playing catch up

My world has changed in the past while. I don’t even know where to begin with this. A while back my mom went for her 6 month checkup after the end of her breast cancer treatment. The MD, who was awesome by the way, found another lump, in her armpit. He took a biopsy just to be safe. Mom also had an ultrasound and a MRI. Mom was shaken, she was ready to throw in the towel, she had enough, and wasn’t sure she could go through it all again. It was a long week of waiting for results. I accompanied her to the appointment to hold her hand. The MD declared “good news” before he could even get all the way into the room. It seems that what he was feeling was just a buildup of fluid and blood. Both mom and I were so relieved. Angela’s dad came back from Portugal for just shy of a month. It really wasn’t too bad for me, but Angela was stressed to the max. I think most of the issue was the fact that we had registered our dogs for city tags, and when he got back he registered his dogs. It wasn’t long before we got a call informing us of the city by law that prohibits more than 3 dogs per household in our city. At first we didn’t think too much about it because Ang’s dad had told us that he would be taking his dogs to Portugal with him, and likely leaving them there to live as their home base, because he is planning to spend most of his time there. After a conversation with him, he stated that he was not taking his dogs at this time because he didn’t want to spend the money to fly them over, and he also had no one to look after them when he came back here to visit. Needless to say, none of us wanted to get rid of any of our dogs, but we were in a tough spot. The fine for having all of the dogs could be up to $5000.00. His dogs are old. One is 14 and the other is 13. Our one dog is a pug beagle mix and is larger and more excitable than the other three. No one would want these dogs, so we decided to give up our Bennie. It’s the hardest thing I have done in a long time. I love that little guy so much. I was there during his birth. We mentioned it on Face.book, and pretty soon we had an offer from someone who was looking for a dog of his specific breed. We took him to his new owner on April 1. They are thrilled, and Bennie seems happy, so I guess I can live with it. I can’t deny that I bawled my face off for hours when he went thought. To make things more stressful, my 96 year old grandmother got really sick the week before Easter. She has been in a nursing home for 14 years with Alzheimer’s. She has been in a chair for at least 7 of those years, and has had no form of communicating other than moaning for pain, and smiling for happiness in at least 6 years. We all knew she wouldn’t last forever. We had just celebrated her 96th birthday three weeks before. I got the call on the way back from re-homing Bennie, Grandma had passed away. I have been emotionally exhausted. I saw the MD on the Tuesday after the Easter weekend. I have been having a lot of back pain. So much so that at times, I don’t even want to move for fear of the pain. He checked me over, performed some reflex tests etc, and decided that it is a muscular problem. He prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and a muscle relaxant along with some physiotherapy. He gave me a print out of some exercises I can do to hopefully strengthen the muscles. I will give it a try. I am really hoping that it works. I have been taking the medications when I don’t have to work, or at night after I have worked, because they make me very drowsy and right out of it. I can’t live like this. I am also going to try losing some weight, but I’m not going to do anything major, just watch my portions and cut back junk food consumption. I am a total binge eater when it comes to junk food (sweets mainly). It’s like I can’t get enough, and I eat until I feel guilty and sick. Not a great practice. We booked our tickets for our trip this summer to Portugal. Two weeks, we’ll be going for. I’m pretty excited, but it was expensive. The 2 year old pays only $150 less than the adults. I am glad though that it is all paid for upfront, and we don’t have to stress about the cost anymore. Angela is less excited than I am because the reason we are going is because she and her 2 sisters have to finalize the inheritance of her mother’s land. She keeps talking about this feeling she is getting, that something isn’t right, and that her dad is being sneaky about something. She feels like she can’t quite trust him. She can’t shake the feeling. My mom and her friend are also going to be travelling with us. Angela, Maizey and I will be staying at Angela’s family home, and my mom and friend will be staying in a hotel that is a 10 min drive away and practically right on the beach in a touristy area. Usually by now, we would be booking our camping trips for the summer, but unfortunately we will have to pass on those this year. I am hoping to squeeze in a 4 night stay at one of the camp grounds just for tradition sake. I will miss the camping, but both of us will be using a lot of our vacation time for the trip to Portugal, and won’t be able to afford much other time off. Our friend Michael also wants us to come up and spend some time at his cottage, just the 5 of us as a family. It would be him, Maizey’s dad, and the three of us. He wants to make it a tradition. I am hoping that we can do that for a long weekend too. The problem is that Angela doesn’t get a lot of time off and has to pick her dates for vacation in November of the year before. Maizey is doing alright. Early in March she had some kind of cold virus and then we all came down with a short lived flu, but lived to tell about it. Since then, though, she has been getting some random fevers. Sometimes up to 102 degrees. She’ll spend a day or two not feeling well, and then just like that, it’s gone. No explanation. We have decided that if it happens again, we are going to go to the MD and ask for some blood tests etc. She really has begun the bossy stage of life. She really is quite good though, most of the time. The only thing that worries me is that she hits. Anytime you tell her something she doesn’t want to hear, or something that she doesn’t like, she just punches you. I don’t like it at all. We’ve tried time out, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I guess we’ll just keep at it. My schedule at work has been changed all around. I use to get 5 week day shifts, 3 afternoon shifts and 2 weekend shifts in a two week period. Now I am down to 3 days, 5 afternoons and 2 weekends. This totally screwed up our daycare. We’ve had to take Maizey out of where we had her because it wouldn’t accommodate this new schedule, and she is now going to a friend of mine. It will save us a bunch of money, but I don’t like not having a set schedule for her. She has also been having night terrors lately. She will begin crying approximately 2-3 hours after she goes to bed. When we go to comfort her, she is usually sitting up with her eyes open, but she does not respond to us in any way. It’s like she is still asleep with her eyes open. We were wondering if this has started because she hasn’t been napping in the afternoon, and is becoming overtired by the time bedtime rolls around. We have noticed that on rare days that she does nap, she doesn’t cry in the night. Well that ought to get everyone up to speed on what’s been going on over here. I really really have to try to update this more often. I really enjoy looking back at old posts and reminiscing about the past.