Down in the Dumps

Meh. It seems like I get a good spurt of blogging energy and the ideas keep flowing so I make so many posts that I have to schedule them for days later because I don't like having more than one post in a day. Then, I come crashing down from my blogging flurry, and don't feel like typing a thing for days. I have things I want to share, but just don't feel up to it.

Lately, I'm just getting so tired of fighting the reflux battle. I never imagined that Sam and Anna would be 5 months old (in a few days) and we'd still be stressing over reflux related issues- whether the medicine they are on produces the best results we're going to get, or whether we need to keep looking for something better. I do think their reflux is under control now, but they still just don't eat well. Sam's doing okay, but Anna's not. It gets so disheartening to get her weighed weekly and seeing that scale barely budge from the week before. Now you might be thinking: why go every week then? Well, because our pediatrician is okay with us not getting frequent weigh-ins at her office as long as I am carefully monitoring her weight and making sure she is still gaining adequately. I am supposed to call if she does not gain about 1/2 oz per day on average. In the last two weeks, Anna's gained 2 ounces total. I called today. Sam and Anna were pretty consistently about 10 ounces apart since birth. Now Sam weighs a full pound and a half more than her, and he's just gaining a decent amount- not going through a growth spurt. I have no issue with her being a little peanut- I just want her to gain a healthy amount of weight.

It seems like most of the time, all I do is stress about weight. If it's not about how little they are gaining, it's about how little I am losing. My goal was to get back into my work clothes by the time school rolled around. I thought way, way back in March that that was an achievable goal for 6 months down the road. I gained 8 lbs from the IVF cycle and 62 lbs from pregnancy which equals 70 lbs of fleshy poundage I'd like to never see again. I've got less than 10 to go from pregnancy weight, but 15 ish lbs to go to my goal weight (what I weighed at my lowest ever in March of last year). And that damn scale hasn't budged in a while. Jillian Michaels and I get together for a little "shred" every morning but the scale hasn't shown a difference in what seems like forever. I've got less than a month until I go back to work. I don't have time or money to buy a whole new wardrobe. I miss my size 4 work pants (insert pouty face here), and I'm afraid I'll never get to wear them again.

And last down in the dumps thought (I put the most trivial in the middle and saved the worst for last): In March (about a week before Sam and Anna's birth day), I shared in a post that we had discovered our dog, Benelli, had a tumor on the roof of his mouth. I updated a month later in another post that we had our vet remove what she could of the tumor and biopsy it(when the babies were about 2 weeks old). We were told that it was cancerous, and fairly agressive so we could have months to a year before it could return to the point that something would need to be done. I owe you an update on our dog.

Benelli's mouth started bleeding this week, and upon looking, we found that the tumor is back. He is also bleeding from his nose, which could very possibly mean that the tumor is causing trouble there too. There is nothing we can really do at this point, but keep an eye on him to gauge how he is feeling. Every day we get out the carpet cleaner and spot clean bloody spots out of our carpet. Benelli wheezes and coughs and I can tell he swallows some of the blood in his mouth.

Last April, I wrote this after learning the results of the biopsy: Benelli was my first pet. My first baby. The first living thing that I took care of, nurtured, and loved. It is so unfair that my children won't be old enough to remember him and love him like I do. I am devastated.

He was such a difficult puppy- made me cry so often, ran around in circles in our apartment with crazy eyes, bit me all the time with his sharp puppy teeth, was a horrible walker, and rivaled Marley with his antics. One day he discovered how to unroll toilet paper to his delight and he ate my glasses and a book once, just because. He had to be taught how to swim. Now, he loves retrieving in the water, and has been known to just swim around in a lake for the fun of it. He goes crazy for fireworks- but only because he wants to go look for the duck after hearing one firework. He's 85 pounds of pure wuss: afraid of cats, and lets our 60 pound 5-years-younger yellow lab push him around. He loves saying good morning to us by going between our legs and getting good-morning-butt-scratches. For him, nothing beats a kernel of buttery popcorn goodness... or when Dad lets him lick the baked on goo in the crockpot pan when I'm not looking. He's been a part of our family for longer than we've been a family.

I love my big black teddy bear so much.

(My husband always gives me crap about writing posts that make him cry. Sweetheart, I'm sorry- I know I did it again.)