If anyone's been wondering where we've been and what we're up to, you can blame the long silence on the sudden outbreak of Global Warming (also knowing as Springtime) that's been keeping me outside and wearing me out by nightfall. Ben has been very busy with the big website programming project he's been working on for the last few months and I've been working on cleaning up the yard.
To date, I've cut down seven or eight young trees, trimmed four very large evergreen bushes, raked a lot of leaves, trimmed ivy out of all the places ivy goes that it shouldn't, wrestled with a lot of old nightshade vines, recovery-pruned a big rosebush, and cut down the old stalks from about a dozen peonies growing on each side of the house. That doesn't count miscellaneous weeding and a lot of time spent on the whole, "Okay...what is this and should I pull it out?" debate that comes with new houses when you've never really seen the landscaping do what it's supposed to. From the looks of things, our house really hasn't had the landscaping cared for in probably two years, possibly three judging by the height of all the young poplars I cut down. I'm not always sure how much to do, since I know the yard is about to get pretty torn up during construction; but those trees had to go! While I'm usually a big proponent of "let it grow because it looks nice there", the trees were growing in all kinds of places that they should not be, including right up next to the house. There's certainly no room for a big ol' cottonwood snuggled up next to our foundation. The forsythia bush outside our bedroom window is so full of flowers that the whole bedroom is yellow when the sun comes in. It helps that the walls are a pale cream-yellow to start with, but when you look down the hall the light coming out of the bedroom is bright golden yellow. I'm sad that the bush won't survive construction but very glad to see we have another in the back of the yard and space to transplant a few babies in another section. Grandma Lila has been sitting out in our ramshackle little sunroom since it's nice and warm in there during the day. I think she enjoys the change of scene; she's also enjoying being able to walk next door, which is what the physical therapist is doing with her on these nice warm days. Actually, the last goal the therapist set for Grandma was to be able to walk next door and now that she's achieved it, he's going to be discharging her from care this week. He says she's doing better than he's ever seen her do and he's been working with her since she first arrived in assisted living last year. That is special news indeed! Mom Turner has been coming and spending more time here with Grandma to allow me to go with Ben in the afternoon to help work on the Big Website Project, since the deadline for the site going live is in five days and there's a lot of data entry work to be done. They've also been doing some outings together like going to a movie and visiting assisted living so Grandma could give a little piano concert. Mom is much better at thinking up stuff like this than we are, that's for sure. I think sometimes we must be kind of boring company. We greatly appreciate Mom putting in all the extra time this week especially, because not only does it mean extra income but Ben and I are getting to spend some extra time together almost like we used to. We've really missed that time the past few months. It's very strange that in some ways, being married has meant being apart more than we used to be. I don't expect this exact situation will always be the case - Ben has been doing a lot of work from home and the more he does, the more the company he contracts for gets used to it. He's been a very, very valuable contractor the past few months and when you get valuable, you start getting to be more flexible. Along with basic data entry, I've been getting some practice in using HTML code, which I haven't done any work with for several years. It's coming back to me, though, and I'm getting to make some of the data I'm entering actually look pretty. Even if I didn't make the original templates, it's fun to be the one applying them! Ben and I have also been working on getting ready for the new addition, which included creating a file to track the receipts for what we've spent so far and keeping track of what we'll spend in the future. We were going to work on creating drawings two weeks ago, but my family contracted the flu and we've been waiting for everyone to stop coughing and feel better. Dad Tuckfield has the programs and the knowledge to take our sketches from paper and pencil to formal prints we can use for all the important stuff like working out little kinks in the plans, budgeting, and submitting for permits (which we already have all the forms for). We've been having lots of suggestions given to us since we first started talking over the addition and I think the plans have taken a solid, reasonable form; though once we start doing formal drawings it's anyone's guess how many interesting new ideas may come up and turn what we've got now into something altogether better. We even altered some ideas a few weeks ago when we went with Dad Turner to Outdoorama and toured a very tiny house. Since then, I've been looking at ideas from people who've built super tiny houses like this one simply because while I know we've got a much, much bigger space...well, why not maximize it? And yes, since my last post, we've remained healthy around here. Grandma's foot isn't swollen, Ben is all back to normal, and so am I. Though personally...I think the warm weather is what brought me back to normal. Nothing like a few days working hard on the landscaping to make me feel settled and myself again! Yesterday was quite a day.
It began with Ben waking up to discover he was quite ill. Apparently, my bi-daily energy problem sprang not from miscarriage recovery, as I'd thought, but from a virus I got much more mildly than Ben. So mildly that I had finally concluded I wasn't sick, just still getting better. Ben got the real 24-hour deal, complete with fever, chills, nausea, and other unpleasant consequences. This wouldn't be so great on most days, but yesterday was a very important day in the Very Big Work Project world. Ben was planning to spend the whole day preparing for a big presentation being made today, and waking up feverish and unable to keep his eyes open was not part of the plan. We made a list of what he needed to get done on the project and then I bundled him up in bed and went to the grocery store in search of remedies. The good news is that I woke up bright-eyed and finally feeling really good for the first time in a while. As the day ended up going, that was VERY good news. I came home with a pretty good arsenal of supplies and began dosing Ben right away. It seemed to take effect pretty quickly - he was at least able to get out of bed and keep his eyes open, for starters. Then I went to bandage Grandma's foot. Grandma has been having some problems with sores on her right foot. This is a very long-term ongoing problem that Ben and I actually spent a lot of time helping her with last summer. Because her foot was set at an odd angle when she broke her ankle many years ago, she has a little spur of bone that sticks out the arch of her foot instead of being tucked in as it would normally be. So checking for sores and getting them cleared up is a routine occurrence for her right foot. But yesterday, I happened to check on her left foot as well and was very surprised to see that her toes were all swollen to about twice their normal size and were very red, as was the area of her foot right behind her toes. That foot usually doesn't have any trouble at all. I checked and her ankle and leg had a little swelling here and there too, but only on that leg. Uh-oh. I don't know that much about swelling in the feet and ankles and what could cause it, but what little I do know says normally you get swelling in both feet if it's something fairly simple and normal. Not just one foot. I didn't want to worry Grandma, though, so I suggested perhaps she might want to make sure she kept her feet up nice and high for the day. I knew the physical therapist would be coming by at noon and he knows a lot more than I do about such things, so I decided to talk to him first. Meanwhile, I was still keeping an eye on Ben and beginning a major housecleaning, because if Ben and I had a virus, I definitely didn't want it spreading to Grandma. By noon some of the remedies were beginning to take effect. By the way, I've found a valuable new resource for stomach upset/diarrhea, etc: Pepto-Bismal. I know, it's really simple. On every grocery shelf. And so are Gatorade and aspirin, but just because they're simple and everyone knows about them doesn't mean I'm not really pleased when the correct combination produces salubrious results. If I understand what I researched properly, bismuth - the natural active ingredient in that nasty-looking pink stuff - works by helping your intestines filter and regulate fluids properly, among other pleasant effects. Ben says it tastes like moth balls. But it worked well and quickly, so I'll be glad to add it to the medicine cabinet supplies. The physical therapist came by and said the swelling in Grandma's foot could be "very bad" and suggested I call the home care nurse to have a look. I did right away and continued cleaning bathrooms and washing laundry (I washed every towel we own yesterday, I think). At around 1, Ben got up, put on two sweaters and a fuzzy blanket, sat in his computer chair, and logged in remotely to work. Success on one front! He really needed to be able to work and there he was, up and about albeit pretty groggily. A major part of the website that was being demonstrated was having an issue and since there wasn't really time to troubleshoot, Ben began rebuilding it from scratch. With a fever. He is quite a man. The nurse came by a few hours later and was also concerned, so she suggested we should probably take Grandma right away to get her leg checked out to make sure she didn't have a blood clot. Yikes. Okay, I knew it was probably not great, but what little I know of blood clots usually involves hospitalization and heightened concern. Ben was in no shape to go to the ER - the only place, we discovered, who does the kind of imaging necessary to check for blood clots - so Mom and Dad gathered Grandma up and took her off to the hospital. Where it was discovered several hours later that she has something nasty-sounding called "cellulitis", which is admittedly better than a blood clot but still not so great. The good news is that it's fairly easily cured with antibiotics, which have already had an effect after only two doses. Ben successfully got the website pages rebuilt and running properly around 7:00. He was doing a lot better at that point, but it had still been quite a feat for him to stay awake and concentrating all afternoon. He took a short nap and finished working around 9:30, just before Grandma and Mom and Dad got back. Then we all went peacefully off to bed. Grandma watched the season finale of "The Bachelor" while eating an english muffin snack so she could take her antibiotics; and Ben and I enjoyed watching a very nice thunderstorm - the first one of the year! - while lying there quietly saying, "Wow. What a day, eh?" Isn't life often like this? It's like I said when Joshua was born: it's amazing that all the things we wouldn't want to have happen if we were planning our life can happen...and a few hours later later we can be peacefully and happily watching a beautiful thunderstorm as if there had never been any trouble at all. And the website presentation today went perfectly, with Ben up and about and back in attendance pretty much like nothing happened to him yesterday at all. Other than he was a little reluctant to eat pizza for lunch on the off-chance it might cause unpleasant consequences in the middle of the big meeting. Now I'm just waiting for him to get home so we can have dinner and go for the walk we skipped this morning so he could get in early enough to do more meeting-preparation work. It's an absolutely beautiful day outside, sunny and about 62 degrees. I found budding daffodils next to the patio this morning. It's too bad there won't be another thunderstorm later tonight... It's the most peculiar thing I've ever experienced: I currently have "bi-daily" energy. Every other day I wake up feeling sleepy and it's an effort to stay awake all day; and then the next day I'm wide awake and ready to go. I think I may be using up too much energy on the days when I'm awake and then paying for it the next day. I've never recovered from anything that made my whole system as squiffy as one little miscarriage.
Today was a good example: I woke up late because it's the Sabbath. We took our time about getting up and then I puttered a bit and made pancakes for breakfast. After which I was so completely exhausted that I went back to bed. I got up after an hour-long nap and kept Ben company while he took a shower, but then I went back to bed and fell asleep AGAIN and didn't wake up until dinnertime. I was just sort of getting myself together to get up when I heard Grandma in the living room talking to Mom on the phone. "I don't know what's going on," she was saying. "I was taking a nap and then I woke up and there's nobody here. I think they're all gone or they're in their rooms or something - I think they must be sick and in bed. Napping? My goodness, how could they be napping at this time of day?" Ben had been sitting next to me keeping me company and using the laptop. We looked at each other a little guiltily and I said, "Uh oh. I better go start dinner quickly!" The good news is I was finally feeling awake by then. It was around 5:30. And now that it's almost 9:30, I'm just about ready to go back to sleep for the night. We were thinking about going grocery shopping this evening and I sort of begged Ben to put it off another day because I still felt sort of foggy and not very energetic. That is not like me. But oh well. I will get over this new affection for sleeping sometime soon. I really am going to get back to normal. I really am. And at least the extreme nap attacks are happening every other day rather than every day. But I tell you: I'm ready to be back to my normal healthy-as-a-horse self. Maybe tomorrow. Oh wait. I should have plenty of energy tomorrow. We'll just have to see about the day after. And I have to have lots of energy on Monday: it's supposed to be almost 70 degrees and I'd really, really, really like a chance to get some yardwork done. I've been looking at the yard all winter just waiting for it to get warm enough to do some proper cleanup work. One of these days when I'm awake. I made a trip with Grandma Lila and Mom Turner today to have Grandma's ears and current hearing aids tested. I've been noticing over the past few months that Grandma is having a harder and harder time being able to hear - specifically, she can't hear the pitch my voice is at. For a while I started compensating by dropping the pitch of my voice and speaking loudly and slowly, but it's gotten to a point where she can't hear most things clearly anymore. She used to watch TV at a semi-loud volume; but now it has to be blasting at full in order for her to hear it.
The thing about this is that hearing aids are expensive. So if the loss of hearing even with them just means people have to speak up...well, people can do that. But the loss of hearing is beginning to intrude on Grandma's life. When Kim calls on the phone, Grandma can't hardly hear a word she says. Even her sisters - who have a pitch of voice she normally can hear fine - are having to shout and repeat themselves for her to hear them. Through my brother Jonathan, I became aware of what it's like not have good eyesight. In his case, he didn't try to stand or walk until he got his new glasses: his eyesight was so skewed he had no depth perception and therefore no balance. Would he have walked earlier than age three if we'd just gotten his eyeglasses? We don't know. But it did occur to us all to wonder when we watched him stand unassisted for the first time two days after getting them. Through Grandma, I'm now experiencing the frustration of not being able to hear. It's no light matter. Your family can be sitting around you at a little family gathering chatting and laughing and you have no idea what's so funny. People have to repeat even little things over and over while you struggle to piece it together, things as simple as, "It's dinnertime, Grandma!" If you need some help and call from the bedroom, you can't hear someone responding, "I'm coming, Grandma!" so you continue calling and calling hoping someone somewhere can actually hear you and will be arriving presently. It's a very isolating, infuriating, generally annoying problem: and when you're someone who loves music and wants to be able to teach kids - who have high, soft, indistinct voices - it's debilitating. According to the testing done today, Grandma has "severe to profound" hearing loss. She isn't deaf, exactly; but she has almost no reception for higher frequencies and even the low ones have to be boosted significantly for her to hear them clearly. The thing is, she doesn't believe us that she really can't hear. She figures everyone has problems hearing everything all the time. All those little annoyances and frustrations I mentioned earlier are troublesome to her at the time they happen, but when we discussed them today she brushed them aside as no big deal. She's being cut off from the life going on around her and she only recognizes it once in a while when something really hard to miss intrudes on her. She does not put her fear of someone not coming when she calls together with her inability to hear them responding to her before they can physically get there. She feels lonely but doesn't realize it's because when conversations are going on around her, she can't join in because she can't really tell what's being said. She gets frustrated watching TV and movies because she can't tell what's going on; but she doesn't realize it's because she can only clearly hear one or two words out of every ten. I spent a lot of time thinking about this the past few days, about what it means to not be able to hear and not to recognize that you can't. I can recognize - even if Grandma can't - how far her lack of hearing is causing her to retreat from what's going on around her. But because it's happening a little at a time, she gets bothered for a moment about not being able to hear this or that, but then just shrugs and moves on. I think a lot of us are like this about other things. Looking in from the outside, people can see how someone else has a handicap that's causing them no end of trouble and frustration: but the person who has the problem doesn't recognize it the same way. "So I lose my temper now and then," someone like this might say. "That's no big deal - people do it all the time, right?" They don't see that the little moment of losing their temper caused their husband or wife to be upset the rest of the day, taught their children that it's okay to let anger get the best of them, and ultimately causes all kind of little rifts and unpleasantnesses that just grow and pile on each other until they wind up divorced with children who don't speak to them. In my family, we have a problem called Feeling Sorry For Myself. One of my great-grandmothers died from this problem. Do the rest of us take it seriously as a life-threatening disease? Of course not. To us, it's just a little problem. Everyone does it now and then. What's the big deal? We don't see how feeling sorry for ourselves saps our life of joy and contentment and causes us to totally ignore what is good in our lives until we're miserable and making everyone around us miserable. And all the while, we barely even notice we're doing it. Just like with Grandma's hearing, we notice it now and then when it gets particularly obnoxious; but otherwise we just live with it getting steadily worse and worse while our friends and family look on and say, "This is a serious problem! Something needs to be done!" Thankfully, Grandma can get hearing aids; and whether she believes us now or not, I'm confident she's going to receive a very happy surprise when she puts those new little computers in her ears next week. In the meantime, I'm going to be listening for the little hints people give me that I have annoying or even dangerous problems I'm overlooking just as completely as Grandma's overlooking the problem with her ears. Because there's nothing worse than a problem you don't even believe is there. We had a slightly unexpected outing today: it was my dad's birthday and Ben and I went with my family to the Henry Ford Museum for a few hours in the afternoon. Grandma Lila was with Mom and Dad Turner (and Jenny) and they went out shopping and to visit Grandma Turner, so she had a slightly different outing; but I think we all had a pretty enjoyable day.
Ben and I went to church, got McDonald's for lunch, navigated out to the museum (and accidentally overshot our turn, which got us a little turned around in Dearborn for a while!), wandered around the automobile portion of the museum's exhibits with my family, held hands and read exhibit boards together, kept track of Jonathan (his favorite vehicle was an old schoolbus Ben says Grandpa Wilfred would've liked to see since it was the first model of the buses that would become Grandpa and Grandma's real livelihood down the line), came back to eat Chinese food with my family and had a very pleasant afternoon. I think some of my siblings are still worried that I'm okay, so it was good for all of us to peacefully visit the museum and come home for dinner, just like usual. Or what's often been usual for events like Dad's birthday. When we got back to my family's house, Katherine and Ben played a game of chess. Back before Ben and I were married, Katherine would play a game with him nearly every night and she is quite a good player these days. She says she's been playing "expert" on the computer, but it's not as much fun as Ben: "It takes too long and it isn't as hard," was her review. It was such a nice day. Ben and I sat and watched a short movie at the museum this afternoon and Ben said to me, "You know, I think in the entire time we've known each other, this is the first time we've gone to a movie. How'd we manage that?" I guess there was always so much to do that if we'd tried dating by the usual dinner and movie method, we'd still be on our third or fourth date. Maybe. Our method of doing all our normal things together is probably what allowed us to decide to get married and get there within a year; otherwise, it probably would've taken us five or six! Ben wrote me an email the other night that was the kind of thing I've heard people just beginning to go out with someone often write. It made me smile, both because it's pretty hard not to if someone loves you that much; and because I know he really does and this isn't just a new crush. It's taken a year of knowing each other and three months of marriage before he's getting mushy like that; and that's the kind of foundation that has the staying power to last seventy years. He didn't marry me because I kiss well (how would he know? I didn't kiss him!) and he didn't marry me because I'm a supermodel, and he didn't marry me because I'm such an interesting person who goes on all kinds of adventures. He married me knowing an "adventure" would probably be an unexpected day at the museum with Chinese food for dinner and he would have to teach me what kissing was like and I'll certainly never be a model. Just as I married him without going to the movies and without flowers and chocolates, but with a very good notion that he's the kind of man who can stand beside me in a hospital and keep me smiling even when things hurt. If you were to ask me, "Is marriage what you expected?" I'd have to say not exactly. These last three months have been so busy and so much has changed and there has been so much to get used to that it hasn't been quite what I pictured it. But certain things have been much better. I would never have gotten so much pleasure from a short trip to a museum before, even though I enjoyed going in the past. Being married to Ben makes small ordinary things special, probably because we're doing them together. It made our day out very nice indeed. The morning started with Ben taking a shower and me trying to figure out what to do today. It feels like there are just so many projects I didn't have the energy for during the last few months that I really should get done now, but today I wasn't sure where to start. Should I organize the linen closet? Sort through that last tub of clothes in our bedroom? Put drawer paper in the cupboards? Wash the cupboard doors with the cleaning solution I didn't want to use while I was pregnant? Wash the bathrooms?
"This bathtub is filthy," Ben announced from the shower. "We are really going to have to give it a scrubbing - what on earth causes pink stains on porcelain, anyway?" "Mold," I said cheerfully. Yes, I was cheerful: because Ben had rescued me from indecision. He likes things clean, but he's pretty easygoing about it; and if he'd noticed the bathtub was in need of scrubbing, that meant it was getting pretty disreputable. On closer inspection, I sort of wondered how I'd manage to overlook how bad it was getting. Shows you how much my brain's been on stand-by lately. Ben had an early day at work, so after I saw him off I finished up the dishes, made Grandma's bed, and got busy on the bathroom. Now, we've been married three months and in that time, I don't think I've done a really good deep cleaning in the bathroom. I've washed the floor and the toilet and the mirrors and the sinks, but usually at different times...and not like I washed them today. It was one of those projects that once I got going, I kept seeing new things to clean. Take the shower handles, for example: it's been so long since someone unscrewed them and cleaned the insides that they were absolutely full of sheets of mold and soap scum. Yuck. It was literally coming off in pieces like paper when I scrubbed it, and with something as small as a shower handle you really have to leave it a long time to get sheets of mold. Dad Turner has been sending us a lot of reading material on biofilm because of a business venture he's interested in and after all that reading, I was eyeing that mold pretty dubiously. (If you've never heard of biofilm, I would be extremely cautious Googling it. Especially after a meal. Just sayin'.) After the sheets of mold, there was all the dust and dirt buildup in the corners and around the toilet. What exactly is the dusty stuff that always collects around the bases of toilets? Is it really just dust? Or something disgustingly more nefarious? These are questions that always occur to me when I'm cleaning and they're probably not things to be speculated on when down on my hands and knees scrubbing whatever it is. I usually comfort myself by repeating, "I'll just wash my hands when I'm done" but you have to admit, cleaning bathrooms really can feel like a hazardous job at times. And I am truly amazed at the amount of my own hair I cleaned out of various corners. I'm used to cleaning at my family's house, but I suppose I always harbored the comfortable illusion that quite a bit of the hair I was always getting rid of belonged to my sisters instead of me. Ha. There is pretty much no one but me losing long dark hairs around here, so I have no other culprits to blame; and my goodness! I lose a lot of hair, apparently. Two hours later, I had both bathrooms clean and was promising myself that they can't get that dirty again. After all, cleaning the house really should never tempt me to go next door and borrow some of Dad's hazmat equipment. The problem was that it just didn't seem all that dirty and I have this mistaken feeling that because there are just three of us, we aren't generating a whole lot of grime that needs scrubbing. Hopefully I'll remember today's lesson long enough to keep up with the cleaning. We'll see. Well, mostly back to normal, anyway. I'm still having occasional random moments of weepiness, but that's beginning to fade. Today I got all the laundry finished and put away (I washed a lot on Friday, then ran out of energy before folding everything and getting it hung up), cleaned the house, washed the kitchen floor, went to an insurance appointment with Ben, stopped in the local precinct so Ben could vote (I still have to vote at my old precinct and I got an absentee ballot last Thursday since I didn't know how much I was going to be ready to be up and around), and made three normal meals instead of the sort of sketchy ones I've been making over the past few weeks. I did not have a nap attack and did not have to sit down at 5:00 because I was feeling queasy. For pretty much the first time in my married life (and today is our three-month anniversary!), I feel myself. It's kind of weird.
One of the strangest things about this is feeling like nothing happened. Physically, I don't feel any different than I've felt most of my adult life. I can't tell I was carrying another little person around with me. This has actually been at the root of some of those random weepy moments, because it's as if I had a baby that just vanished without a trace. I'm not sure this would've made such an impact on me if I had other children, but it certainly made an impact this time around. A friend of mine described the weeks after a miscarriage as bringing her a lot of sudden thoughts like, "Wait, this is just wrong - I'm supposed to be pregnant right now!" and I know what she means. On the other hand, being pregnant was a whole new experience and not being pregnant is something I'm used to. I have no frame of reference for what was coming next, no memories of what it feels like to get really big and uncomfortable or have the baby move or give birth or nurse or any of those things that were "next on the agenda" a few weeks ago. So most of the time, the occurrence of thoughts like, "today would've been Week 13" only brings a sort of wistfulness because I have nothing in my brain to really tie that thought to. Then there are other times when I am suddenly and intensely sad and Ben has assure me that all is still well. I'm glad this is fading, because it's sort of like being ambushed - you're walking along and everything's fine until suddenly wham! you're crying over practically nothing at all. Mom is often like this after a new baby is born. The family joke is that she cries over Hallmark commercials in the weeks after a new birth. I didn't expect that to be a part of this week because I guess I sort of figured this baby was so tiny and so new and my body had never had to make such big adjustments that it wouldn't have to adjust too much going back to normal. In a way, that's true; but apparently I'm still susceptible to crying at odd moments. Ben keeps getting concerned I'm going to think he's taking this all too lightly because he isn't having the same kind of difficulty and I keep telling him I'm really glad he still has that beautiful Turner smile always ready because it reminds me that all really is very well. In other news, Grandma Lila has been officially cleared to walk and make all "transfers" (getting in and out of bed, into the bathroom, etc.) on her own since she has strengthened up a lot and is doing so well. The physical therapist will probably continue to come for a few more weeks, but then she'll mostly likely be discharged from care and will be back to where she was before she fell in November. Sort of like me: it's as if nothing ever happened. I think we're all getting more sleep these days, as Grandma doesn't have to wait for someone to come help her to the bathroom and we don't have to get up every few hours either. It's a lot quieter around here than it was for a while at night. We're also gearing up to get drawings and plans ready for our addition as it looks like this winter was pretty much nonexistent and spring is coming early. We have to consistently have some warmer weather before we can pour the concrete footings for the addition, but that time seems to be approaching fast and we need to get our act together and get things nailed down (ha, ha) and ready to submit for permits. We have a pretty good idea what we'd like to do indoors, but we have some interesting challenges when it comes to things like designing the roof and figuring out exactly what dimensions would suit Grandma's bathroom best. And I think maybe it's time to resume taking walks. I've missed them the past few weeks. There has been a sudden appearance of birds singing in the morning again which makes me think spring really is just around the corner and I've been inside a whole lot lately. Maybe early tomorrow Ben and I can go out and take a brisk stroll around the neighborhood. Now that would really be getting back to normal. It's been a strange experience being required to rest. I'm not sure I've ever been told before to sit around with my feet up for three days and the weirdest thing about it is that I'm looking at the laundry and the kitchen and saying, "Hm. Got some things to do here!" I'm usually so busy that I go around doing lots of little things during the morning and afternoon and don't feel right sitting down and using the computer, etc., until later in the afternoon or evening. Yet here I am, sitting on the bed where I've been most of today except for bathroom trips, trips to make more raspberry leaf tea (hence the bathroom trips...), and a few minutes to make Grandma and I grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch.
I feel very normal today. It's so odd to be in the hospital one morning, then walk out under my own steam and be perfectly fine. Well, I couldn't walk too far yesterday without being out of breath and I still feel a little funny today if I move around too fast, but other than that...I'm almost back to myself. Raspberry tea, by the way, works great at helping a person rebuild their blood supply. I really seriously am feeling so much better than yesterday and I thought I was feeling pretty good then. I hadn't really known how much carrying the baby was actually beginning to affect me until suddenly he's gone. I feel very...light. Empty. My stomach feels empty. It must really feel strange after giving birth to a full-term baby! There were a lot of phone calls to make today, dealing with getting some supplements and settling hospital bills and keeping in touch with family. We are very happy to discover that the hospital visit yesterday is going to be all covered and so will any followup doctor's visits over the next few weeks; we weren't sure yesterday if we'd be covered or if we were going to be paying cash, and emergency room visits can be brutal on the rainy-day fund. That's a blessing that shouldn't be overlooked, that we'll be covered. It's also a blessing that we COULD pay cash if we had to, but it's very nice to not have to. The biggest thing we'll be buying will be some herbal supplements to help me heal properly, and while that would seem expensive under normal circumstances, when we look at it from the "doctor's bills" standpoint it's pretty much nothing. Ben and I spent a while when we woke up this morning talking over things that we had discovered and been reminded of and discussed over the past week. Almost like recapping to ourselves everything that happened. It has been a very intense week, testing our marriage and characters and what we believe in. It's almost bewildering that it could almost come from nowhere the way it did, but when I look back over it...it's been a unique and amazing time. I wish we could've emerged from it with a living child, but we aren't going to look back on this and say, "That was so hard!" We'll look back and say, "Remember when Joshua was born and this or that happened?" If you had asked me at the beginning of this pregnancy all the things I would least like to have happen, they all did. Well, I didn't end up in the hospital with an emergency C-section and a baby in NICU; but everything else - not being able to hear a heartbeat, having an ultrasound showing a dead baby, having to go to the hospital in the middle of the miscarriage, not being able to see the baby after he was born - did. And the strangest thing is that today I'm sitting here thinking, "Oh well. Not what I would've wanted...but not the worst thing in the world, either." The worst thing would have been discovering that Ben and I do not have the strength or faith to handle such things. That would have been horrible. Losing our baby is sad. But we did not lose each other in any way. In fact, we gained each other a little more. I can't stress enough how good this is. I've wanted to be married for a long time because I saw marriage to a good man as a wonderful thing. I now know what I could only trust to be true before: marriage to a good man is a wonderful thing. I wrote a few days ago that I'd been around for the death of babies before and one of the things I was holding onto (besides that God is good and in control) was the ability people have to continue on and find joy in all the little things of life they did before. It's true! Yesterday evening Elizabeth and Anna came over and made dinner for us, then brought everything into the bedroom so we could eat picnic style and I could keep my feet up. They even brought up the wheelchair so Grandma could have somewhere to sit and be able to eat from her little rolling table. Which she enjoyed doing, I think! That was really fun and we could sit around light-heartedly eating dinner and laughing together about various things even though we talked of serious ones too. It was life just as it always is, and that is something that makes it easier than you'd think to take a deep breath and keep going when something you didn't want to have happen does. I was sitting here talking to Elizabeth and Anna about being at the hospital and what it's like to get an IV and what it was like to find out the baby had died and Grandma was just sitting here rocking back and forth in the wheelchair like it was a rocker and listening. She said suddenly, "Did you have any sense a few weeks ago that anything was wrong or did this surprise you?" It was an interesting question. The truthful answer is no, I had no sense at all anything was wrong. It's strange that I didn't, in a way, but I'm glad I didn't. It took my body several weeks to understand the baby wasn't growing and I'm glad I wasn't waiting around for those weeks knowing he'd died and just waiting for him to be born. I've heard of other women doing that waiting and I know we could have handled that too, but I'm glad that wasn't part of the last few weeks. We had a lot of happiness expecting Joshua during that time. A few people have commented that situations like this are the reason people used to wait until after three months to tell people of an expected child. We actually did wait quite a bit longer than we actually knew about the baby to tell about him, not because we didn't want the trouble of telling people if anything happened but because it just seemed right to wait a bit and then we wanted to tell people personally and it was taking us a while to get to everyone. Most people we know did not actually hear about Joshua until about two weeks ago, and looking back the only thing we might've done differently is tell people a bit earlier. It's so much better to tell people about a living baby when everyone can be excited about him rather than tell and then immediately follow up with telling that the baby has died. Ah well. Things to know for the future, I guess. That, and next time we're expecting we're just going to take that initial pregnancy test. The amount of times during the last week we had to be firm on just being pregnant at all, let alone backing up our dates...yikes! It seriously isn't that hard for a person to recognize they're pregnant - at least, it wasn't for me. But that's what you get asked a million times - I really had to tell the entire history so many times yesterday in the hospital that it just became a recitation by the fifth or sixth time. And every time we had to justify why we knew we were pregnant even though we were clearly there having a miscarriage! At any rate, next time we'll have been married a little longer and maybe we'll be a little bolder about marching into a drugstore and buying the silly thing. So there's my advice to any newly-married couple who finds they're expecting: take your supplements (one that's actually called "Change'o'Life" formula was the one suggested to me), take your vitamins, drink your raspberry tea, and take the pregnancy test right away rather than just accepting what all the signs point to. But far more importantly than that, focus on building a marriage firmly on God's foundation, so that when everything is shaken that can be, the things that stand fast will be the love and commitment to God and to each other. We got shaken a little this week (I don't think this was a time when "everything that can be shaken will be"), and without having that kind of foundation it could've been a very, very rough time. But it wasn't. And now here we are...healing up and getting back to normal and looking ahead to the next days and weeks happily and enjoying the time we have with each other now. As I also said a few days ago...this is God's plan, and it is very good. Emma Elizabeth Izzo was born last night.
She is beautiful and squishy and plump and pink and has lots of dark hair and took her good ol' time moseying into this world, though apparently she wants to greet it face-first. She gave her mother a run for her money in labor, but she arrived safely to the relief of all family anxiously waiting by phones and computers for news. Grandpa Paul and Grandma Mary arrived for their scheduled visit just hours later and called this afternoon to say that Florida is warm, Kim is very sleepy, Emma is sleepy, and Stephen is trying to relay to Dad how to work the complicated TV system in the living room. Ben downloaded her picture first thing this morning and displayed it on the big monitor in the living room. Grandma Lila made her way into the kitchen for breakfast and gave such a beautiful reaction to the picture that I really, really wish we'd set Ben's MP3 player up to record it. She took one look and her whole face lit up and she almost squealed, "OH!!! OH!!!! LOOK, IT'S KIM! And the baby is beautiful - oh, she's just the most beautiful baby I ever saw! Look at her little mouth - oh, she's so pretty!" We had to unplug the laptop and put it on the table so she could keep looking at the picture or she wouldn't have eaten breakfast. She sat there and looked at it all the time she was eating and for a while afterward. Mom and Dad sent us some more that we'll have to show her tomorrow morning - she took a nap after dinner and then it was time for bed and she wanted to watch TV, so she didn't get a chance tonight. She did, however, call her family in Pennsylvania and spend about an hour on the phone telling her sisters about her beautiful new great-grandchild and telling them her name and how big she was (I wrote the statistics on the whiteboard for her). So Kim, if you get a chance to read this...Grandma Lila is extremely excited about Emma-Elizabeth, as she calls her. Today was pretty dull after yesterday's excitement, but I discovered one very special and important thing. Today, home felt like home. I don't know why today. Maybe it was because Grandma walked everywhere she needed to go today and it was like she was back to the Grandma I got to know and expected to live with. Maybe because Ben and I are gradually establishing routines that are ours. Maybe because at bedtime I made chamomile tea for Ben and peppermint for me and we sat together peacefully propped against pillows on our bed while Grandma was all tucked into bed and watching a documentary on TV at a nice quiet volume. It feels sort of familiar and normal finally. I've been waiting for that feeling and I'm savoring it now that it's here. Welcome again to the family, Emma. I'm thrilled to be your brand-new barely-in-the-family-myself aunt. May you have a long and blessed and joyful life and may the Lord smile when he looks at what he created in you. Ben and I have been trying to get up early enough to go for a walk in the mornings the past few days.
It started Thursday morning. We forgot to take the garbage out Wednesday evening (again! Mom Turner keeps telling us they never remember either, but they also get up earlier than we do and do not end up racing out of bed to get the trash to the curb ahead of the truck...at least, so I assume...) and Ben had gotten up a bunch with Grandma Lila, so I got up early Thursday, got dressed, and did the routine of emptying all the trash cans and taking the trash to the curb. I had felt sort of fuzzy and headachey when I got up, but the few minutes trotting back and forth taking the trash cans to the curb cleared the cobwebs and made me feel much better. I came in and stuck my cold nose on Ben's cheek and said, "Wanna go for a walk?" I was half joking. He's asked me if I want to go for a walk a couple times in the past two weeks, but he keeps asking when I'm so tired I'm ready to take a nap. I sort of wondered if asking him the morning he was pretty tired from being up a few times would make him groan at me and say, "Go away!" but to my surprise he pried one eyelid open, grinned, and said, "Sure!" He then got up and put his jeans and sweatshirt on and we went for a walk. And it was very nice. The whole morning felt much more relaxed and productive. I think maybe we get oxygen-deprived being in the house all the time and breathing fresh air for a while makes us a little more with-it than we would be otherwise. Since then, we've been going for a walk in the morning right when the sun is coming up. I'm used to being out early in the summer, but I don't think I've ever been out early in the winter like that. The weirdest thing is the lack of birdsong. It's so quiet. There aren't even many dogs out, so it feels almost like we have the whole neighborhood to ourselves - if we ignore the squirrels, anyway. The other morning we saw clear raccoon prints crossing our front yard. The disturbing thing about that, by the way, was that they completely vanished right in the middle of our driveway. I'd really like to know where the little critter went - I sort of gingerly checked out our garbage cans just to see if it might be taking up residence in there by any chance, but no results. One thing's for sure, though: if we maintain this as a habit - and it seems a pretty good habit to have - I'm going to have to get a hat. Boy, do my ears get cold after twenty minutes walking briskly around the neighborhood! I think they stay red for another hour after we get home... |
Author: LaurenWife of Benjamin and mother to two wonderful little girls who are getting bigger every day. Enjoys writing down thoughts and discussions we are having within the family and sharing them with whoever is interested in reading. CommentPlease don't be shy! If you're reading the blog updates, we'd like to hear what you think. Click on the "comments" link to send us a note.
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