Let the holidays begin

GREAT NEWS TODAY. Just got back from Tim's doc and he is still in remission. No m-spike.
It's been over a year and a half now since any chemo meds. We are HAPPY about this. In 2007, we went into the holidays in a bad way. We had just found out that Tim's transplant had tanked
and he had pretty much gone through all that for nothing. It was already tough going into our
first holiday season with the "cancer cloud" hanging over us but that news was devastating.
Then last year, I was so trying to enjoy the holidays. The shock of his cancer diagnosis was behind us, he was in remission and feeling good. Then both of our tenants broke their leases
which threw a ton of work onto my plate and I went through a breast cancer scare that dragged on for 7 weeks. I can't begin to tell you what was going through my mind. A young child to raise
and both of us with cancer???? 5 or 6 days before Christmas, I am laying on a hospital gurney
having my left boob sonagrammed and I knew they found something. She was using this little
plastic thing and shooting the sonagram through it to get a measurement on what she found.
I just about lost my mind. She left to go show the doctor the pictures and when she came back
she told me I was fine. I broke into tears. It turned out to be water cysts and nothing more.
She did not know why I reacted so emotionally. Then I told her the situation and she said.
"OH. I understand now." Tim and I were so relieved. I told Tim, "So much for that boob upgrade you thought I'd get. Looks like you're stuck with the original equipment!" So today is my sister's birthday. We had an oncology appt. and I am
always nervous but the last 2 times we saw this doc on a family member's birthday, we got bad
news. I try not to be superstitious. Someone told me a long time ago that it is sacriligious to
believe in superstition. Makes sense. I don't want to believe that a broken mirror, smashed
spider or the number 13 on a calendar has more control over my life than God. So Lori's
birthday turned out to be the one that we did not get bad news on. We don't go back until
February. YIPPEEEEEEE!!!!! We are so going to drag every ounce of enjoyment out of this
holiday season that we can. I am not going near ANY doctors now. I, personally have had so many bad things happen when I get near a doctor or medical facility. They sent a reminder for
my yearly mammo a few weeks back and I was like " yeah, like I'm ever gonna make the mistake of doing this before X-mas again. See ya in 2010 suckers." I don't care if I have a whole
appendage falling the freek off, I AM NOT GOING to any doctors. So a big HOLLA to God for Tim's continued good health. Today is a good day. Break out the chocolate!

Mom's always last on the list

This is the theme of being a mom and when you are a caregiver too, you can jack this theme up
a gazillion percent. You remember to do everything you have to do for everyone else and forget
or just never get to ANYTHING you want to/need to do for yourself. Will it ever change? I dunno. Two weeks ago as I was getting into bed on aThursday night, I realized I had completely forgotten about my book club meeting. Today, I just got home from picking Olivia up from school and have
been so intent on not forgetting Tim's flu shot appt. that I forgot there was an MM support group meeting today. I totally missed it and they were talking about something I wanted to hear. I spend every second of every day doing for other people and never get to my stuff.
OY!!!!!!!!

They say God never gives you more than you can handle

I'll never forget the day someone said that quote in front of my brother-in-law Mike.
He called BS on it right away. He said, "I don't believe that. Look at the people who
commit suicide." You don't have to look far to find people in desperate situations. Sometimes it really seems folks get more than they can deal with. I opened an e-mail yesterday from a woman Tim transplanted with who we have remained in contact with. (Is "with" a preposition? My senior year English teacher would be mad to read that sentence) Marlene is a single mom and just a year or so older than Tim. I hated seeing her go through a stem cell transplant by herself
and did whatever I could do to help lessen her fear. She just went back on treatment a few weeks ago and would you believe had a stroke at work a few days ago. She DROVE HERSELF to the hospital
in the middle of it and after doing scans and telling her she had a stroke, they also found lesions
on her brain and told her she has MS. I just want to scream at this news. She moved here over 20 years ago from LA to get her baby son out of a bad neighborhood. Her family is across the country and Jersey is home to her now. This girl is not getting a freekin' break and I'm pretty
darn mad. I just started going to Bible lessons at my church. I don't get to church enough and being raised Catholic(I'm Lutheran now) I don't know diddly about the bible. We were reading
a passage a few weeks back where God threatens to punish a man as well as generations of his family to follow if he disobeys him. Kinda flies in the face of that "forgiving God" stuff. I sat there
and wondered which one of my ancestors screwed up so bad that I have them to blame for my
tales of woe. Now I'm wondering what the heck kinda grudge is being played out on my friend
Marlene. I just don't get it sometimes. I gotta lay down. I've got a stomach ache just thinking about this.

Starting the day with a heart attack

So this morning, I am making my oatmeal when the phone rings. I get a computerized message from my daughter's principal telling me my daughter has not shown up for school and is being
marked absent. I immediately go into panic mode because 1. I dropped my daughter off at school 2. I am a card-carrying worry-wart 3. We recently had a luring incident in a town nearby
4. I just watched a show about unsolved crimes which spotlighted a lot of abductions and last but not least 5. I have never owned a pair of rose colored glasses and always think the worst.
I try to call the school right back and the darn message is still going on and won't release the
phone line. FINALLY it ends and I call the school. It's busy. I call again and again, still busy. I
am freaking by this point. What the hell is going on? I've got visions running through my head.
I get out the phone book to see if there are any other numbers listed for the school. None.
So I dial the school # on my cell phone as I run out the door and jump in the mommy van. I procede to lay rubber(that darn thing is pretty peppy) and start flying for the school knowing I
will probably be pulled over before I get there(thank goodness Tim has done the wood floors for half the cops and we know several of the rest too). I hit re-dial over and over and finally I get
a ringing and I pull over. NOW I have to listen to their automated answering system. This makes me nuts. Of course the number you have to hit is always the last option. I get a woman
and start to tell her why I am calling and she says "hold on" and PUTS ME ON HOLD. Then
another woman picks up and I start explaining again and she interrupts and says they just started a new computerized system today and it seems to have malfunctioned. I am about the
20th call from worried parents and she assures me that Olivia is in class and fine. I tell her,
"I am halfway to school in my car and having a heart attack here." She apologized for the inconvenience. I turn around and go home to my luke warm, lumpy oatmeal. About 15 minutes
later, I get a call. AGAIN with this damn automation. It is the school principal again with a recording saying that by error, that phone message went out to every parent in the school. He
apologized for the inconvenience. Nice way to start my day. The thing that ticks me off the most
is I'll bet you a whole lot of money that the MEAT-HEAD that brought us this debacle this morning makes well over 100K a year. You'd think he had enough gray matter to get this
working right before they put about 500 people into heart failure. The parents whose kids walk to school must have really lost their minds. Just one more example of how my outrageously high property taxes are working for me. Yippee-ki-yay.

What the heck???!!!!

Politically speaking.......AAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
My state just elected a man for governor who walked out of an ethics hearing because he was caught doing unethical things and refused to answer their questions. He promises to lower our taxes but he has been caught not paying his own. His campaign was won by complaining that
our current gov. did not create jobs and lower taxes. Newsflash. You cannot expect to bring tons of jobs into a
state that is in this terrible recession handed to us courtesy of the "fat-cat" bankers that cashed in on writing bad loans. You also cannot lower property taxes when the "garden state" is in
debt up to its rutabagas and you are now losing millions of dollars in sales tax revenues due to the recession. It's simple economics people. I sincerely hope this guy is not as bad a guy as he appears to me. I just still can't believe he got elected. Years ago, Tim and I were making a gas stop in Vermont on a day we were coming home from vacation there. Turns out the shop owner was born in NJ and had moved to VT years before. He had just gone back to Jersey for a wedding which was in a pretty urban area of the state. I'll never forget the way he said,
"yep, that state sure is goin' to Hell in a handbasket." Tim and I still laugh about it. I'm not laughing too much today though. That guy was more right than even he knew.
By the way, does this handbasket make my butt look big?

Out of the mouths of babes

The other night, they had a republican convention-type meeting at our community center.
The republican candidate for governor was there. News cameras and all. We use another room in that building for Olivia's
cheerleading practices. After the practice, I got in a conversation with another mom and Olivia and her friend, who
was riding home with us, went into the rep. meeting as it was breaking up. Olivia got to shake the hand of the guy who hopes to be NJ's next governor. I am not a very political person but don't vote for known crooks(heck Jersey has enough trouble with the unknown crooks we've unwittingly elected in the past, I see no reason to hire a known one) or people who oppose stem-cell research especially given our current situation with MM being in our lives. I'm not a card-carrying anything though I tend to vote democratic. I think this whole republican and democratic stuff should be thrown out anyhow
and I refer to bi-partisan as "bi-port-o-san" because too many times, both sides are full of........
well, you know what I mean. So luckily, I was not in this room because Olivia decided to announce that "my Mom is voting for Corzine"(our current governor, the democrat.) HA!! I guess only the folks that were right around her heard this, one being a man I'm friends with, and he got
a laugh out of it. I had to brief Olivia on the political etiquette of not telling who mommy and daddy are voting for ESPECIALLY in the midst of a republican convention. Too funny! I passed
the guy in the hall. Did not shake his hand. Then I heard what my kid had said to boot. OOPS!
I made Liv wash her hands when we got home. His palms have been greased too many times.
Can you spell k-i-c-k-b-a-c-k?

Negligence?

This coming January, there will be a 3 day trip for the 6th grade to a place in the Catskills.
It is a 2 hour drive from here. Tim and I made the decision not to chaperone because I felt
even though they were going to be very strict about not letting sick kids come in light of this
H1N1 deal, I still didn't think it was a good idea for Tim and I to be sleeping in a dorm situation in
the middle of cold and flu season. I also notice that when the kids come back from the holiday
break, all sorts of illness flies around the school for weeks afterward. Tim does not want Olivia to miss out on things because of him but we can limit the exposure a little by not putting all three of us in this situation. The problem not chaperoning presents is that Olivia gets carsick BAD. A bus is hands down the worst type of vehicle to be in for this so
we have to drive her there and pick her up or risk her getting sick in a bus with no bathroom
which is humiliating and if you think kids will not mock her for this, you'd be wrong. I do use
a very small amount of dramamine with her but I'm not sure this amount would work well enough for a 2 hour bus ride part of which will be on country roads. If I give her more, she will
be asleep and unable to function at all both in the bus and for several hours after they get there.
The other problem is that they will use chartered buses without seatbelts. I don't understand this. There are all these laws about using carseats, boosters and seatbelts with kids. You can be
ticketed for breaking these laws but you can put kids in buses without belts anytime with no problem. Have you ever seen those news reports of what happens in bus accidents? The kids
are catapulted out the windows and there is often fatalities and critical injuries. Last year, the principal let Tim and I drive her to a day trip and we chaperoned for them because he considered this carsickness to be a medical condition that warranted it. This year we have a new
assistant principal who tells me the other day that she either goes on the bus or she misses the trip. That is the school policy. When I ask him how he will accomodate a child who is throwing up
and usually has a stomach ache that leads to her having to go to the bathroom at the same time
on a bus with no bathroom, he tells me he will have to check into this further and get back to me.
He also was not aware that we had been allowed to drive her last year. I'm waiting for the phone call with his decision. If it is the wrong one, I will be telling him that my daughter is going on the trip, we are driving her and if he wants to take this further, have at it. He thinks I am trying to
make a story up because of the seatbelts. I told him I would be happy to have Olivia's doctor
speak with him about her motion sickness. BUT even if the problem was just the seatbelts, isn't that a good enough reason? If something happened to her, I'd never forgive myself. One of the roads they will be on is the New York State thruway. My sister lives up that way and you would not want to give her a dollar for everytime she sat in traffic going home from work due to yet another fatal accident on that road. I don't let me daughter drive with people I don't know. I'm sure there are lots of great bus drivers out there but let's face it, there are many who just plain
can not get any other job. I know a woman who drove a school bus for years. She had a heart condition and was in the early stages of alzheimers when they finally pulled her from driving but still let her be a bus aide. I know a man who has diabetes and could not feel his feet well and was
still driving a bus. I don't want Olivia on a bus with no belts. We'll see what this guy comes up with. There are quite a few parents nervous about this especially considering we could be dealing
with weather conditions that time of year. They are all being told, it's the bus or your kid stays home. I'd love to see a law passed that forbids transporting kids like this. Along with that, I think
it should be totally illegal to put young kids on motorcycles with you. I've seen kids as young as
3 and 4 riding with daddy on motorcycles that don't even have sissy bars. Makes me crazy. Those kids have no idea how dangerous bikes are. I think it should be outlawed. I have nothing against motorcycles. Used to ride a dirt bike myself. But putting a kid on a bike on these roads
where we have a gazillion cars per square mile is insane. I sold my bike 2 months after I had Olivia. I decided not to take unnecessary risks with my life but I REALLY don't think it's right to take unnecessary risks with a kid's life when they are too young to understand the dangers.