Sick Days

Our whole family had the stomach flu last week. And this week Eliza and I caught a nasty cold. But unlike me, Eliza's really cute and cuddly when she's sick! Observe in these poorly recorded videos...

Maybe if I keep publishing really crappy looking videos and out of focus pictures, someone will get so sick of it that they'll buy me an AWESOME new camera for Christmas!!! ;D

Failed Attempts...

... at a family Christmas picture.

Yeah, we rocked that self-timer.

There are just too many factors involved apparently.

1) Coordinating clothes that are all clean and wrinkle free. -check
2) Clean people. -sorta check
3) Brushed, combed, or done-up hair. -check
4) Full tummies. -check
5) Not during nap time- oops.
6) Someone else to take the pictures- oops.

Anyone out there free sometime to take our picture? We're strugglin'!

Ridiculous

Steve found this article on the Drudge Report.
Apparently this morning a Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede.

"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back." 4 other people suffered injuries including a pregnant woman who had to be taken to the hospital.

I can't believe people would risk other people's lives for something as stupid as shopping and obsessive materialism. I'm appalled and disgusted.

Merry Christmas?

'Cuz i have had something to prove as long as i know something that needs improving...

I've been meaning to explain a little about what I do for work on this blog for a while now. I haven't before for a few reasons. 1) I thought it would be boring for non-social workers 2) Strict confidentiality laws that protect my clients 3) I'm busy working.
I am currently employed by Region 10 Community Service Board at their Wellness Recovery Center as a Mental Health Specialist. It is a 9 bed crisis stabilization center for adults experiencing mental health crises. Clients stay at our program for up to 15 days.

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I conduct individual counseling sessions, group conseling sessions, community resource linkage, and lots of documentation and paperwork. I have also been trained as a Medication Technician (so I can administer medication to the clients) and as a Certified Auricular Acupuncture/Acudetox Administrator (doing my clinical hours and trained through NADA). I hope to talk more about that some other post.
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I honestly should be finishing up one of my discharge summaries right now, but I don't feel like it. I don't technically have to because I'm not at work, so... I'll waste some time here.
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I learned several years ago that I had to be careful about how much I tell people about what happens at work... or what has happened to the people I work with. When I first started in the social service field, I was shocked by the horror stories. But then working nights 60 hours a week at a women's shelter started making it feel a lot more common place.
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Sometimes I would mention something about work to a friend and family member, though, and I'd find them in shock, close to tears, and/or with a jaw hanging wide open in response to my comment.
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For example, I'd say: "I'm working on getting my client to contract for safety so that she commits to not stubbing her cigarettes out on her forearm while she's staying at our Center. She says she's trying to make the outside of her as ugly as her insides feel."
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So I've composed a few vignettes from classic work situations; they're about recent and not-so-recent clients. Some are from the Provo Abused Women's shelter I used to work at. Some are from the foster children I interned with in Harlem. Some are from the Child Protective Services in Utah where I interned, and some are from my work at the Wellness Recovery Center that I work at now. (I, of course, have not used any real names!)

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Here's a conversation I tried to have over the breakfast table with one of my rommates in college, who I never really told any details about my work after this comment b/c of how shocked she was from it:

One of the 11 yr old boys at work got suspended from school yesterday for pulling a knife on another kid. His mom keeps saying she doesn't understand why he would be acting out this way, but seriously? How could she not know.

Before she came into the shelter, her boyfriend was beating her up, and so she ran into her 11 yr old's room where he was sleeping because she thought that her BF wouldn't beat her up in front of her son.

Apparently, the BF didn't care and picked up the vacuum tube on the ground and continued to beat her with it right in front of the son while he kept screaming for him to stop. How could this kid not be learning to act in violence?

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One of our clients last week had tried to hang himself with his belt the week before. He has Asperger's and his family doesn't want him living around them anymore. He's begged his grandmother to let him live with her now.

His self-soothing techniques for when he gets really overwhelmed involve hitting his head against his mattress (an improvement from the wall), and so he has an ever-present blackish bruise on one side of his forehead. His grandmother just got put into the hospital for health reasons and now he has no one.

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One of my caseload as an intern was a 16 yr old girl who's been in the foster care system since she was about 5 or 6. NYC's Administration of Child Services (ACS) workers discovered her and her two younger brothers neglected, malnourished, and neglected in a dirty abandoned apartment. She's grown up in the Bronx, has an IQ of about 68. She carries around a doll whose hair she braids over and over again.
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She tells me that she wants to do fashion when she grows up, but she wears these red paisely sashes around her neck over her pink t-shirts. She was only allowed to start having a therapist after she took a razor blade and cut two slits under each of her eyes.

Her foster mother is 62 and is preparing a HUGE load of collards in the kitchen while she intermittently yells something at my client into the bedroom where I'm conducting a home inspection.
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My client tells me that her foster mother's biological grandchildren say she stinks and never want her to sit next to them at the table. She wants more than anything to go to a (fat camp) over-night summer camp.

I was able to get her a $1500 scholarship from a really neat upstate NY camp after putting in about 40 hrs of research, phone calls, and arrangements. The foster care agency can put $300 towards the price, but we were still short $350, and THERE'S NOW WHERE TO GET IT.
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If I hadn't been a poor, unpaid intern, I would have paid it myself. I briefly flirt with the idea of asking my rich relatives for money, but I understand that this is just ONE poor foster child out of the thousands and thousands just within a 30 minute drive of where I'm working.

(Samaritan Woman at the Well )

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I was assigned a pretty sweet job of entertaining some of the foster kids while workers met with their parents. One afternoon I played scrabble junior with another worker’s foster child while the worker was talking with her mother, and the girl kept telling me my words were cheating because they were written on the sides of the board game.

It was the end of a LONG day, and I hadn’t slept much the night before because I had been submitting independent study course work, and then this 7 year old was telling me that I was cheating at Scrabble.

I was ashamed that I had to push myself to be the mature adult. The foster child was still in her mother’s care but had been sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend multiple times. I stared at this beautiful, spunky child and couldn't understand how such monsters like her mother's boyfriend existed in this world.

The truth was that she was kind of lucky? Lots of times when teenage girls accused their mothers' or foster mothers' husbands or boyfriends of sexually abusing them, the mother chooses the man over their daughter (sorry I have no stats to back that up, though).

(Perhaps a subject for another post: It's PRICELESS to find good foster parents. Some of the great ones I saw in my work will be my heroes for the rest of my life-- giving homes, love, and security to teeny, neglected, abused, scarred children. And sidenote, Arkansas recently passed a state stature that "made it illegal for any individual cohabiting outside of a valid marriage to adopt or provide foster care to minors. While the measure was proposed primarily to prohibit same-sex couples from being adoptive or foster parents, this measure would apply to all otherwise qualified couples who are not legally married.")

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I grew up being taught that we need to help those in need. But from my comfy white, middle-classed home, the biggest victims I saw were the homeless kittens at the SPCA and myself when grounded from using the telephone for a week.
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The real-life situations since moving on from my sheltered childhood in South Carolina are what have shaped me and convinced me that the society and government we live with is NOT working for everyone.
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Many of the people I work with get what some people call "handouts" -- food stamps, Section 8 housing, disability, medicaid, and other forms of government assistance.
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It's probably just because they're lazy... or African American... or sluts... or drug addicts.*
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They don't want anything better for themselves or else they'd just make it happen like the rest of us hard working, middle class folks do.*

*Italics denote sarcasm.

My goal for this post isn't to produce anger, but maybe give a taste of what I do for work and what life's like for a lot of our neighbors.

Beauty in the Breakdown

(Body Art by Eliza Mae Inc.)

Steve, Eliza, and I all have the flu-- the vomitting, nausea type of flu. It's miserable and gross. And being nauseous and changing diarrhea diaper explosions is an awful combo, by the way. We've been having lots of mid-day baths to say the least.

But life keeps going. Steve doesn't have time to take a sick day at work, and I'm scheduled to do some training tomorrow at work since Region 10 is finally changing to an all digital/computer documentation system. It's about time, but now I have to spend four hours being taught to do stuff that I already know how to do and then only have a 3 hour break until I have to go back into work and stay until midnight or later. Woo-hoo!

What I need to say, though, is that I feel like my day to day life musings, dilemmas, and emotions (happy or sad or somewhere in between) seem to increasingly be of a nature not appropriate or not fit for this blog format. However, I don't want people who read this blog to think that I'm trying to put up things on here in order to pretend like my life is spotless and jumps from one happily ever after moment to the next.

I am disturbed by pretentious people who hide behind smiles and vapid occupations and obsessions. I have a lot of strong feelings about a variety of things, but I don't really feel like this is the correct forum in which to share them.

Steve and I created this blog to keep in touch with family who live far away from Eliza and who would otherwise not have any idea what she's doing in her life (and sometimes what Steve and I are up to also).

I've thought about creating my own private blog where I discuss topics that I actually find interesting and more transcendent than our pumpkin carvings and our family's affinity for Elmo.

Because I believe that there is real "beauty in the breakdown," like candid, unposed pictures. Life is messy and doesn't always tie up nice and neat at the end of each blog post.

And I know people have the term "airing dirty laundry" for a reason, but I think that this concept exactly is something that brings a lot of people to an explosion of repressed emotion at some point in their lives. But there are also things that shouldn't be shared with the general public because that is a form of inappropriate emotional boundaries. And the loudest opinion does not always denote the deepest understanding.

Some topics I wish to explore on a more personal basis are...

Feminism Sexuality Modern, subtle racism

Mental Illness and Mental Health (2 different things)

Politics Disappointment, disillusionment, and dissatisfaction

Loss and grief

Closed-mindedness Alternative medicine

Transcendent vs. Imminent fulfillment related to spirituality.

Doubts and exploration of the church as a healthy form of a developing spirit.

Wealth and Poverty, inequality Welfare Good Reads homosexuality
Proposition 8 personal struggles over-drafting your bank account addictions
disagreements with your spouse (gasp) fighting off ant infestations


And I'm sure I've already lost most readers. No worries. I probably wouldn't have invited you to my private blog anyways- hehe. Don't call me, I'll call you.

The Dashing Baby Reuben!!!

Steve, Eliza, and I got to go up and meet the most adorable baby ever on Monday! We were sooo excited for Kate and Aaron AND Eliza's FIRST cousin, Reuben James Cummings.

Eliza seemed to vascillate between being fascinated by her baby cousin and horrified by him. Mostly horrified by me holding him. She's massively jealous anytime she sees me holding ANYONE else- whether it's hugging another adult or cradling a doll or real baby.
Eliza would demand, "Up!" every time she caught me holding Reuben. Somehow Mom pressured me into trying to hold Reuben and Eliza in my lap at the same time. It made me very grateful that Eliza won't be having a new sibling any time soon.
Eliza got to enjoy some TLC time with her Oma while we were meeting Reuben. The last 3 days since we visited, she's been pointing out all the pictures we have of my mom around the house, and then at other random times just calling out, "MOma! MOma!" especially like when I'm changing her diaper or something. It's really funny. Maybe she thinks Mom will pop out suddenly to entertain her like she did at Kate and Aaron's apartment.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that Aaron seems to be a really awesome and fun dad. Katy and Aaron already seem like freakin' great parents. Lucky Reuben!It was also sooo neat to see the adorable bond that Kate and Reuben already have! Katy is amazing. In the picture below (which I can't get to be any bigger), you can see that Reuben's just staring right up at Katy. So neat.And did I mention that Reuben is a gorgeous baby? He's like a doll (in a not creepy way). I'm so excited to be his aunt. I think Eliza and I might take a trip up in a few days to party with Katy and Reuben some more!! I can't wait!

Congrats Kate and Aaron!

Welcome, Reuben!

Tardy Halloween Report: Eliza the Dancing Doggy

We had a chill Halloween. Eliza mostly just went trick-or-treating at the ward's trunk-or-treat and Steve's work.

She was an adorable puppy dog.

(I thought Eliza was making a really cute face in this picture)

Eliza rocked the trick-or-treating. She loves carrying around bags anyways, so she loved the addition of getting candy from everyone and getting to add it to her bag.

And it turned out that Eliza's favorite Halloween activity ended up being dancing to Halloween music that someone was playing from their car. It was hilarious to see Eliza the Dancing Dog.
We got a really funny video of it, but it turned out to be too dark to show much. Bummer.
To celebrate Halloween, parent style, we took Eliza down to C'ville's Down Town mall and let her play on the little carousel, and then we went and ate Thai food. Delicious. Then we went home and put Eliza to bed and watched Psycho together and ate popcorn.

We also tried our hand at pumpkin-ing. Steve wanted Eliza to create her own to foster her inner artist. So he let her go loose with a sharpie marker on the 3rd pumpkin, and he carved out the result:

Apparently Eliza is headed down the Fine Art style path.

I think Eliza's favorite part of it was getting naked. I swear, the best way to get Eliza to go goofy wild is to take off some of her clothes. I think I've mentioned that before. Funny kid.Steve tried to carve out a ferocious version of Mika on his pumpkin. I did the unoriginal stenciling and did a ghost saying Boo and a rockin', creepy tree.Each holiday with Eliza gets more fun. Eliza was freakin' adorable last year but also completely unaware of the perks, especially being on an all-milk diet. I think next year should be even more fun. We'll see...

Poor doggy

I've had my dog, Mika, since I was 16. He was a rescue from a puppy mill, so they weren't quite sure how old he was when I got him. He's probably about 10 yrs old.

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If you don't like pets or are easily disturbed by bodily functions you should stop reading now. But Mika started peeing blood this last week. It's happened before but not to this extent. We took him in to the Vet's on Monday, and they ran some blood tests on him.

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Yesterday they told me that he has a mass in his bladder along with a UTI. They put Mika on anti-biotics for the UTI, but the mass is more complicated. If they were really going to try to figure out if it were benign or cancerous they would have to perform surgery and do a biopsy and then still have to put him on medicine to treat whatever it is. All of that would cost at least $1000, money we don't really have just lying around. The medicine we get him already cost us around $400 this week.

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Mika's been my unconditionally loving buddy longer than anyone/thing else- b/c honestly, pets' love is way more unconditionally than any human's complex affection. All they want is some food, water, and to be petted. And if I take Mika on a walk he's ecstatic-- it's like Christmas morning for him.

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So here's where I get to write my sappy Mika love stories because this is my blog, and I can be overly dramatic or sappy if I want. And I know, pets get old and die, but that doesn't really make this that much easier for me.

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Mika comforted me through my first break-up and through my wretched (lots of wretching) morning sickness when I was living alone in Provo in a teeny one room apartment. Right after I got off the phone with my mom after finding out that Amber had killed herself, the first thing I did was to cry into Mika's fur and then give him a complete brushing and hair trim. He's no fair weather buddy, which is impressive considering the hell Eliza has put him through the last year and a half.

So I'm worried about him, and we'll have to do ultrasounds every month to see if the mass is growing. Poor doggy.

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(This post was obviously by Amy. I didn't realize Steve was still signed in.)

A Beautiful Day

It was a historical day this Sunday, Nov 2nd. It was Eliza's first admittance into our church's Nursery class. The Nursery class is for kids 18 mo. - 3 yrs old, and we've been looking forward to this day for a long, long, long time.

So now Steve and I only walk the halls with Eliza during the first ~hour of sacrament, instead of all 3 hours of church!

Eliza's nursery leader, Allison, actually babysits for us and is awesome. Eliza loves her. Apparently Eliza was the first kid to get to class on Sunday. Allison asked her if she wanted to sit in a chair and Eliza hopped right up and was all set to go. Didn't even blink when Steve made his exit. The pick-up report was all thumbs up and smiles too!

I attribute Eliza's smooth transition to nursery to 1) Her high-spirited, exploratory nature 2) The fact that I've been taking her to the gym child care center ~4 days a week since she was like 3 months old and teaching her that I come back after an hour every time. 3) Using babysitters, family members, and Steve to leave her well-cared for with and happy so that she's not overly enmeshed and dependent on me for her emotional security (for now at least!).

Nursery is Truly something to be grateful for!! I was starting to consider offering bribes where ever I could to get Eliza in early! We're still primary teachers, though, so our adult spiritual nourishment during the church meeting remains at a minimum.

(All the Sunday report was relayed to me via Steve b/c I ended up having to work an overnight shift at work Saturday night due to short staffing, so I was home asleep on Sunday.)

We voted!

(Eliza's holding her Obama sticker close to her heart.)

Our patriotic family, dressed blue to celebrate our fulfilled hope that Virginia would be a Blue State for Obama today! Virginia has not voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson 44 years ago. We're excited to have helped that change happen!

Yes we can.

Steve had to stand in line for over an hour to cast his vote at 6am before he began his busy work day. Just about 12 hours later at 6:15pm, I breezed through the polls with no line and no waiting. Sometimes it pays to procrastinate (or to refuse to brave the polls with a wild woman 18 month old!).

Yahoo, Obama!