There is no such thing as a 24-hour bug to parents

Man, we had such nice plans laid out for this weekend.  We were going to meet up with Gail Montgomery for lunch and get to pickup the awesome pictures she took of the family a few weeks back.  After that, we were set to drop off the kids with Grandma and Grandpa for a sleepover with their cousins, and I swear, Noah was looking forward to that ALL DAMN WEEK.  Like asking me every single morning.  With our free night, we were going to try to hit up Coho Grill for Restaurant Week, then head home for lots of sleep.  No real plans for Sunday, but again...SLEEP!

Wednesday night, I made Chicken Stuffing Casserole.  Noah started getting kind've mad about it, saying he wanted something else, but we don't do that.  So, then he said his tummy hurt.  We just assumed he was bellyaching, so he ate a couple bites, some green beans, and then went off to bed.  Maybe an hour later, I was upstairs and he came out of his room, again with belly hurting.  And then, the fireworks came.  I won't elaborate on "fireworks", use your own discretion to put together stomach bug and fireworks.  So, that happened, got him to the toilet for about half of it, worked on cleaning up the rest off the rug (Why on earth did I allow him to drink some red Koolaid at dinner?  Idiot!), got him a good drink of water and brushed his teeth, and sent him back to bed, since he said his belly now felt better.  For the next 3.5 hours, he did not sleep.  At.  All.  Came out of his room every 10 mins or so complaining.  A few times, he wretched up a little bit of clear stuff (Assumed it was water).  A couple times, he needed underwear changes (If we labeled the other thing fireworks, we'll call this one bombs).  Finally, I gave him some tylenol to see if that would stop the belly pains, and a little after midnight, he went to bed.

Next morning, he still had bombs, though these cam in the proper facility, and he was still saying his belly felt off, so we called him out of school.  He woke up about as early as you'd expect him to (I end up waking up with Darcy around 5 or 5:30amm so he's up within 10 mins of that), but ended up crashing on the couch around 8am through till about 10:30am.  Always the sign of a sick little man when he crashes in the morning.  Lunch and dinner that night were a bit better, complained less about the belly pains, and finally allowed us to give him some ginger ale (That plan to make him hate soda worked a little TOO well).  So Thursday night, I declared he was doing fine, okay that was the 24 hour bug.

Idiot, you know what's coming next right?

Yup, around 1am, I started the exact same sequence he did.  In the exact same order and time frames.  This happened once before.  He got a stomach bug, was fine the next day while BOTH Shannon and I were curled up in fetal positions in bed struggling not to firework.  So I mustered up some gall and ran him into school (Yeah, parents of kids in daycares are probably about to rip me a new one, but we NEEDED a day of letting him "run free" while I was incapacitated).  Luckily, my side effects were mostly giving way around the time I dropped him off anyway.  Started eating again around lunch, and felt well enough to have a Chicken Cheesesteak for dinner.  Even started to think we'd saved the weekend.

Then, his fireworks started.  Again?  WTF?  After eating, maybe 1/8 a chicken tender and drinking some red Hi-C (Hey idiot, you really deserved that one, a red drink AGAIN!), he just LOST it on the dining room table.  He seemed to be okay after that and went to bed.  Oh yeah, and then Shannon's cycle started too.  So, there went our weekend plans.

And then this morning, he was fine again.  He's still got the bombing problem (still in the correct facility though), but my guess is that will subside in time.  And we made the best of Shannon being down today and not having plans.  I went nuts on the closet in the playroom, finally cleared out all the stuff that used to be in our bedroom and finally turned it into The Playroom Closet (complete with fanfare).  Which allowed me to finally put together one of Noah's Christmas presents, a decorate your own cardboard playhouse.  And immediately, we have plans for tomorrow too, which would be him going nuts on said playhouse.

But to summarize, there is never such a thing as a 24-hour-bug to a parent.  Because inevitably, you catch it, and that just extends the awesomeness.  In our case, this is going on a 36 hour bug.  UGH!

How Do I Score 2011?

New Year is coming upon us. This is an entry I've been working on in my head for a long time. Ever since 2007, it's been pretty easy to "score" what the past year has been...



2007 - Bought our house in Westminster, found out we were having 1st child, I got promoted that year - GREAT

2008 - Noah - GREAT!!!!

2009 - Layoffs at work, our refi deal fell apart between Christmas and New Year's, and Shannon's ectopic - HORRIBLE YEAR

2010 - Pregnant with 2nd child, Work doing better - GOOD



This year...I have no idea how to do this. Darcy was born, so I can't call this a terrible year. She is a wonderful child and a blessing to have every day. But, this can't be a wonderful year. It can't be a great or good year. Because while we have Darcy, we also added this shitty member of our household too. Cancer.



I didn't post this before, because I just didn't want to talk about it or confront the situation head on...Shannon had a CT scan for post-op done on December 7th...Pearl Harbor Day, should've seen that coming. The spots in her lungs grew. In the abscence of any signs of infection, that basically confirms that it is Stage 4 cancer. Despite the successful surgery, the cancer has already spread to her lungs. This is not what we wanted, obviously. This is not what should be happening.

What happens now? Shannon is back on chemo, as we figured she would be post-surgery. But now, I think she has to be on chemo until the spots can dissapear. And that's not even a given, since her chemo treatment pre-surgery never fully removed any spots, only shrunk some. And since it's showing signs of spread, that changes the prognosis. In a direction that we didn't want to think about. Basically, they aren't considering this curable anymore.

Nobody is giving up. She has a lot of fight left, but this development just cuts us down at the knees. The thing I keep coming back to, from a perspective of how this year is...this isn't right. Shannon shouldn't have to be focusing on pills, scans, incisions, colostomies. She should be worrying about Darcy cutting teeth, saying first words, what crap she's getting into now that she can crawl like beast mode. Cancer is a thief, that much is certain. And it's already stolen a laundry list of things from our family. And unfortunately, it seems like that list might keep growing for awhile.

So tell me, how should I score this year? It's horrible to think of this year as a shit year, because Darcy's birth was something great. That's not fair to Darcy. But it's not fair that I be forced to score this year as good when we have this kind've shit from cancer. This year has brought so much loss upcoming to our family, how can you celebrate it? Shannon said she'll still toast the new year because, to be honest, next year CAN'T be worse, right? Right? Maybe right? Hopefully right!?

I think all that can be said...F*@# Cancer! You dirty rat, you can't win this war, we can't let you. Also, I'm going to cut your balls off. Maybe not today, maybe not next year, but someday, I will find a way to spit on your figurative grave, you POS disease.

Twelve Years of Rust: 1st Checkpoint

So one of the hallmarks of the Spark Diet is setting goals for yourself. I suppose most weight loss programs do this, but Spark wants to get more general than weight goals, they like covering fitness, lifestyle, etc. Now, I'm doing Sparkdiet, but I'm not crazily into all the site, it's not bad stuff, but some of it is overkill to me. But I do like the goals idea, because instead of focusing on "I have to lose 100 pounds in a year" and looking at progress against the big number, you can chunk it up.

So originally, when I was dropping nearly 3 pounds a week, I'd targeted 225 by July 1st. But my weight loss settled out and I adjusted it to August 1st. In the week leading up, the scale continued to read 228. I knew I was still making progress, because I'd done good on my ranges, I've kept up my exercise, and the 228 number was more common on random weigh ins. My weigh in number changes from hour to hour, so I generally average them out to figure out my real weight, since so many little things can bump you up a pound or two here or there. So when I weighed in today, I was expecting to not hit my goal.

224.4

Yup, I got it. CHECKPOINT CLEARED! I'm going to celebrate with a Lean Pocket Turkey Sausage, Egg, and Cheese (Still good on my diet) and focus on my next checkpoints. I'm on track to be the lightest I've been since college in just a few weeks time.


8/1/2011 - 225 POUNDS - ACHIEVED
11/1/2011 - 200 POUNDS
11/5/2011 - D.C. Undy 5K
2/1/2012 - 175 POUNDS
4/1/2012 - 160 POUNDS
5/19-20-2012 - Warrior Dash MD

The rush of the party

The buildup for Noah's 2nd birthday party has actually been like a month and a half long. It was supposed to be on the 15th, and we spent the week before that preparing...only for Noah to catch Foot and Mouth Disease the night before and we had to postpone two weeks. So, we then spent two weeks fixing up the living room with new paint and new furniture, and then re-cleaning the house.

This morning, our to-do list was mowing the lawn, cleaning, and then cold prep. We got up at 7am to start it all, for an 11am party. We worked ALL the way up to 11 to get things ready! Not sure if we're just inefficient or what, but it seemed like we just ran out of time to do everything, so we rushed getting things done up to 11. Then we enjoyed about the first 15-20 mins of greeting people and letting them see the house and backyard.

Then it was grilling time. I've never grilled for more than the three of us plus one guest. So now facing grilling for 20 people...yikes. So as a decision made way back, we decided to grab a big box of frozen Kunzler hot dogs and 2 boxes of Bubba Burgers from BJ's. So, first lesson learned...frozen hamburgers are easy to break off and throw on a grill...hot dogs not at all! I managed to "break" 2 or 3 off intact, then I had to run water over the whole package to get any more to thaw enough to seperate, and that took another 10 mins. Noah took a spill during this, so I ran to help him and we got him ice. So by the time I finally got everything ready to throw on the grill, it had pre-heated for about 20 mins. Uh oh...

So second lesson learned...Bubba Burgers must be pretty high fat content. As soon as I threw those things on the grill, LOTS of smoke started pouring out. If anyone took pictures of me during grilling, I must've looked like I'd had acid poured in my eyes. I couldn't see anything because of the smoke singing my eyeballs! I guess I'm just used to 80/20 or 93/7 ground beef fresh hamburgers. My first instinct was blaming the frozen hot dogs for causing the smoke, but it was definitley the effect of throwing 12 Bubba Burgers on the grill. I felt bad for anyone who had to walk past my towering inferno of a grill during this time. Quality wise, I think the Bubba Burgers dried out a bit more. That could've been because I was trying to juggle turning hot dogs really often, grill the burgers, and get the smoke out of my eyes at the same time. In hindsight, better to get the hot dogs done seperately of the burgers. Also better to focus on 3-6 burgers at a time, not 12.

But in the end, I fed everyone, we have leftovers, and no one complained about the food. Not sure if they were just being nice. If they are, please tell me, it won't hurt my feelings. I'm trying to work my way to becoming a grill master here. I also need to remember to clean the side of my grill, those Bubba Burgers left a TON of grease on the spatula, which was then transferred to the side pieces on the grill when I set the spatula down. Oh yeah, and I need to find the one hot dog that fell behind the grill before a ton of bugs take up residence on my porch.

In any case, a big step in my education of grilling.

Since when did little man turn into a fraidy cat?

All of a sudden this week, Noah seems to be afraid of everything. Up until this point, he's had maybe one or two episodes where he got spooked by something, we couldn't figure out what, but sitting with him calmed him down...But then Mom had mentioned he's had a few times at daycare where he's been seemingly afraid of the ceiling fan in the room he naps in. For any of you who know, his first word was "round and round" because he likes watching fans. So, that was weird, but it only seemed to happen there...

Then Monday, everything seemed to hit the fan (no pun intended). Started out with a trip to Sakura. Noah LOVES them, especially "BIG FIRE". He calls it the fire place. So he was in a great mood, sitting in his high chair, eating soup. Chef comes over, starts setting up, lights the big fire...and Noah loses it. He immediately says "WANT TO GO BYE-BYE!!!!!!" Odd, but hey, a big puff of flame probably is a scary thing, so we calm him down. That night, we go up to his room for night night..."You okay then fan? YOU OKAY THE FAN???? I don't like my room!" At this point, I'm just dumbfounded. I turned the fan down, he seemed to be okay...weird.

On Wednesday, a new fear emerged...the shadow. Well, actually, it wasn't the shadow, but rather light coming through the back door. But since I don't know what to call that, it becomes shadow. This freaked Noah out, but I was able to mostly get over that one by taking him up to it and playing shadow games with it.

So yesterday, my stay at home day with him...he lost it big time. He discovered the front room, which was the office way back, now the guest room. It has a low ceiling, so no fan. Well apparently, he has fallen in love with this room because he stayed in it for about 2 hours yesterday. Any time I tried to get him to go to the more kid-friendly living room, no dice, he freaked out. When it came time for nap, he decided he wants to sleep in the front room. Not Noah's room, don't like Noah's room...Not Mommy and Daddy's room, don't like that room. I gave up on naptime after a bit of pouting and tantrum, finally got him to sit downstairs with me. He then goes to sleep, so I laid him down in his room.

It's just all very confusing to me. Half the time, he's fine with fans because he sits in the living room with us and the fan runs almost all the time there. I guess it's just discovering new things and seeing things in different ways. Just hope he doesn't let it flip him out too much, summer is coming soon and if he gets to the point with no fan, i'm not sure how he's going to sleep. Especially if he keeps trying that fan-less front room. Then again, he went to sleep tonight fine with the fan on.