Dr. Flea

I wasn't going to go here. I've tried really hard to stay away, but here I go anyway.

Remember this guy? Here's a link to my own blog because OOPS! the supermega blogstar's blog is gone!

Want to know what happened? Well, the short story is, his ego got way out of control. Here's the long story, which I very accidentally ran accross, having no intention of ever going back to his blog again.



Just a friendly reminder to do your best to choose a doctor with a smaller EGO, as difficult as that may be.

I'm here!

I haven't disappeared from the planet. Blogging seems to be something I can't make time for lately!

We had the one year anniversary of Marissa's death last June 11. We turned off the phone and nobody got their calls returned. We did get a few messages from people letting us know they love us and were thinking of us and that really truly means the world to me, so THANK YOU to our friends who did that for us.

On June 11, we each wrote a letter to Marissa. Then we "sent" them to her by burning them with the fire from a candle lit in her honor. At the same time she died, we planned to be at the park that sits below the hospital window dh and I were looking out as we held her and let her go. That was an adventure! The park is halfway down what is termed "medical hill" (ick~ but that's another story). The parking situation anywhere within the vicinity of downtown is truly sad, so we parked way at the top of the hill and had to walk most of the way down to get to the park. On the way, our 5 year old decides he must go to the bathroom right NOW. So he and I race across the street and luckily find a bathroom at the community college on the other side. We race back across the street and the 4 year old must go to the bathroom right NOW. So she and I race across the street. We race back, to discover she has left her incense in the bathroom. So I race back accross and find the incense. OK! We were off to an interesting start!

We made it to the park, which is a term used extremely loosely here. What it really is, is a very small strip of land with a huge drop-off going the rest of the way down medical hill on one side and a busy street on the other. We made it just in time (Marissa's official time of death was 7:41PM) and lit our incense. Then the baby started crying because he wanted to get down and crawl around and my 7 year old started really sobbing uncontrolably. I think this was good, but I was really afraid she would pass out. She was hyperventilating the whole time we were there and all the way back up the hugemongous hill, which seemed a whole lot bigger going in the other direction with 5 little kids; two of them needing to be carried or pushed, and one of them sobbing. Everyone that walked by was checking us out, wondering what we were doing to her.

All the kids stayed up late except the 2 year old, who crashed early. Venus was bright in the sky and was a beautiful sight from our house. The kids and dh wrestled in the front yard and seemed to have a great time. After they went to bed dh and I sat outside until about 1AM, sharing a bottle of wine sent to us by a dear friend.

The day itself was kind of bad. It was long. Very very long.
The day before was worse. I think because it was a Sunday and she died on a Sunday. I was marking time that day. Noticing when the clock said 10:30 because that's when she coded. Remembering the drive to the hospital. Going through each and every event in my head.

June has been hard. I woke up June 1 and knew it was June. I felt as though she had just died a couple weeks ago. It was not a shadow of the previous pain as I had expected it to be. It was the same sharp, unendurable pain. That was a surprise. But today I feel OK. I have hope and joy and can feel the promise of life. I don't know what tomorrow will be like, but I suppose any one of us could say that on all kinds of levels.

So here I go. Moving forward. I have no choice. As long as she gives me some of those wonderful signs once in a while I'll be OK until I see her again.

Oh! I should mention that the sky looked exactly the same that it did one year ago June 11. It was lavender with wispy clouds.

Roller coaster ride

Truly. That's what this is. The highs are higher than I've ever experienced before. The feeling that things will be OK, that I was immeasurably blessed to have cared for Marissa in the short time that I had her; and that is enough~ except. Except it's not. The highs have an undercurrent of unbearable sadness. When the transitory good feeling passes in hours or days and possibly weeks, I know that what is left is this. Where I am now.

I love school. I'm doing really well. Marissa led me here. It was so perfectly orchestrated. I was really high on that for a while. Now I'm back to what seems to be my set point. I thought about putting a positive spin on this, and I could, but that would not be the truth, and the truth is what matters most.

It's spring. I love spring. Everything is reborn~ except Marissa. She's not here with me anymore. This is my first spring without her. The last pictures we have of her were taken last May, a few weeks before she died. May is coming soon. Time is totally crazy that way. I can't wrap my brain around it. How is it possible that my baby will be gone an entire year this summer?

I very rarely cry. The pain seems so far beyond what simple tears could ever hope to relieve. I feel like such a fraud; walking around like things actually matter. Paying bills and cleaning the house as if I care at all. I talk to people on the phone and it just seems so stupid. We talk about nothing important and I pretend I'm fine.

I watch the baby sleep and I can see his sister's face perfectly. I can't stand to look at him sometimes because it hurts too much. But at the same time I am intensely grateful that I can see Marissa so clearly in him.

How do people live with this pain? And the roller coaster? Does it even out eventually? And at what cost? Do I have to forget what it was like when she was alive? Do I just become numb to it all?

As I finished this post, my 7 year old brought me a handful of lavender flowers she found growing by the house. Hi Rissa Roo:o)

Those everyday things that go wrong..........and more

We woke up yesterday to a broken bathroom faucet and had to spend all day with the water shut off. My dh had to work, and I hear that plumbers are outrageously expensive. I am so grateful for the internet because I was able to google plumbing troubleshooting and come up with what might be wrong. This morning dh is off to Home Depot or some place like that to get a new seal. Meanwhile, the water is still off! I turned it on briefly this morning and raced through a pile of dishes as fast as I could and got things wiped up and flushed the toliets. Yeah, that was the best part with 7 people in the house~ no way to flush the toliets. :P Lucky for me, dh is able to fix it. We are also blessed that we happen to have a bunch of bottled water, so we won't be thirsty and I can have my coffee.

I haven't posted for a while. I'm in school! I love it. In high school you couldn't get me to go to class and I graduated by the skin of my teeth and a couple teachers who knew I could and should do better. I went to college and hated it. Well, the school part I hated. I did like the classes in my major, but truly I didn't care at all about the other ones. Studying was a chore and I pretty much did the last minute cram thing. So I graduated and worked in a job that wasn't even in my field and now have been at home with my kids for the last 9 years or so. This is different. This is homeopathy. I LOVE it. I was studying it before anyway, but now I get to work toward my degree, which gives me even more incentive. I just got my first papers back and got A's on all, plus extra points. :o) I don't think anyone's ever seen me give a damn about an A before. Well, I am quite a bit older now, my partying days are well behind me, and, well, like I said, it's homeopathy.....how can you not love that?

Law of Attraction

This is the whole "Secret" phenomenon. Something I think most people inherently know anyway, but it makes it seem easier somehow. We all know people who are negative about everything and conversations with those people always go in the same direction. We spend lots of time hearing them wonder aloud why these things always happen to them. It is often perfectly clear to the rest of us.

That's all the Secret is. It's focusing on the positive power of attraction, which is so easily lost in the negative. It seems to be human nature to focus on negative energy. We are glued to CNN and coverage of the war and Anna Nicole Smith and how awful it all is. How many positive stories are covered? They are rare indeed. So I will give the movie that. It helps us pay attention to the positive and gives us concrete ways to do it. It also has been able to reach a huge number of people. That can only be good. Our world certainly needs something like that right about now.

What cracks me up about the Secret is how ancient these ideas are. Again, this is stuff we all know, we've just managed to forget~ I include myself here. This is the essence of ancient religions. I liken it to creating your own Karma, or Reaping what you sow, with more intention.

So I had an amazing experience regarding this LoA. I was on MDC complaining about how people want me to "do" something other than be a mom and how I didn't want to do that. One of the members reminded me that others are merely reflecting back to me what I believe to be true in myself. That was a bit of a revelation for me. (I know these things are painfully obvious to others, but they are so hard to see in ourselves) I realized I really did want to do what I thought others wanted me to do. And within one day, the opportunity fell into my lap. I discovered the British Institute of Homeopathy has a complete 3 year homeopathy course, at the end of which I can take the CHC exam and be an actual, legitimate, professional homeopath. This degree requires NO travel. This piece is important because the reason I could never see myself getting the degree is that all of the schools are very far away and require me to be present on many occasions for seminars and tests and so forth. The icing on the cake is that the very day I discovered this, our tax refund was deposited into our account and it is enough that I can pay for this! It will also fit quite nicely in the three year gap I am looking for before inviting the next baby in.

I am so excited that I can't sleep! I was awake much of last night thinking about how wonderful this is. I will start my studies next week and I can not WAIT. Homeopathy speaks to me like nothing else. I am certain this is the direction my life is meant to go in.

My shameless plug

If you know anyone who needs a child's walker, please send them here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Rifton-Pacer-502-gait-trainer-walker-MEDIUM-used-once_W0QQitemZ150089801231QQihZ005QQcategoryZ28176QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

OK, I do see that I can insert hyperlinks here, but I am now officially out of time and patience, so anyone who wants to can cut and paste. Sorry! I am working on my lack of computer literacy little by little.

Also, this apparently does not work at all on Firefox. I can only see the whole link on Safari. Amazing~ weren't computers supposed to make our lives easier??

This was my daughter's walker. She sat in it one time and was never healthy enough to use it. We got it just weeks before she died. It's as new as you can get, and we don't want nearly as much as it costs in it's present condition. Rifton sells this exact one for almost $3,000. For someone without good insurance, this would be a good thing.

That was my shameless plug. We really, really need this to sell.

Thanks for reading:) And now you can check out my knitting below;o)

I knit, too

I am really not good at taking pictures, and even less good at uploading them to the computer. I guess it's not high on my priority list, for whatever reason.

So I finally uploaded a couple pictures of my knitting that I took around Christmas time. Most of the things I knit are given away right away, so I never get around to pictures.

This is the wrap I knit for my mother in law. She asked for it a few months before Christmas. I was really happy with the way it turned out. I used a wool/alpaca blend to knit.



This is a hat I knit for my niece. She was SO cute in it!



I would LOVE to contribute to the family income with my knitting. I haven't been able to figure out how to do that, though. Pretty sure my husband would love that too. For now I'll just continue knitting for those I love, which is reward enough in itself. I am working on a very cute cabled baby sweater for either my nephew or a friends baby due in March. Probably the latter, since my nephew is growing so fast.


Oh, I almost forgot I have a picture of a sweater I knit for my mom.