January 25, 2009

Things have been really hard lately. I went to a "really dark place" shortly after Christmas, so much so that I finally went to the doctor. I could not shake the blues, and just felt like I was constantly on the verge of tears. The doctor prescribed an antidepressant for me, and I took it for a few weeks, but started developing a strange side effect...yawning. Constant yawning. It didn't matter whether I took the medication in the morning or in the evening, I yawned about every 5 minutes! Needless to say, I stopped taking it, as it wasn't doing me any favors! Thankfully I was able to finally put all the stress of the Christmas vacation behind me and start looking forward to March, when Jayson is planning on taking leave!

The kids all seem to be doing well. They are keeping busy, Morgan has been a great help with the "man" chores, especially the cold weather ones like taking care of the cows and shoveling snow. I feel blessed to have such great kids! I only hope I am making this whole deployment as easy on them as I can. Sometimes when I feel down I feel guilty because they have to deal with my crabbiness, which isn't fair to them. It is hard on all of us, so hopefully we all emerge stronger!

January 4, 2009

Happy New Year! Christmas was...tough. I didn't get a chance to post because things got a little rough. Jayson's grandma passed away on the 23rd of December. He was very close to her and was unable to come home for her funeral. Her funeral was the 28th of December in Devils Lake, North Dakota.

The kids and I went to Newcastle to see Jayson's family for Christmas as we always do. His dad had already left for North Dakota, so it was just his Jayson's mom and his sister and her kids, and our kids and me. We had a nice Christmas, and even got to have Jayson there via computer for about 4 hours! He was able to watch the kids open their presents through the web cam, so it was great that he didn't entirely miss everything!

We went home the day after Christmas, got all the pets taken care of, and headed up to North Dakota for Grandma's funeral. Everything went well there, it was sad, but nice to be able to be there for Jayson and his family. On the drive home, the kids came down with the flu, so I had 2 of them throwing up every half hour or so, there was a big nasty blizzard for about 4 hours of it also, making for some serious white knuckle driving, and with all the emotions of the week, I was never so glad to get home late in the evening...after about 14 hours of driving through storms with sick kids....