Sorry for the little break. I did post on my other blog here once or twice since my last check in. Anywho, I'm back and still committed even as I listened to Gideon upstairs "crying it out". That's right, we are knee deep in sleep training and it sure does feel like a losing battle. Send sleepy vibes our way!
I was chatting with my sistier-in-law Patty this week when we got together for our bi-weekly Bible study. She was asking how things were going and I said, it feels dumb to say but I am so glad for a new month and new year, it feels like a clean slate! She agreed, saying it felt cliche to say but it feels so true. At the end of last year we got into some bad habits as a family and something about the holidays being over, school back in full swing, new year etc. I feel like I can start anew.
Back in October Gavyn had his yearly CT scan and check up with his awesome neurosurgeon - Dr.Elbabaa. It felt pretty routine going in, I didn't have any concerns about his shunt or hydrocephalus because he had no symptoms of things being wrong. Boy were we wrong! Super long story but he ended up going in for surgery and having a second shunt placed for his 4th ventricle. Maybe on another day I will come back and document that whole story. A week after surgery we all ended up passing around the stomach flu, and it was Halloween. Crazy. That is when I feel like our family went a little nuts until the end of the year. We went into major survival mode and just never got out of it until now. Seriously, that was only 3 months ago but feels like a lifetime ago. It was rough. November was full of doctor visits, Thanksgiving, family and getting ready for Christmas. Gideon has been struggling with ear infections and colds and the sleep issue has been getting worse and worse (he's still screaming upstairs by the way). I went from calm-fun-mom to psycho-mom. It felt like the kids were loud (they are) and screaming all the time, not listening to us, we were running from one thing to the next, not getting a lot of sleep, trying to have fun because it's the holidays and just ignoring the problems going on. We needed a break, we needed something to change up the routine but it never came. Christmas never felt like Christmas. It could have been from our crazy weather here, 70 one day, 40 the next, its the midwest for pete's sake, where was the snow?! But it just never felt all rosy, jolly and surely not Christ centered around here. There were a lot of time outs (for everyone), yelling, pulling my hair out and crying last month. I'm glad it's done.
Ryan and I finally had a long talk about the family and how things are getting crazy. Unfortunately, when your husband works a full time job and a part time job there are a lot of hours in the week devoted to him working. We can't change that a lot but we can change when he works. That is the plus to his part time job being freelance graphic design. He can turn down projects if he needs to and he can work when it fits into our life. We decided to try and work around that and also make more time for our family to be a family unit and cut loose a little. Somewhere in the Fall we lost our sense of having fun together. Probably because we were dealing with some really serious issues and fun wasn't a top priority. I am very hopeful for our changes though. I have felt so much calmer this week, I have made more time for myself, I have made more time for the kids, to just sit and enjoy them and be goofy with them, that is something we all really need. I keep looking at our new prospects and realizing this could be a really great year for us. I am hesitant to say we are deserving of anything (when you live in light of the Cross that is not something you can't really say) but... We have been through hell and back a few times now and I think we need a year to breath.
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