NatalieKelsey

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Hi everyone! Thanks for the birthday wishes and the comments, faves, and watches. I'm sorry I've been gone for almost a year. I'll be ready to come back on a limited basis, soon. I hear your new GM's are doing a spectacular job, which is totally awesome. Miss you all and hope all is well.

Natalie

Um, yes. I am very, VERY behind with the Daily Deviation features. I am sitting on over 100 DD suggestions; which means were I to approve each and every one of them, I would have enough for every single day between now and when my term as GM is over, plus some. Since you guys and I both know that is unlikely, I will probably open suggestions up again at the end of this month or in the beginning/middle of May. SO...go ahead and keep browsing or bookmark or favorite things that you find that you love, just don't note them to me yet, okay? I'm a little swamped right now.... Heck. I'm drowning.









So, in case you're wondering why it seems I never really came back from Christmas vacation, or at least, why I've been less substantial and present than I've tried to be in the past, it's mostly personal, home-lifey type stuff. I'll explain it here, but it's mostly boring and not dishy fun gossip, or big scary medical news, so if you're looking for exciting, my journal's not the place. Sorry.

I've been asked before how a mother of four kids under the age of 10 has any time at all to make art, or be on the computer, or whatever, and the answer is, I neglect a lot of stuff. I never had a good reason to, other than I get easily overwhelmed by stuff that other people just do, like housework, dishes and laundry, and things like that. When my mom or mother-in-law visit, they help a lot, and the house is clean for a couple weeks after they leave, but then I sink back into my chair and give up again.

When we took my son Aidan to get evaluated last fall for his own quirky difficulties, we found out he was very gifted but also has ADHD. The doctors diagnosing him were pediatricians, but urged me to get myself evaluated, since much of our verbal history was similar and my mannerisms struck them as....well, ADHD!

So I had an appointment in January with a psychiatrist, who took an extensive amount of paperwork and verbal history and found that I also had ADHD...and dysthymic depression...and generalized anxiety disorder....and mood disorder, NOS. Nice. Not really what you want to find out about yourself in your mid 30's when you're already struggling with motivation and weight and mounds of laundry and 4 kids and a husband who loves you but is always at work. But instead of telling me what people have told me all my life (you're just lazy, you need to try harder, put some effort into it, you can do better, you're not living up to your potential, you're too smart to act like this) the psychiatrist said "Here, these will help, come back in a month and we'll adjust them." And he gave me new prescriptions.

What does that have to do with being AWOL from dA? Well...the medicine has had some strange and wonderful effects on me. For instance, I got my brain back! My "hyperactivity" didn't go away, unfortunately, now that my focus is clear I actually end up talking even more than usual because my thoughts all connect up and don't fly off like dandelion fluff. But instead of escaping from real life in books, tv and movies, I'm interested in real life again, and making connections with my kids. Darth Mommy stopped snapping at people, and started figuring out all the awesome things about her kids she didn't know! I knew my kids were smart, but...when you find out the clueless one who doesn't know where his shoes are, you know, the one who wipes snot on his shirt, is actually a budding geologist and paleontologist that loves to spell and learns his piano lessons nearly a book at a time, well, your worldview kinda shifts. Your annoying daughter who never shuts up and does every possible accent and can do not just a line from a movie, but a whole scene complete with sound effects and score...she's also a math whiz and wants to be a comic book artist when she grows up. The son you knew was gifted...he is doing binary math in his head during the third grade multiplication lessons and picked out a middle school algebra textbook when you took him to the used bookstore for a video. If you want to know what the baby, who isn't two yet, is capable of...well, click the link labeled "Crazy Kelsey Blog" up there, there are a bunch of entries about him.

I'm taking classes online, like, "Homeschool With Success " so we can keep learning together this summer and "Enhancing Language Development in Childhood" and  reading everything I can about Chaos Theory and Fractal Geometry so I can "get it" on a deeper level. I feel like I woke up after being asleep for 15 years. I only did one semester of college, before I was burnt out and homesick and confused. I went to beauty school instead. So now I feel like I'm ready for some real learning! Where do I start? Spanish? Chinese? Catch up on my math now that I know I'm not too stupid to learn it?

Another side effect, or maybe main effect, who knows? of my medicine is that I've lost 35 lbs since I started my medicine in January. With ADHD, I often forgot that I'd eaten recently, and so I would snack a lot. The depression made me want to eat to feel better, so I ate bigger portions of less-healthy food and I ate whenever I had someone to eat with, like a friend or family member, because it was less sad to eat with someone. So between emotional eating and double-eating because I'd forgotten I had eaten, on top of my fourth-baby body, I got a lot bigger than I'd ever been in my life. Now with my medicines and better family relationships, I'm feeling happier, so I don't need to eat to feel good; I am focused, so I remember not to eat too often and I remember to hit the gym on a regular basis; the Topamax and Adderall are appetite suppressants, so my portions are reasonable...it's a nice set of "perfect storm" conditions. So because of my new obsession with Zumba, my meds, and my new eating habits, I have recovered my face, my elbows and knees, and my waist! Whee! And a whole lot of my energy.

But instead of using my newfound stamina and energy here at dA, where it is fun to do so, I am expending it in an area I never expected to have to. Two of my kids are going through the process of getting evaluated for special ed at school. This is an emotional, interesting and difficult process under the best of circumstances, but it is especially difficult when it gets suddenly thrown into your lap when you have no idea it's coming. The school is being very helpful, none of the horror stories some people go through so far, but while it's obvious the boys are struggling with something, it's really hard to pin down what it is, exactly. How do you convince anyone to evaluate for special needs when your kid is showing up in the 99th percentile on most of his assessments and the school psychologist and your outside evaluator register your most clueless kid as having a gifted range IQ? I've been studying night and day how to be a parent advocate for kids with special needs, writing letters non-stop, researching, putting together reports intended to be 3 or 4 pages that turn out to be 30 or 40 pages, having meetings with all kinds of school personnel, etc.

So, while this whole journal entry probably sounds like I'm alternately bragging and complaining, that is an accurate picture of my current real life. Alternately feeling like things are really looking up from the last couple of very grey, neutral, go-nowhere and be-nothing years....and then kind of staggering under loads that I'm not used to bearing because I've always shied away from taking anything that looks like a burden. I know there are so many of you that struggle through worse things every day, and I admire your courage greatly. I need to grow myself a measure of courage now too. I'm blessed to have supportive family and friends, school staff and gym staff and doctors and church people and community members. I never have to stand alone. For that I am so grateful.