Love Language

Love Languages

People have different ways of showing their love.  Hugs, flowers, poetry, gifts, deeds, time...   

Food. 

My love language has always been food.  I remember how I felt when I was younger and would bake with my grandma Viv.  Raspberry pillows, cream puffs, divinity for the fair, brownies, cowboy cookies, her homemade marshmallow frosting...  I remember making jello with my mom as a little girl, and watching the ice cubes melt as I stirred them up. I don't remember as many things as I'd like about my Grandma Betty, but I vividly remember her pink-frosted angel food cake that she made for special occasions.  I remember 4th of July picnics, and playing in the sandbox, and Grandma's pink angel food cake.  And I remember how they all made me feel. 

Food.

I was telling someone recently how food had always been my "thing".  When someone has a baby?  Make them a meal.  When I need to say "thank you" to the neighbors who clear the snow from our sidewalk?  I write a note and bake some cookies.  At Christmas time, I show my family I love them by making elaborate and ornate frosted sugar cookies (and dealing with the monster of a mess that it makes...)  Food is one of my ways of showing others I care for them and about them. Always has been, probably always will be: 

A family friend used to bake these amazing melt-in-your-mouth brownies when I was a kid. The softest cake, with marshmallows and nuts in a buttery chocolatey glaze on top... My dad swore by then.  (And anyone who ever had the would remember them.) They may just be his favorite food in the whole world by the way he talks about them.  When she passed, everyone assumed that the brownies were a thing of the past, since nobody had the forethought to get her recipe.  I tried probably a dozen different recipes and tweaked things... and finally, figured it out.  And when I made them for him for father's day a couple years back, her love came back and we were transported back in time to when she would bring those out to us on the farm in her big round white tupperware container, and we would all smile and know we were loved.  Pauline and I spoke the same love language. 

Diabetes. 

One of the things that was hardest for me when Son Number One was diagnosed was that it felt like my love language for him had been forcefully turned off.  He had this diagnosis, and I wanted to make it right by baking him some extra special cupcakes or brownies or fruit salad or cinnamon rolls... And obviously, that would not have improved the situation.  At all. My brain realized this, and knew better, but it felt like I couldn't do what I usually do to lift spirits.  And so when my kiddo said he hated diabetes, and how he just wished he could have some oreos (but he couldn't), it was like a gut punch to me.  

And so I did what any normal mom would do in my place.  I got on Amazon, ordered some things I never planned to need... almond flour, coconut flour, paleo baking mix, sugar free syrup... and hit the internet for options.  I settled on a low carb peanut butter cookie. I made it lower carb by subbing sugar free syrup for honey.  I crossed my fingers that they'd be a success.  When they came out, and the kids deemed them to be "amazing!" and "bake-show worthy!", I felt a ridiculous amount of relief....  (even they were miles from my best baking...) Baking treats was still in play, just had to think things through more carefully.  And the look on his face when he heard he could have TWO?  Priceless. And so it shall be. 

My love language will not be silenced.  

Monsoon Season

I'm sure you've heard the phrase "when it rains, it pours...".  I know I have about a thousand times in just the last month alone.  It's not been a rough day or week or month... It's been a rough season.  I'm calling it monsoon season.  It's not raining, it's pouring.  Continuously.  Here's an approximate timeline of our last month or so, starting the week before Christmas.

Baby Sloth is sick.  Fever for 5 days. Drive 45 miles to pediatrician in a snow storm. Told its something viral.  Miss fun wedding/reception/mini overnight getaway with the kids because of very sick baby.  Take Baby Sloth back to pediatrician when they re-open after the New Year's Day holiday.  Baby Sloth has RSV.  Needs nebulizer, meds, lots of TLC, and very little sleep that's not when being held by mom.  Three pediatrician appointments to get a diagnosis...  Wop wop...

Baby Sloth just gets over his illness. A few days later, The Feisty One wakes with an ear infection.  Like the scream-y kind. Shrieking, wailing, gnashing of teeth...  Schedule appointment for him plus Son Number One for pediatrician.  Feisty one diagnosed with ear infection, Son Number One with Diabetes, and subsequent hospital stay for 3 days, but I've already covered that adventure...

I go to dentist to get some work done (literally my least favorite place, despite having a very kind dentist...).  Get some lovely news about one of my teeth (and how expensive it will be one way or another....)  Brakes light comes on in van...  Funeral to attend...  

Baby Sloth was to have surgery and it was pushed back because of his RSV diagnosis, and it comes as no surprise that he has a raging double ear infection AGAIN.  Because really, why would I not want to go say "hi" to my BFF's (the reception staff at the peds office) every week?  Finally today, after 3 days of fever, he seems to maybe have turned a corner. Surgery in a couple of weeks... Cross your fingers that nothing crops up between now and then. 

I am a level of tired I haven't seen since maybe Queen Bee was a preemie newborn.  I may or may not have dropped like $40 on a "hard to find transformer toy" for the Feisty One for reasons not even I can quite put my finger on. My hair looks awful, and I've been getting a lot of "you look.... tired" comments, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that the rest of me looks awful, too.  School kids wanted to watch a video, and I was legitimately concerned that I would fall asleep in a dark room, so I instead subjected my ears to the sweet sounds of a classroom full of xylophone playing elementary students.  

I know that life has seasons... and that this monsoon season will pass... but it's passing like a kidney stone.  A slow moving kidney stone at that.  It's painful and exhausting.  And cold.  And gets dark early.  And I'm tired... 

Fear Makes the Wolf Bigger Than He Is

I promise that there's [lots] more going on in my life than just my family's new foray into the care and feeding of a newly diagnosed Type 1 Diabetic kiddo (in addition to the other three hellions who require their own various special things), but this is new and fresh and at the forefront of what I'm doing as a parent and as a human being.  There are many things going on in my brain since Number One Son's diagnosis, and rather than make a whole bunch of posts, I thought that I'd make just make a list of things that I've learned that I never knew I didn't know.  (I think that's a line in a Disney Song...  "You'll learn things you never knew you never knew..." Pocahontas is so wise.)

1.  Type 1 Diabetes is not a cut and dry thing.  Somehow in my mind, it was "you have that, you get insulin, you are totally fine".  Turns out that was only a tiny bit true--in that you get insulin.  Newly diagnosed kids have levels that are all over the place.  We've already had highs and lows and we've only just dipped our toes into the ocean of T1D things to come.  It's not a condition where you can simply take one pill or get one shot and then not have to worry about it--though it would be plenty more convenient if that were the case. We talk to our amazing nurse or one of her equally amazing colleagues almost daily, and I am not sure I can adequately put into words how much I appreciate their tolerance of my endless questions.

2.  Pee is really important.  Once we figured out the root cause of the drinking and peeing overloads, and that we knew that even with all of that, our guy was actually dehydrated, it was an easy problem to fix.  The big symptom went away nearly as quickly as it had started.  (And we rejoiced).  Pee tells diabetics if there are problems... and when there aren't, it's glorious.  And 6 year old boys, being the strange little creatures that they are, have no issues with being the ones to dunk the ketone test strips into the urine and watch with wonder to see if the color changes or not.  I have cared more about pee in the past one month than I probably have in my entire life, with the notable exceptions of my own at-home pregnancy testing for each of the kids.  Just when I thought the excitement in my life from testing urine was officially done, too...  :-)

3. "Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." --German Proverb
 In my copious amounts of spare time, or when my brain is still running 100 miles per hour and the rest of me isn't, I find random bits of interesting things on the internet.  I was trying to find some quote that summed up my feelings on "no-fear-diabetes-parenting" and this was pretty spot on.  We know it's there, and we are managing that.  Beyond that, there's not any good reason I can find to not just continue with life as "business as usual" as we can.  Certainly there are limitations to that, but we haven't found a lot yet.  Son Number One is a pretty remarkable kid, in that he has stayed pretty matter-of-fact about the diagnosis, and while he knows it sucks, he also realizes that if he wants to be healthy--and he does--that all of these things have to happen. We have been very honest and up front with him about every detail of his care, and he is soaking the things up like a sponge, and is being very matter-of-fact with anyone who cares to ask him about it.  Instead of crying and being despondent, which I expect is a reasonable reaction for a 6 year old, he has taken everything head on.  He does all of his own finger pokes and testing, he knows how to read carb labels on products, his math skills are improving from adding up carbs for meals, he wants to do his own injections, and he is Proud when he tells people what he has to do to stay healthy.  He has an ownership in his care and health that many people don't get until they are older, I expect.  And it is pretty remarkable.

4.  Sugar-Free isn't the same as Carb-free.
In a relatively short time, we've figured out that carbs are hidden in everything, and that that there are many people who are misinformed that sugar-free is the same as "diabetic friendly".  Lots of sugar free foods are completely full of carbs. My logic has always been that if it's sugar-free, it will also be low carb.  Turns out it just means that sometimes it may be lower carb.

5. People overwhelm me with kindness.
Since I'm assuming most people who read this know me personally, most people know the community where I live.  And most people probably know each other, or at least know someone who knows someone else, etc.  I always like to believe that I have several families here.  I have my family, the one who's actually related to me (whether they like to be or not...), I have my school family made up of colleagues and friends and students and students' families.  I have my church family who remembers me (despite my poor attendance record recently...), and I have the rest of the community, many folks I've known since my own childhood.

I have been asked so many times how Son Number One is doing that I've lost count.  I have had people tell us that they're praying for us, and that we are in their thoughts, and how sorry they are.  We are sorry, too.  We've had more gestures of kindness sent our way in the past couple of weeks than we deserve.  During our stay at the hospital, I bet I had a message from nearly every person in my hometown who works at the University offering to bring me anything, or to do anything they could do since they'd be right there.  A good friend had a lovely batch of sugar-free cookies sent from across the country for him, along with a couple books for him, including his very own diabetes cookbook.  A couple people have brought us meals, which is amazing, but what's more amazing is the amount of thought and care went into preparing them.  People have been counting carbs for my boy. Stories have been shared with me from others who have Type 1 experiences, and I appreciate every one.  I've had not one, but two community members tell me that the local Lion's Club would like to give him a scholarship to go to a summer camp for kids with Type 1 Diabetes.  I've even had the well-meaning message about what I can do to "cure" his diabetes (currently, there's no cure), which I will take at face value as the gesture of kindness it was intended to be.

A lot of people have commented to me how rough the past couple of months have been for my family, and they aren't wrong.  The last month alone has felt like a year.  Baby Sloth had a bout of RSV that started right before Christmas, and I don't honestly think that I have had a complete and fulfilling night of sleep since about a week.  And here we are, after slogging through a month that has felt like six months.  We're still OK.  The Queen Bee still has her nose stuck in a book and wants to eat nothing but sweets, Son Number One is as patient and gentle as he's ever been--and stronger and more confident than he's ever been.  The Feisty One is still feisty.  He likes to threaten to bite his older siblings, and throwing the occasional hot wheels car isn't out of the norm around here.  Baby Sloth is just starting to stand up to things, which means that my house needs another round of baby-proofing, and I'm just not ready for that.  Super Dad is away for the week, as usual, and I am holding down the fort of the chaos parade that is our normal. 

We are still OK.  We're going to be OK.  Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is. 

What's with the 1?

When one starts a blog, one must consider some type of catchy title for the blog.  I often tell people that my life is just "this side of chaos", meaning that it could devolve to anarchy at any given moment.  I am the (mostly) proud owner/handler of 4 small people...  The Queen Bee is 8, Number One Son is 6, The Feisty One is 3, and Baby Sloth is 9 months. And I work... And due to logistical things I am a single parent to these lovely humans much of the time...  And Number One Son was just diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.

So that's where the clever 1 comes from in the blog title.  See what I did?  In my younger years, I'm sure I would have come up with something far more clever, and yet presently, that's the best I can muster.

Someone told me today that "someone could LEARN from how you're handling the Type 1 diagnosis." That really struck a chord for me, because I don't feel like I am doing anything different than any parent would, but since people all do things differently, I may be.  So here it goes.  People have been asking how I "knew" he had diabetes (moms just know), and so here's how that all went down.

Number One Son, a couple weeks before Christmas, started drinking more than usual (CLASSIC DIABETES SIGN).  He complained of being more thirsty in the evenings, and chalked it up to "teachers don't want us getting drinks all day long when we're doing classwork", which as a teacher seemed perfectly reasonable.  I don't know if you've ever had the privilege of having one student ask to get a drink of water and then the rest of them need one, and before long you're ten minutes into water drinks for everyone...  So it seemed reasonable.  I know his teacher, and I trust her drink-to-kid-ratio judgement.  So we let him drink as much as he wanted to "get caught up".  About a week later, he started wetting the bed at night.  I'm sure if he knew I was writing this, he'd be not entirely pleased... but in the interest of maybe helping someone at some point... that's what happened.  (CLASSIC DIABETES SIGN).  We're not talking normal, run-of-the-mill amounts of pee, either.  We bought some of the heavy-duty overnight pull-ups for him, and when even those couldn't stem the flow of the copious amounts of urine, we bought some disposable bed mats for him which helped--but still didn't completely contain the overnight deluge.  He has never been a kid to wake up in the night, and he was waking up two or three times to pee--and STILL PEEING THIS MUCH.  I'm a little guilty to say now that I was more annoyed with the extra laundry than I ought to have been...

And then one night we told him he couldn't have any more drinks before bed, because we needed to try and slow down the peeing.  And he became hysterical.  Begging for water.  BEGGING.  I have never seen anything quite like it in my life, and it was terrible.  And so we gave him some sips, and felt like asshole parents (and feel even more like assholes now about that incident...) I remember saying to him around that time one night when he was coming out of the bathroom and heading to his bed how "tall and skinny" he was getting (LOSING WEIGHT--CLASSIC DIABETES SIGN) but I didn't put that together until later.

Then one morning, after Christmas and the new year... January 9th...  we had a delay from school for fog or something, I don't remember what... but The Feisty One woke up screaming with an ear infection, and so I made plans to take him for his appointment.  Son Number One came out of his room with his overflowing pull-up, and in that instant, I'm not sure what clicked, but I just knew that he was diabetic.  I can't say what made me realize it that quickly, but I made him an appointment with the pediatrician for that afternoon.

Once we got there, our pediatrician, who I adore, looked over The Feisty One, and confirmed his ear infection.  (Good job, Mom, for figuring that one out.)  Then the conversation shifted to Son Number One.  "Does he drink enough during the day?" Well, he doesn't think so.  "Can you get him a water bottle?" Yeah, we can.  We will... I know... Probably an easy fix.  "I mean, we can check his urine and see what that tells us... and if that comes back we can check his blood, I guess." OK.   And so off we went, me telling my 6 year old kid how to pee in the "hat" on the toilet with the impending sense of doom, knowing in my heart what the diagnosis was going to be.  After a couple minutes, the nurse came back into the room with a little slip of paper, and said something quietly to the doctor who then told us that they were indeed going to check his blood...  and that she "didn't want to tell us what she thought it was..." but she didn't need to, since I had already put that together before the appointment.

They checked his blood (it was 441--which is loads higher than it should be), our awesome pediatrician (who I adore) told us about when her own son was diagnosed,  they brought in stuffed animals for both boys, a nurse on staff with Type 1 came in to talk to us for a minute...  They called the hospital to plan for his admission, and looked at all of us with pity, and soon we were on our way. 

It was a surreal hour.  I remember thinking "Well, this is the last day that I woke up with four kids and no lifelong illnesses."  I remember actually giving myself some "mom points" for figuring it out as soon as I did (and feeling guilty for not figuring it out sooner).  I remember thinking that before that day, if someone would have been given crappy news, I would have taken them for an ice cream cone or something as a treat to distract them, but that was obviously out of the question. And I remember thinking that if I freak out, or if I start crying or making it seem like anything is totally out of the ordinary, that my sweet and strong 6 year old boy would be afraid.  The one thing I wanted more than anything was for him to not be afraid. 

And so that's just been that.  It is his (and our family's) new "normal" (and by that, I obviously just mean one more layer of the chaos that already existed) and we are adapting.  Being sad or mad or bitter doesn't do anyone any good, so I am actively trying to stay positive and to make sure that he does, too.  More to come later...  if I am on the ball...  but for now, 100% of my minions are asleep, so I'd be foolish not to at least attempt to sleep myself.

Third time's a charm... Or fourth? Fifth?

I've always loved writing, and due to many years of piano playing, I have some pretty mad typing skills.  I may not outrun anyone on the track (and by track, I mean literally anywhere...), but I can type really fast, which makes writing loads easier and faster with a computer.  So I can write close to the speed I can think.  Which is something, I guess. 

Over the years, I have maintained a pretty active social media presence, going way back to the MySpace days...  I enjoy posting things that happen in my life mostly so when I am older, I can look back on them and have easy access to memories that I'd otherwise forget.  That is the main reason I post as many things as I do.  Who doesn't want to look back in 10 years and remember the gross diaper their kid had or the awesome view of the lake while on vacation.  It's the good with the bad, and memories are memories.  I'm an equal opportunity memory-maker. 

Lots of people (maybe 8, I guess.) have suggested that I write a book someday.  And maybe someday I will.  This is the next best thing for now.  I've attempted to blog more than once, and so I'd be lying if I said I was optimistic that I will keep this one up for very long--but I'm going to try.  There's a lot going on in my life at the moment, and someday, it will be interesting to look back and remember things that I'd like to forget now... but may want to revisit at some point (more on that later.)

So... yeah.  [awkward silence]