Marion Makes…

Hello from my new website, friends! We’re now hosted on wordpress instead of bearblog, and I’m super excited about it. The site content is still very much the same as before, but with so much more functionality and adaptability. I have a search bar! I have a tag cloud! You can leave comments! 🤩 I hope you all like the new site as much as I do, cuz it was a stupid amount of work to transfer my posts, lmao. If you have any suggestions for the site, please let me know!

Now on to the meat of the post.

It’s been more than a month since my last big update, and for good reason. I think it’s safe to say that June was one of the busiest and most difficult, traumatic months of my entire life. I wrote longer documents than I have in decades. I took more notes than my notebook could handle. I made more phone calls than I care to remember. I had more anxiety than I’ve had since I was unmedicated. There was so much strife.

Because of the emotion and the people involved, recalling suppressed memories became a center point of this ordeal. We dredged up traumas from many years ago, that we’ve been carrying with us silently like poison in our pockets. The emotional consequences of that work are something we’re all still processing, and likely will be for some time. Through it all, though, we held on to each other for support. I have never been more proud of my family in my entire life. We communicated, we consoled, we encouraged. We’re still doing so.

I haven’t sought permission from the family members involved to go into details, so for the most part, I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for it. I will say there was hospital time involved, and difficult decisions to debate and agonize over. Everyone is alive and well now, though, on the other side of it all.

There’s very little else I can say about the events of the month, though. That situation and being a mom took up the entirety of my brain power. I did very little crafting. I have read some books recently, though. I tore through the first two books of Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy in four days. Going more slowly for book three.

The only other new things I’ll mention are that my psychiatrist and I made a big change to my medications (in the middle of this crazy time, no less) to try to combat the depressive state I was in for a few weeks before the shit hit the fan

AND

I had my arm implant birth control removed in anticipation of trying for child number two! We wanted to aim for conceiving around August (it wasn’t just around the corner when we decided to do this, lol) or September like we did for Erica. I greatly appreciated not being pregnant through the summer with her. I do have to wait for my period to come back before we can try, but the doctors said that should happen in time for our goals. I believe it, too, cuz I had horrible cramps a week after I got the thing taken out, for the first time in forever.

Some of the regular updates:
Zaide is still holding steady at a very dependent and not very communicative state. He mostly watches TV. Not much change there as far as outward symptoms. His last scans (in May I think?) did show increased tumor size, but since then he’s started a new treatment that did improve his condition somewhat. We’ll see if it’s affected the tumors positively as well after his next scans, next week.
Erica is still developing strongly and wonderfully. She’s very close to walking, and has even taken thirteen steps in a row once, but she’s regressed a bit in the last couple weeks while her brain processes the new way of moving. We try to still do walking practice with her almost every day, but she mostly just wants to crawl or cruise with help right now. We’re not pushing too hard. We’re staying at Shoshana and Zaide’s house to take care of Zaide while Uncle K is gone, this time for a nine day stretch. So, her routines are a little off, and her play spaces are a little less conducive to walking.
She’s also been a little bratty, with more screaming fits if we don’t hold her all the time, which means we’ve been practicing playing alone a little more to combat that. She has started making new angry noises that make her sound like a malfunctioning blender.
Other Erica updates – she’s giving high fives now, and they make her happy; Nate swears she said “I love you” back at him once; she points her finger and waves it around while saying “no no no;” we took her to her second night market recently, which is super exciting cuz it’s one of her first memorable “you’ve already done this once!” moments; she has started giving me gentle touch to show affection, including one time walking behind me and outta nowhere just patting and rubbing my back like I do for her.

After how long I’ve put this post off, I feel as if I owe you guys more update, but I honestly had such a fully terrible month that there’s not much else to share. We are doing better now, and still are all supporting each other as best we can from afar. I’m also very much looking forward to next month, when I’ll have my annual meetup with my internet friends. For this month, I plan to go back to basics and focus on my daily quests, especially health and wellness related, because those dropped almost completely last month. I really really want to build healthy habits that I can model for Erica and baby two when they’re old enough to understand them, and so I can be healthy for pregnancy two.

Anyways, I suppose that’s it for this month. I hope you enjoy the new site, fam. I don’t know what format the monthly update alert emails will take, hopefully they don’t (didn’t?) throw anyone off or cause confusion. I’ll miss being able to write the emails myself, but this will be good if I build up readers.

Much love :)