you know that infected gum I was telling you all about? The one I had belligerently been treating by obsessive flossing, listerine rinsing, panadol taking and so on and so forth?
Yeah well in the last couple of days, it went away – woohoo! But curiously it was still too tender to eat on that side of my mouth. I was all – oh it’s just out of practice. But weirdly, the tooth/gum still felt swollen in that I can’t really close my mouth and have to really concentrate to not lisp.
Then tonight, I’m sticking my fingernail between that tooth and the one next to it, because it seemed like a good idea, and I thought, “Curious, my tooth moves. Oh look, I press on this end, it moves that way, I press the other, it moves the other way.” I’m playing with this notion thinking, wow, my tooth is going to fall out, just like Felix’s did the other day (his first top baby tooth to go – the other one is now hanging precariously and he’s looking a lot like Cletus).” Then it dawns on me. It’s only one side that is moving.
That’s right folks. My back molar on the right hand side has dawg-gone split in two. So now who’s gonna be Cletus.
*****
In other tooth news, Jasper still only has 6 teeth. At 15 months. 6 dinky little teeth. Oh, and you wanna know how many times I’ve found him standing on the dining room or outdoor table in the last week?
S.I.X.
He also loves yoghurt, particularly when I take the boys shopping with me and buy those hideous marketed-to-children types rather than my standard bio-dynamic natural sort.
*****
We had a family bbq at our place today. I did Bec’s lamb:
It was a lovely lovely day.
A delicious dinner you can have on the table in under 30 minutes
*updated September 30, 2015*
There’s much fuss about quick dinners these days. You can start this and have it on the table in under 30 minutes, EASILY. I promise.
I’ve been making it for more than seven years about once a fortnight but never less than once a month. I guess it’s this family’s spag bol.
The only thing that has changed since I started making this is I now tend to use chicken tenderloins rather than faffing around with chicken breasts and my ginger shallot sauce is a compulsory accompaniment (also now added to recipe below).
because quite frankly, this sleeplessness? then the tense sleep? the waking suddenly to lie there for a few hours? I’m not liking so much.
Sometimes, you read something and sit there slack-jawed at how well someone says something you feel, something you know so intimately, that it just needs to be appreciated, and shared.
I was led to this by Dooce today. My favourite bits:
In the decade since his [Peter Kramer] first book [Listening to Prozac], medical researchers have found evidence to move depression from mood disorder squarely into the category of disease. It causes visible, irreversible damage to the brain cells. It eats at the blood vessels and attacks the heart. It causes bone loss. It’s cyclical, and if left untreated, it gets much worse over time. Depression costs more days off work than backache. In its most obvious health consequence—suicide—depression kills more people annually than war and murder combined. And we now know that, like diabetes, it’s probably behind many of the coronary and other deaths that are recorded as something else.
Depression is no joke.
this:
It looks like sloth, but it feels like war.
this (my bolding):
Like rheumatoid arthritis, depression turns your own body against itself. It chews not on your cartilage, but on your brain cells and your sense of reality. It’s as seductive as a wife-beater, shutting out other voices to turn itself into your only friend. The only one who tells the truth about the bleakness of the world. All your energy goes towards getting through whatever stands in your way—struggling, slogging, pushing, through work and small talk and getting food—whatever it is you have to get through until you can be alone again with the voice who can be trusted.
And the last thing it feels like is an illness. No, this monumental, world-swallowing suckage sits outside you: it comes from the project, the job, the love affair, the city, the family, or the decade. For me, these low cycles have always led me to abrupt life changes. It’s a kind of shock therapy: uprooting jobs, careers, relationships, and countries. Those shifts feed the craving for anonymity and reinvention, and they leave behind the shame of a condition that breeds shame.
When I was eight years old I got glasses for the first time. I put them on in the living room, and when I looked out the window, I could see each blade of grass, crisp and bright and distinct, where before there had been a soft green blur. I looked at everything that day, and said hello to all the small things. It was amazing, that all this had been there all along.
Getting better from depression was like that. Missing dimensions popped back up. Plain old normal days tasted crisp and delicious. And then there were the bittersweet replays, when I traveled through the previous months and years, and counted all I’d misheard, misfelt, and missed. Depression isn’t noble or interesting; it’s monotonous, self-absorbed misery that leaves little room for art or kindness or other people.
and this:
…how to return to people who hadn’t realized I’d been away. I would have liked some scars to point to, to explain my absence.
