How to tell when your toddler is well trained.
Me – ‘It’s nearly 9am, let’s go jump on Daddy!’
Amy – ‘YAY!’
Amy – *runs*
Me – *continues replying to emails*
Amy – *from the bedroom* ‘Bounce bounce bounce!! YAY!’
And I? Am sitting here giggling while I listen to the bed squeak and Amy laugh.
Happy Sunday!
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Also, head on over and congratulate Marie. She had her baby this morning! Congratulations!
I had plans this morning. Big plans.
I made breakfast and ran hot water to soak the dishes. I pulled out my cookbooks and told Amy that we were going to do some cooking. I planned dinner in my head (pumpkin soup) and mentally caculated the amount of housework I needed to do to make the house look the same all day (same being: slightly messy).
And then? At 8.15am as Amy and I were eating breakfast and watching cartoons, the power went out.
Snap!
Nothing.
I checked the meter box and then, finding nothing wrong (except a lack of power to said meter box) I rang Aurora (Tassie’s power providers).
Funnily enough, I was the first person to report a power outage. They said they would send a team to sort it out and I hung up.
90 minutes later, the faults message* still didn’t know where the power was out. 90 minutes after that they knew that power lines were down, but that ‘time of restoration is unknown, due to the extent of the damage’.
Now, we have tank water. Meaning that our water runs from our tank, into the pump that then pumps the water to the taps. So, if I have no power, lo and behold, I have no water.
Have you ever spent a whole day stuck inside with a toddler (weather was too shitty to be outside) with no power and no water? Also, no hot food?
Leslie, I know you have.
Needless to say, it was a shit day.
Amy spent alot of time asking for eggs and then crying when told there was no power to cook eggs with. She spent alot of time tantrumming because we couldn’t go outside. And she spent ALOT of time asking for us to ‘cook sumping!’.
Sigh.
By lunchtime, I was over it.
By 2pm I was ready to kill things.
By 3pm, I rang Aurora again, only to be told that the power had been restored to ‘all but a few’ houses.
Guess who wasn’t in the 99%?
Luckily Aurora’s technicians are pretty good and the power flicked back on at 3.45pm. I have never been so relieved in my life!
Amy got her eggs and I was able to take a break from being a human trampoline. At least to the Toddler. The little one is not so nice.
The good thing though? Nathan came home with a brand new charger for my laptop. YAY!
*You can ring the faults/emergencies line and get a computer message of where the power is out and when it is due to be fixed.
Just a quick post while I have the chance. My laptop battery charger is on the blink and I can’t make anything charge, so if I disappear for a while, you know why. Am hopefully getting a new one tomorrow. Fingers crossed that it is all I need.
BIG thankyou to Kat, I got a package in the mail today. THANKYOU!!! Will post pictures as soon as computer is working again.
And if you have a moment, head on over to Suzie’s blog, her little boy is in hospital with Meningitis at the moment and she needs all the good thoughts/prayers/well wishes she can get. Go and hug her for me.
So, as I was awake last night vomiting again, I came to a conclusion.
I don’t do pregnancy well. Sure the payoff at the end is OH so worth it (bring on my baby!) but the journey? Not so fun.
And I blame a good portion of my pregnancy woes, not on pregnancy, but on my CFS and how it relates to my pregnancy.
I found out the other day that I’m not immune to Rubella (German Measles. Very dangerous for the baby if I catch it during pregnancy). This set alarm bells ringing in my head, because at last count I had been immunised for rubella 3 times. Once as a toddler, once when I was 12 and then for a final time at 16 – less than 4 years ago.
I knew my immune system was pretty bad, but I hadn’t realised that it was actually non-existent. Makes me wonder that there is something that all the blood tests that have been run (admittedly, prior to being pregnant) have missed.
Surely a disappearing immunity to a disease I was immunised against should raise questions markers for my doctor?
But the thing is, I don’t look sick. I might look tired sometimes, but generally, unless you know me quite well, I don’t look sick. I don’t talk about it outside of immediate family (Mum, Nan and Nathan) much.
When I was barely 13, my hip started to hurt. I couldn’t walk and I felt a little off. Tired and headachey and sick. Xrays showed nothing, blood tests showed nothing conclusive and yet, I was still sick. I couldn’t walk (6 weeks on crutches) and I couldn’t go to school.
My headaches continued, as did the tiredness, even after my hip was better enough to walk on. Funny though, after my hip got better, it was a steady stream of other joints/muscles putting up complaints.
I was so sick and exhausted, that I couldn’t brush my own hair. I needed help getting out of bed and I had NO hope of washing my own hair. I just couldn’t keep my arms above my head long enough to get anything done.
I was nauseous alot of the time and couldn’t eat much without wanting to vomit. I lived on pasta and salad for months. Doctors told Mum that I was ‘faking it’ and ‘anorexic’ because they couldn’t find anything else wrong. God knows I wasn’t either of those things.
It was the most frustrating 2 years of my life, trying to get a diagnosis and treatment.
After nothing was found in my bloods (except one slightly raised infection counter that is STILL raised, but not high enough for them to consider) and nothing was found on a CT, they diagnosed me with CFS, told me to exercise lightly and regularly, watch my diet and go home and cope.
That was almost 7 years ago.
I have been at home, coping, with no better diagnosis than CFS, for 7 years.
I still have days where I can’t eat. I still have the muscle aches and the joint pain and the overwhelming tiredness. Most of the time I can ignore it, but pregnancy aggravates all my symptoms terribly.
It’s silly, little things like stirring soup? Make my arms ache and I have to sit down. I can’t chop vegetables without resting. I can’t stand for long periods of time and I walk a very fine line between eating enough so that I don’t feel sick due to an empty stomach and not eating so much that my body revolts and I lose it all again. I don’t heal very fast or very well.
It’s hard, not that I am sick, because hell, I have been dealing with it for *this* long, I know that I am not going to lose my ability to cope, but because to other people, if I don’t look sick, it isn’t really happening.
That is the problem with auto-immune diseases (yes, CFS is considered an auto-immune disease. It is also only supposed to last 2-5 years before you recover), you don’t look sick. It’s even harder because even if you are visibly sick, it is an invisible illness.
The medical profession is very good at fixing obvious problems. A chest infection; an earache; a broken leg; but if your disease is hidden, you get thrown in the ‘too hard’ basket and left to cope.
The medical roundabout of trying to get a diagnosis is dizzying and frustrating, because of not looking sick.
To other people, I don’t look sick. Hell, sometimes I have a hard time convincing Nathan that I am having a bad day. My headaches don’t go away and something is generally aching at any given moment. But I don’t look sick.
And sometimes, I don’t know whether that is a curse or a blessing.
I would just like to take a moment out from my busy Sunday to declare my hatred of the new Mozilla. It freezes. It fucks up. It randomly encounters errors and closes.
Dear makers of Mozilla, making your browser prettier DOES NOT make us overlook the issues it has. Bring out a freaking patch to fix it already!
I also hate email programs. Specifically Microsoft Outlook Express (2003) which decided this morning to randomly NOT FUCKING WORK. Sure, I might have changed anti-virus programs, but how the hell does that affect my emails? And my email program?
Also, if the repair option in the setup continues to freeze, don’t delude yourself that anything is going to be easy.
I have uninstalled everything and I am starting from scratch. Someone hold me.
Also, dear Vista. I have never had any problems with you, but your backup/restore centre really sucks. I don’t like it. Seriously, telling me there was an error when I was on the VERY LAST DISK? So not cool.
So to summerise. I have spent all day on my computer, getting approximately nothing done and finding more things that need doing with every minute.
If I don’t reply to your emails, they got lost in cyber space and I didn’t receive them. Send help instead.
xx
****
Updated:
My email program is now working. Office is reinstalled (5th try lucky). I am going to bed.
I’m still shitty with Mozilla. And Sitemeter.
Oh and useless fact #102, my dog eats carrots. Raw ones.