How to Built a Community

"Unity. As one stand together."

I very much crave a sense of community. Of giving and receiving from a group of like minded friends. I have made a lot of friends and reconnected with existing friends online and it has been so nice to see how willing people are to step up to help each other. I really want to find a way to integrate that spirit into my everyday face-to-face life.

Questions I'm Asking Myself

1. What kind of life do I want for myself and my family?

2. What is most important to me?

3. What kind of values do I want to teach my children?

4. What do I feel is missing in my life?

5. What worries me about the direction my life has been going?

6. What worries me about making changes?

7. What would my ideal life look like?

8. What am I afraid of?

9. Why have I started to dread holidays? What can I do to make them better?

10. Am I suggesting that we just *stop* buying things altogether? What about necessities? Where do luxuries fit into this? What about holidays, birthdays?

Resolutions

Palace of Fitness

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How I miss you! I will be back just as soon as everyone is healthy! 

Gratitude

When S and I were divorcing I thought one time how nice it must be for some divorced/remarried couples to have two extra people who loved the kids and were there to help. And when you take out the negative emotions that come up sometimes, it really is a blessing.

S and Miss C took the boys last night on what is usually one of my nights. He took them to the dentist and  they took them to school this morning. I was able to focus on my sick baby and husband knowing that my sweet littles were being loved and fed and taken care of.

This morning I was talking to a mama friend who is still married, and also has three kids. We were discussing how stressful the day to day running of a household is WITHOUT sudden illness and when she heard the boys were with their dad she said: 'I wish I had somewhere to send my kids sometimes!'

It seems that blended families are the new extended families. I don't have grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. to lean on but thankfully I do have another set of parents I can call in emergencies.

It is sometimes hard emotionally to *share* but I'm getting better at dealing with that, I think.

This morning I checked my phone and saw that both S and Miss C had texted to ask how baby G was doing. It felt good to know they cared and were there for us.

I am an over-thinker

And I am really working on it. I tend to over-process a situation. It goes from understanding to confusion pretty quickly. It's even worse when I am not exercising or meditating. I have been home with a sick family for a while and that takes away my daily refocusing time. Once I am able to exercise and blow off steam I'll be less wound up.

Mama Guilt, Sick Babies and Chewed-up Fingernails

Ok. So everything sucks really, really bad right now. G seemed to have caught a cold a few days ago. He got a cough and then a fever. The fever was mild but I was still monitoring it closely. I gave him all of the big guns from my hippie medicine arsenal. I made a garlic ointment, which made him smell like a plump little ravioli.

He seemed to be fine, still in good spirits and maybe having a lessening of symptoms. Around the same time C got super ill. Fever, chills, body aches, congestion, the works. He slept on the couch last night so he would be away from our room and baby G. It really really sucked being away from him.

This morning I went back to bed after taking the boys to school and we all woke up for the second time around 11am. G was burning up so I took his temp. 39.1 C. Why the eff was my thermometer suddenly measuring Celsius? Who knows, but that converts to 102.something. Which was way higher than it had been and way high for a baby.

I called the nurse hotline and she asked for symptoms then told me to count his breaths. 18 breaths while she timed, according to her that was high so she suggested we go to the ER.

G seemed to be in good spirits while we were being admitted and I felt silly, like a skittish amateur mama. But once they started listening to his lungs it became apparent something was wrong. They x-rayed his chest and did a flu/rsv test. The results came back (-) flu  (+) rsv. Shit. Shit. Shit.

So I am in charge of 3 boys (2 of them healthy and happy, luckily) alone and am trying to manage our day to day lives PLUS attempt (and fail) to orchestrate a move and try to take care of a sick baby and very sick husband.

The house is crazy messy and probably filled with germs. My landlord wants me to show the house when it's convenient for prospective renters, which means when it's very very inconvenient for me.

So why the guilt? Well, I feel terrible about ripping the boys from the comfortable lives we have built here. They have to go to a new school next year and they really like living here. I also feel guilty because I take G to the infant room at the gym. The gym has been so great for me--but if he caught RSV there, not so great for him. He could have caught it a million other places and he DOES have school-age brothers but...I never took the boys around a bunch of other kids and they didn't get sick until 18 months. I also feel guilty because C is so sick and I can't give him much, if any attention. I ran him a lukewarm bath when his fever hit 104 but that's about it.

So right this second I am on a mattress in the kitchen next to the cat bowl. G is in his Rock and Play next to me, he needs to be on an incline for his nose to drain. I also need to be near the table, and his nebulizer for his breathing treatments. I wanted to let C have the bed and cant really be in there while he's so sick.

I am exhausted and overwhelmed and hoping we make it through all of this in one piece.