Life is Exhausting!

So I work two jobs, have two great little boys, and a wonderful husband.  All in all, I'm am very happy, but so exhausted.  I know I have no one to blame for this, it's just the way it has to be right now and I can except that, but I sure can't wait till it's a little more relaxing in my life.

After Abel got sick last summer and we had to cancel the build of our home, I decided that we needed to totally rethink our plans.  I mean total overhaul. We were moving to Austin no matter what, but what were we going to do when we got there?  Originally we were going to be in a new home with a mortgage and property taxes and go back to working the old same jobs we were in Houston, or at least we hoped we could get the same jobs. When the wrench of Guianne Barre was thrown in, we new things would need to be tweaked a bit. I thought long and hard about it and decided on something that would be rough, but in the end would be best for our family.

My husband had been in the Air-force and although he was discharged too early to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, since he was a Texas resident he found out  he qualified for the Hazelwood Act. This also pays for all tuition.  So, I told my husband, "This is the new plan. I am going to work two jobs while you're on disability and you are going back to school. Figure out what you want to do because this is the most convenient time to get it done. By the time you can work again you will have your Associates degree." He thought it was a pretty good idea although he didn't like the thought of me having to work two jobs.  I explained to him that regardless if he went to school or not, The money we have lost from his paycheck had to be made up for somewhere. This was our only option.

So now I work 7:30am to 4:30pm as a purchasing assistant in downtown Austin and 6pm to 11pm at a restaurant 3 to 4 nights a week. Thankfully, my husband is a trooper and deals with a great deal of pain while also dealing with the kids except for the three days a week he goes to school. Sometimes sitting in class for 4 hours at a time can cause him pain for the entire next day, but he gets through it. Hopefully the pain will be gone one day.

We are both exhausted only one year into the the new plan and have at least another year to go. We try to focus on the kids as much as we can in our limited spare time so that this period of time is not as crazy for them as it is for us. I think they are doing well, but they are noticeably clingy when I am home for the evening and weekends. Nicholas, the oldest, always asks why I have three jobs. I guess it feels like three to him. It definitely feels like three to me.

My husband sometimes feels like he has put me in this situation and others might think he is being selfish. For anyone who might think that this situation is unfair to me I want you to know that this whole thing was my idea. He still can't work which I think people forget sometimes. We had to do something drastic to change our lives for the better and if I have to sacrifice my time and energy for a little while that's OK.  It also makes our bond as husband and wife stronger.  In the end we are going to have a better life for ourselves and our boys because of it.

Why I Love My Kids

Besides the fact that we are genetically bonded for life, I love my kids because they are evidence to me, that life is worth living.

Even though on a daily basis, they make me want to pull my hair out, they even more so make me smile in wonder. Having personalities and idiosyncrasies truly unique to any one else. I am amazed everyday that I made these perfectly imperfect human beings.  Being perfectly imperfect myself, I have a lot of regrets in life, but they help me see past those regrets and keep me on the right path.

Nicholas is the oldest and I think he literally saved my life.  With him as my strength, I was able to stop all my unhealthy behavior.  He was what I had been waiting for and didn't even know I needed or wanted.  He is a sweet boy and so smart it's scary. He tells me he loves me 50 times a day including lots of hugs and kisses.  What more could a girl ask for. I get this adoration from my husband as well, but I cherish it from my boys because I know it won't last for long.
Then there is Jacob.  Another very sweet boy. Little blondy with dimpled cheeks. He is very possessive of his momma and doesn't like to share my lap with his brother. He is not quite as mild mannered as his brother and does all the things I thought a toddler was supposed to do before I was spoiled with Nicholas. A bit more aggressive than I would like and much more stubborn. I was worried about starting him in daycare due to these characteristics, but he is the favorite of the teacher's and they compliment him on his discipline and calm manner. Hmmm. Where is this Jacob when we are at home?

I love these boys more than I could possibly express and the thought of anything happening to them brings a lump to my throat. They are my life.  Everything I do is for them and they deserve every bit of love I have.

You Have Chosen Wisely My Husband

Expecting to come home to the silent treatment and annoyed glares, I was pleasantly surprised when my husband came through the door with a smile on his face.  After the short, but raging exchange between us the night before, I did not think it would be much better the next time we were in a room together.


On the way home from work, with our boys in tow, I realized I didn't know what the plan for dinner was.  Although I didn't plan on making any communications with my hubby until he got home, the boys were starving and I needed to know.  I sent him a short text, "What are we doing about dinner?".  He responded with a list of leftovers and some other options.  To those I responded with, "OK. I will figure something out" followed by a smiley face.  I hoped this would let him know I was not in the mood to be rude and hopefully it took him out of attack mode.  Just a simple gesture and no arss kissing.


So either that gesture did the trick or he thought about my words and chose to not pursue the battle royal.  I believe that this recent bought of PMS is due to the fact that his body is becoming tolerant to the pain medication he is on.  Since the medication is highly addictive he is not taking more to compensate (thank goodness) he is in a great deal more pain then normal.  Although I am very sympathetic to this, I made it very clear that if this was the reason that I am becoming his punching bag (metaphorically) I didn't have time to deal with it.


I think I've finally gotten to the point in my life where I refuse to keep my mouth shut.  I have spent my whole life letting people run all over me and making me feel responsible for their crap.  No more!  All though it is stressful to fight for yourself, and I am still not great at it, it is vital for your soul.  Even if it is the person you love most in the world, if they love you equally they will see the error of there ways.


"You have chosen wisely my husband!" I love you..

Choose Your Battles and Your Words Wisely My Dear

Just another day in paradise?  I think not.  My life is a crazy train and I feel like it might derail at any moment.  I'm a giant nerve, tender to the touch.

I currently work two jobs.  Since my husband is on long term disability at 60% of what his salary was when he was working, I have to make up for the lost wages, not to mention that we have just started our two boys back in daycare at $975 a month.   So being the tough be-atch that I am, I have taken on this challenge of being super mom, wife and workaholic.

During the days I work as a purchasing assistant and all around peon, at a high frequency trading company(investing money using computer systems to trade in milliseconds).  The company does very well and is sure to pass the rewards on to it's employees. I receive great benefits and outrageous bonuses.  Other than the job being absolutely mind numbing, it's great.

Three to four nights a week, I work as a Server/Bartender at a steak house.  I first started working there after I spent a month and a half putting out resumes and only getting one interview (which obviously didn't pan out).  I was working at the restaurant full time and making really good money, but as summer time approached business dwindled and money was cut in half.  I immediately started putting resumes out again. This time I got phone call the 1st week which led to the above mentioned day job.

The little time I spend at home, I try to catch up on quality time with the family while also trying to calm my nerves and relax.  With two kids climbing all over you the later is virtually impossible.  On the weekends I spend Saturday being pretty lazy.  Saturday is my reset day, a time to recharge my energy.  Sundays are dedicated to getting things ready for the upcoming week and usually spending time with the extended family.

So working my arss off and having absolutely no time for myself, the very last thing I want to do is have to deal with my husband's PMS or Piss Me off Syndrome.  If you read yesterdays post, I told you about the slight tiff over discipline of our 20 month old.  Well, apparently this is going into a cycle off pissyness. Yeah me!!!

After working all day, then going to the 2nd job only to make $21 and have to do ten times the work because they were fumigating, I end up in a fight with the hubby.  What is going on?  Two days in a row.  This is not like us. 

Everything was fine the whole day yesterday.  The spat, which was really just a difference of opinion, the evening before was not mentioned again.   I texted him at the end of the night to let him know I was going to be late because of the extra work and I had also volunteered to take a friend home, 5 minutes away from work in the opposite direction of home.  This friend does not live in the best neighborhood and my husband knows that.

All of a sudden I am an ingrate who doesn't care about his feelings and do as I please no matter how he feels.  What!? When I ask him why this is a big deal when he knows I have driven my friend here before and was never reprimanded, he says that we have talked about it before (don't recall what I think was a conversation with himself that was never voiced to me) and I never listen to half of what he says anyway.

Um...I work all the time.  I don't have any friends that I go out with.  I am always home when I'm not "making that money" and I don't allow myself to do anything I "want" to do, so I don't know what he's talking about.  On the other hand, I let him retreat to his hideaway when he needs to rest, never raise a disapproving eyebrow when he wants to play poker with friends and takes money from our very tight budget to do so, and support him in just about any endeavor.

Our fight did not get far as it was midnight and I had to be up at 5:30 am to get myself and two little ones ready to go.  He sent me to bed and said we would talk the next day.  Usually I would not be able to sleep for hours, but having worked all day I was pretty exhausted.

So, it's the next day.  I have not gotten a single text from him nor have a sent him any.  I don't want to piss him off, but more importantly, I am not going to be the one to hang my head and start kissing ass to make it all go away.  I have little tolerance for unnecessary bull shit.  So to my husband I say, "Choose your battles and your words very wisely my dear! You really don't want to go there with me!".

Argument Over Discipline

My husband is a much better and more consistent disciplinarian than I am and I don't have many complaints because our kids are pretty good, but occasionally I think he goes overboard.

Last night at the dinner table, our 20 month old, Jacob, would not eat his dinner.  We are big on putting our kids in time out.  We ask nicely once and then to the corner they go.  This has worked very well on our four year old, Nicholas, who we started the time out discipline on at 18 months.  He is a near perfect child and doesn't get into a whole lot of trouble.  Jacob on the other hand is a bit more stubborn than his brother.

So Jake wouldn't eat his food and kept spitting out what ever we could get in his mouth. Daddy said, "Alright, that's it.  You are going to the corner!".  Nothing out of the ordinary, except this time he went into an extreme tirade as he put our little one in the corner.  He will always raise his voice and let them know why they are there, but he went above and beyond loud this time and even scared me a little.

When he sat back down at the dinner table I told him he didn't need to yell like that.  I immediately got the "look" followed by, "Don't!! Don't do that!  I do that for a reason!".  "OK" I said in a slightly condescending way.  I wasn't going to have an argument with him at the dinner table in front of Nicholas and with Jake crying in the corner.

Silence continued for the rest of the meal.  Afterwords, my sometimes moody husband retired to the bedroom to do some homework.  I got up, did the dishes, forced Nicholas to eat at least three more bites of pork roast and stewed about the attitude I had just received.

Eventually, I went into the bedroom and told him exactly why I made a comment to begin with.  I asked him, Do I usually make a comment when you yell at the boys?". No reply. I told him that the only reason I said anything was because he sounded like a crazy person screaming at our toddler like that and that if it scared me it probably scarred him for life.  It is one thing to raise your voice, I can fly of the handle also, but he needs to check himself occasionally.

I simply walked out after that.  He didn't look at me once while I was making my case, but I'm sure he thought about it afterward.  We stayed away from each other the rest of the evening and by the time I went to the bedroom for the night he was at least talking to me.

We pride ourselves on our communication with each other.  We don't have squabbles very often and sometimes I don't know how to deal with it when we do, but I always know that we will work through it even if it means having to agree to disagree.

Our History and Ongoing Battle with Guillain-Barre

On June 10, 2009 my husband Abel went into the hospital for back surgery.  I was so nervous, "Back surgery!" I thought to myself.  "One wrong move and he could be paralyzed.", I agonized.  Never showing my fear to my dear husband, who had been in pain for eight years and could barely walk as it was because of it.  He just wanted to be back to normal again.  All he wanted was to be able to roll around and wrestle with our boys.  We had just had number two, Jacob, who was six months old and then there was our forever energetic three year old, Nicholas.

Nothing could prepare us for the journey we were about to take.

The surgery went as planned and the surgeon assured us that even though the full recovery was going to be about two years, he would eventually feel like the man he used to be, before the herniated disk which led to his first surgery at the age of 23, which led to a total collapse of the disks. After living with this horrible pain for eight years he was so happy that there was a light at the end of this tunnel.  Of course there would be much more pain to deal with before it was all over.

The day he was being discharged from the hospital he had mentioned to me that his toes felt a little numb.  Thinking it was just a circulation issue from being in a hospital bed for a week we were slightly concerned, but willing to see if it would right itself. Abel really just wanted to go home and start his recovery.

The next day, Abel told me that the numbness wasn't going away and in fact, it was getting worse.  "What the hell is going on?!" we said to ourselves. The surgeon had us come back to the hospital immediately.

It took a few days and a spinal tap to be sure, but what was going on was Guillain-Barre.  Not directly related to the surgery, Guillain-Barre is rare auto immune deficiency that causes the immune system to attack the nervous system.  We were told that he would slowly be paralyzed from toes up. They didn't know how far the paralysis would go.  It often is so severe that it paralyzes organs and life support would be needed.  They don't know a lot about it, just that it usually comes about after having a virus or viral vaccinations such as the Swine Flu vaccine. They were unsure in Abel's case because he had not had either.  It's unknown why some people get it and others don't.   It always eventually reverses it's self, but the recovery time is never known. We were told it could take anywhere from 6 weeks to 2 years.  The only thing they have seen really help is a plasma exchange.  It doesn't stop it but they believe it speeds up the recovery process.

I was dying inside and couldn't even imagine how Abel was feeling about this diagnosis. My husband is a strong, energetic man.  I can never get him to sit still and now he would have no choice in the matter.

It took ten days to get to his full paralysis which luckily was contained mainly to his arms and legs.  He was close to life support one evening but fought it off.  He ended up in ICU for two weeks just to keep a closer eye on him.  Total, he spent 6 weeks between 3 different hospitals and another 6 weeks in a rehab facility, where he reached his lowest point mentally.  We were able to pull him from the depths of his dispare and he began to see the sunshine again.

After a 24 hour stint at the rehab hospital, where I had to show that I could do absolutely every thing he needed done, he was allowed to go home. That's when the real fun began.

We had a hospital bed set up next to our bed.  By it's side lived a hydrologic lift and harness for the purpose of getting him in and out of bed, to and from his wheel chair.  The lift proved to be much easier to maneuver in the hospital(Damn carpet!).  That lift became my nemesis and I couldn't get rid of it fast enough.  A physical therapist came to work on Abel's muscle tone and essentially teaching him how to walk again.

My husband had become as helpless as a baby, diapers and all.  All I could think about was how emasculated he must feel.  We had only been married a little over a year.  This was quite a test for our marriage.  I was working full time, taking care of two small children and a now I had a paralyzed husband.  Oh yeah! We had also started building a house about a month before the surgery.  Shortly after he came home we had to cancel the contract because we just didn't know what the future was going to bring our way.  The house was completed just two weeks later and shortly after that it was sold to another family.

It was  a struggle to say the least.  I had my Aunt spend a couple of hours in the afternoon with him and I took the evening shifts. His mother would also come into town from Austin, every other week.  It was the longest time of his life, he said.  For me it was all a blur.  I set myself on auto pilot to get through the day.  I stuffed all my emotions down as deep as I could so that I could be the rock my family needed.  One night, before he came home, I woke up in the middle of the night, pillow soaking wet.  I had been crying my eyes out in my sleep.  It kind of freaked me out and then I realized that it was just my body trying to let go of this worry and stress it was carrying around.

Eventually, he started making serious progress and in mid-October he took his first steps in four months.  We could both breath a sigh of relief.  It was the best day of our lives.  He still had and has a long way to go for a full recovery.  He still walks with a cane and hasn't gotten feeling back in his toes (this maybe permanent).  He is still in a great deal of pain from the original back surgery but not as bad as it was during the full on Guillain-Barre which, even though you can't feel your extremities, there is massive amount of nerve pain associated with it.  His toes on one foot are curled up and will not straighten out by themselves, so we have been told he will need surgery soon to correct that.  It will involve putting pins in his toes to keep them straight.

He is currently on long term disability through his old company that basically laid him off after three months of this ordeal.  He is going back to school while he can't work, but even that takes a toll on him most days.  We stay optimistic about the future and know that things could have been much worse.  He has been very strong through this whole thing and I honestly don't think I could have handled it as well. 

As a family we have pulled through the storm quite well, but I can't help but wonder what the next disaster will be in our lives.

A Little History

So lets start with a little history about me and my family.

I was born on July 21, 1975 to Debbie(18) and William Penrod(21).  Neither of which had any business having children at that point in time.  My dad later told me that as far as he new mom was on the pill.  Apparently, she decided she was ready to have kids and didn't inform dad. 

My mother abandoned the family when I was five and my brother was three.  Dad raised us as a single parent until I was ten, when he lost his job and we went to live with my mother.  Despite the fact that he was an alcoholic, he was a wonderful and loving father.  I miss him dearly, he passed away when I was 22 from a variety of different ailments such as, cirrosis of the liver, Hepatitis C and lung cancer that wasn't diagnosed until two weeks before his death. 

I had always been an independent child. I grew up quickly living with an alcoholic father and a behaviorally challenged and slow brother.  I very much took my mothers place as the caregiver in our broken family. So when I went to go live with her and her new family, (new husband and their two boys) it was a change I did not adjust to well.  I never felt much of a bond with my mother and my stepfather was a very conservative, controlling, "you'll do things my way because it's the right way" kind of guy.  For the most part, he was a good guy but I wasn't used to the rigid family dynamic and we clashed in opinions and power struggles till I was eighteen when he kicked me out after an argument.
I was not a bad kid by any means, just stubborn and passionate about what I believed.  He sees that now that he has dealt with far worse from my siblings.

So I have been on my own since I was eighteen and have made many mistakes and been through the ringer in relationships.  I won't go into details here.  I will leave that for the book I have just begun writing an outline for.  I will explain how a little girl from Texas over came some unthinkable situations in her life and became the well adjusted and happily married mother of two.  We too have our family drama and that's what this blog will capture.  Our daily challenges and how we overcome as a family.

"Family always comes first" - William Penrod (my dad)