Photo re-cap of our summer...

before i cut myself some bangs

Gettin' ready to go to work

At the New Freedom Carnival

I've been on an ice cream making bender... This here is blue berry ice cream sweetened with agave and of course blue berries

Not sure what this means for his future, but man he's a cutie!

This is their new favorite thing to do when it rains

Asa's summer uniform. briefs and boots

Baby chickens in a tree at SidebySide Farm

Large alien plant in the hoops house at SidebySide Farm

This is how we've been picking up the CSA. We hook Thor the dino-dog up to the kids wagon and make him pull us on the bike hike trail... 

Asa's monster mouth from a Sunday breakfast/brunch outting with Lali and Granpa and Miah and Ceci and Lollo and Jocelyn

Punk rock hair

Do-it-yourself aerial yoga!

or maybe i'm just pretending to be a silk worm

reunion after Esther spent 5 days at Oma's house. Longest trip away from home... 

They really missed each other

More home-made ice cream joy... this time it's just vanilla with a couple grain sweetened chocolate chips on top for fun!

And this is Mommy and Daddy's special treat, Guiness Floats

Delectable

Such funny faces...

Jesy's beautiful belly. It's been so cool to watch  her and Ceci grow with babies...  They're both due any day now... 

This is me trying to fetch a frisbee out of a creek... I'm waiting for it to float down stream



It's been a very laid back summer. I'm a bit tentative about the fall, like i said in my last post. It helps to re-cap the summer and remember just how much fun and low-stress we made it for ourselves. Maybe i can make the fall fun and low-stress too... 

Happy 7 year anniversary blog!

Happy 7 Year Anniversary my darling BLOG!!

And as a present i got you this lame-@ss post! aren't you so excited?

 It's been a long road... and it's getting to the point where i hardly post any more... which i feel sort of guilty about considering i had hoped to record my children's lives through this channel so that we could always look back...

It's also been pretty helpful in tracking my own crazy moods, life changes, etc...

All that said, i have no plans or vows to start being a better blogger on the horizon.  I have a busy, crazy life full of children, work, being a bi-polary-type mess, and [insert other thing to finish the list off here].

Esther starts kindergarten next week. I'm more scared than she is. I don't know how well i'll do putting her on the bus that first day... wish me luck. I'm excited for her, scared for her, sad that her toddler-hood is officially over...

Ben leaves for Japan in less than 2 weeks. He'll be gone a MONTH... i'm nervous about doing the lone-parenting thing, worried about the delicacies of working from home, annoyed that he is going (at all and/or without me/us), tired of thinking about it all... I know i'll be fine.  To be honest, it'll probably be easier without him. I have lots of offers of help from family and friends. I'm hoping to hire a neighbor girl for one afternoon a week to just give me some breathing room and let me play catch-up a bit.

I guess that's it for now. The storm from last week blew out our wireless router in the hollow. So i'm hoping the new one will be more powerful and will reach down to our house allowing me to blog from home rather than during breaks at work... here's a'hopin'

Does anyone know what happened to Dr. Sears?

I can't seem to find Dr. Sears Cool Fuel drinks anywhere, it's out of stock on all the websites and all the stores. The drsearsessentials website's shopping cart doesn't work and when i call the customer service phone number, it's been disconnected.

Is the Dr. Sears corporation going under?

Ben is going to visit his crush...

Ben booked his ticket to Japan.  He is leaving 9/2 and will be back 9/30. I'm going to ask my boss this afternoon if i can work from home for a month... wish me luck... :(

Chincoteague Vacation

We did it. We had our very first successful FAMILY VACATION!
There's this myth running around that family vacations are inherently fun. Or am i the only one that was operating under that fiction?

After we had Esther we tried and tried every year, sometimes twice in one year to have a family vacation. Pretty much all of them, with the exception of a few moments, turned into stressful, bickering, aggravating pits of hell.

This year? It was FUN.  What happened? well, i think it was a culmination of factors. I think the kids are old enough and independent enough finally to have fun and let us have fun too. I think that i have lowered my expectations tremendously and come to the conclusion that my personal moods have a great effect on the over-all mood of the family. If i want them to have fun and be easy going, i have to be. Seems simple enough, but my moods may as well be Andre the Giant for all i seem to be able to tackle them sometimes...

We rented the cutest little house:

We didn't do a lot while on vacation. We hung out in our adorable house during the heat of the day and took the kids to the ocean either early in the morning or late in the evening. We went to the play ground. Ben took Esther crabbing, i wish i had pictures of that.  We played a round of mini golf, took walks, went to the toy store, and got Esther a pony ride... Ben and I didn't bicker at all and in fact have been making a point to be extremely sweet to each other. Asa spent the whole time recuperating from his sickness (see previous post) and Esther was just psyched to have a new house to explore (read: destroy), especially one that included a Bonk Bed (bunk bed).

More on Asa, and other topics...

Did you know they use lasers instead of drills to remove cavities these days?  The left side of my face is numb. I just had a cavity removed and filled for the first time in about 15 years... It was high time i guess.

Anyhow, back to Asa issues. Shortly after i wrote the previous post, i took him to urgent care. This was about two Thursdays ago.  While he was getting better (fever gone, swelling starting to subside) it was very, very slow. And Thursday as i was trying to pack and cook and he just wanted to be held it occurred to me, "why the heck, not?" so i threw the kids in the car and drove to urgent care (with a brief pull off to the side of the road to call my sister-in-law, hi ceci!, just to make sure i wasn't being silly).

Urgent care was ok. They checked him over and agreed his ear infection was going away and that he didn't have a fever any more.  They then, as a sort of after thought decided to do a throat swab to check for strep throat since the swelling in his neck was so severe. I'm glad they did. I almost said no to it too just to save Asa (and me) the pain (with my kids you have to pin them down before they let you do anything to them and it's so painful to watch).  But i did let them. The initial swab that they do there in the office came up negative and they sent the other off to the lab. I took him home and we set off on our trip to the Chincoteague. A couple days later, while on vacation, i get a phone call from the urgent care office saying the lab came back and he did indeed have strep. One of those curious strains that does not cause a sore throat. The kind that causes high fevers and rashes and... oh, did you know that strep throat is the same as SCARLET FEVER? yeah. so fun times. They called a prescription in to the only pharmacy on the island and we got Asa started right away. Almost instantly he felt better. Now he's back to his hilarious self and i couldn't be happier.

We've been weaning off wheat the last week or so. I would still like to take him off wheat and see if it makes a difference in his allergies and gaining weight. So far it's pretty hard to tell if it's doing any good because he's just ravenous all around which could be due to his just not being sick anymore. But we're stuffing him full of food. He comes to me all day long and says "Mom, i finished my granola but i'm STILL HUNGRY" then he giggles and mumbles something about how he's the just like the very hungry caterpillar in that book by Eric Carle.

So here's to him feeling better. Here's to that mysterious maternal instinct (which i can be slow to listen to) that tells mother just when professional intervention is needed.

The Asa Puzzle

So, as you may already know, Asa has a nasty double ear infection. Based on my half-assed attempt to reconstruct the last 12 months in my crappy memory, i think this is either the 2nd or 3rd he's had in the past year. Which, it seems is within the normal limits of most kids his age. However, it does seem like he gets sick a lot. Both kids actually seem to get sick a lot. It all really started with Esther starting school which is completely normal, apparently.

Esther gets sick far less often now. And maybe it's just that Asa is going through a similar seasoning process considering the kinds of germs Esther is probably bringing home from school.

HOWEVER, all this aside. I'm considering it might be time to take Asa to see a naturopathic doc.  If you recall, a while back (well over a year ago i think) our old pediatrician diagnosed Asa with Failure to Thrive. Which is just an awful term by the way. They should consider renaming it so it's not so freaking alarming. Though i guess in some cases (parents not feeding their children, children with horrific diseases, etc) it's ok to be alarmed.

Anyhow, Asa is small is basically what it means.  He's almost 3.5 years old exactly. He weighs about 25lbs (i think he lost a lb or so being sick). i don't know how many inches he is tall... but he's in about the 2% i think.

So after that diagnosis we changed pediatricians. The new pediatrician recommended an endocrinologist in bmore. we went. i didn't like her either. and frankly, ben was kind of an angry, accusing dad in the first interview so i can see why she was the way she was, but still... i didn't like her and i didn't like ben around her either. Regardless, they did blood tests, urine tests, and a sweat test (for cystic fibrosis, totally scary) which was an awful, awful test in which they stabbed his arms, wrapped him in plastic and then made ben try to get him to run around all while crying. Seriously, the tortures they think up for these kids!! it's outrageous!!!

After the results of the tests (he was a little low in vitamin D, and he does not THANK GOD have cystic fibrosis) the endocrinologist told us to keep him on a high calorie diet (this was a year ago july i think). We've been pushing food ever since and i still make him and Esther drink Amazake shakes fairly frequently and i've been a bit more lax on my cow dairy nay-saying. I've also found that doctor sears makes pediasure-type substitute which are not nearly as scary (though still a little scary) and we buy those from time to time. He was supposed to go for a follow-up last july and due to something i can't remember we cancelled it. After that, i just never rescheduled. I don't have the heart to put him through tests that i firmly believe are not necessary and that he is small because of GENETICS!!! i mean really, i am 31 years old. I'm 5 " tall (which puts me in like the 2%) and i weigh anywhere between 90 and 98 lbs (depending on whether or not i'm doing trapeze regularly or completely stressed out and not eating due to my children's health issues) which isn't even on the chart for adults. SOOOO according to my genetics he's right on the mark. Add ben's into the mix and if it were just a matter of my percentile, plus his percentile then divide by two, Asa would be in the like 10th percentile or something like that. WE ARE NOT BIG PEOPLE!! which would mean he's still not too far of the mark.

ok. so enough with the rant.

His latest ear infection has me thinking. is he sick more often than he should be? is his smallness really due to something else? could the state of his teeth be a symptom as well? could his being prone to seasonal allergies and inexplicable rashes also be a symptom?

Call me crazy, but i guess it could be a subtle wheat/gluten intolerance. i mean people go their whole lives without knowing that they're sensitive to a food substance...

so i got the name of a naturopath in hampden (thanks terri!!!) and i'm thinking that i will at the very least spring for the initial visit and a) see if i like her (i've hated all of our healthcare practioners ever since we switched insurances. i want to go back to Dr. Schlenoff in hereford!) b) see if she thinks his symptoms could be connected or are unreasonable or suspicious for a kid his age...

i think i will continue to write-off the endocrinologist as long as i can get away with it. and i just may go on the hunt for a new pediatrician... again... ugh... though i guess anyone with an MD is likely a firm believer in western medicine and not likely to work well with a naturopathic/holistic approach... :(
it may be time to move to a new country...

photos and our up coming family vacation

most of these pictures (if not all?) are from Oma (Ben's mom) during a parent-free weekend stay the kids spent with her.  I've (fairly) recently discovered instagram which,  in cahoots with facebook, renders this blog basically meaningless drivel that is out of date and usually just me ranting about how awful i am anyhow...

all that said, here are some pictures:

They're growing up fast, eh?

June is on the other side of the threshold staring at us with those creepy eyes that insist summer is here...
We're getting ready for our FAMILY VACATION (10th-16th).  Most of our family vacation attempts are at best, not awful, at worst really, really, swear-off-all-future-family-vacationing awful.  But here we are attempting it again.

We rented a house in Chincoteague (as Ben says, we spend our daily life practically camping in a cabin in the woods, why would we spend our vacation just as isolated - so we've rented a house in a town, a compromise between Ben's downtown city/hotel vacation dream, and my backpacking in wretched climates vacation dream).  I think we'll all be rather comfortable. And as another lessons learned, we're only packing a small portion of planned meals and we'll be having some of our family fun eating out (yes, that raises all sorts of nutritional concerns in me, but hey, lets live on the edge once in a while. A week of nothing but bacon will at least earn them shiny hair? - at least ben and i won't fight about it...)

In preparation for this fun family vacation, Esther and I are starting Misty of Chincoteague tonight.

Ok. well. hope your summer (or winter - stephen) is off to a good start. We'll see you around... hopefully...

Mother's Day and Others Day

I've taken to spending my short breaks at work (which i force myself to take every time my head feels like it may explode or my fist might "accidentally" try to punch someone in their GIANT head - ends up being about once every couple of hours) catching up on my google reader and posting to my [pathetic] blog.

Mother's day was good. Had first breakfast in bed with ben of tiramisu and strawberries. had second breakfast with my parents and brother and ceci. Ben took the kids to have lunch with his mom and I rode my motorcycle all over the place... my arms are actually sore (i know, isn't that so weird??).  Esther was super cute about mother's day. she was so excited to give me the present she made at preschool that i had to remind her a dozen times that it was a surprise and she couldn't tell me what it was. Also, she has insisted that today is Asa day and tomorrow is Esther day. Because they both need days where we tell them how special they are to us and get them special treats...

May has gone by in a flash so far. I guess that's what happens when you have event after event after event after event after... oh man, i'm soooo tired.  This weekend is the Jacob Backpacking trip to commemorate my cousin Jacob who died suddenly and tragically (dec 2010) and MAN, yep i'm still pissed...
Anyway. i'm looking forward to remembering him through blisters and woods and fires and sleeping under the stars.

After this weekend... i have nothing planned until mid-june. well, that's not entirely true. i plan on fixing up the trails in the woods around the house, making (and using) a campsite up on top the ridge behind the house, playing in the garden, taking the kids to get ice cream at Bonky's, sniffing ben's neck, and other such joyous undertakings...

if you need me, i'll be the dirt-smeared girl in 2-day old clothing at the top of the big walnut tree howling like a monkey and grinning like a loon.

recovery through reclusion...

the grants are in. the fairie festival is over. no surgical procedures on the horizon (at least until we can reschedule). 

and now for some hiding out at home with my smooch-faced babes and ben... 

monday was rough. i probably should have taken a sick day, but i just couldn't see a way around it. And honestly, if i'm going to try and shoot fire out of my eyes at everyone i come in contact with, it's probably better to be hiding out in my office all day then at home with my kids (whom i've already probably damaged beyond repair).  i've been trying to take it easy. re-collect the bits and pieces of myself that have fallen off here and there.  i've even been dressing particularly frumpy to go to work the last three days (ben says it's a backlash from costuming for fairie fest for three days straight).  

All in all the weekend was good. i made more $ than last year, but still not quite enough to justify the whole rigmarole of it. so this was my last festival as a vendor. i think i will save my talents for gifts within the family and  maybe small commissions if/when i can carve out the time.  on the upside i have lots of stock left for the babies that are all about to be born this summer. 

work is slowly killing me. i'm still trying to figure out a way to be happy here rather than trying to find a new job. but i'm just not sure how to do that. i'm toying with the idea of talking to my boss, but i should probably have a more concrete idea of what/how to present whatever it is i can come up with that will make work more tolerable. 

Once i can get copies from those who are good enough to take photos i'll post them here. in the mean time, there's a couple on facebook and one or two on instagram... 

if you don't see me in the next couple of weeks, i'm fine, just tired.