Missing the boy...

It's been a long couple of weeks.  Mikey has been gone on tour with one of his bands.  They don't make a ton of money... usually just enough to get them to their next destination, but he absolutely loves it.  This is the longest one he has ever been on, (two weeks), and I miss him.  His dad misses him too.  In fact, he is always a little depressed when one of the kids are gone... tonight we went out to sit on the swing on the front porch and within minutes he was down checking on Mikey's car to make sure it started for when he comes home.  (It didn't... it needs a new battery.)  I do find his deep love for his kids to be extremely endearing, but I have no idea what he is going to do when they finally move out, ha!

Mikey will be home in a couple of days, so all will be back to normal in the Collins' home.  Meanwhile, I've enjoyed getting pics from all the different states he has been visiting.  He even got to spend the night at his Aunt Jenna's house in Texas.  They were so good to him and the band... put them up in their home and fed them... even went to his show!  Mikey just loved getting to visit with them and I was grateful to know he was being taken good care of for a night.

On another note, while we were out on the porch tonight, enjoying the AMAZING weather, I couldn't help but admire the little rose tree Mike planted for me last summer which has more than tripled in size... it's insane.  It was so heavy that we had to tie it down to the ground on one side to hold it up.  I need to trim the left side, because it is thicker and heavier than the right, but I can't trim it while there are so many buds... I just can't.  Here is a pic from a week ago:

And here was my view from the porch tonight!!!  

How crazy is that!?!?!?  It will bloom like this a few times over the summer.  (As soon as this set of buds fall off, I'll trim that left side.)  Yay for beautiful things and a hubby who fills my world with them... I always think of him when I hear the lyrics in the song "A Million Dreams" that say:

The special things I compile,

Each one there to make you smile...

(A Million Dreams, The Greatest Showman)

That is so him.  He just fills my life with beauty.  I'm a lucky girl. :)

When Tuesday feels like Monday...

Well, today has been a day.  It didn't start well because I had some issues through the night so I got a grand total of 3 hours sleep.  The alarm went off just after 5am.  I can't tell you how many days I just want to roll over and go back to sleep, but I made the decision just under a year ago that I would get up every day and do my best, no matter how I was feeling.  When you make a deliberate decision like that once, it stops you from having to make it every single day.

This weekend wasn't the best.  Our big freezer in the garage broke and we lost most of the food in it other than a pile of steaks that had somehow managed to stay partially frozen and very cold, probably because there were several packs piled on top of each other.  We were able to keep those in the refrigerator and grill them last night so we could slice it and refreeze it to use in burritos as needed.  Everything else was toast.

It always pinches my heart to see that amount of food wasted, but as we tossed everything, I remembered back to another time that we lost an entire freezer worth of food when the kids were very little and money was quite tight.  The door had been left open and we didn't find it for three days... I remember gagging and sobbing at the same time as I piled all the spoiled meat in to bags to throw away.  I always bought meat when it was super cheap and we had it stocked piled, so it was a LOT... and throwing all that away was a huge blow to our budget.  I also remember my sweet parents who brought us over two checks that night, (one from each of them), for us to go out and replace all the lost food.  It still tugs at my heart and makes me tear up to think of their compassion and love for us.  There were so many times that they did things like that for us back then... heck, they still do!

This time I admit I breathed a little easier, knowing that even though it was still a terrible waste, we are blessed to be in a much better financial situation than we were back then, and we will be ok.

Yesterday was memorial day but Mike had to work, so it didn't feel like a holiday.  I did get to have sushi lunch with Dee and then we had mum and dad over to help eat some of the grilled steak with baked potatoes and salad. We spent the evening playing Five Crowns and had a good laugh together.

Still, after the long holiday weekend and no sleep last night, work was tough today.  I was tired and grumpy and one of my teams accidentally missed an assignment, which NEVER happens.  I wasn't angry... they got it completed within a couple of hours and I know they have been completely slammed the past couple of months, but I still felt crappy about it.  I don't like to miss ANYTHING!  However, I have created a couple of new reports that will help us track better going forward and am confident we will be able to stay on top of the workload.  They really are an amazing team.

The rest of the day didn't go much better, so while I have been trying to take a hiatus from Diet Coke for the past couple of months, I gave in when one of my awesome team members dropped a can on my desk.  They are so good to me and know me so well.  This was literally the only way I got through today.  Diet coke with sugar free raspberry and coconut syrups over pebble ice.  Heaven!

Tonight I'm hitting the sack early and tomorrow is a brand new day.  I've already made that decision to get up in the morning, so here's to a better day... and just think, it's hump day already.  Bring on the weekend! :)

Real Life...

I am pretty proud of the fact that I work full time in the office 5 days a week.  I have a good job with amazing benefits and I manage about 30 wonderful people that I love working with and who make my job quite enjoyable most days.  I'm blessed that I can work an earlier shift so I get up fairly early, (5am), but I am able to leave the office most days by 3pm.  I always tell people close to me that work gets the best hours of my day and they definitely do!  I do reasonably well with energy levels in the mornings, but come 3:30, I'm pretty much toast.  Real life confession:  This is me most days when I get home from work for about 30 mins... no filters, just real life, washed out, pasty tiredness.  :)

Yes, I suffer from somewhat awful fatigue, (see the meme at the top of this post for a rather accurate description of what MS fatigue consists of.)  I'm not talking about the kind of tiredness that you feel after a late night... this is an almost inexplicable exhaustion that makes you wonder if you can function for even a minute more when it hits, but I am doing all I can to manage it and I think I do a decent job.  (Most people have no idea I even struggle with this, so I call that a success!)  I take prescription medications specifically for this symptom twice a day on top of vitamins to keep me going and I know that once I'm home I'll function much better for the rest of the night if I just take 30 minutes to rest.  Then I'm up and making dinner and enjoying the evening with my fam. :)

The point of all this is that MS doesn't have to stop you from living life.  You just have to figure out what works for you. Right now, this is what is working for me!  If you suffer from MS fatigue, talk to your doctor and ask what medications are available for you.  I take Amantadine twice a day, (the one that made me sick the very first time I took it, but that I gave a second chance), and it has been a game changer!  (Before that I was falling asleep at 7pm every night.  Now I'm up till 10pm most nights again.)

I'm so grateful for all the modern day medication that is available to help me deal with this.  I refuse to give up.

The real MVP...

Well, I have definitely not missed the hot weather.  The past couple of weeks we have had quite a few of days that have hit in the low eighties and with the return of the heat comes the return of my spine zinging and my sheer exhaustion.  Why oh why can’t we have more spring and fall here in Utah?

After a beautiful weekend, the temperatures are climbing up again.  One of the worst things for me is leaving the office daily and having to get in to my scorching car.  It can take my body hours to recover from even just a few minutes of that kind of heat exposure. 

In February my amazing hubby bought me a new car… a Hyundai Santa Fe Sport.  

We call it the “MS Model” because he made sure it had lots of features that would help me personally with different MS symptoms.  The BIGGEST feature being that I can start that sucker from my phone in my office, tell it what temperature I want it to register inside, and by the time I get down the stairs and out to my car, it is a cool 67 degrees in there.  

This may not sound like a huge deal to any of you, but oh my goodness what a difference it makes to my afternoon!

I will admit I fought him on purchasing another car, but I have been SO grateful to have that this past couple of months.  I can’t imagine how much more wonderful it will be when the weather is in the high 90’s. 

Thanks sweetie!  You are seriously the real MVP! :)

Graduation Day...

This past Friday, Dee graduated from the University of Utah.  This girl has put in a heck of a lot of work and sacrificed an immense amount of time to get this thing done.  It's not always easy to focus on something like this, especially when lots of your friends are working full time and seem to have more fun and more money than you.  Dee has had a pretty heavy workload with working 30 hours a week, (40 the last semester), and going to school full time, but she has endured pretty gracefully.  I have always told my kids that sometimes you have to make short term sacrifices for long term gain, and she nailed it.  I'm so proud of this girl and all she is doing.

We have had the best few days.  We decided this kind of accomplishment definitely deserved a big party for Dee to celebrate with her friends, so I took Thursday AND Friday off of work so that I had a full day to prepare, the day of the event to host and enjoy, and the weekend after to recover.  Planning ahead and breaking things out in to little chunks is literally the only way I can manage these kinds of occasions so thank heavens for to-do lists and a generous PTO policy at work! :)

Tuesday night I ordered about 80 prints off of Dee's Facebook and Instagram accounts to decorate the house with... I wanted to display fun pics that highlighted her hilariously amusing personality.  Wednesday after work I went by Hobby Lobby and a couple of other stores to get something for everyone to sign and to pick up decorations and paper goods.  That night I sat and mounted all the pictures on to black paper and added gold and red embellishments and then got some of the decorations up.

Thursday I did all the food shopping, the rest of the decoration shopping and took Dee out to buy a new dress.  (We may have brought home three, but don't tell her dad! ;)) Thursday night we finished up the house cleaning and decorating and started on some of the food preparation.  (Shout out to my hubby, my mum and Lois for all the assists.  I couldn't have done it without them!)

Friday arrived and everything went off without a hitch.  We left the house just before 10am and I picked up a fresh orchid lei on our way to the graduation.  It was easy to pick out Dee from the sea of graduates because of her sparkly blue frozen cap that her friend Shelby made her.  (It was SO cute and SO her.)  The ceremony was long lovely. ;)  I was surprised to see that some of her friends and her co-workers came out to see her graduate.  Pretty cool peeps in my book!  The weather was perfectly beautiful and we took loads of photos of course, then we grabbed some village baker to go for lunch and headed home to prepare for the party.

My mom did a couple of hundred meatballs for mini-subs and I ordered 200 wings from wingers, 100 bone-in and 100 boneless in sticky sauce and buffalo.  Best decision I ever made!  Not only were they extremely yummy, but they took a heck of a lot of work away from me. We also prepared fruit with caramel dip, veggie and cheese platters, hot seven layer dip and chips, spinach and artichoke dip with pull apart rolls, pigs in a blanket, pinwheels, caprese salad on skewers, and frothy pink punch.  It was just A.MAZ.ING.  I'm so grateful to my mum for all the food she took care of for me.  She is the most incredible woman and I am so blessed to have her support.  Even my pops was in the kitchen helping do food!  Mike ran all the errands, picking up the cake, the rolls and the wings last minute.  I just appreciate my whole family and them pitching in so much.

The party was a big success.  Most importantly, Dee had a wonderful time and her friends were sincerely lovely to be around.  There were lots of laughs and plenty of love.  It was pretty late by the time everyone left, so we did minimal clean up, just putting away any food we needed to and leaving the dishes for the morning so we could get to bed.

Saturday Mike and I cleaned the kitchen early and took down the decorations and then I finally caved to my exhaustion and literally spent the entire rest of the day and night in bed... napping, watching TV, napping, watching TV, napping...  you get the picture.  I probably slept more than half of the day, but I don't even care... it was completely worth it.

 Congratulations Dee!!! I'm so proud of you baby girl. :)

Here's a little glimpse in to her beautiful day: