Year: 2015

First of all, thank you to everyone who reached out to me (mostly on instagram) about CTS. The doctor/all my internet research told me about 50% of people recover without surgery but it’s great to hear from so many people who only needed a brace & rest.

SPEAKING OF REST, I’m bad at it. On Monday I had some banners that I needed to make & ship straight away, and then yesterday I could not help myself, I had to make something. I had this really dark blue suede that came in a bag of scraps, not enough to make into shoes or boots, but perfect for patches! I made two appliquéd and embroidered suede & leather patches, a crescent moon & stars and the constellation Aquarius.

It was actually so nice to just make something for funsies (although I did put them in the shop BECAUSE OF COURSE I DID and have sold some already, oops); on Monday night I got very depressed sitting on the couch and doing nothing with my hands. I figure… people who get CTS can’t just quit their whole lives, they have jobs and responsibilities that they have to keep doing, and so do I. And as long as I wear my brace and take breaks and don’t do TOO much it’ll be fine. Also, I managed to find a median nerve-friendly activity I can do in the evenings to fill the crafting void: painting my nails! It’s something I enjoy doing, it keeps my hands busy AND if I try to make or sew anything I’ll screw up my mani.

Gwen is super fascinated by my brace. Whenever I take it off she steals it and tries to put it on. I found a small legwarmer of hers with a hole in the side for her thumb and she likes to wear it around on her right arm, just like me. Of course, I HATE my brace so after work today I’m going to go to this pharmacy by the hospital that I’m hoping will have a better selection. Is it bad that I just want a brace that looks cool? I mean, I have to wear it for two months, and this navy blue & red neoprene number is really cramping my style.

Spot the danger.

This dress is her absolute favourite right now: a print with foxes, and pockets??? Who could ask for more from a dress? Not this girl.

I’ve been having a lot of pain and numbness in my right hand for the past little while so this morning I went to the doctor. He confirmed my suspicion that I have carpal tunnel syndrome. Like, I JUST beat Graves’ disease (or at least it’s in remission) and now this? Just one annoying health problem after another? Is this what getting old is? Because NO THANKS. Sign me up to become a non-corporeal vaporous being of pure energy. Upload me to the cloud.

CTS can be linked to hypothyroidism, so with my history of thyroid disease I will need to get my TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) levels tested, but my doctor thinks it’s more likely from the repetitive work of all the crafts I make. Kind of funny that my husband, who has worked in IT for like, fifteen years, is fine but apparently my pathetic median nerve can’t hold up to a lil crafting. Ok a LOT of crafting but still. Ha ha. Soooooooo funny.

Now I get to wear this cool and not-at-all uncomfortable wrist brace all day and night, or all night and as much of the day as I can. It’s pretty annoying because in my line of work (my day job, not my side hustles) I have to wash my hands 350 million times a day, so it’s put on brace, take off brace, wash hands, dry hands, put on brace, take off brace, wash hands, put on brace, repeat ad nauseum. Every time I prepare food or wipe a nose or change a diaper. So tedious! And wearing the brace for extended periods of time (ie ALL DAY AND NIGHT) makes my wrist and hand all sweaty and the sweatiness trapped under the brace makes my skin all irritated and itchy.

It’s also annoying because making things is what I really love to do, and now my ability to do it is seriously impaired. tbh my ability to do ANYTHING is impaired, like it hurts to do the dishes, it hurts to lift Gwen out of her crib, it hurts to hold up a picture book to read to her. I have to wear the brace for 6-8 weeks, and if it doesn’t improve then I might need surgery, which sounds super fun.

Over the weekend I made these cute bunny boots for Gwen, and I was going to give a pair away on my instagram, but after talking it over with Taylor it just doesn’t make sense to give myself extra work right now, which is so unfortunate. I’m in the middle of making some black leather boots with a double fringe, but I might put finishing them on hold. Idk. I have a bunch of open banner orders that need to get made, so I’ll probably focus on those, the things people have paid me money for. It’s going to be hard to not be making anything else though; I’m so used to working on something all the time that just sitting watching tv and not doing anything with my hands seems weird.

PS To add to the fun today, Taylor was working from home last night and discovered the source of the mystery puddle: a little crack in the ceiling, way at the back above the upper cabinet where we couldn’t see it before, with water the seeps/drips/pours out intermittently. So that’s great, I can only imagine what a joy this’ll be to have repaired.

Totally empty train cars are eerie.

Magnolias are in bloom all over the city.

Little Seawall walker.

Can’t resist sunlight through the trees.

All the flat stud rivets I mangled & destroyed while figuring out how to set them. Good thing I bought 100, haha.

The other week Taylor and I got up on Saturday morning and found this super mysterious puddle of water on the kitchen counter. It was under and around the Nespresso so my initial assumption was that Taylor has refilled the machine’s water tank and spilled some on the counter, but he hadn’t refilled it, just turned it on. We worried the Nespresso might be leaking, but the water was clear and had no coffee smell at all. I checked to see if water had gotten trapped under the dish-drying rack and run over to the Nespresso from there but no, the rest of the counter between the sink and the puddle was dry, as was the ceiling. When we opened the cupboard above the Nespresso we found a second puddle. This one was much smaller, at the front of the bottom shelf only. Nothing above it was wet, the shelf-puddle was much smaller than the counter-puddle, and very localized. The very front edge of the shelf had actually become swollen with water, as if it had been sitting there for a very long time, but none of the things on the shelf (sippy cups, coffee caps, sugar bowl) were wet. As far as we could tell, there was no logical explanation for the water. No one had spilled it, it hadn’t leaked from anywhere, and the fact that it appeared to have originated in the otherwise dry upper cabinet and dripped down onto the counter made zero sense. The only possible answer: ghosts. Ghosts did it.*

Gwen discovered this week that if she shuts herself in the bathroom and opens the cupboard under the sink, the cupboard door will prevent the bathroom door from being opened. This caused some serious panic on Monday night when she shut herself in there alone with the bath running, but I managed to bump the cupboard door shut and get in before she climbed into the bath unsupervised. She usually can’t get into the bathroom by herself (there is a gate in the hallway) so we don’t have childlocks on the cupboard but I guess it’s time for that to change.

On Tuesday afternoon I took gwen to the post office with me to mail a couple banners and a pair of boots. I am ALWAYS at the post office, like AT LEAST 2-3 times a week so I’m fairly friendly with a lot of the people who work there. One of the employees, who I chat with regularly, commented on Gwen, saying “She’s always so quiet, I never hear her make a peep!” To which I automatically replied “She doesn’t talk, she has a speech delay.” TALK ABOUT A CONVERSATION DERAILER. And it’s also not strictly true: Gwen does talk, just not as much as she should. tbh she hasn’t made any huge strides since January; she has a couple new words but not many**. She has, however, reached the point where not being able to effectively communicate has become so frustrating for her that she just SCREAMS and SCREAMS. She also screams to express happiness & joy, so in spite of her delayed talking she is DEFINITELY not “always so quiet.”

* It’s possible that one of us sleepwalked to the kitchen and put an ice cube in the cupboard which melted slowly overnight, but idk how much more likely that is that ghosts. Not very, tbh.

** Huh, just as I was writing this post the speech pathologist we saw in January called to see how Gwen was doing and schedule an appointment for early April. Serendipity!

This was a very creepy spot.

Spot the hummingbird!

You don’t see these little Douglas squirrels as often as the Eastern Grey squirrels which have basically taken over.

On Friday Taylor, Gwen and I took a walk through the Stanley Park trails. We hadn’t been through the park (only around the Seawall) since the early fall. We went past Lost Lagoon, up to Prospect Point, around Beaver Lake and then home. We tend to choose our trails at random and almost every time find something new or go a new way. This time we came out of the forest just below the Rose Garden, a way I SWEAR I’d never come before. Along Cathedral Trail are all these weird upright root slabs from trees felled in the 2006 windstorm. I feel like I MUST have seen them before but they are like… EXTRA WEIRD now. Taylor said the look like somewhere a dead body would be found all hung up and posed like in Hannibal or True Detective (potential serial killers pls don’t get any ideas), and one of them is DEFINITELY a place used for romantic interludes, based on the condom wrappers around it, haha.

Gwen had a great time running around up at Prospect Point, less fun when we put her in her stroller to go back down the trail. She’s definitely keen on walking more when we’re out, which is fine sometimes but others… yeesh. When we walk places together she wants to point out every dog and car she sees, and when she lets go of my hand to point out cars while we’re crossing a busy street it’s not great.

Another thing she likes to do (that is totally unrelated to walking) is she has to kiss everything goodbye. Please note that I’m saying everyTHING, not everyONE, because unless you are a toy, or a shoe, or a piece of garbage or a sharp object she shouldn’t have getting a kiss from this girl is a rare gift. Those objects (and every other object) need to be kissed. Sometimes it’s cute, like when she cuddles and kisses her baby Calico Critters. Sometimes it is not at all cute, like when it’s a soiled diaper. Sometimes it’s when she knows she’s got something she shouldn’t have and she pretends she just wants to kiss it, like I KNOW you are up to no good with those scissors and my passport, no amount of kisses will convince me otherwise!

Our cool co-ordinating outfits.

Telling Taylor to get on the swing next to her.

All pictures by Taylor Laramie

It was so beautiful and sunny today, I really wanted to go out and do something. I walked around so much on Friday and Saturday though that my body was like LOL NO, so I figured we should stick close to home. Before lunch we took Gwen out on her lil scooter to the playground. My hope was that she’d want to scoot around on the large paved area to get some more practice, but as soon as she saw the swings it was GAME OVER, MAN. She does love scooting though; on the way there I helped her (it’s slightly uphill to the corner) but coming home she had no interest in my help and would push my hands away. She fell once but after some brief yelling she got right back up and scooted home.

This month Taylor made the screensaver on our Apple TV an album of pictures from our two trips to Maui. I’m assuming he did this in honour of our wedding anniversary, which is coming up in a few weeks. Seeing all these pictures (which are five and six years old now) has been making me so nostalgic all week! Also, I reallyyyyyyyyyyyy want to go on vacation now. We’re taking a trip up to Kelowna in May to Taylor’s moms’ place, and in August we’re going to my mom’s on the Island, but it’s not the same as going somewhere on a plane, or somewhere we have to cross a border to get to, or even somewhere we’ve never been. Maybe someday we’ll be able to afford to go on a real vacation again? Anyway here’s a little #tbt (throwback Thursday for those of you unfamiliar with hashtags) of Hawaii 2009/10.

Last weekend Taylor & I took advantage of our Friday off (well, he has it off, I work a split shift totally three hours) and took Gwen to Science World. We hadn’t been since Sym was 5 or 6 and Gwen had never been. It was a little busy- there were quite a few school groups there (including a crowd of marauding pre-teen boys that I kicked out of the little kid area, sorry not sorry but “ages 6 and under” means SIX AND UNDER) but we still had a good time. Gwen had a blast for sure. The feature exhibit was about animation and she had a ton of fun pushing all the buttons on every display.

Checking out some implants, haha.

Storyboarding.

Doing a little stop motion animation with dad.

The infinite abyss, Gwen wasn’t impressed.

We stayed for a few hours and then I had the BRILLIANT idea of walking home. It’s not technically that far but we’d already been walking around Science world for so long I think it was too much. My legs were basically toast afterwards. I’ve been trying to do a lot more walking but next time I’ll just take the train home like a normal person.