February 4, 2015
Life with DOG!
There’s no time that watching a dog sleep isn’t funny and Seamus is no exception.
He curls up so tightly that his back legs are tucked under his chin;
sticks his tongue out while sleeping;
snores, sleep-growls and barks;
startles himself out of sleep and he glares like I did it;
is likely to be on his back with all legs waving in the air about 60% of the time.
Also, I love it when he’s on his back, rubs his face with both paws, then topples over.
Medical woes
A bit of waltz with this fella. Skin looks horrible, skin improves, skin gets bad again, skin improves. We keep experimenting to see what gives him the most relief for the longest period of time.
A Dog and Our Money
This guy eats quite a lot. Easily 30% more than Doggle did and he still acts like he’s starving before the afternoon is over. His bones aren’t showing anymore, seven or eight gained pounds later, so we’re being careful not to overfeed him since his activity levels aren’t very high. He obviously doesn’t much appreciate that.
I had some luck picking up his special grain free diet at about $1.50/lb from petflow.com with a 20% discount, but aside from those one off special deals, our best bet for this particular brand is the local PetClub store. With a minor sale or coupon, we can get pretty close to $1.50/lb from them.
In case the medications alone aren’t doing the trick for his health and we need to change his diet, we may try a Twitter recommendation of the Kirkland Signature Nature’s Domain which is apparently just a repackaging of the Taste of the Wild brand. This recommendation comes from someone who only feeds her dog the best so I’m reasonably certain that it’s a decent high-quality alternative that would be good for him.
January 12, 2015
Life with DOG!
I can’t seem to get a dog that doesn’t turn into PiC’s dog. Within days it was clear that Seamus didn’t want PiC to be the alpha, he just wanted to be Daddy’s favorite. When PiC went away for a weekend, he pulled a classic Doggle, moping his way into bed at 7 pm: life isn’t worth living, I’m just going to bed early and maybe he’ll be here when I wake up.
So I get to be alpha in that I’m the discipline parent and PiC is the beloved parent. Which means I can always get him to take his meds, cooperate with a bath, ear cleaning, or wound care, and go to bed when I say, but any time PiC might be around, he’s a much much happier dog.
Out of the blue, Seamus decided to violate the no dogs on furniture rule, nearly destroying the slipcover in the process. When he screws up, he goes big!
Medical woes
To date, we’ve spent several hundred on his surgery, and a few more hundred on additional rounds of medications to soothe his skin as we slowly start to figure out what works to keep it happy.
After a rough start involving steroids and a stressed bladder, we went months without incident.
Clever boy tried to outsmart me. Having been scolded every time we hear him licking his paws, he tried to throw me off by licking the air for a while. I was stealth- watching and the second he thought it was safe to lick his actual paw, he was clearly shocked to hear his usual scolding. I don’t want him to aggravate his skin further so we have to regulate that pretty strictly.
His back is looking pretty wonderful, though, so there IS improvement. There are no inflammation, rashes, sores or weeping wounds – hurray!
A Dog and Our Money
I had a brainstorm when the County insisted that we license him, despite his being a foster for now. I’d just paid up for Doggle’s 3-year license this year and they don’t do refunds. But glory-be, they were willing to let Seamus take over the rest of the license! And they were amazingly easy to work with, we did it all by email and it was taken care of in just a few days. I’d be impressed by the efficiency of the local government but it was probably only because the licensing has been farmed out to a company.
January 9, 2015
“You don’t tell me ‘No’, you say ‘No’ to your parents!”
When I was nine, a landlady was prescribing the weirdest diet to fix whatever she thought was wrong with me. The details I remember involved raw eggs, sounded terrible, and possibly was meant to plump me up but I distinctly remember politely hearing her out and then answering truthfully when she wound up the unsolicited diatribe with the demand: so are you going to do it?
“No.”
She nearly burst with indignation! How DARE a scrawny child say she wasn’t going to follow her sage (and totally bogus homeopathic) advice?
She followed up with a lecture on how totally inappropriate it was for me to decline to follow the instructions and how out of line it was (I stopped listening around here to ponder on why someone who was basically a stranger would tell a little kid to defy her parents or feel the right to dispense “medical knowledge” and tell her off for trusting her parents better than a stranger in matters of…. Anything.)
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong when I looked at Mom’s bemused face. After all, there was nothing wrong in saying No. I hadn’t called the lady a quack or been rude to her. But that was also the first time I’d ever said no to an adult. I had no idea it was going to become such a habit 🙂
In my teens, a dear friend’s dad told me something about parenting that really stuck: one of the hardest moments for kids growing up is to realize that their parents are actually human too, they make mistakes. They’re not gifted with omniscience just because they’re parents. And the moment you, as a child, realize that, your relationship evolves… And that can be painful.
It’s so true.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
In our culture, “Respect your elders” is one of the highest tenets.
To this day I still can’t call teachers who have become good friends by their first names. It’ll always be “Mr./Mrs./Ms. [X].”
Learning to manage my relationships with adults, including parents and parental fugues, required a great deal of learning to reason, to accept that we will disagree about things –fundamental life changing things– and still love and respect those who are important and disagree with me while walking my own path without their help or approval.
Heck, to this day, my dad still doesn’t know what I do for a living. It’s just completely outside the realm of normalcy in our family. They understand going into medicine (as a doctor or a nurse), engineering, and accounting. And some entrepreneurial things. But I’m the weirdo who went the Humanities route and then even further off the tracks into the professional world. I might as well be a lawyer, it’d make more sense to them 😉
By and large, I always respected my parents and what they taught me based on their life experiences.
As a first generation kid, though, there were more than a few situations in which it would have been a big mistake to follow their guidance. Oftentimes, it seemed to just be down to personality or cultural differences, and it wasn’t always clear who was right, but it was valuable learning when to trust my own instincts and seek other sources of wisdom.
When it came to functioning in the American workplace, the generational gap was the overriding factor and it became most obvious that there were ropes I’d have to learn on my own.
This isn’t a revelation, every new generation has to learn to manage adulthood without training wheels on, but even after years of standing on my own, some lessons still take time to learn. These were my two biggest though:
Don’t stand up for yourself
Then: Dad was always the pacifist in the family, the salve after Mom’s fire, and I had trouble relating to him. I was always frustrated by his lack of action or motivation to act when someone wronged him. When an employee embezzled and basically put them out of business, he felt that it was better to turn the other cheek or “take the high road”. So instead of possibly recouping some of that lost money and staying afloat, my parents had to declare bankruptcy and shut down what had been their livelihood for years. That embezzler screwed us and our long time employees over and I was outraged that Dad refused to fight.
Now: I realize I didn’t know enough about their recordkeeping to know if they could have made a case but it still bothers me that he didn’t fight.
Then: When my sibling was bullied at school, I’m pretty sure the advice was the same: take the high road. By the time it was my turn to get bullied .. Well let’s just say I never waited to get advice on the matter. Even as an 8 year old, I knew I wasn’t going to stand for being literally shoved around and hurt, especially since there were never any official consequences and he never got caught. When our class bully tried to throw me off a platform, he got the biggest punch in the gut I could muster. Years of fighting with my sibling had given me a pretty good right hook and I’m sure the kid, who had at least 30 lbs on me, didn’t have an inkling that was coming. He never laid a hand on me again. My reaction to unwelcome touching, with guys twice my size who would try and force themselves on me when it was clear I didn’t want someone hovering over and hugging me, remained the same throughout the years. No one ever had the temerity to repeat their aggressions after getting a sharp elbow in return but I could NOT understand why they thought it was OK to put their arms around me, uninvited and without permission. (Actually it was clear why they did it, it was a stunt to show off to their friends what they could get away with. Joke was on them, really.) Obviously, I’m not a natural hugger.
Now: Dad recently related an anecdote where he sharply told off his sister for advising my cousins to take the high road on some bullying situation, pointing out that if her grandchild was being pushed around and hurt, would she honestly advise turning the other cheek and keeping quiet?
Either he’s changed his stance or he only wouldn’t go to bat for his own. I don’t know what it was but he’s certainly never advocated standing up for yourself to me, he’s always tried to talk me out of it.
Trust your bosses: they mean well
Right.
Then: When my manipulative boss tried to give me cash for personal use, my parents guessed he was just trying to be nice. But my gut said there was something not kosher in being handed cash out of pocket by a married male boss with tendencies to hold unvoiced expectations over your head. He made it very clear he considered this money a personal gift, but it wasn’t so clear what he expected in return. He certainly wasn’t saying he wasn’t expecting anything nor that it was OK to decline, so from his position of authority over me, it was an incredibly awkward place to be in.
Now: I don’t know if trusting someone in a position of authority is a cultural thing or if it’s the habit of deferring to authority because they can make trouble for you (mine certainly did) but I don’t think I ever asked for their advice when it came to workplace dynamics ever again.
Are you a product of both a culture or generation gap? One or the other?
January 7, 2015
Reading Parenting with chronic pain on Slate was a huge wrenching reality check for me.
There’s nothing new in there. No surprises about how chronic pain plus the rigors of parenting go down. Nothing that I haven’t worried over and discussed to death with PiC. There were many many days where I just couldn’t see committing to parenthood because of it. But reading another chronic pain mother’s experience, after the child has arrived and is older, is a bit of a kick in the gut nonetheless.
Chronic pain has now dominated 2/3 of my life. There is no cure and very few effective ameliorating treatments for what I have other than trying not to “overdo it” (which is to say, do ANYthing that resembles having a real life) on bad days.
I have no reason to think that it’ll get any better. Parenting was always going to be a challenge but parenting with only 65% of normal function, at best, well, that’s going to be a hell of a thing.
I wonder if this is a huge mistake for LB’s sake. My parents, in some very real ways, shattered my late teens and most of my 20s with their financial and health instability and poor decisions. Am I setting LB up for an equally difficult path?
Obviously you could argue that no one knows what tomorrow brings and that terrible things could happen to any healthy parent as well but
A) most people don’t really actually get hit by a bus so that “anything could happen” argument holds very little water here practically speaking (and anything could STILL happen but magically getting better is not likely) and
B) I already have an existing chronic and limiting condition that has only gotten progressively worse over the years. This isn’t a game of What If, it’s a When and How Badly will this deteriorate?
We’ve committed.
We are committed. There’s no turning back and I don’t think we would choose to if we could turn back time. (I don’t know. I just don’t think we would. And maybe that’s just because I’m stupid. But it’s highly likely that LB will be an only child if we don’t adopt.)
But this just reminds me that I’m not paranoid, that the sort of lurking fear that I’ll be crippled “someday” is not being dramatic given the number of days I can only just exist.
This is why I’ve always insisted that our emergency savings are UNTOUCHABLE. And our savings rate must NEVER fall below 25%. When I get too sick or broken to work, I need to know we won’t be falling back on the charity of … who exactly? No one in my family is fit as support even were they inclined to provide it, the few who might be in a financial position to help are terrible people and I’d never ever ask them for help. His family’s got their hands full already.
Simply put, we must maintain solid financial health because my physical health is at best, average, on a good day.
December 29, 2014
Do you cook with your partner?
I read “How Cooking With My Boyfriend Showed Me Our Relationship Was Toxic” and in between shaking my head over the clearly slothful boyfriend who expected to be served and catered to, I realized, oh wait, PiC and I can’t cook together anymore.
You know I adore him, obviously, and this doesn’t affect our actual relationship, but we cannot be co-chefs.
He can be my sous chef, he’s all over the grocery shopping as necessary and the dishwashing as well, but otherwise, he gets the boot when I’m cooking. And likewise if he’s cooking, I just set out the ingredients for him, get out of the kitchen and do the clearing up after.
We just don’t work well together! He’s a backseat chef, questioning whether I should be doing or not doing something a certain way, which drives me nuts. I tell to “just shush and dice the onions. I don’t care what they look like as long as it’s cut up!” which drives him nuts.
See, for all that I’m a Type A in other things, the kitchen is where I get to be haphazard, laissez-faire and not really follow directions fully. Just like he defies the GPS’s recommendations, I routinely take only what I want from recipes and with a little guidance from Twitter, barrel along my happy way. That also means I don’t want to answer many questions that aren’t important to the taste. (To be fair, sometimes how a veggie is sliced actually does make a difference but never does the size of the minced garlic matter.)
He, on the other hand, and he needs structure and specifications, dammit! If he could get measurement requests down to the millimeter, he’d be in sous chef heaven.
Basically it came down to this: unlike other things about the house, neither of us could fundamentally compromise on our styles. So, out ye get, non-primary chef.
My firm rule about separation in the kitchen was an ongoing joke, mostly him ribbing me over my refusal to deal with his running commentary, until one day ….
We were having brunch with a dear friend who is, in many ways, just like him. So, as he tried to slice the bread, she was hanging over his shoulder scolding him for how much it was getting squished. As he started to fry up, she was at his elbow, surveying, heck, I don’t know, his spatula technique? She actually rattled him enough that he spilled some egg! He’s had his occasional kitchen snafus but never when there are witnesses. That’s also my area.
True to form, I sat in the other room working, chuckling over the hollering (mostly hers) and the fuming (mostly him).
Honestly, I thought the best part was that she didn’t know how irritating she was being. I was very wrong. The best part was actually later in the day when he turned to me and said: oh my God!
Didn’t even need context, I knew immediately what he meant. I started to laugh, and said, “Yeah. But it’s about time you got a dose of your own medicine.”
The look on his face was priceless. “NO WAY. That’s what it’s like?!?”
“YEEEEEP. This is why you stay out of my kitchen.”
“Oh. My God.”
“Yeah. Seriously. Stay out of my kitchen.”
Love, y’all. It’s also about boundaries.
November 14, 2014
Seamus is still with us, still going strong.
He’s a dear dog, in his own silly ways, and is doing surprisingly well with the transition considering he’s had to be shuttled hundreds of miles and spent a lot of time with near-strangers over the past few months.
We’re working through his health problems, it’s taking a lot of elbow grease, and an incredible amount of cooperation from him. Doggle was always a sweetheart but even he occasionally had opinions about being tended to.
His ears have probably never been cleaned. We spent an hour with his head in my lap as I worked out all the guck with cotton balls, gauze pads and the occasional Q-tip. (Word of warning: Vets don’t really like for people to use Q-tips. They’re easy to lose in long ear canals. But since I’ve done this a million times and have done it both professionally and with professional supervision, I’m comfortable with it.)
His nails have probably never been trimmed. I snuck up on him during a nap and trimmed them… a few minutes after I was done and left, he cracked open an eyelid.
His skin still looks pretty bad. All the scabs and bumps from his condition are still not resolved, but it doesn’t look red, angry and patchy anymore. We think he may always be on some kind of medication, given the as-yet undiagnosed condition and how slow it’s been to respond to a LOT of care.
Regular medications. Without Doggle around, it takes a LOT more effort to get this guy to take his medications. Doggle always lurked during the pill rolling (I use pill pockets so we didn’t always have to pill them), so Seamus was convinced anything I offered was going to be fantastic and he couldn’t swallow it fast enough. No competition = no motivation, apparently! The plus side, though, is that PiC has learned how to pill a fairly cooperative dog, so there’s that 🙂
Needles needles needles. With no vaccine history that I know of, we had to subject Seamus to the full battery of vaccines and he’ll have to get boosters next year. After that, he’ll be fine to transition to a 3 year schedule.
But the biggest thing was his surgery. At his age, I hated to put him under anesthesia but he really needed to be fixed for obvious reasons and as he was at risk for cancer. PiC’s convinced that being the drop-off man means that Seamus held a grudge about the surgery but after a few days on pain meds, the old boy is nearly good as new. The vet gave us a huge discount (about 33%) and the bill still pushed $900. Thank goodness for savings.
***
It’s been a rough few months but he’s such a trooper and chock full of personality. I’m still glad we decided to commit to it.
September 10, 2014
I’ve been having what feels like more than my fair share of scary or awful symptoms lately. I won’t get into defining what’s fair, for the purpose of staying on track here, though. There’s been the usual (dizziness, intermittent nausea, pain rotating through the body, cramping of all sorts, weakness) plus a dash of new, weird, annoying stuff (chest pain, difficulty breathing) so basically it’s been like throwing a bright springtime picnic.
At some point there was a definitive moment, while contemplating all of the weird, that it seemed clear that something had to be different, this wasn’t just the usual “I’m broken” kind of wrong. Amid the usual range of random symptoms that cycle through, it’s usually impossible to tell when a new symptom is actually different.
Despite my typical assumption that I’m just broken, I ventured a test anyway. It was a bit on the early side and so to keep us on tenterhooks, the home test strip (1 line for no, 2 lines for yes) came up: one and a half. Seriously.
It took a blood test and an ultrasound, for me to actually believe: I’m expecting. We’re expecting. There’s gestating going on in what I have always referred to as a non-childbearing *waves hand* midsection. Did you know it’s possible to almost immediately start having symptoms in Weeks 5 and 6? As PiC said, “you can have symptoms this early??” Not cool.
It’s been weird. All kinds of weird. Both from the gestating POV and from being among a lot of blog and offline friends who are in baby stages of life, either having had them or struggling with having them, and I find myself torn. I hurt for those friends who are hurting and there’s a small part of me that’s hesitant to be happy about having a thing they want so much.
Because this is, despite all my practical reservations, a thing that I find myself happy about. Over the years, practical reservations have ruled my thinking: family health and financial history, my health issues, who the hell knows how we’re going to raise a child to be a good thinking human being without any help we don’t hire except for the few loved ones who might be able to come over for a week or handful of days, and BTW the Bay Area is frakkin’ expensive.
You might see where I derail into all of the scary life things and start to forget that this is actually a good thing. It is. I’m grateful that it didn’t require serious intervention and ever so grateful that I’m even able to conceive at all. Infertility, multiple miscarriages, difficult pregnancies and all are common in my family and at my age, with my health … I’m grateful.
And because I’m grateful and happy and possibly even a reserved excited about it (because again, early days), I’m trying to concentrate on what’s in front of me.
What IS in front of me?
Food is a problem. I LOVE food but uhm. This microscopic alien has literally run my life from minute to minute. I eat driven purely by instinct. In a single day, I might be repulsed by the very names of my normal foods, only cold veggies and orange juice allowed, then desperately need a steak. Cravings are normal and I typically ignore them but this level of craving is ridiculous.
I alternate between wanting to do ALL the cleaning and wanting to do nothing at all. Energy aside, my brain has become subject to an ON/OFF switch flipped by who knows what.
The seventeen trips to the bathroom a day have commenced and I’m possibly more annoyed about that than anything else but I suspect something else will top it soon enough.
Even after having it officially confirmed, it still doesn’t feel real. After all, fatigue and queasiness is a normal fibro/fatigue symptom for me. But as it turns out, there is a reason for it and it has a heartbeat. A heartbeat. This is weird.
When I’m fatigued, it’s about as bad as any kind of fatigue I’ve had ever, but as I described to a friend, it’s like I walk around w/50 lbs of bricks on my back daily. What’s another 5 or 10 bricks? They suck but I’m already accustomed to slog through a swamp, bearing lead weights.
All the literature keeps warning me and PiC to tolerate my mood swings but so far they’ve been:
1. If I can’t eat food today, again, I’m going to yell at someone.
2. If I can’t sleep tonight, again, I’m going to collapse.
Those probably aren’t considered moods, though.
This doesn’t in any way mitigate the pain of losing Doggle. However well intentioned, please don’t suggest that it does or it will. In some ways, it’s almost worse, Doggle loves – loved – small children (and really loves – loved – the smell of them); there were few things that could get his attention but concern for a crying child has always been at the very top of that short list, easily trumping anything else.
We had very much looked forward to introducing him to his human sibling to love and grow up with.