Getting started

We started our adventure this week and it's been ok, but not great yet. I had breakfast five days and took my meds four of those days. Considering that I haven't been taking my morning meds at all, I feel like this is progress. Now that we have our food stamps for the month, we can plan ahead for breakfasts again and this should be able to become a more steady habit. Cross your fingers!  ;)

We were going to start at the gym on Monday, but Dan couldn't breathe. He was using his rescue inhaler repeatedly and we finally did two breathing treatments with his nebulizer before bed and that seemed to help. Weather changes mess him up. We considered going to the UgL on Tuesday, but Payton had an appointment so we started on Wednesday. I'm still a little sore today.

The last time we went to the UgL, last May, neither Dan nor I was able to complete the workout. We had to give up and go home. We both felt a lot of anxiety about going back and whether or not we could do this. Melissa, our trainer, modified the workout and spent a lot of one on one time with each of us. We made it through, and we are both still a little sore today. But we know we can do this. You'd think that if you've already done it, doing it again shouldn't be such a scary thing, but somehow it really was. But we broke through the wall.

Today, I have a trip that starts at 1:30 and we're going to work out at noon, so I'm gonna sponge bath and change clothes and hope that's good enough. If not, I'll rethink this next time but we don't want to start letting inconveniences stop us already. They really worked to help us be able to do this financially, so I feel like not giving our best would be letting Melissa and Fernando and Erin down as much as ourselves and our kids. I'm trying to be very honest here in the blog too, even when we screw up or backslide, so I hope to be accountable to you all, too. 

Accountability is really hard for me. My depression grabs each minor setback and starts diving into that dark pit that won't let me out. Then I quit talking to anyone I should be accountable to because I don't want to be letting so many people down. I know that most of the people who read this love me. Why else would you be reading this? And you want me to succeed, so instead of reprimands, I am much more likely to get encouragement through my honesty, which is good, because I'm really good at reprimanding myself.

Our foods haven't been great this week but I just updated the budget for April and we don't have the money do to a lot of stupid stuff, like dollar menu or gas station hot dogs. Since we budget our money far better than our time or health, I'm trying to use that as a tool to help us in other areas. No fast food is a good tool. Also, our driver window on the car doesn't roll down, so a drive-thru is a big pain in the tookus. Dan's checking out cook books for cheap, healthy, low carb recipes and we checked all the grocery ads for good deals. We have noticed that there are not a lot of good sales on the things we are looking to buy now that we want to eat healthier. If anyone has some good recipes, especially crock pot stuff, let us know.  :) I keep thinking of freezer meals and stocking up but we just have our little fridge freezer and the idea of prepping twenty meals at a time kinda freaks me out. I don't even think we have room in our kitchen for a project like that.  But I was thinking that maybe if I could prep three or four meals worth of one thing, that would be a start and I could maybe build from there? I'm not sure yet. Guess we'll see how things go.

A Healthy Budget

So, we weighed in at the UgL last night.  I decided that since the other scales weren't agreeing, I'll track my progress with the scale at the gym.  According to that scale, I'm 309.6. Still not a pretty number, but it's a starting place.  My body fat percentage is 46.something. I don't remember what.  Fernando told us that once our accounts are set up, we'll be able to see all of our stats that are recorded and that we'll be doing check ins every six to eight weeks. I think that's all good for me, because it gives me a time frame to look forward to rather than looking for infinitesimal changes every week. Also, if my weight is not changing much but my body fat is changing, or my measurements, I'll be able to see that there is some kind of progress.

I was thinking about the budget thing a lot yesterday, how you have to do your current budget and see how bad you are doing before you can build to make progress. This was my first health budget. It's hard to do because it's painful to look at where you really are, but you will never know if you're making progress if you don't truly know where you started. This got me to thinking about payday loans. Dan and I used to be stuck in a payday loan loop until someone who loved us helped us get out of them, under the conditions that we would never do that again. It was kind of hard to not get a payday loan when things were tight at first. If you've never done that, thank God! If you have done this, you understand how hard it is to change your way of thinking and to get the thought of getting a payday loan out of your head. It occurred to me that Dan and I are living a payday loan lifestyle. We have been looking for short term fixes for long term problems. We are hungry, tired and in a hurry, so we grab a burger off the dollar menu. This does not help our finances, our health, or any other aspect in our lives. It's just a payday loan for our health. In the long run, it's hurting us far more than it's helping us. It's taking money we could be spending on real food, adding unhealthy crap and weight to our bodies and the long term costs of the health problems on the horizon are going to outweigh the cheap up front cost to our finances and our time. As with the payday loans, the interest is killing us.

Just like with the finances, we have to take baby steps to make real changes. I know this is not going to happen all at once. We are going to do well and then bobble and have to get back on track. But we've come miles with our finances and we can do the same with our health. We just have to remember that a stumble is natural, expected and ok. Dan has been working on finding us better meals with lower carbs, and I am now eating breakfast each day so I can take my metformin. Two years ago, my A1C was at 5.9. Last summer it was at 6.0. They said a point a year is ok. I'm thinking a point a year leads me to 6.5 and diabetic by the time I'm 45 and that is NOT ok with me.

We're measured up and know where we stand. We are making small changes that we can live with and maintain. We may be rumblin', bumblin' and stumblin', but we're going to make real change.

Here we go again...

In the past week, I have been weighed twice. My doctor's scale read 300 while the health department read 311. I'm not sure whether to be annoyed at the difference or just horrified at such a nice, round number. On this note, among other reasons, Dan and I are refocusing on our personal well-being.

We signed up for the Underground Lab again for a full year, and we paid in advance. We now have each other to account to and the large sum of money we have spent to motivate us, as well as the trainers to kick our butts the concern and love of family to get us through the rough patches.

Tomorrow, we weight in. We'll learn weight, take measurements and get our body fat analyzed. It's not going to be a fun day because it's not going to be pretty, but we'll never know our own progress until we know exactly how bad we have it now. It's a lot like making your first budget and realizing you've got to make some serious changes to survive.

Wish us luck...

A New Beginning

TMI Warning!  This post contains highly personal details that may be disturbing to some.  I know I am not the only person feeling these things, so I will share anyway.  I will be as tasteful as possible and my intention is not to offend.  I will mark the offending passage so you can skip it if you like.  Thank you.

Exactly four weeks ago today, Dan and I completely changed our eating habits and began the Paleo lifestyle. Dan likes to research and so he dug up info on all kinds of diet changes and figured that this would be the best fit for our needs. It was easy to tweak so that we each could make adjustments for our individual health and the kids would not need completely separate meals.

I have to admit, after so many different diets and workout programs that were a bust, I did not exactly have my hopes up for great results. However, Dan's a great cook and started planning menus and helping more with the grocery shopping.  This made it a lot easier for me to stick with the program since all I had to do was eat.  :)  Then Dan suggested that he take over the vision card with our food assistance.

My first reaction was, "NO! I MUST MAINTAIN THE FACADE OF ULTIMATE CONTROL OF ALL THINGS!"

I didn't say this out loud, and once I mulled it over for a second or two, I realized that this was doable.  A week later, I couldn't thank him enough for lifting such a huge amount of stress off of me that I hadn't even realized I was carrying.

The first week was hard.  I was crashing bad from the lack of carbs and was crazy tired.  Add sugar withdrawals to that and you have one very grumpy Eeka.  I started working out of my funk about the time Dan hit his.  How bad were these crashes for us?  Let's just say that if we hit these lows at the same time and there was no reasonable thought between us, someone would have been sleeping in the car!  But, we've been through this type of thing before, so we knew it was temporary and we continued to work past it.

As we completed our second week, we were both finally back on an even keel and the worst of the physical cravings were over.  We have been eating so much better since we made this change, mainly because we are starting with whole foods and cooking at home.  We've spent far less eating out, even though our grocery bill has barely increased.  Week three, we realized that we are eating far less food at one time, Dan's love handles had flattened out and his tummy had shrunk.  POOP ALERT:  The only change I had noticed in  myself was that my poop was solid and floaty instead of mushy and sinking as I was used to. I was feeling better by eating better foods, but I was still breaking out the magnifying glass to try to find any sign of outward change.

***TMI***TMI***TMI***
On the fourth Monday of our new life, my period started.  As I put in my tampon, I realized that it was easier to place because there was no longer an extra layer of fat guarding the gates.  I have also developed heat rashes from time to time in the area where the lower tummy, a.k.a. front butt, overhangs my upper thighs.  I realized that the size of the heat rash danger zone seemed to have decreased.
***SAFE***SAFE***SAFE***

Now, these changes were not apparent to anyone but me, so I was very afraid that I had made them up in an unconscious effort to create hope.  I spent the week teetering between putting my faith in a false hope or giving up before I got too committed.  On Friday, I went to the doc for labs and had myself weighed.  When we started, I was 283 pounds.  On Friday, I weighed 269 pounds.

I could not believe I actually lost 14 pounds in less than four weeks, just by changing my diet!  I wasn't as strict with my food choices as Dan was and I hadn't put any effort into working out at all.  When Dan and I decided to have a little one-on-one celebration, we discovered that without as much extra fat in the way, we fit better. :)

Today, we have completed four weeks.  Tuesday, Dan will be weighed and have labs drawn and a blood pressure check.

Payton's going to help us get before pics, even though it's not totally before.  By the end of the week, we'll know if our body chemistry is doing as well as our weight loss or if we need to tweak our foods a bit more.

It's amazing to have hope of real change in our future!

The other parent phone call

I have issues.  If you have read this blog before, or know me in person, you already realize this.  So let's move on to the issue of the day.

Melissa called this evening.  Melissa is Dan's ex-wife and the mother of our daughter, Ash.  I never got around to turning my ringer on today, I guess, because I didn't hear the call come in.  She never calls.  Like, once a year?  Maybe?  There are definitely issues in communication, among other things.  Dan doesn't want to talk to her, so she and I usually do the talking and play nice for Ash's benefit.

Anyway, her message was the sixteenth message in my voice mail.  Ugh!  So, I deleted a handful of messages, hung up and called back.  (This was so I could see how much progress I had made before I call back in to my voice mail. . .  I know, issues.)  Message sixteen was short and to the point.  Melissa wants Dan to call her back so they can talk one on one.

What does this mean?  What's going on?  Did I do something to make her mad again?  Is she upset because I asked Ash when she's going to come see us next?  Is she going to try to keep Ash away from us MORE?  Do we need to call a lawyer?

I am good at a few things and I am QUEEN of the worst case scenario game.  I have no idea what's really going on, but I can't even think of a reason that might not be bad.  I know I cannot be the only person who does this.  It sucks.  I've had a really good day with the kids, done some productive things, got a nap, scheduled some appointments, ate a yummy steak salad for supper, hung with the kids and Willie.  Very good day.

My chest hurts now and I'm on the edge of tears.  This is just dumb!

I'm on happy pills and have been working really hard to not get caught up in following any slightly negative path to it's worst imaginable outcome.  I have made great strides is almost every area of my life.  Why can't I deal with this any better?  Even as I'm writing this, it is not helping me to cope like I thought it would.  I'm trying not to slide down the slippery slope into a full blown panic/crying attack.

What I do know is that this relationship has never been easy and it probably never will be.  I also know that our relationship with Ash has been suffering and I don't know what we can do.  I know that we've seen her four times in the past year and this is the third summer she's not staying with us, as outlined in the parenting agreement.  I'm not even sure what can make this situation worse and I keep reminding myself that I don't even KNOW that this is a bad thing.  Melissa didn't sound mad when she called, but she NEVER calls to talk to Dan, specifically.

I have been praying about this situation for months.  I have a great new friend who understands, offered to car pool to western Kansas if we can coordinate visits and gave me the info for a lawyer who I can talk to for cheap.  These things should all make me feel more secure than I have in the past, but my neurosis is winning. . . .

I hoped to come to some calming, rational conclusion.  Something that would logically show me that I can relax at least long enough to let Dan talk to Melissa before I worry.  Something I could share to encourage other folks who know, all too well, exactly how this feels.

I will now begin with my distraction therapy (tv, games, cheesy romance novel) in order to avoid following this line of reasoning to the point that I convince myself that we'll never see Ash again.

I know the problem here is with me, not Melissa.  I know that we'll find out whatever is going on and deal with it and get through it.  I know that I love Ash to infinity and beyond.

My encouragement for the day--You are not alone.  I'm here.  I understand.

That fine line. . .

It's almost eleven, I have to be up at five thirty but I'm just not able to sleep.  I figured I better work some things out by writing or I'll never get to sleep.

The last time we saw Ash was in January, when we celebrated Christmas at Mom and Dad's house in Quinter.  When I checked with her about coming for spring break, she said she didn't want to come because she was mad at Dan.  She said she was upset that he never answers her facebook messages or texts and he doesn't call her.  She was also upset that he has so many pictures of Livi on his facebook and almost none of her.

Part of the confusion comes from the android tablet Dan has that shows he's always logged into facebook if he has wifi even though he is rarely actually uses it.  We let his phone shut down as we weren't really using it and it seemed like a waste of money, so texting is pretty much out.  Anybody who hangs with Livi much takes her pic and tags us, so they show up on our page, but we don't have a working camera and we've only seen Ash twice in the past year, so it's hard to compete in that department either.

Basically, the way I see it, Dan and Ash just need to be together in one place so they can talk in person and work things out.  I'm not sure how this will happen if she doesn't want to come her and they don't talk on the phone.  When she wouldn't see us over spring break, she wouldn't message Payton or I either.  Then about a month later, she texts to see if we are coming to her eighth grade graduation.

Dan and Payton neither really get the idea of a graduation for eighth grade, but I've tried to explain that it's a pretty big deal in some places.

Dan and I got the time off work and Payton will have to miss a band concert, but he's ok with that.  Missing the band concert is actually the only reason Payton wants to go.

Payton is so hurt that Ash wouldn't see us or talk to us that he doesn't understand why we should go see her now.  Why would she even invite us if she didn't want to see us?  I tried to explain to him that if we don't take this chance to see her, we could lose her.  For good.  He tells me that we already have.

I pray that he's wrong.  I see how hurt he is and I want to fix it but I can't.  I don't know how Ash is feeling because I haven't really had a chance to talk to her, but I imagine she's feeling as hurt as Payton is.  It seems like a whole lot of hurt has come from some kind of misunderstanding that we can't seem to get past.

We're going to Hill City for the graduation.  We can't afford not to.  I just hope we can all get past the hurts and celebrate Ashlynn's day.  Then, I hope we can sit down and work some things out.  I know how much we all love each other, but nobody seems to feel that right now.

Dear God,

Please help us all to let our defenses down enough to love each other.  Let us look to help the person who we have hurt, rather than defend our shortcomings.  Let that love that has always kept us tight bring us back together.

Love, Eeka

Through the eyes of a child. . .

Olivia and I have some interesting conversations, and yesterday was no exception.  Sometimes her perspective is so clear and mature that I'm completely amazed.  I shouldn't keep being surprised by this, yet somehow, I am.

Olivia wanted to know why girls don't have penises like boys.  I told her that if we had penises we wouldn't be able to have babies, so she asked what we have that boys don't.  I told her we have a vagina.  I was beginning to get a little nervous about how far this conversation was going to go.

Then, thankfully, she started asking if the vagina was in her tummy.  We talked about the uterus that holds the baby and the ovaries that hold the eggs that might get to be babies.  She decided that babies don't get to be born until it's their birthday so that's why not all eggs are babies.  I let her stick with that for now.

She was worried that if she has a baby, she might have twins who have their ears stuck together.  I know that they talked about conjoined twins in school a while back, so I wasn't completely surprised at her train of thought.  She wanted to know how twins were made.  We were talking about when you have two or three eggs which makes two or three babies and they all are in their own water balloon.  I explained that they can't get stuck together if they each have their own balloon.  She wasn't sure if she should believe that you could really have three babies.  I told her that I had three babies with three water balloons a long time ago.

Olivia wanted to know who they were.  When I said that they died in my uterus and they didn't get a birthday, he asked if they were boys or girls.  They were only 9 weeks, so we didn't even find that out.

"What are their names?"

We never named them.  We never had a chance.

"Oh.  Well, let's name them now.  We'll call the boy Junior.  The girls will be Buttercup and Kaylea."

I smiled at the this.  I looked at her and saw how beautiful she is and felt how sweet it was of her to name kids she never knew.

She looked at me and gently took my hand in hers.  She rubbed the back of my hand with her other hand and said, "I'm sorry your babies died, Mommy."

It took some extra blinking to keep the pipes from leaking.  I gave her a big hug and asked if she wanted to know any more about twins and triplets.

She counted up and said that I would have had six kids: Junior, Buttercup, Kaylea, Ashlynn, Payton and Olivia.  I reminded her that I didn't get to carry Ashlynn in my tummy, even though I love her bunches.  I told her that I did have one other baby who didn't get a birthday so I could have had six kids, though.

"Well, since we already have more girls than boys," she mused, "We'll name this one Miles.  Like Max and Miles at church.  That's a good name."

We got sidetracked after that as Dan and Payton were ready for us to start our running around for the morning and I shrugged it aside.  When my sister miscarried a couple years ago, I relived all of this and dealt with it.  I was good.

We swung by McDonald's to get some breakfast for Payton before his choir rehearsal.  We waited 20 minutes after paying and getting our drinks and never got our food.  We had to get Payton to school or he would be late.

"I'm going to come back and yell at them later," I said as I drove away.  Tears started coming. "Dan, I'm going to need your help with that."

"OK," he replied automatically.  When he looked up and saw me crying, he was confused.

"I'm not crying about McDonald's."

"I know," he said, "You are feeling bad because Payton doesn't get any breakfast."

"No.  Livi named my babies."

We dropped Payton off at school and Dan and I talked a lot.  I couldn't understand why I was having such a  hard time with this.  Dan reminded me of the scene in the Disney "Tarzan" where they say you can't name the human or you'll get attached to it.

That didn't make any sense to me.  I've already been through this.  I've already dealt with this.  I'm done with it.  I have given birth to two beautiful kids and been blessed to help in raising three others.  This seemed bizarre.

Dan looked at me, held my hand and said, "It is never going to go away."

For a guy who wasn't with me through either miscarriage, he sure seems to understand a lot about what I have been through and am continuing to go through.  I don't know what I did to deserve the blessings of a husband who will support me through not only what we've been through together, but things he's never experienced.  I never did anything to deserve a six year old who understands and comforts me more than so many adults know how to do.

I don't know if this will ever be easier when life brings these memories back to me, but I know I can get through them with astounding support.

I know that I will never forget Miles or Junior or Buttercup or Kaylea.