We're doing something a little different today. We're having a guys day out today. The boys and I have guys nights on occasion but this is a bit different. Rather than simply being myself and the boys, it will be my Dad, brother and nephew as well. Were going to see Aquaman and grab some lunch together. I'm super excited.. ☺
Most people will never know, let alone fully understand what it's like to have a child with fragile health. Please understand that if you are among the many who don't get it, count your blessing every single day because I wouldn't wish this on anyone. Living in constant fear for your child's life is truly awful. The stress is endless and the heartache is abundant. The guilt for not being able to take away your child's pain or fear is unbearable on a good day and I'll just say that the bad days are really bad. 😔 My oldest son has several life threatening health conditions and they require frequent doctors visits, hospital stays both planned and emergent, as well as special procedures every few days. Thankfully, he's not be…
Any minute now, a delivery truck will be dropping off our brand spank'n new gas range. My parents decided to surprise us for Christmas with a new range. We were originally going to convert from gas to electric but our panel would need upgraded to the tune of about $2,000 and that's simply not worth it. We actually prefer gas but our old gas range made everything sticky. Although truthfully, everyone says there must have been something wrong with our gas range because that's never happened to them. Anyway, I pulled the old one out a couple days ago and made room for the new one. We're so grateful for this. It's been way too long since we've had a fully working stove. We've found ways to work around it…
I have been sorta off the grid for a couple days and there's a few reasons for that. Mostly it's because I'm depressed, tired and just haven't had the energy to put my thoughts together. Another is that I've been hit with a couple hate mobs and even a death threat on Twitter. Most Autistic adults are amazing people and I'm blessed to have many as friends. My wife is Autistic and so are all my kids. There's a very small, but incredibly vocal subset of Autistic adults who are very aggressive, rude, hateful, intolerant and simply mean people. They say some truly vile things and seem to think it's okay to threaten people who don't agree with them. I was lucky enough to the target of these hate mobs,…
We had a pretty great Christmas this year. The boys had an awesome day and we're really proud of them. Lizze and I got to bed relatively early last night and got up about 7 AM, so the kids could open their presents. Our rule is, they can raid their stockings after 6 AM but no presents until 7AM. Considering the level of impulsivity our boys deal with, they manage to do remarkably well with this rule. ☺ The overall theme this year was Nerf Laser Tag. We thought they would enjoy the change of pace and we were right. They love the new Nerf Laser Tag guns. They also got a bunch of other things but the Nerf stuff is what will likely be their focus. I'm really proud…
First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I truly wish all of you the absolute, very best. Now on to something a bit more serious. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen that I've been talking about depression quite a bit lately. There are a few reasons for that but most of them don't really matter at the moment. I feel that it's incredibly important to talk freely about mental health issues because we have to de-stigmatize the topic. We've made a ton of progress over the years but we still have a long journey ahead of us. There is absolutely no reason that anyone should ever feel shame for living with mental illness. The main reason I've been talking more about this lately is because…
The good people at Quell provided me with a free Quell 2.0 in exchange for honest feedback. All opinions and experiences are my own. Many of you are aware that I've been living in chronic pain since August of 2001. I was firefighter finishing up paramedic school and I got hurt on a call. I ended up with an L5/S1 left sided herniation and it changed the course of my life. Pretty much since that day, I've lived in constant pain. Over the last few years, I've been walking and that has made a big impact on my pain but it's always there to some degree. This pain, while better managed, still dictates a great deal of my life. I could sleep on the best mattress in the world and…
When I originally started writing this post, it was just a basic update. As I was writing, it evolved a bit and will now serve a dual purpose. While this is still an update, I also wanted to share a bit about my Depression because it helps to remind or make people aware that Christmas can be hard for like me with Depression. Last night the boys spent the night with Lizze's parents. Lizze and I used that time to take care of a few outstanding Christmas related things. It's been a little while since I had some time off and I've been struggling with Depression a bit more than usual lately. When you're depressed, exhaustion is absolutely not your friend. For me personally, exhaustion makes it harder to fight…