Happy New Year!

Here it is, the start of a brand spankin’ New Year. This is the time when many people set out to make changes in their lives, and as cliché as it may be, I made a couple of “resolutions” of my own.

The first and foremost resolution I’ve made was to focus more time on my family. As some of you may or may not know, I have been working nights for the past 2 years. Needless to say, this definitely takes a toll on your body physically and mentally. My sleep pattern was completely messed up, I was not sleeping much in the day, and I was tired all the time. Not to mention how being away from home at night can affect the relationship with that other special person in your life. Things weren’t all perfect with my hubby and I don’t think the fact that we weren’t physically sharing the same bed helped us out any. You see not only was I working nights, but I was overworking myself with 5 and sometimes 6 nights of 12 hour shifts (7p to 7a).

This year I made a resolution to end all that nonsense and get a real life schedule like most people. So for 3 weeks now, I have been working days (from 8a to 4pm) and it is truly a breath of fresh air! I don’t know what took me so long to wake up from this nonsense! I think I was just afraid of what a change would actually bring. I guess its just human nature to be afraid of the unknown. I had been working with the same patient for over a year now and was comfortable with the familiarity of it. But if I had known it would have been this easy, I would have made this change months ago!

I feel so free in a way now. I am so grateful to come home and spend time with my family like normal folks. I love picking up Sophia from her school and just hangin’ out for a while, playing, reading, just being with her is so special now. Before, I would usually pick her up from school and then busy myself with getting all my stuff ready for work. Now I get time to be with her and enjoy her as she grows up. Yay!

Another plus for me is that now I have time to share and communicate with my hubby. We really didn’t talk much or spend any time together. We have had some extra rocky times for the past year or so, in which we have both had issues we had to deal with, and I don’t think that being away from each other so much really helped the situation at all. Now, after Sophia is gone to bed, we actually get time to spend some enjoying each other’s company, watch a movie, talk or read together, whatever! Even if it’s just doing the house work together, now I feel like we are more of a family. Even in these few weeks I notice some major differences.

Ok, so what about all those other resolutions? As much as you folks rag on me for not updating my blog often, I really find it difficult to believe that any one would want to read anything about my boring life, let alone a long and drawn out blog entry about all my goals for the year. For this reason and since I am so bad at coming up with ideas for this blog, I will leave those resolutions for another time. Consider it my cliff hanger type ending…. Until the next episode!

Exhausted!

Thats how I feel at this moment. If I analyze it I really dont have too many different things on my plate. It's mostly just work that is draining me. I think working nights is begining to take its toll on me. There's also some other issues that I'm dealing with like my "what am I doing with my life" crisis, but we'll leave that for another post.

Right now I'm at the point where even the thought of blogging makes me cringe, but I can't very well leave my multitude of avid readers (all 4 of them) in suspense as to what is going on in my life. So here goes...

Sophia is still struggling with some virus or another. I ended up taking her to Miami Children's about 2 weeks ago. Poor child was an angel for all that she went thru. She was tested up, down, and sideways (so to speak). They did a straight cath to get some urine, started an IV access to draw blood, gave her a chest xray, swabbed her mouth and throat, and aspirated some little boogies from her nose to test as well.

Gratefully, everything came back negative. No bacterial infection, no flu, no RSV, no adverse findings in her lungs. Just a plain ol' virus that has been goin on and on and on forever it seems. According to the MD, she probably has just been having one virus overlapping another and another and so forth.

Well at this point she has been sick for over a month straight now and it is extremely frustrating to say the least. It is frustrating as a mother to see how she is doing so terrible and not be able to just take her pain all away from her. Her primary symptoms keep changing from week to week but they are mostly that of your basic cold. This week she started again with the cough. I took her to the doctor's for a check up just to get reassurance. Not to my surprise, she is just working thru a virus which is normal for children her age especially just starting school. According the MD, some kids can be sick up to 100 days when they first start school.

My poor baby hasn't been herself. She is so fussy at times and obviously uncomfortable. I wanna take it all away from her but all I can do is give her lots of love and patience. She has missed a couple days of school, and thankfully I convinced the hubby to stay home from work yesterday so i coulld catch up on some sleep. Its can be quite challenging to take care of a toddler during the day and then go to work at night. I think I may change my middle name to "sleep deprived". Mommie needs a time out.

That brings me to my original rambling in this post. I'm really getting tired (quite literally) of working nights. Although I do enjoy the flexibility of being available during the day. Its this very availability that is not allowing me to sleep much. It always seems like I have something scheduled, somewhere to go, some favor to do, or some errand to accomplish that just cuts into the middle of my day making me lose time for precious (very precious) sleep.

I'm at a point where I want a change, but I am afraid of it. What to do... what to do...hmmm... Fear is so paralyzing isn't it? (but that's another blog)

Tonight I was really thinking…

I have so much to be grateful for. I am grateful. My spirit and soul are satisfied with everything God has granted me. I am rich in so many ways. But sometimes I feel I really have to consciously make an effort to count all my blessings. While it is true that there is room for improvement on many levels, I already have so much that most people only dream about. I may not have all that others financially richer than me have, but I have more than many people in this world.

Yet my human nature wants more. I have been itching to fix a huge hole in our master bathroom tile wall. For almost a year now it has been non functional and now it has become like a storage closet. I also want to redo the kitchen cabinets as they are old and broken and falling apart. But all that takes money that we really don’t have right now. So I stress about it sometimes, it’s really inconvenient but if I really think about it, it’s not the end of the world. My mom recently bought furniture for Sophia’s room and I was happy to finally fix it nice but of course that just got me to thinking about our old hand-me-down living room furniture that is like from the 1980s and our mismatched bedroom furniture with dresser drawers that are falling apart.

Well, I don’t want to come off as if I am complaining, I just need to vent my frustrations from time to time and like I said before I feel I just have to make a conscious effort to rethink my priorities, reshift my focus and really count all my blessings. I want to truly just be satisfied with what I have for now and learn to make the best with the resources available to us at the moment.

Today Sophia went back to school after a week of the sniffles. But as soon as we pulled in the school driveway, she let out this phlegmy cough and actually spit out a little hawker. I couldn’t take her to the doctor’s because I myself had an appointment for an endoscopy this morning. Danny had to accompany me because I was not going to be able to drive afterwards due to the anesthesia’s effects. So I reluctantly had to drop her off. I did, however make an appointment with her doctor for tomorrow morning (Tues). I wasn’t so concerned at first, but now that her cold seems to be changing and still not gone away, I am beginning to worry more.

My endoscopy went well. Just ended up very groggy and tired after the procedure but I was somewhat back to myself in the evening and just in time as it turns out. Sophia was really not herself tonight. It kinda worried me since I just tend to overanalyze and question everything. She usually goes to bed by 8pm at the very latest but tonight she was wired like the energizer bunny. She was extremely cranky, needy, and whiny. She was very sleepless for a while there. All she wanted to do was play and stay up and if I tried to put her down she would just throw a fit.

I really didn’t know how to react when this happened because she normally does not act this way and it was not under normal circumstances. First of all she had just returned to school after a week of absence. Second I noticed there really was a change in her cold from the simple sniffles and runny nose to a deeper chest cold with a bit more of a productive cough than the past week. Then I thought she might be teething or feeling some aches and pains or something. She really does not usually act this way.

I was struggling between whether I should cuddle her and let her sleep with me for the night or whether that would just spoil her. Danny is a bit more strict and tends to think more of the latter but eventually I just gave in to my instinct, cuddled with her on the couch, and stayed with her a bit more until she finally fell asleep from pure exhaustion sometime just after 10pm.

Tomorrow I’m going to take her to the doctors early (830 am) but I don’t have such a positive expectation about the visit. I honestly am not to keen on these doctors. I feel they don’t really care too much about Sophia. She has been seen by 3 different doctors on various occasions (bad continuity of care) and they are usually very nonchalant about everything. They kinda make me feel like a crazy lady who worries too much. But my instinct tells me that you can never worry too much when it comes to your child’s health. I keep telling myself that I want to change doctors but I never get around to it. Then when she gets sick I want to kick myself for not doing it. Let’s see what the outcome of tomorrows visit turns out to be.

Sniffles, Sneezes, and Sleepless nights

Everyone says it’s inevitable, you put your child in school and they are bound to start getting sick. This week the common cold has been all too common in our home and it seems Sophia has been the hardest hit.

I’m grateful she hasn’t had a fever, but I feel completely helpless to see her go through this. The doctors say there’s no cure for the common cold, you just have to let it run its course. I know this all too well as a nurse, but it is difficult as a mother to see your child deal with all the symptoms and not be able to just take it all away.

She has had a runny nose, sneezing, and the occasional nonproductive cough since Saturday night. I haven’t taken her to school for the past 3 days and I think I may go for the full week just to be safe. She’s been doing pretty good otherwise considering how a person feels when they are under the weather. It’s been a bit challenging since I’m still working at night but I have done my best to keep her school’s schedules and she has just followed right along. She’s been taking her regular nap and going to bed no later than 7:30 pm. It sets my mind more at ease that she has adjusted so well and sort of confirms what they say: this is just all part of growing up and I can expect her to be all better real soon.

Sophia's First Day of School

After much apprehension and research, I finally registered Sophia in a preschool. Needless to say, I had a harder time with it than she did. To this day she still has not cried once when I drop her off. About the third week she just became a little clingy with me and still does, but if I just go in the classroom with her for a while she will begin playing and eventually forget that I’m there (takes all of about 30 seconds) and then I can leave. I always end up staying a while and observing her thru the door window and she is as happy as can be just playing and/or singing with the other kids.

Although she hasn’t cried, she did have trouble adjusting to the new schedule. At home I didn’t really have a constant routine set up with her especially when it came to naptimes. It took her about a week to finally adjust to their naptime routine but she finally got the hang of it. Now, I try to keep her lunch and naptimes as much as possible on the weekends or non schooldays so as to not mess her up.

Since the school is literally about 5 min from my home, I also like to drop in unannounced from time to time so that I can check up and make sure she is doing well. I used to do it more in the beginning, but since she has really been adjusting so well, I do it less often now.

I am really amazed at the way that she is learning and verbalizing so much more since she started school. I know it was bound to happen eventually and it is the natural progression of child development but I really think that the interaction and stimulation she is receiving in school has helped to speed up her learning a little bit. I was remembering just the other day how I could actually count all the words she was saying with just one hand. Now it would take me some time to list all the words (and phrases) she can say and I’m sure I would still miss a few.

I know this is only the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of a long journey for us but in the midst of all my apprehension, I think this was the best thing we could do for her at this stage in her life