Considering vegetarianism

Each passing day I lie to myself that it will be better.  Because it can't get any worse, right?  RIGHT??  I forget that my stress level has not been this high in a year, so little things are compounding to make every day somehow shittier than the day prior.  I now have a myriad of phantom pains, and I'm simultaneously exhausted and wired all the time.  I should not be like this!  I am not a rookie!  SELF, GET IT TOGETHER ALREADY, DAMMIT.

Sunday morning we went to the Commissary, which is always an exercise in futility.  The produce is always disgusting, the other customers always slow and confused and in the way.  As we were waiting in line to get assigned a cashier, Matt and I noticed a cart stuffed with a particularly spectacular assortment of meat.  Meat hoarding is a regular occurrence, but this was exceptionally organized.  Stack after stack of steaks and ground beef and chicken thighs.  And as I'm openly gaping at it, we somehow get assigned to the same line, right behind them.  GROSS.

She's not paying any attention to me whatsoever as she's unloading it, so I continue to stare, open-mouthed.  She's got it all pretty much on the belt when she moves some white containers around that look like double-tall margarine tubs.  On closer glance they are, wait for it, chicken livers.  Blech.  All of a sudden the cashier calls out to the cashier one lane over for some paper towels, and starts ripping them off eight at a time, and I can't figure out why, and then I realize OMG ONE HAS SPILLED OMG OMG OMG.  There is blood on the conveyor belt and on the scanner and in the bagging area.  I am gagging.

The woman, on the other hand, has noticed this, and thinks it's somehow funny.  She swats her arm in the air and starts jabbering at the neighboring cashier in Vietnamese (this is just a guess) like, "Oh hey Martine (or whatever weird "English" name they've adopted), one of those livers spilled again!  HA!  Hate it when that happens.  How's the husband?"

The cashier finds some kind of spray bottle that I pray has something more in it than just water (and I wouldn't even drink naval base water, at that).  She sprays down the scanner bed and the conveyor bed and is about to be finished when I yell (no, really, I startled myself at the volume) that she's "MISSED A SPOT, RIGHT THERE.  NO, RIGHT THERE.  THERE'S BLOOD."  

Fucking disgusting.  And I have no choice but to stand there like an idiot.  My whole cart has already been unloaded.  Except for the scanning bed, my hope is that I'm safe from the conveyor belt because the offending spot is now on the mysterious underside.  The moral of this story is ALWAYS TRAVEL WITH ANTIBACTERIAL WET ONES AND WASH YOUR HANDS IMMEDIATELY AFTER YOU GET HOME.

Bubbles, too, help distract from bloody chicken livers.

The bubble that popped right on my lens.  

Like they had ESP or something, our friends with the terrifically professional espresso machine asked if we were up for some afternoon coffee later that day, and I was all, yes, Baby Jesus, please.

This is the ONLY salvageable progress picture from Sunday, and she's all puffed from crying about having to have her picture taken, and her mouth is full of her chocolate bribe. 

And then later that night my jilted running partner and SD BFF came over for dinner (her husband's gone, otherwise we would have allowed him over as well), and after we ate and put Bug to bed, she and I sat on the computer and Googled people we knew and then judged old pictures people from college had on Facebook while Matt rolled his eyes.  It was magical.

Matt was off on Monday, so we ran as a family down at Mission Beach before meeting up with a friend afterward for coffee and play.  I pulled a total dick move while we were running when two guys came up behind me, slightly huffing.  I always make up stories in my head about what other people might be thinking while I push the stroller, and generally they surround people underestimating my ability to actually run.  So I leave Matt in the dust (sorry, but not really) and decide to keep up with the guys after they get even with me.  But I pulled a total runner faux-pas and stayed at an obnoxiously close distance, hugging the right side of one of them, so like the front wheel of the stroller was even with his back foot.  For about a mile.  He kept looking back at me,  but they never really sped up (probably because they are better people than I am).  I wanted to pass them but wasn't sure how long I could maintain the pace with the stroller, because I'd never really done it before, and also I had a husband a half mile back that I was supposed to be running with.  My guess is we were running low 7's, because my average pace for the whole 4.5 mile run (even after adjusting back to running with Matt) was like 7:36.  *does body builder bicep pose*

After our run, we had a ginger beach date.  It was so cute.

The only kids who move slower than her are the ones considerably younger.

No, that's not random beach trash.  We thought it might work as an extra sand toy, but it was thrown aside, literally.

Then both kids started fraying a bit on the edges and we all went our separate ways.

We took Bug home and put her down for a nap so Matt could go and get the BIG GIRL BED.  Then when she woke up, we put it together, and I held my breath for what I expected to be a complete disaster of a bed time later that night.  But she, as always, surprised me with a) her legitimate excitement about the whole thing, despite not being moved enough by it before to stop pooping in diapers and b) her ability to actually fall asleep in it and not escape ONCE the entire night.  I suppose it's like cosmic balance.  Having a kid with complex and rare medical issues who also had a terrible time with big transitions might be too much.  Maybe.  We still haven't gotten rid of the pacifier at night, though, and still require the aforementioned diaper for pooping, so we're not all the way there yet.

Sooo excited.  Both of them.

THEN THERE WAS TODAY.

She slept in, which was weird, but also sort of expected, because her mattress is like insane-comfortable (well, at least to the two female clones in the house.  Matt thinks it's too firm.).  We had our post-op today at 10:30, so I wanted to get our run in ahead of time.  She had other plans, and threw a gigantic fit about going running.  FINE.  So we didn't run.

Originally our appointment was scheduled for tomorrow, because he normally just does surgery on Tuesdays and Fridays, and clinic on the other days.  But somehow he got overbooked, and had something like 48 (!!!!!) patients scheduled for tomorrow, so they called and asked us if we'd be willing to switch to Tuesday.  I thought I was coming out ahead on the deal, because the guy always runs late, and I figured any day I wasn't up against 47 other people would be a good day.

When we got there, though, the regular receptionist wasn't there (see: not regular clinic day) but the one technician girl we always see was.  She told us that the doctor wasn't there yet, and I tried to ask if we could just wait in the large waiting room (where the toys were) but she insisted on leading us into the exam room because another doctor would see us.  And she did see us (I think she's a resident), relatively quickly.  I give her a five out of ten on ability to coerce small children into doing her bidding, which is up from the two she got the first time we met her a few months ago.  Then she left and... nothing.  NOTHING FOR TWO HOURS.  We waited in that room, Bug and I, for the next two hours.  The movie "Up" was on the little screen at the other side of the room, but Bug could barely see it from the one chair in the room, and isn't interested in anything other than Sesame Street anyway.  So I watched it (those talking dogs were my favorite part) while she watched Elmo on my phone.  And then the movie was over and I realized that she lost the wireless connection and had been streaming YouTube shit over the cellular network and told her my phone was broken and we couldn't use it any more.  So we ate graham crackers and goldfish and I did ab exercises while she shuffled around the room, and then she started climbing on the chair and trying to jump off (so impressed it took her an hour and a half to get to this point versus the usual ten minutes) and basically I was just losing my mind.  It was past 12:30 when he finally came in.

Isn't there a horror movie that kind of looks like this?

If not, I will write one.

You could tell he was running behind by the way he breezed in, and this was the first time I'd ever seen him without a tie on, excluding when we saw him in scrubs the morning of her surgery.  I was already feeling frayed having waited as long as we did, and her total disregard and disdain for his instructions were driving me nuts.  These last few days I've really wanted to be compassionate toward her, but she's just been acting so TERRIBLY.  He thought that she was healing well, which was good, but was rather cold in his conclusion that we had "exactly the results we were expecting" (i.e. her pupils are level, and she's discontinued the head positioning in exchange for looking through her glasses).  I was like, great, but I still feel like a mess, and she still looks like a mess, and I know that you're not technically trained in any sort of psychological anything, but I'm grasping for straws a bit here.  That's it?  Like months years of debating this, and that's it, we're done?  We're good now?  Why do I still feel so fucking nervous and unhinged, then? It shouldn't have felt so odd, and probably should have felt more reassuring, especially considering how many kids he sees and has operated on, but his thirty second assessment and metaphorical hand brush off that everything was good felt almost like a dismissal of any sort of fear or emotion that I have around this.  I suppose I should be used to this, when medical professionals look at her and say, "she's great!" but like I've said before, I am open and WOUNDED RIGHT NOW.  AND WE WAITED OVER TWO HOURS FOR YOU ALONE IN THIS ROOM.  DAMMIT.

At quick glance, her eyes individually already see better.  Before the surgery they were each at 20/60 corrected, and are now at 20/50.  I am just hoping upon hope they continue to improve, lest our fears of her never getting a driver's license come to fruition (you need a corrected vision of 20/40).  And they probably will (improve, that is).

The worst part is when I asked about her eye shape.  Her lower lids are still quite swollen, which makes sense since the lower muscles had the most done to them (entire portions removed), and it has made her eyes a strange shape.  They should "mostly" return to normal, but even though he detached the muscle from the lower eyelid, they are still connected, and it may stay a bit higher up.  "Gravity will be on our side," he told me, but it took every ounce not to cry about that.  Call me superficial all you want, but I didn't want her eye shape to change that direction.  It makes her look... hmm.  There is no way to be PC about this. Like she has special needs.

I told him I had been photographing her every day for my own records, and he got intensely interested in this and the photos, because no other pediatric patient had ever done that before.  He had seen one other person do it, an adult, and the photos were made into a movie documenting his recovery.  So far I have not been very consistent about time of day or background or how she looks at me, mainly because I figured it was just for me, but now there was incentive to make them more uniform.  I always love a task.

He was done, so we left, and since it was already after 1, we had no time to stop for a special treat (not that she really earned one at the end, anyway).  When we got home I tried to get her to stand against one of the white living room walls so I could take a quick picture and she lost her shit, and I lost my shit, because dammit Bug, all I'm asking you is to stand against this wall for five seconds.  That's it.  You don't even have to smile at me.  Just look at me.  But she didn't want to do it, so she threw things and alternated between limp and boneless and flat as a board and on and on.  I yelled at her, I put her in time out in her dreaded crib, I threatened to throw Elmo DVDs into the trash ("BUT THEY'RE NOT DIRTY," she yelled).  It was ugly.  It was epic.

Fucking E-P-I-C

Then she ground her heel into the meatiest part of my calf while I was sitting cross-legged on the floor and it literally brought stars to my eyes and I really lost it.  I hated myself and I hated her and I hated EVERYTHING.  Finally I decided that all pictures would now be taken at the kitchen table during lunch, because if anything else, she usually sits still when she's eating, and there's good light by the window.

First I tried actually while she was eating.

It's like she's mocking me.

After thirty-odd pictures of half-chewed food and half-closed eyes, I gave up and waited until she was done.  

I said open your EYES, not your MOUTH.

EYES, I NEED YOUR EYES OPEN.

She is just as patronizing in person, by the way.

Then she didn't want to nap, and I heard her ripping packing tape off her nightstand (until I buy one of those corner cushions, there is a washcloth taped to the corner of the nightstand so she doesn't impale herself in the middle of the night) and I went down there and started threatening her again and she somehow agreed with me and fell asleep.  Then Matt came home and instead of going for the run I told myself I would go on, I fell asleep (twitching still, I'm sure) on the couch.

After much deliberation, we decided to go out to dinner.  My favorite place to go when I'm feeling sorry for myself is the Cheesecake Factory.  So we went there, and while it DID feel good to be out of the house, the food didn't taste all that good (please, spare me the "when does it ever taste good?" because when you're in the mood for it, it DOES) and she decided it was worth $6 to eat three macaroni noodles and then whine about eating Matt's french fries for the rest of the meal.

All is not lost, though, because MIMI ARRIVES ON THURSDAY.  Mimi, I apologize in advance if I disappear completely for three days.