All I Want For Christmas Is...

♪ ...My two front teeth  ~NOPE!~  To be lice-free... ♪

Yep, that's right.  Katryn, the little girl that spent the night with us last night, ended up to be completely infested with head lice, unbeknownst to us.

Me and Jamie did notice that Katryn kept scratching her head an awful lot the whole time she was here, but we didn't really think too much of it.  She had her curly hair pulled up in a ponytail, and I just figured that it was itchy (you know how ponytails get after awhile).  

Last night, Katryn did mention casually to me while she was scratching her head that she had "fleas".  So I just figured that maybe she really did have fleas in her house, and that she might have gotten a few in her hair.  (She lives in a mobile home in a nearby trailer park, which I have heard has a problem with fleas).  No big deal, right?  Fleas happen to everybody once in a while, right?

Anyway, late this afternoon, right before Katryn's aunt came to pick her up, I was in the mood to take myself a nice, hot, bubble bath.  The last thing I did was wash my hair.  I had noticed that my head was feeling just a little bit itchy off and on today, but I just chalked it up to the fact that I hadn't washed my hair in a few days, and that I'd been wearing it up in a clip for the past couple of days.

So I ran the conditioner through my hair just like always, and just like always, I pulled out the stray hair-strands to rub onto the side of the shower wall to scrape off and dispose of later.  But what do I see in the middle of the small wad of hair?  It just looked like a bit of dirt, but something told me to look closer at it.  So I did, and discovered that it had legs.  It was a bug.  It was a freaking louse.  I was absolutely horrified, but somehow not surprised.

I got out of the bath and immediately went to the living room to tell Jamie what I had discovered.  Jamie and Lilly were sitting on the couch alone together watching TV, and I asked "Is Katryn gone?"  Jamie told me yeah; that her aunt had come and picked her up as soon as I had gotten in the bath.  I said "GOOD...'cause she has HEAD LICE".  And I told Jamie and Lilly how I had found a louse in my hair just moments before.  Then Jamie looked at Lilly's hair and saw them crawling around without really having to look hard at all.

So we got Lilly into the bathtub immediately and began scrubbing her head.  I don't know how many lice we ended up seeing floating around drowned in the tub, but it was enough to be grossed out by it.  And I picked a bunch out of Lilly's hair while she was still in the bathtub.

At that point, we realized that we needed to strip off the beds, and pretty much basically wash everything in the entire house that could possibly go into the washing machine.

After seeing that the lice were still alive in Lilly's hair even after a good hair-washing, I made a flying trip to Wal-Mart to purchase some lice-and-lice-egg killing spray for hair.  It was so embarrassing standing there in the Lice Remedy aisle, perusing the choices.  I pretended to be checking out the band-aids.  It felt like the entire store was crowding around me, watching and judging.  I wanted to crawl off into a little hole.  Finally, I made my choice, and then I went to the Housewares section to purchase some new bed pillows.  I needed a new one anyway.

On my way to the checkout, I saw a couple that Jamie used to work for, and they had their kids with them.  I said Hi to them, and they asked me how I was.  I told them that I would be fine, once I got rid of the lice!  They were very empathetic and said that the same thing happened to them once.  They told me that the spray that I had picked out was the best kind to use, so I was glad.  They said trust them...they had tried all the different kinds of stuff they offer, but that spray turned out to be the best.  So that made me feel good.  I thanked them and sauntered off to make my embarrassing purchase.

I wished that our Wal-Mart had a self-checkout so that I wouldn't have to put my lice-away spray up on the counter for the cashier (and all the rest of the world) to see, but we don't, so I had to reluctantly plop it up there.  Thankfully the lady didn't say anything.  I guess it could've been worse.  At least I wasn't buying vaseline, condoms, and a big cucumber or something.  O__o  LOL!

So I rushed home with the lice-away spray (I bought 2 bottles to be sure to have enough), and immediately began spraying Lilly's hair with it.  The spray came with a little flea-comb-like thing to use to help get the little boogers out of the hair with.

So I sprayed and sprayed until Lilly's hair was completely soaked, and commenced to "flea"-combing her hair.  I was surprised at the number of lice that I ended up combing out, even after Jamie had scrubbed her hair with shampoo, and she had soaked it underwater for a long time.  Those stupid things are hard to get rid of!  I made sure to kill each louse that I combed out.  It was disgusting.  And I was PISSED that we were having to go through such an ordeal.

Jamie texted his cousin (Katryn's aunt, who had come to pick her up) and asked her if she was aware that Katryn had head lice, and eventually she texted back and said "no she doesn't...she was checked at school right before Christmas Break because they'd had an outbreak in the Primary School, and the school nurse told us that she just had dry scalp".

Jamie told her to look again.

Again, she came back with "I had Katryn's mom look in my hair, and I don't have anything.  And we looked at Katryn's hair and don't see anything".

Jamie told her to look AGAIN.

We didn't hear anything back.

Let's just pray that they treat that poor child's lice so that she (or anybody else for that matter) doesn't have to suffer with it anymore!  Geez!!!  (BTW, they're moving from that mobile home to a different house closer to town in the next few days, so I feel sorry for whoever ends up renting the mobile home that they are about to vacate...the new renters will most likely end up with the lice)!!!  :/  :(

Then I got Jamie down and soaked his hair with the spray.  I combed and combed, but only ended up finding 1 louse in his hair.

Jamie returned the favor and soaked and combed my hair, but he didn't find any more lice in mine.  Let's hope we discovered it early enough to completely head it off at the pass, and we'll get rid of it as quickly as it came on.  Thank God I just so happened to notice it in time before we became completely infested...I hope there aren't any yucky lice eggs lurking around our house somewhere that will hatch out and breed to make more.  Yuck!  >:P

I've lost track of how many loads of laundry we've already done since early this evening.  And there is still a gigantic mountain of it left to do.  We'll probably have to be washing non-stop for the next couple of days, I'd say.  Dammit!

Oh, well.  I guess we needed to clean the bedrooms anyway.  This lice snafu just lit a fire under our asses!  ;)

And everybody say a prayer that no lice ended up at my brother's house, because Jamie took Lilly and Katryn over there to play with little Claire for a while (before we knew that Katryn was infested)!  I texted my sister-in-law Jenna to alert her to the potential for them to have a lice infestation (and to apologize in advance if they ended up with it), and Jenna went ahead and washed Claire's bedding just in case to be on the safe side.

Stupid lice.  Ugh!!!  >:{

Call The IRS!!!

Tonight, Lilly's step-cousin (?) Katryn --who is 5-- is sleeping over at our house.

Domino is skeptical and mildly annoyed:

Right now, it's after 10:00 PM, and giggles, chattering, squealing, and crashing noises are still abounding LOUDLY from Lilly's bedroom like it's World War 3.  Lilly's ADHD medication of course wore off hours and hours ago, so she is pretty much entirely out of control and going completely ape-sh*t-crazy at this point.  And I have a headache.

But Lilly did do something funny a while ago in all the chaos.  

Lilly was trotting around in the living room, and she trotted up to me and then pretended to fall down in the floor in front of me.  I just ignored Lilly as usual, and she said to me "Don't you care?  Don't you even care that your kid fell down in the floor and is hurt?!?...CALL THE IRS!!!"  At which I looked at her and said "Call the IRS?!?...What do you mean call the IRS?!?"  To which Lilly replied, "Or you know, those people you call when you've fallen and you can't get up...what is it...LifeAlert or something?!?"

I thought that was pretty dang funny.

Little terd.  LOL!  XD

Merry Christmas, Everybody!

I baked some Christmas cookies last night for me and Lilly to decorate.  As we were decorating them with frosting and sprinkles, Lilly got heavy-handed with everything, so the cookies that she was decorating were a little gloppy and messy.  At first, she got a little upset, especially after looking over at my handiwork, but then she said, "I turned my blooper into a work of art"!  It was so funny!  LOL...'blooper'!  Ha ha ha!

Here are some Christmastime funnies for you to enjoy:

Ugh, What A Day

I've gotta figure out how to get my sh*t together.  This insomnia junk is ruining my life.

I couldn't sleep again last night, even after reading Lilly's new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book --the entire freakin' book.  I had a headache, too since I took my medicine too late, and got up in the middle of the night to take some Advil.  Just like always, I ended up finally falling asleep when it's actually closer to time to be waking up.  So I felt like crap again this morning.  I got Lilly to the bus stop, and then dragged myself back to bed.  And this is where it got really crappy.

Just as I was starting to get to sleep pretty well, what happens?  The $%#@$$#$% smoke detector's battery starts dying, so it starts beeping LOUDLY.  It's impossible to ignore, so I had to get a stool to stand on and rip it off the wall in the hallway.  Then I tried to rip the dying battery out of it so it would shut up, but I couldn't remove it with just my fingers.  So I had to rummage out the ^%$$#%$@#^&%* tool kit and find a $#@%$&^**&^$ flat-head screwdriver to pry the &^%$#$#%$^&& dying battery out of the $##$^&&%$#@ smoke detector with.

I was so freakin' pissed.

After I disabled the smoke alarm, I groggily went back to bed.

Then the #$$#%$&^**^%$#@#% dog started barking.  Stupid &^%%$#@$#%^&* Maddie barks at EVERY-FREAKING-THING.

So I laid there and tried to go back to sleep, but stupid Maddie wouldn't shut the &^%$$##%^^&& up barking at absolutely nothing for an eternity.

So I moved to the couch in the living room.  I never actually went back to sleep, but I was too sleep-deprived and zombie-like to get up and do anything, and my head still felt bad, so I just laid there on the couch all day, feeling like crap.  And the big ol' heavy-ass cat crawled on top of me and crushed me down so I couldn't even get comfortable.

Then the mailman came to deliver a package, and I had to spring up and pretend like I'd been awake all day, even though I never change out of my pajamas unless I'm going out in public and I'm going to be seen by anyone.

It's actually a damn good thing that the mailman came right when he did, because it was time to pick Lilly up at the bus stop, and I had no idea.  I have an alarm set on my cell phone to remind me, but I soon discovered that my cell phone's battery had died (and I was completely unaware of it), so the alarm wouldn't have gone off!  I would have laid there waiting for the alarm to go off to let me know it was time to go get Lilly, but it wouldn't have went off!  So thank God at least that turned out OK.  The last thing I would have needed to be the cherry on top of this terd of a day would be for the school to call me and ask me why I wasn't at the bus stop to pick up my kid (like they had to do one time before when the $%$##@#$%^& bus driver was earlier than usual).  How embarrassing.  I hate that stupid bus driver.  He's such a terd.

And one other good thing happened; Jamie's work gave him a smoked ham, so at least we won't starve to death for Christmas.  Yay.

I don't know what's going to happen with Jamie's temporary 2-week layoff during Christmas/New Year's.  He may not be eligible to receive unemployment pay since he's only gotten 2 paychecks from that company so far.  I think you have to earn something like $3,000-some-odd dollars at a company before you can be eligible to draw unemployment benefits.  I don't know if they can go off based on the pay he earned at his previous 2 jobs or not. He's supposed to find out.  He's decided to go in to work a couple of days each week while they're closed for the holidays and forego taking his breaks just so he can be earning some money.

Needless to say, I'm not really feeling the Christmas spirit this year.  I'm just hoping that we end up getting a big tax refund this year to help get us out of the hole and back on our feet a little bit more.

Stupid life.  I wish that good stuff would outweigh the bad to make it feel more worthwhile sometimes.  :(

I think I'm gonna try taking one or two sleep aid tablets tonight in an attempt to try to get myself on a reasonable sleeping schedule.  Ugh.

Oh, yeah, and another crappy thing seems to have happened.  The "big" (most expensive) Christmas present that I ordered for Lilly was supposed to be delivered by FedEx yesterday.  It's a little electronic gizmo sort of like an iPod, but it's specifically made for kids (it can play music, take pictures, you can play games on it, and you can get on the internet with it).  It still hasn't arrived yet.  This morning when I checked the tracking on it, it no longer said "out for delivery", but instead, "N/A".  So I guarantee that the package must have gotten crushed into a million pieces inside the stupid FedEx truck, and the FedEx driver probably just flung all the little crushed-up bits and pieces of it out on the side of the road as he/she went flying down the highway.

On a positive note, Lilly did a fantastic roundoff/back handspring on the air track at gymnastics class a while ago, so I was really impressed with that.

I don't know what else to say.  I'm gonna go take my medicine now.  :/

Well, I'm Fingerprinted!

Today was my appointment to be fingerprinted so that the Board of Education can have a background check run on me to make sure I'm not a crook before I cook (ha ha, get it; I'll be working in the lunchroom!  Ha ha ha, I crack myself up)!  XD

Anyway, it was fun because of course they do it all on snazzy computer equipment these days; no more messy black fingers anymore.  You can see the fingerprints showing up on the laptop screen right as the guy is pressing and rolling each of your fingers on the little electronic scanner gizmo that he uses.

I asked the dude what he would do if someone was missing some fingers, and he said he didn't know; he hasn't had one of those yet.  It was funny.  And then I told him that now I'm gonna hafta give up my life of crime now that I'm fingerprinted.  And he said yep, no more safe-cracking for me.  So all in all, it was fun, and we all had a jolly good time.

Now I guess I just have to wait 1) for the background check to go through, and 2) for a call to come in whenever they finally need a substitute lunch lady.  I don't really know how it's gonna work, but I'm sure they'll let me know...!

Ugh...Is It Easter Already?!?

I suffer from insomnia, so every night I lay there in the bed, tossing and turning; wide awake for hours on end.  It sucks, because you feel like you're the only one in the whole world who isn't asleep.  Especially when everyone else in your house is fast asleep, and they blissfully stay that way all night long.  Grr.

Whenever I do finally fall asleep, I only sleep for short bursts, and wake up frequently.  I'm a very light sleeper.  By the time morning arrives, my mind and body is finally ready to give up, so after I groggily get Lilly to the school bus stop, I schlep back to the house like a zombie and crawl back into bed.  Only then (at 7:00 AM every morning) can I pretty easily drift off to sleep, and stay asleep for about 3 to 4 hours.  It makes me feel like such a loser.  :/  I'm gonna be so screwed when I have to go to work.

Anyway, in the wee hours of the morning (technically this morning, but I'll call it last night), I had been asleep for just a little while, when something woke me up out of a dream.

In our family, we have completely non-traditional sleeping arrangements.  The sleep-place choices are A) The Couch in the Living Room, B) The Bed in Lilly's Room, and C) what I call "My Bed".  But most importantly, at no time whatsoever do Jamie and I ever occupy the same sleeping place.  I absolutely can NOT stand to even try to sleep in the same room as Jamie because he makes the most God-awful rackets the entire time he's sleeping, for hours upon hours on end, and it's all I can do to refrain from smothering him to death with a pillow to cease the incessant noise.  It's not that he snores; he just makes very loud breathing/clicking/wheezing/gurgling/whistling/you-name-it kinds of noises.  All freakin' night long.  And it drives me bat-sh*t insane.

So anyway, the sleeping plan for this particular week has turned out to be that I get to sleep all by myself in "My Bed", and Jamie and Lilly crash together in Lilly's Bed.

So back to last night.

Some weird noise woke me up out of a dream (which pissed me off pretty bad, because it's so rare that I get to sleep deep enough to the point where I actually have a dream), and since I'm such a light sleeper, the stupid noise woke me up.

So I laid there, trying to get my bearings about me, and began listening to the noise to try to figure out what it was, because it was still going on every few seconds.  I knew if it wasn't going to stop on its own, I was going to have to get up and investigate and put an end to it.

The sound was coming from Lilly's room.  I laid there and listened to study the noise, and determined that it was occurring about every 8 seconds.  I figured out what it must be.  It sounded exactly like one of those little toy baby chicks you can buy at Eastertime; that when you hold it in the palm of your hand, emits a "cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep" noise for as long as the two little metal circles on its bottom make contact with your hand.  Like this:

I came to the conclusion that Lilly had put the toy chick in bed with her (she always has to sleep with a million stuffed animals), and either her or Jamie had rolled onto it, and its battery was low, causing it to "cheep" slower than it normally would if the battery was new.

Well, since the noise wasn't about to stop, I flung off my covers, got out of bed, and made my way across the hall to Lilly's room.  As soon as I walked up to the bed, I knew that it was no toy chick making the noise.

It was freakin' Jamie.  He was sound asleep, flat on his back with his mouth gaping wide-ass open, and as he breathed in every 8 seconds, his throat would make 1 single damn "cheep" sound.  It sounded exactly like that Easter chick toy.

I wanted to murder him.

But instead, I pulled Lilly's bedroom door to (we can't close our bedroom doors all the way because the damn cat will stand at the closed door and meow her ass off until you open it back up again).  Damn cat.  

And I trudged back to "My Bed" and began yet another futile attempt to get back to sleep.

Uhhhh.

The Cake

Tomorrow is Jamie's 42nd birthday, so I decided to be nice and bake him a cake.  I texted him from the cake mix aisle in the grocery store and asked him what flavor he wanted.  He replied back with "chocolate; or you could just get me a box of Ding-Dongs".  Uh, NO.  A sh*tty box of store-bought Ding-Dongs is entirely unacceptable in the realm of birthday celebrations, even if you are an actual 'ding-dong' like Jamie is.  >:/

So when I got home from the grocery store, I asked Jamie and Lilly if I should make cupcakes, a round cake, or a rectangle cake.  Jamie didn't care (remember, he would have been satisfied with just a stupid box of Ding-Dongs), so Lilly chose a round cake.

So off I went to the kitchen to bake the cake.

When it was done, I took the pans out of the oven, and I could tell that it was probably gonna be good.  The last time I made a cake, the stupid cake somehow managed to stick to the nonstick pan, and I had to scrape and scratch and pry it out, which of course made it totally crumble and suck.  But this time, I could see that the edge of the cake was slightly separated from the pans all the way around, so I knew it was probably going to come out of the pans just fine.  (Plus I used different pans than I did last time, just as an experiment to see if that would make any difference).

Well, I let it cool for 10 minutes just like the box said to do.  And the first cake that I flopped out of the pan turned out just fine:

*oh yeah...I'm a cake BOSS...!*

And after I got done doing my short, mini-dance of success, I flopped the second cake out of its pan:

*wait...what?!?...DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN!!!*

The damn cake stuck to the pan in one place, causing a giant crater to be ripped out of it!  (But you better believe I scooped out the part that was stuck in the pan and promptly inserted it into my mouth)!  YUMMMMM!

Oh well, that's what frosting is for......disguise!  Heh heh!  >:D

See?  It turned out just fine!

Giant crater?  What giant crater?  HEH HEH HEH...

Ssshhh......

Jamie's Crazy Work / Lilly ADHD Update

OK, so he got it wrong.  The name of the company that Jamie works for is Ameratex, NOT "Ameritech".  *sigh*

Anyway, when Jamie came home from work yesterday, he told me about some more weird things that they manufacture.

Are you ready for this?

BODY BAGS.

Oh, and also, PART BAGS.

You know, Part Bags.  The ones that hospitals use to put legs and arms and junk that they saw off and cut out of people in.  Like a morbid, restaurant doggie-bag!  :D

I'm beginning to see a slight pattern here.  At first, everything that Ameratex manufactured seemed to be completely random stuff.  And it pretty much is; I mean, what do motorcycle grease rags have to do with slings that people need to use whenever they hurt their arms or legs?  Well, nothing, really, except for the fact that I guess both of those items are comprised of cloth and apparently involve sewing.  So I guess basically, if there's any kind of item that people need to have manufactured, and the company Jamie works for has the appropriate equipment in place to manufacture it, then they manufacture it.  They are even about to start making/printing those tarp-like signage banners you see hanging up on the outsides of stores.  It's so random!

Well, at least there's never a dull moment.  It would be pretty fun and interesting to work on making grease rags one day, and body bags the next.

Or how about this...imagine some biker dude in his garage working on his motorcycle (using one of the Christian Motorcycle Association grease rags that Jamie screen-printed at Ameratex to wipe his dirty hands on).  But there's a really tight bolt that the dude is having trouble getting to turn loose (and he doesn't have any WD-40 laying around).  So he literally wrenches and cuts his wrist trying to wring off the bolt (and ends up needing to use an arm-sling that Ameratex manufactured).  But a few weeks later, something goes wrong, and the cut on the dude's wrist develops gangrene, so half of his arm has to be amputated (and the cut-off portion gets placed in a Part Bag manufactured by none other than Ameratex).  And when the biker dude recovers enough from his amputation to finally be able to test-drive his motorcycle, he forgets that his cut-off hand was the one he used to use to mash the brake with, so he ends up careening down into the grand canyon (after slipping on a banana peel, of course).  And then what do the paramedics use to store the biker dude's mangled corpse in?  Why none other than a good ol' quality-made Ameratex body bag, what else?  (But don't worry...the story has a happy ending...remember the dude was a member of the Christian Motorcycle Association because he had their grease rag, so he ended up riding his ghost-bike up to Heaven, so it's all good)...!

Step 1:

*the ride to the grave in The Motorcycle Hearse*

Step 2:

*the Stairway Highway to Heaven*

Step 3:

*insert heavenly chorus here for full effect*

Hmm.  I can see it now...Ameratex expanding even further in the future and starting to sew that silky lining stuff that goes into caskets.  And their company catch-phrase can be:  Ameratex...from Cradle to Grave...

Man, I'm a marketing genius!  They need to hire me!  LOL!

Anyway, Jamie also found out yesterday that what Ameratex does for all of its employees during the week of Christmas and the first week of the New Year is to just give everyone a Temporary Layoff so that way everyone can enjoy the holidays by not having to work, but they'll still get paid (unemployment) for it.  So that's pretty interesting.  That means that Jamie will be off work from December 23rd through January 3rd -- a total of 16 days off in a row!  (Including weekends).  Jamie has a cousin, Ronnie, who works as a boat motor mechanic, and that's what his workplace does for him every year.  Since Ronnie's work is kind of seasonal (nobody needs to have their boat motor worked on in the wintertime), his employer gives him a Temporary Layoff every year for several months (until the season picks back up) and it's time for him to go back to work.  So that's pretty cool.  I hope it doesn't mess with your unemployment benefits (I don't think it does, but I'm not totally sure).  With the way Jamie is about getting and keeping jobs, the last thing we would need is for him not to be able to get unemployment when we need it, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that everything will be all right.

Anyway, changing the subject, I took Lilly to yet another doctor checkup yesterday to follow-up with how her ADHD medication is working.  Remember the doctor started Lilly out on about the lowest dosage of 10 mg, and bumped her up to 18 mg when the 10 mg dosage wasn't working well enough anymore.  I finally thought to ask the doctor just how high the dosage can even go on Lilly's medication, and she told me 72 mg!  So it's good to know that we still have a ways to go (if needed).  Lilly's doctor is very cautious and never wants to overmedicate with anything.  I guess that's why ADHD has got a bad name, because people assume that a parent just doesn't like the way their kid acts, so the parent trucks their ill-behaved kid to the doctor, and the doctor immediately prescribes some high-powered drug that turns their kid into a zombie just to satisfy the parents...well, that's not the way it works.

Sure, kids can act up a lot.  Sure, kids have a lot of energy.  Sure, kids can get grouchy when they're tired, overstimulated, and/or hungry.  But ADD and ADHD are real conditions.  It's not just "hyperactivity".  It's not caused by eating too much sugar or bad parenting skills.  Just like a person that has diabetes, or MS, or AIDS, or cancer, or something like that wrong in their bodies, ADHD is also something that is wrong in your body.  Just because it happens to do with your brain doesn't automatically make it something that you can secretly control just by changing your attitude or outlook on life, or by just thinking positively.  That's something that has always bothered me (especially since I suffer from mental disorders myself, and it obviously runs in my mom's side of the family),is the stigma attached to it, and the general belief that "mental problems" aren't real, and that the people who claim to have "mental problems" could easily and instantly "cure" themselves if they'd only just change the way they think.  Well, that's like saying that a person confined to a wheelchair who is permanently and irreversibly quadriplegic would be able to walk if only they'd believe in themselves.  

And that kind of attitude that society takes with people who truly suffer from mental disorders ends up making them feel a trillion times worse.

It's like this comic:  

If Physical Diseases Were Treated Like Mental Illness

Anyway, off of my mental illness soapbox, and back to Lilly's ADHD medication update.

The process of tweaking Lilly's medication dosage is a long, ongoing, tedious process.  It takes a lot of work, baby-steps, and a lot of time to try to get it just right.  Both me and Jamie and Lilly's teacher have had to fill out multiple forms many, many times already to gauge Lilly's behavior so we can see how the medication is helping or not.

The thing about ADHD medication is that it is to be taken first thing in the morning.  This gets the kid through their school day, which is vitally important, because if a kid who has ADHD is not medicated, then they seriously won't be able to pay attention no matter what, and that will result in poor performance in school.  So an unmedicated kid with ADHD would basically be set up to fail in life.  (Another fact about ADHD:  it's not something that kids "grow out" of.  It's a real disorder that they have all their life long, and should probably always take medication for in order to be the most successful in life).

Anyway, by the time Lilly gets home from school at about 3:45, her medication has worn off, and she is starving and extremely grouchy.  So she will act horrible and drive us insane all evening long until bedtime, no matter what we do.  So Lilly's doctor is having us try something new.  The doctor has prescribed Lilly 5 mg pills of her same medication for her to take just as soon as she gets home from school and has a snack.  That way, she will be able to focus on getting her homework done, and it should hopefully be easier for us to get her to bathe, take care of her teeth, and get dressed.  Because it's a major, knock-down-drag-out fight every single day to even do simple tasks such as that.  It's ridiculous, and makes us all extremely miserable.

So hopefully this new 5 mg after-school pill will literally be just what the doctor ordered.

The doctor did also say that there is another, longer-acting ADHD medication, but that it is for kids who are older (like Junior-High age and above) that we might try with Lilly whenever she gets to that point.  So that's good to know.

Lilly goes back for her next ADHD medication checkup on January 7th.

Fingers crossed (again)!  :)

New Rule (In Addition to the 5-Second Rule)!

OMG, the funniest thing EVER happened a while ago!  XD

We had gotten back from Lilly's dance class, and I was getting myself a brownie (which I had made a small pan of earlier today, and they had completely cooled down by then).  Somehow, my brownies always turn out kind of hard to get out of the pan (even though of course I grease it like you're supposed to), and when I'm trying to cut the brownies, they stick to the knife and just tear up and make a mess.

So I scraped and scratched and ended up obtaining myself a small pile of brownie-crumbles and put them on a little plate to have for a snack.  I didn't care that the brownie was mutilated; I just grabbed myself a fork to eat it with.

Well, while I was messing with trying to get the brownie out of the pan, Lilly was changing out of her dance clothes nearby.  When she took off her shorts, she said to me in a kind of disappointed tone, "Mommy...look".  So I looked over to see that the black thread of her panties had raveled out massively on numerous different areas of the garment.  Lilly explained to me that all the strings had been bothering her all day, and I asked her if she'd like me to cut them off.  She said yes, and I got out the scissors, but then of course she informed me that she wanted to be the one to cut the strings off.  So I handed the scissors over to her, and went back to digging out my brownie.

Well, a minute later, as I was happily headed towards the living room with my little plate to plop myself down on the loveseat and enjoy my pile of brownie-crumbles, my fork fell off my plate, and I thought I saw a rather large brownie-crumble tumble down and land on top of the coffee table.  So me, being one not to mind eating things off the table (or floor -- especially in my own house), I quickly picked the dropped brownie-crumble off of the coffee table and immediately inserted it into my mouth, where it rightly belonged.

But about 0.000008 seconds later, I went "PTOOO"! and spit it out, sending it flying across the living room.

What I had put in my mouth wasn't an accidentally-dropped brownie-crumble at all.

It was Lilly's underwear strings that she had snipped off, wadded up into a ball, and laid on the coffee table!

Me and Lilly laughed about it until I thought our stomachs were going to bust!!!

So, New Rule:  Look BEFORE you follow the 5-second rule to ensure that the bit that you just picked up is even edible!

LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  XD

Obamacare is AWESOME!

Today Patti helped me sign myself and Jamie up for Obamacare.  We had lost our insurance back when Jamie got fired from his garbage truck job, and that sucked, because even though we don't ever need to go to the doctor but maybe a couple of times a year (and Jamie doesn't take any prescription medications), my medications (which I determined recently that I absolutely CAN NOT do without --and survive--) cost about $180 per month.

The Obamacare sign-up online was really smooth and very easy to go through and understand.  In the end, I was able to get a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan for me and Jamie that only costs us $41.21 per month for the perfect amount of coverage for us.  It has a $400 deductible and a $1,200 out-of-pocket max.  And I'll be able to get all my medications for only $24 per month, as opposed to having to pay $180 per month!  So I am thrilled!!!

Whoever thinks that Obamacare is awful simply doesn't have all the facts.  It's a total lifesaver!

And Lilly has finally recently been approved for Medicaid, and her card actually came in the mail yesterday.  It's just in time, too, because she has yet another follow-up doctor appointment on Tuesday to check on how her ADHD medication is working.  (Since Lilly qualifies for Medicaid, she is ineligible for Obamacare).  We had to pay out-of-pocket for Lilly's doctor visit and medication last month, which sucked, because it totaled almost $270.  Fortunately, I think that Medicaid can reimburse us for that amount since Lilly's application was in the middle of being processed when those fees were incurred.

So yay, at least medical insurance won't be a worry for us anymore!  And I can do without all the worrying that I can get away with!  Whew!

Jamie's First Day

It turns out that Jamie technically works for a small company called Ameritech, not Dacorp.  The Dacorp portion of the company is located within the same building, but it's kind of separate.  Dacorp is apparently where they do sewing and stuff.  This Ameritech/Dacorp company manufactures all kinds of weird different stuff.  Yesterday, Jamie screen-printed 900 grease rags for the Christian Motorcycle Association.  And they make tarps (like you see on the roofs of some children's playgrounds), and "turkey bags" (in which to place your decoy turkeys -- what else), among all kinds of other oddball things.  Weird!

Anyway, Jamie really likes it; he works in a room with about 5 other people (many of which he was acquaintances with already, or they knew the same people), and he says it's really quiet in there; that you can barely hear the machines running.  So that's surprising and good.  And Jamie said that everybody working there is super-friendly and talks back and forth to each other and cuts up a little together all day.  It made me think about my old days at the bank when not everyone was super-friendly, and it was a severe no-no to even talk to each other.  So I'm glad that Jamie is getting to work in a nice, laid-back place.

The plan is for Jamie to eventually be trained on pretty much everything in the place so that he can step in and help anywhere that's necessary.  And he will probably even drive their truck, too.  (Let's hope that this truck is actually bolted to the frame)...LOL!  :/

He has to be there at 7:00 every morning to start working, and he gets off work every day at 3:30.  And he doesn't have to work on the weekends.  They take a break around 10:00, a 30-minute lunch at noon, and another break at 2:00.

When Jamie worked for the garbage-truck place, he had to get up at 2:30 in the morning and start running his trash route at 3:00 AM.  And then he would have to work up to a 12-hour day.  He never complained about it, but face it, that sucks!  This morning was interesting because Jamie was at home long enough to help me get Lilly ready for school (which is a MAJOR undertaking, since Lilly is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE to get out of the bed, and many times we barely make it to the school bus stop in time thanks to Lilly's awful, comatose morningtime dawdling).  So that works out really well for us, and I'm so glad!

So who knows.  All the people who told me that things happen for a reason, and how when one door closes, another one opens, maybe they were right after all.

I mean, sure, it sucks not to be making very much money.  I know money isn't everything, but it would be nice to have treats and buy cool stuff that we really don't need, but that would be fun to have once in a while (especially for Lilly), but money can't buy happiness.  You just have to figure out how to finesse your finances and realize that it's not what you make; but what you keep.

So maybe this employment snafu has a silver lining.  (I'm hoping)!

Fingers remaining crossed!

Jamie Got a Job

Well, after working for just a few days on the temporary solar panel installation job, a guy from some rug manufacturing/screenprinting factory called Dacorp (which is located in Morganton) called Jamie yesterday and told him that if he'd like a job, that he would hire him this week.  And since the man from Star Foods never really has called Jamie back, Jamie decided to just quit the temporary solar panel job and start working for the rug/screenprinting place.  For $10 an hour.  He starts tomorrow.

Whatever.  I'm just reporting the news.

:/