It Just Keeps Getting Better

Warning: If you are a man, this post discusses lady parts, and not in a way that is exciting, unless you're a gynecological intern. Proceed at your own risk. If you don't like to hear about lady business, go away. But only for this post. We can still be friends.

As was noted in a previous post, I am having a hysterectomy in about a week. I'm still super stoked about it. I'm actually even more excited about it now, after I had my pre-op appointment today. My doctor asked me if we were also doing a bladder repair. I told him that I wasn't aware that that was an option, but if it was available, sign me up! He asked if I peed when I laughed, coughed or sneezed. I laughed right then and almost demonstrated the problem for him. He did an exam and told me that I am an excellent candidate for the something-something-incontinence-something-sling, or, as I like to call it, the peeper fix.

Hooray! No more crossing my legs when I sneeze! No more coughing bouts followed by, "Oh, man!" Of course, I immediately texted my husband and good pals to let them know the wondrous news. If you haven't met Emily, you are missing out. No one gets my humor the same way she does. She is the only person with whom I know that I will never cross the line and have to say, "Oh, that was offensive, huh." She giggles along with me. She and I have discussed, along with practically every woman who has ever given birth, the unfortunate side effects of childbirth, i.e. a weakened pelvic floor. She has expressed her desire for the peeper fix. So my text was a two-fold mission. First, to inform her of my good fortune and second, to make her jealous. It's what friends do. But because she is the awesome friend that she is, this is what she had to say:



Julie: I'm getting my peeper fixed! No more
crossing my legs when I sneeze!

Emily: What?! No more uterus or pee pants? It's a Christmas miracle!

Julie: I KNOW! There really is a Santa Claus.

Emily: Yes, Vagina, there is a Santa.

And then the nurse and the receptionists inquired as to my well-being, as I was purple-faced and gasping for breath. Can't...stop...laughing. So I repeated the conversation to them and they all laughed so hard that I'm willing to bet at least one of them tinkled a little. Don't you just love irony?

*sigh* I have great friends.


So now, I have a serious question. It has already been determined that Shirley must go. But I have been given the option to bid adieu to my ovaries, Thelma and Louise, as well. They are essentially healthy, other than the fact that I have poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. Ovulation is painful. I can feel the follicle burst and then I have pain when the egg descends. Other than that, those two girls don't cause much trouble. I don't have a family history of ovarian cancer. Every other type of cancer, yes, but not ovarian. My doctor says that he recommends leaving them in because

• I'm only 32.
  
• Hormone replacement therapy is iffy and not always successful or without complication.
  
• I am very young to go through menopause and removing the ovaries would induce that lovely life change. Apparently it is much more traumatic to your body to go through menopause artificially than if you let nature take its course and do it in its own sweet time, which my doctor estimates to be about nineteen years from now.
  
• There is no immediate threat of illness or problem if I leave them in. He has left the choice up to me.

Here is my question: what would you do? Have any of you had a hysterectomy, either partial or complete? What, if anything, would you change? What about experiences with hormone replacement therapy?

I would really like to hear some feedback on this before I go in next Monday. Please, please give me some opinions! Ultimately, it is my decision, and I'm already leaning more one way than the other. But I would still like to hear some opinions from those who have experience.

Go ahead and leave a comment here, or if you would prefer to comment privately, email me at hoolianna55(at)hotmail(dot)com or send me a message on facebook.

Thanks in advance, ladies! And, uh, men, too, if you braved reading this post and have advice. Weirdos.

It Made Me Giggle

I found an old cell phone memory card tonight and found this picture:


I think I laughed harder tonight than I did when I saw this in a store. I have a juvenile sense of humor.

She Totally Ratted On Herself

Noel's third grade class wrote letters to Santa last week. She brought hers home last night and showed it to Morgan and me. I didn't want to keep this all to myself...

"Dear Santa,

I don't think I have been good this year because I have been getting in a bunch of trouble this year. How's the North Pole? I'm getting in trouble by talking back to my mom, being mean to my brothers, and whining when I don't want to do something or when I wasn't the one who did it.

My parents are the Santa Claus so we don't have you anymore. How do your reindeer fly? What's your favorite Christmas song? Mine is The First Noel because Noel is my name! I'll leave milk and cookies for you and carrots for your reindeer! Even though you don't exist to my parents you still exist to me.

Love,

Noel Bennett"

I love that girl. She must have had a bad day and been feeling particularly down that day. She really isn't that poorly behaved. We reassured her that her good behavior far outweighs the bad.

Is it bad that this letter makes me giggle?

An Unorthodox Christmas Wish

Are you familiar with the song "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas"? Familiarize yourself.



I went to see my OBGYN a few weeks ago and sang this song to him, only I substituted 'hysterectomy' for 'hippopotamus'.

After a battery of blood tests, physical exams, biopsies, etc., I'm excited to announce that my uterus and I will be parting company on December 27.

I never thought that I would be so excited for invasive surgery as I am to have the cursed organ removed.

My uterus, whom I shall call Shirley, and I have had a love/hate relationship. When I wanted Michael, she willingly obliged by the end of the first month of trying. Then when it was time for Noel, baby number two, Shirley was again most accommodating. However, when Morgan and I decided that we wanted a third child, Shirley put her foot down. Repeatedly. And she shouted a lot. To add injury to insult, my period of infertility was also when my heinously horrible menstrual cramps began. I had never experienced a single menstrual cramp until Noel was about three years old. But once they started, Shirley made up for lost time. The first two days of my cycle for the past six years have entailed me lying in bed, wishing that the sharp-toothed spiny tennis ball in my belly would just chew its way out already.

After three years of tears and infertility treatments, Morgan and I decided to quit trying. We had two healthy children; we were blessed and grateful. We got rid of our crib, our car seat, all of the accoutrements that one accumulates with the raising of small children. We looked at the bright side. The kids were (mostly) potty trained and relatively independent. No more bottles, diapers or sleepless nights.

Then Shirley promptly removed her foot. The one she had put down, remember? Yep. I got knocked up.

We were very excited, even though we had just gotten rid of every. baby. item we had ever owned and we had no medical insurance.

So Adam came along, and with his delivery came extensive hemorrhaging and the threat of an emergency hysterectomy. The doctor and nurses were able to stop the bleeding, however, and Shirley got to come home from the hospital with me, firmly rooted in my belly instead of floating in formaldehyde in a glass specimen jar.

I decided, being the frugal and incredibly stupid woman that I am, that no contraceptives were necessary since I had been, for all intents and purposes, infertile for three years. I considered my third pregnancy to be a fluke. Which is why I got pregnant with baby number four when Adam was eight months old. Shirley is a jerk. She has a twisted sense of humor. I taught her a lesson, though, when I had a tubal ligation after Jack was born. No more practical jokes for you, Shirley. Hah!

She has chosen to fight back the only way she knows: miserable, agonizing, wretched periods. She has to go.

Sorry, Shirley. You have no one to blame for this but yourself. Thank you for my children.

Goodbye.

The Monster Quilt (!)

I don't usually share my crafting projects on this blog but I'm going to make an exception for this project. I wanted to try applique, something which, until now, seemed too intimidating. I got the idea for a monster quilt from Little Birdie Secrets. Their monsters inspired some of mine and the remainder I made up. Each piece is hand drawn, cut out and fused, then machine stitched. There was a ton of time involved in the making of this quilt but it was a lot of fun and I love the end results!








I also used this quilt as an opportunity to try out a few other firsts, namely basting spray and stipple quilting. The basting spray was nice and I think I'll be using it again in the future. The stipple quilting took a while to get used to. I had trouble getting the tension right and there were issues with the top looking great but the back being too tight. Also, I learned the value of good quality thread. I thought that I was using good stuff but after it broke innumerable times and I finally switched to a different brand, I was much more pleased with the results.

All in all, it was a great learning experience and I'm very proud of the end results!

All right, blog land. I have 947 things to do before my kids get off of the bus in an hour but I would be derelict if I didn't take the time to post this.

My pal Brittany posted a very similar blog last month and I've thought about it ever since. I've thought how wonderful it is that God sees fit to bestow miracles upon us as we obey Him.

Lots of things happened to bring us to a very bad place yesterday morning. I won't chronicle all of them, suffice it to say that Moe's check had finally become available in the checking account (thanks, long weekend!) and I paid all of our bills. It was a good bill-paying, too, because we actually had money left over, which is always nice. Then, just to be safe, I checked the other check register (yeah, I have two, but I use one almost exclusively) just to make sure that I hadn't missed anything. I had. I figured it all out and we were in the hole ninety some-odd dollars and pay day isn't for another ten days. Frick. We had no cash on hand; no money socked away, nothing for a rainy day. Additionally, I had paid all of my bills online and you can't take that stuff back.

Note: Yeah, we're still stupid and we're still learning. This is embarrassing to write but it gets better, I promise. Don't judge.

Anyway, distraught does not quite cover how I felt all day yesterday. My diabetes is out of whack, therefore my insulin is out of whack and insulin is a hormone so therefore my hormones have been, you guessed it, out of whack. It's been stressful. On top of all the crazy emotions that I've been fighting every day, I behaved like a complete idiot last week, did some stupid crap, said some even stupider crap and in the process learned that honesty really isn't the best policy when you're dealing with personal opinions of another person's behavior. Did you know that not everyone likes to hear what other people think about them? Yeah, shocker. I'm an idiot, but at least I've learned that lesson. It's been a tough lesson to learn and the situation is not fully resolved. I fear that in my idiocy I have forever closed a door on some relationships that I cherish.

So, let's sum up what we've got so far, shall we?

• Emotions: out of whack
• Hormones: out of whack
• Judgment: out of whack
• Finances: out of whack
• Personal relationships: out of whack
• Life: pretty stinking whacktacular

Yeah. I'm not trying to blame hormones or what-not for my behavior; I take full responsibility. I'm just pointing out that things have been, uh, whacky around here.

This brings me to yesterday. Financial ruin, checks will soon start bouncing like a twelve-year-old at a bar and there's not a thing to be done about it.

Then I remembered the $100 in cash that I had set aside for tithing. Hmm. I talked with Moe. We could always use the $100 in the bank account and pay the tithing later. But we have been taught that we pay our tithing first, even if we don't feel we have the money and then trust in God to take care of us. We prayed for quite a while and I'm a little ashamed at how hard it was to make the decision. But once we knew, we knew. That wasn't our money to use. We had set it aside for tithing and using it for anything other than tithing would be disobedience.

Once the decision was made, it really didn't lessen my stress level. I was trying to have faith that all would work out, but I just couldn't figure out how. I talked with a friend about it and she suggested calling my Relief Society president. I hesitated, knowing that she would go to the bishop. I was already embarrassed enough at the situation and I didn't want to go running to the church to bail us out of a hole that we had dug ourselves. I finally called the RS president, if only because she always asks me why I never call her when things go wrong. She said that she would call the bishop, ask his opinion and then get back with me.

She called back a few minutes later and said that the bishop thought that we should put the tithing money into our checking account as it would be too late by the time he was able to do anything for us. Then we could talk with him on Sunday and figure out how to handle the issue of the tithing. I was still on the phone with the RS president as I sat down at the computer to check the bank account before I headed into town to deposit the money. There was a deposit of $100 in our account that neither I nor my husband had made. The checks that we had written and forgotten about hadn't cleared yet so there were no overdraft fees and that $100 deposit made it so that once everything had cleared we would still be in the black. We would have less than $10, but there wouldn't any overdraft fees. I told the RS president who got a little choked up. I was too stunned to cry (which will shock you if you know me at all).

I went through the evening feeling buoyed on a cloud of obedience and blessings. All I could think was "Wow."

Today came and I settled down to the task of trying to figure out a way to get a little bit of cash to get us through until the next pay day. The mystery deposit solved the immediate crisis, but there was still the matter of needing money to pay for gasoline and other necessities for the next several days.

To make a long story short(er), I received orders for two quilts this afternoon and one of the women paid me $60 in advance.

After Moe and I had made the decision not to use our tithing money to save our bacon, I tried to relax and have faith but I just could not see any way that we were going to get the money. I knew that things would work out, even if "work out" meant that we would end up with six overdraft fees that would eat up the next pay check but I would survive. That doesn't sound like the most pleasant way for things to work out, but again, I had faith that God would provide.

Provide he did, and in a most spectacular and obvious way. I think He wanted to make sure that I saw His hand in it. I did, and thanks.

Now the thought that is niggling at the corners of my brain is this: Why do we ever choose anything but the way we know to be right? If God has promised, he will come through.

I am proof.

I'm Busted

A Quick and Incomplete Summary of the Current Goings-On in the House of Bennett

As you may have read, I have chickens. (That sounds funny if you read that like some sort of terminal disease - "Did you hear? She has Chickens." "Oh, no! Once that gets into the blood stream they don't usually make it past a month.") Ahem. I decided that if I was going to feed and clean up after the critters that I might as well make it interesting, so this spring we bought Araucanas, a breed of chicken which lays colored eggs. For reals.

My family has waited in wild anticipation for the colored eggs to appear, and they finally did. But they were brown. Brown. If I had wanted brown eggs, I would have bought any number of other breeds of chickens that lay plain ol' brown eggs. I was schnookered. But then, wonder of wonders, look what we found:

In the upper left is an egg laid by one of our two Leghorns, which are a year older and therefore lay bigger eggs than the newbies. In the bottom right is an egg laid by the only chicken who read the manual. Colored eggs, girls, blue and green and sometimes lavender.

On a side note, the brown egg to the immediate right of the white egg had two yolks. I was frying a bunch of eggs for my nieces and nephews for breakfast and we were admiring how cute they were, the widdo biddy teeny fwied eggs, and then we were like "Whoa! Two yolks! Sweet!" We also wondered if the green egg would be lime-flavored. It wasn't. It was mint.

~

Adam's newest thing whenever he is angry with me or has to do something that he doesn't want to do is to yell, "You're busted!" At first, because he's three and doesn't speak all that clearly, I thought that he was calling me a bastard. And I was like, "Wha...?" How do you even know that word? I have a couple of bad words that I say occasionally, but that's not one of my favorites. Then I realized that he watches Phineas and Ferb. A lot. So, now I get to hear "You're busted!" several times a day, followed by the tinier and more mangled version of the same phrase exclaimed by Jack. Because anything Adam does, Jack does also.

~

I am totally the world's worst mother. Mike left Sunday night to spend several days with his grandmother and before he departed, he left me with this admonition: "I'm out of bird seed. Can you make some egg mash for my bird while I'm gone?" Yep. I can. Nope, I didn't. I figured that I was headed to the store the next day to buy more bird seed and that the little bugger could wait one day for his food. Obviously, he couldn't, as I found him dead in his cage half an hour before I left for the store. I haven't told Mike yet. How do you tell a ten-year-old kid that you starved his pet to death? After you had promised to feed it? I was sorely tempted to buy a new bird that matched the old one, but I can't bring myself to lie to the kid. As Moe told me, how can we expect our kids to tell the truth if we lie to them? So when he gets home tomorrow, I will put on my big girl panties and tell him. I hope he still likes me after that.

~

There is another vote in my favor of Worst Mom Ever as yesterday was a tough day. The boys played Dueling Diapers, as I have not yet had the courage to begin potty-training. Jack would poop, then minutes later Adam would, then Jack, etc. Three times each, for a total of six nasty, nasty diapers. Jack bit me so hard that it brought tears to my eyes and I couldn't get my finger out of his mouth. He'd stuck a bolt in his mouth and I was attempting to retrieve it. He laughed as I struggled to get my finger out of his mouth. A few chickens got out and I had to rescue them from the dog, wearing only a nightshirt. A short nightshirt. It occurred to me only as I was walking into the house that there may have been farm hands around. If there were and they saw me, I'm sure they got a show, and I don't just mean me running barefoot after my deaf dog, yelling at him (yeah, he's deaf and I was yelling), and assuredly flashing everyone who cared to look. You're welcome. As mentioned above, I killed Mike's bird. Throughout the day there were many screams of "You're busted!" and the old standby, "NNNOOOOO!" because simply saying it isn't enough. It must be screamed until the voice cracks. It was a rough day. My nerves were fried. Then Noel walked into the house with an armful of carrots freshly pulled from the garden and deposited them on the counter I had just washed. "Look at all the carrots I picked, Mom!" I hung my head, thinking that I was now going to have to pull off the tops, wash the carrots and the counter and find something to do with them so that they didn't go to waste. She saw my reaction and started to cry. She'd been trying to be helpful. I. Suck.

~

On the bright side, my flowers are all doing wonderfully as there are no goats to eat them this year. One of my sunflowers is over ten feet tall. I'm going to take pictures as soon as it blooms. It will be wicked awesome.

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I'm working on several sewing projects right now including capes and jammies for my small terrors and a quilt and some new baby stuff for a friend who's due really soon.

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Adam has become very protective of Jack. If anyone is harassing Jack (read: changing his diaper, dressing him, wiping his nose) and Jack is unhappy about it, Adam will yell, "Leave my bludder alone!" while glowering menacingly over the offender.

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We have adopted two stray cats, Edward and Babs, or as Jack says Eddard and Bob. They are friendly and the mousingest cats I've ever seen, which is great. As my good pal says, we live in the middle of a field surrounded by mouse food. We've got lots o' mice. We also have a pair of Great Horned Owls living in the tree in our front yard, which is really cool yet also kind of scary as I read that they occasionally attack humans. Super.

~

The natives are beginning to stir. Adam just plunked his sippy cup in front of me on the desk and demanded "More milk!" The kid really needs some manners. So I'd better go. I most definitely do not want to be busted.