Another travel..

We're headed out again tomorrow-to WV. To "home", to pick up daughter- who has been there since the 26th of July. I think she's more than ready to come back, and we're more than ready to have her back :) She will more than likely come back with a big I can do anything I want, you're not the boss of me now, attitude. It's expected, and it will take awhile to get her back into normal mode, but I'm up to the challenge ;)

Due to what I am sure will be a guilt-induced,non-stop grief ridden trip, I've cut it short and have already planned out most of the time while I'm there so that I don't have to hear about living here and not there. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my family. They are awesome, and they have always been wonderful to me. You would never know by the insane amounts of complaining I do as of late, but I am very appreciative of the family I've been given. However, moving here put a strain on our relationships, and it's only just now starting to come back around. I know that for each person, they are only saying the things that they say out of love- but when you get those sayings from 5-10 people at minimum, I end up coming home emotionally spent. So I do what I can to be accommodating to others feelings, while drawing a line to make sure I spare my own feelings and sanity. It's what has to be done ;)

In the midst of all of this planning and preparing, son has taken on the task of completely disrupting his sleep schedule. I blame it partly on myself and summer, because we are a lot more flexible with bedtime during the summer, within reason. it started out with us just bumping bedtime back an hour for him- which put him in the 9:30ish range. When he goes to bed, he sleeps an average of 10-12 hours, which is normal for his age. However, over the course of the last few weeks, he has managed to push his bedtime back to midnight- and that's even with me not letting him take a nap. Ugh. I'm not really sure what has thrown him off so much, but it has definitely been worse since the Bahamas trip. I haven't really bothered to try to get him back on a schedule, just because we are leaving again tomorrow and I know that it would serve no purpose. Daughter was always good to sleep away from home, because we allowed her to sleep in the bed with us. However, I refused to have another kid in my bed for 4 years, and so son sleeps in his crib and does very well- but it makes travel difficult. Especially coming back home because then he wants to be in the bed with me since he's been able to do it while we were gone. Whew.

I say all of this to say, I am mentally beat. I go home, to two ill grandpas. My one grandpa who is living with the return of his cancer, and- against my advice- no one in the family has told him that they know that his cancer is back. It's a real communication issue, don't you think? My other grandpa was put in the hospital the day that we came back from the Bahamas- July 26th- and is just now being discharged. Only he has been in the hospital for so long that he is so weak. He's been through many, many, tests, and had to endure many days in a row that he couldn't eat. So he's very weak and has to be discharged to a local nursing home for rehab physical therapy. It's all VERY hard on my family, because he's nowhere near needing to actually be in a nursing home. He's very healthy normally, and very self sufficient, so for him to be in a nursing home is very frightening for him. Imagine being yourself- completely in your right mind and healthy, just weak, and being surrounded by Alzheimer's patients and people who are calling out and moaning all hours of the night. I have to admit for me, when I was in nursing school, the nursing home rotation was the hardest for me. You see lots of things that you don't want to see- you don't want it to happen to your elderly family members. You also don't want to see the people there that are neglected by family, and a lot of times neglected by the staff as well. It's a place full of people- often times too many- yet it always felt so lonely to me. So as you can imagine, having my totally healthy grandpa in a nursing home is quite traumatic for my family. If you've ever been in one, just imagine yourself there as a resident. Meh. :/

So in between seeking constant updates on my grandpa(s), dealing with guilt that sometimes creeps up on me for not being there, juggling a few personal problems of my own, and son's apparent late night party habit, I am spent. I can only hope that after this trip, life resumes some sense of normalcy and I can relax a bit.

Yeah right...