I feel bad sometimes when I read other people with EDS/chronic pain talk about their experiences. There are places on my body where if you came up and poked me fairly gently I would drop to my knees from how overwhelmingly it hurt. If I take even the most casual inventory of how my body feels I am always in pain. I just keep doing shit anyway. I show up feeling half dead from exhaustion and I move through sheer force of will. I feel bad because I do not believe that it is healthy that I can do this, exactly, it just hasn’t been very optional for me. I have been in pain since I was a small child and I had shit to do and I had to just get on with it. I don’t know why I feel like I am fueled by rocket fuel.

I am clearly a bad example for my little zebra. Some days he is clearly in intense pain and he gingerly forces himself to keep doing his chores. I ask him why he doesn’t rest when he is in pain. “Well you don’t.”

They do as you do, not as you say.

There are some big goals this year. My big kids asked if we could go on one-on-one fun trips this year. If I am very very very lucky these will be the only big trips of the year. I’m crossing my fingers. One is soon and one is at the end of the year. Both involve me needing to ramp up my fitness in order to manage them while having any kind of a good experience. I am happy that the trip with middle kid is first because they are not starting off with lots more fitness than I have. Phew. I get to pull them along through training work rather than running and feeling half dead and like I can’t keep up. Eldest walks like his dad–they both walk like they are a half breath away from falling into a full sprint. That’s it: they walk like they are doing a run/walk paced run. I don’t walk like that.

MC and I are heading down to London in late February. They want to shop and see some historical sites and pretty parks and maybe a museum. My expectation is that we have to be Disneyland fit in order to have a good time (expect to walk 10 miles a day). I am trying to pull them in the direction of 4mph but frankly 3mph will be plenty fine for actually doing the time in London. When I walk as slow as they prefer my hips get really stiff and I feel like crud so we do have to pick up the pace a little. Luckily they are super motivated and excited. We have drawn up a slowly progressive plan for increasing our mileage and our speed. I am gratefully referencing the book Blacksheep gave me for running training.

I am thrilled about this experience with them, specifically the training, because we are getting to talk a lot about how what we eat and how we sleep dramatically impacts our ability to manage the long walks. I am introducing tracking and talking about evaluating how we feel on different days after different kinds of choices. I’m not controlling all the choices–just requiring reflection on them. They are starting from a place where 5 miles a day is not a lot or extreme so it’s not as much of a moon shot as it seems. Realistically if I asked MC to walk 10 miles today they could; it would just take almost 5 hours. 5 miles is a 2-ish hour walk right now.

Oh hey, it’s snowing again. This year has been so intense for snow–by far the most snow of any of our years here so far. That’s funny because this is our fourth winter and the snow is getting more common and hanging out longer with every passing year. Jenny said it barely ever snowed here! (In her defense the 10 years before we arrived had fairly low historical snow falls.)

As we are training for these… of course we had a big bike wipe out yesterday and MC got a bruise on their backside they are going to be feeling for a very long time. I rubbed them down 3 different kinds of topical analgesics and said we will be doing a lot more on the treadmill until it heals because they will walk awkwardly on the ice and that’s dangerous. Also: no more bike rides unless it is over 5. That sucked.

I love this whole winter hibernation thing. I feel constitutionally suited to having things just shut down for months out of the year so I can work on stuff internally and in my house.

Have I mentioned that I stopped taking the ADHD medication and I feel like my brain is hopping around like a grasshopper on speed?

So MC and I are going to London for a long weekend in February and EC and I are going to Paris, with probable stops in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and probably some city in Germany but I’m not sure which yet. We will be gone around two weeks. Yes I know that these trips seem unfair in terms of size and balance, but EC and I are going to be spending the entire day every single day going from museum to museum (although I suspect the Louvre will be a whole day on its own). He wants to take pictures and notes on as many kinds of art as possible in that time period. To be fair: he knows a fantastic amount about art history and already knows all the periods and most of the masters and who they worked with. He is going because he can already rattle off the names of hundreds of paintings and he wants to see them in person. This is school.

You can see why the kids do not enjoy traveling together very much. After the trip to Texas last year EC vehemently announced, “Remind me never to take a family vacation with any of you people again.” That hurt my feelings. Dude! IT WASN’T A VACATION!!! It was a trip to see a dying relative in a place that our entire family finds overwhelmingly stressful and difficult. There was no way for that trip to go better than it did and realistically it went about 300% better than I expected even with luggage that didn’t arrive for five days. My mother in law was nice for the whole trip. That was outstanding and I can just express gratitude.

Nevertheless there was no part of that journey that was a vacation. Just no.

Between the trip to London and the trip to Paris I am going to be ramping up speed. I will already be in better shape for distance. I’m going to whisper it here first. I want to run the 2023 Loch Ness Marathon. It’s the 1st of October, over 6 weeks before the trip to Paris so I will be nicely recovered after the race. I’ve been working on the treadmill for a few weeks so far in addition to the outside time with MC. I am doing shorter speed work in a controlled environment because I like my knees very much and walking on ice and snow is one thing, running is another.

It’s January now! I am allowed to pull my garden planning information out and plan out my work for the year. I told myself I had to wait out December and just focus on getting through the days. Woo!

I’ve been saying since I got here give me five years before you judge my garden. This is winter number four. I suspect that this coming year’s work is the last of the bones. Of course the deck around the apartment and the balcony off the lounge are both rotting and getting close to dangerous. This house is nonstop. Now I need to leave enough travel space around the house for whoever eventually replaces our windows (many are broken and in bad shape) in the next few years and I can fill in from the edges. In my head I see Noah’s aunt’s property up in Oregon. She has a gorgeous homestead that could probably feed her year round if she didn’t think preserving food was boring and a waste of time. Ha. Instead she feeds the local wildlife. Ok.

My goal in the long run is to be able to walk out of my house and find something to eat every day of the year. Sure a lot of that will be in the polytunnel during the winter but I’m ok with that!

I’ve already added one hazel this year (two other sub-types of hazel are coming but they haven’t arrived yet), two grapes, and a Cherry Silverberry that I am ridiculously excited about. That on top of scores of canes in previous years, a bunch of rhubarb, strawberries, cherries (5 different kinds!)… It’s going to be absolutely amazing. In 4-ish more years I will be able to tell people what kind of produce from my yard will be in season when so they can pick their visit around what they want to eat. That makes my heart soar. I’m doing this.

I may be creaky, in pain, grouchy, and difficult but I am also lucky, hard working, ambitious, determined, and incredibly successful at reaching my goals. I am the luckiest bitch.