Would you like to have a fart party? If you haven’t been to one, it’s where the guests put their butts together, in pairs I guess, and both fart at the same time. Elias invented this concept, and invited me to come. Unfortunately I was booked solid.
(Maybe the day before the party there should be a pre-party… with gas-producing foods?) (Please no one tell Isaac about the idea of lighting farts on fire– this would combine both his interests perfectly!)
Ah, life with young boys. The mirth of farts, the louder and the stinkier, the funnier. I’m actually glad that there are two boys in the house, so they can amuse each other with these topics and I can leave the room entirely. Farts don’t really interest me at all. Indeed, I’m against them.
It’s MLK day today. I don’t know if this is a worthwhile way to honor the importance of the day… in fact I’m sure it falls short. But what I’m doing is sitting in the library (for some reason it’s open) and putzing around with some writing. I have a lot of ideas flying around in my head, and the problem is that it gets overwhelming immediately. The other problem is the lack of any sort of consistent time to sort through them. It’s not the sort of thing that can easily be rushed. In fact rushing, I’ve found, makes it worse.
I have my eyes on the wonder of time up ahead in the fall, when Elias will start full-day Kindergarten and I will have SIX HOURS A DAY. I’m sorry I’m shouting, but it’s been like… 8 years??? All I can do now is try to catch ideas as they flit by and jot them down someplace, so that one day, roughly September 1, 2011, I’ll be able to sit still and focus. We have a trial day coming up in February… Elias is going to bring lunch and stay til 3:15! What a clever boy. What a wealth of time for me!
As it is right now, I have never more than an hour or two at a time, and it’s so disjointed, with lots of driving in between. Exercise, dishes and cooking take it all up. Right now, the kids are at TaeKwonDo– there’s a party sort of thing run by the teachers, not a class. They are playing dodge ball and zombie tag and running around in a large padded room. Pizza, surprise birthday cake for some little girl there, a screening of “Despicable Me.” Really this is a lovely way for them to spend some time, vent, and get tired enough to be tame enough to bring back home. “A tired dog is a good dog.” That’s my motto. And that’s why the boys are doing TaeKwonDo twice a week, gymnastics once a week, plus either swimming or skating once a week. I pay others to tire them out because I simply can’t.
I fear pinning too much hope on the glory of September. What if I have a major relapse in dizziness, or something? Or something else happens. I’m working on the exercise plan with much difficulty. The pattern seems to be (now two weeks into it) that I can get through the exercise itself okay, but then a couple hours later I just hit a wall and feel horrible. I must lie down. In fact, I must sleep. I read on this blog called potsrecovery that the lady did exactly that. She’d get through the exercise and then come home and sleep 2-3 hours! And then could function. With her life, she was able to make that work. With mine, there just isn’t enough time and it’s very hard.
It’s kind of interesting to actually have a Real Condition that causes me to hate exercise. I always thought I just hated exercise in a general, American sense of being a couch potato. I also always thought that if I simply worked harder at it, through force of will, I could one day become Jane Fonda (so dating myself!! I mean Meagan Fox.) So many, many times in my life I’ve gone through phases of determination to make a change, and so many, many times I’ve had little progress, lots of misery, or in the most recent case, progress undone quickly. I really was in good shape in spring and summer 2009, but so hopelessly dizzy I could barely walk across the room! How useful is it to be thin and hot when you can’t even stand up to show it off? And yet, here again, for the one-millionth time, I’m digging in my heels and trying.
Vestibular Therapist Vince lauds my efforts, though, and I just have to believe that I’m on the right track. He convinced me to buy a blood pressure cuff for home, so now I’m tracking it a lot more closely. (My mother told me to buy one about 18 months ago– she was very right!) What I’ve found is that a) the tons of salt I’m ingesting is not giving me hypertension by any means, and b) when I feel somewhat bad and light-headed, my blood pressure actually is somewhat low. I haven’t had a really bad episode since I got the thing the other day, but I’ve found that when I feel even slightly bad, it’s down to 100/70 or something like that, with my resting heart rate up to 100. I’m intrigued to find out just how low it gets, when I’m freezing cold and can’t stand up. At my very worst, at the tilt table test, it went down to lower than the machine could read– something like 80/40.
I’m slugging salt water as we speak. Almost done with my first liter of the day, only two more to go! Yippee!
Back to get the kids from their posse of other young fart enthusiasts. Time’s up.