You gonna eat that?

. . .

Is this the flare from hell? My hands this morning were so bad I had to take off my wedding & engagement rings. I have never, ever had to do that before... even throughout my 3 pregnancies, I was able to wear my rings, every day. I did take off my rings for both my surgeries, and I kept them off for a day or two afterwards, so maybe if I had tried to wear them on those days, I wouldn't have been able to.

But I didn't just have surgery. I haven't really been doing anything -- a bit of running around, sure. Not doing anything, really? That's gotta be a lie, because the thing I have been doing is eating badly. Like today, a sourdough bacon cheeseburger. Only ate about half the bread, but even so. Why? This morning, DS2 asked for scrambled eggs and toast and ate 2 bites of toast and none of the eggs... so I ate them. The eggs, actually, I had planned on eating (I know my son), that was fine. But the toast? WTF am I eating toast for?

Yesterday, breaded calamari and a pint o' Guinness... various chocolates here & there. Not too much, just a few bites. It's a very old habit, very dear to me, and one I will probably never give up. But I'm better off eating regular dark chocolate than I am eating chocolate-covered pretzels, which the kids so adore. Of course they do, they're amazingly good.

Then, on top of it -- soy. Bad, bad, bad. Trader Joe's soy and flaxseed tortilla chips. Those things should be banned as evil. They taste soooo good and are quite reasonable, carb-wise. I didn't even eat a whole serving. But then I made quesadillas for dinner with these new LC tortillas I found at the supermarket, and they were just awesome, even though they do have trans-fats in them (boo, hiss), and, of course, soy! For a treat, it's not going to kill us, I figured -- and these tortillas really were a treat, very soft and pliable, not LC-tasting at all. Awesome, or they would be, if they could get the trans-fats out.

So, maybe it's the soy that's making me all bloated and puffy and in pain. Or all the wheat I'm eating when I had been pretty clean for a couple of weeks. Not perfect by far, but a lot better than I have been recently.

I'm not just feeling bloated and puffy, either. My weight is up by about 5 lbs. I'm feeling very weak and flabby and horrid. Part of that could be hormonal (mood swing!), but part of it is just that this bod has lost 2 organs in the last 5 months and is completely out of shape. I hate that. But I'm feeling so crappy lately that the idea of working out is horrifying to me. What, inflict more pain on myself? Even I am not that crazy.

Strangely, though, fibromyalgia has been known to respond positively to gentle exercise. I need to sign up for a yoga class or get a tape or something...

Of course, all this pain and yuck could be the bad habit of staying up late and having to drag my butt out of bed every morning. Or maybe I'm just trying to do too much too close to my surgery, and this is my body's way of trying to get me to slow down.

I have to do better than this, I have to feel better than this... I finally picked up my Vioxx today and will take 25mg before bed and hope that I feel better tomorrow.

Tomorrow afternoon all the upstairs carpets get cleaned, and then we will do the big move to the new rooms on Saturday. DD's furniture rehab isn't even started yet, but no matter. Maybe it will get done, mostly, on Saturday? I can start it tomorrow, some things. It will happen eventually.

The living room and dining room are inundated with stuff to go to charity. I have to call for a pick-up, but I'm waiting for the part for the crib to come before I send it off. It's not a major part and I could possibly get it at Home Depot or Ace Hardware, but Ragazzi said they would drop one in the mail to me, so I'll just wait a few more days for it to come.

The kids were great today. We went to BK for lunch, Nordstrom for sandals for all 3 (they were angelic), returned some stuff at Robinsons, which required walking all the way through the mall. Then we went to Ultimate Electronics and got a new CD player for the car. I splurged and got one that can handle MP3 and WMA formats, because I will be burning my own discs, one of these days, and I want to be able to play them in the car. The install took about 45 minutes, so we browsed through the nearby furniture store looking for lamps (nothing remotely suitable), and CostPlus looking at everything, before we ended up back at UE in their DVD theater watching the end of "Toy Story". Then, we went to Border's and got a snack and read some books in the children's section...didn't get home till 5:45, having left shortly after 11.

Through all that, I had to keep them in line but only occasionally, and there were no major blow-ups or disasters, and DS2 only whined for about 30 seconds in Borders. It was amazing. The saleswoman at Nordstrom's complimented the kids and said they were a pleasure to work with. They all waited their turns and were polite and helpful.

Before I was a mom, my most fervent desire was to be one of those unflappable parents who always knew how to diffuse a difficult situation, who never lost her temper, and who had an infinite amount of patience. On a day like today, I did a pretty good approximation of that mythical creature. I have learned, though, through bitter experience, that you can't be patient and accepting all the time. Sometimes, your kids have to see that they have gone too far, that being mean will make people angry, and that actions have consequences, including provoking emotional responses in other people. And parents are people, not servants or automatons, and certainly not sponge-like beings that are supposed to just take whatever is they decide to dish out.

DD, for whatever reason, decided that she wanted to be in a snit before we left today, and announced she didn't care about me, or anything, except a boy in her class and her Teddy. How sweet -- not. I gave her the long list of things I do for her, everyday, and she didn't even have the grace to look in the least bit disturbed by it. She's only 5. I can imagine how this battle will have evolved when she's a teenager. Actually, I try not to think about that. I'm hoping we'll have had this conversation so many times I won't have to do it again, ever. For now, though, she seems to think that her not caring about me is her best weapon.

I've told her that all it is is hurtful. Eventually she gets over herself and calms down and wants to be lovey, but then I have to tell her, I don't want to snuggle with you now, you really hurt my feelings earlier and I need a little while to get over that. I don't hold any major grudge but I can't just switch on the happies, either. That's just too fake. They all need to know that words hurt grown-ups as well as children.

I did, however, have a brilliant idea today. DD has trouble putting on her socks. They are very stretchy, they have to be or they bag up on her skinny little feet. Because of the stretchiness, it's hard to get them on her feet the right way, and she's sensitive to the way the seams are lined up. I finally realized she could stretch them out a little bit by putting them on her hands (like mittens) to just loosen them up, and then they would be much easier to put on her feet. So she tried it, and had no problems. Why couldn't I have thought of this 2 years ago, when this problem started?! Probably because at that point, I didn't have DS2 running around, wearing his socks on his hands as mittens as part of some dress-up game he plays practically every day!