Monday, just one more grueling day.

On the kids's side of things, today was just tiring. They were somewhat fussy about their meals, but they don't exactly enjoy fresh veggies. Cuddle Bear decided that the only way he was going to eat raw carrots was if they were dipped in barbecue sauce. I decided I didn't care and gave him some. Snuggle Bug ate all of my grapes. I'm a bit disappointed, but at least he decided he was going to eat something healthy.

Tomorrow, I suspect they are going to be cranky about cereal for breakfast again. I just don't know how to make donuts. If I did, I would make them for the kids. It seems to be their absolute favorite thing to eat for breakfast. I am considering buying a baking tray that looks like it makes min-bunt cakes and whipping up a bunch of them and calling it good enough.

We have loads of laundry that need put away. I look at it and feel bad about it all. Which then turns into my desperately trying to ignore them until the end of the day where I can't avoid them any more. It is a vicious cycle that eventually turns to piles of clean vs dirty laundry about the apartment. It's about as pleasant as my mood roller coaster.

My mood is still down. I'm still super anxious about everything. I'm on the hunt for a new psychiatrist and probably a new therapist. The combination of 'just think happy thoughts' and 'it's not as bad as you're saying it is.' attitudes I'm getting from the clinic has me feeling even worse. I am trying to get over this fear that a new psychiatrist would decide that I am too much of a problem client and try to shuffle me out the door on a boatload more medications rather than help me.

I have not been having good days regarding self image, unsurprisingly. I realized this evening, however, I need to start wearing my new heels if I am going to have them broken in enough so that I'm not walking around on blistered feet at K&R's wedding. I'm still quietly going "OH GODS WHAT DO I WEAR!?!" never mind the fact that Beloved helped me narrow things down to two possible options.

I am really getting tired of this social phobia telling me that whatever I pick is going to be the wrong thing.

Burning out.

Today was a long and exhausting day. I spent 90% of it cleaning and directing the kids in cleaning. After all of this work, the toys are now sorted out. The books are all organized on their shelves. The toybox is full and sitting in its proper location. The extra blankets are stowed in the kids' chests. We got a lot of stuff done. Looking around the room, though, it doesn't feel like we did. Thinks were relatively picked up this morning.

I tripped over a few toys as I was walking across the room and saw a bin full of just random stuff. I got angry. Then I started cleaning. The kids were confused when I dumped out the toybox. They were even more confused when I insisted that they couldn't just throw anything in there. It was a painful process to sort all of their toys. They didn't like it. I didn't like it. But it was something that hadn't been done in over two years. When things started to shape up as how they were going to get put away, it got easier.

I'm glad that I saved those stupid McDonald's halloween buckets. I used four of them. Two to hold dinosaurs and random animals. One to hold knock off transformer toys (which were in happy meals originally) and one to hold all of the action figures they've got. We have three gallon sized bins full of toy cars and an additional fleet stowed neatly beneath a shelf and a table, mostly. I have recycled a large box that held pullups to hold large dinosaur toys and large action figures. I also recycled a slightly smaller box to hold stuffed animals.

The big innovation was taking the box that Cuddle Bear's toy weed wacker came in and turning it into a shelf on the wall. Instead of holding the weed wacker, it is full of small stuffed animals. The whole affair is light enough that it can stay up with three anchor points. The other innovation came from taking a box that the electric grill came in and cutting it up to make a 'tool box' out of it. Between the two tool boxes they had to begin with and this third one, they have 90% of their toy hand tools put away underneath their toy workbench. Sitting on top of it is the rubber work belt that came with it (with tools in their respective places) and a handful of others with it.

I have folded up the extra blankets that the kids kept shoving around on their beds and put them in the base of their chests from Grandpa M. When they went to bed, they didn't notice the blankets missing. Maybe we can manage to get to the beginning of cool weather before they come back out. I don't know. It did make for them to have an easier time making their beds. (This is a new thing. The kids mess up the sheets on their beds and, in the past, we fixed them. Now they are taking responsibility for it. The results thus far have been mixed. Hopefully putting the blankets away, this will make for more positive results.)

Their brand-name Transformers toys are sitting on top of their bookcase. The extra large ones are in back against the wall. The smaller ones are towards the front, where they are easier to access. Snuggle Bug broke Cuddle Bear's new one this afternoon, so I took away his more complicated version of Bumblebee. We'll see if he bears this in mind when he is sharing with his brother. If he breaks his brother's brand new transformer again, I believe that I will have to put them up for a bit. As it stands, we are missing one somewhere. In all of our cleaning, we have not found it. I suspect it is under the couch, which we did not touch today.

I didn't get the kitchen clean. I ran out of energy for that. I didn't get any laundry put away. And I have a pile of mail that I really need to go through but I am apprehensive about it all. I look back over the day today and I realize that in some respects today's big business of going through the toys was a form of procrastination. Because why procrastinate in a small way when you can go huge, right? Thus, tomorrow morning, I think I will do a 'bad mommy' thing and let the kids watch cartoons as I go through the mail, balance the checkbook, pay bills, and make official phone calls.

I'm super anxious about looking for a new psychiatrist. I'm afraid that they're going to look at my file from where I have been getting services and take the abject nonsense that these people have written as gospel and ignore what I have to say about it all. Money anxiety is taking a backseat to this.

Fuck Bipolar

I haven't been well. My silence over the last little while may have lead some of you who know me intimately to suspect this. I am ... angry. This is on top of the lingering depression problem. It has not been too the extent that I believe it is necessary for me to go into the hospital. It has, however, been enough that it makes getting my household duties done difficult. It has made getting out of the apartment and being in the community difficult. All the little things that my therapist says I should be going out and doing right now, I am really struggling to do it.

I have had this happen before. I mentioned it to my psych nurse way back in Spring. I think I posted something about how well that went. My kids were on spring break. She thought that putting me on another SSRI was a great idea. I went from depressed to suicidal in the span of about 3 days and then I was in the hospital for about a week while they fixed my medications. At that time, one of the psychiatrists that was treating me asked me how long I had been on the combination of Seroquel and Geodon. I explained I had been taking it for about 7 years. Cue him being offended and all around not happy. He was particularly not happy with the fact that my dosage was so high.

Next thing I know, I was taken off of a LOT of medication. I felt a bit better. A little time goes by and the mild sense of dysphoria grew more intense. I say something to my psych nurse. She tells me that my moods are not really fluctuating, it was just life happening. She tells me that my problem is the stress that comes from being with the kids when they are on break is causing my depressive symptoms. After a few months of this nonsense, she says 'well, let's increase your seroquel.' I voiced my concerns about this because upping my dosage of antipsychotics really didn't do anything to stabilize my mood, unless you counted mild zombification as stabilized.

At which point, she says that I'm being overly anxious and triples my prescription for Ativan. This all happens Monday this week. I start taking the 300mg Seroquel and problems become apparent. My coordination is off hard core. I was stumbling like I was intoxicated. When I got out of bed, I nearly brained myself on the door jamb which is a few feet away from the foot of the bed. It was awful. I couldn't walk across the room with out tripping (and this was with out kids toys in the way). I was exhausted and I had a massive headache. But, the part that really disturbed me is my vision changed. My close range vision is blurry now. My moderate distant range vision is what my close range vision was before (I have a mild astigmatism in my left eye so things are a bit fuzzy). And, things have a bit of a halo about them.

Cue a panicked call to my pharmacist who says that is all an indication that I am on too much and I should call my dr stat. Call the psych nurse and I don't get an answer back until the end of the day, despite the fact that all three of the messages I left clearly conveyed my distress over the situation. She says that we're going to press on with the increase in the antipsychotic, stating it will be a 50mg increase before a 100mg increase. (Originally, I was on 200 mg of Seroquel. Which I got put on when it became apparent that the Geodon was losing effectiveness as a mood stabilizer. And I was put on that when the Seroquel in the past was losing effectiveness as a mood stabilizer. And before that, I was on both meds ... and the drama and bullshit just goes back to when I began dealing with these people.)

So, Beloved and I discussed it. I was upset and afraid. We decided that I was going to go back to the 200mg dosage. The mind fog lifted to a significant extent, the coordination issues cleared up, but the vision issues remained. I tried again today to get ahold of my psych nurse. No one called me back from her office. So, I called my general practitioner. I gave the nurse I spoke to a quick rundown of the situation so I will be going in on Monday to figure out what the fuck we're going to do.

In the mean time, I'm going to feel like shit, be frustrated because I can't see properly, and want to crawl into a hole and hide from everything.

Fuck this bipolar business with a rusty chainsaw.

August. Woo.

The dry weather has been pretty hard on my plants. but, you can see that I did get a little bit out of my garden. On the left is a chocolate mint, in the center is an orange mint, and on the right is a sweet mint. And at the extreme right is Billy (aka Snuggle Bug) showing off his new trucks.

We have begun the process of acquiring school supplies. I am graciously sharing two of the super cute pencil erasers that I found out at the store. Going by the school's lists, we're all set for the first day. The boys each have new backpacks. because the bottom seams were looking worn. I discovered that I had a stock pile of supplies left over from last year when I was cleaning. So, I brought them over for Gin's girls to have.

I'm WAAAAY behind on my knitting stuff for the holidays. I am, however, pretty much set on what we're doing for the wedding present to Katie and Roger. I'm partially finished with the gift I am making for J&J's wedding anniversary. And, in the midst of all of this, I'm left struggling to think of something that would be a good present for Beloved.