After seeing yesterday's post, Bernard sent me over to Teresa Ollila's site. The photos, especially the shot of the little girl testing her brother's blood sugar, really moved me. O was very interested in the one of the little boy getting an injection.

One week's worth of Olivia's insulin syringes

 
Droughts don't make for such nice waterfalls, but we made do with a breeze.
 

And a nice hammock. 

Off to spend an evening in the woods. I have promised Olivia waterfalls.

In the meantime, please enjoy...

A sampling of the craptastic offerings that I managed not to score today at the St. Elmo Community-Wide Yard Sale:

-an enormous - and I mean enormous - glass jar full of dried beans
-an equally enormous black, plaster panther
-3,657 ratty-ass stuffed animals
-a wide assortment of material on the Second Coming and eleventy billion of those Sue Grafton books, you know the ones: "B is for Bludgen" or "P is for Patricide" or whatever

I love events like this. I finally got a smile out of the neighbor on the next corner, whom we see EVERY SINGLE DAY and had yet to respond to our hellos. Met the new neighbors up the street and relieved them of some of their herbs and a tomato plant. Avoided meeting the folks with seventeen weed eaters and seemingly every jar, can, mattress, and cigar box they have ever come across. Oh wait, they weren't having a sale. That's just their yard.

1:00 am wide awake
Lord help.
Lord please.
Let me make the right decisions.
Help me stay focused.

Days I feel like we're managing.
1:00 am I stare at the ceiling fan and know I am missing something.
Something's headed down the road at me and I am not prepared.
Complications. Bad reactions. Damage.

She has a rash. Is it just a rash?
Bruises all over her arms from the needles. Daytime I see them for what they are.
I look at them in the light coming in the window at night and I hate them.
Clean her finger, prick her finger, wait for the numbers.
I could do this in my sleep now.
But I don't
1:00 am wide awake.

This woman's music makes me feel really good.

This scares the bejeebus out of me.

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." - Albert Einstein

So this is how it's going to end - with neither a bang nor a whimper, but merely an annoying chorus of "Can you hear me now?"

My blog hiatus stretches close to a month, so I guess I better end this dry spell. I don't know why I have been absent. There's been plenty worth documenting.

O turned two.


(The cupcakes were low sugar and delicious. O's numbers were beautiful all day. A nice present for us all.)

We put off making a decision on Baby Number Two.

O's off the ports. She wore two and they definitely made things easier, but she could not get used to it and asked us not to put in another. So we are taking a break, but will try again soon. Without them, the injections are again an ordeal for both of us. It basically comes down to sit on her or sneak up on her and neither feels like a good option.

Some days I feel like I have allowed myself to be lulled. I haven't been reading much about diabetes, haven't been preparing for or researching the pump. I watch her numbers; I count her carbs (trying to figure out how much she gets and how much she feeds to the dog); I try to factor in how her activity level will come into play. If it works today, I'll try to replicate it tomorrow. It rarely does, though, and tomorrow morning I will be back at it, counting, guessing, praying. Day slides into day. A bit of a holding pattern, which is probably neither bad nor good, I guess. Catching my breath.

But Olivia? Most definitely not in a holding pattern. We go to the playground, the zoo, the museum. She picks up a new word every 17 seconds and keeps up a running commentary on everything she sees. She sings Twinkle, Twinkle to her bear. She asks to hold my hand. She amazes me every single day.