February 22nd, 2010

In Memory of a Little Life

In Lov­ing Mem­ory of Saman­tha Michelle
Born too Soon at 19.5 weeks
Feb­ru­ary 22, 2003

February 21st, 2010

Bad Mommy: Yup, That’s Me!

In keep­ing with my not-so-vocalized plan to take care of myself this year, I have been going to var­i­ous doc­tors to ensure that my health is up to par. This includes the den­tist. Back in Decem­ber a tooth broke so I found a den­tist who referred me to a Peri­odon­tist to make sure that the gum area where the tooth broke was clean enough to have a replace­ment. Between my den­tist appoint­ment and my peri­odon­tics appoint­ment, the tooth next to the on that fell out– a tooth that was pre­vi­ously root canaled– also fell out​.My years of mak­ing fun od the var­i­ous tooth­less peo­ple in my col­lege town of Oneonta were com­ing back to haunt me! At any rate, I saw the peri­odon­tist on Sat­ur­day and had to have both teeth extracted.

If you have never had a tooth extracted, con­sider your­self lucky. In fact, despite hav­ing been in labor for over 30 hours and even­tu­ally hav­ing to recover from a c-section, I will tell you that the post-operative pain of a tooth extrac­tion is the WORST pain that I have ever felt. It is a com­bi­na­tion of back labor mixed with a per­ineum tear all while hav­ing a root canal with­out anes­the­sia. One day after the surgery, I found myself break­ing down in tears every few min­utes as my body received jolts of pain.

Now, I have pain killers. He pre­scribed, along with an antibi­otic, Tylenol with Codine which never really works for me but does allow me to sleep. How­ever, when it comes to drugs, I am a light­weight. One Tylenol PM knocks me out for 12 hours and I have to refrain from tak­ing any­thing when I am home alone with my daugh­ter. So today, while my hus­band was at work from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm, I was forced to go med­i­cine free, take care of my daugh­ter and even walk the dog.

And that’s where the “bad mommy” thing comes into the play. My hus­band fed her break­fast this morn­ing, and for lunch I fed her fudge cook­ies and milk. I fol­lowed that up with a snack of fudge cook­ies and a few sips of my soda. For din­ner, I begged her dad to bring her Chicken Nuggets and apple slices from McDonald’s. I did not get her dressed today nor were her teeth brushed this morning.

And I feel very guilty. This never hap­pens– even when I am sick she gets bal­anced meals and a bath. Today, how­ever, I had an Aim­ing Low moment and I swear all I could do was apol­o­gize to my hus­band. Luck­ily, the Tylenol with Codine will kick in soon and I sus­pect that the guilt would be for­got­ten. I am shar­ing this sim­ply because I want proof that we all mess up. And that I am human.

February 14th, 2010

Valentine’s Day Purge

Andrew and I don’t cel­e­brate Valentine’s Day. Much like her, we choose to only indulge in dis­counted choco­lates the day after.  For us love is about the every day not about the forced emo­tional dis­plays of affec­tion. Social Media, as much as I love it, is much like Valentine’s Day– forced rela­tion­ship fluff. Lately, I have been feel­ing suf­fo­cated by my online life. So, in keep­ing with my desire to be fluff-free I have been doing a lit­tle purging.

Twit­ter Purge

I have mul­ti­ple Twit­ter accounts but @momontherise is my main account for this blog­ging. Unfor­tu­nately, it is also one of the rea­sons that I haven’t really been into Twit­ter lately. I was fol­low­ing so may peo­ple that I really felt there was not per­sonal involve­ment. When Google intro­duced Buzz I was imme­di­ately drawn to it because of the per­sonal nature of the net­work. You con­nect to peo­ple right away in part because you can fol­low con­ver­sa­tions and such. As I talked about this with a few online friends, one men­tioned how she had unfol­lowed every one in her Twit­ter stream and started adding only those who she wanted to con­nect with. She pointed me to http://​www​.unfol​low​ev​ery​one​.com and I imme­di­ately decided that this was the great­est thing since WiFi. I fol­lowed suit and went from fol­low over 5,0o0 peo­ple to none to 150. I am only adding those who I actu­ally talk to– those who are more inter­ested in sell­ing me their busi­ness or ser­vices with­out con­nect­ing on a per­sonal level will have to go. I find it very dif­fi­cult to func­tion in the noise.

Face­book Purge

Since refo­cus­ing on build­ing my busi­nesses (kristinabrooke​.org and Moms/We of Hue), I decided to extend my purg­ing to face­book too. I started by remov­ing myself from all the games that I played on the site (Cafe World and Mafia Wars are addict­ing), block­ing the appli­ca­tions that were too dis­tract­ing, and then I removed over 100 “friends’ from high school, col­lege, and pre­vi­ous jobs. The fact of the mat­ter is there is no point being con­nected to peo­ple who you never really liked or con­nected with in real life any­way. I hated HS and really have bad mem­o­ries of a lot of my so called friends from those years. Hav­ing them on my FB page made me sec­ond guess what I was post­ing and it was just too sti­fling. So, I broke up with them. The games were eat­ing away at my pro­duc­tiv­ity and I had to remove them too.

Next Steps

Prior to writ­ing this post I opened up my Gmail account and decided to unsub­scribe from all the mail­ing lists, newslet­ters, and other groups that I get email from but never read. I am tired of open­ing my Inbox and find­ing over 1000 mes­sages most of which I delete with­out read­ing any­way. If I don’t care, I am not going to subscribe.

I am also going to clean out my Blog­lines account and remove the blogs that don’t update or the ones that I really don’t read. I just don’t have the energy to deal with the overcrowding.

I’ll be writ­ing about my In-Real-Life friends Purge soon too.

Are you purg­ing?  How?