{"id":763,"date":"2008-01-31T11:03:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-31T16:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/thursday-january-31-2008\/"},"modified":"2008-01-31T11:03:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-31T16:03:00","slug":"thursday-january-31-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/thursday-january-31-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday January 31, 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a (hopefully) unbeatable week.  One schedule got changed and I forgot to notice another thing on my all-important external brain (aka planner) and the next thing I knew my week was looking crazy.  Sunday morning I crawled into the car to go to church and realized the fight with my back had begun.  I writhed all through church Sunday morning and gratefully sat Indian-style Sunday night when they turned the lights out for the slide show.  <\/font><\/p>\n

Because of the baby’s compromised size, I knew I should get back on prenatals.  So I did.  And every subsequent morning is more nauseous.  <\/font><\/p>\n

As though the week wasn’t full enough, I noticed Adam was having trouble hearing.  Not just when he was playing and didn’t want to hear, but everywhere.  In the car in a normal conversation, he would ask a question and we’d answer.  “What?”  It happened almost every time.  Since there is no real way of picking up concrete symptoms on him that indicate illness, I followed my gut feelings and took him to the dr Monday morning.  “Has he had this low grade fever at home?”  Uh, no, I hadn’t noticed.  I was feeling a bit glib inside that at least I’d probably guessed correctly this time.  Dr. A checked his ears.  Nope, they’re clear.  So Michelle came back in and did the hearing test.  Passed with flying colors.  Odd.  His throat was just a tad red and with his history, they also did a strep swab.  Positive.  Smile.  Are we honestly going down that road again?<\/font><\/p>\n

I begged her for new generation antibiotics.  Please, please, PLEASE<\/em> tell me I will not go through another three months of strep.  We got groceries and stopped at the pharmacy on the way home.  Six loads of laundry, a closet-full of ironing, and three gallons of chili soup later I dropped at the supper table, exhausted.  Tuesday morning Adam woke up with a definite fever and a terrible, coarse-sounding chest cough.  Thank God for Grandma’s…(who else will volunteer to take care of a sick child?) … because I’d promised Martha I’d help clean their house to get it ready to move.  Wednesday took some baby-sitter shuffling to keep Adam away from children again while Emily and I helped Jo fix food for her freezer.  And 2 gallons of the chili soup disappeared at the moving day.  <\/font><\/p>\n

So now it’s today.  Adam still has fever; but at least he’s eating a little more.  The cough sounds very pneumoniaish; but it must be viral as opposed to bacterial if it is, because he’s on day four of antibiotics.  I should actually listen to his lungs.  Mostly I just try to keep him hydrated and make sure he’s not breathing too fast because unless he needs an inhaler, the doctors wouldn’t do anything else anyway.  I thought I was going to clean and do laundry today; but I’m so tired it would take a tow truck and a very strong tow rope to move me.  I feel nausous and achey and headachey.  Cranky?  Yeah, that, too.  Waking up every 45 min for half the night from back pain is not conducive to feeling rested in the morning.  Neither is a burning up with fever, hacking sputum, three-year-old crawling into bed with me at 6:50.  I think I’ll go drink a Coke and lie on the couch and hope for better hours after lunch.  Because tomorrow I have four cakes to decorate for the school’s open house.  I’d agreed to do them if someone kept Adam; but now he can’t go there because of germs.  Maybe there will be cream cheese icing and real roses instead of decorator frosting unless things turn around pretty fast.  <\/font><\/p>\n

I wish I still had the comic strip I saw in a magazine several years ago for women who don’t know how to say no.  It said, “Turn head to left.  Turn head to right.  Repeat several times.”  If any of you wanted me to do something, you better call in the next few days; because next week is the beginning of change.  I’m going to start turning my head.  Except uh, oh.  I think the time already ran out.  I already said no when <\/font>Gina<\/font><\/a> wanted me to babysit tomorrow.  Except that she never quite got the chance to ask before she got an earful of woes and only told in retrospect what she’d been planning to ask!  Sorry, Gina.  <\/font><\/p>\n

Are any of you overachievers?  What do you do to keep from overbooking yourself?  And for all you people out there who live well-balanced lives, what is your secret to keeping things that way?  I don’t do this all the time.  I go in this ridiculous cycle of not doing anything and then seeing all these things at once and volunteering for too many things and not leaving enough slack for things to go wrong, or bumped.  Then I get burned and say no to everything until I\/we recuperate before starting the cycle again.  And the truth is, I always survive.  Sometimes even better then I expect to, and yeah, sometimes not so well.  And I always can<\/em> do it.  Just not always without repercussions.  How do you decide when to say yes and when to say no?  And is that fight for balance even right?  Jesus took time to rest; but there are many times when He moved with compassion<\/em> in spite of being exhausted.  I notice those words a lot when I read the Gospels.  Compassion.  Not pity.  Compassion.  Empathy.  And whenever I think about that, I wonder if my own things are really that important.<\/font><\/p>\n

I think it’s time to go take a nap before this gets any more disjointed.  Adam is probably about ready to take me in to get my ears checked because I squint and wait 30 seconds to process what he just said before I answer.  It’s sort of foggy around here.  Oh, and if you want one of the best chili soup recipes in the world, see if you can get <\/font>Emily<\/font><\/a> to post it.  But beware, there won’t be any leftovers.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a (hopefully) unbeatable week.  One schedule got changed and I forgot to notice another thing on my all-important external brain (aka planner) and the next thing I knew… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p39ynQ-cj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michellebeachy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}