a day for doctors

that day is tomorrow; the day of the doctors. here is what tomorrow is shaping up to be:

8:00 -- adeline's sick visit (at her usual ped) if she still has a fever in the morning
10:45 -- adeline's hearing test in dublin
2:30 -- my mri at osu hospital
3:45 -- my mri follow up with dr katz on osu campus medical building

thankfully, my mom will be here to take care of whoever is home. i think i am a bit nervous about the mri b/c what if they do find something wrong & here i am expecting everything to be okay & normal? or what if addy's hearing test results are not good?

yes, i am trying very hard lately to stop being so darn pessimistic!

& we have a sick sick toddler right now who is refusing a nap but is exhausted & a recently healthy baby who just wants to play & is starting to crawl backwards consistently (crawling backwards really upsets her, btw...she gets so mad that she is going further away from the desire object instead of closer. she is so close to crawling!). & i still can NOT find curtains to match or even semi coordinate with our new bed spread. oh, the important things in life, eh?! but, hey, i've been waiting a long 6 years to have a bedroom that looks halfway decent (you know, the paint isn't chipping or something in the room actually goes with other stuff). creating harmony, that's what we're after. but searching for specific bed room items does not create harmony in my mind. at least so far it's pretty much pissed me off. lol.


life with kids...
it seems wes & i are both hit right now with dripping exhaustion. this winter has been draining... it seems once one person is recovering from an illness, the next person gets it (or something new, or something recurring, or...). most of our extra energy & focus has been directed towards our kids, which is sorta how parenting is, right? but there is that 'marriage' part of the equation that gets put on the back burner. we miss the time to just throw stories back & forth & laugh at/with each other & finding things to argue about that isn't the fault of the other person (like politics, or which flooring we are dreaming of putting in). this past winter just floated by for us...we were surviving, eeking by with week immune systems & tired eyes & bodies & sort of just grunting hellos & goodbyes. & it has been discovered tonight, after an evening of discussing why we feel distant from each other, that we miss each other; we miss our close friendship & our god blessed healthy marriage. not to say that god isn't continuing to bless us...but if we hardly have time to talk to a human, it's fair to say we hardly find the time to talk to god, either.

so we obviously!!! need to get out more, have time away from the house without the girls in tow. this seems insurmountable, though! many hurdles...find a babysitter we trust, set aside enough money to truly be able to afford to go out, find something to do (in columbus, that seems to be difficult...it was easy in boise: take a hike!). & there are so many other barriers.

any ideas? help...

so yes, it has been decided tonight that we NEED to find a reliable babysitter. we've received several names from friends & neighbors but when we call, either the babysitter doesn't call back or they call back a week later...which leads me to believe they are overbooked or just don't care (either one made me give them the axe before we even hired them!). plus, hiring a sitter for 1 kid is easy; hiring 1 sitter for 2 kids is not. ya know, wes & i can barely get the job done by ourselves sometimes! (there is that fact of teenagers having more energy, however) so we also have to figure in competence to care for two kids & get them to bed. & do you know how much a sitter costs, anyway!?! my cousin who is a sitter says $10 an hour...that leaves mcdonald's as the dinner out of choice for wes & i, ya know!

then there's also the end of the day. watch tv or hang out? communicate or veg on the couch? it's very easy to just tune out & watch a show. really, i don't think there's anything wrong with that but now that we see it's getting in the way of us even talking... what's funny is that we watch 41 minutes of tv at night, when we do decide to watch tv. so it's not as if we're downing hours of tv. just 1 show, then we're off to bed b/c we ARE that tired (oh, around 9:30 it's bedtime for us).

egads, parenting is hard. marriage is hard...put the two together & you get something very hard. i guess i'm just putting this out there, hoping to get a great insightful response from a couple who has it all together. lol, please, let that happen! or better yet, a fairy god mother will just plunk down on the keyboard & say 'here are some elves to watch your kids while you go have a nice time out of the house'...i guess if the elves never showed up to clean our house, they certainly won't show up to babysit.