The Time Draws Nigh (In Which I Agonize About Going Back To Work And Am Both Successful And In Deep Trouble Simultaneously)

Tags

anxiety, depression, dog training, maternity leave, parenthood, Perfect Husband, work, working mother

How has it been nearly a year since Fritter was born? Where did the time go?

  
I have spent the last month or two slowly gearing back up to work mode, because in a month I am going to have to go back into the world of unmet expectations and absolutely no down time which is the life of the working mother.

I don’t wanna.

I don’t want my cuddly baby to get bigger.

I don’t want to leave her at daycare because she has some stranger issues (which I will discuss at some point).

I don’t want the stress of having to meet people’s expectations, avoid judgement, etc.

I don’t want to lose the hour and a half of down time I get every day during Fritter’s morning nap while Owl is at school.

I don’t want any of it. I LIKE maternity leave.

 
But, since it isn’t a choice, what I really want is to get my dog training business going, and going HARD. Because training dogs pays between 40 and 70 dollars an hour and working at the vet clinic… doesn’t. Also because it’s one of my life dreams, along with being an author.

In Which I Unravel The Secret of Meditative Tasks

Tags

anxiety, coloring, knitting, meditation, tasks

So, colouring books for grownups. That’s a thing, now.

It happened so suddenly. One night, my mother in law told me about an article she had just read about how colouring can help depression and anxiety, and how they were making special books designed to soothe one or the other. The next day – the VERY NEXT DAY – I went to our local drug store and BAM, those same books were there.

  
The next time I went into Chapters I saw even more, with even fancier, more intricate designs.

I was intrigued.

You see all of those pictures and they seem to just beg to be coloured. They are beautiful, and all they are missing is your own artistic touch.

(As a random piece of trivia, I won a colouring contest when I was a kid and it netted me a $100 gift certificate to Toys R Us. Unfortunately, I let my mother talk me into giving HER the gift certificate to use as needed for gifts for friends’ parties. My mother gave me a verbal IOU of $100 which I was hypothetically supposed to be able to cash in on an as-needed basis. Eventually, after much wheedling, I managed to convince her to part with $40 of it for a stuffed porcupine puppet. Then we moved to Curacao where there was no Toys R Us so I called it a loss.)

I tried colouring along with Owl in one of his books one day, too, and it was pretty fun, even if I did feel like I was showing up my five year old.

Then reports started pouring in from friends. One with anxiety says she really enjoys it. She finds it helps give her focus, takes her mind off of her anxieties, and refreshes her a bit. Another friend has actually set up a standing date with one of her other friends to colour together. They love it.

It seems like there’s good science behind the fad, too. Colouring seems to inhabit the perfect space between “too challenging” and “not challenging enough” to create a near-meditation state. You can focus on the task while letting your mind wander. Instead of thinking about your breathing or something, you think about your picture.

Heavens knows I need something to help me get into a meditative state because I’m not doing too great lately.

So I have been seriously thinking about colouring, but there was something that was holding me back, and it has nothing to do with Toys R Us gift cards.

The honest fact is that I’m not very interested in colouring. I mean, it sounds fun, and it looks fun, and I think I would like it if I were on vacation and just wanting something to do. But I’m not on vacation, and I have a long list of recreational activities that I would rather do when Owl is either in school or asleep and Fritter is sleeping.

Writing is pretty high on that list, as is reading and binge-watching The Walking Dead alone or watching QI with Perfect Husband (by the way, if you enjoy intellectual British humor, rare trivia, and Stephen Fry, but you haven’t heard of this show HIE THEE TO YOUTUBE THIS INSTANT).

When I have some semblence of mental energy, I write. When I don’t, I collapse in front of Netflix or I read. Colouring would be ignored in both instances. I certainly wouldn’t want colouring to take up potential writing time. My writing, no matter what it is, feels productive. Colouring wouldn’t. Like Netflix, it would be purely recreational.

So I put it on the backburner.

Then, last week, I was visiting my friend the Farm Fairy at her knitting store, and she was pushing me, yet again, to try knitting.

She is always trying to get me to knit, and I always say no. I’m not good with my hands. My fingers aren’t nimble. Maybe it’s because I spent my childhood galloping around on four legs pretending to be a horse instead of dressing dolls. Maybe it’s my poor spatial skills. Maybe it is because I am left handed and my mother is right handed and when she tried to teach me knitting left handed she got all confused and gave up.

“The thing is,” said the Farm Fairy, as her puppy licked my baby’s face and Fritter chortled and pulled on the puppy’s fur, “I took a break from knitting to prepare for this big trade show, and when I was able to start again I realized how much I missed it. It’s sort of meditative, because it’s repetitive and you need to pay attention a little, but it’s also the sort of thing you can do while watching TV or chatting with your friends. It’s something for your hands to do, and I realized that I worry about things a lot more when I don’t knit.”

 

KNITTING!

After all, the colouring books aren’t a unique way of de-stressing. Psychologists have observed the same effect from other repetitive, only-slightly-challenging activities, like playing Tetris. They all lead to “flow”.

In fact, I bet that was why everyone got obsessed with Flappy Bird.

PH likes to clear-cut things in Minecraft. Talk about repetitive tasks. I don’t know why, but he will spend hours in Minecraft simply demolishing huge mountains. But more on that in another post.

Anyway, my point is that knitting is just as good an activity as colouring. It is repetitive, mindless, but also requires a certain level of focus.

“Think about it,” said the Farm Fairy. “What happens to dogs when they don’t have enough to do?”

“They bark, destroy things…” I said.

“Spin in circles, chase their tails, suck their flanks… they develop stereotypies, right? Destructive ones. People aren’t so different. They need something to occupy them, something repetitive to do just to keep their hands busy.”

She makes an excellent point.

Plus then instead of just instagramming my colouring pages, I can actually have THINGS that I could MAKE for people.

And the nice thing about being able to make people gifts is that they have to cherish them no matter how crappy they are because I MADE IT FOR YOU.

Besides, the world is full of nerdy knitting projects that I would love to be able to recreate. If I could do that while watching The Walking Dead I would actually be improving my productivity!

What about the fact that I’m spatially impaired with poor manual dexterity?

Yeah, there is that. Well, you don’t know until you try, right? And the Farm Fairy is a good teacher.

So I had my first lesson last week, and it IS fiddly and difficult for me, but I spent all this week knitting while listening to QI. I feel like I’m able to focus more on the dialogue while I knit. My mind doesn’t wander as much. There’s no room for mind wandering. The knitting and the conversation eat up all the brain power I have.

Plus in the end, I would get a square, blue dishrag. So my evening productivity was already going up.

I finished off my first knitting project, the dishrag, today. Here it is:

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s beautiful.

In Which My Anxiety Fixates On Something That Is Completely Impossible To Prevent

Tags

anxiety, baby blues, mental health, post partum, SIDS

In the days following Fritter’s birth, I got a lot of questions about my mood from the public health office.  They called to check on me when we got home from the hospital, a week later, and again when Fritter was six weeks old.

Through some sort of file sharing with the hospital, they know that I have a history of depression and so they kept reminding me to expect baby blues. In fact, you could tell they expected it to turn into full on post-partum depression given the whole depressed-husband-and-a-four-year-old life situation.

I expected baby blues too. I mean, that’s pretty normal. Weepiness, sobbing over Skittles commercials… that sort of thing.

But it never came.

In fact, when they took me through a depression questionnaire at the six week mark, I passed with flying colours.

Look at me, all not-depressed

I don’t know why I have been spared any sort of bizarre hormonal fluctuations, or post partum depression, but I am grateful.

Maybe it was having the support of my parents and mother in law (who flew out here again once my parents returned back to Nova Scotia). I haven’t had to behave like a fully fledged adult since the nightmare that was early January.

Support. It helps.

In any case, I’m feeling pretty happy, but I DO still have my generalized anxiety gnawing at me.

When Owl was a baby, I used to fret over his head. I kept having images of accidentally crushing it like an egg or melon.

With Fritter, I am terrified of SIDS.

In Which I Find Everything Unnecessarily Difficult And Fight Hormonal Reactions To It

Tags

anxiety, doctor, hormones, ob-gyn, pregnancy, prenatal care, stress, work

My friend Hannah from Hodgepodge and Strawberries recently said to me that ‘pregnancy is like 9 months of non-stop PMS’ and I thoroughly agree. Life is hard enough on general principle, but when you’re trying to do it while surfing on a wave of irritation and overreaction it becomes just that much more difficult to navigate.

Picture trying to hold sixteen different items in your arms at once, while sobbing.

I have become a ball of horrible crippling anxiety and tears.

On top of the two jobs not to mention the “gee I haven’t bought any presents and now there’s no time to mail them back to Nova Scotia in time for Christmas” stress, I’ve been trying to deal with my medical situation.

So, you won’t have forgotten the mysterious disease of May/June. Well, a month or more ago I went back to the specialist because the itchy rash kept coming back. It usually starts on my chest and neck, burning and red, and then fades away while the itchiness spreads over my whole body and causes me to scratch my skin off for days. Antihistamines don’t help. Cortisone cream doesn’t help. So I went back to the internist. I was thinking that maybe this thing was autoimmune after all.

The internist listened carefully, and narrowed her eyes. “I think you should go back to the opthamologist and see if your optic nerve swelling is back,” she said. “If it is, we should probably do a lumber puncture, and you might need to talk to a neurosurgeon.”

I’m sorry, what now?

Yeah, it turns out that itching which isn’t soothed by cortisone or antihistamines can sometimes be NEUROLOGICAL.

I hadn’t mentioned it to her, but the wooshing noise in my left ear had returned a few times, too.

So I went back to the opthamologist, having spent the last three days at work saying “I MIGHT NEED A BRAIN SURGEON” whenever someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer.

The opthamologist looked in my eyes and said, “Yeah, the swelling is back again. Not nearly as bad as the first time I saw you, but definitely worse than the last time I saw you.”

Then, when I went in to my family doctor, she said that the bloodwork that the internist had done showed that my CRP (inflammation) values were up again, too.

So… what does this mean? Lumbar puncture? BRAIN SURGEON (FUCKING  BRAIN SURGEON OH MY GOD)?

Well, I don’t know! Because NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW.

I called the internist’s office on Monday and was like “Uh, what do I do now?”

And they said “We don’t know… doesn’t say in your file… we’ll ask the doctor tomorrow.”

Today is Wednesday. I still haven’t heard back. So I called and left ANOTHER message asking what the hell I do now.

And that ain’t all.

The internist also apologetically told me that I should be considered a high risk pregnancy because they have no idea what’s wrong with me. Better safe than sorry.

That means that I need an OB, not a midwife.

I decided the last time I was pregnant that I wanted a midwife this time around. Midwives are covered in British Columbia, and you can still have a hospital birth and epidural and all that wonderful stuff. The big benefit to a midwife, as I saw it, was that she will come to your house and check your dilation so you don’t need to go back and forth to the hospital UMPTEEN TIMES and wait for two hours just to be told that you haven’t dilated in the slightest EVEN THOUGH YOU’VE BEEN HAVING CONTRACTIONS EVERY 3 MINUTES FOR THE LAST 18 HOURS.

Not that that wasn’t wonderful and all.

Besides, it sucked that I saw one or two doctors throughout my prenatal care and then my baby ended up being delivered by a stranger who didn’t even remember me when I went in for my 6 week post delivery checkup.

So I got a midwife for my last pregnancy and had all of one appointment with her before the baby died in the womb and all that stuff happened. 

This time I held off for a while – partly because I was half-convinced that the baby would die again so I didn’t want to jump the gun and partly because my doctor was like “let’s make sure your weird disease doesn’t cause any problems.”

So I’ve been seeing my family doctor for prenatals which she said she could do through 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Then the rashes and the head wooshing started and now the internist has officially said that I should be considered high risk.

Which means that I need to have an OB.

Which sucks.

So I asked my family doctor to refer me to my previous OB clinic. After all, if I have to have an OB again, it might as well be the place that gave me a healthy baby last time, somewhere I am familiar with and with some faces that I’ll recognize.

Does that seem too much to ask? DOES IT?

APPARENTLY IT IS.

In Which I Try To Use Worry As A Weapon To Fight Off A Bad Ultrasound Outcome…

Tags

20 week ultrasound, anxiety, baby, defects, fear, miscarriage, pregnancy, worries

My 20 week ultrasound is tomorrow, and I’m doing my Anxiety Girl thing.

Back when I was in my Generalized Anxiety CBT group, they talked about how pathological worriers will often suffer from the superstitious belief that  their worrying is actually productive.

Then I raised my hand and told them my own personal theory of worrying, which stunned them for a moment, and then the leader said,

“That is the most COMPLEX rationalization of anxiety I have EVER heard.”

Wanna hear it?

Of course you do.

Okay, as you may know, one of the many bizarre and perplexing things suggested by Quantum Mechanics is that we could very well exist as one universe in a vast multiverse – that there are alternate universes created on a quantum level for every possible outcome. There could be thousands of YOUs out there, all living similar but slightly different realities.

And yet we only experience it as one lifetime, right? My particular consciousness is separate from the consciousnesses of all the other Carols out there – thousands of things could happen to various Carols throughout the multiverse but I will only experience one of those.

Maybe in another universe, my last pregnancy didn’t end in a miscarriage.

Maybe in another universe, I stayed with my first boyfriend and never married PH.

Maybe in another universe, I didn’t contract that weird disease (I went back to the internist the other day, by the way. The rash keeps coming back, so I spend half my time scratching off my own skin, and lately I’ve been hearing wooshes in my ears…).

Anyway, here is my theory: if I concentrated hard enough, maybe I can CHOOSE which reality my consciousness stays in. Maybe by WORRYING that a certain bad thing will happen, I can consciously AVOID it happening to THIS PARTICULAR iteration of my consciousness. Of course bad things still happen, but aren’t they always different bad things from what we expect? Aren’t we always blindsided by the one thing that DIDN’T worry us?

My GAD group used that as proof that worrying doesn’t help. I suggested that maybe it means that our worrying needs a broader spectrum.

Of course, it’s crazy, and the CBT stuff helped me drop a LOT of that. I don’t worry nearly as much as I used to and look what happened! I had a silent miscarriage and walked around with a dead baby inside me for weeks.

So, this time of course I was terrified of a bad outcome and my 8 week ultrasound was clear. The baby is still alive – I can feel little kicks and twitches at night and sometimes around noon. But all kinds of bad things could happen at tomorrow’s ultrasound. The baby could be hideously malformed. It could have soft markers indicating Down’s Syndrome, or worse, another Trisomy that is seriously deadly. Heart defects, spinal defects…

So far I have googled Trisomy 18, Trisomy 13, Anencephaly, and have read over 20 personal stories from people who had horrible news from their 20 week ultrasound and either ended up deciding to terminate or carrying to term and then taking photographs of their dead/deformed and dying baby. For some reason, ALL OF THESE people are deeply religious and use the word “sweet” and “angel” multiple times.

Not sure if seriously defective babies are some kind of Trojan that Jesus uses to infect people or if only religious people have the strength to document their experiences. Could be both.

I’m also wondering what we’re going to do with Owl if the news is bad. We haven’t out-and-out told him that I’m pregnant. He has noticed that my stomach is getting bigger and has asked several times if I have a baby in there. PH finally  told him that my body is TRYING to grow a baby but we don’t know if it has been successful yet. This prompted him to say loudly “You can’t be making a baby, Mommy! Daddy’s PENIS isn’t in you VAGINA!”

We were in Cost Co at the time. Several people looked around. Kids are great.

Anyway. We told him that tomorrow we will go see a special doctor who can look in my belly and tell us if there is a baby in there. In an ideal world we will be able to bring him in, tell him he is going to have a little brother/sister, and show him the baby on the screen.

But if it’s terrible news, how do we keep his infernal curiosity silent long enough to receive the bad news, discuss the options and digest it all? How do we explain to him that yes, there is a baby in there, but it may not be okay? What do we say to him when we’re told that it’s a boy/girl but it has a hole in the heart/no brain/appears to be an octopus?

 

I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.

Now if you excuse me, I need to google more weird things that can be found on a 20 week ultrasound so I can ensure that our baby doesn’t have them.

You Want ‘Em? We Got ‘Em.

Tags

action figures, anime, anxiety, auctions, collectibles, D&C, depression, ebay, Marvel, selling, star trek, star wars, WoW

Perfect Husband’s depression still weighs him down, but I’m seeing signs of hope… like a vague interest in things.

A couple of weeks ago he started browsing auction items for an upcoming collectables auction.

He wore himself out obsessively researching every item on the auction, noting its average sale value online, and then figuring out the maximum he could pay if he wanted to make a 50% profit off of the item.

He used to work at Ebay a long time ago, and he knows the tips and tricks for figuring out what stuff is really worth, and not just what it is selling for.

His list had hundreds of items.

I figured it was pretty unlikely that many items would sell for half their value or less, given our prior experience with Vancouver auctions, but I was glad that he had a project, because it was the first sign of being interested in anything that he had shown in a long time, so I encouraged him.

This is our living room after he unloaded the car.When he came back from the auction, the car looked like this.

That was the first load.

He had to go back the next day for the second load.

The next morning when we woke up, he said, “I dreamed that I spent over $3,000 on toys and they filled our entire living room.”

“Yeah, that happened.”

We have Star Trek figurines, Star Wars, Muppets, DC Comics, Marvel, WoW, anime, and all kinds of other statues and models and action figures that I’ve never heard of.

Who the hell is Elongated Man?

Why is a Star Trek Salt Vampire worth money?

PH has catalogued, photographed, and stacked them all in our computer room, where he guards them jealously from pet fur and curious little boy fingers.

When he finally sells them all, we’ll make a significant profit. Plus I think it’s healthy for PH to have a project. I keep hoping it’ll help ease him out of his misery.

Unfortunately, PH is now suffering from severe anxiety that they won’t sell.

But I’m not worried.

And when I’m not worried, you can take that to the bank.

I Need More “Merry” Before Christmas.

Tags

anxiety, Christmas, depressing, depression

Sorry for the long radio silence.

I’ve been waiting for something to happen that ISN’T depressing.

We’re all upset about Newtown, although a part of me asks why, in a world where 30,000 children die from hunger and disease every day, this particular twenty hits us all so hard.

Mike Graston’s image, as published in the Windsor Star

Maybe it’s just the unforgiving truth that we assume that we are safe.

Our children are fed, clothed, and vaccinated. Our plastics are BPA free. We use car seats and booster seats, we monitor their play around the clock. We assume our children are safe, and when that belief is shattered, we take it very hard.

In any case, I feel like Newtown started this cascade of bad events. Everyone on my Facebook feed seems depressed. Bad things are happening.

My work has had a run of tragic losses – I rushed a long time patient into the back when his owner presented him for a routine procedure and I took one look at him and realized he was dying, which he did anyway despite oxygen and CPR.

Then I had to drive up a snow covered mountain to recover a dead puppy from a Vancouverite who was too scared of driving in snow to bring him in when he was hit by a car. I won’t talk about it any further, not because I don’t want to talk about it – in fact, I do, in vituperative and graphic detail, to anyone who will listen (much like the Ancient Mariner), but it’s far too depressing a story for me to inflict on you. Suffice to say that the blood stains on my passenger seat still bum me out when I get into the car.

A realtor came to look our place over and give us a valuation (just in case) and politely told me that our house is a dump and would go for about $20,000 less than similar units selling in our complex. Because it’s a dump.

You mean this isn’t desirable?

I’m beginning to sympathize with Aunt Josephine from A Series Of Unfortunate Events.

We went across the border to get some mail, and got pulled aside at the border over a misunderstanding, which resulted not only in a long wait with a child who was past his nap time, but us having to pay tax on duty free liquor (yup).

Owl got sick the day before my work’s Christmas party, which resulted in our friends not wanting to babysit him lest he get their baby sick. My awesome neighbour did dig up a potential babysitter for us, but we just didn’t have babysitter money in our Christmas budget so we brought him to the fancy dinner. He was a hit, but PH had to go home early with him, thus missing out on the theatre show – even though my boss had already paid for the ticket.

PH isn’t having a great time either. He just found out that a former coworker who he finally escaped from when he changed locations last year is going to be his coworker again – someone who used to make his life hell.

I came downstairs this morning to find that PH had rearranged Owl’s alphabet magnets creatively.

That about sums it up

I still haven’t mailed all of my Christmas parcels. Hell, I haven’t even finished my Christmas shopping.

I’m sleepy all the time. I think it’s the long, dark nights and short, dark days.

I took a Wellbutrin this morning.

Focusing on the positive:

Monday’s Canada’s Worst Driver showed gay man love, and that made us happy. You don’t see enough of that on reality television.

Owl seems to be recovering quickly from his cold.

When the realtor walked into Owl’s room, she brightened up and said, “oh, THIS is nice!” in a surprised tone of voice.

And it really is.

My much-coveted cape coat arrived in time for my work’s Christmas party, a gift from my mother.

I’m getting a fancy new video camera with my Christmas bonus money from my dog training business, which I can use to make training videos and possible become rich and famous. Or just use to make more Owl videos.

Best of all, I was voted Employee Of The Year at work! How’s that a turn around from almost a year ago?

(as an amusing side note, I also found this post from around this time last December, so things are definitely looking up)

Being Employee of the Year is not only a huge morale booster, it’s a $1,000 prize which must go towards a trip of some kind. PH had been talking about taking Owl and I to Disneyland, but I was wavering because of the cost. PROBLEM SOLVED.

…Except that an hour after PH booked it, the friends who were supposed to be going with us to share a room with us (cutting costs) and taking Owl off of our hands ended up having to back out – problems with the husband’s work schedule. So that’s a new problem.

Right. POSITIVE.

The problem with being me is that rather than bask in the “I must be awesome” glow of being Employee of the Year, I am instead plagued with thoughts like this:

“You don’t deserve that, you haven’t worked nearly hard enough.”

“Everyone must be pissed at you for winning, because THEY wanted the $1,000 prize.”

“Now, if you don’t work even harder, people are going to regret voting for you.”

“No one complimented your dress at the work party. They probably thought that you were slovenly and awful and have lost all respect for you.”

“Your dress slipped when you hugged Dr Hank Azaria, exposing your bra. Now everyone thinks you’re a ho.” 

And other such cheerful thoughts.

Did I mention I took a Wellbutrin?

In Which I Fret About The Chance That Things Might Change In The Nebulous Future, Because, Hi, I’m Me.

Tags

anxiety, change, generalized anxiety disorder, homes, life, living far away, moving house

PH likes change.

It is one of his most baffling but also more endearing qualities. He likes to visit new places, try new things, and basically expose himself to all kinds of potential for disappointment, regret, and other things that I avoid as if they were herpes.

Change me no likee.

Well, that’s not quite true. I like GOOD change. Really obvious, risk-free, guaranteed-to-be-positive change!

Most change doesn’t fit that criteria.

It was his love of change that sent PH out to Vancouver in the first place. He sold all his possessions, up and moved.

Making the decision to move out there with him several years later was probably one of the riskiest things I have ever done. I was leaving friends and family behind and quitting a job I liked. But on the other hand, I was heading to a place with much better job opportunities, I was young, and I had my fiancé with me.

It was fun, and exciting, and difficult. I had trouble finding a job, I had trouble making friends, and I had a lot of trouble putting down roots. I suffered depression. I lost two jobs.

But I’m finally getting settled in.

And now, Perfect Husband is starting to get bored of Vancouver.

I think he is also getting tired of sharing me with three different jobs – my vet clinic job, my dog training business, and my occasional Elance work.

Even though he knows we need the money, and he is supportive of my dog training business in general, he doesn’t like me disappearing for half the weekend on my dog training appointments. And if my clinic job asks me to work a Saturday? There is definite grumbling to be heard.

But at the same time, we want a second child and have no idea how we will be able to afford it. The math just doesn’t work.

If we didn’t have a $220,000 mortgage plus monthly condo fees, we wouldn’t be feeling the pinch so much. It doesn’t help that we know that if we outgrow our current place, we’d need an even larger mortgage. Our current one is tiny by Vancouver standards, because our complex has so many repair issues.

For a larger place, we’d be looking at $600,000 or more, very probably. And that just ain’t gonna happen unless I suddenly become VERY famous and rich.

So whenever a job pops up at PH’s company in a place with lower housing prices, even if it’s a job that he is totally unsuited for, he applies for it and starts browsing houses. I’ll get a text saying ‘Hey, want to live in Memramcook?” or “Who wants to move to Burns Lake?”

Of course, since he’s largely unqualified for most of these jobs, and because he lists moving costs as a condition of getting the job, the chances are remote… but there have been some close calls.

And every time he does this, I have to think about how I feel about moving.

The problem all comes down to change.

I’m actually HAPPY right now, which, to quote Marlin from Finding Nemo, is a big deal, for me.

I like the vet clinic where I work. I like my boss, and my coworkers.

My dog training business is picking up. We actually have a minor TV celebrity on our training roster right now. If we get permission to use her name on our website, that will look AWESOME.

I have friends who have little boys of about Owl’s age. Our neighbour dropped his two sons off to play with Owl for a couple hours yesterday and the house got so much more peaceful with to toddlers to occupy Owl’s attention. We have another friend’s tot coming over for a babysitting session tonight, so Owl will be happier than a pig in muck.

For all of the issues we occasionally have with Owl’s daycare, he loves it there. He talks constantly about the other kids, he hates to leave, and they love him. They tell him “I love you, baby” constantly.

Daycare Lady’s daughter even painted a large (and slightly Uncanny Valley creepy) portrait of him which now dominates the playroom. It is the Temple of Owl over there.

So why on Earth would I leave?

Oh, right – the fact that we are a $4,000 flight away from our families at Christmas time.

Oh, right – the fact that our parents aren’t getting any younger and are missing Owl’s toddlerhood.

Oh, right – the fact that we have no idea how we will be able to support a second child.

Oh, right – the fact that we definitely have no idea how we would ever afford a larger house than we have now.

If you had asked me three years ago if I wanted to leave Vancouver, would probably would have said yes. I was unhappy with my job, my friendships still felt uncertain, and I was lonely and feeling damaged by years of workplace bullying.

But now I don’t know.

I want to be closer to my family, but I don’t really want to start over in a new city – make friends, put down roots, go through all of that again.

I REALLY don’t want to have to hunt for a new job. My job experiences have been so fraught with stress that I just can’t face it again.

If we moved anywhere, I would want it to be either such a massive promotion that PH could mostly support us on his own, and I could just write or train dogs for extra money on the side, or it would have to be a place with such cheap houses that it amounted to the same thing.

And when it comes to moving back to the Maritimes, well, I have a lot of conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are home to me, and probably always will be.

The clapboard houses, the drifts of snow, and the shabby corner convenience stores are real to me in a way that Vancouver has never been. I see Vancouver as shiny and soul-less by comparison.

Besides, if we moved back there I wouldn’t be facing the making friends issue – I still have friends there, although they don’t have boys Owl’s age the way my friends here do.

But they’re old friends who would pick up with me as if I never left.

On the other hand, I’m a massive snob.

I went through the public school system in Nova Scotia and I shudder at the thought of putting poor Owl through it. Even though I know there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere, and it’s all just a crap shoot.

I also feel like being a professional dog trainer from Vancouver means something, whereas if I ever wrote a dog training book, the fact that it was written by a trainer in, say, rural New Brunswick wouldn’t do much for my reputation.

Everything in the Maritimes is small, and expectations are low. Businesses tend to have shoddy signs, and websites that use comic sans. People “from away” are looked at with suspicion.

I feel like moving East would be a huge step back for my career, even if it were a step forward for our finances and family life.

This is the stuff I torture myself over. 

I’m happy right now, but like it or not, change is coming – either we have a second child and things get really challenging, or PH actually gets an offer from one of these jobs he applies for, and my entire life will be uprooted, with good and bad consequences mixed right in.

I DON’T LIKE CHANGE.

Potty Training: NO MORE EXCUSES

Tags

anxiety, biting the bullet, excuses, house breaking, parenting, potty training, puppies, toddler, trying new things

Since this is the long weekend, we have decided to take advantage of three days off to bite the bullet and try potty training.

I’ve spent the last few months reading The No Cry Potty Training Solution, and asking every single parent I know for advice.

My mother has no advice, since I was potty trained by my aunt. I asked her for advice before she died and she said she had just made a big fuss over me – apparently for weeks afterwards whenever I used the potty I would ask “Auntie Helen happy??”

Not Mary Poppins over at Daycare Daze lays out her Smartie method, which she has been using with great success for decades.

Hannah from Hodgepodge And Strawberries has also blogged about potty training, and vehemently expressed her distaste of pull-ups to me over Twitter.

@IfByYesTweets no worries. i have OPINIONS about potty training. i've trained, lemme see, five kids now. PullUps are bollocks.

— Hannah (@hpstrawberries) November 9, 2012

And we’ve spent the last couple of months getting Owl accustomed to sitting on the potty (both a small potty and a potty seat on our toilet) while reading stories.

Once, while running around with no diaper on, he started to pee so we sent him to the potty where he deliberately finished the pee to great acclaim, and he was so encouraged that he did it again a few minutes later.

Our excuses for not potty training him properly were wearing thin.

Ultimately, I was afraid of failure, and afraid of change. I have anxiety issues. Change scares me. Doing something I’ve never done before scares me.

Then I had an epiphany.

I was called to a man’s house to help him deal with his new puppy. He was red-eyed with sleeplessness, and shack-wacky for spending three consecutive days holding his puppy. Every time he put his puppy down the puppy would pee or poop, and he was so anxious over messing up his dog’s house training that he was driving himself insane.

Even though this is the best kind of owner – 100% dedicated to starting his puppy out right – he was thinking of returning the puppy for the sake of his own sanity.

So I stepped in and made him put the puppy down, and as I talked him through the process of interrupting the behavior, moving the puppy to the correct spot, and then rewarding things when done correctly I realized…

…I have TOO potty trained before.

And Beloved Dog was challenging to potty train.

If I could train Beloved Dog, if I knew the steps well enough to walk someone through it and be paid for doing so (he kept the puppy, who is doing much better, and signed on for six more sessions), then I could potty train a toddler.

So I went out and bought stickers and smarties, bristol board for a (very crude)  reward chart, and training pants.

Let’s DO THIS THING.

No More Purple Pills

Tags

anxiety, busy, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, motherhood, stress, time management, welbutrin, work

I have been off of my Welbutrin for about three months now. I started to wean myself off in June, skipping the occasional day, until I actually forgot to take it at all for a week.

Then, when we went the the states, I left the pills behind, and I haven’t touched them since.

I’ve been doing fine.

I had a happy summer, loving my husband, liking my job, training dogs, writing on Elance.

I’ve been very tired. I feel very extroverted out.

I wish that I didn’t have to juggle work AND dog training AND Elance, but I’m not willing to give up any of these. I need them.

I need the work, the dog training is my insurance for the future when we have a second kid and full time work will no longer cover daycare costs, and Elance is extra money in my pocket while building my writing credits, which is REALLY part of my long term plan.

I spend my mornings trying to shepherd Owl into his clothes and into the car, I work for 9 hours with no break, and then I pick Owl up and entertain him while PH makes dinner. By the time we get Owl to sleep it’s 9 pm and I’m exhausted.

PH wants me to take more time to myself, to hand him the baby and say “YOU deal with it, I’m out of touch for an hour” but I rarely take him up on it. First of all, because I hand him Owl and then disappear training dogs a couple times a week as it is, and second of all because I want to spend time with my husband and son.

But PH thinks all this work is adding to my anxiety.

I haven’t really noticed it (maybe fish don’t notice water, much) but PH thinks it has been worse lately. I don’t know if fall coming on is beginning to activate my SAD, but that seems hard to believe, because it’s been warm and sunny an gorgeous outside lately.

So maybe it’s just all too much.

But I’m not quite sure what to do about it. We need money, and I need to make money while building a way to make money with fewer hours in the future. So I think this is just how it is right now, and I’m not unhappy or miserable.

Just a little stressed.

That’s within normal range, right?