things

Christmas is 2 weeks away and I am not even remotely ready. We don't have our tree up yet, we're waiting for DH to come home -- tomorrow! Yay. It has been a long almost-week without him.

The weather has been nasty: cold, rainy, ick. If I wanted to live like this, I'd move to Seattle. It's unusual for us to have this so many days in a row. I shouldn't complain because we need the rain (and northern AZ is just loving all this snow, they'll actually have a decent ski season this year), but I feel cold all the time and everything hurts.

That could, of course, be because I caught the boys' stomach virus (DS2, last Tues/Wed, DS1,Thurs/Fri), but if this is just a stomach bug it's a particularly nasty one, since it landed on me Saturday night with a vengeance and only showed slight improvement today. I called my g/e doc to find out whether or not my meds could be making it worse; it turns out that yes, taking 4x the usual dose of Prilosec can have nasty side effects. Things have been better since I stopped taking it, but I'm nowhere close to all better.

My father-in-law is in critical but stable condition, he is in a long process of recovering from the infection and surgeries he's had. At this point it's a question of diligence, making sure he doesn't develop any other opportunistic infections, etc. It's difficult because all we can do is wait, and pray.

Everything feels stretched out and oddly rushed at the same time. I wish I felt better. I wish I could believe I will feel better, soon, but I don't. Maybe this is all just stress and when DH comes home I'll be fine. I remember feeling exactly like this in my early 20s, everything I ate gave me a stomach ache, not one part of my digestive system worked right. It lasted for months on end. I don't even remember how I got over it, I just know I did. I don't want to go back to that particular circle of hell now, or ever.

It was stress, then, and it's probably stress now, even though I don't consciously feel stress, I know it doesn't work that way. It's one thing to have an adversarial relationship with food when you're basically cooking for yourself and your husband, it's another when you're supposed to be feeding the entire family. So much of family life centers around food, and today I could finally tolerate it.

I weighed 136 pounds this morning, which puts me down about 8 pounds since I started noticing my weight decreasing. I'm trying to keep up the fluids today and I'm finally not losing more than I'm putting in, so hopefully things will stabilize.