Category: Uncategorized

After my big emotional outpouring about being diagnosed with Graves’ disease I kind of felt like I didn’t really know how to get back into blogging about regular things. I was planning on doing a real post earlier this week but I had a Very Difficult day dealing with doctors’ offices and health woes (including a couple new symptoms that developed this week, great), so instead I just said FORGET IT.

I took some me time to have afternoon baths and finish marathoning season 3 of Pretty Little Liars so I can catch up on season 4. I made a few banners for etsy orders and I made a few banners because WHY NOT.

When I print out sheets of letters for mini banners I fill in any extra space with words like “UGH” and “GROSS” or phrases like “WHATEVER FOREVER” and “CAN U NOT.” I have tons of these hanging around so I figured I’d better start using them. For these “PUKE” and “BARF” banners I used gold & silver for the letters and fuchsia and peacock for the hearts/stars, respectively. I’ll probably put these up in my etsy eventually, so if you are a big fan of puke and barf keep your eyes peeled.

I spent a lot of time making goo-goo faces at Gwen. She’s totally professional at travelling around the house to get at something she wants now. I used to keep all the remotes and controllers in a basket by the couch, but this week I had to fill it with toys instead because she kept crawling over and dumping it out. One of her rattles was kicked under the fauxdenza I’m making in the dining room and she crawled all the way there from the living room to fetch it out.

I know this is a terrible picture but it’s been almost impossible to capture her new “tough baby” sneer, because as soon as I take out my camera or phone she smiles and tries to grab it.

As for my health, well I don’t really care to discuss my new symptoms because they are too personal, but I will say while one sucks SO HARD OMG I HATE IT, the other I actually don’t mind. I’ve been on medication for a week now and I’m starting to feel a little better. My sweatiness has lessened (THANK GOD) and I’m much less jittery. Sometimes I do still feel like my heart is racing but it’s not as bad as last week.

One thing that’s been happening that I am really unhappy about is weird spells of muscle weakness. I’ll be standing or walking and suddenly I’ll lose all the strength in my arms or legs. I hate it because for some reason it always happens when I’m holding Gwen! Luckily I haven’t dropped her or fallen down while holding her but I’m really afraid it might happen.

This weekend I’m looking forward to working on some more just-for-fun banners (I have some drippy-style letters printed out that I’m excited to make, as well as some cool ideas for ombre skulls), rearranging my side of the office now that Taylor’s is done:

… and making goo-goo faces at everyone in my family. They deserve it.

I’m having a really tough time today so please accept this photo of an actual giant baby in lieu of a real post. xoxo

It’s really odd for me to think back over the last month. In May I was perfectly fine, then at the start of June I got sick, and now here I am, diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. It definitely seems surreal, especially with how quickly it progressed over the past week and then everything that happened yesterday.

In retrospect I’m kind of glad I put off going to the doctor until I was really, truly, undeniably ill (although I’m not recommending it to you all. Go to the doctor if you’re sick!). My doctor saw how sick I was and sent me straight to the hospital, where I was tested, diagnosed, got my very own endocrinologist and a prescription for medication in just three hours. Originally my doctor was just going to send me for blood tests, the results of which she wouldn’t have gotten back until the middle of next week (because of the long weekend) and lord knows when I would have been able to see an endocrinologist after that.

Because everything happened so quickly yesterday I was able to start taking medication right away, and I do feel a bit better already. Last night I was actually able to sleep (not a lot, but more than any other night this week) and I no longer feel like there is a hive of bees that’s been lit on fire inside my body (maybe just one burning bee). I’m still sweating like crazy and currently considering taking my second cold shower of the day, but it’s actually sunny & hot out today so maybe it’s not totally unreasonable.

And finally, on a mushy note, I just want to give a heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who has commented, sent messages and just been generally supportive over the past couple days. The reason I was being so jokey about being sick/my diagnosis was to hide the fact that I was scared out of my mind. When I went to the doctor yesterday, and she sent me to the hospital, I was petrified and alone. Taylor was at home with Gwen and I didn’t know how long I’d be in emergency so I couldn’t ask him to bring her, and leaving her at home with Sym wasn’t an option (she’s not ready for full babysitting yet). All your kind words & emojis help me to feel like I wasn’t alone, so thank you.

s’ disease. I have Graves’ disease. I know, I know, I just blew my wad on this post but how could I not open with that joke? I COULDN’T NOT, and now you know something about me, that I like to defuse tense or stressful situations (especially medical ones) with humour.

Anyway. Remember way back in early June when I said I was sick? And how several times this month I said I was still feeling sick? Turns out I’ve been getting sicker and sicker and developing more and more symptoms. My main symptoms are sweating, insomnia, and jitteriness (although I’m also nauseous, manic, and weak and floppy like a kitten). I feel like I’ve had fifty shots of espresso a day when I’ve only had one, I’ve barely slept a wink this week and the sweating! THE SWEATING OMG. I’ve been head-to-toe drenched in sweat 24 hours day for weeks. I’ve been taking 2-3 showers a day and ten minutes after getting out I’ll be sweaty again. GROSS.

Taylor has been pestering me to go to the doctor and after reading some terrifying WebMD articles I finally made an appointmentx for this afternoon. After I told my doctor my symptoms she was like “sounds thyroidy. Let’s get some blood work done- OH WAIT YOUR HEART RATE IS 117 GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM BEFORE IT EXPLODES.” I mean she didn’t LITERALLY say that but it was the gist.

After that I went across the street to the hospital, where I spent the next three hours. I had an ECG, blood work, a chest x-ray in case it was a heart thing and not a thyroid thing, and was asked if I was hallucinating.xxb Eventually my blood test results came back and as it turns out my thyroid hormone levels are all messed up. One of them is slightly elevated, and one is almost three times as high as it should be. GREAT.

I was given an IV injection of a beta blocker to help calm my heart rate and the sweating and then I waited for the endocrinology team to come get me. They checked my eyes for bulginess (no, thank goodness) and lid lag (which I do have a little of), and checked my thyroid for swelling (yes) and tenderness (no). Based on everything they are 95% sure it’s Graves’ disease. In case you don’t know what Graves’ is, it’s an autoimmune disease that causes your thyroid to FREAK THE FREAK OUT and be super overactive. The cause is unknown- it is possible that it can be triggered by pregnancy but with Gwen almost 8 months old the doctor said it wasn’t that likely to be the cause. But WHO KNOWS, it could have been caused by that, or a virus, or genetics (although I don’t know of any thyroid issues in my family medical history), or even just stress! It’s a mystery of science.

There is a test to confirm the diagnosis, but with the long weekend and the fact that the test is only performed a couple of days a week I wouldn’t have been able to get in for at least a week and a half, and since I literally cannot continue to live life as a big sweaty hummingbird the doctor decided to start me on medication right away. I was given a prescription for a beta blocker and an antithyroid, instructions to make an appointment with the endocrinologist at the end of July and a requisition to get my blood tested again before the appointment.

So yeah. I’m happy that I know what’s going on with me know and that it’s something treatable, I’m happy it’s not something more serious, but after spending the whole day keeping my chin up (not literally because it’s hard for doctors to check your thyroid that way) and being jokey about the whole situation, I’m mostly just really, really tired and really, really sad.

It’s been a seriously exciting week in the world of baby. In the last seven days Gwen has learned to sit up, cut her first tooth, and figured out how to belly-crawl forward. That last one means Taylor and I absolutely must spend this weekend getting the office in order, since right now it’s a bunch of boxes and unbuilt furniture stacked under the window and the area under his desk is a veritable sea of dangling cables, just waiting for sticky baby hands to yank on them (idk what it is with dudes and fucking wires and cables everywhere).

Christy Marx is a legend.

Another abandoned place, this one a whole island in New York.

How cool is this print? (although it should have an orca on it. I’m really into orcas this week, which you’d know if you follow me on twitter).

A super easy & fun looking craft for the upcoming holidays.

Check out Sara’s Society6 page for awesome “Whatever Forever” prints, phone cases and pillows (with free shipping through this weekend!).

A little post of what Gwen wore this week.

Gwen has perfected her forward lunge-style crawling, and by using my phone as bait I was able to get her to do it for the camera.

This baby, I tell you. She’s gonna be getting into everything any minute now!

This week is turning out to be a total drag. It’s rainy and gross out (Sym is especially annoyed because her class has been going swimming at an outdoor pool every day) so I’ve barely been able to leave the house. I mean, I COULD leave the house but pushing a stroller around in wet weather isn’t very fun so what is the point?

To add to the misery, Gwen is also miserable. On Monday she cut her first tooth and she is NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT. This does explain those nights last week when she wouldn’t sleep- that happened again on Sunday night and Monday morning I discovered the tooth. Since then she’s been whiny, clingy, and demanding. She’s been taking 45 minute naps (we’re used to 2 hour ones) and hardly eating- she just chews on the nipple and drools formula all over the place. She doesn’t want me to put her down and when I do she cries, but when I hold her she cries too. It’s incredibly frustrating not being able to help her feel better! She’s always been such a chill baby that I’ve that that when something finally happened to change that I wouldn’t know how to deal with it (emotionally), and lo and behold, my horrible prediction has come true.

I’m hoping that today will be better, but she’s been napping for less than an hour and I can already hear her starting to wake up, so I’m not optimistic. Poor baby. Poor mommy.

Remember yesterday when I said Gwen had little interest in sitting up? NEVERMIND.

She sat up for longer than she’d ever done- usually she’ll topple after only a few seconds, but today she stayed upright for entire minutes.

It’s so funny how babies will have no luck with a particular skill for so long and then suddenly Get It.

I think I say this every time I post about Gwen, but I honestly can’t believe how quickly time is going. Over seven months already??? HOW. It feels like this was just yesterday:

… but that tiny baby is all grown up and probably weighs 20 pounds now (her last weigh-in was about five weeks ago and she was 18lbs3oz).

She’s very tall, very strong, and a very physical baby. She’s kind of a daredevil- she loves being startled, thrown into the air, and when the dogs jump over her (although not necessarily ON her, especially on her face with scratchy dog claws).

Gwen has no interest in rolling from her front to her back, and barely any in sitting up on her own (she can balance while sitting up now though). The only thing she is interested in is travelling around the house at high-speed and also backwards. She gets up on all fours (hands & knees or sometimes hands & feet) and rocks back and forth, and she’s started pulling her knees forward when she’s rocking she hasn’t yet figured out that she has to move her hands forward as well. For a second last weekend I thought she might be going forwards, so I put a line of tape on the floor so I would be able to tell more easily, even if it was just one inch.

It didn’t work out like I hoped.

She did once launch herself forward to grab a toy, but it was more throwing her body in desperation than crawling. She can turn around, and will go around obstacles or move into a parallel position to scoot alongside something. She does still get stuck under furniture, but it doesn’t happen as often as it used to.

So far the baby-led weaning has been an exercise in futility. She is getting better at picking things up and putting them in her mouth- just not food.


If I could find a way to make food look more like a smartphone I think I’d have more luck, but as it is I can only get her to eat solid food if I break it into teeny tiny pieces and pop them in her mouth, and even then 90% of it gets spat out. The one food I have had luck with is yogurt, which is great but also annoying because spooning mush into a baby is so flipping tedious.

She loves it though. I’ll probably start making her some baby food to help her get used to different tastes and textures and then try the blw again when she has better hand dexterity. I’ll also probably buy her a toy smartphone so she stops trying to devour mine, geez.

Gwen is still the best, most chill baby. Sure, she has her moments of frustration and anger where she cries and fusses, but it’s usually just when she gets stuck under the furniture, or can’t sleep, or is lonely. She still loves bathtime, she’s still a good sleeper (although her schedule has been messed up a couple days this week, leading to her refusing to go to sleep at bedtime, or treating bedtime like naptime and waking up after an hour). She loves hanging out with us, grabbing our faces and slobbering all over us, cuddling on the couch or in bed, or sitting on my lap and mashing the keyboard when I’m at my desk. She loves whatever her big sister does and she’s more obsessed with dogs than ever. She’s just the best, really.

PS if you need more Gwen in your life follow me on instagram since I pretty much just post pics (and now videos!) of her and also dogs.

I think calling these posts “lazy” is more apt than ever lately. I’m feeling pretty lazy about everything, this blog included. My house is a mess, my roots are out of control, I haven’t paid my bills yet this month (OOPS) and even though I have like, fifty billion blog posts in my head right now, when it comes to actually typing them out I’m like… I’d rather not. I have been working on etsy orders, but I’ve also been eating a lot of ice cream on the couch while marathoning Teen Wolf, so…

Anyway. You know.

Years ago someone jokingly accused me of being an internet fraud, that my “online persona” was a creation of an eight year old girl, and the pictures I posted of “Symphony” were pictures of myself, and the pictures I posted of “me” were actually of my babysitter. It’s my favourite rumour about me ever, although it’s clearly not true (… or is it). Internet fakery is a real and fascinating thing though, and this week I got sucked into the Warrior Eli Hoax Group blog. SO BIZARRE. There have been fakers in my online circle before, with made up lives and drama, who were caught and exposed, but maybe there are more. Anybody could be anybody on the internet.

Botanical prints are really popular (here on the internet at least) and these have top be the coolest.

The Tigering!

Hipsters Who Dress Like Jackie From Roseanne

I will watch this movie JUST to see this gif on the big screen.

See what Gwen wore.