(no subject)

Day eight of no "soda", "pop", or "coke", whatever you prefer to call it. Did I mention why I decided to do this again? My sister took her five year old daughter to a chiropractor (with some other specialties like AK and acupuncture) because she was concerned about allergies and constant ear infections and hoping they could avoid tubes or any other kind of surgery. The chiro talked to her a lot about what Bennett should be eating (and not eating) and they got into a discussion of pop and artificial colors, flavors, and sweeteners. The stuff that woman said scared me to death. Especially about aspertame. Weight gain, memory loss, calcium deficiency, increased chance of diabetes...this just from artificial sweeteners. Add in the other crap and it starts to look like straight poison. Gross. So, I seem to have successfully replaced my Coke Zero with iced tea. I probably drink too much of that now, but it is unsweetened (I've never liked sweet tea, isn't that odd?) and has all those antioxidants or whatever, so I hope it is good thing. I ran out of green tea, so it has been mostly black tea, but at least it isn't poison. And it is keeping the caffeine headaches at bay. For the first week, really until yesterday, I also wanted to eat a LOT more than I usually do. Especially sweet stuff. I was feeling frantic for a candy bar one day, like almost crying because I didn't have one! It was a lot better yesterday and is definitely better today. I'm craving protein this morning and not donuts and pancakes and waffles like I was the whole first week. I'm feeling pretty good too, more awake in the mornings than I have felt in a long time. Just more energetic in general the last few days.

It is 10:12am here and Zoe and Luci are still in bed. I'm letting them sleep because they've both not slept well for three or four nights before last night. Last night everyone fell asleep really quickly and no one got up all night. Luci is just in one of her no sleeping phases that happen at least one week out of every month. Zoe has something going on though. I'm not sure what. It really started while we were at West Point and the grandparents were here. She just seems really afraid of all kinds of odd things. While we were gone the toilet in the main floor bathroom got clogged. It happens to that toilet a LOT. We've made it a rule that you are only allowed to pee in that toilet. Heh. More than one piece of toilet paper and I'm in there with the plunger. Very annoying, but I don't think I've ever gotten angry with anyone over it. It isn't the girls' fault! Anyway, when the toilet started filling up, according to my MIL, Zoe flipped out and was running around the house screaming and crying that the toilet was going to overflow. She's done it a couple of times since too, in other bathrooms and now refuses to even flush a toilet at all! Yesterday, at bedtime she was sobbing because she thought Luci used too much toilet paper in the their upstairs bathroom and had closed the lid and sat on it screaming and protecting it from Luci flushing it until I got up there to fix the problem. And a couple of days ago I was upstairs putting laundry away and the timer on the oven went off. It beeps three or four times and then stops to beep about every thirty seconds until you stop it. I heard it but finished what I was doing before heading down. As I got to the head of the stairs I heard feet running at top speed and Zoe's panicked screams. She appeared at the bottom of the stairs, with tears already on her cheeks, yelling that the stove was beeping, come quick, was it going to be a fire?! Poor baby! Anyway, she is having a dreadful time going to sleep at night, afraid of everything, and having nightmares, I think. She also cried when I took her to preschool on Monday, refused to get out of the car for carpool drop off and I had to walk her in and give her, sobbing, to her teacher. She told me last night that she is "afraid they will put up a gate and she won't be able to get back to us" from preschool. I tried to reassure her that they would never try to keep her away from her mommy and daddy and we talked a lot about the purpose or preschool and how much her teachers care about her (and they do!), but she wasn't reassured. It wasn't until I told her that Daddy and I would break through any door and make anyone who tried to keep us away from her get out of the way that she seemed to calm a little. I think I may call her teacher though and let her know what is going on, so maybe if they are talking about fire safety or "stranger danger" or whatever they can keep in mind they have a kid who is really freaked on their hands. I just keep trying to reassure her and she's been sleeping with an icon of Christ (the Good Shepherd icon) for awhile, so I'm not sure what else to do but ride it out. She is a very sensitive soul with what we like to call an "artistic temperament" and maybe just a normal cognitive and/or emotional development stage is hitting her hard. I can't really remember what should be going on cognitively and emotionally with an almost five year old. I need to look that up, I guess.