feeling good

It's been a fairly low-key week. Greg, Eamon and Sarah have had horrible coughs for 5 weeks? Ugh. This Wednesday Sarah had a sore throat, "burning eyes", and generally felt icky. She stayed home from school. Then again Thursday and today. Poor kid. her cough is terrible and so whoopy, croupy. The way she always gets when sick. Like she's been smoking stout stoagies for 40 years. Eamon seems to be on the mend, Greg is feeling better but with the terrible cough.
I've been surprisingly fine through all of this. Yesterday and today I finally felt a little stuffy headed and achey, but I'm warding it off with Emergen'C, drinking lots of fluids and really trying to avoid sugar.
My NARM exam was postponed yet again due to no baby model. We've agreed to wait til my December client has her baby before we schedule again. We won't be using my client's baby. The evaluating midwife has offered to find both mom and baby models for me since she's 3.5 hours away.

We dyed Sarah's hair with pink stripes last Sunday. It looks super cute. She has this great head of thick hair that just lays so nicely. Don't know who she gets it from. She's like a Breck Girl from the 70s, shaking her mane lusciously.

I made an appointment to be seen by our new naturopathic MD that Greg's been seeing. Greg is the biggest cynic and unlike me, gives very few people the benefit of the doubt (which makes a good balance between the two of us on most days). At any rate, I tested this doctor out on Greg, and got the thumb's up that he's a cool guy.
I feel like my blood sugar is going crazy. I know I have a history of it crashing and getting light headed, blacking out, etc. but it's not happened in a really long time. Lately, even when eating well, I get a headache about an or two after eating. I see light around people's bodies when I look at them. I get super cranky if I haven't eaten in a while (and granted, I always leave it too long~ but there's a part of me that is so reluctant to be the type to carry baggies of nuts in my purse!). I get the shakes and generally feel like shit 2 hours after I've eaten anything. I feel like I could sleep after every meal. I feel like I'm much older than I am! Like 50 years older than what I am!
Speaking of, I'm really loving my senior clients. I'm appreciating life in general so much more. They are truly amazing. There are times when I can't help thinking terrible things like: Why are you saving all this crap? Why are you clipping all these useless articles and catalogueing them? Why are you putting off moving into assisted living for another 2 years when you are 86? Why NOT? I'm so inspired by my clients basic feistiness and desire to live every single day. They savor every minute it seems, and so they should. It is SO refreshing to witness and have as a reminder to slow down and enjoy my life.
This year has been a year of heavy processing, of coming down from the ceiling (like a cat with it claws stuck upside down) of pressure and anxiety that was my apprenticeship. And although I love and have a lot of respect for the women who trained me, no one could have prepared me for the sorry to say it, but, fucked up dynamic between preceptor and apprentice. It's somewhere between mother/teenage daughter and therapist/patient and other crazy roles to be sure. I've talked to other midwives, other apprentices and many admit their frustrations. It's so hard because the work we do is so intimate, yet there's this air of secrecy, of hardcore confidentiality that makes it hard to define the proper boundaries we should keep. And then the general business of our lives makes it terribly hard to process with each other. My apprenticeship was all full-steam-ahead, and I am so done with that model of living.
My kids and my husband suffered from it, while being graciously supportive. It is so nice to have time be my own, my clients be my own.
And I am so fortunate to have found this side job of senior companionship/errand woman. I'm working with great people who have done amazing things in their life and continue to do so at 80, 86 and so on.

I think my very nature is to glom onto GOGOGO! It's like an addiction of sorts and would have to be to be on-call, I think. Maybe not. I guess I'm just saying I'm happy to have some balance in my life after 5 years of pushing for things to GO!

It's a struggle for me to make myself drink my tea while it is hot. To watch a movie with the kids without folding two loads of laundry, making a phone call, and cleaning up the toys.
Talk about sitting on your hands!

Okay, enough reflection and so on: a vagina update.
The orange construction barrels are gone from my thighs (I felt like I was in this nothing-per-vagina state for 2 weeks). The post sex, post Halloween yeast issues have been resolved. I experienced my first post-IUD period. The cramping was so minor (but I usually have none anyway). The bleeding was heavy on days 3-4 and went away on day 6 or 7. Definitely more clotty, but didn't feel like I needed to do much different.
So I am happy to report that I feel really good about this IUD decision. The best part being that I can have unprotected sex when I'm ovulating and want to have sex, without worrying. That's the downside to working with your fertility signs and ovulation, right? When you most want to have sex, it's not a safe time to do so (if your plan is not to become pregnant, of course). Now, it's all systems go! And what a huge relief. It's amazing how feeling protected takes away so much strain and tension revolving around our sex life. And I didn't feel like there was any tension there in the first place. Now that it's gone, I think we're both way more relaxed.
Good stuff.

Okay, I should go. I realized that I somehow forgot to pay our car insurance, oh, NINE DAYS AGO. And here it is almost midnight on a Friday. Hopefully I can pay online or by phone, now.