in other news

Since all I've written about lately is the potty, I thought maybe I should write about something else (though there's not much else going on around here).

In the evenings after Rachel's in bed we've been working on our vacation plans. We're headed, without Rachel, to Arizona and the Grand Canyon in May. After a tour of Arizona (Canyon de Chelly, Antelope Canyon, Monument Valley, Painted Desert, and other National Monuments and places like that), we'll be arriving at the Grand Canyon on my husband's birthday--how's that for a birthday present!? The next day he's going to attempt to hike the canyon, down and up, all in one day. I'm alternatively completely freaked out and fairly calm about this hike. I'm not going, so he'll be alone (although he assures me the trail will be heavily traveled and there will be lots of people to help him if he needs it). I did find the other day a place there where you can rent a sattelite phone to take down with him. He thinks I'm a worry wart, but he actually thought this was a good idea, so we're going to look into it.

I wrote a month or so ago that I was struggling with headaches. It's actually been an ongoing struggle since I was 13. No one's really been able to figure them out. They're not migraines, though they seem just as bad (they hurt horribly and are really dibilitating when I have them). So last month I went to a headache specialist (I'd tried several other specialists over the years, but they all wanted to give me pain medicine, whereas I've always wanted to find out what causes them and get to the root of the problem, not just cover up the pain. I didn't go to those doctors more than once.) When I was expecting Rachel my headaches seemed to magically disappear! I had a whole host of other pregnancy related issues, but thankfully headaches wasn't one of them. And after she was born I went for over two years without problems with them either. It was wonderful. But over the summer they started up again. I resorted to what I've always fallen back on, Excedrin. I had broken myself of it several years ago (with really bad caffeine withdrawl headaches to show for it), but it's really the only thing that took them away. So I started taking it again. And of course one of the first things the doctor wanted me to do was to stop taking Excedrin. He also put me on a medication to help me sleep (regular sleep patterns are a must for migraine sufferers, I've learned, and even though mine aren't technically migraines, it helped! My headaches went away for about three weeks! I was sleeping great, too, which was an added bonus. The drawback was that I was sleepy ALL the time, not just at night. I also started feeling dizzy and lightheaded. And my headaches came back. So yesterday I went back to the doctor. My blood pressure was high while I was there, and he said that was probably causing my dizziness and he didn't want me on a medication that was doing that to me. So he switched my medication yesterday. It's still supposed to help me sleep and keep my headaches away, but hopefully the other problems will go away. He also put me on magnesium, which I guess is supposed to help with headaches. At any rate, today I didn't have a headache! And I haven't been tired. So hopefully this new medicine will do the trick and we'll have solved the 21 year headache problem! And now that I've told you my life story of headaches, let's move on to something more exciting.

Today we went to a birthday party for a friend's little girl who was turning five. Rachel's friends with her and her younger sister, who is actually just a week older than Rachel. It was a soccer party, because my friend teaches soccer at this indoor soccer place, called "Locker Soccer." They played lots of games with soccer balls. I thought Rachel would love it, and I think she would've done great if I hadn't been there, but because I was there she wanted me to hold her hand and be with her every minute. She was afraid to venture out on her own to play the games with the other kids. She ran around and kicked balls a little, but after a couple of minutes she kept coming back to me. I hope she's over this phase before it's time for me to be a room mother or a brownie leader or something like that. Otherwise I may never be able to do those things, because she'll be clinging to me the whole time! She also thought she should be able to open a present (she doesn't quite get it that only the birthday girl gets to do that), and wanted her cake NOW, rather than waiting for them to take pictures of the birthday girl with her cake, sing happy birthday, and wait for the cake to be cut and passed out. She has a lot to learn in birthday party ettiquite, I've discovered!

So that's about everything that's going on in my world besides potty training. We'll see how this next week goes in that department. She's been kind of on-again, off-again with it the last couple of days. Hopefully it'll keep improving.