Initially she’d gone into hiding because she didn’t want to be around the munchkin; paranoid as she was about hurting him in some way. She re-surfaced just after we went into therapy in 2008 because Elsie had asked to talk to her and suggested that she make an effort to get to know the munchkin and find out what a wonderful little boy he is. She did that, and she hung around for a few days but she found it difficult to adjusting to life, not only had she missed, for the most part, his first year and a half of life, but we were in a completely different house than she was used to and a completely different body, for that matter, having gained 40lbs while pregnant and not lost any of it, and in fact, fluxing between pregnancy weight and about 10lbs over it. So, it was hard for her. None of her clothes fit. She didn’t feel comfortable physically, and while the rest of us don’t entirely feel comfortable physically we’d at least adjusted to it. For her, she disappeared when we were around 200lbs and came back to us being almost 250lbs. She tried to work out, exercise, do yard work, but in the end she got frustrated by the fact that she was essentially battling the rest of us who had become a bit apathetic to the whole situation, so she challenged us to rectify it, got a plan from our GP, and said she’d come back out once we’d lost some of the weight.

Well, that did and didn’t happen. We’d gotten back down to around 238 when the zombie months hit and the weight came back. We’ve struggled and waffled since then, I’ll admit, starting programs, attempting to cut out soda and things and falling off the wagon more often than not. The other day I weighed and we were 255. Kiddy threw a fit.

We had some discussions the night before about the way things were going and she pointed out that she was done. We’d failed our promise to fix things and apparently a good chunk of that was either lacking willpower, or refusing to act on said willpower (all internal eyes point to Max). So, she said she would come back and that would mean we would HAVE to do something about it. She made some intimations that she could and would be a worse Drill Sargent than Terri ever was. I know Kiddy is often credited as being our “inner bitch” and she comes across as very brash, and at least one of our friends expressed concern about this attitude. However, we do have a cooperative agreement on this factor.

The fact of the matter is we have failed in all our efforts. It’s practically a year ago now that we had spoken to Dr. A about “fixing our body” for our own benefit and continued good health, and in that time overall we’ve gained 6lbs from what our weight was at that time. Our first “going to lose the baby weight” attempt when we were still living at the former apartment. That diet started at 239!! and where are we now? As of this morning weighing in on the Wii 252lbs, which is at least down from last week (we hadn’t done the Wii in 5 days when we signed on this morning). As a side note peak of pregnancy weight was either 246 or 247.

This is BAD. It’s no wonder we have trouble sleeping and feel winded after only a short amount of exercise or walking. Not only are we battling the pain and the fibro, but we have excess strain on our body from all this extra flab. It is absolutely ridiculous, I agree with that assessment. I just tend to flail and waver. I know I do. It’s hard to rectify those patterns, and as much as I claim to have more of a backbone than Ami did I still, well, I eat as though I did more exercise than I do, or I neglect to eat at all, which is equally bad.

So, we have a plan of attack. Kiddy picked up some SlimFast shakes yesterday at the store, and for the first week we’re going to have one of those for breakfast and a few snacks. We’re not going to cut out carbs entirely this first week but we’ve agreed to have less of them than we normally do. Carbs are a HUGE thing with us. There’s some sort of compulsive freak out if we don’t have potatoes when we do the brunch thing and so on, which wouldn’t be so bad if we then didn’t make said brunch into a sandwich. So, if we’re going to have potatoes we either put it in a wrap or we have nothing with it. We reduce the amount we have 2 wraps only, not 3 or 4. No extra potatoes past the original serving. Things like that. Fruit for snacks. We have a huge water melon to work on which will help with that this week, and we can start getting apples and yoghurt again. If we make something like pasta with supper for everyone else only have half a serving.

These are the common sense things we’ve been attempting to stick with so far, and failing miserably at. More salads would be a good thing too, or other vegetables aside from potatoes such as carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, all of which we like.

In added good things, as of right now there is no soda in the house that we can drink. It’s all Cherry Coke Zero and Pepsi, so there’s no worries on reneging with that one. Water and tea it will be for the rest of the day. Mrgh further caffeine detox.

One of our friends brought over a paraffin wax bath the other day. The idea is that you heat up the wax along with some citrus oil and dunk your hands into it and then once the wax dries peel it off your skin and leave your skin soft and supple. You can also put it on your feet and it’ll help to slough the dead skin off along with the wax. The wax melts but isn’t supposed to be that hot. My friends were dunking their hands in and out of the wax no problem; but I put my hand in and it felt like my skin was going to melt off. Logically I knew it was fine; however I wasn’t able to submerge more than the tips of my fingers.

True it’s a matter of knowing your limits, so I stopped playing with the wax and went back to making ice cream. Often times cold causes me issues as well. Joy temperature sensitivity.

I woke up to munchkin demanding I get out of bed and get dressed, always a fun way to start the morning especially when it was one of those where even opening your eyes hurts. I limped to the bathroom, saw my hair looked like squirrels and rats had been having a fight for territory in it during the night and attempted to brush my hair, moving my arm up to my head hurt, brushing my hair sent little flames across my scalp.

Today is going to be immensely awful, I thought. Please let munchkin be in a happy, playful mood.

I slowly put on pants and hobbled out to the main house to find my dear, darling son had waited until this precise moment to thrust an empty drink cup in my face, “I want water.”

“Well, I said, you know where the fridge tap is.”

“No!” he said, “YOU HAVE TO DO IT!”

“Mommy isn’t feeling well right now. Please get your own drink?”

“NO!!!” he closed his eyes with a cocky look on his face, thrust the cup at me.

“Munchkin,” I said, with epic restraint, “Either get yourself water or go thirsty. Mommy is not in the mood for this right now.”

He elected to throw the cup on the floor and tromp off towards the living room.

“Fine,” I said, “You can’t have been that thirsty.”

And sat in a chair in the dining area for a while. After about five minutes he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere and went and got himself a drink; and accepted reheated leftovers from yesterday’s lunch for his breakfast. We had the more usual whining about not being allowed to play on the Wii first thing and then the day progressed with Mum taking us to get my car’s tires fixed and movement getting a little easier.

The flare up can be attributed to several things, the wonderful arrival of my lovely visitor, not sleeping properly for a few days due to several of us being amped up and freaked out about the house being shifted around to accommodate furniture moving down from the loft which is going to become a friend’s bedroom rather than hubbie’s man room, and doing a lot of physical labor such as threading a cable down from said room to the bottom of the stairs and tacking it to the wall in various places so that we can more easily access the router and modem and also give said friend two sockets in his room.

Now the heavy furniture such as couch and entertainment center I’ve not touched, but I have moved several small DVD racks and helped push around a couple of small bookcases and earlier in the week I moved my dresser from one side of the bedroom to the other, which while it didn’t seem so difficult being on wheels on tile floor…probably didn’t help. I’ve also been pushing myself to do these things because the sooner they get done the sooner everything in the house is in one spot and we can start getting adjusted to the new set-up.

On the upside a lot of these things make the house more functional. Certain things got set up and then left because change is difficult for us to deal with at the best of times.

But the pain I could do without. This morning is a little easier. I was actually able to get up, or at least sit up and start to get out of bed before things really started to ache, and then I decided I would take a shower in the hopes that would help and it has to a point. I can clearly actually type longer than a twitter update or three. I’ll be able to do the tarot card of the day updates; and we can look to the three card draws for Ostara & Easter that we’d been talking about doing.

One of the fun things I woke up to was a new kind of pain chart which I think is awesome, and really gets the point across for people better than just trying to extrapolate a number. I’ve had doctors ask me this before. I remember when I was at the ER after I fell and it turns out I had fractured my elbow and sprained my wrist, and the intake person was asking me how the pain was on a scale of 1-10 and I’m going, “Ummmm…what?” and he repeated the question and I was a bit, “Well, I guess it’s a four or a five?? I don’t know it doesn’t hurt much worse than what I deal with normally it’s just all in my arm and not all over…” then they took a few x-rays and left me alone for three hours by which point I was curled up in a ball praying to the Gods that it be over soon while I cried my eyes out, and they come back with, “Um…well, we don’t know what’s wrong with your elbow but your wrist is sprained and all we can give you is a couple of Tylenol because you’re pregnant…” may as well have given me skittles.

Anyway, based on the new spiffy pain chart yesterday was a solid 8 and escalated towards a 9 any time I tried to do something like lift a drink of water to my mouth or take something out of the fridge. It had calmed down to about a 5 to 6 when I did anything by the afternoon. This morning I woke up between 3 and 4, though right now thanks to the wonders of modern plumbing it’s calming down to a solid 3 and it’s mostly in my arms and elbows.

We’ve been working little by little with the ‘room of requirement’ last night we had what amounted to a ‘town meeting’. Each of us ‘alters’ took our place in the room and we had a sort of round table discussion about various things that have been going on, ways we can work together, ways we can continue to facilitate doing things from day to day.

We have to get back on the ‘exercise’ kick. I say ‘exercise’ because most people would consider it doing things normally from day to day. I’m not going to be going out for jogs or running marathons. I can’t. I have to work up to that and it may take several months for me to even be able to jog to the end of our street, let alone sprint, but I will, we want to be able to.

Max was in a ‘rare’ introspective mood about things and admitted that he also needs to take responsibility for actions, for food intake, for sweet intake in particular and wise up. This is not his body to abuse this is OUR body to take care of and we each have a right to have a working body and considering that we’re time-sharing it we have to really manage our time and our resources more so because the body is ‘defective’ much like our poor battered car.

I would love to just get into Gemma and drive her out to Daytona to show munchkin the beach every week or go to St. Augustine take the ghost tours as often as it takes to actually see the ghosts but she’s old and battered and beaten up and so we have to content ourselves with going down to the highway to go to the playpark and have fun there so that she’ll still be right to run on those special occasions when we can all go up to take a ghost tour or go out to the zoo or something else like that.

So, our body is like my car, we have to baby it right now so that we can get it right. Much like we have to put the right fuel and additives and everything else into the car so that her fuel injectors stay clean and she doesn’t choke and die, we have to stop putting all sorts or processed, sugary crap into ourselves, stick to our guns on removing the caffeine from our diet, cut down on portions, and amp up the energy. We’re getting better from the bronchitis now so we don’t want to push things, but it shouldn’t be too hard to start getting up and doing stretches in the morning, gentle stretches that help us ease out the kinks that we usually have because of the fibro and walk, to get out of the house, to build things up slowly so that we can start painting the house again; all those things.

We also need to stop looking at days we don’t walk as failure days, unless we literally don’t do anything else that day. If we’re going to be going to the store or doing other things then those take the place of walking. It’s another bout of spoon theory. Once we’re having a more consistent energy level because we’re carrying around 180lbs instead of almost 250lbs then we should be able to walk, run, jog and do the store things to, but right now we need to focus on having less on our frame so that we can be healthier overall.

I got a three page letter from someone telling me how chiropractors were a total crock and I should stop going RIGHT NOW or do myself irreparable damage. I wrote back and told her that I appreciated her concern but that I was doing fine and why I was doing fine; but nothing in return. I suppose, what can they say? They’re wrong. The messages apparently come from concern, however the simple fact remains that if you’re not in a person’s specific health situation you can’t actually say what is best for them.

Treatments that work for arthritis do not work for fibro because fibro makes you so temperature sensitive, and also fibro affects your muscles and not your joints.

Musculature is an issue because of the fibromyalgia. Excessive strain on my muscles becomes worse for me because my body is unable to repair damaged muscle tissue as quickly as others might, so I have to be very careful and slow when it comes to exercising like that because those microscopic tears that everyone experiences when they move around from day to day and exercise do not heal and just get worse if I don’t get enough sleep, which I often don’t.

However I realize that there are other psychological issues which impede me on the weight frontier. On the basic level it’s hard to stick to a diet, it’s even harder for nine people to stick to a diet and that’s often been a chunk of my issue, if there’s just one of us alters who is not on board for the weight program it falls apart. It just takes one of us, and often times this has been Max, to go “OOOH CHOCOLATE! NOM-NOM-NOM!” and eat an entire bar or box, or make his super White Russians with kahlua and chocolate syrup as well as milk and vodka, and then there’s a general dissent because it’s “Oh, well he had candy, why can’t I?” and so on until it devolves and we’re back to snacking on junk food and being lazy about things.

Additionally I came to the conclusion that on some level there’s a desire to be unattractive. My step-father was very into thin women, and would harp on my mother to a greater extent but also me about weight. I know when I was pregnant he was very displeased that I was getting fat, and kept insisting that I should diet, even though in many ways I was eating much healthier while I was pregnant than I had before as it was important to me to make sure the future munchkin was not addicted to caffeine or born unhealthy due to something I ate or exposed him to. I stopped bleaching and dyeing my hair even, refused additional x-rays when I fractured my elbow. I didn’t eat sushi or rare meat. I didn’t drink. Max was very silent during most of the pregnancy, actually. These are things that most mothers-to-be do. They allow themselves small treats, but generally they cut back. I ate more fruit than I ever have while I was pregnant, no wonder the munchkin is such a fruit bat.

However, my condition was extremely distressing to him; and he would tell random people when we were out how displeased he was and how disgusted he was about my weight. Most people looked at him like he was off his nut. Anyway, my point is that I wonder if this has stuck with me on some level, and I’ve subconsciously not been giving weight loss my all because it makes me unattractive to him, and therefore if I do run into him again there’s less likely to be those comments about my butt or my breasts that he was so fond of, or the attempts to touch said areas, and the squeezes and the kisses. As it is I haven’t seen him since I stopped working at the gas station, and even there he had not shown up since Christmas because hubbie Had Words with him.

Though I realized this past week, that this is still giving him power over me. My fear of him is still on some level ruling my existence, and so I should stop. He does not need that power. He does not deserve that power. I deserve to, as I’ve said before, become healthy for me, and to lose weight to help me, to help there be less strain on those muscles, to help me sleep better, to have more energy and to be there for my family, to be able to run around with my son for more than five or ten minutes at a time. All those things. For that I should be healthy.

I’ve been having issues with my health at work, again. I spoke about the fact that I pulled out my shoulders and was having flare-ups. Despite the fact that the chiropractor sorted out my shoulder I was still having problems with the strain on my body. For the past few weeks, Kore and my husband have been concerned about the strain I was under, and my husband had spoken to me a couple of times about turning in my notice.

Last week both he and I and Kore and I had long talks about the problems I was having and the earnings versus cost and I was leaning towards the fact that it was not worth it, but Sunday cemented that for me. I worked a short shift on Friday and was very sore all through Saturday. Then I worked a full shift on Sunday and by noon I was in a lot of pain. I was trying to put that on a combination of things, fighting off a cold, it being “that time of the month” but the fact remains that by the time I got home I was in so much pain I went to bed, and was pretty worthless for three hours. I drug myself out of bed purely because I knew that I needed to eat, and I was fairly out of it for the rest of the evening.

So, that cemented it for me. This can’t go on. I psyched myself up to go talk to my boss on Monday forgetting that her standard days off are Sunday and Monday. Boss rarely answers her phone when she’s not at work, and doesn’t seem to get voice mail messages, and I didn’t want to leave her a note or write her an email, because that’s very impersonal and also she has issues sometimes with other people at the job reading her messages, so I didn’t want to risk her finding out from someone else before me. I was able to talk to her yesterday and she was very understanding. I told her straight out that I was going to have to turn in my notice and when she asked why I explained that I was having flare-ups again and I didn’t want to be calling in sick when I was only scheduled for a few shifts a week, and she said she appreciated that because the type of job that I was working it’s hard to get someone else to come in if you can’t work your shifts, it’s easier to not schedule me at all.

When I called today to check on my schedule I hadn’t been scheduled, which I had anticipated from the way my boss was talking when I explained things to her. She said she wants me to be able to be well, and once I am if I don’t have another job she’ll have a place to me. I wanted to check though because I didn’t want to assume that she wasn’t taking into account the two weeks notice.

But as of this week I’m free of the store, and just that relief of stress makes me feel a lot better. I dislike I don’t have anything on record though. This was just personal realization, not anything mitigated by a doctor’s stipulation. So, I don’t know what that’s going to mean with regards the disability claim. However it is something that I’ve had to do. I can’t go on losing one to two days worth of my home life for eight to fourteen hours of work.

Other than that my shoulders were really messed up which I was having a hard time sorting out at first, what could I have done to my shoulders? I didn’t mess those up jogging; but they were obviously messed up when he first tried to adjust my shoulders I cried out and I could feel the tears welling up they were so sore and out of joint. After a few moments he managed to pop my shoulders and the relief was immense. He said to me he figured I’d have to have been having some spasms and issues like that, which I have. It’s been several nights I’ve been twitchy, in particular last night where I went to bed early and slept from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. when the munchkin came in and then again with the munchkin from 5:30 a.m. until 9 a.m. when I woke up and then remembered I had to go to the chiropractor, and I’m really glad that I did.

I go again in February. I’m on once a month visits now, unless something messes up. Though I did work out on the way home what I did to my shoulders. Around New Years at work I was asked to help change the gas prices on the sign. This involves using a six foot metal pole to hit the sign and yank down the incorrect numbers and then swing the numbers back up on to the sign and slide them into place. It was tough work and on a very cold day, but it involved a lot of stretching and swinging of a very heavy pole.

So, I’m definitely not going to be doing that any more. The new plan is to start walking every other day, or perhaps even every day again, until I can walk at a brisk pace for 20-30 minutes without getting winded then I can perhaps start the Couch to 5K but doing half of the time, doing the jogging/walking for 10 minutes and walking the rest of the time, until I can handle that and then actually starting the work outs themselves. So, we’ll get there, we will. We have the drive and the need, we just have to do it the way the body will allow. So, we don’t punish ourselves any more.

Current measurable tally is that we’ve thrown out 5 garabage bags worth of stuff that was un-Freecycleable (broken, missing parts, expired, extremely nasty) and gone through 4 paper towel rolls, but this is good, because it’s giving us more space, and we’re taking back the house.

I was telling Kore we didn’t clean this thoroughly when we moved in, but then we moved in very quickly. We had only a few days to get out of the apartment given we signed the paperwork on the 21st, and only had the UHaul for the 22nd and had to be out of the apartment by the 31st.

Anyway, here’s our before and after pictures. I figure publicly logging this will be a triple encouragement for us to not let things get this bad again. We’re also going to write up a list of chores and what has to be done how often to help everyone in the house keep track of things they can be doing to keep the house in order

Main bathroom before

Master bathroom before

It took us three hours to get them both cleaned and it was pretty darn gross in some spots given certain areas hadn’t been cleaned properly after the toilet got blocked up.

Main bathroom — Reveal

Master bathroom — Reveal

We picked up new toilet brushes for each bathroom and new trash cans too, and given everyone has a problem with the way the trash cans were going Kore added a helpful note to them so that we’ll hopefully remember to put trash bags in them which will prevent them getting so grody and make them easier to change on trash day.

After we get everything cleaned up there will only be the cosmetic things which need to be done to the house from now on. We need to get the floor tiles replaced in the bathroom and the hallway and finish the exterior and interior painting that we need to do. We have all the paint already it’s just a matter of getting things done. That will be a less intensive thing done a little bit a time though. I’m so incredibly achy and sore all over this morning and was most of yesterday too. I can see I’m going to be taking some of my “horse” pain pills today. They got that nickname because they’re 800mg and they’re HUGE.

Anyway, I really need to get on. I have to get a quick breakfast and then knock on Kore’s door so that we can get going with the days’ work load. I work tomorrow but hubbie is off and has promised to pull out the refrigerator and clean behind it and help Kore with the rest of the living room that we don’t get to today. He also has his loft that is his to deal with entirely.

Last night we watched an episode of “Hoarders” to make sure we kept motivated to get things cleaned up. It really did help. I may have to put another one on while I make breakfast.

Anyway, the office I found after driving past and coming in through the back, despite my GPS sending me all around creation to get there. I was greeted by, as it turned out my future lawyer’s assistant. There are two lawyers who work out of the office and each of them has their own assistant. She gave me paperwork to fill out and warned me there was an appointment before me still filling out theirs. However, given I finished first the lawyer took me before them and we went through things.

Given the nerves I kept rambling about things and he had to keep stopping me so that he could take notes, and apologized for cutting me off a few times when I was going off topic but he was figuring that the previous appointment would finish up and was trying to streamline. Part way into my medical history he pegged who I was from the phone he’d been trying to remember and was able to fill back in several of the things I’d missed or not been sure about on the form with my information and what he remembered.

He then appraised me of the situation as it is with the legal system and the government. He said until he got medical information he wasn’t sure if the fact I’m working part time will help or hinder me. He said depending on the judge if the claim gets to hearing level some of them are more receptive if you’re at least trying to work and doing all that you can and others aren’t. That with the legal help the people who receive benefits after an appeal goes from 6% to around 16%, which still isn’t that great, but that only 40% of people that they work with are denied at hearing. So, that’s something.

His retention fee is only $50 so I paid that and then he gets 25% of back pay upon winning the case. So, we’ll see what happens. While I was there I filled out the appeal paperwork that they had, and signed the other forms that they’ll fill out and then send to the government. I’ll get copies of everything, then we have to wait and see.

He did warn me that if it has to go to hearing, Florida tends to have at least a year wait for hearing, but given financial hardship they can appeal that and get us bumped up if it goes that far; which I anticipate it will because I was denied last time. Things have changed a bit since then in that I have been working, and I have a chiropractor, but he said the SSI department tends to not really care about what a chiropractor has to say considering them not “real doctors” which…well, that’s silly to me, but there you go.

On the one hand my lack of sleep and the wandering child alter that have been going on every other day this past week actually work to my advantage on that one. Doesn’t make me feel any better about it, but there you go.