Spoiler Alert: STILL SAD

Speaking of reading.  It is the 10th of the month and I am plodding through just one book. WHAT IN THE HELL.

But, conversely, I have wasted more time than I ever have in my entire life scrolling mindlessly through social media.  I am just about up to the class prep red line, though, where I will suddenly have to snap to attention because I have NO TIME LEFT to do anything at all.  Gah.

I don't want to celebrate my birthday this year because I am just not feeling celebratory.  And yet.  My birthday is coming.  Luckily, I scheduled dentist appointments for Jack and harry, so I will have some time to be grumpy and put-upon.

I am barely even taking pictures.

I had a funny post about  Take Your Kid to Work day, and I took GOBS of pictures of that.  But then, you know, my dad died that very night, and now I cannot even look at any of those pics.  Not yet, anyway.

Before my dad died, I was kicking some Whole30 ass, so my phone is full of food pics.  But, like, not pretty ones. Like these:

So much penis shaped food and so much kale.  Bah.  Now I am eating carbs again and feel kind of gross about it but also give zero cares about meal planning or prep.  So, there's that.

Rainbow day at dance (also the day my dad died, but it's pretty cute)

Baseball season is upon us!  Dorothy likes to literally roll in the dirt like a cute little farm animal while the boys play. 

Harry is umping whenever he can to save up for a new phone (SO CUTE)

 Remember what I said about food prep?  We are eating crap all of the time.

 On a literally brighter note, Ben is LOVING the rainbow of sunglasses her got for his birthday

Dorothy wears a pair of my dad's reading glasses almost everyday

At his choir concert, Harry almost couldn't sing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" because he took a second to think about the meaning of the song.

Jack and Cooper had a screaming fist fight on the front lawn this morning as their dog walk ended.  No picture because I had to, you know, intervene.

Beatrix still has an ulcer on her eye, and we are going on week three of the effing cone of shame and it's driving me nuts.  She doesn't seem to mind.

April: What I read

Here's another terrible grief side effect:  I DON'T WANT TO READ.  Can you even?  I don't know what to say about it except... who cares?

But still, April was a good reading month:

13. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley:  Meh.  You can probably skip this one.

12. When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon by Joshua D. Mezrich: I wanted to like this-- I really did.  But the eugenics stuff was just too much for me to brush off casually like the author did.

11. American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson: I was not as riveted by this as the rave reviews suggest I should be, but I could appreciate how intricately crafted it was.

10. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi:  This was not as good as the reviews led me to believe it would be, either.  **shrug**

9. The Secret of Clouds by Alyson Richman:  This is sad.

8. The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich:  I loved this and read it to help Harry with a book report.

7. An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen:  Yep.  Scary.

6. Inheritance by Dani Shapiro:  This is a really buzz-y book and for good reason.  Read it!

5. The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin:  Still awesome and worth a re-read for you as well.

4. Watching You by Lisa Jewell:  She is one of my very favorite thriller authors, and this did not disappoint.

3. Never Tell by Lisa Gardner:  A new DD Warren book?  Heaven!

2. The DNA of You and Me by Andrea Rothman:  I LOVED THIS ONE.  Such a sad, sweet love story.

1. Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reed:  THIS IS THE BOOK TO BEAT IN 2019.  Also, you should read all of this author's books and be amazed because they are all excellent.

Grief navigation tips: some to share, and I want some more, please

1.  Don't beat yourself up about falling off the whole30 wagon because all of the food and vodka you're surrounded with the the first few days after a loved one dies.  You are only human.  Also, life is obviously short.

2.  Preparation H works great for puffy grief eyes.  I am also eying one of these facial rollers, and I bought a gel bead sleep mask that I can put in the freezer.

3.  You can actually be too sad to sleep.  Did you know that?  The night my dad died, I was up almost the whole time.  I would drift off for a second, have a weird dream, startle a little, and then remember that my dad was dead and be wide awake and so, so sad.

4.  You can also get grief acne, so that's a thing.

5.  I know I was just complaining about too much booze and carbs, but the grief diet is a good one.  Except, you know, that it sucks so bad.  I am too sad to want to eat and also feel a little sick all of the time.  MY JEANS FIT GREAT. Hashtag fucked up relationship with food.

6.  Kids express grief by being assholes, which is kind of stressful, but no big deal when you remember that as freaked out as you are, they are probably ten thousand times more freaked out than you can even imagine.

7.  Mindfulness helps.  If I can focus on the present moment, I can be mostly OK.

8.  People are going to give you the grief eyes and ask you how you are doing, and the best way to respond is to say "I feel terrible.  This is terrible."  It cuts through you pretending to be OK and them offering some bad advice.  You can both just kind of agree that death sucks, and the conversations are generally really soothing and pleasant.

9.  There's no wrong way to grieve.  Want to go through dirty tub after dirty tub of pictures from the garage?  That's OK.  Want to be super annoyed about the never ending picture bins?  That's OK, too.  Don't judge your feelings.  Just try to ride them out.  Like that one time in college when mushrooms were nothing like you thought they'd be.

10.  Make like Elsa and let it go.  If the me of April 24th knew how infrequently the me of May 5 cleans her house, she'd be scandalized.  Also, I wear giant sunglasses everywhere because I am constantly crying, and I am pretty OK with that.

Ok, that's what I've thought of in the last 10 days.  (I SAW MY DAD 2 WEEKS AGO TODAY AND HE WAS FINE AND WE WENT OUT TO LUNCH AND I HUGGED HIM AND TOOK PICTURES AND THIS SUCKS SO BAD).  What tips do you have?  How do you stop yourself from being overwhelmed by the enormity and the permanence of the loss?  That's where I am really struggling.

Status Change

If I am being honest, I had a bad feeling about my dad's surgery all along. 

I know he did, too, because he talked to Ben about when I was a little girl and how fast it all goes before he gave him a rusty chainsaw on Easter.  Also, the day before Easter, a black cat ran in front of his car when he and my mom were driving home from dinner, and he was really shaken up about it.

My dad had surgery on Tuesday, April 23, to repair an aortic aneurysm.

 He discovered the aneurysm by accident when he got a CT scan of his back in February in advance of getting an epidural to relieve him of the pain of spinal stenosis.  After more scans to verify the size of the balloon, his doctors told him he was not a candidate for the simpler endovascular aneurysm repair procedure that is minimally invasive and features a stent.  His aneurysm was too close to his kidney for doctors to maneuver that way, so they needed to do an open repair, which is a huge and risky operation. 

At first, my dad opted to take a wait-and-see approach, planning to come in for another scan in 3 months to see if the aneurysm had grown.  The anxiety, though, of living with a 5.5 cm bulge in his aortic artery was weighing heavily on him, and he decided to go ahead and have the surgery to repair it.

The surgery went well, and even though my dad faced a rough recovery, we were all relieved and hopeful on that Tuesday.  Wednesday saw him walking around the ICU, talking on the phone a little, trying to rest.  On Thursday, he no longer needed to be in the ICU, although he remained there, in the cardiovascular ward, because the hospital was full.  He was retaining some fluids from surgery, and doctors monitored his kidneys, but my mom talked about his discharge in a couple of days, and he began to mange his pain with oral medication, one of the tickets home he had been promised.

On Thursday, April 25, my mom went home in the evening to buy a few groceries, take a shower, get some sleep.  That's when she got a call from the hospital telling her that my dad's status had changed, and she needed to hurry back.

My brother called me at 9:33 with this news, and the three of us obsessively called each other, speculating about what very bad things we'd hear and when we'd hear them until 9:59 when my mom called me.  No words.  Just tears.

My dad died last Thursday night.

We miss him so much already.

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/pekin-il/gary-r-meinen-9365379

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/gary-meinen-obituary?id=17915443

Whole 30 Redux

I am on day 10 of my latest Whole30.  I might only do a Whole 27 because Mother's Day is May 12.  I am FOR SURE only doing a Whole 28 MAXIMUM because my damn birthday is on May 13, and I mean!

But, anyway, I have to report that I fee AMAZING.

I have no idea if I have lost any weight or anything like that, but I just feel so great.  I haven't had the urge to take a nap in the last 9 days, and I am pretty sure it is because I am not eating any carbs.  There is a literal spring in my step.

I know that this means I should probably lay off carbs, you know, forEVER, but we all know that my 41st birthday will see me face down in some champagne and a huge chocolate cake.

In some ways-- actually, in MOST ways-- I HATE how good I feel.  It would be so much better if I still felt all bloated and logy and had heartburn at night.  But, alas. I have boundless energy and really stable moods.  Shit.

This was my favorite meal so far:
Chicken breasts sow cooked with salsa, Rotel, and frozen spinach (I ate them for DAYS) and sweet potato chips in the air fryer (with ghee and TJ's Everything but the Bagel dipped in Tessa Mae's spicy ranch dressing)

For some reason Pinterest bugs me, but I have been making a Google doc with Whole 30 recipes I want to try, and I have all of the ingredients for turkey chili-- If I can get up from my writing cocoon (NOT LIKELY) I will for sure throw it together.

Basically, I have just been obsessing about food and taking pictures of chicken salads.  You?

Hoppy Easter!

After Cooper turned his hands throughly green, we packed up the car and headed to Pekin to celebrate the weekend with family.

And, of course, a quick stop at our alma mater.

Could not resist.

Our old speech team won another national title a couple of weeks ago, and there's a flag flying in their honor on the qaud.  Which is behind the main part of campus that existed when we were students and is a brand new quad, which is SO SO WEIRD.

This was all houses!

Harry was so annoyed that I took a pic of him with a purse.

Future college kid:

From there the weekend was basically all food and selfies.

And bunny ears

The Easter Bunny hid 24 eggs at our hotel, and I did not even get out of bed to take pictures of the hunt #winning

Crappy hotel breakfast-- THEIR FAVORITE

Jack is a champion jumble-doer

Totally amazing pekin view from the hotel pool.

POOL!

Clowning around at my parents' house

Family pic at brunch

Cousins!

Pretty brunch view

Egg hunt at my parents'

Pocket full of eggs:

Huntley is such a pretty boy.  Yes he is.

The kids were worse than usual on the drive home because they could not WAIT to get to Wisco and see what EB left for them, since his hotel note clearly said their baskets were waiting for them.  Roller blades for all!  And assorted other junk!  And a mom who is doing the Whole30 and couldn't eat their candy!  EVERYONE WINS.  Except, possibly, me.