chocolate

So I have recently discovered that a gluten intolerance is part of the source of my chronic lower back pain. How nice. Now I'm on this new diet that does not include bread, pasta, and rice. And I'm so grateful to have my back pain HUGELY reduced, I am hungry and craving and I just want a pancake or a piece of toast! IS THAT SO WRONG????

Anyway, I don't know why I didn't really listen to this fact before, but I recently figured out that chocolate has an anti-depressant factor...I think I've decided what will be my new addiction.

My swimmer

Crazy faced swimmer!


Breaststroke!

Haylee with her relay team(black goggles)

So most of you know that I spent the better part of my childhood in the pool--hours upon hours of back and forth, hundreds of thousands of laps, always training. At one point I realized that probably somewhere hiding on my skin are gills, because I feel almost more at home in the water than I do in the air. For years I ate, drank, and breathed swimming and loved it. Even now a summer doesn't pass by without me somewhere near a pool or in a pool, teaching or coaching the next generation and perpetuating the love of the sport.

When I became a mother, I vowed that I would never force my children to swim. Well, that's a lie, because I do feel strongly that swimming is a critical life skill that must be attained and for the skill to be sufficient our family has a 3-summer minimum requirement for swim team. However, I did vow that I wouldn't force my children to swim like I swam--I would only require summers and allow them to choose it as a year-round sport if they loved it. After all, swimming is no small commitment. It is intense, to say the least. Early mornings all summer long, practice before school in winter, weight training, two-a-days for the entire season (we used to laugh when the football players complained about their two week stint in two-a-days).

This year my oldest daughter, Haylee, chose swimming as her sport. Now she still loves to sing and dance, and will probably always find a way to incorporate that into her life, and I support her completely in doing that. But this year she chose to become part of her high-school swim team. And it has not been easy. She has had a shoulder injury that has plagued her the entire season, virtually preventing her from improving the way she has wanted to, but she has stuck with it. Tomorrow is the Region Swim Meet, and she will be swimming the 50 free and the 100 breaststroke. I am so proud of her. And while her swimming and her accomplishments belong completely to her, I am thrilled to claim her as MY SWIMMER!!!

Go Haylee! Show them how it's done, sweetie!

Brain Damage

My girls!


Bella having her first outing to the Rec Center. She loved it!

These pictures were taken a while ago but I can't just continue to post without pictures. I'll lose my viewership!

So things are much better now. Of course, sometimes they get worse before they get better, but that's another story for another day. I've been working out at the gym and at home on the treadmill and such for about 2 1/2 weeks now and it is a totally different experience than pre-surgery. I cannot believe what a difference and I'm so psyched!

But back to the title of my post. I think I have brain damage. Permanent. Stop smiling, this is no laughing matter. I want to blog but I feel a thousand thoughts swirling around in my head and I can't sort them out. Has that EVER happened to you?! Sometimes I wonder if my mommy brain is ever going to heal. People say in a couple of years it will go back. A COUPLE OF YEARS??? How am I supposed to run this family until that time? I thank the Lord every day to have a mother who comes and does all my laundry and cleans my house and helps with the babies so that I can drive carpools and cook dinner and all those "extras" that wouldn't get done if she wasn't here. Without her I'd probably be a candidate for that show called "HOARDERS" (if you haven't seen it, you should. It will make you feel like you are so organized, even if you're not, like me) and my kids would be running around in smelly clothes with dirt stains, or the piles of laundry would be protruding from my laundry room.

So back to the mushy brain. What is the deal, anyway? If God could teach our bodies to create life, then why can't my body seem to find its way back to normal? This, I will never understand. Well, okay, maybe after I die and everything is made known to me. But probably not before that. Thankfully I have a wonderful surgeon, Dr. Steven Bennett, who could help put my body back to normal. But I think I'm going to need my brain. In fact, on my oh-so-messy desk there is a post-it note that has a list of things I need to do during business hours--phone calls to offices, appointments that need to be made, etc. I wrote those things down so that I would remember to do them, because during the day I forget everything.

There is a small problem.

I forget to check the list.

So there it sits. I need to call the Jr. High. I need to order a wedding gift for the daughter of a close friend. I need to write a letter to my insurance company appealing their refusal to cover my much needed surgery (another post for another day--why is it that Insurance companies feel the need to dictate what is "medically necessary," anyway. Is my doctor on their panel? I submitted letters from 5 different doctors stating why I needed the surgery, and they still rejected it. I could go on, but I digress...).

Okay, the other thing that is bugging me. My skin. I swear my skin has aged at least 10 years in the past 2 years. This is not fair. I need solutions. Because I have oily skin I still get, okay I'll say it, zits from time to time. I have a great cleansing system but it's not an anti-aging one, so I've been perusing the drugstore trying to figure out which one is the right one. There are about a hundred and each one claims to be the most cutting edge amazing one. Why do they have to make this so hard for me? I already cannot keep two thoughts straight. How am I supposed to select from the one with retinol or the pore-refining mask or the anti-aging day cream, etc.? Anyone have some amazing suggestions? My sister swears by Arbonne but it is pricey and their cleansers don't clear my skin.

The babies are almost 15 months. I don't regret a day of their aging. Maybe it's because I've already been parenting for over 15 years so to see the trio grow is not sad. I did wince when I put their fall clothes away and get out their winter ones, but only for a minute. They are all walking now and emptying all my drawers. I keep telling Dave that someday we will wake up to a quiet house and everything will be right where we left it the night before. Then Haylee will bring over her kids...

surgery and pubescent anger

Okay, I'm going to give it a try and see if I can get back to blogging. For those of you who don't know, I had abdominal reconstructive surgery November 20 to repair my abdominal muscles which were destroyed by my triplet pregnancy. You might wonder how pregnancy can damage abdominal muscles, so just picture the muscles dividing up the middle, stretching way beyond capacity, then a yoga ball protruding through them and pushing them out to the sides of the body. Then one day the doctors remove the enormous growth, and expect the muscles to gracefully shrink and return to their original position along the front of my abdomen. Well, enough said, right? They didn't return. They tried, but to no avail. I even spent 4 months in physical therapy trying to tighten them and strengthen them but there still remained a 2 inch gap up the center of my abdomen from my pubic bone to about 3 inches above my navel. Needless to say I've had severe back pain for the past year and as one Dr. put it, it's as if I've been walking around with all my nuts and bolts loose. (Is there surgery to tighten the nuts and bolts of my brain, because I think they're loose as well?)

So I had the surgery and it all went well, and they were even able to remove some of the extra way stretched out skin tissue, which is great. I have permanent sutures up the middle of my abdominal wall. It has been a long, slow recovery process and the hardest part once the initial pain subsided has been the exhaustion. I'm so flabby and have lost so much muscle tone and have even gained weight since the surgery because of inactivity. I wanted so much for it to be a minor surgery and it was SO NOT A MINOR SURGERY! I finally received clearance to return to normal activity and I have so much work to do to get my body back in shape. I'm so hopeful that I will have some relief from back pain and some stability but this has been no picnic. There have been many moments when I have been very angry to have had my body destroyed by bringing these babies here. Why oh why oh why oh why couldn't I just get them here without such vast physical damage being done to me????? WHY????

But that's not really what I wanted to write about tonight. Tonight I wanted to write about the phenomenon of how I went to tuck in my 12 year old son tonight and he spewed anger and defiance all over me, even though the last time I saw him was 2 hours earlier when he was eating the awesome dinner I'd cooked and appreciating every bite. So I come to find out that he had been in a fight with his dad and so he's angry at HIM, but I guess because I come in representing the parental unit then I'm GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION, right? I'm so bugged! How is this fair? Okay, I'm the queen of telling my kids that life is not fair, but really, do I deserve this anger vomit that is being hurled in my direction? All I was going to do was give him a hug and tell him good night and I'm being received as if I'm his most hated enemy. And I cooked dinner! And he loved it! And then I went to run errands, and now all I get is this ugly side of him? So Uncool. The girls at school would not be impressed, that's for sure. Maybe I should get on their Facebook pages link them to this post.............nah...I'll just send him some love from here in the dark computer room and forgive him and hope that he gets some much needed rest tonight so that he feels better tomorrow. After all, he's my son.

Do you remember?

Remember when I used to actually post things on my blog?