But I digress… again.

I present (ha ha get it pre-sent/present – ok, I know that was awful) to you my very first entry into the bloggers quilt festival.

Years ago I saw a tree skirt at Pottery Barn that I fell in love with. Of course, I didn’t want to pay $95 for a tree skirt. I mean, when I was a kid, I think we used an old sheet or something. No way, no how I was paying more than $15 for a tree-skirt. But oh, I had to have that perfect tree skirt, and this was in the height of my Pottery Barn knock off days. (You should see the wine cabinet I made Chris build.)

I’ve had friends bugging me for years to blog about this particular project. I did want to do a post on it on several occasions, but could never drag myself up to the attic to dig it out of its storage box before we put the tree up, and by the time the tree was up, the living room would be such a mess that there was no way I wanted photos of that on my blog.

So here it is. Well loved and not washed until last year… I was so afraid to wash it despite all the dog hair and dust because the only machine sewn seam on the whole thing is between the white background and the red border. Everything else is hand sewn. These days, I wouldn’t worry about hand sewn goods being put through the wash, but this was one of my first projects, and knowing now what I didn’t then, I was terrified that the whole thing would turn into a frayed mess in the washing machine.

But last year, after all the presents were opened and the piles of trash in the living room were picked up, I noticed a big gray smudge on the once white background. From the dog lying on the skirt. So I had to suck it up and wash the thing. I figured if it fell apart I’d just make another one. Though, I must admit that I did consider reenforcing it before the washing. But when I pulled the tree skirt from the dryer last year, I saw that now my beloved skirt was not only in one unfrayed (and clean!) piece, but it was also all freshly-washed quilty crinkly. I was elated. (I was also glad that the red border didn’t bleed all over the white background.)

The quilting on this bad boy shows me that by the time I made it, I had come a long way from the first quilt, and had some idea of what good hand-quilting was supposed to look like. Or at least what traditional quilt-show worthy hand-quilting looks like. I only say that because these days big visible stitches in hand-quilting seem to be the cool thing to do. You can also see that I didn’t “properly” bind this quilt either. I merely rolled the backing fabric to the front and sewed it down. I’ve done that on a few quilts too, because sometimes it’s just the only thing that will work. I’m sure that quilt-show judges would ding me for that, too. (Yes, Amanda, I’m talking to you… wink wink).

And just because… a gratuitous kid photo. Apparently she likes lying on the quilt as much as the dog.

Tuesday morning, July 5th. The day before my sweet boy’s first birthday. I buckled him into his car seat to take him to the sitter (my mom) so I can go to work. But damn. I forgot the container of creamer to take to work, so I ran back in to get it. Back outside I remember that we’d been working on my dad’s house over the weekend and the shop vac with nasty gunk in it was in the back end of my car. So I open the tailgate and put the shop vac into the garage. Come back around and pick up the creamer and pull the tailgate shut… and that’s when I was all of a sudden on the ground wondering why my teeth hurt so bad.

Yeah. Genius. Ow ow ow. Holy shit, my head hurts…. I crawled into the car from the passenger side and fished around in my purse for my phone while holding my head with the other hand and dialed Chris and told him to come home. NOW. I knew he would think I was over reacting, but I was really proud of myself for not crying and having the presence of mind to actually call him before collapsing in the driveway. That’s when the baby started screaming. That’s when I noticed my head was gushing blood.

Somehow I managed to get a towel out of the kitchen and put it on my head. And all I could think of was the pain. And that I was very lucky that the baby was already buckled into his seat. He was pissed off about it, but I knew he was safe. I was also really glad that I didn’t get any blood in my Coach purse. Yeah, I have my priorities straight. Really.

I think Chris was pretty shocked when he pulled up to the house a few minutes later to see me bleeding and rocking in the driveway saying “oh shit oh shit oh shit” over and over again.

Next thing I knew, we were in the ER and they were asking me if I blacked out. I didn’t think so (though now I do think I did as this disjointed recollection clearly — ha ha — shows). Then we were sitting in the waiting area for what seemed like forever while some dude kept telling me that I had blood running down my arm. No kidding, Sherlock, really?

What happened to blood being the ER’s equivalent to a fast pass at Disney? Cue really bad elevator music.

Fast forward a few minutes. Now I’m sitting on a table in a freezing exam room with a wad of gauze stuck to my head with some sort of numbing gunk on it, blood drying on my pants and arms. Meanwhile, the doctors and nurses are running around freaking out because the handout on the tetanus shot says that people who’ve had Guillain-Barre syndrome, might be contraindicated. Whatever.

Lucky me. While they were trying to locate an immunologist, I needed to go…. badly. So I found a restroom. But on the way out my gloppy gauze fell off my head and landed — yep, you guessed it — gooey side down on the nasty hospital bathroom floor. Joy.

Twenty minutes later the doctor comes back in and tells me he thinks that I could have the tetanus shot because my reaction was to a flu shot and the tetanus shot doesn’t have the same ingredients that caused my reaction. Eh? I didn’t care anymore, I was going to get the shot anyway. I’m pretty sure my neurologist would have told me to get it.

Now the doctor wants to go ahead and do the staples in my head — because staples are better and don’t require shaving hair — but the nurse has brought the wrong staple gun in. That thing was huge. I swear it was big enough to staple an elephant who just had a c-section together. After the doctor finds the smaller stapler, I finally get to point out that the numbing gunk has been off my head for a while, and that maybe we should put more on there. The doctor declines and says it will be ok, it hasn’t been long enough to wear off. Um, ok.

Five staples and much pain later (yeah the numbing effect didn’t wear off at all), we finally got out of there. Chris took pictures, but I’ll spare you the gore. They forgot to mention that I might have a concussion. Which I didn’t really figure out on my own until a couple of days later when I ran a red light in my foggy stupor and realized that maybe I shouldn’t be driving… especially with the kids in the car. The fourth day, I woke up and everything was clear again, and that’s when I realized I must have been concussed. I’m telling you, top rate speedy care at that ER, baby. All for the bargain price of $1500 bucks or something.

So that’s how my awesome weekend ended. I suppose it could have been worse.

If they have programs for children with special needs, why can’t they adjust the curriculum for children whose skills are far beyond the lessons being taught in their classroom? In my opinion (which is worthless at best) gifted children *are* special needs cases. At the very least, they could skip the child ahead to keep her challenged. But that is not generally allowed either. Children must be grouped according to age. For some unknown reason, they think that putting a younger child with a group of older children at the same academic level is unacceptable. Chris said it best, “No child left behind means no child gets ahead.”

Have you seen the test for graduation from school in 1895? I’m willing to bet that the percentage of students graduating today who could pass is remarkably low. I know I can’t pass it. Schools are so focused on passing standardized tests, that they forget to make learning fun. Children are filed into a classroom, expected to sit still and pay attention and go over the same monotonous bullshit every day. For the students who have already mastered the days lessons, it is a painful, boring process. And what do young kids do when they’re bored? Well, I know what MY kid does when she is bored, and that is entertain herself. Unfortunately there isn’t much way for her to entertain herself in her classroom. Her notebooks and crayons are put away out of reach. Without thinking about it (because she is FIVE) she begins singing to herself or wiggling. And when a child demonstrates these behaviors the first thing school administrators and teachers do is jump to the conclusion that she is ADHD.

I can’t tell you how angry this makes me. Not because in some cases they are probably right, but because in this case, I told the teacher MONTHS AGO that my child was bored. And that this is how she behaves when she is bored. For example, if we take her to a restaurant and she is given a coloring sheet, she will happily color it until the food arrives. However, if we forget to bring paper and colors, or the restaurant doesn’t have special kids activities, she wiggles, and sings and tries to get up and walk around.

But ADHD is out of the question. Alexis can sit for HOURS and color. She can sit for HOURS and write a story. She can read a 150 page book to me in one go. I don’t think her attention span has any deficit at all.

From what I can understand, the reading lessons in her classroom consist of staring at a sight word on the overhead projector and saying it out-loud with the class for several minutes. Can you imagine how boring it must be to read the word “the” 50 times? Especially to a child who is starting to read chapter books to herself?

But according to her teacher, “It seems to me that being challenged is not so much the issue as is learning interpersonal/social skills”. What a load of crap. My child can carry on an intelligent and engaging conversation with an adult. “[S]inging the Good morning, Weather, Days of the Week and Month of the Year songs with the class [and] counting the number of days we’ve been at school on our number chart” is probably BORING.

But hell, what do I know? I’m just her mother.

** I’m half tempted to post the entire email thread here just to prove what an idiot this teacher is.

As my co-workers will tell you, there are always cards to be played. One of our key requirements for new hires is that they can shuffle large decks of cards quickly.

The lunch wheel must be spun NOW. Eew, no not that place spin again! No, again! Deciding where to go for lunch can take a good half hour. And after lunch we’re heading over to the bookstore for some research – on novels and comics and craft magazines.

I must checkout the kitchen to make sure there is no new free candy or something. I need to get countless bottles of water and cups of coffee. I need to stand around the brewing coffee pot and shoot the shit with my friends. Oh and now I have to pee 20 times in a day because of all the coffee and water I just drank.

I’m sorry that I fell asleep in that meeting last week. I forgot my laptop so I could hide behind it and plan my next 5 vacations. It takes serious scheduling to get 5 weeks of vacation out of the 3 weeks I’m given. Now that’s time management!

I’ve got phone calls to make, evites to check, appointments to schedule and errands to run. There are TV shows to review, video games to play, parties to plan, and websites to write. And someone should really solve that Rubik’s cube, it’s been sitting unfinished for a couple of hours now.

Don’t go on vacation, because then I’ll have to deface your cube in some way, and that takes planning. Do you know how long it takes to collect enough post-it notes to cover your entire workspace? Coming up with an original idea is just too much work, better to just google it and steal someone else’s prank.

Whew, I’m tired. I think tomorrow I’ll work from home.

* If you’re my boss and you’re reading this. It’s all a joke. Really. Besides, don’t you have a meeting to go to or something?

I wrote the post with the sole reason of telling people my story. I never said that anyone shouldn’t get a flu shot. I told my story in the hopes that people who were looking for information on the flu shot would find both sides of the argument. I told my story as a way to face what happened in full. I told my story because it’s interesting.

I want people to THINK about what they are putting into their body before blindly following the sheep to the slaughterhouse. THINK about what’s in that shot. Did you know it has mercury, formaldehyde, and steroids in it? This video is meant to be funny, but it’s also informative. And sad though it may be, his version of the flu shot might actually be more effective than the actual vaccine because it contains the ACTUAL STRAIN that is out there. Did you know that the flu shot given is just antibodies against 3 PREDICTED strains. As if all the chemicals weren’t bad enough, now we’re throwing ESP into the mix.

If propaganda isn’t your style, then maybe this is something to think about. There are years when the flu shot is in short supply, and the people that REALLY should get a shot can’t because Joe Blow down the street got a shot even though he’s not in any of the risk groups. I cited the CDC when I said that the shot is meant for people with a high risk of complications from contracting influenza.

People who should get vaccinated each year are:

1. People at high risk for complications from the flu, including:
   • Children aged 6 months until their 5th birthday,
   • Pregnant women,
   • People 50 years of age and older, and
   • People of any age with certain chronic medical conditions;
   • People who live in nursing homes and other long term care facilities.
2. People who live with or care for those at high risk for complications from flu.

Believe it or not, I’m not one of those people who refuses to vaccinate her children. Honestly, for most diseases that have an immunization it’s a really good idea. I mean, do we really want to reintroduce Polio or Diptheria back into the populations. Hell no. But the flu (and chicken pox) rarely kills individuals who are young and healthy to start with.

But you know what? The bottom line is that this is MY website, MY blog, and MY story to tell. And that’s really all the justification and explaination I should need.

About 11 pm, I check the medicine cabinet for some leftover cough syrup. Score!! Hydromet from LAST Christmas when I had the Cough. Never mind that it’s been expired for nearly a year. I down a couple teaspoons and head off to bed. About a half hour later, I’m hanging on to the bowl of the toilet gasping for air as I knelt there and offered up my tortilla soup to the porcelain gods. Back to bed. Of course, now I’m coughing again, and I’m pretty sure all the drugs I just took are somewhere on their way to a lake with 3-eyed fish. At least they won’t be coughing, pregnant fish with RLS. Lucky them.

Sunday wasn’t much better. I coughed and coughed and coughed, but at least I had the foresight not to take anymore year old, EXPIRED codiene products. Whenever I’m sick, Alexis gets to do and eat pretty much whatever she wants because as I lay dieing in bed, she bugs me incessantly. Mommy, can I have… Mommy, can I play… YES, SURE, DO WHATEVER. Go play with knives, swim in the pool unsupervised, drink some bleach but just LET ME SLEEP!

By 2 o’clock, I’ve had a couple of broken hours of sleep and I feel like the worst mommy of the year. I called my mom in tears and she offered to come get Alexis. So after a quick temper tantrum about “I’m going to miss you sooo much mommy”, Alex agrees to go play at grandma’s if she can play “trash can”. (This is apparently when my mother stuffs her into a sleeping bag and carries her around like a bag of trash – She never played games like that with US… She would just tickle us until we gasped with our last choking breath “I love you sweet, beautiful mommy.” And yes, I do that to Alexis, too.)

When Chris brought her home later that evening, I was, at least in a better mood, if not sicker than before. My sweet (beautiful) Chris makes me dinner and tea and tucks me into bed by 7:45.

So here I am on Monday morning, when I am SUPPOSED to be having two glorious days to myself while Chris is at work, and Alexis is at school. Hell, I even have appointments at the spa. Will I enjoy them? I’ll probably be hacking up nasty snot balls during the whole thing. I really pity the masseuses who are stuck with me today. I suspect I’ll infect them as well. But what do I care? I get to have a 45 minute foot rub.

So I was knitting along on this new sweater I was starting for myself, when I realize that it’s twisted. So I decide to “untwist” it by moving it to another set of needles and then back. Um, DUH it was a circle, and twisted (think mobius strip except with more than 1/2 twist) Now I have 2 inches of sweater that I have to pull out because it’s so damn twisted. (I went searching for a picture of this… apparently I am the ONLY MORON ON THE PLANET WHO HAS DONE THIS!!!) And did I mention this would be the THIRD time I frogged it? Grrrr.

The morning started with me *edited*…. Honestly, I’m not TRYING to be difficult. I’m just scatterbrained like my mother. It’s GENETIC, ok?

Then I call my mom (yes, the scatterbrained one, whom I aspire to be like, dammit!) when I’m on the way to pick up Alexis to see if I can come get the video camera when I’m done. I needed the camera because her very first school program was today, and Chris couldn’t make it because he’s taking a class that’s on Tuesday nights. When I pick up Alexis she informs me that she got in trouble again in class (she was in trouble yesterday, too). AUGH!

We head to get the camera, and as I’m pulling into my mother’s neighborhood, she calls and asks if I’m coming. I tell her I’ll be there in just a couple of minutes, but my step father is in the background barking because he is hungry and wants to go eat. JESUS!

Anyway, at least the show was super cute. Alexis was a bit nervous at the beginning, and had to pee so bad at the end that she was dancing, but in the middle she did great. I hope the video is good, and I hope I can steal stills from it.

So, crappy day, but ended up good, and I have nothing interesting to say.

In late July, we had a huge family crisis. I’m not going to say what it is, because it’s not really my thing to tell, but it was the thing that caused Chris and I to head to therapy. My mom’s reaction to that was “be careful, sometimes those therapists will ruin your marriage”. We weren’t too worried about this, but we were cautious going in. We both knew that we wanted the relationship to work, and to do that we needed to learn to communicate.

I’ve been depressed and on meds for it for most of the last 17 years. Until very recently, the only time I was drug free was when I was pregnant, and the 17 months I was nursing. So I know myself, and I know that I need to be medicated to be tolerable to myself, and to others.

About two weeks after we started seeing the therapist (whom we both loved, BTW), I made the incredibly stupid decision to change my medication. I’d been on this particular drug at a moderately high dose for over a year, and I was so damn tired all the time. My doctor and I went through everything we could think of before dropping the meds and nothing came back positive or worked at all. So we decided to switch to a drug that I’ve never taken before because it is contraindicated for people with a history of seizures. But it’s been a really long time since I had a seizure (knock wood), and there was never a reason found for me to have them. So I was willing to take the risk, as this is a drug that works very, very well for my mother and brother.

My doctor wanted me to wean off my current meds, and then see what it was like to be drug free for a bit. I was to call him when I felt I needed to be prescribed the new med. The plan was to wean to half of my current dose each week. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy because as always, I had done my research. I knew I was going to feel horrible physically, but I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming depression that would take hold of me. By the time I was off the old meds, I was feeling so shitty that I was working from home 3 days a week, just to spare my co-workers my irritability.

The feelings of worthlessness, and fatigue, and hopelessness engulfed me. I couldn’t drive my car without thinking about driving it into a ditch. The only thing in the world that kept me going was my daughter. There was no way I could bear for her to grow up without a mommy.

I called the doctor for the new medication, and started it the next day. I knew it was going to take some time to start working so I also went to visit the acupuncturist. Now, I’m usually a skeptic, but the first time I went, she put a needle in my “happy” spot, and I smiled for like 10 days. I almost *never* smile (not because I’m unhappy, just because I don’t smile). So I thought she could help.

She did help. For 24-48 hours after I would see her, I would feel BETTER. I could bear life, go to work, joke with my co-workers (who really are the greatest bunch of guys ever). But in the end the depression was stronger so I called in the big guns and found a psychiatrist. (I always read that as Pee-Sigh-Kye-A-Trist — thanks Animanics)

When I called the office, the had to ask me some questions and see if I really qualified to be seen. WTF? I almost started bawling on the phone. The next day they called me back to make an appointment… two weeks later! I thought I was going to die. I didn’t think I could handle another 2 weeks.

Amazingly, the next day, the three week mark after starting the new drug, I felt better. It could have been the drug, it could have been the weight of the world lifting off my shoulders because I *was* going to do something. I don’t know. I don’t care. It was a huge relief. By no means was I “all better”, but at least I could cope.

When I finally got to the Pee-sychatrist, I told him all of the stuff going on, and he was awesome. He wasn’t the kind that says “tell me how that makes you feeeeeel”. He even encouraged me to go back to school if that’s what I wanted. He told me that if I wanted to be the nurse or doctor, that I would probably be MORE sought out because I have a background other than medicine. THAT surprised me.

Oh, yeah, and he doubled my dose of meds. This was an experiment. If I was feeling better on this med, could I feel “all better” if we doubled it? Awesomely, he just told me to double my pills instead of prescribing the higher dose single pill. That way, if I needed or wanted to, I could drop back to my old dose.

The first several weeks were pretty awful physically. My stomach hurt so badly. I really couldn’t eat much, but I was forcing some food down.

(I’ve always had an issue with food. Whenever I would go out anywhere I would think, “where can I get something to eat or drink?”. I would count the minutes between meals. I couldn’t pass a cookie or a doughnut or almost anything in the office without eating one – or more. This, of course, lead to a few extra pounds. Twenty or so. I’d been trying very hard for the last six months to lose those pounds. I weighed and measured and wrote down and counted the calories of EVERYTHING I ate. Yes even the two cheerios that fell on the counter when I was making breakfast for Alexis. I had been eating 1500 calories per day, and swimming a mile and a half every day all summer and I GAINED weight. WTF?)

All of a sudden, I wasn’t thinking about food anymore. I could actually work through lunch and not really notice. I wasn’t getting in my car and trying to figure out where the nearest coffee shop was on my way. I wasn’t looking longingly at the crap on the table at work.

I lost 10 lbs pretty quickly. (Again, knock virtual wood) I have hope that I’ll lose the other 10 and finally fit back into the 15 pairs of too small jeans or so in my closet. (I already made it into 2 and now one of them is too big)

So all of this long story is just to say that changing the meds has made me happy. I feel GOOD. I haven’t felt this way in, well, ever. I have energy, I have spirit. I have a libido! Chris and I are doing well, at least *I* think so. Sure the stress of life gets me down a bit, but being up more than down is so much different than what I have ever experienced.

I have hope.

I just spent an hour over at dooce.com reading archives. I’ve been reading from the very beginning for about 4 days now. But I can’t stare at the computer anymore. It’s making my eyes and my head hurt in that special way that only happens when there is a big ass smudge on one of the lenses of my glasses.

I’d better be careful, or I’ll end up blowing the $200 in my paypal account on stuff from Etsy. God knows I don’t need any more stuff. And I’d probably buy something that would need to be *made into* something else. So it would probably sit in the sewing room untouched like the 15 or so unfinished/unstarted projects in there.

Bleh. Feh. Meh. Whatever is your pleasure. I’m gonna go wander aimlessly from room to room some more.

And if that wasn’t bad enough. I find myself in one of the pictures on the FRONT of her flickr page. In fact, I’m in the picture that is the image to click on to get to the wedding photos. There I am in all my drunken glory (and oh am I a mushy idiot when I’m drunk) hanging on Sarah’s stepmother with my left boob practically hanging out of my dress! Oh, and my arms look fat. And WHY am I always the person who is practically horizontal in pictures?

Tiffany, I will get you for this.