Goodbye 2015!

Goodbye 2015!

It was a good year, even though I forgot to post anything on the blog. This year, I'm trying to get back in the habit of writing.

In 2015 we bought our first "real house" along with Brian's parents. They have closed the bed & breakfast and are in the process of selling the house on the coast and moving permanently in with us. Currently, they're staying with us for about a week and a half at a time and it's working out well for everyone involved. Fortunately, the house has a master suite, so everybody can have their own space. Very important for when small people have nightmares and wake up in the middle of the night, stumbling into someone's bedroom looking for comfort.

Mental-health-wise, it was a good  year. After spending 2014 trying medications seemingly at random to help with the postpartum depression/my regular depression which returned with a vengeance, I finally got on a good "cocktail" of medications. (My co-workers at the county took a vote and told me how much they liked it!)

Mimi started 2nd grade, then promptly told me "Mama, it's really embarrassing when you tell stories about me." So even though she's so cute it's hard not to gush, I probably won't be commenting on her doings as much.

Carol has started talking in complete sentences. She didn't bother until she was 3, because Mimi made sure she got most of her needs & wants met and "interpreted" for her. Her first complete multi-subject sentence was "Me hug the kitty that lives under our deck."

Which brings me to FizBit. Although he theoretically belongs to the next door neighbors, he resides under our deck. Why? He's seen the writing on the wall and decided he'd rather run the risk of being hugged by an overly affectionate 3 year old than regularly live with his 10, 7 and 4 year old humans. Who like to do things like dress him up in doll clothes and pretend he's a puppet. It's not the same thing as having a "real" cat, but it's a nice substitute.

Carol likes having a cat around so much that she regularly hugs him and says things like "Me love you kitty." And then insists that she herself is a cat for the rest of the day. When she was a newborn, her cries sounded like mewing because she was a bit premature, but this is slightly ridiculous.

"Carol, it's time to use the potty!"
"But mama, me kitty! Kitties no need to use the potty."

So on this blog, I'm just going to refer to her as Kitty.

Totally worth it!

I've been doing a lot more spinning lately. While the several tons of fiber I've accumulated over the years does provide a nice amount of insulation, it's been taking up space. Without turning into yarn. In spite of my best efforts, no amount of wishful thinking makes roving spontaneously metamorphose into yarn.
Apparently, I forgot about the most important step of the process to change the fiber from nice fluffy batts of wool to yarn I can knit with. Spinning!
Carol is walking (when she feels like it) and crawling all over the place. Now that she's fully mobile, I'm trying to train her to ignore the spinning wheel. She'd have to try hard to injure herself with it, but she's a clever lass. I'm certain she'll figure out a way.
So every time she touches the spinning wheel, whether it's in motion or not, I slap her hand and say "no touching the spinning wheel!"
As I was spinning some silk today, the drive band kept falling off the wheel. Carol, of course, tried to "help" me fix it. After that, when I didn't notice that she had been playing with the wheel, she got my attention and did it again. She spun the wheel, and dutifully held out her hand to me for a disciplinary smack. I could almost see the gears turning in her baby head.
"I want to play with the beautiful spinning thingy, but every time I touch it, Mama smacks my hand away. But if that's the price of playing with it I think I can live with it. Maybe I should make this process as easy for Mama as possible--just smack my hand so I can get back to playing with it!"

"Are you on meds?" and other questions

Can I just say that I'm sick of answering stupid questions about my mental health? I hate the stigma that surrounds mental health problems, but I harbor an even greater hatred for the well-meaning but completely asinine questions people ask about mental health.

"Are you taking any meds for depression? I saw a commercial for...."
Yes, I have major depression. Yes, I am taking prescription medication. (No, I will not share.) The rest is none of your business.

"Is it contagious?"
Depression? Under normal, abnormal and even highly impractical circumstances, no. Not even if you watch a lot of cable news, and then the depression just gets worse instead of better. (Although I suppose if you watched cable news with other people and they got depressed, you could theoretically claim that major depression is contagious, but then you'd have to count the cable news as a vector so it still wouldn't be directly communicable person-to-person.)

"If you're a psychiatric nurse, why aren't your children better-behaved?"
They're CHILDREN. Given that they behave better than half my co-workers and three-quarters of my relatives, I'm not sure what my choice of profession has to do with this discussion. If I wanted robot slaves for offspring, I would have created robot slaves instead of reproducing in the conventional manner.

Carol!

Due to growth issues, Carol came early. She's now almost four weeks old. The Mimi says she likes being a big sister, and seems to be responding well to the change. Then again, she's not the one getting up to feed the baby every three hours!

The Mimi loves to take pictures. Here's one she took of Carol with her favorite stuffed bunny, Monty:

 

Time to start adding money to Carol's counseling fund!

Preterm Labor: the Sequel

Over the last few months, I've been too busy to blog. Either that, or the self-esteem issues that come with my chronic depression have done a good job of convincing me that blogging is pointless because "no one wants to hear what you have to say anyway." Possibly both.
I didn't even bother to post the news about our "new addition." But now due to mandatory medical leave, I seem to have time for writing once more.
Shirley's fervent prayers for a little sister (the week where she prayed "and if the baby is a little brother--I guess I'll keep it" was particularly memorable)  are in the process of being answered. Carol Marzetta Mackey should show up for her scheduled C-section November 27th.
However, last week, Carol apparently got tired of waiting and I wound up in the local ER with contractions every 3-4 minutes. ("Dr. Obstetrician was looking over your chart from home and said he was really impressed with how strong and regular they were" isn't something you really want to hear from the staff. Unless they're giving out prizes--but all I got was some drugs that make me a cranky space cadet.)
So now I'm home for the remainder of this week and taking meds to stop the contractions. The meds help stop the contractions, but the side effects are a pain. I've got a massive constant headache, dizziness, feel exhausted, nauseous, anxious, and can't concentrate on anything for more than a couple of minutes. It's like having mono with a side order of paranoia.

In Memoriam

Shirley T., Brian's amazing and wonderful adopted grandmother, went to be with the Lord last month.  She was a great lady, and I'm glad I got the chance to know her, but we all miss her. I'm also glad the Mimi got to know her namesake some before she died.

Last summer, the Mimi wasn't getting the whole "great-grandparent" concept, so we started calling Shirley and her husband "SuperNana" and "Super PopPop." That was the week before this picture was taken. At Shirley and Jim's 60th anniversary party, the Mimi walked up to Shirley and promptly asked "SuperNana, where's your costume?"





"I'm so awesome I don't need a costume,"Shirley said, right before she gave the Mimi a large stuffed pink and white glittery unicorn wearing a sequined jumpsuit and a pink marabou feather-trimmed bolero. (It used to sing "You are my Sunshine" when you hugged it, but some minor surgery fixed that.)



And a picture of my mother-in-law trying to look nonchalant at a formal dinner party while carrying the "it's so pink and fluffy I could die!" unicorn around:

When we went to Shirley's funeral a couple of weeks ago, the Mimi looked around the packed room very wide-eyed before saying "Wow, SuperNana's got a huge fan club!" And we were all blessed to be part of that club.

Family, visible and invisible

On Saturday, we went to a family gathering to help our favorite cousin move. Shirley wore her Perry costume.  One of the cousin's friends inquired how we were related to her.

"Jay's my cousin, and I'm also Perry the Platypus' father," Brian explained as he pointed out the Mimi.

"I'm Shirley the Platypus!" the Mimi wailed.

Last month she announced she wanted a little sister. I told her she'd have to pray harder for it, because I was already doing what I could.  That's when she decided that Perry the Platypus was not only her invisible friend, but also her imaginary little sister. Does that make me Perry the Platypus' mother?

Showing off my ignorance

As I watched this news clip this morning, I found myself thinking. (Always a dangerous pastime.) And I realized there's a lot of room for religious diversity in America, and I'm thankful for the church I'm in. Apart from the fact that to join the church of the Nazarene one only needs to agree to "Jesus, Son of God, Saviour," I'm not good at conformity.

Reasons I'd make a terrible Amish person:
I'm posting this on the Internet.
After this I'm going to check my e-mail, watch a couple of videos, and sing along with the radio as I drive to work.
The bonnets are cute, but I'd have a really hard time growing my hair out.
I love buttons!
I can't sew.
Just because I know how to cook on a wood stove doesn't mean I want to.
Attending school only until eigth grade is so 1800s... wait a second...
If orange traffic triangles on the buggy are "too showy," I'm guessing glitter is off the list. (Kudos to the neighbor for politely and concisely explaining to the reporter why this was an issue important enough that people were willing to invoke their right to civil disobedience and go to jail over.)
Add more in the comments if you think of them!

Shirley the Platypus!

I haven't been posting many pictures of the Mimi lately. That's because she spends most days running around in only her underpants. While we don't mind as long as she follows some basic ground rules (if someone comes over you must put on clothing, you must wear clothes to leave the house, etc.) it has cut down on the number of pictures we've taken of her.

She dressed up as Perry the Platypus for Halloween. (I crocheted the hat, and the rest is a matching teal sweatsuit.)

Now, not only is that costume the only outfit she's willing to wear, but she's claimed Perry as her imaginary friend. They're currently playing hide and seek in the living room. ( I drew the line when she claimed that Perry wanted chocolate for lunch.)

Cheaper than Xanax

I've started up a new/old hobby--counted cross stitch. When I was a child, family members would give me cross stitch kits for every birthday, Christmas, etc. I really enjoyed cross stitch, but since I had serious problems with the whole "counted" part of it, none of my projects turned out well. 

Beguiled by the prospect of amazing projects like this one, I've taken it up again. (I've never felt the need for zebra skin rug before, but I do now!) So far I'm working on a very simple geometric rug for a dollhouse and it's turning out well.

If my hubris led me to overestimate my needlepoint skills and I fail at it, it'll be okay. I may spend 30 hours working on something which is best used to wrap up catnip and make a very decorative cat toy. It's a soothing, relaxing craft (profanity? How dare you blankety blank blank suggest that I should moderate my language?!) and way cheaper than most of my meds.

Feelin' like a redneck

When we were in SF, one of the guys at church asked me "What is your ethnicity?"
And I relplied that while there's some Germans, Poles, and Native Americans in my family history, "I'd have to describe my cultural group as "redneck."" And for the most part, that's still very true.

Brian is pastoring again, and he's very happy about it. It's obvious that he's really missed having a place to serve. He's now associate pastor at an area church. (And we didn't even have to move. Yippeee!)

Our new church has a large Native American population. About half the church either is affiliated with a tribe, or related to/married to tribal members. And just like in Nome and San Francisco, I have to accept that there's a lot of things I just won't understand because this isn't my culture. But sometimes it gets kind of perplexing...

One Sunday as I was dealing with the very social Mimi's desire to run all over the church and "talk to my people, Mama!" I heard a voice behind me.

"Hellooo, my Native American friend!" It was the woman who was greeting people at the door, who identifies herself as Chocktaw and Cherokee.
I looked in the direction she was facing and saw that she was talking to the chairwoman of the Grand Ronde Tribal Council! Apparently this is a running gag between the two of them.

Fun with telemarketers

We get calls from telemarketers all the time. When it's a recorded message "robo-call" we hang up immediately, but if the company cares enough to hire real people to solicit our money, then we can care enough to use a little creativity as we tell them no. Sometims our excuses are even true.

"Hi, we're collecting funds for the Oregon Special Olympics--"
"We get all kinds of weird phone calls that are phishing scams, so I'm sure you can understand if I'm a bit skeptical. There's a gal at my work who is really a coach for a Special Olympics basketball team, so I'm just going to give her money.""But the Oregon Special Olympics--"
"Is a great organization. But because I'm not sure if you actually will give them money, I'm going to give ten bucks to Chrissy at work, because she will." [click]

"Hi, this is Your Current Bank, and--"
"Really? It's eight o'clock at night here. You've always been nine-to-five people. I had no idea you'd extended your hours."
"We wanted to make sure you knew about our life insurance division..."
"Curent Insurance Company has been good to us, and we really like them. They always send us those little pocket appointment  books every Christmas."
"We have life insurance, and if you sign up now the first month's premium is free! It's a limited time offer..."
"You called in the middle of my daughter's bedtime routine, so my time is limited too." [click]

"Hello, this is the Oregon State Police Chief's Association, and we're raising money for our campaign against methamphetamine."
"Meth?! That's where all my business comes from!"
"Um, okay...We're trying to make neighborhoods safer and limit the damage meth is doing to our communities."
Belatedly, the though occurs to me that this one may actually be legitimate. "You actually are calling from the Police Chief's Association?"
"Yes, and can we count on your support this year?
"I'm sure you have promotional material to mail us. Send it to us and we'll think about it."

Quote of the week

"Unfortunately the Ativan I took to deal with my anxiety about going to meetings has made me sleepy during this meeting and that makes me anxious," I overheard one of my co-workers say at the weekly staff meeting yesterday.

And that pretty much sums up my experiences with antidepressants. The trick seems to be finding a medication whose side effects don't mess up my life worse than the depression does.

However, I am back to knitting. I've been working on several pairs of socks based on variants of the modular hexagon pattern in the "Think Outside the Sox" book. It's nice to be at least somewhat back to my usual routine.

When I'm in this mood, yarn is just expensive string

I've been having a bit of a funk lately. And when I say "funk" I mean "the blues, but without the catchy music."

One of the bad things about a depressive episode (apart from the appetite and sleep disturbances, the thoughts of guilt and hopelessness, etc.) is that I lose interest in some of my hobbies. I'm still spinning yarn, but I've lost all interest in knitting at the moment. Sure, it looks like fun, but I just can't find the energy to care about it.

It may be a bit before I find the time/energy/motivation to get back to blogging regularly. It may be even longer before I can write anything that I consider clever enough to be worth posting on the blog.

In the mean time, I'm keeping in close contact with my mental health person and doing what I tell my patients to do: keep going to therapy and keep taking your perscriptions, because it works eventually. 

And if it's not working enough and you can't get ahold of your doc/therapist and you're thinking of harming yourself, go to the local ER or call 1-800-SUICIDE or 1-800-273-TALK, both numbers of the National Suicide Hotline in the US.

Time for pictures!

The Mimi turned three this month. (Although she seems to have gotten her units of measurement muddled and keeps telling people "I'm three pounds!")

She's also decided that she's a superhero and "borrows" her father's sweatshirt for a costume. "I'm SuperMimi!"
"So what do you do?"
"I'm SuperMimi!" Saving the world from evil one stuffed animal tea party at a time.

You know you're from a small town when...

One of my friends from St. John is heavily pregnant. She asked for suggestions on how to trigger labor. Another friend had this suggestion : "When my mom was pregnant with me the men in at the St. John Hardware told her to try a big chew of Copenhagan, mow the lawn, and if all else fails tell my dad to start harvest. I was born on the first day of harvest that year. Mom swears she never tried the chew though."

How I spent my weekend

On Saturday, Cat, the Mimi and I went to the spin-in in Newport. In spite of trying on (and discarding) four different outfits that morning, the Mimi still managed to be clad in nothing other than training pants when Cat arrived so we could car-pool. (And then decided to wear the first outfit of the day.)
The Mimi was amazingly well-behaved for the spin-in. She held my hand (and hissed "no touching, Mama!" every time I visited a fiber booth) and was polite to people. My father-in-law was kind enough to keep an eye on her for an hour or so, letting me sit and spin with people. When I told him I didn't want him to think I was dumping the kid on him so I could goof off, he said, "No, you're going to sit and spin. In our family, that's perfectly fine work." Love the in-laws!
The best part was seeing the expression on his face when someone asked the Mimi "what are you going to do after lunch?" and she said "gonna take over the world!"
I made out like a bandit, if I do say so myself. I picked up a pound of miscelaneous longwool for ten bucks, got some silk hankies (I felt inspired by the Yarn Harlot and I've already dyed them up) and even found some silk/camel fiber at an insanely good price. I'm out of mad money until March, but find it hard to care.
Because the Mimi is prone to crawling in my lap while I'm using the drop spindle and saying "me help make yarn?" and "helping" me spin, she now has a very pink starter spindle and some equally pink wool roving that's for her. Baby's first fiber stash!

Anxiety disorder du jour

I've been knitting lots of hats lately. I've no idea where the camera is, and no motivation to take pictures of them, but at last count I have completed three hats in as many weeks. I have six more in progress at varying stages of completion.
While I still despise knitting scarves, I'm finding that hats are a good way of using up all my sample skeins and remnant balls of handspun yarn that I keep for sentimental value. Not only are stripes colorful and fashionable on hats, but my CDO (like OCD, but the letters are in alphabetical order, like they are supposed to be) doesn't kick in quite so bad when I'm knitting hats.
As I see it, a scarf should be fashionable, or warm, or soft, or at least pleasant-looking enough that you're not ashamed to take it out in public. All a hat needs to do is fit on someone's head. The fact that there's only a half row of fuzzy pink yarn on a hat project seems an appropriate way to use the yarn and add color--but if it were on a scarf I'd feel the need to rip it out if I didn't have enough yarn to repeat the stripe at the other end for "symmetry."

Found a new pet project

I try to keep my political leanings to myself on this blog. Sometimes I even succeed. But I feel no such qualms when it comes to sex education and STD prevention. Sharing knowledge about contraception and how to avoid preventable diseases ranks right up there with "Women are people!" on my list of things I want to share with the world. ("Jesus loves you!" is first on the list, but I think that working on the other two as well helps get across the message that Jesus cares about your life as well as your soul.)

Ever since I dealt with an ill-informed minister who declared (in 2005, mind you)  "HIV is God's judgement against homosexuality," I've felt extremely passionate about HIV prevention. Especially in over-looked populations, like older women. I realize that no one wants to talk to Nanna about her sex life now that she's dating again, but it's a lot better to have an embarassing conversation with her now than to later look back regretfully and wish you had. If you care enough to remind her to get a flu shot, you should be willing to mention that there's a lot of nasty STIs out there and how to prevent them. 

And then I found this site, which seems to link this quite handily with my yarn obsession. Knit A Condom Amulet!  What a wonderful way to raise awareness of this problem. (and use up scrap yarn.)

And the antonym of "pot-head" is...

Holidays always bring out the crazy in everyone. There's something about lots of people in a small house, large amounts of fattening food, and uptight Martha Stewart wannabes who "just want everything to be perfect"--combined with strictures against making any offensive political or religious statements (At Christmas 2008 I wound up in the doghouse for suggesting that Jesus would come back whenever Jesus felt like it, regardless of who got elected president.) and reminders not to bring up awkward family politics that just brings out the collective squirrelyness (not dysfunction, because that implies that you have a plan, and we're way too disorganized for that) that lurks just beneath the surface of even the most WASPy middle-American suburban family.

And since extended holiday dinners with relatives, non-relatives, and screaming children always make me (a lifelong teetotaler) want to pick up binge drinking as a new hobby, I've spent the last two weeks asking patients (most of whom are either in recovery, or avoiding alcohol as part of their probation) very specific questions on what they're planning to do to stay sober over the holidays.

And the responses have been very illuminating. They've ranged from "go to extra meetings," to "my wife won't let me buy beer, and it's too far to walk to the store."

One slightly offended gentleman told me, "I don't have a problem with alcohol."

"That's good sir, but your parole officer does have a problem with you using it. So what are you going to do to keep him happy this holiday?"

"I'm spending Christmas with my in-laws, and they're the most uptight stone-cold sober-heads you're going to find. I couldn't drink even if I wanted to!"