The Happy Campers

Well, I was worked up for no reason!  My younger brother invited my family to go camping with him, his wife and his three kids.  Growing up we were constant campers - not your traditional tent or camper type either, we were lean-to extreme back woods campers.  My brother has a trailer and a nice tent for the kids, so this is by no way roughing it.


That being said, in the last two years, every new experience that Alison embarks on scares me to my core.  I am mentally and physically more than equipped to handle an outdoors adventure much harder than the one we were going on, but I was so timid.  What if she's hypo all weekend from running around with her cousins?  What if she runs high all weekend and I can't really justify letting her have marshmallows around the campfire?  What if she's hypo in the middle of the night?  She wakes up with night terrors when she's low at night...she'd wake the whole park up!!!


In the end, Ali's BGLs were a little all over the place.  She did have a hooking incident on the playground that lead to a set change.  But she slept in the tent with my 7 year old niece Trin, my nephew Tristan and my brother.

We ended up having to come home early (Saturday evening) because Riley was really under the weather which was a real dissapointment to everyone except Riley, who seemed happy to be in her own bed.

I cannot wait to get Ali back out to the campsite.  I now also realize that Camp Banting is a real possibility in four years! 

Thanks go out to my hubby and my brother for convincing me to go out even though I was anxious about camping - I realized how much I missed it and how much fun it was for my girls.

So, I Think We Might Be On To Something....Finally!

Looks like, since our last endo visit, we might be onto two tricks that work for us (fingers crossed, touch wood).  First, it seems that we have all our basals worked out and programmed into Alison's Ping...except maybe mid morning (she's still coming up low at lunch even when she's not active- we hit 1.9 the other day which was scary).  Two, using her hip and butt for insertion site works best for Alison with the Inset 30.

We have not had any bad insertions since her appointment which is unheard of for us, since 4 year-olds wiggle during site changes!

BTW, the Inset 30 link above is a link to a how-to site change video.  I'm sorry, it is in German, but it is one of the better ones for the proper placement of the feet of the Inset 30, so I thought that the language be-damned, it was worth posting!

Happy Anniversary Mommy

Today is one of those odd days of reflection for me.  I can, with exact clarity, remember where I was at every moment of this day two years ago.  I can recall the smells, the sounds, the thoughts running through my head.  If I think too hard, I can even bring back that overwhelming feeling that the room is rapidly running out of air.

Today is the two year anniversary of Alison’s diagnosis.  Last year I tried to sweep it under the rug.  It didn’t work.  Instead of keeping busy, I was miserable.  This year I decided to take another approach.  Another D mom was blogging about how they celebrate the victories on their diagnosis date, so we thought we’d take that approach.

Alison had a scheduled appointment at the Endo clinic and we went to Dairy Queen after.  Nothing fancy.  In fact, it will seem like nothing at all to most of you on a hot summer day, but, in our house, where ice cream is a luxury, it was akin to a royal visit!

The part of the day that is still replaying in my head right now is a conversation I had with one of our nurse educators and a student that was learning from our yearly panel review session.  I had mentioned how far we had come in the last two years.  How I looked back to two years ago, exactly today, and don’t even recognize the person I was, how much I have grown and adapted.  I said how I really wish I would have known that it was going to be ok.  Not tomorrow, or the next day, or six months down the line.  Not that it was ever going to be normal, or the same, but that we’d find a new kind of happiness and that’s ok too.  He mentioned that the past weekend had been a very busy diagnosis weekend in our area.  So as I go to bed tonight, my hope and prayer is this…I hope that those going through the phase that we were in two years ago tonight will find the grace, courage, hope, love and strength, a little bit at a time.

And as Alison said to me while devouring her ice cream “happy anniversary”