As of the last two days, I have officially failed my accepted "challenge" to blog once a day, every day, for 30 days straight. I suppose, considering all the things happening in our lives right now, it was a bit much for me to expect of myself. On the plus side, I have succeeded beyond Husband ("The ADD Muse Says ..."), who has not blogged since the 17th! Ha ha! I will consider this my small victory and run with it.
After I got over myself the other day, I suggested to Husband that we go out to dinner with the remainder of our limited funds. My mother watched The Kid while we went to a local restaurant we have only been to once before (on my birthday last year, ironically enough), and when we came home we re-watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno - not because it's a particularly family-friendly movie, but because it's absolutely adorable under all that crass humor and foul language. We picked The Kid up from my mom's house well after midnight, when we had finally finished watching the movie and half of the deleted scenes (which, for once, were deleted for a REASON; they all sucked) and realized that we were falling asleep. It reminds me of the ending of Shrek 3, where once they've finished dealing with their new little ogre babies and said kiddos are asleep, Shrek looks to Fiona and says something akin to, "So .. Now what should we do?" It's of course meant to be suggestive, meant to be a lot of things, but a split-second later the "camera" switches to an unexpected scene of the two sprawled on their bed, fully-clothed and passed out to the point of snoring. That is parenthood. THAT is accuracy. It wasn't a bad birthday at all, and I appreciated the alone time with Husband, even if all we did was watch a silly movie and try not to fall asleep.
Since then we've been continuing our struggle with housing and money. The latter appears in the form of well over $100 in back-rent owed to our current landlady, whom I have been carefully avoiding calling back for two days now because in all honesty, I've no excuse for it being late other than the fact that we are broke (trust me, what little we spent on dinner would not have made up for the money we owe her). In the business world, being broke is an excuse, not a reason, and it seems silly to put her through more trouble when we hope that my check this week will be enough to repay her the remainder of rent and leave us SOMETHING to work with for the rest of the week. I'm finding it more and more difficult to avoid putting away plain old cash, hiding it somewhere; mostly I'm avoiding it because I worry I'll lose the money, or that the container I put it in will be packed away and lost forever once I get back into the swing of packing. I'll admit, on that note, a good portion of my laziness with packing has been that it seems odd to want to pack up all of our belongings when we have nowhere to move to.
The former, to get back on track, has come to us in the form of a string of failed apartment listings. Out of the seven or so we contacted last week, two were houses (out of our price range), one was in our price range and big but had SO many problems that wouldn't be fixed that it wasn't even worth pretending we wanted it, and the rest were tiny apartments out of our price range, which is just plain silly if you think about it. Out options have gone back to being incredibly limited, and the paperwork to apply to live in a nearby 100 apartment complex is daunting to say the least. Some 12 pages of information to provide, a credit check (hah, yeah right), a waiting list, and even then, no guarantee that before June 16th (when our lease officially ends) we will be given an apartment. To say that I'm concerned about our housing situation would be a massive understatement.
The only other news I have to report is really only pertinent if you've kept up on my Twitter updates. I mentioned a while ago that my mother was having problems and was going home from work one day instead of being admitted to the hospital she works at. She has had breathing problems her entire life in the form of asthma, and smoked for quite some time off and on throughout her life. She has had severe breathing problems before, and this time ended up buying a nebulizer for home treatments. After two visits to her doctor, an MRI, an echocardiogram, blood work, and chest x-rays, along with an upcoming stress test for her heart, the general consensus is that her heart is enlarged because of her asthma, and she is likely suffering also from a condition that keeps one of the valves in a ventricle from "firing" in proper order. This combination of problems, while just as serious as any other heart issue, can be treated via medication and careful monitoring, and as long as she monitors her own health, it seems that this is something that will not immediately require surgery or other major invasive procedures. Of all of the answers that we could have been given to her problem (emphysema, lung cancer, multiple heart attacks, etc), this is perhaps the best-case scenario, because short-term treatment does not require surgery or other expensive and painful-recovery procedures to fix it. There is the unfortunate knowledge, though, that something will EVENTUALLY need to be done; of course, the verdict is still out on what, and when. She has been given detailed instructions on how to manage her medication, warning signs she should watch out for, and how often she should need to use her nebulizer during attacks and on "okay days" - more usages than what's considered within "safe" limits, and she needs to go back to the pulminologist immediately.
The only plus side I've seen so far is that next Thursday night we get to meet with my doula for the first time and find out if we're truly interested in having her along for what little is left of our journey into becoming parents a second time over. I wanted my sister-in-law here, but she has two kids of her own living with her constantly and lives 1600 miles away - if the scheduling wasn't a bit of a problem, the money would be (and is). Even this has a downside, though, as that's the day my mom is going to her pulminologist, and Husband rearranged his work schedule to make sure he'd be working during the day and not in the evening so he could meet our doula, too - and it turns out that Thursday is the day I was supposed to take my second three-hour gestational diabetes test. Oops. So I'll have to reschedule that, though I'm hoping since Husband is off the following day I can just push it to Friday. I don't like that test and I'm genuinely worried about the outcome this time (last time I passed with flying colors), so I don't want to postpone it any longer than is necessary. I want to get it over and done with so the full results will be back before my next OB appointment on May 5th or 6th.
Well, it's a bit past 2 AM now, and the heartburn and choking that had woken me up after a little less than an hour and a half of sleep are both long gone, replaced only by a somewhat dry mouth and a vague nausea that I can only assume is thanks to the two cups of chocolate milk I drank in an attempt to quell the heartburn. Nausea I can deal with, and that alone won't keep me from sleeping, especially when I have a conference call for work bright and early at 9 AM and will then be going to work afterwards. Time to head back to bed.
