The Grandma Tag!!

Hi Guys!

I have been so sick since the beginning of December, but I am going to caught up on my Social Media Challenge.  I am finally starting to feel better and thing I have a good plan in place to get all caught up. 🙂  So here I go….

This is the 42nd day of #365smc!!  If you don’t know what that is – check out THIS LINK – which will tell you all about it and how to play along if you wanna. 🙂

Today I am thankful for something that everyone has at least 2 of….well, biologically speaking.  I’m talking about grandmothers!!  Some of us have foster grandmas (I mean that both literally and figuratively), adoptive grandmas, bonus grandmas, etc. I have 2 grandmas and decided to create a grandma tag.

Grandma #1 – Mamaw.  She is my father’s mother.  She passed away on February 11, 1979.  I was three years old.  I don’t remember much about her, but she did pass her red hair down to be and I am super grateful for that. 🙂  I remember the date she passed, because unfortunately it was also my fathers birthday. 😦  I feel like I have some kind of connection with her though… even know that she is gone… must be the red hair.  We redheads tend to stick together like that.   However, because I don’t know a ton about her or have really any memories with her, I can’t do the grandma tag on her, but felt like she absolutely deserved telling you about. 🙂

Grandma #2 – Granny.  Man do I miss my granny.  She is my mother’s mother.  She passed away on May 5, 2011…I remember that date for a whole other – kind of comical reason.  My granny lived in the Northside of our town for most of my life.  They Northside was predominantly Hispanic.  My granny wasn’t prejudice at all, but she complained a lot about her neighbors that were not so nice and usually spoke little or no English.  So the fact that she passed on Cinco de Mayo is just kind of funny to us.  We think it was her way of sending us one more little haha.  Also, I had my son in 2011 and I was prego when she passed.  So… her passing date is pretty easy to remember.  I sure do miss my granny.  I think about her all the time and try and talk to my mom as much as possible.  My granny had a long life and we had lots of laughs, I was very lucky to have known her. 🙂

THE GRANDMA TAG

1. What do you call your grandma and why?

I call my grandma: Granny.  Not sure why!  My cousin (one of my very best friends now) calls her Nanny… I don’t know where that came from either!

2. What does your grandmas house smell like?

My granny’s house always smelled like food!!  She was always cooking something!!  She would find the best recipes in magazines and make new things all the time!!  I LOVED her skillet meatloaf!!  I can’t share that one with you.  Family secret. 😉

3.  Can you name something specific or interesting that your grandma always wears?

Scrubs!!  My granny loved to wear scrubs! Mostly scrub tops with cute little animals. 🙂  I love that I get to wear scrubs to work now.  When I shop for scrubs it reminds me of my granny. 🙂

4. What is something you enjoy doing with your grandma?

I loved to go thrift shopping with my granny when she was still alive.   I remember one time we were shopping in one of our favorite thrift stores and my granny wanted some new flip flops…  She kept scooting along in her wheel chair – pushing herself around from isle to isle yelling out: ” I sure do need some new thongs!  Do you see any thongs over there that will fit me?  I nearly peed my pants from laughing so hard. And she just thought I was nuts. 

5. What is something that your grandma has or passed on to you?

That’s easy!  Her love of Avon and a good book!…and a good bargain!!…and her love for food!!! 🙂  And hopefully if I’m lucky in my old age… her sweet sweet spirit.

Take a second to hop over and check out my VLOG this weekend.  I’ll be posting a video called “The Grandma Tag”.  It’ll have a little clip of my granny in it, just a few weeks before she passed away.  It is a memory I will chericsh and it makes me so thankful for the technology we have today.

That’s it for me guys!  Sweet dreams and I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow!

Love, Cat

No insurance. Ugh!! (Warning! Scary pics of my throat!)

**Before I get started I must warn you, there are pics of my throat in this post and they are nasty!

Being a work from home mama means I haven’t had the opportunity to get medical insurance on myself. I mean, I’m a mom! I don’t have time to be sick! I have insurance on my kiddos. You know…my little goblins that go to school every day, don’t wash their hands near enough and Lord, lets not discuss how bad their bathroom can get!! And you guessed it…yep, I’m the one who cleans all their messes, wipes their brow when their sick and tries to keep them healthy.

Now me? Yeah, I hardly ever get sick. (But boy when I do – its a doozy!) So insurance is just not something I’ve thought was necessary. (Although as I get older I know it will be mandatory.)

What does all of this mean? It means that when I do get sick (and it isn’t something I can just sleep away) I have to pay an arm and a leg to be seen at an urgent care clinic or sit in the ER. Today I chose the ER, because everyone knows it takes forever to get through that mess. This means I’ll get to take a nap! Without the oldest 2 arguing and the youngest one slapping me in the face saying, “Mama? Mama?” wanting me to play.

Here was my experience:

12:00 noon – Admitted. People watching can be fun. In the ER, not so much, it was just sad. There was an elderly woman that was in a wheelchair and she just kept repeating, “Help me, help me, help me” over and over in a tiny little frail voice. Her daughter was there holding her hand telling her it would all be ok. Then there was a couple. The girl was checking her boyfriend in for depression. She was pregnant and obviously on some type of drug. And then there was Mr. Tattoo. Covered from head to toe with tats (not tasteful ones) with crazy hair and a face mask on, popping wheelies in the wheel chair someone had put him in. Ugh.

12:10 – Triage done. Lets move to a room. (What already?! I didn’t even close my eyes yet!)

12:13 – Oh hell no! The room they put me in had some kind of crusty white stuff on the mattress…

And someone else’s hair on the pillow…

I will not be taking a nap on that! I thought they changed these or had some kind of paper sheet in between patients! Gross!

12:15 – Nurse Ellen is here. Nice enough I suppose. She gave me ice chips so I was pretty excited about that. 🙂

12:25 – admitting is here: how are you going to pay for this? Out of pocket…sigh.

12:30 – Doc is here. Super nice guy. Looked in my throat for all of 2 seconds and said, “Oh goodness”. Because that’s what you want to hear all the doctors say.

This is what the right side looked like:

This is what the left side looked like:

The weird part is…it’s the right side that really hurts! Not the side that looks like I have a tooth growing in my throat!

Then basically said he wanted to give me a shot of penicillin in the butt to clear it up. And I could have a shot of steroids to reduce swelling faster (I opted out of that. I hear steroid shots really burn.) then a script for some liquid pain meds? Yeah…I don’t know about that.

1:06 – Still waiting on that shot. And starving. And can’t lay down.

1:10 – Nurse Ellen comes in to release me with my prescriptions. Um, yeah…so I still haven’t had that shot that is supposed to make me all better. And can you please switch the pain meds to pill form. Liquids are not really for me unless its Alka Seltzer – which is my go to drug.

1:12 – Dr. is back. He says “This isn’t really a question of what you prefer (pills or liquid). It’s simply what is sensical. (Is that even a word? I’m sure he meant sensible.) If your throat is swollen you shouldn’t try to swallow pills because they could get stuck and try new problems.” Thanks so much for saying I’m dumb – but I’ll take my chances with the pills. I know I don’t like liquid meds.

1:27 – Nurse Ellen comes in sporting a ginormous needle and no joke says, “You’re gonna be sorry you asked for this. It really hurts.”!!!! Are you kidding me? Then she says I need to pull down my pants because this has to go in your butt. So I do and then she tells me to just hang out a minute while she gets the computer on. I’m not an FML kind of person…but right there…in that moment with Evil Nurse Ellen behind me I was repeating ‘FML’ like a mantra!!

1:30 – The shot was not fun, but it wasn’t that bad. Now I have to hang around for 20 minutes to make sure I don’t have a reaction to the shot. So what the heck am I supposed to do! I’m flippin tired as hell but am not getting on that mattress (ok so I did sit on the very edge – I couldn’t stand there for 20 minutes.) And I am starving.

1:41 – These rooms have no doors…just curtains so you overhear everything. Somebody has a ringtone that says, “Ding, ding, ding, hey you want a taco?” For their text tone. (I love tacos and today is Taco Tuesday, but there is no way I could swallow taco shells. DAMMIT!) The nurse just asked the guy across from me if he smokes. He’s like, “You mean cigarettes?”

1:51 – And outta here. Nurse Ellen says my tush will be really sore tomorrow. Awesome.

So no nap. I’m going to get something to eat and going home to research personal medical insurance.

#yuckola

So….I am miserable. I haven’t been feeling well but I have been trying to respond to comments and visit a few of my favorite blogs. However today. Today is no good. I am certain that some alien-like creature “skidood” it’s way into my belly and is currently making hundreds of babies. Oh. My. Gosh.

So just wanted to let all of my (super awesome) followers know why I e been MIA. Ugh.

Now I am going to attempt to roll myself into a tiny little ball, burrow myself inside of my pillow, pretend I don’t have 8.2 billion things to do…and try to sleep off whatever this is.

Sure wish I felt like this guy:

But honestly it’s much more like this one:

What do you guys do when you are super miserable but have so much that needs to be done?