I know I said my next post would be related to how being a mom changes my approach to mental health, and I am still working on that one.  I've had a rather rough PTSD week and writing about that topic was just not coming together well. I also felt I had something else kind of tumbling around in my consciousness that kept trying to find it's way out. Since the main purpose of this blog for me is to express that which keeps tumbling around in my head, it seemed like this was probably a good topic for today. We are in the process of becoming members of the church we have been attending since fall.  And one of the questions on the membership application temporarily threw me.   What changes, if any, did your commitment to Jesus Christ bring about in your life attitudes, habits, objectives, and relationships? This shouldn't be a hard question.  My life is 100% entirely different.  Attitudes, habits, objectives, relationships.  All different.  So why is it hard to answer. And I fi

 So, after wrapping up my posts on the kids' hypoglycemia, I realized that my last post was leading me in a direction of wanting to speak more about my mental health and how my mental health struggles affect my parenting.   In terms of diagnosis, my standing list right now is Generalized Anxiety, Major Depression, and cPTSD.  My struggles with all three began relatively early in my childhood, although I wasn't able to fully articulate those struggles until much later.  This post isn't meant to dive to deep into the whys and whens of all that, but I think it's important to preface what I'm about to say with the fact that I do not remember a time in my life when I wasn't dealing with anxiety, depression or both. I'm about 15 years in with counseling and about 5 now since meds were added to my treatment plan. It is really only in the past few years that I feel I have achieved relative stability. I still have rough patches where my issues are much more apparent,

So what does having 3 kids with unexplained Ketotic Hypoglycemia look like for our family? My intention is never to over or under play what happens to our kids and the effect that has on us.  I do want to bring awareness to KH because it is one of those things that can be easy to miss.  So many of the symptoms are non-specific or look like something else.  I want to in some small way bring awareness to what it's REALLY like for us, as parents in the day in and day out aspects of this. And (full disclosure) putting my thoughts out in the open is away to keep them from jangling around in my head and driving me nuts. Most of what we do is not significantly different than anyone else.  We are a bit neurotic about snacks and drinking enough water, but out and about on a normal day, not much will appear too different. It's behind the scenes in the preparing and planning that most of the differences take place. At present, we see Henry having episodes pretty frequently (as many as sev

 So here's a little bit more about how we discovered OUR kids' KH.  It is long and hard to follow at some points.  It was long and hard to follow for us too. Adorable picture of kids to lead off long post. At his well visit in November, I mentioned to the pediatrician that Billy had been throwing up a lot.  Usually just once, first thing in the morning, but several times a week.  He often complained that his belly felt cold (his toddler way of describing nausea or stomach pain) and would sometimes be pale or shaky and very distressed. The first couple of episodes, I thought were a stomach bug, as I think most people would. But then they kept going on and on. Not every day, but sometimes several days in a row.  Sometimes with several weeks between the episodes. No rhyme or reason really.  They were happening often enough that I was considering strapping a barf bucket to his bed somehow so the darn thing wouldn't wander off. It's hard to capture on camera, but Billy looks

As many who follow my Facebook know, my boys (and Florence to a lesser extent), have been dealing with some health issues of late.  At this point, we believe what is happening is something called Ketotic Hypoglycemia (KH).  I wanted to try and explain a bit about what it is and how it affects people.  There's a spectrum to it, and our kids are on the mild ends. We don't see some of the scarier symptoms listed, but I'm intending this to be a summary of KH in general.  I also say "children" a lot.  This can also affect adults, but is much more common in children. KH is also known as "accelerated starvation." Basically, for an often unknown reason, the body moves through the stages of metabolism too quickly.  The metabolism chain starts with burning glucose created from the carbohydrates we eat, then as those carbohydrates run out, glycogen is released from the liver to keep blood sugar levels stable.  Once that supply is exhausted, the blood sugar can drop

 Well, I wanted to get this done closer to his birthday, but unfortunately both boys went on a nap strike just in time for me to be two weeks late at this.  William Frederick Sorg, the third.  Big name for a little guy but oh boy does he live up to it. I suspected I might be pregnant in early February when someone commented that I had been super tired and asked if I was coming down with something.  I was like "Oh, it's probably a baby."  At that point I was joking, but then I started to wonder.  So I took a pregnancy test early in the morning of Valentine's Day, still expecting a negative and just to find out I was getting the flu or something.  To my shock, it was positive.  I left the test on the counter for Bill to find and he was equally surprised. Pregnancy with Billy was a bit of a roller coaster.  I was way more sick with my boys than my girls, and the sickness lasted into my second trimester.  At our 20 week ultrasound, we found out that he had a marker on h