A Wonderful Blessing

I've been super busy the past couple days. I'm only taking the time to write now because we had a wonderful blessing today.

Yesterday was our roommate Aaron's birthday. We went to his parents' house for cake and ice cream. His sister always makes new and interesting cakes for everyone's birthdays. This year for Aaron's, she tried doing a giant cookie with a giant brownie on top. But there was a dip and she needed to make it level, so she melted chocolate chips and poured them in between. As I was taking a bite, I felt a crack in my mouth. I had cracked the cement on my bridge trying to bite through almost 1/2 an inch of solid chocolate. It was painful and my bridge could come out. It's actually a fake tooth that's cemented to the backs of the teeth on either side. We had no idea how we were going to pay for any dental work. Then Mitchell's mom called to ask him something and he told her about what happened. She told us that one of the Brothers in the ward works with Mitchell's old dentist. We got an appointment today and he fixed it for me for only $50. What an amazing blessing! It normally would have cost at least $200. Thank goodness for the kindness of members of the church.

A Big Project

Mitchell let me buy the stuff to sew Joseph's costume. I couldn't find it to buy anywhere. There isn't an actual pattern for it, so I'm using a different pattern. And I could only find the right color fabric in lining and the pattern calls for double knit cotton. I talked with one of the ladies at the fabric store and she thinks I can do it. We'll see how things go. Hopefully I'll finish in time.

I'm annoyed right now. Joseph is awake and excited. It's my fault. I needed to do some errands and I have the car, but I kept him up and we missed his normal bedtime schedule. He fell asleep in the car, but then he woke up when we came in. I wish that I could do errands in the day time or that I could have Mitchell watch him in the evening while I did errands. I feel like I'm stuck at home now, at least if I ever want to get him sleeping normally. It's frustrating. If I want to go to a Relief Society activity, that means keeping him up past his bedtime. So I have to choose between Joseph sleeping at night or socializing and having friends. I hate decisions.

The Wonders of Sleep

I got to sleep last night!! It wasn't the best sleep, but it wasn't Joseph's fault. My old sleep problems have been returning since I've been off of my medication. But Joseph was in bed by 8:30. He did wake up in the night, but there wasn't any screaming. He slept for 4 straight hours without waking up!! And he slept in his own crib the entire night! I think this might be the very first time he's done that. He did wake up at 7 instead of 8, though. But because I got some peaceful rest, it wasn't as hard for me to get up with him.

Today is my first appointment in the series of appointments that are supposed to get me in to see a psychiatrist. I hope everything goes alright with this. I've been waiting for a very long time.

Change of Plans

First, I'm going to tell you something a little funny. We got our couch for free from a family in the ward. It's got some stains on it from their two little girls, but it's still a very nice couch. Joseph put his first stain on it today by trying to take a bite out of a cushion while he had a mouthful of berry yogurt.

Okay, so Mitchell told me to take today as a rest day again because I got hardly any sleep last night. Joseph was waking up about every hour last night and if I tried to put him in his crib he started screaming. I was in the rocking chair until almost 2 and then I gave up and took him to bed with me, but he still kept waking up and crying a lot. The only thing we can figure is that it's his teeth bugging him.

I might work on other things, but my main goal for today is to relax so that I don't have a breakdown. Things like this are very hard on my depression/anxiety.

Same Goal, New Day

Okay, I'm setting the same goal for myself that I did on Friday and Saturday. I'm going to complete it this time, though. I'm always ready to get back into my normal routine after the weekend.

A New Calling

We were sustained and set apart as assisstant nursery leaders today. I don't know if I'm ready, though. I enjoyed being nursery leaders last year, but it's harder now. I was so tired today after Joseph keeping me up all night. There are twice as many kids as there were last year, too. And there's lots of cryers. It will be good, though. It's a good chance for me to work on my patience.

A Plea For Help

Joseph is 10 1/2 months old and he still doesn't sleep through the night. In fact, he wakes up an average of 5 times per night crying and sometimes screaming. The earlier in the morning that it gets the more frequent his waking and louder his screaming gets. Any ideas of what I can do?

Quiet day.

I didn't do my goal today. I just took it easy. I did go grocery shopping, though. That needed to be done.

Something sad, though. When I came home from Walmart, I found one of our pumpkins smashed on the porch. We don't know who did it. We didn't even get to carve them yet! It's really upsetting, though.

I'm glad tomorrow is Sunday. It's going to be a busy day, but it's the only day that I get Mitchell with me the whole day.

We are watching House right now, so I'm done for now.

Joseph Being Silly

Here's a video of Joseph. He just woke up from a really long nap and was being funny. It's kinda long and not super funny, so you don't have to watch the whole thing if you get bored.

Not A Good Day.

I feel horrible and I have a lot on my mind. I'm not sure how well this is going to translate from my brain to computer. I'm not always good at putting my thoughts down, especially when I don't feel well.

First, I didn't complete my goal for the day. I started cleaning off my dresser and unpacking my jewelry and things, but didn't get very far before other things came up.

Second, we didn't have FHE. Those other things got in the way of that, too.

Third, I got a migraine. THAT is what came up and prevented me from doing anything. I still have it, but it's a little better. I tried resting, but Mitchell got hungry, bored, and the baby wanted Mommy. I was getting clues all morning and I should have known that a migraine was coming on, but it's been a while since I've had one.

Right now I'm sitting on the couch at the house of Mitchell's friend, Peter. He's letting me use his laptop. Mitchell and Peter went for a walk. Mitchell's frustrated with the way things are going for him and wanted to talk things over with a friend.

I don't think I've gotten everything out of my head, but I need to let my thoughts settle for a minute. I might post more later. I'm going to call my mom and watch Goldeneye.

A Little Pirate Baby

Grammy (Ellis) and Aunt Sara came over to give Joseph a present yesterday. They bought him a sweater/hat set and some matching shoes. They are still a little big for him, but he'll grow into them soon.

Before I post the pictures, let me give you a little background. My husband loves pirates. He has a pirate skull seat cover on the driver's seat. He has this pirates vs. ninjas t-shirt that he wears all the time. And in a comic he drew (which he's amazing at), he drew himself as this huge pirate. So, when Joseph was born he started getting pirate things. He has a pirate blanket that my mom made for him and he had some pirate pajamas and a couple shirts and even a bib. So now he got some more pirate things.

We had a hard time getting any smiles, and he doesn't like wearing the hat, but maybe he'll like it later. He looks really cute though.

My Personal Makeover

Okay. So for one of my Christmas presents, Mitchell gave me a book called You Can Do It! The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-up Girls. It's really fun. I've been working on the Look Sharp merit badge. It's all about updating your personal style so that you feel better about yourself and more comfortable with the way you look when you leave your house.

Step 3 is "Shop in your closet." That's what I'm going to do tomorrow. I'm going to shop in my closet. I'm also going to unpack and organize my jewelry and organize my makeup. It's a big project and I don't know if I can do it all in one day. Especially because we made Fridays our Family Home Evening night because Mitchell works on Monday nights (we're carving pumpkins!).

The first part of the badge was to take "before" pictures. I'm going to post them. I intentionally made the horrible face, but the ponytail, lack of makeup, and t-shirt with jeans are my typical everyday look.

Then I made a "style file" of fashions and styles that I like. I cut up a magazine and pasted them in my binder. Then I made a shopping list of essentials that I need and 3 style wishes. So first, I'm going to shop in my closet and reinvent the things that I already own. Then I'm going to host a clothing swap. And then I'll finish out shopping at the store after hunting for the best prices around.

It's been pretty fun trying to work on the merit badge. And there are so many more badges that I'm excited to do.

I actually did it.

First of all, here is the video of Joseph doing laundry. Mitchell helped me figure out how to do it.




I did finish my goal for the day. I couldn't have done it without Mitchell. I was having a hard evening. I was just feeling overworked and underappreciated (not by Mitchell, by other people) and he got me out of bed and working. It really didn't take long to finish the project at all. Here is the final product. It's so much nicer. Joseph likes to pull my shoes out of their cubbies.



I'm going to post about tomorrow's goal in a different blog because I have a few more pictures that I want to post and I don't want this one to be too long.

New day, new goal.

Yay me!! That is all of my folded laundry. Except for a couple small loads that I didn't get in because it was almost midnight. That's what I get for taking a 3 hour nap with Joseph. *cring*

I had lots of wonderful help from Joseph while doing the laundry. He's so funny. He does this every time I fold laundry. He thinks it's the best game. I have a cute video of him, but I can't figure out how to make it small enough. I'll wait until Mitchell comes home.

Alright, now for today's goal. We moved into our apartment on my birthday, the 28th of August. I still have not finished unpacking our bedroom closet. I still have most of my shoes in a box. There are also boxes of other things that have not been unpacked. Our closet is a walk-in, but on Sunday, when Mitchell tried to walk into it he stepped on the heel of my overturned church shoes. He's been wearing a bandaid on his foot to cushion it from the pain of walking ever since. So, I promised I would take care of the closet this week. I hope I can get it done.

It's Laundry Day

As you can tell by the above picture, my laundry has gotten out of control. The clothes on the right are actually clean and just haven't been folded for a week and the upper left clothes are all dirty. Doing laundry once a week doesn't work with a baby. I've known that for a while, I just haven't adjusted my schedule.

Oh, and last night, I DID find my vitamins and get them all organized. So I accomplished a goal. Yay me!!! (If you've ever watched The Suite Life with Zach and Cody, then you'll know about the "Yay me!")

A (Nearly) Perfect Evening

Tonight has been very calm and very nice. I bathed Joseph with the smell of a pear coffee cake wafting in from the kitchen. Then we read stories and I exhausted my repertoire of memorized Primary songs trying to get him to sleep, but I succeeded about 40 minutes ago. It's very quiet and peaceful in the house. I was listening to a Norah Jones radio station that I created on pandora.com (check it out, it's an awesome website) and that plus the running of the dishwasher and dryer really just helped me relax. The only thing that would make the evening better would be Mitchell laying on the couch drawing or playing his PSP, but he works nights at Chick-Fil-A, at least for now.

He put in his 2 weeks notice on Saturday. He kept getting the feeling that it was time to quit and he's been wanting to quit for quite a while now. Ross, his brother, quit and then left on a mission and then most of his friends were fired and then he switched to evenings, so he doesn't have friends to talk to like he used to. And even more frustrating for him is that he's not appreciated for the work he does. He's been working there for a couple years now, I think, and he's been passed over for promotion multiple times. 4 people were just promoted this past week and only one of them had more experience than him working for Chick-Fil-A, but he's been working at that particular store longer than all of them. He's definitely one of the top ten most knowledgeable workers they have, but he's taken for granted. So he's looking for another job. Sam, another brother, does the hiring at an animation studio down in Atlanta and sent Mitchell something to work on, so he might end up getting a job down there. I don't really want to move to Georgia, but I'll follow my husband anywhere.

I have a lot of thoughts in my head, so I'm going to keep blogging until I get them all out.

When I was singing Joseph to sleep, I looked up the Primary Program songs for this year and started singing those ones to him. One of the songs is How Firm A Foundation. I absolutely love that song and I can't sing it without tears coming. Every time I sing it, I think that it must have been written specifically for me. The only thing I don't like is that we never sing all the verses in church and they are such great verses, too. Verses 3 and 4 are my favorites and they are the ones that I can't get through without getting choked up. I'm going to post the words so you can read how wonderful they are for yourself.

3. Fear not, I am with thee; oh, be not dismayed,
For I am thy God and will still give the aid.
I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by my righteous, upheld by my righteous,
Upheld by my righteous, omnipotent hand.

4. When through the deep waters I call thee to go,
The rivers of sorrow shall not thee o'erflow.
For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless,
And sanctify to the thy deepest distress.

The rest of the song is amazing, too.

Okay, so I'm coming to the end of my post. I need to set a goal for tomorrow. I've been slacking on the goal setting thing for a couple days. So, tomorrow I am going to unpack and sort out all my vitamins. Mitchell's dad is a psychiatrist and recommended some vitamins to take that will help with my depression and my awesome mom also recommended some, too. So now I need to actually unpack them and start taking them again because I haven't been since we moved into the apartment. I will report my progress tomorrow evening.

Frustration

So I have looked on just about every costume website and called all the stores in the area and the costume that I want to buy for Joseph is out of stock EVERYWHERE! Mitchell says that I'm not allowed to sew it because it will be too frustrating for me. He's probably right. I have enough stress right now. I asked for email notification on all the websites of when they will have a costume available. And it's too late to change because we already bought Mitchell's costume and it arrived today. We are all going to be matching. And I'm not revealing what we are dressing up as yet, so you'll just have to wait.

Saturday is a special day...

Okay, it't time for today's goal. And that is to clean my house... or at least make it presentable. Our home teachers are coming to visit us in our new apartment for the first time.

I don't want them to see the disaster that it is right now. I haven't even actually finished unpacking and putting everything away in our dining room/office area. I'm not sure if I'm really ready to tackle a project of this magnitude, but it needs to be done.

Wish me luck...

Cookie Mania

I did it! I made over 70 cookies today! It was fun, too. It was hard and I almost gave up, but I did have fun.

I didn't get started until the afternoon because I was doing stuff with Mitchell. Luckily, he was home to help with the baby, otherwise I wouldn't have finished. I decided to make a double batch because I knew I wanted to take cookies to people. I don't have a mixer, so I was borrowing my mother-in-law's hand mixer. I had probably 4 cups of flour left to add when the mixer started to smell funny. I decided to mix in the rest by hand. That's when I almost gave up, but Mitchell came in and started adding the flour and mixing it all together. He got it to the right consistency for rolling it out and turned it back over to me. I rolled and cut and rolled and cut and rolled and cut for a long time. Then I baked for a long time. I made a single batch of frosting and did the white and black frosting. Then I made another single batch and did the orange and green frosting. I don't have one of those icing decorating kits, so I used sandwich bags to frost the details.

We delivered 6 plates of cookies. 4 were to sisters that I visit teach, 1 was to a family that Mitchell home teaches, and the last was to Mitchell's mom. None of the sisters were home and 2 of them don't even live at that address anymore. Luckily, they still have family living there who were willing to deliver the cookies. I have 1 more plate to deliver to a sister tomorrow and Mitchell taking one to Kevin at work. Delivering the cookies was an adventure in itself. It was cold, dark, and rainy and we had to drive all over Virginia Beach. It was fun, though.

Tomorrow I have a huge mess to clean up.

Mitchell told me to save it until tomorrow so that I can get to bed at a decent time. It's already really late. I'm happy, though. I'm glad that I accomplished this goal that I set for myself and I had fun in the process. Yay me!!!

Fail. Sorta...

So I didn't make the cookies today. The errands took most of the day and Joseph was cranky for the in-between times.

BUT... I did buy Mitchell's Halloween costume and the pumpkins that we are going to carve for FHE tomorrow night. I also got the food coloring for the frosting. Tomorrow is going to be my cookie making day, I think. Although, I'm starting to think I want to wait until next week to make them. I'm thinking it would be a fun to deliver the cookies to people as a FHE activity. Maybe we'll do that tomorrow and carve pumpkins next week.

Anyway, today was mostly okay. I got a splitting headache and a horrible backache in the early evening. Joseph was being fussy and I couldn't handle wrestling with him for dinner, so Mitchell traded shifts with a co-worker and got off early to be with me. Pain combined with a cranky baby pushes me to the edge. Luckily, Mitchell has good friends at work that are willing to help out. I promised Kevin some Halloween cookies for trading with Mitch.

K, I'm exhausted. Now I just have to get Joseph to go to sleep so that I can go to sleep.

Goal #1

Halloween is my favorite holiday. It has been for a long time. Even when I was a kid and the other kids loved Christmas or their birthdays because they got presents, I loved Halloween. So my goal is to celebrate this holiday as fully as I can. I'm going to decorate, get costumes, make cookies, and more.

Today I'm going to make Halloween sugar cookies. Mitchell bought me some Halloween cookie cutters at Dollar Tree on Monday and I've been dying to use them. We'll see how things go. Joseph has been feeling clingy the past couple days, so it's been hard to get stuff done. I also have to run a bunch of errands because I have the car this morning.

Let's get this started...

I set up this account back in January, but I never finished setting it up. I had different plans for it then. I had decided to do my own Julie & Julia type thing. I thought about doing it a month or two ago, but never got around to it. But now I'm here and I'm making myself start this.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression 5 years ago. I've been on and off medications and treatment since then. A couple years ago, I started taking my new medication and things have gotten easier. Until about a month ago... I ran out of my medication and I don't have any insurance to get a new prescription. I'm waiting on an appointment with the health clinic now. The past 3 or 4 weeks have been some of the most difficult of my life. Sometimes I don't know if I'm going to make it through the day. The goal of this blog is to get things off of my chest and to record my progress.

Today was a bad day. That's why I decided to start this.

My brain is slowing down and I don't know what else to write at this moment. I'll continue with this later.