Thankfully, A Bit of a Breather

Nothing lasts forever, and luckily that includes situations that are causing massive amounts of stress on your family. After over a month of practically killing ourselves with our work schedules we hit a breaking point and Mark quit. Some of the decision was motivated by how utterly exhausted and nonfunctional we were, and realizing that not only was this situation not sustainable, it was definitely not worth it to have some extra money. If we're going to be stressed, at least we can be more well-rested while we're at it. Also, while I realize (and remember from personal experience) that working as a CNA in a care center is certainly no cake walk, this place was particularly bad. As in, on at least a few occasions Mark was the only CNA for the entire facility with about 60 patients. And then having the administration force the CNAs to sign papers that stated that should anything untoward happen during a shift the blame was all on the aides - definitely not a good sign when administration isn't supportive of its employees. Mark was working graveyards but not getting any sort of shift differential. The straw that broke the camel's back was Mark getting accused of stealing some old lady's belongings. While everyone knew this was absolute bullcrap (especially considering one of objects Mark was accused of stealing was a 2-foot-tall porcelain doll and the "stolen" objects kept changing in description), it was not worth it for Mark to deal with conditions like that. So that's done, and it's been MUCH nicer around here ever since. Mark working as a CNA elsewhere is still a possibility, but we'll see if we can find something that will work better with our schedule.

The other big news is Mark finally made his official decision about what to study and he starts classes in a couple of weeks to go to ITT Tech for their Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering Technologist program. You might be thinking that this is a very big change from what we were all originally planning, and you would be absolutely correct. After much considering, we came to the following conclusions. While scrub tech would be a really fun job, in reality it doesn't pay well, the job itself would become pretty stagnant after awhile, and depending on the surgeon you end up with, it could be pretty miserable too. So that's out. We looked into nursing, and while I still think Mark would do well at it, it's just not him. Plus, a good point that Mark brought up was that after all these years of dealing with crappy shiftwork, it would be really nice to get a normal Monday-Friday, 9-5, no nights/holidays/weekends sort of job that pays well right off the bat. The way he ended up on engineering goes back to his high school years when he was interested in studying robotics or biomechanics or something similar in college, and was actually offered scholarships for this field of study, but his parents at the time didn't want to cover the rest of the tuition. And most 18-year-olds don't think, "Okay, I'll just get student loans to cover the rest of the schooling." So Mark didn't study engineering out of high school. His mom has plenty of stories about how growing up he was always taking stuff apart to see how it works (which seems to be the hallmark trait of an engineer) and even now he's always creating and building stuff (which doesn't always go well when you consider he's also accident-prone). We will have quite a bit of tuition we'll have to pay off after he's done with school but this is a career that you can pretty well guarantee a great starting paycheck right out of the gate. And he is so excited to get started. I've jokingly told him he'd better be sure this time because he's not allowed to change his mind again. We're looking at 3 1/2 years total. So a bit longer than we were originally thinking but it'll be worth it, and we're hoping that once he has his Associate's halfway through he can at least get an internship or something part time to get his foot in the door. And the best part is Mark has the best mentor he could ask for - my dad is an electrical engineer who graduated from MIT and is very pleased that someone in the family has finally seen the light and chosen the true path to enlightenment. I think we should all take a moment to feel sorry for me because after growing up with an engineer for a father, now I'm going to be living with one too.

So now that we have that part of our lives all sorted out, it's been easier to focus on Mira. Some days the best way to spend time together is to grab a snack and eat outside and talk about flowers and butterflies and other things that capture a three-year-old's attention.

Mira also likes to take selfies with me. Here are some fun ones.

And another picture of her enjoying some "white ice cream."

I hope I don't jinx myself ... but ... I think we've finally got potty training figured out. She had a really rough patch a couple months ago when she had a cold and totally regressed to the point where she wasn't using the potty for her business hardly at all. That was incredibly frustrating even though I knew that kids can regress when they get sick. But once she got better, she's had it down pat ever since then. She's even been going poop in the potty! I'll admit there's a fair amount of bribery going on (now she thinks she needs a treat every time she goes poop in the potty but I'm still willing to pay that price to avoid cleaning up those accidents!) but she's got it. She's had maybe 3 poop accidents in the last couple of months and those have seemed to be related to a change in routine that got her particularly excited and/or distracted to the point that she just plain forgot about having to go. And I can live with that. It was unbelievably frustrating when I knew she knew exactly when she had to go poop and she wouldn't even make an effort to go to the potty - even though she'd go pee in the potty every time so clearly she knew what was going on. Last week she pooped her pants and while I was cleaning her up (not even mad, just confused because she'd been doing so well) she said sadly, "I sorry, Mommy." No way you can get mad at that!

Mira is starting to show a very thoughtful side and a surprising amount of awareness. Most days, by the end of the day everyone is getting burned out and ready for the day to be over (and after about 4 or 5 PM Mira becomes a monster anyway), and a few times I've gotten mad at Mira for some sort of misbehavior. I'll reprimand her, and a few minutes later she'll always come up to me and, without any prompting whatsoever, hug me and say, "I sorry I was mean to you, Mommy." Every time. So I'm doing something right.

The other time I knew I was doing something right was when Mira bolted out the door and ran up the street, and completely disregarded me telling her to come back. I had to drag her back inside, lecturing some boring Mom lecture about being safe and letting an adult know and needing to listen and now she has to stay inside, and she stomped her foot and yelled, "You're mean, Mom!" I actually almost laughed out loud when she said that because I'd always told myself that if I heard those words it meant I was being a good mom.

I love this picture. This is how Mira shields her eyes from the bright sunlight. She's got the basic idea.

Here she is showing off some sketches on a dry erase board. They're works in progress.

Any time Mark and I eat with chopsticks Mira of course has to as well. Luckily we found these cool learning chopsticks for kids, and Mira actually does really well with them, as you can see. Where were these cool things when I was learning to use chopsticks?? Genius invention.

This next picture is just Mira in a nutshell. Fearless, sassy, fashionable.

A fun activity we've been doing lately is discovering new playgrounds to go to. It's been nice for me to get out of the house to do something and Mira thinks it's fun to find a new place to go. Plus she just needs lots of physical activity. She's so energetic and physically active and rough-and-tumble, but she's also emotional and dramatic, so we ended up with an interesting combination there.

As frustrating and exhausting as parenting this crazy child can be sometimes, it's definitely never boring.

Late last month, Mark and I finally were able to take some time for ourselves and we went out to celebrate 12 years together. That's wild when you think about it - like, that's a crazy long time when you think about it! We went on a hike in the mountains, which also happened to coincide with the annual Wildflower Festival. So while the wildflowers were pretty, the view was ruined with all the other people who were also wanting to look at the wildflowers. Nature, for me, is ruined a bit with lots of people around. But it was still a beautiful hike, not horribly long or strenuous (which was good since Mark is still recovering from his hockey injury), and it had been a long time since we'd gone on a hike, which is something we both enjoy.

I'm usually not a fan of selfies but I made an exception because of the sceneery.

And then that evening we splurged and did our next favorite date, which is dress up and try out a new place to eat. We went to a martini bar called Twigs that had about 30 different martinis to choose from, plus very nice food. We may have found our new favorite hangout - for when we have the time and money to hang out at nice restaurants more often, anyway.

And lastly, our mutant vegetable garden. It's been unusually rainy the last month and these tomato plants just won't stop growing!

This was a couple weeks ago and they're even taller, wider and denser now.

Our zucchini plant, which so far has given us 4 very large zucchinis already.

Now try to imagine about 50 green tomatoes and branches so thick and heavy they're dragging on the ground. I think I will not be incorrect when I say we will have WAY more tomatoes than we'll know what to do with this year. I think we're going to learn how to make our own tomato sauce so we can freeze it and store it for awhile. Mira keeps asking when the tomatoes will be ready (she LOVES tomatoes), and I have to keep reminding her that when the tomatoes turn red they'll be ready but since they're small and green they won't taste good right now. Mira will point at a bunch of small tomatoes, clasp her little hands together, and say, "Aawww, it's my size!" Anything small is "her size." But then she'll tell a story about how "Me was a teeny baby, and me got way way big, and now me is all growed up!" So she's tiny but she's also all grown up.

Like I said, never boring around here. I might complain, but I do like some excitement in my life, I suppose.

Wally just wants a good nap.

I Don't Know How We Do It, Either

Lately when I tell people how our family's schedule is looking these days, the most frequent response I get is for eyes to enlarge in bewilderment, heads to shake and I am told, "I don't know how you do it." Well, most days it involves watching the clock, desperately counting down the minutes until it's another day passed, because another day gone is one day closer to things settling down.

Mark officially passed his CNA certification, and he got a job at a local care center. Check him out in his new uniform!

A lot different from his previous work uniform, I'd say. After he'd been working as a CNA for a few days I asked him what he thought of it. His response was, "It's a lot easier than I thought it would be." Well, yeah, being a CNA isn't innately difficult, the job itself is easy, but the hard part is the physical labor. Mark, being the healthy strapping male specimen that he is, isn't having much difficulty with the physical demands of the job (that was the difficult part for me way back when I was a CNA - I like to think I'm Superwoman sometimes but I am not physically capable of turning and transferring totally dependent people weighing 400+ pounds by myself). He is, however, having some difficulty with the questionable ethical practices of the management team. I am having lots of difficulty dealing with the schedule they put him on. So even though the extra money has been nice I think everybody will feel much better about this situation when Mark 1) starts working at a different facility/ in a hospital where there's more accountability, 2) starts school and drops to part time, 3) starts working a different shift, or 4) some combination of the above.

Mark's shifts are 10 PM - 6 AM, 5 nights a week. I work 7 PM - 7 AM, 3 nights a week. Ally, our friend who in the past has been extremely helpful with childcare, is still extremely helpful at nights and the odd weekend but unfortunately, due to a schedule change, is not available during the weekdays. So what that leaves us with is Mark and I are both working graveyard shifts with no one consistently available to watch Mira during the day. Some days we've been able to get Mark's parents or my mom to watch Mira for a few hours so we can snatch a few hours of rest but more often than not, we have had to resort to switching off during the day every few hours. Unfortunately Mark gets the brunt of it because as he pointed out, if I'm doing back-to-back shifts I have much less time to sleep than he does. I've offered to break up my shifts to see if that will help but Mark has told me it's his fault we're in this situation so it's his duty to deal with it. I say we're in this as a family so I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make life easier in the meantime but I've been too tired to really argue the issue so far. So in a nutshell, all I can say about life right now is it's kinda rough (okay it's a LOT rough) but as they say, I can sleep all I want when I'm dead.

Mira, I hope, isn't picking up on our stress and exhaustion. I feel bad that I've been so bone tired these days that even the idea of taking her to the park feels about as overwhelming as hiking to the top of Mount Everest, so maybe it's in my favor that we're in the middle of triple-digit heat so it's not like going to the park would be that comfortable anyway. I feel bad that I'd had all these plans for fun things to do and places I wanted to take Mira and now, in the interest of paying our bills and buying groceries, we haven't been able to do those things. I try not to think about any of that because there will be more summers and things will calm down, but thanks to being chronically sleep-deprived molehills become mountains in my head and it's a depressing thought for me. I need to realize it's okay to not be an over-achiever and to not have to do everything. It's such a hard lesson for me. And honestly, Mira is happy and won't care as long as she's got her parents.

And she is such a ham! I sometimes am taken by surprise at her sense of humor. One night I put her to bed, which usually isn't much of a struggle but this night she wanted to stay up. I kept telling her she had to stay in bed because it was night time and blah blah blah she wasn't listening anyway but I was obliged to spout it all off. I walked downstairs into the kitchen, and a few minutes later I walked back into the living room to see this:

That is Mira's laundry hamper. She had dumped out her dirty clothes, and crept downstairs under the hamper. I actually laughed out loud. It's hard to get upset at cuteness like that.

Mira's expectations of me are actually not as high as I tend to think they are. I mean, one of the many highlights of her day can be something as simple as having a bowl of "white ice cream" (vanilla) outside on the steps.

And sometimes all she needs to have fun is to nab my phone and take a bunch of pictures. I came home from work a few mornings ago and sat on the couch, which is a great way for you to realize how tired you are. Mira fished my phone out of my pocket and got this:

Mark asked her if she knew how to take a selfie. She took about 30 of them but these are my favorites.

And then we took a family selfie.

And sometimes, just spending the day with Grandma and munching on an apple will do the trick.

See, I don't need to make tons of plans and take her lots of different places to make her happy. She is happy and I sure don't feel like I'm doing a whole hell of a lot to make that happen! So there you go.

And conversing with her can be entertainment by itself. One evening she was getting really frustrated with a princess outfit she was wearing. The skirt wasn't doing what she wanted it to do or something, I don't know what her problem was, but she was getting more and more frustrated and was right on the edge of having a full-blown tantrum about it. After trying patiently for awhile to talk her through it without much success I finally commented, "Someone's getting tired." Mira looked at me and says, "You?"

Also, attitude. Not sure where this comes from. I asked her to do something, like put a toy away or some such business.

Mira: "No, Mom!"

Me: <warningly> "Mira."

Mira: <dramatic eye roll> "Ugghh!! TAY, Mom!" <stomps off pouting to do the bidding of her Big Mean Mom> (Also, tay = okay.)

Another time, Mira was playing on the iPad and had the volume up higher than I liked.

Me: "Mira, could you turn the volume down on the iPad please?"

Mira: "Ummmmmmmm.... No."

At least I asked.

Mark told me today that before we had Mira he had thought a lot about what our kid would be like. He says he always knew we would have a girl, and he pictured her having long, dark hair and a calm personality. At least we got the gender right but I dunno what happened after that!

July means two holidays in Utah. I unfortunately worked the entire Fourth of July and that weekend so nothing fun happened there. But Pioneer Day of course rolls around and I had that off, so we still got to spend some extra time with family. Last night we went to Mark's parents' house with some other family members and had dinner, then watched the city fireworks from the yard. A storm just barely grazed past and the light was amazing. Of course the iPhone camera doesn't do it justice but still stunning.

Today we slept in. In case you were curious, a three-year-old is just about as tall as our bed is wide. Mira doesn't sleep in bed with us very often but when she does I find it's one of the sweetest things. Then I took Mira to the community pool at my dad's condo. Mira was a little more cautious with the water at first but she had a lot of fun.

She sure loves her grandpa!

She would swing from the pole and cry out, "Save me! Save me!"

Auntie Sara to the rescue!

No fear of the deep end!

Eventually things will get easier. We'll figure something out. At least when Mark starts classes he'll drop to part-time so in some ways that will help our schedule. I should mention that Mark is thinking now that instead of being a scrub tech he's going to do nursing school to become an RN. For not a whole lot more extra school, we're looking at more job opportunities, and much better pay. We still need to pound out the details because unlike scrub tech, nursing school has prerequisite classes that we'll need to factor in, so this will be a longer time commitment but the payoff will be better. I've always thought he would be a great nurse so I'm secretly (but not so secretly now, obviously) very excited, and as always so proud of him. He'll do great. (He claimed he could never be a nurse because after hearing me talk about my job he's convinced he's not smart enough to be a nurse. I countered with a story of a home health nurse I did clinicals with back in nursing school who was convinced that caffeine is a vasodilator, and if she could pass the NCLEX, Mark definitely was smart enough to be a nurse. And let's not even get into a NICU nurse who though an albuterol nebulizer would be absorbed through the patient's eyeballs. Clearly, passing the NCLEX is not the best indicator of how smart a nurse is.)

On that note, a few nights ago at work I demonstrated why nurses shouldn't be allowed to play with sharp objects when I tried to cut a pill in half and ended up slicing my fingers open. This is why we can't find the staplers, we can't be trusted with them. (Needles are still okay though.)