Saturday Night
We had a fun little dinner party tonight. We invited over one of Mike’s former co-workers and his wife, so maybe it wasn’t so much a party as dinner guests. I made Asian peanut chicken and bought pastries from a local bakery, so it was super easy (except for the part where Mike worked his butt off cleaning the house. But that was super easy for me. Poor, abused Mike).
We have a little bakery just down the street from us (literally, I could walk there in about five minutes) that I’ve never gone to before. It’s called Royal Bagel Bakery and I’m just not that into bagels. Plus, I can be really weird sometimes and not want to go into places that aren’t familiar. Why? I don’t know. It’s not like they are going to take away my birthday if I don’t stand in the line in the correct fashion.
I guess it is an Italian bakery, so I didn’t know what most of the stuff was. I asked them to recommend a few things, so I ended up with an assortment of pastries that I cut into smaller bits and we all sampled everything. The best: chocolate cigars. It was rich chocolate ganache rolled in a flaky pastry. Yum!
The other reason I’ve never gone there? I didn’t want to know what goodies were contained in a bakery within walking distance. I don’t need any more temptations. I’m already as big as a house and can’t seem to lose any of it. I keep growing and growing and growing–and we’re not talking vertically. I’m using food as a therapeutic outlet, so the more unhappy I am with my body the more I eat. In the past I’ve been able to reign it in and make up rules that limited my eating, but I guess I’m not motivated enough yet. I am currently in a loop of bad eating=unhappiness=bad eating=weight gain=unhappiness=body hatred=bad eating repeat repeat repeat. It’s hard to help yourself when you hate yourself.
Anyway, we haven’t seen our guests for well over a year. We’ve known them since we moved out here–seven years. They’ve always been wonderful, loving parents. Tonight they scared the ever living shit out of me. They have two teenage daughters and it sounds like they have been through hell this past year. They didn’t give us a lot of details, but they’ve had to hospitalize one of their daughters and then move her to a very small private school. They looked worn out, beat down, and ready to give up.
As the saying goes “bigger kids, bigger problems.” I never wanted to have kids because I knew what my mom went through with my sister. I convinced myself that we wouldn’t have to deal with those types of problems because we are good parents who present a united front. We don’t have dysfunction in our family unit. We will nip trouble in the bud. We will be kind, loving, and set firm boundaries while still fostering independence. Seeing a nice, engaged, loving, formerly happy family going through this sort of ordeal makes me want to crawl in a hole and never come out. Or stick bricks on my kids’ heads so they can never grow up.
Let’s think of something happier.
I started getting eczema on my hands when I was 16. It’s gone through good cycles and bad cycles. I’m always trying to find the culprit since it has become very apparent that it’s an allergic reaction, but I have never come up with a long term solution. I just can’t figure out what triggers the reaction. At one point I even thought I was allergic to my engagement ring, which was so sad!
My hands usually clear up when I go on vacation, so I’ve tried changing everything from my body wash to shampoo to hand soap. I have tried eliminating certain foods from my diet. I’ve tried different lotions. I’ve even blamed the humidity.
Still, my hands have been in horrible condition ever since Elsa was born.
My hands started healing when we went on our Thanksgiving adventure. When we got home, I found a big laundry basket full of wadded up clothes. I assumed they were dirty, but Mike said they were clean. Why would I leave a pile of clean clothes out? I hate wrinkled up clothes?
I started folding this huge pile and my hands started itching. It became unbearable. I had to use some of my cortisone cream to stop the itching, and I only do that in a worse case scenario. It’s great for stopping the itching, but if you use it too much it destroys your skin. Your skin just sort of disintegrates, leaving gaping wounds that take months to heal. Fun! I’ve had better luck using a cortisone based lotion instead of the straight cream, but it still scares me.
Maybe the laundry is the problem! Doh!
When Elsa was born I dramatically altered our laundry routine because of her diapers. We’d used All Free and Clear for years, but switched over to Tide Free and Gentle because it supposedly doesn’t leave a build up in the washing machine. I use a special diaper friendly detergent on the actual diapers, but don’t find it effective with regular laundry. I also use an allergy friendly dryer sheet because I don’t like static cling and can’t keep track of dryer balls.
Since I’ve figured out it may be the laundry, I’ve stopped using the Bounce and started using the dryer balls again. I have also been washing my hands really well after handling the clean laundry. I’ve always avoided unnecessarily washing my hands because I thought the wetness made the problem worse. So far my hands are looking great. I hope this was the answer. It is so frustrating to know that there’s a solution to the problem and not be able to find the solution. Sure, I could go to an allergist, but in order to be tested for an allergy you sort of have to have an idea of what they should test you for. Let’s cross our fingers and our toes and hope that I just need to stop using bounce and be mindful of laundry residue. It would be amazing to have hands that didn’t hurt all the time.