Summertime Blues (instead of reds)

It has been 103 days since the onset of my most recent period. (Editor's note: Made it 108 days and started on our way out the door to a water park. Happy birthday to me!)

Lest you have the urge to start doing the menopause dance, allow me to share with you my experience over the past 3 summers:

In 2022, I stopped having a period after July 10, only to pick back up on November 2 (116 days). After that, my cycles were fairly regular (for me), about 22-40 days in length.

In 2023, I stopped after June 6 and picked back up on November 5 (153 days). The periods leading up to that were wild. In April, I had a 10-day period! In May, we were in Montreal and it was only three days... but like, still as much as the 10-day one. Mal and I were on public transit for hours sight-seeing, and it was not tidy but it was our last full day in town and I didn't want to cut anything short!

It was this day. Man, I am ready to go back!

This year, my last period before summer break was absolutely terrible. It was again short, maybe 2 days, but it was so much in such a short time frame that it was overwhelming. I had lots of things to do, but if that ever happens again, I'll just stay home. I couldn't keep up.

Will I beat last year's record? I hope so. If ya gotta bleed, you could do it in a worse place than Montreal, but I don't want to be dealing with that on our vacation next month! So hopefully we again make it to at least November before anything happens.

What I do notice is that each year so far, the period before the break backs up one month: July in 2022, June in 2023, and May this year. Wish me luck and all that.

Then again, I did have my thyroid removed so who knows if or how that might affect it. My thyroid was functioning normally before, and now things are slightly "hot" until we make sure my antibodies are gone and start dialing back the dose.

Regardless, wish me luck... This process is very annoying and I'd like to be done with it!

What a difference a decade and a half makes!

This morning, Mal wanted me to come sit with him while he woke up. I love to do that, but I'd already been up, walked, and made breakfast and I was ready to sit somewhere comfortable, which his bed is not (it's under a window, so there's nowhere to rest my back without the window pane cutting into my upper spine).

I asked if he'd sit on the couch with me instead, and he said it was too cold. So I got him a blanket, he covered up, and we snuggled for a bit.

After he was up and around a bit, I started to fold up the blanket to put it away. 

"I still need that! I'm a little chilly."

I suggested that he turn off the ceiling fan, which he did.

Now I'm going to interrupt this story to go back in time to the late aughts, then we will return to this morning.

When we were living in Sherman ("we" being D and me), we'd had a fellow homeschool family over for dinner. Their three kids and my one were alternately playing in D's room and hanging out with us adults. As their departure drew near, the dad went back to get his youngest, Rebekah, from D's room. Rebekah was on D's top bunk, which was very big and only about 2 feet from the ceiling.

Rebekah was talking to her dad over the side of the bunk and said, "Watch this!" She then proceeded to manually turn the fan, whose blades overlapped D's bed by several inches (we never turned the fan on when it was bedtime!). The dad started to reprimand her, then said, "Oh! Dust doesn't fall off of your fan blades." 

I didn't say anything, but the reason it didn't was that I dusted the fan blades every single week.

I dusted everything every single week.

Bookcases, end tables, the fireplace mantle, door frames, air conditioning vents, computers... I dusted once a week, every week.

Coming back to the present time, I have to confess that when I turned the fan off this morning, I was appalled by how much dust was on the blades! I cleaned it, and dust definitely DID sheet off of the blades. It was too much for the wipe to hold, and it all fell to the floor like giant dust-bunny snow.

Things have changed. 

At some point, I stopped my old cleaning routine where Monday was bathrooms/kitchen, Tuesday was dusting, Wednesday was vacuuming, Thursday was sweeping/mopping, and Friday was laundry and catch-up on anything else that needed to be done. 

At some point, I stopped having families over for dinner. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would *love* for my house to be super clean. I enjoy looking at old pictures and seeing how tidy and spotless everything looked. But I don't have the will or energy anymore.

I don't have a kid who wants to help Swiffer anymore, either!

Also, I remember from the time always feeling "behind" in house-cleaning, like I couldn't keep up. Once, I expressed this frustration to my ex-husband and he said, "The house is never clean, so why are you stressed about it right now?"

I guess maybe I decided to stop worrying about it so much and just sit down and play on the Switch sometimes. I still want my house to be very clean as much as I ever did. I just don't feel like it's possible so I don't strive as much. And consequently, my house gets dusty. If you're ever over and it bothers you, you are more than welcome to fix it!

A (pre) Christmas Miracle!

Hiya, toots!

This summer in central Texas has so far been seasonal from the before-times of the late 2010s. It is just now consistently getting into the 100s during the day, whereas last year that started in May. We were saved from like 10 weeks of the blistering heat of the recent past, and I appreciate it!

We've had enough rain in the general are that the lake is 8 feet up (though it's still just under 40 feet low) in the past 2 weeks. 

Mal and I have been taking advantage of our PogoPass, glad that we paid for those before James got laid off. 

Last Sunday, Mal's friend was out of town so instead of meeting him like we always do, we went to Typhoon Texas. It was raining when we arrived, and there weren't a lot of people there. We were able to have the place practically to ourselves!

 

I got to use my awesome new shrug to protect my scar from sun exposure!

Then later in the week, we went to the LBJ Library. That one wasn't on the PogoPass last time we had it, so this was the first time Mal's visited. He loved it as much as I expected he would. Given his Five Nights at Freddy's obsession, the LBJ animatronic was one of his favorite parts.

We've gone to Indigo Play, Inflatable Wonderland, The Thinkery, James took Mal to Pump It Up Round Rock... we still need to get down to Wonder World to take the cave tour, and to San Antonio for the Witte and Zoo. Did I mention that I only paid $50 per pass? Just going to the water park and kids museum paid for it!

One down side to the great weather is that the mild temps and rain have super-charged the grass. I mowed on a Tuesday, and needed to do it again by Saturday. Then I made it until yesterday (Friday) and mowed a third time in under 2 weeks! I was thinking, "That's it! It's all going to go dormant now!" because we're heading into 100s every day and no rain in sight. But then this afternoon, it poured rain out of nowhere for an hour. Good. And bad. But mostly good. And also, I should be grateful for an upper body workout; pushing a giant battery up the hills of our back yard is not a joke (and, yes, it could be self-propelled but that drains the battery faster).

Mal's homeschool gymnastics class starts back at the end of next week, and his classes start back in just over 4 weeks. He's ready to get back into his schedule and so am I.

Of course, he'll miss a couple of weeks of everything when we go on his 10th birthday trip. Please send us your good vacation mojo because our travel is exactly as far out right now as it was in 2020 when we realized that Covid was going to cancel everything. And, yes, I got travel insurance this time! We were lucky to get back every single penny we'd paid 4 years ago, but I don't anticipate businesses doing that again. (Also, the CrowdStrike outage freaked me out about flight stuff; fortunately, for this trip, we're on Southwest.)