Tough Weekend and the Highs and Lows

Every day is an adventure, I know that's a bit of a cliche, but our little family is no different than a regular business that has staffing issues some times and other times plenty of help. Rianne and Teagan have been pretty good and are generally straightforward with their needs, either hold me, change me, feed me, let me sleep, burp me, etc. Brielle has taken Teagan's position as trouble maker. We are still not sure what causes Brielle to arch so badly and she has an upcoming appointment with the gastroenterologist where hopefully we can make some progress. This blog has some of the best and worst of the kiddo's.

I didn't mean to, but I dropped a bomb on Mindy. Generally guys don't talk about their feelings for a reason, it worries our wives. She asked the question innocuously enough, "how are you doing?" I said, "when Brielle cries, it makes me want to kill myself." S#$#. I did not mean to let that out. Now, her confidence with me alone with them has just been dissipated in one sentence. Before you start grabbing your DSM-IV TR's out (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th Edition, Text Revision) and calling for an intervention, I just wanted to talk about Serotonin...

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is involved in happiness and conversely, depression. When there is a lack of serotonin in the neural synapse then people get depressed, so SSRI's, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors stop the reuptake of serotonin, keeping it in the synapse, keeping people happy. However, that's artificial, the cause of the serotonin deficiency is not fixed...i.e. what's making a person unhappy. When Brielle cries, I just feel so bad for her, but I may have a bottle in each of Rianne's and Teagan's mouths and no third arm to comfort her. Sometimes she just won't be comforted, and that combined with all of their screaming together can make it really tough. It feels like someone just took a Dyson vacuum cleaner to my synapse and sucked out all my serotonin, then they smile and the serotonin is back, then they cry, serotonin gone, smile, serotonin back, cry, serotonin gone, sleep serotonin back and so forth. Here's the triplet sine wave of craziness in video and pictures.

 Some of these are tough to watch, so I would wait until the next blog if you're a little squeamish.

This is kind of cute, Rianne is patting Brielle on the head when she started crying...

It's Okay Bri, look, my fly's undone, isn't that funny! Oh, C'mon Bri.

This clip is Brielle, 3 minutes after a GI episode. She's just fine, hanging out as if nothing happened. It's the weirdest thing.

Here's Brielle 3 minutes beforehand. It might be one you don't want to play. It's tough to listen to, maybe you understand why I wrote what I did above. To see your daughter like this and know we just have to wait for a specialist, it's just heartbreaking.

And here are Brielle and Teagan playing a little later...

And Teagan being Teagan...she was fine two seconds later.

This is a link of Teagan without the picture


And an oldie, but goodie, we remember how sick Brielle was, and how tiny, and that even as tough as it is for her now, she's still doing well...relatively. 

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