mid-week practices, but I try to make the games. Tonight I offered to bring the neighbor boy too so he could see Spencer play and Henry could play soccer with him too. I ended up scoring the game because one of the coaches was not there so C took over coaching and I took over scoring.

 

Home at 8:30! Sent neighbor boy home, trimmed H’s nails and threw him into a shower, C and S came home separately 10 minutes later and I followed the same routine with S – trimming nails and throwing in the shower. Spencer was hungry again so he had a pulled pork and cheese sandwich and C read with Henry and I had a glass of wine and SAT DOWN and both kids were in bed by 9pm. Whoo. Bedtime is 8:30, but there’s no school on Wednesday and baseball nights are tough to get in bed on time.

I climbed into bed and painted my nails while watching rewatching Grey’s Anatomy and then stayed up too late watching extra episodes. Sigh. 

Hey Monday, Monday - day two

Monday the weather was just plain depressing.

Look:

Depressing.

There was a lot of work, and a lot of rain and hey, new cute shirt though!

Mondays are my “less dealing with kids, more dealing with everything else” days. Or technically, my “me” days, as I have time to myself. Time to do grocery shopping and laundry and picking up the house with my headphones in, anyhow. So. I get off work at 4:00.

Post work groceries:

Laundry:

Beer:

Picking up random limp Ironman balloons and deciding not to take the Tervis sticker off the skull.

Cooking while watching Leap Year:

(clams casino over linguine)

Listening to Henry cry about eating spaghetti/not eating candy.

Post-dinner coloring session, again watching Leap Year because I didn’t finish:

The kids were around from about 7pm but they were doing their own thing and I forgot to take any pictures of them. There was some running wild and some video games and some arguing about video games, and then some reading time. I read with Henry while Spencer read his own book in the living room, but then he came into my room to read at the foot of the bed like a puppy while we finished up. They were in bed at 8:30.

And then I took a Unisom and said nighty night at 9:45pm while C stayed up watching football.

A whole week of my life - Day one

Stephany inspired me to do a week of posts regarding my day to day, so here’s comin’ atcha regarding my Sunday. She’s doing Monday through Sunday, but unless you want all-baseball, all-the-time, we’ll start with a non-baseball day. Sound good? Right. I'll try to keep these short because I tend to get long-winded, and I don't want to bore you. My life is truly not that interesting.

Sunday. Sunday was a freaking blast, guys. I didn’t have high hopes for it when I was yanked out of a dead sleep in the wee hours of the morning by a blood curdling screem because Henry had been sitting on a suitcase trying to zip it up and caught the zipper on his ….. inner thigh. Inner thigh. Whoo. He ended up with dark blood blisters where it caught but obviously it could have been worse.

I like to short order cook on weekend mornings. No one likes to short order cook, right? Well, everyone in my house likes their breakfast a little different and it’s not too hard to personalize because I have a wonderful massive egg pan.

Adults: alternative mimosa (I had these terrible leftover wine cups, so I mixed it with coconut la croix and orange juice and made them palatable) eggs scrambled with tomatoes, onions and brie, English muffin and bacon. And coffee. Coffee coffee coffee

Kid 1: bacon, plain scrambled eggs, melon but not watermelon, kale milkshake

Kid 2: bacion, scrambled eggs w/ American cheese, no melon but watermelon, kale milkshake

Momma happy, everyone happy.

The rest of the day we headed over to the Epcot Food and Wine Festival and guys, I had so much fun. I didn’t have high hopes when we pulled into the parking lot and it was ALMOST FULL but it was a great time and I ate so many good dishes and the kids were fantastic. We danced to BBVD and watched the Chinese acrobats and did a Perry adventure and I ate and drank and ate and drank and my kids even tried some things too (although they also got tried and true things like fancy nitro chocolate ice cream and Belgian waffles and German sausages).

I think that being off my meds, while harder to deal with the anxiety, makes me enjoy things more. I just had such a great time and because of that I know my kids did too. We fought less, I got annoyed less, I hope it keeps up, and I hope that whether it's all in my head (ha!) or is an actual physiological reaction, I hope I can feel like this more often than not.

That was our day. Just fantastic.

Books

Henry loves books but I hate to read aloud. This is a problem. But whenever I get a book for Spencer, I also get one for Henry. Book fair was this week, and S wanted the third Captain Underpants because they've re-released it in full color, so more of a graphic novel look. Whatever. I only had a minute to purchase before moving on with our 1,871 things needing to be done so I picked this book up for Henry on my way out of the media center.

Fabulous. Fun, rhymes (I don't know if that's necessary in your life, but if I'm going to read out loud I need a good cadence to keep my from ripping my hair out in boredom), great themes. And fun. Again.

Three ninja thumbs up.

Reality Bites

You like how I posted on Sunday (well, Monday and backdated) with a Hey I’ll be here all month! And then promptly disappeared again?

via GIPHY

So here’s the deal. I … am off my anxiety meds. All of them. I harbor no illusions about my headspace and if this doesn’t work then I am perfectly willing to load back up on meds but I feel like over the last 18 months I’ve continued to pile on meds without a thought to changing meds or pulling off any meds. Just more and more. I was up to four including one specifically for turning my head off to sleep. If I didn’t take that pill, I didn’t sleep. Even if I thought I took it. So I couldn’t deal anymore, and when I went on vacation a few weeks ago I pulled myself off the night meds. There were a bunch of REALLY bad nights, but thankfully since it was vacation I could sleep in if I needed to, and eventually I was able to regulate. (however the time change has royally messed me up and I have spent all week this week trying to figure that insanity out).

Then over a week ago I forgot to take my day meds two days in a row, and rather than put myself back on them like a responsible medicine taker, I threw my arms up and said “let’s see how this goes!”

The truth is, it was fine for a week. Then I had two days of LBP and migraine and swimmy head and attacks of not being good enough for my kids. I almost cried when they killed off an extraneous character in my favorite audiobook series. That was rough. But last night I took a Unisom and got a full night’s sleep and woke up feeling like Wonder Woman.

I’m doing this to myself, I know. But I can do this, and if I can’t that’s okay too.

November is the month of challenges

I decided to go for NaBloPoMo this month to get me back into writing. Writing! Imagine that! Of course, in true Bapryll fashion, I decided this on November SECOND so today is backdated so I can think I did it instead of failing from the onset. Weekends will be hard for me as I don’t log onto a computer on the weekends generally. I’ll need to get back into blogging via iPad. Heh. We shall see. I’m also not yet on the blogroll for such things because Google Docs and my computer are frenemies and have decided to ignore each other in public. Basically, I have forgotten that this blog exists. I have a lot in my head that I’d love to get out, and I stopped remembering how that works. How does that work?

Challenge number two is that I signed up for a BettyRocker 30-day workout challenge. Here’s the thought process: I hate to workout. I hate it. So can I get 15 minutes under my belt and work toward kicking my butt back into running? The time change means that theoretically I could get up an hour earlier and work out and shower before readying for work (again, we’ll discount Sunday AND Monday when I couldn’t pull myself out of bed to save my sorry life) so there it is. 15 minutes. I can do this.

And hand in hand with a Betty Rocker Challenge is that I am challenging myself to keep myself accountable for food for 30 days via Myfitnesspal. Blargh. Except that Sunday I have to figure out how to log a handful of items from the International Folk Fair, ¾ a bottle of Prosecco and a meatball hoagie. Yeahhhh.

I’m sure that I’ll come up with more challenges during the month like it’s my very own pre-NYE intentions list. But three challenges in one month. That’s doable, right? Right.