Happy Father's Day!

This week

It's been a good week.  Lots of hiking, lots of crafting, lots of playing outside, lots of living.

On Sunday evening we went for a hike at one of our favorite parks and discovered that there was a whole network of trails that we'd never found before.  Some construction had opened up a new route to these paths and we were so thrilled!!  (And sad to think we've lived here 7 years and just found these.  Better late than never.)

My kids are always so thrilled when we "hike" through the glacial ravines in our part of the country.   "Look at the giant mountain!" they say.  Can't wait to see their reaction to the Rockies. :-)

My sweet Tot.  Even when he is a stinker and won't go to sleep I still love to kiss his fat little face.  Sidenote: I wore this red shirt when I took the kids to the dentist last week and the receptionist told me I looked lovely and that it was a perfect color on me.  It totally made my day and I thought how much a compliment from a relative stranger means.  I'm usually pretty good at giving compliments to people I know, but I want to start doing it more for strangers.

On Friday the kids made a batch of lemon bars (I took the pan out of the oven and poured the filling over the hot crust, but they did everything else) and they were so proud of their creation.  We ate it later that night during a rousing family game of Cranium.  Abigail, Luke, and I were ahead for almost the whole game and then we lost on the last 2 turns...poor Abigail started crying and was trying so hard to hide it.  I rubbed her back and whispered into her ear that Daddy and I wanted her to stay up and play a game later--just us big people.  She was so thrilled--I was completely exhausted and ready for bed but it was so worth delaying my own collapse in order to spend those 40 minutes playing Settlers of Cataan with her.  (She lost again but didn't care.)

 

My beautiful little Nathan.  I love love love my sweet baby and I love the natural light in my bedroom every afternoon.

Luke on our walk this morning--we cleaned the church together and then went to another park where we hiked the last time we cleaned the church.  Oh look!  A tradition! :-)

And last but not least, an update on me.  I am doing so well.  I honestly can't believe the difference that the medication is making--it is literally night and day.  The week before I started I spent one whole Sunday in bed crying almost the whole day.  When Neil got home from church I sobbed to him that there was nothing good in my life--not one thing.  He named off all kinds of good things and I categorically shot them all down with the pessimistic flip side of the good thing.  I told him that I wasn't suicidal but I really did feel like I had nothing to live for--like I was just existing and there was nothing to look forward to and my life just stretched ahead of me in a horrible dreary road and the only way I could keep going was to not think about the bleak future.

The second day that I was on the medication I woke up feeling like the world was burgeoning with possibility.  All of the things that were stressful and burdensome in my life were still there, but I felt like I could not only conquer them--they just didn't concern me.  I realized that there was nothing I could do about them but worry and so I just put them aside and focused on having a great day with the kids.  Yesterday I looked around the house and realized it was totally trashed and that I should have asked the kids to clean up before they went outside to play in the sprinkler.  Old Me would have been SO frustrated and started crying, feeling like the house would never EVER be clean EVER.  New Me shrugged, decided they could clean it up later, and grabbed a handful of popsicles out of the freezer and passed them out to my dripping little munchkins.

It's amazing and I am so, so, so grateful that I am able to enjoy my life again.

Adventure day: nature center

image

Today the three older children had dental appointments.  Luke and I had a lovely time in the waiting room reading stories together while Nathan nursed--I think the adjustment has been a bit difficult for Luke, since he's used to being home with just Isaac in the morning while Jules is at morning kindergarten, and now suddenly Abigail & Juliet are both home and there's a new baby.  Disconcerting for a child who is as routine-loving as my Luke.

After the dentist, we stopped off at a local nature center for our adventure day.  Frankly, I was hoping that we'd be following the nature center by a walk through the woods, but alas, Nathan's feeding schedule didn't allow for that today.  Someday soon.  But we did have a little interlude hanging out in the bird-watching room, putting together the bug puzzles, playing with the nature puppets, looking up a few of our favorite wildflowers, coloring pictures of muskrats, maneuvering the webcam to check for blue herons in the bog, looking at the fossilized mammoth bones & teeth, comparing various types of turtle shells, and identifying various animal tracks.  It's a lovely little place.  My favorite part--it always seems so tranquil--is the bird room.  It's fully glassed and looks out over an area packed with birdfeeders and backed by giant pines.  There are always lots of birds (occasionally a few squirrels) and the birdsongs are piped in through a speaker in the corner.  I love to sit there and watch the birds and squirrels while the kids exclaim in delight over the cardinals or the red-winged blackbirds.  It's a beautiful place to relax.

And then we came home and ate ants on a log (celery with peanut butter & raisins) because that seemed like an appropriate thing to eat.

family fun day

Isaac is terrified of squirrels, so he seized the chance to snarl at a stuffed one.

On Friday, Neil came home and told me that his adviser had cancelled their weekly meeting on Monday.  Consequently, all of the hours that Neil would typically spend on Saturday prepping for the Monday meeting were now free, and he was planning to take the whole day off to have fun with the kids.  YAY!!!  This was hugely, hugely exciting.

We decided to head a few hours south to an interactive history museum that I'd read about a few years ago on Simple Kids and had wanted to check out ever since.

One of the very first exhibits that we saw was from our local zoo--they had all of the cool animals that aren't actually on display at the zoo out with them.  The armadillos were pretty cool (but not nearly as cute as the pygmy hedgehog, which I wanted to take home).

Neil got a real kick out of the fact that the boa constrictor was named Julius Squeezer.


Cute Isaac with binoculars...

The main body of the park is divided up into three sections--one is a prairie homestead, another is a prairie town in 1836, and another focuses on the way the Civil War impacted the state.  All of the different areas have actors in period clothing working in the different buildings (think carpenters, weavers, farmers, potters, blacksmiths, etc.) The Civil War area also has some really cool multimedia presentations that were quite impressive (our favorite was the cannon that "shot" through the wall of the theater).

So in the homestead area, there was a barn with lots of cute baby animals that Luke did not want to pet. At all.

 Juliet literally burst into tears when she could not pet this lamb--it was in a different area behind a closed gate and she was heartbroken that she could not enter its stall.  I have to say, I empathized with her because it was about the most darling fluffy little thing you can imagine.

 The baby calf was pretty cute too.

 Jules finally settled for the mother sheep but she wasn't very happy about it.

 We moved across the yard and went into the loom house, which was REALLY cool.  The woman weaving here showed all of the kids how to finger-spin yarn out of freshly carded wool from the sheep we'd just been petting.

 She also told us how she dyes all of the yarn.  She'd just finished dying the skein of yarn dangling over the pot in the photo below, using osage orange from a jar on the mantel (the fire was still pretty warm from boiling the dye).  All of those little jars were full of different herbs, barks, and roots and labeled with their contents and the color that it would produce.

Abigail would have been happy to stay all day watching her weave and listening to her describe what she was doing, but the boys eventually got bored and we moved on.

 One of the things I really liked about the museum was how hands-on EVERYTHING was.  The kids spent quite awhile at one homestead pumping water and carrying it over to water the garden (there were also laundry tubs with period clothing nearby if they'd wanted to scrub the clothes).  There were so many things like this all day where we could really involve ourselves with frontier life.



One of the actors was weaving chair bottoms from the inner bark of a hickory (Luke is sitting on one of the finished chairs).  She told me that the chair bottom will often outlast the chair itself.



Another thing I LOVED was the attention to creating shady zones--lots of big mature trees overhanging pathways, little canopied areas with benches, giant pump bottles of free sunscreen everywhere...it was great.

The kids all did really well--I was impressed with how chipper and upbeat they were, even though we were on our feet ALL day.  Nathan was a champ and nursed and slept happily all day.

 So funny story--we were walking along this street and the girls stopped to try on this yoke.  While we were explaining how they would have used it to carry water, I noticed that Isaac wasn't with us.  We quickly looked around and spotted a nearby reproduction outhouse with a door that was closed whereas it had been open when we'd walked by it.  Sure enough, we found Isaac seated inside with his pants around his ankles.  He was not happy to leave ("but I have to GO!!").

 One of the really fun parts of the day was when we stopped by the doctor's house in Prairietown just as he brought out his violin to play a reel.  The other actors gathered up enough people to form a ring and Juliet, Isaac, Luke & I joined in (Neil videoed the whole thing, so this is the only picture I have).  Afterwards the actors brought out lemonade and cookies and we enjoyed them in the shade.

 At the end of the day, we went back the welcome center so I could feed Nathan before we loaded everyone into the car.  Juliet was in HEAVEN when she found this child-sized loom and spent the whole time working away diligently.

 The other kids were thrilled to find two giant baskets of stamps.

 And as we passed by the gift shop on the way out, I spotted the rock candy I'd been searching for all day after promising Abigail we could try some.  Turns out the giant multi-colored suckers nearby ended up being more appealing to the kids.  Oh well.  They were cheaper.

 On our way home, we stopped off at a street fair in our hometown that I'd really been excited about & where we were planning to eat dinner.  Total bust--lots of crafts and interesting tattoos, but not much to eat.

 And then we went home and fell into our beds.  Great day!

Postpartum depression and summer plans

Earlier this week, I started taking antidepressants and meeting with a therapist who specializes in post-partum depression and birth trauma.

Whew.  Got that out.




I didn’t plan to talk about this on my blog so soon—I knew I would at some point, but I thought maybe I’d talk about it when things were stabilized or when I stopped taking antidepressants or something like that. Like some sort of retrospective in a few months or a year. But as I was cleaning up my kitchen after lunch today and thinking that I should blog about our trip to the zoo this morning, I also felt very strongly that I should write about this TODAY.  So if you’re the one who is struggling with something similar…this post is for you.  One of the things that has been most helpful for me is knowing many people that I love and respect who have taken antidepressants, and not seeing it as something shaming.  I’m also really grateful for a husband who has supported me whole-heartedly, and parents & sisters whose first response was to tell me how glad they were that I sought out help.

 In all honesty, I have been thinking about talking to a counselor for about eighteen months.  I even made some calls last summer to various therapists and talked with my doctor about some anxiety medication or cyclical antidepressants that I could perhaps take on an as-needed basis.  She offered to write me a prescription but I ended up not filling it.  I’ve spent a lot of the past year and a half feeling like I was living in a black hole.  I've had trouble feeling comfort when I prayed for peace.  I felt like I was on the verge of tears about 60% of the time.  It was virtually impossible for me to keep my temper when my children misbehaved and I would cry hysterically when Neil was gone at night and I was all alone. Most days I would wake up and wonder how I was ever going to get out of bed and do everything that needed to be done, and the idea of getting up was so overwhelming that I would just lie there until I heard the children and knew that I really did have to get up.

After Nathan was born, things were so much worse that I knew I needed to stop self-medicating with running and schedules and B-vitamins and take a different approach.  I was starting to have panic attacks whenever something unexpected happened, even if it was something I’d dealt with a thousand times.  The point where I realized I really needed to find help was when I dropped a plate on the floor and stood staring at it unable to think of what my next action should be.  It wasn’t until Abigail knelt down and started cleaning up the mess that I knew I should be cleaning up too.

  Things have come together amazingly quickly—I was able to see a therapist the day after I first contacted her—and I am feeling much better already.  I know there is still going to be an adjustment period and things are going to take a while to completely normalize, but we are headed in the right direction.

 
One of the things I decided a few weeks ago was that I didn’t want my children to remember this summer as the summer that Mommy was sick and that dictated everything.  I don't mean to say that if someone is suffering from mental illness that it's completely possible to carry on as normal--that certainly isn't the case for me and I don't think it is for anyone else.  I'm fortunate, however, in that I do have a lot of good days or hours and if I plan very carefully we can take advantage of these.

My children do know what’s going on—I just told them that just as we would get medicine for an ear infection, I’m taking medicine to balance the chemicals in my body that control my moods—and we’ve created several systems for them that help me too.  One of the things that is most intimidating to me right now is having to make lots of choices.  So I’ve ramped up our typical summer plan that we’ve been following for the past 4 years and used our whiteboard to specify what’s happening every day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner plans, plus the day's major activity and the journal prompt).  This is helpful in that I have a visual record of what’s going on, and the kids also read it and keep me on task.  And speaking of being on task, I updated everyone’s craft-stick responsibility boxes, and so they’re self-directing in terms of their responsibilities and I can tell at a glance who has practiced their piano, made their bed, or done their summer math cards.  It’s really helping me to stay calmer.  I've found that it's very stressful for me if I'm trying to remember what needs to be done next by each child or to prioritize our day, so delegating those to the children is helping SO much. And, as always, if I can build in one activity a day where I feel like I'm being a really great mother, it takes away that constant worry that I'm inadequate and not giving enough quality time to my children.

As in previous years, we wrote a giant summer “bucket list” as a family and the kids and I made a bunch of lists of things to do for craft day, adventure day, and learning day.  We’ve been working down our lists and I think it’s going to be a good summer.