"And DON'T underestimate the importance of BODY LANGUAGE, ha!"

 The title is from Ursula in Disney's "The Little Mermaid"- the old animated one I grew up with- and it doesn't quite fit this post but it's close enough for government work. It's too hot and I'm too sleepy to fight with it for a better one. "GETMO; Good Enough To Move On," as Craig Groeschel says at the Global Leadership Conference.

I got a good look at myself in the mirror the other day and had to just laugh ruefully. This is not how I pictured my middle aged body would look. I do remember telling Dada decades ago that I wanted to be "pleasantly plump" and I guess what I had in mind was Mrs. Weasley from the Harry Potter series, though it was way before there was a Harry Potter. I think I desired that because nobody in my entire family was ever plump and I thought it was cute. We are a family of beans. String ones, generally. 

At any rate, since I don't have boobs, the first thing I see when I look down is my stomach. For someone who wanted to be plump, it's still a bit disconcerting. Not the lack of boobs- I'm fine with that- but the amount of belly. Welcome to middle age. 

Added to that, my right arm has been in a compression sleeve for almost two months and therefore looks like a fish belly. While I KNOW tan is actually sun damage, I have always felt healthier with a tan and I am *insert your favorite synonym for "mad" here* that cancer has ruined yet another summer for me and I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself. My sweet radiation doc begged me to not burn because of the radiation I underwent, and that all looks... nontraditional... because half of my chest is "tan" from the radiation and that's the half I'm supposed to keep protected, under a rash guard, with SPF 50 on the parts that might be exposed. The other half is meh tan for mid-July in a normal year, but I have to keep telling myself that it's not been a normal year. And then my white right arm and hand with tan fingers. Gah. Ridiculous.

My hair is coming back pretty well and it looks like even my eyelashes and eyebrows have decided to show up this time. However, I have started one new med and will be starting a second, and hair thinning/loss is a possible side effect. If this goes to Round Three, I don't plan on ever growing hair back out again. I like it short and fuzzy. Makes me happy and boy, does it streamline your morning routine and your Walmart receipt!

*I forgot to mention all my small incisions still glue covered and healing from last week's hysterectomy. Added to all my other scars, you could draw some funky constellations on my body!

To add insult to injury, every time I go outside I swear I get another bug bite. Mosquitoes I can handle. It's the chiggers! My heavens. It's not just me- the New York Times has an article on them and the comments section is full of misery loves company as well as tips for relief. For those of you who live where there aren't chiggers, and those areas seem to be shrinking due to climate change, count your blessings. I think the only reason poison ivy is worse is because you can spread that around whereas the bites stay put. Chiggers like to get you in the worst possible spots- along bra and underwear lines, armpits, in the folds of back fat, along your groin, not gonna lie- I even have two in my buttcrack. Talk about hitting below the belt! My poor mother did some weeding when she visited and ended up with 24 bites herself. I'm so sorry. They itch for about three weeks and the jury seems to think that it's best to not scratch them open due to histamines and less chance of secondary infection.

So there's no red, white and blue here, just fading black and blue bruises from my IVs, pink from the insect bites, and a depressing lack of tan! In the meant to be comforting words of my radiation doc, "not for forever, just for this summer." *sigh* Whatever you say, Doc.

Chemo #2, check!

 Okay gang, I'm officially halfway done with the AC part of chemo. Two down, two more to go. This time I get a three week break before my next one so that I may feel like myself and enjoy my favorite holiday with some of my favorite peeps! Yippie! 

Dad got to go with me yesterday and kept me company through all the sitting around. I reminded my nurse about "a slow steroid, please" and she said, "oh, no worries, I ALWAYS do that one over a 10 minute span- I don't push it!" There were no issues, no turning tomato red, no weird tingles, nothing. I felt like my heart was beating just a little fast during my bag of Pepcid, which I don't remember happening before, but it could just be the massive chemical dump that was happening and it didn't last long sooooo...

My doc was thrilled with both my bloodwork numbers and my range of motion. It's so nice to have a cheerleader like her. I don't know what parts per million or whatever the units are supposed to be, but my white blood cells were 9.9, hemoglobin is supposed to be at least 10 and mine's 12.3, and platelets are to be over 100 and mine were 167, so she was actually cheering when she read those. I guess those are the magic 3 that they keep a close eye on. 

We talked again about radiation and I told her we have our second opinion consult tomorrow morning. She said her very strong vote was for proton therapy. It'll be interesting to see what Dr. P recommends tomorrow.

We also discussed having my lady parts- ovaries, tubes, and uterus- out in the future, but it's not an immediate thing. At this point, I told her I feel like a Mrs. Potato Head just ditching pieces left and right. "Well, don't need THOSE anymore and who needs hair and I don't need THAt and..." My Dad and my doc both cracked up, but it's the best mental image I can summon up to describe my poor old bod at this point! 😄 As if to drive the point home, my period started today and I find myself musing about the absolute indignities of cancer treatment and planning and all of it:

- mosquitoes who bite me don't even have the decency to die thanks to the chemicals in me which I find absolutely unfair.

- I have no body parts capable of feeding an infant yet my ovaries and uterus care not, apparently, and just keep chugging along though that ship has not only sailed but has been used as a funeral pyre, lit on fire, and sunk. Yet here we are. 

- I got to discuss my bowels and my periods in front of my father, poor thing.

All of it is weird. But I have the best team, the best tribe, a big God and far too much food and I am hanging in there! 

AND happy birthday to my precious Mommeeeeeee today! We all send birthday hugs home with Dad. Miss you and love you bunches! 

Happy hump day, everybody. Take good care of you!

Oh dear

All I can hear in my head is the caretaker of Hogwarts, Argus Filch, sneering, "we aaaaare in trouble now, aren't we?" Clearly I am a member of The Weeding Inept Tribe, or TWIT. 

Look at this disaster zone!

If the saying is true about "one year's seeds is seven years' weeds" then we are going to have tomatoes for the next century. Eeeeeeek. I did start in on the wedding yesterday after over a week of vacation and apparently tons of rain while we were gone. I just about bathed in OFF and still got half a dozen mosquito bites, but the super annoying part was how they'd sing in my ears as they bounced off my skin. It was 88 degrees and I was dripping everything- bug spray, sweat, dirt, haha. It's going to take a lot more work, but the upside is that we won't have to buy tomatoes any time soon! Yeeesh.

 

Summer snippet

Finally watched "Solo" with the boys, who naturally got quite the kick out of it. I don't remember now if there's a creature in it which prompted the discussion, if he was thinking of "Pirates of the Caribbean", or if Liam's imagination is the culprit, but we had a conversation about a space kraken. He quipped, "it'd be a spraken!" Makes sense to me. 

Liam's at Fusion camp this week, so the Resident Nine Year Old spent the day at the pool with me yesterday. He is happy as a clam plummeting off the diving boards, tooling around in the lazy river, soaking up sunbeams on his deck chair while ensconced in my floppy hat, or splashing around in the shallower pool. I am also happy as a clam as I get to sun and read in relative peace. One of Carrie's favorite comic strips is called "Strange Planet" by Nathan W. Pyle, and we have a running joke about the one featuring "star damage". You can find it here ; have fun perusing his strip. It's very entertaining! 

I don't know if everyone is having the same issue with bugs and weeds that we are and if it's because of the incredibly wet spring and the lack of rain now or what, but mosquitoes and some unidentified but apparently ravenous type of bug have eaten me alive this year. I have a sneaking suspicion something crawled into bed with me, twice, and has nibbled all over. The only conclusion I can draw is that I am quite tasty. It leaves itchy raised bumps like a mosquito bite, but the tips fill with fluid like a blister. Any idea what special level of Hades that happens to be? Not a big fan, I must confess. So I'm out there watering the garden before 7 AM in jeans, boots, a hoodie, with my shirt and pants tucked in, gloves, and a baseball cap sprayed with bug repellent, waving the bugs away from my face. This morning I ended up in a cloud of gnats who decided it'd be fun to hover under the brim of my baseball cap. Ugh. How is it that the tomato plants look the same as they did when I transplanted them yet the weeds have covered every inch of available space and then some? I could tear everything out and then the next day they're back again. Persistent little buggers! I do have one tiny cucumber though, yay!

We hosted the June and July birthdays for Dada's Krav Maga group last Saturday. It was a small turnout but that just means we got a lot of fun out of a smaller group of people. And it means we had to clean first. If you want to see our bar clear, some right after we have a party, haha! That's the only time any of our horizontal surfaces are ever free. We also witnessed a kettle of vultures cruising overhead for probably a solid ten minutes. They like to roost on the neighboring funeral home (how fitting is that? I find it funny and a bit spooky) and in the parking lot. They're probably the same ones who circle hopefully whenever I'm riding along the bike trail...

Damon has a bluebird visitor that we've been spotting with some regularity. We used to see him at the bus stop while we waited, but I've seen him swooping around out back above the ditch/creek and he was back out by the bus stop when we retrieved the garbage and recycling bins yesterday. Liam's favorites are still the goldfinches, which we often hear chattering from "up high" in the branches, "po-ta-to chip, po-ta-to chip" and he never fails to light up when he hears them.

We've been going through a lot of Gatorade, library books, bug spray, sunscreen, and ice cream this summer. How about you? The roofers aren't finished yet and I've been trying to hold off on planting some of my flower seeds because they'll end up right where the rest of the old shingles will be dropped. I don't know if I should just give up and get them in the ground and hope for the best or if I should just give up for the year completely. I suppose I could round up enough pots to just try them that way, but that seems like more work than I want to do. Summer is supposed to be a break, right? 

Happy Hump Day!

So this is happening

Spring has sprung. That means it's time to get seeds ready. This is the first year in the new house that we've gotten the grow lights out and had everybody on the counter in time for a head start, haha! 

Pay no mind to the photo bombers. Damon was helping with the watering can and the big kids were goofing off at the table. 

Dada got a bunch planted: cucumbers, strawberries, basil, marigolds, cauliflower, tiny red and tiny yellow tomatoes, Cherokee purple tomatoes, I think two other kinds of tomatoes (I'm sensing a theme) and we have some spots left to fill with squashes. Everybody else can either go straight into the ground and not worry about frost (peas, beets, broccoli) or wait until after the freeze- free date (carrots, lettuce, watermelon, eggplant, nasturtium, chives, lemon grass, and, ahem, wildflowers). We have another small section of ground out back covered with pizza boxes and bricks to kill off the grass. That will be the strawberries-and-friends patch. Apparently strawberries appreciate helpful thyme, which I happen to have seeds for. I was thinking somebody else is supposed to join them... carrots, maybe? 

Dada had another week of training people last week so we didn't get him as much as we'd like. We did our usual homework and karate, had a no school day due to fog, had home group on Friday night when it was 75 and the kids were all running around outside like they'd never experienced fresh air before. Yeah, it was pretty great. Our friends even brought their dogs along, so Triskal had somebody to lounge on the deck with as well! 

We also got the first mosquito bites of 2017. Someone delighted themselves in my sandaled feet and was a bloody, gross mess when I squished her. Carrie won herself several and Damon got a great big one by his right elbow. 

This week is more of the same wash/rinse/repeat. Perhaps the weather will stay a little more consistent and we can squish in some time in the puddles Great Outdoors away from the cause of all the screaming and yelling Wii. Have a wonderful last week of March, wahoo!

Life is Stranger than Fiction, and involves fish

On our way to the bus stop this morning, Carrie and I notice a plastic bag sitting in the driveway. My mind goes immediately to the children's book Turtle, Turtle, Watch Out! It's written by April Pulley Sayre and beautifully illustrated by Annie Patterson.

In it, a baby turtle hatches, escapes the dangers on the beach, makes it into the relative safety of the waters, and is rescued more than once by well-meaning human beings. On one occasion, she is tempted to eat a tasty jellyfish which turns out to be a plastic bag. The bag is yanked out of the water before she can eat it, not knowing it could choke her or clog in her stomach.

So I say, "huh. Jellyfish."

Carrie smiles and picks up the bag, narrowly missing being squirted by the water inside. I tell her to be careful as she's dumping it out (who wants to start the day with wet tennis shoes?), and then I hear her exclaim, "Mama! There's a goldfish in here!"

Sure enough, there IS a goldfish, a for-real, live goldfish in this bag of now-nearly-no-water. I tell her to set it down while there's still some water in there and she, now wide awake, exhorts me to go put said goldfish into our "pond".

So here I go, lowering plastic baggie into the water for a few seconds to let more water in while poor little fishie gets somewhat acclimated to water that is full of dead mosquitoes, dead leaves, quite alive frogs, and goodness knows what else.

By the time the boys head out to the bus and stop to hunt for Mr. Fishie, he's either hiding somewhere, been eaten by a frog (is that possible?), or sucked up against one of the pump vents. What he is not is floating belly up. I warned Carrie he may not even survive until afternoon because of shock.

Dada says he's heard of finding cats and dogs in the driveway... but fish? Who does that!?

Why I Haven't Been Blogging, Excuse #983754

 

Well, frankly, some of us have been a little twisted up:

 

 

While some of us have been dumped at a new-to-us camp in another state:

 

And we've been inundated with family and the corresponding shenanigans one would expect from said family:

 

I guess in short we've been carpe diem-ing. ;)

 

We've been busy living life in the summertime. More karate lessons, walks with friends, watching movies like The Neverending Story and The Fellowship of the Ring, having popsicles and way too much ice cream, smashing even more mosquitoes but not as many as have been sipping off of us, and tons of laundry.

 

Care Bear spent 4 gloriously brother-free days at Camp Michindoh with about 400 other middle school kids from our church (yes, that's 400, not 40) and says the best part was Gold Rush, like Capture the Flag but harder. She had a good girlfriend in her cabin with her and it sounds like the whole week was amazing. We're glad she had the opportunity to try something new. Ask her all about camp!

 

The kids have been into the Legos, the squirt guns, the bristle blocks, the Transformers, the stapler and staple remover, the Smart Links, the comic books, and the pool.

 

We took the extended family to the pool and had the most exciting time yet. A man fell victim to a seizure, which caught Uncle Kelly's attention and help. The pool was cleared and the EMTs got him more stable and out of there. A little while later a storm headed in so it was everyone out of the pool again. We left just as really big drips started splattering the cars and were in a total downpour by the time we got home. Nobody seemed to mind too much, and the cousins were off and running again in no time.

 

The guys mixed up two batches of homemade ice cream, chocolate and vanilla, and special thanks goes to Aunt Evelyn for being our phone-a-friend help in regards to recipe discrepancies. Both turned out excellently. Both are probably almost gone.

 

Grandmama is on her way here now after visiting with Nana. Tomorrow the kids have orthodontist appointments and karate. Today is sheet day. I'm stalling on lunch.

 

*sigh* Time to go. Happy Monday!