It has been a helluva week at the Moon house.
As I type, Silas is upstairs in his room whining "Mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy" over and over again and refuses to go to sleep even though it is an hour and 20 minutes into his naptime. If I go up there he will want me to lay with him which sounds like a simple, good idea until I get up there and lay down (exhausted in a way only a 32 week preggo can be) and he turns into a bull/root hog hybrid and uses every inch of my body as a springboard. When he is not jumping off of me while I try to nap for just a few minutes (between begging him to PLEASEfortheloveofeverythingholy lay down and be still), he is either picking skin off of my horribly chapped lips (OUCH) or poking my boobs and laughing hysterically. All of that to say that I'm betting there's no nap for him today which means the afternoon/evening could be very interesting.
Friday I had my bi-annual teeth cleaning at the dentist and because I get pregnancy induced gingivitis it was a most miserable experience leaving me with a headache that lasted the entire day and teeth/gums so sore that I could barely eat (and since I'm pregnant and all the good medicine is banned, I was stuck with taking the most useless medicine of all time - TYLENOL.) Am I grateful for access to a dentist and that aside from this ginigivitis that will go away right after the baby comes I have never had any problems with my teeth? YES. Does that mean Friday sucked any less? Nope.
Saturday was fine for the most part. I had a meeting with my YoungLife peeps to plan out the semester and then I refurbished a rocking chair for the nursery - which turned out GREAT and as soon as I move it inside (read: tidy the nursery and make room for it) I'll definitely be sharing pictures. I worked on the chair until waaaay too late and when I was done a finally sat down my uterus got cranky (she does that sometimes) and all of the other wonderful aches and pains of pregnancy hit at once. I hoped going to bed would ease the pain but it did not and Justin and I both had one of the worst nights of sleep we have had in a while. Also, a bug flew on my face at some point during the night and my reflexes made me bolt up in bed which left my ligaments in my abdomen quite pissed at me. I never found the bug so even if I had been able to sleep I probably would have been up worrying about it crawling on me again.
Sunday morning finally came and I let Zach know that I wouldn't be making it to practice with the worship team. Justin got up with Silas and let me try to sleep some more but I finally got sick of trying to sleep while everything on my body hurt and just got up. We decided to stay home from church (which is always such a HUGE decision to make for us because we truly love our church family and time spent in worship with them) to try and just rest and recuperate. We hoped to get to go to small group later that afternoon. That didn't happen either. Silas barely took any semblance of a nap and was in a MOOD when he came downstairs. There were lots of fits being thrown and Justin and I were just over it. At one point Silas was screaming at me about something and then turned and ran head first into the open laundry room door leaving him with a swelling knot on his forehead. He literally screamed for 20 minutes over it. Oh and also? He couldn't poop. This NEVER happens to him (really - I can't remember a single day in his 2.5 years that the child hasn't pooped at least once) and when he was finally able to go he just cried and cried. Heartbreaking.
STICK A FORK in us, right??
Hold your horses.
Monday rolls around and I am determined to get out of the house and go register for a few things at Babies R Us that we need/want for baby girl. Silas had a meltdown right before we were walking out the door that turned into a 20-30 minute screamfest. I still have no idea what started it all. I finally collapsed in my chair and started bawling and because he has maybe seen me cry once or twice in his life this stunned him enough to make him breathe and calm down. He didn't like me crying and I felt bad for freaking him out, but at this point I just needed to cry. So we did. And then we picked ourselves up (I cherished the moment when he grabbed my face and said, "Mommy no cry - Yiyas tiss it all better"), re-grouped, and headed to Babies R Us. We ended up meeting Justin for lunch (hallelujah!) and then headed home. While Silas was napping I decided to take a long soak in the tub because my back and hips have been aching pretty badly lately and a heating pad can only do one thing at a time. I stepped into the tub, held on to the wall, turned the water on to let it get warm, swished the water around with one foot to rinse the tub out while it was warming up, and then promptly slipped and fell. I twisted around to make sure that I didn't land on any part of my belly (and thankfully I didn't) but that meant that I landed on my left buttcheek on the edge of the tub and it was extremely painful. I just sat there trying to figure out what on earth had just happened when I realized that another pain was hitting my back and butt. Yeah - that would be the scalding hot water that was now coming out since I never reached to turn on any cold water. Then my hugely pregnant self was trying to maneuver around a slippery tub so I could simultaneously turn on some cold water and get my butt out of the hot water. It was awful but now I soooooooooooo wish that someone else had witnessed all of this mess so they could laugh with me. I'm sure I looked ridiculous. Mind you, all of this happened in about 15 seconds. When I finally got the water regulated I just slumped back against the tub wall only to be greeted by a contraction. A contraction that I not only could feel, but could SEE happening. It freaked me out because even though it wasn't actually hurting me, it was much more intense that my normal Braxton Hicks contractions, and it lasted for nearly three minutes. I was afraid to move, but eventually I just rolled onto my side in the tub and it slowly eased. Almost immediately the baby started kicking and making her presence known (like I could forget, right?!) so that was a relief. I had my phone handy and was ready to call for help if there were any more contractions or it seemed like something was wrong, but it didn't. I just relaxed for a bit and then let all of the water drain, pushed myself up to where I was sitting on the side of the tub, and basically crawled out of the tub for fear of falling again. I was in pain, but it was from my bruised butt and the fact that my abdominal ligaments had just had a workout. Once I was safely in my recliner, I called Justin to let him know what had happened and he said he was coming home even though I insisted that I was really fine. But the Lord gave me a good one y'all and he didn't listen and came home anyway because he knew that even if I was fine I didn't need to be chasing a very rambunctious 2 year old around the house. HE WAS SOOOOOO RIGHT. I skipped YoungLife that night (BOO - missing church and YL in one week was super sad) and then didn't sleep well at all.
Tuesday morning Silas woke up about an hour earlier than usual and I woke up to my left shoulder aching. It had been hurting all night and I couldn't figure out why, but I realized when I got up that I must have hurt it in the fall because I was using that arm to try and catch myself. Yeah. Fun stuff. On top of me being really sore and moving very slowly all day, Silas hadn't pooped since Sunday evening and he was acting like he felt miserable and would just randomly grab his butt and start crying and run and jump in my lap for comfort. I borrowed some medicine for him from
Leslie and prayed and prayed that he would poop soon (oh the things parents pray about!!). While I was cooking dinner he decided to try and help so he pushed a dining room chair up to the sink. He reached a little too far and fell off and onto the back of his head. He scraped his arm and got another knot on that poor head of his. This led to a long crying spell (bless his heart - now his tummy, booty, arm, AND head are hurting) and while I was rocking him and trying to get him to calm down, I smelled something funny. Yep. I had just turned on the burner with my empty skillet on it and when he fell all I could think about was making it better and I forgot to turn it off. The skillet was smoking something fierce. Thank the Lord it didn't have oil in it or anything else for that matter. Silas finally pooped (though it was heartbreaking) and once he was in bed Justin and I pretty much collapsed in a heap on the couch.
So that's the way things have gone around here since Friday. Rarely do we have more than one "bad" day in a row, but this week has been full of them and more than one time I have had to stop in the middle of it all and literally say out loud, "This is not the end. The world you live in is fallen and there will always be yucky moments/hours/days/even weeks. Get up. TRY AGAIN. HE is at work here and it is worth it." And then I cry out for help from the only ONE who can for the millionth time. I wish I could say that everytime I cry for help that a calming peace rushes over me and rose petals fall from the sky. Not the case. Sometimes I do feel better instantly and see the present stressful situation in a new light. Other times nothing really changes and I just keep trudging on and wait for it to pass.
{ To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on.} - so saith William Chaucer in A Knight's Tale ;-)
One my goals for our family this year is to have a Grateful Notebook where we each write things that we are thankful for EVERYDAY. You may remember me doing this for a while here on the blog. I was inspired by Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts. Anyway - this is what we are doing and it was so helpful this week to consciously make an effort to find something to be grateful for even in the middle of the yucky.
Sarah sent me a link to a blog post written by another mom and it was talking about how sometimes it is just hard to Carpe Diem every moment of every day. But she said there are moments every day that are good and cherish-worthy, moments that are on God's time (kairos), and it is these moments that we'll be documenting (along with everything else we are grateful for).
Is anyone still reading this ridiculously long post?
Thanks for hanging in there if you are.
I hope it didn't sound whiney and like I was just complaining. I just wanted to write down what the week has really been like. Another goal is to blog the good, bad, and ugly this year because these are our memories and I need to do a better job of preserving them.
Will you hold me accountable??
I'm looking forward to the end of 2012 and reading back over our list of gratefuls and even this particular blog post and smiling at what the Lord has done through it all - the good, the bad, and the ugly.
