Short Mark Update

I spoke with Mark's case worker the other day (you know, one of the few people who can actually go see him), and we had a little discussion about Mark's activity level.

I know pretty much zero of my FTD spouse friends are surprised even a tiny little bit, but the activity logs show that he leaves his room between 20-65 times in a shift (varying between 4 to 8 hours a shift) for the aides. This is approximately every 10-15 minutes the entire shift long. Imagine that...having to get up and follow a grown man around keeping him from entering everyone elses' room every 10-15 minutes for 4-8 hours. As an aside, I know you probably wouldn't believe it, but it was even worse than that at home. He would do the same loop every 30 seconds. All.Day.Long. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, couch, kitchen, couch, bathroom, bedroom. Wash, rinse, repeat. He would sleep for maybe 4 hours a night, after sun downing for 4-5 hours and then sleeping from 10pm-2am and then he'd be up to start the loop again.

They've limited Mark's 1:1 aides to just a handful of them instead of the rolling rotation like before, but we're looking at ways we can help to calm him more. Some suggestions I had were that I get him a new smartphone (he lost his over a year ago, and I kept thinking we'd find it) so he can play games on it, as well as a smiley face chart so he can select which one he is feeling each day. The thought behind the chart is that he may not be able to verbalize what he's feeling, and, as I've noted over time, you could ask him a question that you know the answer is "yes" to, and he'd say "no". This gives him another way to describe how he's feeling. This thought was something I gleaned from the videos they gave me at Mayo Clinic. Certain parts of his brain (say, that could associate a face with his feelings) might still be connecting while the parts that form verbal cues would not be. Another suggestion was to have some "snack" cards that he can select what snack he wants from the pictures. My thought behind that was that he may just want something different and not know how to verbalize that.

I also asked if we could try to set up a regular video chat with him every evening, as that tends to keep him in his room for longer. We try to chat with him multiple times a day but he seldom answers, so sometimes it goes days between our chats. I can still check in on him with the video surveillance camera that I have, and I can talk to him through there, which I do as long as he's not sleeping, but it's not nearly as good a picture, and it's harder for the kids to chat with him that way.

Speaking of videos, his assisted living facility put out a really cute music video featuring the residents, and Mark was on it. He also was featured (see below) on their Facebook page for Red, White and Blue week. It's so good to see him being involved, and I just love how great the staff and aides have been with him and working to make this whole quarantine thing as enjoyable as possible for the residents.

January Recap

Disclaimer: I'm going to shake it up a bit this year and ::gasp:: just post when I feel like it. No holding myself accountable for making sure every event gets documented (although I'm sure I'll be kicking myself when I get to scrapping events and I don't have a nice little commentary on them). I just don't have the time to keep up with it, and I'd rather spend my time NOT doing a play by play.


January.

I knew it was coming, but I still couldn't be prepared for how completely insane the month of January was. January is notoriously the absolute worst month for me at work: Every January I vow I'm quitting. It is usually fairly busy, and it is also when my boss usually is out on vacation for about three weeks every year. This year was no exception, except for the part where things were (unexpectedly) extraordinarily busier than usual, and I had to recall a LOT of hardware and networking knowledge from the past six years just to stay afloat each day, which is just...well...so completely exhausting. I really don't like hardware and networking: I dare say I loathe it. And to top it off, people were just not very pleasant about their needs, so my daily interactions were a compilation of really rude and mean people who were angry because I didn't know what I was doing and was doing my best to figure it out. So January? Yeah, January can just kinda go away.

But that really, really hard month is now OVER!!!!!!!!

Don't get me wrong: We had some really great moments in January: Moments where my boys just made me laugh and giggle and smile. We had tickle fights and played in the bouncy house together. We painted and colored and had races ("It's time for marks, guys!" -Cashel).

The boys clung to Daddy...

We were sick...and then well.

Happy...

and then sad.

We ate a heck of a lot of popcorn.

The boys enjoyed a fun evening at a daycare party in town :)

I got my new camera!!

We cleaned and cleaned and cleaned, and it obviously did a heck of a lot of good with two toddlers in the house ::sigh::

We are still fighting the nap battle with Cashel, and it's getting old fast. He'll push all day to not take a nap...

...and then BAM. Always at the most inconvenient times he's just done for the night. Before supper. Which means that he wants to eat at 3am.

We had a wonderful night "off" from parenting in which we ate, we shopped and we worked on projects! We're not THAT old, though: We did actually consider hopping a plane to Vegas for 24 hours haha And then we laughed and laughed at how ridiculous that sounded. We didn't want to waste our precious time off traveling.

We enjoyed lunch with Great Grandma Vi :)

Cashel turned THREE (and I DID still do a recap on that - click here for it!)

 

Looking Ahead...

Yeah, we're done with the trip and all now, but I wrote most of this up before we left and just never got it posted, so I'm not changing it.

We are GIDDY about some time off as a family in Key Largo!

We will be leaving these temps (which are arguably pretty great where we live for this time of year!)...

...for these temps :)

We cannot wait, and we're mostly packed and ready to go. The boys are really excited to fly on an airplane :) Mommy and Daddy are really excited to STOP WEARING COATS for a week! Oh, and Mommy is excited to not NEED to have a second cup of coffee, but to relax and enjoy one anyway :)

And that, my friends, is as far as we have thought about our future for the time being. We've been too weary to think about much else. We know there are events coming up this year and plans to be made, but for the time being, our minds are on vacation, and I just have to say: It's about time!

One Heck of a Weekend (March 14-16)

I don't typically blog about average weekends unless we have something going on, but this weekend was so insane that I feel the need to!

Friday night wasn't so bad really, but that was mainly because it hadn't all hit me how crazy Saturday and Sunday were going to be. We did a little grocery shopping to prep for meals for two sets of our friends who had recently had babies: White Chicken Chili with some bread and muffins. It seemed simple enough, but as usual, it took entirely way too long at the grocery store. I don't usually mind it, but I was especially missing my boys that day, so it seemed like an eternity.

We got home, rushed to get the steaks ready and on the grill, the potatoes sliced up and ready for fries and asparagus washed, seasoned and in the oven {Mark's Mom was coming over for supper, so then prepping another couple steaks}, the bread together and thrown in the oven as soon as the fries and asparagus was out, the muffins whipped up and in the tins ready for when the bread came out, then I rushed to get started with the chicken and other food prep for the white chicken chili.

Friday night, I was in the kitchen from the moment I got home until about 9pm, when I messaged our photographer to see if I could swing out to her place to pick up our pictures still that night (yeah, she's cool like that!). I totally did, chatted for a few minutes, then came home and tried to get our {teething}{almost-crawling}{right-before-a-leap} baby Kendrick back to sleep {after Daddy had been trying for a while already}. I crashed into bed. I crashed HARD, you know, for about 2 hours before fussy Kendrick was awake again...and then again...and then again...and again...and again. I gave up at 7am and decided to start the day.

It seemed like it was going to be a simple day, really. The food was all prepped, I threw the crock pot on the base and got it started, then made on some blueberry pancakes for breakfast, along with some bacon and was just getting started thinking about putting on some coffee when ::crash:: Cashel knocked my coffee maker off the counter. No coffee in this house, I suppose, so I slipped on my shoes and ran to McDonald's quick.

It was a good morning beyond that. We had lots of snuggles with our kiddos, fun play time, lots of smiles and laughs :) It was such a happy morning :) And sweet Kendrick is just on the verge of crawling, so it's fun to watch him work at it with such a determined face :) He's constantly doing what yogis refer to as the downward dog, but can't figure out how to pick up one of his arms to take that next move. It won't be long!

When both boys were actually napping {small victory the past few days!}, and we had eaten our lunch, I got a lot of picking up and a small amount of deep cleaning done, some laundry folded and put away, and the boys' bags packed and ready to go for Grandpa and Grandma's that evening. I finally got to sit down and see some of the pictures from our photo shoot last month (OMG they turned out SOOOOOOOOO good!!), but it was all of 20 minutes before the boys started waking up.

Then it started getting a little crazy. It was 4:30pm before we left, so we got to Mark's Dad's at 5pm, visited for about 45 minutes, then jetted off to take supper to the Graber's (Meeting Baby Lincoln), and we stayed to visit a little while (or what seemed like a little while...an hour later...) and left finally around 7:15, grabbed some Burger King and stopped at the dollar store for some cards, then what I am officially dubbing "the longest trip to Walmart in ever". It's not that we were really there so long, but more that I couldn't stop thinking about how late it was for the boys (they go to bed at 6:30 and 8!), and how crazy Sunday was going to be.

Right as I finally thought we were ready to go, I remembered that I had to get all the supplies for not only a diaper cake but also for cake balls for the next weekend. Thankfully I remembered this BEFORE we stood in the checkout line for 10 minutes and had to go back through. So...30 minutes (and more money than I care to admit on my blog) later, we finally walk out of the store and head to whisk our kids away. And then we made a quick stop out to drop off supper #2 for the next day to the Stude's (Meeting Baby Collin).

It was a LONG day. Nothing bad, nothing crazy, just lack of a proper list on my part, which caused me to scramble. And if you know me, while I do appear to handle scrambling very well, I am not really a fan. Whew! Big day #2 in the books! At least I had a "Day of Rest" ahead on Sunday, right? RIGHT?

I'm going to use bullet points for Sunday, because truth be told, I'm too tired to expound, and I'm pretty sure you're too tired to read it.

• Up early to get more white chicken chili made for OUR supper
• Blueberry pancakes AGAIN
• McCafe run yet again
• Ridiculous amount of snuggles with the boys, then...
• Off to church
• Wonderful service and fellowship, followed by...
• Chicken patty sandwiches and leftover steak for lunch, followed by...
• Naptime. For Cashel. And...
• Kendrick did NOT get the nap memo. He was up ALLLLL afternoon. And ONLY wanted Mama.
• Meanwhile, Mama had a hefty to-do list for the afternoon, including:
  
  • Assemble a diaper cake
    
  • Make 2 dozen cake balls
    
  • Make the weekly meal plan
  • Get to the grocery store to buy the week's groceries
  • 2 loads of laundry
  • 2 loads of dishes
• Supper was, thankfully, already done, so we ate, then cleaned up
• Bath time
• So many snuggles I think I broke my snuggler!
• Bed time
• 9pm, and it's FINALLY time to get to the grocery store, come home, put all the groceries away and...
• GO.TO.BED.

It was insane. I'm done with weekends right now. I'd rather have to just go to work, where I actually have time for a cup of coffee, usually.

In all of this, I am reminded that I am so ridiculously grateful for all this crazy right now. It's all so surreal, this parenting and housewife-ing and family and friends and blessing and being blessed and celebrating and shopping and so so little sleeping. It reminds me that next weekend, when we're just as busy, that we will manage just fine. I cannot wait to see what's to come. But for now, it's 9:06pm and I am going to bed. I'm praying for a 3 hour stretch tonight :)

Rough Days

I've been following a new blogger in my feedly feed lately: Matt Walsh of The Matt Walsh Blog.

The guy just kinda "gets" me, and last week he posted an article that just resonated with me BIG time. And seriously, I had to just laugh while reading it. Here it is. The premise of it is that when you have kids, you stop living for yourself and start living for them, and if there has ever been a month where I've felt that at its fullest, it has been this past one.

I haven't posted many updates as of late because, well, to be honest, things have been a little rough for us lately. We're not entirely sure what exactly to attribute all the frustrations to, but we know that within the past 3 weeks, our poor little man Cashel has definitely had both an ear infection and cold. We're also about 90% sure that he's cutting at least one of his final set of molars right now, considering he has been waking up numerous times in the middle of the night screaming and is refusing to eat. It's not fun :(

He is on an antibiotic, and we've noticed that he's slightly more himself (after over 2 weeks of being just ridiculously NOT himself). He's also occasionally on Tylenol and/or Advil (if he's acting abnormally uncomfortable), and he has randomly been asking incessantly for his "beaname" back after two whole months of not having it.

We've all been sick the past month at some point or another, so we're hoping the last half of January fares better for us.

I've thought numerous times over the past month that our kids are really trying to kill us with the hours they are keeping. We finally got Kendrick back to only waking up once (at 4am) again, but just as we reached that milestone (And might I say - HALLELUJAH!! It has been weeks now), Cashel wakes up again.

With being sick myself, then Mark being sick, then both boys being sick, I feel like our house has been in complete shambles. In fact, the only reason the dishes get done at all any more is because we have to give Kendrick a bath every 2-3 days, and he isn't sitting up quite yet lol

I have most definitely been tried and tested these past few weeks. Between all the junk going around at home, I would typically look at work as a reprise, but it has been abnormally stressful at work as well, so it's hard to catch a break.

So here we sit, in our warm, cozy, filthy, happy, clothes-strewn-everywhere (where the heck do they all come from?), kleenex-covered, medicine-dropped-filled home, since we can't escape from it right now due to the below-zero temps (and apparently blizzard conditions). And ya know what? I'm feeling pretty darn good :) But if you don't hear from me for a while, just know that it's nothing personal :)