Another Crazy Week

I think this is the longest I have sat in my chair at work all week but I won't be here for long. It's only Wednesday and it has been a crazy week already. Monday I didn't even have time to have dinner before going to my part-time job. Last night I barely fit in a run and supper before errands and crashing at 9:30 to be up early this morning. Today I am heading on a day trip for work and should be back (if everything goes according to plan) by 4:30 giving me about an hour to check emails, grab supper and head to my part-time job. Tomorrow I should have a fairly light morning to catch up on everything I haven’t been able to accomplish this week before our monthly social hour where I will be running around from about 2:00p-8:00p. Tomorrow I have another half day to work until my committee meeting. Then I have to spend the evening preparing for the garage sale that we planned months ago with our friends but completely forgot about. Saturday night is my friend 30th birthday so we will be out all night. Maybe I will have a chance to rest a bit on Sunday before work between cleaning the house, grocery shopping and making sure T has all his homework done.

Speaking of T, he got a job!! He will start at our local Taco Bell this evening. I wish I had more time to encourage him before he start but he will be on his own. I hope this goes well. I was able to fit in sometime this week to get him a checking account, which I think I was more excited about than him. We are slowly making progress. What we are not making progress on is having a baby. This is our "break" month. Nothing special has happened. I have to make sometime this week to call my doctor to see what the next step is. Overall, this week has been crazy and until our big fundraiser at work is over on May 11 I think I will be running around like a mad women.

P.S. Folding adorable baby clothes three times a week is not helping my insane case of baby fever. Grant it, I think I have earned baby fevers since today marks 1 year of trying to have a baby but still. There are so many cute things I want to buy for my nonexistent baby. It's terrible.

What a week

I don't really know what to say. The week started off fine but ended in disaster and next week seems to be a repeat of this week already. So much happened but here is the low down. Lots of people are either out of the office or quit/retired. We are shorthanded everywhere. I have been yelled at on the phone approximately 5 times a day because someone is unhappy with our new doctor. The rental service we used for our trips messed up and I had to cancel another trip this week. This caused more people to yell at me. It also caused me to be yelled at by my boss even though I really didn't have any control. I have been super tired and think I am getting sick.

Overall, it's not been a great week. At least I have tonight and tomorrow to relax until my week starts again. UGH.

Why is this so hard?

This month is the worse! I know that it's only half way through the month but so far I am not a fan. Not only am I tired from trying to adjust to working two jobs I have been overly moody and felt terrible on and off for about a week now making things even worse. Wait? Moody? Not feeling well for a week? Not sleeping well? Maybe I am pregnant? NOPE! Or at least not according to my wonderful app on my phone that records all my temperatures and tells me if I have ovulated. Now I know I shouldn't base everything on a app on my phone but it's been pretty darn accurate so far. This month is an off month for us so it means no medication which means I should be back to normal from not having side effects from the medicine but nope. I think I feel worse this month. Plus, I have been temping every day still to keep a good record and my temps have been all over the place. It's really crazy to see my chart. I did have hope that I ovulated a couple days ago but was burned by my temperature dip this morning. I don't know why I let myself hope that my body would work without medication. It won't. It hasn't since I was a teenager but here I am again disappointed by my free floating, hopeful heart. Oh, and did I mention that another person that I went to college with is pregnant? This one I thought wouldn’t bother me because I know she has struggled to get pregnant and had to do IVF to conceive but the way that she is flaunting it around Facebook and talking about it nonstop is making me irritated and most days I want to punch her in the face. I mean, seriously, she announced her pregnancy (she was only 6 weeks along) while on her three week vacation in Paris. Also, why do you need a vacation to Paris when you are a stay at home wife?!

Not only have I felt terrible this month and realizing that trying to have a baby with a broken body like mine is such a task and an emotional train wreck but I am just tired and everything at work seems to not be working out for me this month. Every plan I have made at work seems to be torn apart by unforeseen events and our annual fundraiser is coming up soon and there is so much to do. Today I am just feeling tired and I have a severe headache. I think I may need more caffeine to get through the day and a pedicure real soon.

Sincerly,
Very cranky and Very Tired

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

This morning I am excited to be a part of a wonderful company. In July I will celebrate 2 years with Elder Care and today I could not be prouder to be working with them. Over the past month Elder Care has won 3 awards of excellence in Oklahoma. First, one of our programs won partnership award due to our cooperation with another local non-profit. It's wonderful to be acknowledged as a cooperative non-profit. Then just a few days later we found out that we one of twenty-four finalist for a ONE (Oklahoma Nonprofit Excellence) Award. We were chosen as a finalist out of 17,000 other nonprofits in Oklahoma; what an achievement! The 24 finalist were divided out into 8 categories (3 nonprofits per category) and a winner would be chosen out of each category. Then at the end of the evening one nonprofit would win the overall "Top Nonprofit of Oklahoma Award". We were not sure if we would win the "seniors" category because we were up against two very well-known nonprofits in Tulsa. However, when our category came up we were surprised to hear that we had one first place in our category. We were flabbergasted. Then as we sat there listening debating amongst ourselves about which nonprofit would take home the overall award they called our name. We won. They chose Elder Care as the 2014 Top Nonprofit of Oklahoma! We screamed a little and didn't know what to say when accepting the award. How amazing is that; what an honor. Then the news continued to get better as we came to work this morning. This morning we received word that we had won the DHS Aging Services' Program of the Year award for Golden Opportunities. I sat in awe because that was my program. My program won. We were nominated for this award and filled out the necessary paperwork but didn't really expect to win but we did. The program I have poured myself into for the past 18 months was being acknowledged as program of the year. Now, I know that this award doesn't have anything to specifically do with me because it was for the program which has been established for over 7 years now but still what an honor.

With all this I sit here this morning proud to be working for Elder Care. Not only have I grown in my 18 months here but I am part of something truly special. It's great to know that I am working with a great company and have so many people to learn from. It's amazing!

How does one live with the craziness?

I sometimes wonder how people live with such chaotic lives. I am not meaning temporary craziness but permanent, day to day, year after year craziness. I hear all the time about families that live like this; typically the poor because they can't seem to pull themselves away from the chaos. My mother always seems to be in a cycle like this. No matter how much I try and help it seems to always be a whirlwind of things. One week she may be working and everything is fine then the next week she is sick. The following week she doesn't have a job but a few days later she has her same old job back. Every week things are changing and never the same. How can she live like that? I understand the idea that once you live in the chaos you begin to adjust to it but who would want to do that?

I am often encouraging her to do things different. To get a different job that would be much more stable, to stop trying to pay debt down with more debt, to demand that her life have meaning and for people to stop treating her like a Slumdog but it doesn't help. She always seems to have a "good reason" for continuing to do the same things. She has been here for almost a year and made no real changes, it’s frustrating. I feel like her behavior is still the same and that without me being on her all the time she would slip into the same cycle and soon would end up homeless again. I know I can't actually change her and that she has to make the changes for herself but I just can't figure out why she wouldn't want to change.

Her lifestyle also concerns me because even though T is not living with her he still is around her and sees it. T is so unmotivated and already seems to have the "woe is me" attitude expecting things to be just given to him. I am afraid that constant exposure to someone who is not moving forward and making good decisions will continue to rub off on him creating a problem instead of encouraging change for him. I don't think she quite understands that he sees how she lives and could be learning from that example because she seems to always make it through. I want him to see her trying and improving. I want him to eventually one day be able to look up to her and see that she has made so many changes that he can too. I want him to learn from both her and I but she doesn't seem to want to be the example he needs.

Sometimes it's all just a bit much for me. Just watching her whirlwind of chaos is tiring but when I try and battle through it to reach her or T it becomes down right exhausting and energy sucking. I know that what we do know will have a large impact on both of their lives but sometimes I just want to wash my hands of it and let the chips lie where they fall.

11.5

Today marks the halfway point for my cycle this month. This means that in about two weeks (give or take a few days) I will know whether or not my body was able to ovulate this month without the medication or not. It also means that in about two weeks I will either be pregnant or moving in to trying to conceive for over a year. I am expecting we will tumble over the year mark with ease as my body has never acted correctly without medication but there is always a small part of me will always hope. I think the main reason that I hope that this will be our month (other than the obvious ones) it that it will mean we will most likely have our baby in 2014. If we don't get pregnant this month it means our baby will be born in 2015. In my mind this seems so far away. I know it's the same amount of time as every pregnancy but to see it topple into another year. Don't get me wrong, I am not really a fan of having a baby in December especially since there is a good chance they could be born on Christmas but I would love to have one before the end of the year. Plus, there is a small part of me that things a New Year’s Eve baby could be awesome. Grant it, there is a good chance that even if we did get pregnant this month that the baby still wouldn't come until 2015 because I would chose not to have an induction and wait for labor to start naturally or at least that is what I am saying now. Who knows what I will actually be like when I’m pregnant. I also still hold out hope to get pregnant this month because I would love for the hubsters brother and family to be here when the baby comes and not in Florida.

With all this, I think I am going to be okay either way this month. I don't have my hopes up too much because I know my body plus there are so many pros and cons to having a baby at the end of the year/beginning of the year for us that I guess it really wouldn’t matter. Therefore all I can do is wait. Wait to see if I ovulate in the next few days. Wait to see if we manage to get pregnant. Wait to see what the doctor says if we don't get pregnant. Wait to see if our lives will change soon or if they will continue to stay the same.

P.S. I think we may need to talk with my in-laws about out struggles. Lately, they have been dropping some hints about us having a baby. I think after almost 5 years of marriage they want us to have children. I have been reluctant to say anything because I don't really know how to bring it up and it is very difficult to share something so private, especially when you are unsure of what is exactly going and only have a suspension.

Messy Weekend

This weekend was kind of a mess. It seems like every time we turned around we had either forgotten something we needed to do or something new would come up. This was not the plan. My plan for the weekend was to have a somewhat relaxing weekend since this week I will start my part-time job which will increase my hours to about 60 a week of work plus making sure T gets to and from night school, keeping up with my exercise group, taking care of my mom, keeping up with the house chores and making sure I fit in time with the hubster and friends. It's going to be crazy so I wanted a less crazy weekend but of course the universe had different plans.

Don't get me wrong it wasn't a terrible weekend but we had a lot of stuff to fit in that shouldn't have taken as long as it did. Here are a few of the highlights from the weekend.

- My mother ended up in the hospital
- All the errands I needed to run took twice as long because everyone and their brother was out this weekend
- My house took much longer to clean because every time I would start on a project I would get interrupted.
- My debit card got stolen so I had to sit on the phone with the bank over the weekend
- T accidently broke the lawn mower while working on the lawn causing us to have to clean up an excessive amount of oil and buy a new lawn mower
(Good thing for that part-time job, right?)
- My phone is being a jerk and not giving me all my text so I spent an hour or so backing it up, resetting it and restoring it. That didn't work so then I spent 30 minutes in the AT&T store only to be told they couldn't do anything and I would have to make an appointment at my closest apple store, which is an hour away.
- My stomach wasn't feeling well so I spent a large amount of time in the bathroom


All of these things were manageable but definitely made sure my weekend was not as relaxing as I wanted it to be. On the bright side I did get to start watching Game of Thrones this weekend. I think I am going to like it.


P.S. For those who are wondering, I still haven't decided what do do about my relative's situation. I have talked with them a couple of times recently and they seem so happy...