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June 29th, Wednesday. He's Doing Fine

(1000mg b12 dissolve tablets from Trader Joes, 4ml liquid prozac,  1mg melatonin)

Today was so hectic I wasn't very good about giving Ewen all his stuff...fish oil, probiotics, magnesium etc. But he went to sleep fairly well with no fuss and not even really any huffing.  He never swishes saliva anymore when he goes to sleep thank goodness. He seems to be doing OK, a little bit dissatisfied with "boring" things and wanting lots of breaks (he didn't go to band camp today). But he is in a good place I think. Sunday he will start his once a week....500 mg zithromax.

I have been tired...Prozac makes me very tired and I haven't been very good at getting up in the morning...I half love lounging for hours and half hate it. But something that I did today which was new, was float on my back, by myself in my parent's pool and look  up at the sky and the trees. The sky was so blue and the very tall tree branches were swaying in the breeze and the green was as saturated as the most intense photo app filter. I suddenly remembered the last time I was so overwhelmed with the beauty of the trees and the sky and it was in college when I was riding my bike to class down a road canopied by trees...in the summer time. My roommate happened to be walking past me and barked at me.."Get your head out of the clouds!" She wasn't very nice.

I also remembered that back then it was uncomfortable to feel such amazement at beauty and not know what to do with those feelings. But now I am comfortable with joy. I know what to do with it. I store it in my body, every little hurting aching part of it and it soothes me. I made myself think of nothing as I floated on my back in that pool and instructed myself to remember how it felt.

Lounging in the morning also makes it impossible to go to sleep at night and it becomes a hard to break cycle. So I get my work done at 2am now with headphones on. I love the sounds of the crickets and frogs at night. Summers are my favorite season even though they sometimes get up to 110 degrees here.

Today I felt useless all morning and couldn't get myself to put the clean laundry away. But when we got to my parent's house I decided to clean out the car and ended up spending 4 hours doing so. I hosed down the floor mats on my parent's gently slanted, sunny and long driveway...and scrubbed them with a scrubbing brush on my hands and knees. I use the shop vac to extricate all the hiding wrappers and horrifying bits of trash stuffed way in the backs of the crevices under seats. Then I washed the whole car down, cleaned the windows with windex and  then wiped it all down again. Yes, this took hours and I took frequent breaks for tall glasses of iced water and I jumped in the pool then came back dripping wet to finish because the sun would dry me within minutes. I used the hose to wash me off too while I worked. It was actually pretty fun. I listened to my audio book too while I worked, "You Before Me". God, that thing was over 10 hours and I finished it tonight while putting the youngest to bed. She can only go to sleep hugging me. Speaking of my youngest, I called Ewen's psychiatry office to try and get an appt for her. I told them that she has social anxiety and doesn't talk at all to strangers, she sometimes won't talk to us and has even started using sign language recently when she doesn't want to answer our questions. I read online that therapy can be very helpful for this...so we will have 2 kids in therapy. The only kid NOT in therapy will be the one with Autism!
But it will be a while until she is seen because she is #90 on the wait list!! This is a University facility. The brain institute has TONS of money. I know because my Dad works for that department and their Christmas parties alone are ridiculous examples of how much they have to spend. If they would only give up that christmas party they could probably pay the salaries of two more faculty members at the children's psychiatry clinic and maybe bring that crazy long number down.

Maybe I'll tell the local news station that my kid is #90 on the list. That would be a good story. No one ever complains on social media or publicly, because no one wants to tell everyone that their child goes to see a psychiatrist or an OCD therapist etc.  So maybe an anonymous nudge to the TV station would bring to light how much they need more support from the university and should be giving the children's psychiatry much more attention.

p.s. I just saw that it is June 29th. I have been so far from the calendar that I missed June 27th. That is the 9th anniversary of my sister and her baby passing away. How could I have missed it. Thank goodness I did. I think of her every day, especially on her birthday and June 27th is a very dark day for us. I'm glad I didn't realize it when it was happening.




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