My daughter with my two nieces at my mom’s birthday party.

This past week we have been catching up and recovering from my trip to the emergency room last Friday morning.The short story is, I fainted early in the morning after intense head pain, got a huge goose egg in the process, and agreed to go to the ER because my husband thought that I had had a stroke. They ran a bunch of tests on me and could find nothing wrong. I had intense abdominal pain through the whole thing but it’s gone now and I am feeling as good as new. The whole experience made me feel very grateful for normal mornings where I can get up and move and use the bathroom without pain or fainting and go about a normal day!

The long story is the following… Venture kept begging me to put the Christmas tree up. I refused. I am not one of those people who puts a tree up simply because it’s the day after Thanksgiving. The calendar may say it’s Christmas time, but I have to feel ready. Ready as in the house has to be more clean. I gave up the idea of doing a total spring cleaning in December but insisted that we at least purge some toys.

After reading the Headgates ebook almost 2 years ago (see http://headgates.org) I have been stirred up. I feel partly in agreement, that I could have fewer toys, and partly wondering how it would be to only have 15 toys. And no Legos or Lincoln logs. I could see the value in simplifying our toy collection but wasn’t ready to pare it down to only 15 toys, which is what the Headgates author suggests. I just don’t want to be that spartan! My compromise almost 2 years ago was to stick them all in a big box in the corner of our family room to be reckoned with later. We left out a few. I wanted to be able to have them back if I could see that we missed them. Well, we did. Now I know why my toddler was so bored and why I was resorting to Barney so much. Most of the toys were stashed away! 

So the day of reckoning finally arrived. 18 years of Christmas and birthday presents were upon me. Any Toy Story character would have been shaking in his boots. It reminds me of Babe where the animals in the barn say “Christmas means carnage!” That’s what it means to some toys as well, especially in homes where purging is an annual pre-Christmas tradition.The first full week of December we went through the big box and organized and I came up with a better toy organization system. I did get rid of a bunch of broken toys, and I almost parted with the Lincoln logs, which the Headgates lady urges me to do, but my husband says to keep them. Whew. I was beginning to think I needed counseling in order to part with them. Anyway,  as my kids have gotten bigger we have needed more space for them to have desks to be scholars in our family room. Unfortunately we don’t have an office or study room. The family room is this narrow long room for DVD watching, surfing the Internet, homeschooling, playing with toys, crafting and now sewing, and all the other hard to name activities that kids engage in. So the storage space for toys has become smaller and smaller. So I prayed and asked Heavenly Father to help me figure out how to store the toys now that I had spent three days purging and organizing.

He gave me an idea! He knows I don’t have money to go buy fancy shelves or bags. I don’t really like too many shelves or bins for toys anyway because then the toddlers just go and dump all the toys.  He told me to just use all the tote bags I have. All these years, since reading Daryl Hoole’s Art of Homemaking book I thought I had to have drawstring bags for toys but was too lazy to sew some or hunt some down. But I was told through the Spirit to just take bags I already have, non-drawstring as they are, and the coat hooks that my dh bought years ago and never finished putting up. I decided it was time for me to put them up myself. I wonder what Helen Andelin would say about that. Actually, my ten year old boy Venture put them in so maybe Helen would be OK with that. So we put these coat hooks in the corner where the big box used to be, up high, and hung the tote bags full of toys, bagged according to categories. So that solves the problem of not having drawstring bags that I can knot. Just put them up high and that helps control the toy flow, since only big people can get them down. We have all the Little People buildings down low but the actual little people and other little toys are in bags.

So the next day, after finally getting the toys organized, I fainted while going to the bathroom. I guess I need more excitement in my life. Homeschooling, mothering seven children, continually organizing and homemaking and cooking three meals a day and getting ready for Christmas and chauffeuring aren’t enough. I wasn’t out for very long, according to my husband, but when I woke up I was on the floor, kicking the wall involuntarily. So my husband called 911 and the ambulance came, fortunately, without the siren going. The people asked me all these questions. One of them was if I am still able to have children. I was in a lot of pain when I answered the question so I am afraid I sounded worn out about the idea of having more children when I answered. They probably thought, “Oh, this poor woman, the picture of the typical middle-aged woman who is tired of kids and being a housewife and deathly afraid of having any more.” Actually, I am very grateful I am able to have more children. Having children is a privilege and I do hope to have more. Then they asked me when my last period was. I think they were trying to rule out an ectopic pregnancy since I was having intense abdominal pain. I said the date and then my husband pulled out our handy dandy fertility chart to confirm and say it himself. 

So we go to the ER (thankfully without sirens blaring) for some tests (CAT scan, ultrasound, and blood work) and they ask me there, “Is it true you are taking fertility drugs? We heard that you are.” 

“No, I am not.” Inside I am thinking, where did they get that from? I don’t need any help getting pregnant, thanks. Just for the record, I am not pregnant and this trip to the ER was not because I had an ectopic pregnancy.

Later on, I realized the helpful friendly young paramedics probably have no clue about the ordinary purpose of fertility charting. In my case, the purpose is natural family planning in order to prevent pregnancy. I would love to have a baby right now if only I didn’t weigh so much and were completely healed from the stress and trauma of the last pregnancy (whole other story). Even if I were wanting to achieve pregnancy I would be fertility charting. They probably thought that I was doing it to go along with taking fertility drugs. I am wondering if that’s because fertility charting and NFP are so out of ordinary. Are they so out of the ordinary that paramedics, mostly men who are probably married, don’t recognize them? It’s funny how something I say and do can be mistranslated into something completely untrue. It’s also funny that something so natural is so misperceived. Every married couple should learn fertility signals before marriage and should track them. It’s part of being healthy and being connected to your body.

All the tests came back normal, except for the urinalysis, which showed I have a UTI. After taking it easy for a few days and feeling inspired by my younger sister’s efforts to fete my mom for her birthday, we got the tree up. And I have finally started my Christmas shopping. 

So my questions. 1. What are some natural ways to treat a UTI? and 2. Does anybody have any stories to tell about fertility charting?