Obit in local paper: http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/apr/13/ida-mae-russell-sills/

Well I'm home from my nerve conduction test.  And I have (drum roll please) PERIPHERAL NEUROPATHY!  Which I could have told you before they spent 15 minutes zapping me and sticking needles in my lower back.  Sigh.

Joel and Chad have strep.  I told the pharmacist I'd see her later in the week for the scripts for the rest of us.  Ugh, that stuff spreads like wildfire!

Last week on the way home from church, Miranda told me she forgot to ask Bro. Kenny if she could get baptized.  I told her we'd talk more about it later.  So Saturday I asked her why she wanted to get baptized and she said because of the prayer she prayed during the invitation last week.  So we talked to her about it some more, and she is really sure she asked Jesus into her heart.  So she went forward during the invitation yesterday.  Don't have a date for her baptism yet, but it will be soon.  She seems so young, but she really understands and means it!  Woohoo!!

And speaking of Easter, this was in my mind all last week:  No one really understands what eggs have to do with Jesus rising from the dead.  So...

 Jesus is risen!  Quick, tell the rabbit to hide the eggs!

I went to my dr. way back, I think in January, and he mentioned doing a nerve conduction test to see why my feet are so awful.  He also started me on Lyrica, which made me think I could get off the elavil.  Wrong.  I was sooo down and miserable.  So I went back on that, half a pill a day.  I thought that was working, but yesterday I was just a mess.  I feel so useless and worthless, like I can't do anything right, and all the choices that I make are wrong.  I feel like I'm ruining my kids' lives by homeschooling them, but sending Vivian to the gang-infested middle school is really not an option either.  I know somewhere in my brain that homeschooling is the best decision, but I feel like I have done it so poorly they'd be better off anywhere.  I also feel like dh would be so much better off without me around to screw everything up.  Yes, I know, he'd be totally lost without me, blah blah blah, but he would be so much better off with someone who would keep house, and be stricter on the kids, and still be a sex goddess at night.  Someone who's not broken.  I feel like I'm defective, or broken, because I can't handle the stuff that I should be doing.  And so many people do all that stuff, plus work full time.  Why can't I get myself together?  I think most of it is this pigsty of a house.  During all the antidepressant times, I just don't care enough to keep up with housework, so when I start to come off of them, I freak out because it's so bad and I can't get a handle on it.  That makes me feel like such a total failure.  It shadows everything I do and I almost feel like I'm walking around with my filthy house tied to me like a ball and chain.  I can't find stuff, I can't have people over to my house, I can't volunteer to do anything, because my house is such disaster.  I'm working on it, really.  I've been trying to do one big cleaning challenge a day.  But Chad wants to have friends over all the time, and Vivian needs to have friends over because she doesn't have anyone in the neighborhood to play with, and I just can't.  I'm grouchy when people are here because I see it all as someone else would, and I'm horrified.  I want them to just go away and not see my mess, and I want someone else (my kids) to be trying as hard as I am to clean it up.  Imagine if 3 of us were tackling one disaster a day???  And not leaving a wake of disaster everywhere we go instead!  Amazing.  But I don't know how to motivate them.  Never have.  I'm a failure of a mother too.

I think I need a bigger dose of happy pills so I can go off happily into don't-care-land.  Ugh!!!