Wow this is my first post in like 4 months, in fact it’s only the second or third time I’ve even laid eyes on the backend of this site. Why so long, you ask, if you even still care to come around. Well like the title states life is messy sometimes. It’s funny I was looking at my last post and to quote myself I said something like “my life is so tediously boring right now”. Seeing that now makes me want to laugh and cry. Literally a week after I wrote that my life became anything but tedious, and most definitely not boring. I guess I’ll start at the beginning and try not to make this blog too long, but if I begin to ramble just bear with me, I have a feeling this is going to be very therapeutic.

So, somewhere in the middle of April, someone related to me on the hubby‘s side (this person shall remain nameless out of respect) had to surrender themselves over to the police to do no less than nine months in jail on some domestic charges from 2008. This person has 8 kids, 4 of their own and 4 from their spouse’s first marriage and they all live with them. Another story for another time, trust me on this. Well, they didn’t tell anyone about this court case until about 8 days before they were supposed to turn themselves in. Anyway the spouse has a job which takes them out of the country for several months at a time, if you’re smart you’ll be able to figure out what that is without me saying. Long story short, no parents, 8 kids, and we (hubby and I) are the only family who live close enough to allow the kids to finish out the school year and not interrupt their lives any more than necessary. So of course hubby and I agree to take them in for the last month and a half of school because it’s family and that often means doing things that may be uncomfortable for you to help out the people you love,but I digress. So we came up with a plan where we would take them up state to their grandparents when summer break started, which seemed great and worked for us, only they forgot about the Ireland cruise they had scheduled for July and August so two days before we were supposed to take them there we got rooked into keeping them all summer. So for the past few months I have spent almost every waking moment with 7 boys all under age 8 and a 13 year old girl with an attitude problem. Don’t get me wrong she definitely deserves to have an attitude because her parents keep completely screwing up her life, but as someone who has no children this has been a trying time in my life. Not really because we got a insta-family, or a teenager with an attitude if you will, but because of that old saying when it rains it pours, and the hits just kept coming. Okay, before I go off on a tangent filled with sayings and the sage wisdom I’ve acquired from this experience, I’ll continue with my story…

So as June begins, everyone is adjusting and the kids are happier and becoming more like themselves again yada yada yada and the train (which has 2 seats and 10 people crammed inside lol ) is chugging along when we run smack dab into a brick wall. In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, I have a dog named Lola, and she’s like my baby plus she’s a diva. Well, one Saturday she’s playing with the kids and everything is fine one minute and the next no one can find her. A little while later she comes hobbling up to me crying and whimpering, she can’t walk on one of her hind legs and it’s just dragging behind her. So we do a dash to the emergency vet clinic, which by the way is about a 45 minute drive away. Again with the long story short clause, she has something called IVDD or Inter-Vertebral Disc Disease which is fairly common in dachshunds, especially if they’re overweight (which she is) or they are allowed to jump off of things. Basically, it’s a ruptured disc disease which puts pressure on the spinal cord and causes paralysis, I included a link if you want to know more about it. Well her case was pretty severe considering the fact that by the time we got to the vet both hind legs didn’t work and she was dragging herself on her front paws. She had paralysis from about the mid-back to the tail and we decided to treat with meds, wait and see instead of emergency surgery which would’ve cost a fortune. Watching her in pain and looking so sad was horrible, my poor baby even remembering it makes me want to cry. She was prescribed some Prednisone for the swelling, an antacid for the side effects, and about six weeks of crate rest. Normally keeping her crated for that long would be bad, but having kids around that she was dying to get out and play with made it so much worse. Add to that the fact that she had to be given oral meds every 12 hours, and the paralysis made her lose bowel control so we had to express her instead of taking her outside to potty. Essentially that means squeezing the urine out of her bladder every couple of hours so she didn’t accidentally go in her kennel. Yeah, so 8 kids that didn’t belong to me and a dog who was incapable of taking care of herself. By now I’m thinking, just as you probably are, this can’t get any worse, only it did.

So in the midst of dealing with all this, my sister calls me the week before the 4th of July holiday and her first words are “I have something to tell you, and I need you to not get upset.” Right away, I know it’s not good. Turns out my uncle, my mother’s brother, passed away. It was a random Sunday afternoon, he was watching his son and he took a nap and just never woke up. His girlfriend came home and their 4 year old said daddy’s been sleeping a long time and won’t wake up. My uncle was only 50, and by all accounts pretty healthy, so this came as a huge shock to our whole family. The autopsy is still out, so we still don’t know the official cause of death but it was just so sudden. I mean I had just talked to him not long before that. So we had to go through the funeral process and all that good stuff with 8 kids and a paralyzed dog who’s incontinent. Like I said the hits just keep on coming. And my poor mother, she has lost 3 sisters, both parents, a grandma, and now a brother all in a 7 year span. If anyone can tell you about how to keep going after a loss and living each day to the fullest, it’s my mom. I feel so grateful that she’s still around, especially with the way her siblings keep passing away too young. My mom is 55 and none of her siblings have ever even made it to that age, in fact she’s the second oldest out of 10. It’s weird the blows life throws at some people.

So needless to say I’ve really been put through the ringer this year, but all in all it’s starting to look up. We took the kids to their grandparents a couple of weeks ago and then hubby and I spent a week of well deserved vacation together enjoying some alone time. Yay for no kids, it really was good practice for when we decide to start our own family, but I can definitely say I will not be having 8 kids. Or even 7 or 6 or 5 or 4 lol… maybe 1, possibly 2 . Anyhow, they’re starting to adjust to being there and starting a new school and everything. They call us almost every day, mostly to check on the dog‘s progress, but I’m sure they also miss us. I know we miss them, even though it is nice to sort of return to normal. The dog is doing much better, the paralysis wasn’t completely permanent and as of today she has complete mobility in one hind leg and about 40% in the other. This means she can hobble around three legged and she kind of uses the bad leg to balance, stand, and stabilize herself. It’s been about 12 weeks and this is marvelous progress considering we didn’t even know if she’d ever walk again with out the help of doggy wheels. Here’s a picture I took of her yesterday. She was standing but of course she sat before the flash snapped lol! So right now I’m just trying to get back to what life used to be for me, which is weird. I work, write, do the internet thing, all things I haven’t done for months, but it’s so quiet here I can’t seem to concentrate. I mean, no one’s crying, or running around, nothing’s broken, it’s very surreal and it’s already been about 3 weeks, it is nice though my time being my own again. Apparently I needed these experiences to make me a better person, or to make me cherish what I have or something, which trust me I do now. This was definitely a summer that changed me, made me more responsible and what have you. Hopefully the change was for the better, but I guess time will tell. Oh yea, in the midst of this I also had my 30th birthday so happy belated birthday to me!! More posts to come soon, just because I have the time now and I can. I shouldn’t have said that I probably jinxed myself haha! Big love readers, if you’re still out there

Filed Under: family, heart matters, life @ 8:52 PM | 3 Comments