May 17, 2007

Hey Everyone,
My boys have been counting down the days till the end of school. I'm not really sure why because I'm pretty sure after 2 or 3 days of no school they will be bored and want to go back! Actually I think they are mostly excited about being able to say they are 1st graders. :-)
I don't have too much to say today. I've been feeling a bit down about things lately. Just seems like I don't have time to do anything except chores and drive the kids to and from places (Yeah, I know, welcome to motherhood). I just see other moms that seem to be able to do so many things, and keep up with their houses, etc., and I wonder what is wrong with me. But I decided that probably the problem isn't that I have abnormally messy kids, or anything like that, but that I'm just not in a very good place personally right now and that is why things seem overwhelming. So I have recommitted myself to getting to bed earlier, reading my scriptures more diligently (I've been guilty of counting our family scripture reading time as my own personal scripture reading time, and it *doesn't* count!), and I re-joined Weight Watchers to get off these 12.4 lbs that have creeped on over the past year. I will be back to my goal weight by Naomi's wedding! It feels good to get back on the program, I already feel more in control of myself. I'm also going to concentrate more on things I am grateful for, instead of complaining about annoying things.
So, here are some things I am grateful for. My kids, while they have their moments, are also very sweet to me. Last Saturday I took the boys to HEB, and we had the usual "discussion" about who gets to sit in which seat in the children's car-carts they have there. There are only 2 seats, and I have 3 boys, so there is always a "discussion." Anyway, it was Brigham's turn to sit up on the handle-area of the cart (not supposed to be a seat, but oh well). I noticed that whenever I went over to get something off a shelf, Brigham would turn himself comletely around to be facing me. Then he said to me, "Mom, I have to turn to see you whereever you go because I like to look at you because you are beautiful." Awwwww. And the next day at Church he was sitting next to me in Sacrament meeting and he kept turning his head and sniffing my arm. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "I like to smell you because you smell so good!" He must be buttering me up for something, huh?! Mosey has also been doing something really sweet. He will come over to me and hold my cheeks in his hands and then give me the sweetest little kiss right on the mouth. He is an exceptionally sweet 3 year old, and I am very blessed! Last night after I read him stories, I was so tired I decided just to go to sleep right then, too (8:00 PM). So I had the pleasure of listening to him tell stories to himself. I know he always does this, because I can hear his little voice in there for quite a while before he is quiet, but I usually can't hear well enough to know what he is saying. It was so cute to hear him telling this elaborate story about ants and an anteater which runned out to a field and shaked and shaked and shaked (??) and then falled asleep and sleeped and sleeped and sleeped and then waked up... Anyway, it was very funny to listen to him talking to himself. And Joseph has been so helpful recently! He's been my most willing boy when it comes to cleaning up. He's also been my least fighting boy! (Brigham and Mosey have been having some tiffs recently). He's been waking up happy and cooperative in the morning and generally just being a joy to be around. We got a nice surprise when his teacher sent a notice home over the weekend that HE also we selected for Principal's Pride for the month of May. So Brigham and Joseph both got Principal's Pride for their class, and both for creativity. I was very proud of them, and it was good for both of them to get that recognition. I am so proud of how well Joseph has been doing at school. He had such a rough start at this new school, but he has been SO good the last few months. No arguing at all about going to school, no conflicts with teachers or other students, he's just been a really good boy.
Ben has also been great helping me when he gets home from work. I guess he can sense that I've been stressed out. He's been doing dishes, running the Scooba (love that thing), and took the boys to a cub-scouts information meeting Wednesday night while I relaxed at home for an hour.
So overall I am very blessed, and I feel better focusing on those things than on the petty annoyances of life.
I'm reading this book called "Stumbling on Happiness," which is VERY interesting, I recommend it. Anyway, the author is a professor of psychology at some school or another and one part of the book talks about how our mind will put up a strong psychological defense when presented with really devastating things. Humans are able to be amazingly resilient in the face of tragedy or betrayal or other really bad things. But our defenses are not aroused by the little annoying things of life, so it is the little things that really affect our happiness, and NOT the big things you might expect. This explains why proportionally more marriages fail over little things that partners do to annoy each other than for big things like infidelity or abuse. Weird, huh? So anyway, I guess that explains why I can feel supposedly unaccountably down about relatively minor things. Interesting concept anyway.
Hopefully tomorrow we are closing on our new house! Our lenders are being very slow and leaving things to the last minute, so we are crossing our fingers. Ouor house in Florida still hasn't sold, and apparently the market is sort of collapsing. Sigh... Apparently the area has 24 months of inventory on the market right now and only half of those homes will sell in the next 12 months. Frustrating. I think we're just going to have to bite the bullet and drastically lower our asking price and just get this thing sold. Our variable rate mortgage is going UP very soon, and we just need to sell it. Oh well, that's how it goes sometimes. We'll be fine financially even if we don't make much money on the house, so really that is one of the "little things" I need to just make roll off my back.
I hope you all have a great Thursday and a great weekend!



Brigham up for Principal's Pride.



Joseph up for Principal's Pride.



All the Principal's Pride kids (K-3rd grades) for May.



Mourning dove we found on our deck the other morning.

May 17, 2006

Hello Everyone,
Well, just a few tales from the Turner household tonight.
First the regular health report... Not that great, unfortunately. I've been taking the dexamethasone for 7 days now. It has improved my left leg, it is much less painful. But I certainly haven't regained all sensation and now my right arm has been tingly. This happened with the prednisone, too. The symptoms I took the pred for did seem to diminish, but right at the same time some new symptoms popped up. I guess I'm just not sure what to expect. Should these steroids totally wipe out all my symptoms? Since it's not, does that mean it's not working? I guess I'll call my doctor again tomorrow, but I really, REALLY don't want to have to go in for IV steroids. The Dexamethasone is causing enough havoc as it is. It's been giving me major hot flashes and for a couple of days (when I was still on the highest dose) I got really depressed. I am down to 2 a day now and that seems to have improved, but I was pretty miserable for a couple of days. Of course one of the side effects of dexamethasone is a spike in depressive symptoms. I actually noticed it *before* I looked up the Dex side effects, so I'm pretty sure it's not just psychosomatic. Monday was the worst day for that. It was rainy and dreary all day and I was tired and just BLAH. I had no energy and couldn't focus on the kids. Mosey watched cartoons the entire time the boys were at preschool. I felt terrible, like I had absolutely no right being a mother and the whole world would be far better off if I just ceased to exist. Lovely thoughts, huh? Happily, I am feeling better today, but still really having trouble with mental clarity, motivation, and fatigue. Mentally, I just can't seem to focus very well. When the big boys come home from school, I almost go into overload because they are just chattering nonstop and I can't keep up and their volume is about 2 times higher than it needs to be and after about 5 minutes I just want to shut myself up in a closet for some QUIET!!! Aggghhh. But I'm hanging in there and doing my very best to be patient and I know this will pass soon.
So, that's the whiny part of my email over and DONE with.
Let's backtrack a couple of days. Mother's day was very very nice. Ben continued pampering me and got up with the boys on Sunday morning and let me sleep until it was time to get ready for church. All I did was get up and get myself ready and he was in charge of the boys. Church was nice, of course, the primary kids got up and sang mother's Day songs and it was really cute and all that. I have so many memories of Mother's Days being days of sadness and uncertainty, it is still, even after almost 5 years, a total wonder to me that I have these 3 little boys. I know a couple of women in our ward struggling to have babies and felt sad for them. After Sacrament meeting the bishop asked all women over 21 to stand up for a bag of chocolate kisses and a bookmark, and one of these girls didn't want to stand up. I walked over to her and held her by the shoulders and told her she better stand up, she deserves to, but maybe I should have left her alone. Hard to tell. Sometimes you just want to ignore it all, other times it helps to have someone else recognize your pain. I was happy to see my other friend, Vanessa, who had just had a miscarriage last Mother's Day, standing smiling and glowing, 25 weeks pregnant with her little girl.
After church I tried to give back to Ben a little by letting him take a nap with Mosey. He actually didn't get back up until I got the big boys in bed for the night. So I'm kind of a good wife, too, I guess! Ben's been under major pressure at work, though, and hasn't gotten enough sleep that's for sure.
So Monday and Tuesday were sort of yucky days, full of rain and getting nothing done. The good side of all the rain is that it appears Ben and I (mostly Ben) fixed the leak in our roof. We got an estimate almost a year ago and the damage was going to be like $1600. Then after the hurricanes it became downright impossible to even book any roofers, so we decided what the heck we'll try and fix it ourselves. Well Sunday night was the LOUDEST rainstorm I can remember, and no leak!! We still have to get a whole bunch of replacement roof tiles (out of stock everywhere-- go figure), but after those are installed we'll be ready for another hurricane season. We better get cracking on that. Actually the storms down here on Monday were so bad that there is a whole new rash of building condemnations from additional roof damage that didn't get fixed yet from the hurricanes last year. Sad. Lots and lots of blue roofs still up around here and hurricane season only 2 weeks away.

Joseph has, over the last 3 days or so, turned into my little valley-boy. I'm not sure where he has picked this up, but it seems almost every other word is "like." It really cracks me up, but I'm trying not to call attention to it because I think it will probably pass on its own. Brigham hasn't started doing that, but we'll see if his speech patterns are strongly influenced by Joseph. Joseph also told me that he wants to be an animal scientist when he grows up and that Mosey can work in the same office as him. And that Mosey can live with him too, until he is big enough to have his own house. Cute, huh?
Brigham, my dear sweet little guy, is the chief culprit responsible for my auditory fatigue these days. He simply must vocalize each and every little thought that comes into his head. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of words he utters each day, but it is pretty astounding. This has gotten me into a bit of trouble, though, because I simply can NOT pay attention to each and every thing he says (particularly when 2 other boys are talking at the same time). And I do admit to zoning out now and then and just agreeing with him, or giving non-committal answers. So anyway, apparently a couple of days ago I agreed to take him to the dollar store if he was quiet in the car (which I am quite SURE he was not-- it would have been a momentous occasion for him to be quiet in the car). Well, he hasn't forgotten about this committment and was reminding me constantly about it. Finally this morning, when he was in my room at 6:15 AM asking to go to the dollar store before school, Ben told him he had to do some chores and then he would get a dollar for the dollar store. So he happily picked up some toys and after school we headed to the dollar store. What do my boys pick out? Well, guns, of course. These are the first real toy guns they have had, aside from squirt guns. They came with a little police kit including suction cup darts, police shades, handcuffs, radio, and shield. The boys had a FABULOUS time playing with these toys this afternoon, until Mosey got tired of being the badguy and constantly getting handcuffed. So, do I just go with it? I think I'm ok with them playing with toy guns when the game is police and bad guys, and not just the boys being bad guys. I don't know, chances are those cheap dollar store toys will break in about a day and a half and it won't be an issue anymore. I am not very worried about my boys' sense of morality, though. We talk about right and wrong constantly and choosing the right and being honest and good and all of that. And they are good little boys.

Mosey, however, is turning into a 2 and a half year old. It's amazing how quickly this is happening. I'm telling you, it has been in the past WEEK that the transformation has taken place. My formerly easy-going, go-with-the-flow, happy-go-lucky little guy is getting WHINY and STUBBORN and DEFIANT. Oh, so sad!! Please let this only be temporary insanity on his part! He is doing naughty things just to see if he can get away with it, and when he can't, he throws a fit (major fit a couple of days ago when I wouldn't let him keep spilling his juice on the floor). He gets up on the table repeatedly and refuses to get down. He climbs up on the counters (trick he learned from Joseph), and of course can't get down, and so screams until I get him down and then does it immediately again. Throws food he decides he doesn't want. Tears Brigham's drawings. Knocks down a very complicated airport the big boys built in their bedroom. Hits with a stick and won't stop even after time outs. When he sits on my lap on the computer (which is whenever I'm at the computer and he's awake), he kicks out and slams the keyboard under the desk so I can't type, or else he pounds on the keyboard so I can't type. And then gets extremely angry when I put him off of my lap. If I'm laying down he'll come and JUMP on me just for the reaction. What am I going to do? I think part of the problem is that he is bored when the boys are off at school. He used to be satisfied just sort of following me around, or playing by himself, but not so much anymore. I know he is going to be very happy when school is out (only 7 more days, sob, sob!!). I'm not sure WHAT he is going to do next year when the boys are in Kindergarten. I think I'm really going to have to find a preschool for him to go to a few mornings a week. I really have NO idea what to do with an only-child at home! Really, it is weird. With the boys at preschool only 3 hours, our time is pretty much spent getting him fed and dressed, a few chores done, maybe some errands, he'll watch Little Einsteins, and then we get the boys. But until 2:00 every afternoon? He'll be totally lost, and I have no idea how to entertain just ONE child! We will certainly drive each other crazy.
Ok, this is way too long for one night. Sorry about that. Hope you all have lovely Thursdays and all that.