Confessions of a Starbucks addict

Today was my 15w2d appointment. Everything went well. The baby's heart tones are good, though I forgot to ask what the heart rate was. My OB has cleared me for the shoulder surgery that I need. She would like it to happen in the next month. The only caveat she had was that there needs to be an OB around before and after the surgery to monitor the baby. I will be seeing my perinatologist on Monday (I think) and will ask if he'll be around, or has someone he can recommend. The only reason my OB can't do it is because the surgery is going to be at Valley Medical instead of Highline. My OB doesn't have privileges at Valley.

My BGs have all been in the range that they want... less than 95 mg/dL fasting, and less than 120 mg/dL 2 hrs. post-prandial. I'm thinking my A1c is going to be in the low 5s this time around. :)

We talked a bit about this new progesterone shot that's out, that seems to help out with preventing preterm labor. My insurance covers it, so my OB wants me to do it. I'll be calling my "case manager" at UHC to let her know that my OB ok's the shot. Basically from 24w to 34w a nurse will come to my house and give me a shot once a week. My OB doesn't believe I'll need it, but because of the clotting issues that I have inherited, it's a good thing anyhow. Since my insurance happens to be one of the only who cover it, my OB says that it won't hurt so I might as well get it.

I am frustrated that no midwives will care for me here in WA. They're all scared of T1s. I'd really like to have a homebirth this time around...

Troy and I let our families know at Christmastime that we are expecting baby #6. The reception from my mother was less-than-enthusiastic, but gotta love my mother-in-law since you could hear her congratulations all the way from Denver!

Today I am 15 weeks and 2 days along. Due by my count on June 21st. The ultrasound at 6 weeks showed an EDD of June 26th. I'm counting by my date, but going with their EDD since that gives me a few extra days before the dreaded word "induction" passes my OB's lips. :) I've already seen a perinatologist to make sure that having diabetes isn't affecting this pregnancy (it's not, my A1c is stellar), and for an early ultrasound to determine the nuchal transparancy for an early risk assessment of Down's syndrome (NT was 1.3mm, so exactly perfect), and also to find out if being "advanced maternal age" is going to be a problem (it seems not to be). I have to say, I really wish that I could just transfer care to the perinatologist...he's awesome! He is going to tell my OB not to induce before 40 weeks, since he sees no problem with going to term, though he's leery of going over 40 weeks because of the possible placental degradation in T1 diabetics. So yay! Here's the most recent 12 week pic of the baby:



In other news, Tani switched to an Academy school, where the instruction is more catered toward the individual student and their success. For her this means a more focused artistic slant to her education, they bring in mentors to help the kids in their chosen profession, as well as help them with scholarship applications for the colleges they want to attend.

Chris is starting his first term of college next week, so it should be nice with him actually doing something for awhile. :) Kaycee and Shayna are already ready to go back to school... PJ is PJ. She loves to hang out with us all day.

I have an OB appointment later this morning, so I'll update after I get home. :)

I can't believe I've gone this long since my last post! Lots to catch up on, but no time to do it, so I'll just start anew today. :)

Today was Chris's High School Graduation ceremony. It was really nice. :) Of the three cameras I brought, two had batteries that died right before and during the ceremony. The video camera's batteries were good though, however I need a cable before I can upload those pictures. :( Luckily, my mom brought her camera with fully charged batteries.

Here are a couple of the pictures:


















Above L-R: Me, Chris, Shayna, Kaycee



The picture above is all of the kids, my mom, and me.

The ceremony was beautiful, the day was beautiful, the after party was fun! :D I'll blog that in a few days.

PJ got to ride on her first city bus the other day. She had a lot of fun!

Picture 1 is PJ waiting for our bus. Picture 2 is her running toward some flowers. Picture 3 is showing the pretty landscaping in front of the school, where the bus stop is located. Picture 4 is PJ on the bus.

We're going to do it all again today, since I'm taking the car to get its brakes done. The other day we were getting new tires on the car. I don't think we'll be doing the bus again, unless PJ wants to go back to IHOP, which is a couple miles away from the Firestone...

Patrick, Kyle, Josh, and Tani... right before heading out to Rocky!


















This is Josh. Tani helped him dress for the event!




















These two refused to dress up. On the left is Donald, Chris is on the right.















So Tani and Kyle like to dance. Who knew?!








So we're going again this weekend. To the Tacoma show. Donald's mom is going to join us, as well as Troy. Should be a good time!

If you know that line, then you know where I was at midnight! :D If you don't, well here's the explaination.

Some things just never change... and others do.I took Chris and Tani to RHPS...and one of Chris's friends, and three of Tani's friends. They were all virgins. Well, technically Chris wasn't a virgin, since I took him when he was 5 days old...but seriously does that count? I think not. So he was re-deflowered. :)

I'll tell ya, the AP lines up here (in WA) are way different than they were 15 years ago in CA. Some are the same...the standard ones, you know, Janet's still a slut, Brad's still and asshole, Chuckie still has no fucking neck, etc.

Then there are the fun, new (to me), lines that I learned. Like when Rocky flips the switches down at the start of the dance show... "Rocky flips red, Rocky flips blue, Rocky plays football at Wazoo!" (Wazoo is the nickname for Washington State University, which is the rival to Seattle's U-Dub, the University of Washington.)

The thing that I didn't like about the show this evening was that there was a guest cast from Tacoma. Don't get me wrong, their cast was great. The problem was that they brought their audience with them...and they have some really different lines than Seattle. So in some of the parts you really couldn't understand what anyone was saying. Another problem was that the theater plays the soundtrack for the movie *incredibly* loud. Half of the AP lines you couldn't hear because they were drowned out by the soundtrack. That sucked. I was really hoping to hear some new ones that I hadn't heard before, especially in places that I had forgotten the lines. Ah well... there's always next Saturday (in Tacoma, Seattle only performs once a month).

I let Tani tag along home with her friends for their after-party. I took Chris and Donald over to Safeway to get me some Excedrin (I'm really getting too old for this shit!), and then we went to Denny's. Back when I was their age, our after Rocky breakfasts were at Carrow's in Union City, but since there are no Carrow's up here...and hell I don't even know if there are any Carrow's in existence anymore...we decided Denny's was good enough. We made the wait staff laugh their asses off with the rude and obnoxious comments. Apparently I must be some kind of sinful parent allowing my children to talk they way they do (technically I am only the mother of one of the kids that was with me, the other was Donald - Chris's best friend...like OMG his BFF DYK! inside joke, you had to be there). After Donald and Chris played 13 over and over with the loser taking Tabasco shots, we left.

A fun night all around. I met another mom there, taking her 16 year-old step-daughter to be deflowered. She gave me her card and asked me to send some of the pics I took to her. :) Yes, I have some really raunchy pics of my dd and her bff's...

I'm going to bed now. It's only 5:45 AM. :P

It was a rough couple of weeks on me. Long story short, as of two weeks ago the high school wasn't going to allow Chris to graduate because they thought he was credit deficient. Grrr. After numerous calls to the old school district, the new district, the homeschooling people, I finally realized that maybe all the school needed was his homeschooling transcript and that might suffice.

I emailed back and forth with the principal, since the counselor wasn't much help... We made an appointment for this morning, I went in ready for battle. I have now learned that going directly to the top of the food chain is best. The principal looked at the transcript, accepted every credit on there, told the counselor to add everything to Chris's transcript, have Chris take an online 12th grade English (a 3 week task that he needs to meet grad. requirements), and he'll graduate! Woohoo!

Persistence pays off. I swear if the counselor had his way, Chris wouldn't be graduating this year, and that would just suck!

So my friend Christine stole this from someone, and I'm stealing it from her. :D What you do is Google your name and the word "needs" together. Here's my interesting commentary...

1. Rikki needs to repost with the EXACT error message if we are to better aid her/him.
I am always very specific with error message posts. Usually though I can find the error with Google, so I don't need to post on a board about an error I see... of course I rarely have errors, so I probably wouldn't need to do that anyway!

2. Rikki needs a hug.
Well sure, who doesn't? Seriously though, I do need one today after the crap I've gone through to make sure my son will graduate with his class this June!

3. Rikki needs a home.
Well, no I don't. I own a home. Though I do want to move, so if you find me a home with at least 5 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, at least 2500 sq. ft., and a fenced-in yard for less than $200k, I might consider it... The weather has to be exceptionally good wherever this house is, I'm tired of rain, snow, and sleet. Give me 70 degree weather year-round and I'm a happy camper. :)

4. Rikki needs help in the gardening then.
Aside from the bad grammar, I probably do need help in gardening. In fact I hate, loathe, and totally despise gardening. There is something to be said for being one with nature, but if it's my own yard, forget it. There are way too many wasps, hornets, bees, moles, squirrels, crane flies (piss ants, my daddy calls 'em!), and dirt in my yard. I'd be happy to cement in the entire place, but I think that might bring the property value down. It might also piss off my neighbors.

5. Rikki needs to quit living in such a deep-rooted state of denial.
Trust me on this, I'm not in denial about anything. Everything is on the surface here. Wait I thought of something! I know that I'm fat but my mind tells me I'm not. For some reason my mind thinks I'm still that skinny little gymnast that I once was. The scale says different. :P

6. Rikki needs to catch up in comments.
Hmm, that's quite accurate actually. I know that I haven't been the best at posting on DF lately. I rarely post comments on my friends' blogs. Sheesh, I'm a miserable person aren't I?

7.Rikki needs to stop eating at McDonalds.
Well actually, I have. When I started Weight Watchers, I quit McDonalds food. I still will stop by occasionally for an iced tea, but that's it. :D

8. Rikki needs to disappear and never come back.
OUCH! Reading further on that link, you will realize that the person was talking about a character on CSI:NY. Ha! I do think it would be fun to disappear for a few hours. I'd love to see if the kids even notice if I'm gone.

9. Rikki needs surgery to correct a very painful eye condition.
This, I know, is untrue. For me anyway. I may be needing a surgery for a possible rotator cuff injury though. Finding out this week...

10. Rikki needs to take responsibility for her actions and accept the blame for what she did.
Jeez! What did I do?!? I think I'm a pretty accountable person anyway. The only thing I can think of right now is that I probably not fighting hard enough with two school districts right now. I may end up caving and having to pay close to $1,000 to have my son repeat classes that he already made up while homeschooling. Grrrr...

Well, that was fun. I tried doing it with Aurica and only came up with three things. I guess it's not such a popular name...

Okay, so I haven't talked about it a lot in this blog. I've been losing weight. I joined a gym. I'm getting healthy after an entire year of inactivity... The one thing that I can't figure out is why my bgs drop like hotcakes while I'm exercising. I've turned my pump down with temp. basals, up to two hours ahead of time, still no luck. I've started just eating one or two Nature Valley Granola Bars, in the peanut butter flavor, on the drive to the gym...without bolusing. That seems to keep me pretty well for my sessions at the gym. I still drop, like crazy, but it's not 911-worthy.

The other day I went to the gym, had only one granola bar, ended up at 37mg/dL after only 20 minutes on a bike... now I started at 113, which is lower than I'd like to start exercising at, but it was better than nothing.

Because of this new phenomena I'm having, my doctor said she'd do whatever she could do get me on a CGMS. We immediately contacted Medtronic to inquire about the Paradigm system. They gathered my insurance info and three days later (okay 5 days because of the weekend), they called and said I was approved. They went over the payment schedule (since my stupid insurance changed last year and they cap DME at $2500 per year...eek!), and today I emailed all the forms back with Troy's (he's the primary insurance holder) and my signatures. The insurance person at Medtronic emailed me back saying that he just needed the script back from my doctor. Unfortunately that news was emailed to me after 5 this evening, so I emailed my doctor to ask if she'd faxed it back to them. I'm waiting to hear, but she's usually not in the office on Thursdays, so we'll see if I get a response before Friday...

So, a new pump to learn... and a CGMS to learn... I'm really hoping that I'm not stupid! :D

I was tagged by Overcompliance. Six Word Memoir Rules:

1. Write your own 6 word memoir.
2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you'd like.
3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag 5 more blogs with links.
5. And don't forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Hi Angie, if you're reading this you found me! I gave you the wrong blog addy though... the one you'll want to see is this one. :)

The rest of you readers out there...just ignore this post! Or don't, be nosy, like I'm sure that you are. :D Angie is my personal trainer. I met with her today to go over my fitness goals and new food plan/exercise plan. She wants to see my food journals. Now you nosy people are satisfied, you found out about Angie... life a little better now?!

I'm just getting over being sick. I hate being sick. God forgive me if I'm ever sick like I have been again... I just know that someone in my house will die if I do! :D Probably not Troy...probably one of the kids. Or maybe the cat. Stupid cat is in heat while I'm sick. See cat. See cat splattered on my wall from clawing my foot one too many times...

I'm just kidding. Or am I????

I can't stand living in Seattle anymore. I hate it here. I really have had this pounded into me the last few days. Today it's overcast and rainy. Yesterday started that way but got nice and sunny. The two days before were nice and sunny. Those two days I was really happy, ready to get up and out of the house. Yesterday, it started crappy, so I felt crappy all day. Today is a repeat of yesterday, feelings-wise. I hate the weather here. I don't know how people stand it. It sucks! Never, ever move to Seattle if you grew up in California. It'll mess with your mind, I swear.

It's been 7 weeks since I had my last Starbucks. I'm proud of myself over it. I felt myself slip a little today when Troy got a mocha for himself. I really craved one just then. I drank water instead of going out and getting myself one. Yay me! He has the points to get one, I don't, unless I don't want to eat food for lunch. I'm not stupid, I want lunch! :D

So I decided that since the kids have this week off of school (weird mid-winter break), I went and stole Tani away from the house and we road tripped it (Greyhound, leave the driving to them!) down to Portland, OR, yesterday. It was a great ride down, and getting around on Portland's transit system is really easy.

Today we're going to Oregon's biggest mall, Lloyd's Center Mall. It's supposed to be huge and have a ton of stores for anyone's tastes. I'm sure we'll have fun spending all of Troy's hard-earned money! :P We had Olive Garden for dinner last night...can you say, "Not on WW program!"?!? Oy, it was difficult to figure out what to eat, but I had a lot of the salad and mostly protein for dinner. The "Mixed Grill" they call it. It was skewers of steak and chicken. Half of the plate was steamed veggies. Yum! I ate half of the meat, none of the potatoes, a lot of the veggies too. I was stuffed!

A surprising coincidence, Tani's BFF is here in Portland this week, visiting her grandma. We're going to meet them at the mall today. It's just so funny. Tani didn't know we were coming here, and I had no idea that her BFF was here... It should be fun seeing how Ash acts when we're not around her "normal" life. :) I thought I'd take the girls to a movie too, so we'll see what her grandma says. It'll take us about 30 mins. to get to the mall from our hotel, the public transit here is great!

Tomorrow we're going to the Portland Diabetes Expo. Troy and I went to it last year and got a ton of freebie pens and a couple of pedometers. I'm hoping that Tani will grab a bunch of freebies for me too. :D

My son, my first-born baby, turned 18 today. I'm so proud of the man he's become. He's really pulled himself together in the last year, and he seems to be happy. He's got a nice girlfriend, he's in college (getting credit for high school and college through Running Start), he's got his head on straight.

Happy Birthday, Chris. I'm sad that you're 18 already. I miss cuddling you in my arms. Give your mom a hug occasionally, okay? <3

Now it's PJ's turn. She's got a fever, though not as high as Shay's was. She's also got aching ears. I'm sure I'll be taking her in to see her doctor tomorrow. I'm sure she'll be put on amoxicillin too. Poor thing is just miserable. :(

Troy and I have been trying to make her as comfortable as possible, but it seems she's fine for awhile and then gets upset when she remembers that her ears hurt. As long as a TV show is on that she likes, she's fine. She especially hates the early morning, she came into our room just bawling this morning. She quickly went back to sleep after snuggling in with me, but she didn't sleep too well. She napped a little on my lap this afternoon, didn't like it when I moved her, so I made sure to cuddle with her when I got back from the bathroom. :)

I'm hoping that after a day of abx she'll be fine. I'm going to try and get her an early appointment, after my physical therapy appointment preferably, since I already had to reschedule that appointment.

I can't wait for summer to begin! All this sickness in my house is really getting me angry.

Shayna's appointment was at 2:40 today. She saw a nurse practitioner instead of her doctor because the office was completely overwhelmed with kids.

After giving the history of her illness, I told the nurse that I was quite sure it was an ear infection, but it couldn't be a big one since she wasn't really playing with her ears, nor were they red. Boy was I wrong! The verdict, a double ear infection...and not just a mild, run-of-the-mill infection, no. This one is oozing fluid and very angry red in both ears. My poor baby. No wonder her temps never stayed down.

So, she's on twice a day amoxicillin for the next 10 days. I feel awful. :(

The nurse told me not to feel guilty. At least I wasn't her, she said. Once, her 15 year-old had double pneumonia for two weeks before she figured out that it wasn't just her daughter complaining about her asthma meds not working. I guess letting an ear infection go for a few days is okay... I did tell her that I really don't like giving antibiotics for ear infections since most of them go away on their own. She told me that the reason Shayna's fever hasn't gotten any better is probably because the infection is so bad. I asked if I let it go so long that her hearing could be compromised and she said no, that's a relief!

As for school, Shayna will be out tomorrow too. That's a total of 6 days out sick. Shayna's teacher sent her homework packets home with Kaycee today, so I'll get Shayna to do them over the weekend. She's been itching for something to do, so hopefully that will make her happy. (The kid loves homework, what can I say?)

As for everyone else in the family, we're all good. I still have a bit of sinus congestion from my bout of the cold and PJ is sniffling a little too. Hopefully this is the end of the rounds, yes I said *rounds* of illnesses that keep going around our little family.

My little Shayna is sick. She stayed home from school on Friday because of a severe cold. Her teacher told her to tell me (on Thursday) that she should probably stay home because of all the sneezing. I kept her home and she seemed fine. She played all weekend, I just kept dosing her with children's Robitussin for the awful coughing and runny nose she had. When Monday morning came, she really wasn't looking any better, so I kept her home again. That day she stayed on the couch all day and didn't really have an appetite. I figured she'd be fine the next day.

Boy was I wrong. I was awaken by Kaycee looking for the thermometer. Kaycee came back in and told me that Shayna's temp was 106 degrees. I quickly wake out of my twilight sleep and freak out. A few minutes later Troy checked her temp again and it was 103.9. Not 106 but almost 104. Not too much to worry about, but I knew that a fever meant she'd have to stay home.

I called in to the attendance office at her school and asked the attendance secretary to call me back. When we were in the Federal Way school district, if your child was out of school three or more days you had to take them to the doctor for a note. Apparently the attendance secretary wasn't up on the rules for the Kent district, so she said she thought it was five days. She and I worked it out that I wouldn't need to take Shayna to the doctor's unless she was going to be out another two days. She told me to keep Shayna home on Wednesday too, since the policy is that the child must be fever free for 24 hours before returning to school.

Today Shayna seemed fine all day. She got up and drew a little bit, she watched TV, ate a smidgen of food, and tried to force herself to drink water. We gave her unlimited sugar-free popsicle privileges. For most of the day her fever was gone. All of a sudden, it came back with a vengeance around 4 PM. Ugh...

I've decided to go ahead and take Shayna in to her doctor tomorrow. No amount of children's Tylenol or children's Motrin is keeping her fever at bay for more than a few hours at a time. I feel so badly for her. She looks miserable. She sleeps constantly. Poor thing. I worry about dehydration in her, so I've been trying to get her to sip some water at least once every half-hour, unless she's asleep. I'm hoping that this is just an ear infection or something equally simple. Unfortunately if it is an ear infection and she keeps her high fever, they still won't let her back into school...

Ah, kids...

It's been 4 days since I've had a mocha frap from Starbucks. I don't really miss them. How bizarre. I never thought I'd go more than a day without a mocha. Those were my passion, I couldn't go without them. My mom would be so proud. :)

Today is report card day in the Kent School District. This means that the kids get the day off so that the teachers can work all day on report cards. I just don't get this... I mean they have online grading, so you can go in and see what grades your child is getting throughout the semester, which means that the teachers pretty well keep up with their grade books. So, why do they need a whole day to do report cards? Some things just confound me.

It's a cold day in Washington today. It's snowing in the mountains, luckily not here in the valley areas. It's still cold though. 38 degrees today. I'd really like to have central heat in my house, unfortunately almost no one has central heat, unless you put it in yourself. We've got electric baseboard heat. People think that's so great because it costs less. I find that to be untrue. Our power bills during the winter are insane. I'm sitting next to a heater right now and I'm freezing. I hate Washington. Okay, I don't hate Washington, but I do hate the weather here. I guess I'll always be a California girl. I like warm, temperate weather. Not too cold, not too hot. If I could find somewhere that was 70 degrees year round, I'd be in Heaven!

Back to my addiction... I don't know if it's from not having mochas for the last four days or now, but my blood glucose has been so even and steady it's scary! On the new "lifestyle" I'm eating fruits and veggies, some complex carbs, etc. and wow my bgs are super! I'm waking up in the 70s and usually don't waver by more than 30 points in a day. I have had a few lows...54 yesterday. Ugh. I was so tired after that. I'm still trying to learn bolusing splits with the new foods. Seems to be around 27% up front and the rest over an hour or two, depending on what it is. An hour seems to be the best. I'm going to have to basal test though, since I am dropping overnight. I just don't like staying up all night for basal testing. :) Who does, really?

I'm thinking of taking the little girls to the "Bouncy Place" today. Their school's PTA is sponsoring the get together. Only 125 kids will be let in, so we may have to get there early. We'll see. It starts at 4:30 this afternoon and goes for a bit under 2 hours. They'll have a blast... I told Kaycee I wouldn't take her if she didn't help clean the front room. Nothing's been done in there yet, so I may end up going back on what I said and taking them anyway. I guess it will depend on how I feel around that time. :)

I lead quite a boring life, don't I?

I decided that I needed a new blog to keep track of my journey to "lifetime" weight loss. Please read it if you want to know all about how good, bad, and ugly my journey has started.

Of course, I will still be writing in this blog, since I'm prone to rambling about my life and the lives of my children. You really don't need to read that in my weight loss blog. :)

Click here to see the new place!

I have started to feel better. My lungs aren't attacking me nearly as much as a month ago. My doctor took me off of Atenolol, which is a beta-blocker, because the pulmonologist looked back over my history and decided that maybe, just maybe, the Atenolol was causing my shortness of breath. So, I decided to look into it. Did you know that Atenolol has a sulfa-derivative in it? Not many people do...nor do many doctors. Oh, and Cipro, that has sulfa too. By the way, I'm allergic to sulfa drugs. How nice. So I've been slowly poisoned for a year. Neat-o. Thanks.

Now, because of my year of inactivity, I've gained weight. A lot of weight. Not that I was skinny before last year, but I've never gained this much weight in a year, unless I was pregnant! I can't do a lot of exercise yet, as my lungs are still scarred, but I can reduce my intake, that's for sure.

I joined Weight Watchers. Troy joined with me. Our weigh-in/meeting day is Sunday. We allowed ourselves to eat whatever we wanted on Sunday, but we counted everything. Monday turned into a similar thing, though we tried being as low in Points as possible. For the week I'm -16 Flex points. Hey, I got really hungry after combing out Tani's hair for 8 hours... I did do pretty well yesterday though. Troy and I went to Denny's for lunch. I had a chef's salad and a bowl of veggie beef soup. Total Points for that was 14. I ate the soup first, with a couple of saltines crumbled and mixed in. When the salad came I dug in with gusto. I normally hate salads. I have to say, this was a really good salad. I didn't eat all of it, so was able to take the rest home and have it during a "resting" break while combing out Tani.

Today has been difficult. I've so far had 7 Points worth of food. 2 Lean Pockets (3 Points each), a WW Yogurt (1 Point), and an apple (1 Point). I had Troy buy some low-fat tortillas, ham, turkey, and fat free cream cheese when he was at the store today. I also had him get some salad makings and some fruit. It's weird going from excessively processed, overly messed with foods to raw, make-your-own foods. I'm lazy, I don't want to cook. This is going to be a struggle!

By the way, Weight Watchers is in no way low-carb. I thought that they might have some skew on the whole "low-carb" fad. Nope. Which makes my life doubly hard, since I have to count *all* carbs and input them into my insulin pump. This is also not helpful because a lot of the low fat items are really carb heavy. A normal diabetic should have about half of their insulin come from basal and the other half from bolus. So far, I'm changing to 1/3 to 2/3. Which doesn't help me in losing weight well, since insulin supposedly makes you gain weight. Ugh.

Isn't it funny how as you age you don't look forward to your birthday anymore? As much as I've told my kids to just forget that today is my birthday, I really would have liked at least one of them to remember that it is... The one time they listen to me. :)

My dad called me. He doesn't like people who drive and talk on their cell phones. He was driving when he called me. Silly guy...

My husband wished me a happy birthday and he got me a mocha and lunch. :D He got himself a mocha and lunch too... Good thing it's his birthday as well, otherwise I might feel cheated! Not. :D

I'm really testing to see when/if the kids remember my birthday. By the time they go to bed they had better say happy birthday to me or else they are scrubbing the toilets. :D

I used to be really smart. I used to have rather high-thinking jobs. In the last 10 years, I've not done a thing to keep up with the times. I'm a mom. I'm a stay-at-home-mom. What's worse is that I'm a stay-at-home-mom that literally stays at home. I don't go anywhere and I don't do anything. I stay. That's my life.

I've come to realize that I've really let technology pass me by. I used to be the person that everyone came to when they didn't know how to use some new program at work. I once taught an entire division (of a company I worked for) how to use PCs, since the company decided to migrate away from Macs. I knew how to use the entire MS Office suite. I knew Lotus inside and out. I kept up with stuff like that because I *had* to, or they'd find someone else to hire who knew more than me.

I guess I haven't totally let technology pass me by. I mean, I know how to use a DVR with the best of them. I know how do download mp3s and how to load them onto an mp3 player (never mind that I don't actually own an mp3 player, but my kids and my parents do). I can figure out a new cell phone within minutes of powering it on.

I once worked for IBM. This was back in the day, pre-MS Office, pre-OS/2 Warp. Heh, we were lucky if the computer we were given was actually a computer and not a terminal. Back then, when I first started there, I was unlucky and had a terminal. This wasn't so bad because for two weeks before actually starting work there, they put me in a class to learn Script. I learned two other programs while I was in that class, but Script is the one I used most. Script was what we used to type up simple letters and documents. Think of it as HTML for the MS-DOS generation. Scary! No, not really. It was just a ton of tags to put in front of your words. Make sure you close out the tags and your document will look fine. Like I said, it was HTML...sort of. It didn't have commands that didn't make sense.

My point is, I knew Script. It was coding for secretaries. Years later I moved beyond being *just* a secretary. I kept up with the times. MS Word made my life much easier. Give me a GUI over anything else, thanks.

When I left the workforce, I was working for Visa. I was in the international fraud department. I helped track perpetrators of fraud. I also helped everyone in the department with their computer issues, because I knew how to fix them, and I did it quickly and efficiently.

Then I became a stay-at-home-mom. I used to keep current with the new releases of MS Office, only because my husband's company used to buy the Developer's Suite from Microsoft, and he got one of the licenses. I used to get all the new MS stuff. The last MS Office I had was 2003. It's just too expensive to buy anymore.

All of this stagnation became quite obvious when I was trying to "freshen up" my blog by changing its template. I wanted to find something that someone else had done, tweak a few things, and have a nice, new, pretty page. This did not work out so well. What the heck is CSS? Who decided that HTML wasn't enough? Why would someone make it so that I cannot resize the column widths by making the header have part of the columns start in the header? Who decided to make my life difficult?

I'm sitting here, pondering going to the community college to learn all this *new* stuff. I know, CSS has been around awhile...but I didn't pay attention. I'm thinking that I'm about 10 years behind everyone because I've been at home. I haven't been a tax-paying member of society for that long (in case you're worried, I don't pay taxes but my husband sure does!) I'm almost afraid to admit that I have become exactly like my parents, calling on my husband to figure things out for me because I just don't get it anymore.

Do I really need all this stress over a blog?

So back at the beginning of December, I posted about the consequences of taking a D break, saying that I was going to ask my doctor to order an A1c. I did just that...asked. Then, I put it off...for quite awhile. Instead of just fasting that night and going in the next morning, no I decided to wait a little bit. See if I could fake my A1c into a good number. Note to self: this concept does not work. Well, it may work a bit, but I don't think the A1c test at my doctor's office weighs the previous 12 weeks differently than anyone else's A1c test.

So I finally bit the bullet and fasted (I actually had to get my lipid panel done as well, since you may be scratching your head as to why I needed to fast for an A1c), and went in last Friday for the blood draw. She emailed me my results today.

6.3! How did I manage that? No, I'm not in the 5s, but I'll take low 6s to be sure. Honestly I was expecting near 8 or 9 with as many highs as I've been having. And come on, I mean this was after our Christmas feast...just 3 days after.

My meter had no where near that average. I think it's time to get a new meter. Or maybe my doctor needs to get a new A1c machine... Until then, I'll work a little harder at testing and matching my boluses.

So it's 12:43 AM, January 1, 2008. I missed the time changing from 2007 to 2008. I was in the shower. It's cold here and I needed to warm up.

Sad. Really sad.

No party, no champagne. I live such a boring life. A couple of my kids are spending the night at a friend's house...they came over to wish us a happy new year. I was in the shower. They didn't say it to me. I'm glad. They would have walked in on a horrible sight... Probably would have ruined their whole year! :D

Happy New Year!