growing pains

Oona turned four yesterday. We had a party at my house and my body is still trying to recover from it. Toby's family came over, like they did for Owen's party too, and let's just say I wind up feeling incredibly ill at ease in my own home. Add to that a bunch of kids screaming and tearing up my son's room, I tried to prep the room before the party, removing curtains and curtain rods (one was ripped out of the wall at a New Year's party) taking clothes out of the closet, because there is no door to the closet and I didn't want clothes all over the place. But they wound up ripping the sheets off the bed and taking the mattress off the boxspring? This is one of the many times when I just feel out of place. I really like all the parents and their children but I seem to be the only one who has a problem with this, and it's so lonely!

Oona acted like a typical, newly minted four year old; on a roller coaster of loud excitement, testing the bounds of bossiness and devolving to tears over minor transgressions, for the most part on my behalf, in trying to get her to behave, crazy Mom that I am. The past two weeks she has been uninviting Owen and I from her party (originally we were going to have it at Toby's) and Owen was ready for us to stay home together, cunning boy he's always looking for a time with Toby or I just to himself. My GI system has been a wreck today. Owen was a little upset that I had to cancel our plans to go see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs but I've spent the day running to the bathroom. Owen was kind enough to ask how my diarrhea was doing while we were at Panera, I said he didn't want to talk about that too loudly at a place that sells food but it was okay at the point, thanks for asking.

Oona got a lot of great creative presents that I had fun with once Oona, and then Owen tired of them. We colored a purse for Oona and painted a tea set today. Oona took this picture of me putting her Madeline paper doll together, I like how my hall looks in the background, it's still not done yet.

Me and the kids after the party. It's nice that I really tried to make myself presentable for the big day. I ran around in my pj's cleaning for the party, changed and stuck a bobby pin in my hair and this is me bobby pinless before cleaning up after the party. I called back the brownie man and told him I wouldn't be cleaning his place, that I was going to stay local. He sounded put out. I wish I had an alternative, insensitive House type self that could say 'Bake your own f*cking brownies!'

That House - Id would be helpful in so many situations. They put my Grandma on Levaquin, an antibiotic used to treat life-threatening infections because God knows we can't have the 94 year old woman on hospice for the past year die?! This is something that my Mom gets annoyed with me about. The whole situation is awkward because she's the POA and I'm the future nurse who sees Grandma most often and, being curious and questioning things constantly, I find myself at odds with what's going on with her care. Like... why give someone on hospice antibiotics? My Mom won't question it, just thinks 'they' know best and gets snippy with me saying it would be cruel to just kill her, while sort of implying those are my intentions. She has said outright You can't just kill her Kim. And then I feel mad and guilty and bad. I thought the whole mission behind hospice is comfort when a person is dying. My Grandma has had at least 4 rounds of antibiotics since being on hospice and it seems more like aggressive treatment to keep a dying person alive. She has to die somehow. I'd like it to be comfortably and not this drawn out piece by piece tragedy. I start thinking a lot of this treatment might be more about money than what would be best for my Grandmother, which at this point I feel is to let her go. She's between this life and the next. She's so tired, she always says that, but she'll never complain about hurting (I think that would be unseemly in her mind) and she spends a lot of time living in the past, the streets of her youth and family that were important to her when she was young. I don't know if there's a God or a heaven after this life but when I hear her I just want her to join the life she's talking about; where her Mom and my Grandpa are, she wants to join them, she keeps saying her room isn't where she lives and she's waiting for them (her dead relatives/loved ones) to get her. There's a little booklet hospice gives out to family when a loved one is first put on hospice, it talks about the natural part of the dying process. One thing it stresses is that those close to death lose interest in food and stop eating and that it is not cruel for a person to starve in this way. That it is crueler to force feed a person ready to die. But where my Grandma is they do everything but tube feed a person. They have mechanized meals (i.e. mush) that care managers will spoon feed the more severe patients. They'll give my Grandmother Boost drinks and energy bars between meals and she'll say she's not hungry but you get a polite person with dementia and they'll fold and eat what you put in front of them pretty quickly. It creates a big strain with my Mom and I. It makes me very very mad about the treatment of the elderly, in general, with dementia issues, specifically. I get mad enough to want to get a master's in public health after getting my nursing degree so I can figure out a way to design a humane assisted living facility that will keep the patient's needs paramount over money. I'm ready to email Dr. Gawande and have him present my argument in a much more palatable, meaning intelligent, articulate, non-person-going-postal, way.