Catharsis of the Bogue

Oddities, Profundities, Profanities and Dad Stuff

Tag: stay at home dad (Page 3 of 6)

The Footsteps of My Mother…How I Follow.

May 27, 2014 / / 5 Comments

Growing up I always wanted to be like my Dad. He was strong, smart, and full of a barely restrained rage that got him through the tough times. I learned many things working around the house with him and I just didn’t get other things that he really hoped were ingrown in HIS son. Alas, in several ways I am a miserable failure in his eyes.

Not the least of which has been my decisions since I started to have kids. I have tried to finish college several times now and I am very close. It just seems like things keep getting in the way and I am left being a stay at home dad. Don’t get me wrong, I love my kids and this is a fantastic opportunity to bond with them when they are young. Think how it must (and does) irk Mr. Ex-Navy SEAL, Type A+ personality Dad.

The reasons behind the stay at home part are many and they may end up their own posts. This latest round was mostly to take care of my youngest daughter. She was diagnosed with End Stage Renal Disease or Kidney Failure just before her first birthday. They told us right then she would need extensive dialysis and eventually a kidney transplant. So, through this that and the other, (I think I will write a book about this. Ebook or real? Any thoughts?) I stayed home and shuttled her to dialysis 4 times per week for 2 years. She finally got a kidney transplant last May and is now only going to the doctor once a month so I am freed up.

That is one of the reasons I am blogging now. I am working on my writing skills, I do have a couple of ideas for books that I would like to actually sell. Maybe I can parlay my blog into the cash to do school and finish up those pesky 18 credits.

Now back to my main point, I am a stay at home dad. I am following in my mother’s footsteps and not entirely my father’s. And I don’t care. I am proud to be able to take care of the house and the kids as well as the yard and the car. I can change a water pump or a diaper with equal ease, if not equal time. I can rebuild a wall or teach my first grader how to read. I can do dishes or divide fractions with my 9 year old. I can field dress a deer or wash laundry.

I am proud to follow my mother’s example and do all of these things. I am proud to be a writer and will be more proud when I am a successful one. I know what it takes to keep the house running now, and my hat’s off to those mom’s and dad’s who stay home and do it.

Now, go do something useful!
-Justin

What I did today: The Grind Report

May 27, 2014 / / 4 Comments
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Image by DanielleCM via Flickr

Not that there was any way to avoid it, but I am sure you have noticed my lack of postings here on the Catharsis the past couple of weeks.  Call it lack of motivation, call it laziness, call it what you will, but I have been absent.  I hope that there is someone out there who is at least annoyed by that.

I have written something like this post before and I am sure  that if you remember those you are sick of it and are ready to unsubscribe.  Let me just say, please don’t.  I have ideas again and things to write about but my time is not balanced well at the moment.  I could blame it on a number of things including sick kids and a 7 month old who likes to wake up in the middle of the night, but the only person to blame is me.
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Migraines and Laundry, Which is Worse? part 2

March 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

As I started yesterday, This is part 2 of my migraine journey and latest stay at home dad info.  And Journey just came on the radio, Any Way You Want It is AWESOME!  part 1 is Here

Admittedly, laundry sucks and it is not my favorite thing but if I don’t do it, there are no clean clothes.  No, the wife can’t do it, she works and now she is pregnant with number 4 so her energy is gone.  I am not complaining about doing laundry I just don’t like to.  But I went to fold the 3 loads I had washed.  About that time I got what I call the “numb bubble” again.

The numb bubble is one of my migraine clues.  It is not the scientific term but it is my term.  It is a strange feeling, complete numbness in a “sphere” roughly the size of a baseball that moves.  It usually starts in my fingers and “travels” through my hand, up my arm, and through my face.  That is the worst part, it is like being on lots of novacaine but it moves.  And it sucks.

If you just think that a migraine is a really bad headache, there is much more to it, usually.  I have read about migraines lately and there are different types but most have some sort of “aura” associated with them.  That is the type I have.

Since I was about 12 I have had migraines but didn’t have them diagnosed until something like 14 years ago when my girlfriend (now wife of 13 years) the nursing student (now Nurse) told me what my “sickness” actually was.  I used to wake up in the middle of the night with the “numb bubble” in full swing and the visual aura happening.  I would think, “Oh great I am sick again.”  I didn’t know all of what was happening but I knew that I would be throwing up a few times with a bad headache to go with it.  And then I would be fine later.  I believe to this day that my parents thought I was faking because I was better later.

I got medication at the hospital thanks to my girlfriend and from there it has helped to alleviate the symptoms before they led to the vomiting stage.  I still have the numb bubble but much less now, mostly just the visual aura that tells me the migraine is coming.  I have tried to explain that visual aura to people and I think I will try to do it in the next post.

Later

Justin

Continue to part 3 Here

Why I stay home, part 2

March 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Hello again.  Guess what? I broke my visitor record yesterday and I like it.  Today I feel like doing the Rocky and Bullwinkle thing.  “When we last left you Frostbite Falls was falling into …”   The real from yesterday, I was talking about how I quit working to go back to school and ended up with a 1 year old in the hospital for Kidney Failure.

Today we will start there.  For 16 weeks I went back an forth between the hospital with my wife and 1 year old, and home with my 7 and 5 year olds.  School had not started for the little one so babysitters were plentiful for a few hours each day.  That kind of contradicted our “We will raise our kids” mantra but it couldn’t be helped.  I was still home with them at night and as much as I could be.

After she got out of the hospital, she didn’t have kidney’s any more.  The disease that she had was a genetic mutation and required removal of both kidney’s before they became cancerous.  Without kidney’s my little one year old needed dialysis daily.  At first I took her 20 miles every day to the University of Utah to get dialysis.  We tried dialysis at home but it didn’t work after 3 months of trying.

As of September 2007 she needed dialysis 4 times per week and it was my job to take her.  My wife had to work to keep the insurance that was paying for all of this.  One month of dialysis treatments was almost $22, 000.  Insurance is good.  There was no way that I could make enough money to pay the mortgage and no way I could get insurance to cover her medical bills.  They ended up at around $900,000 for 2007.

So my job was to take the baby to dialysis and be the stay at home parent for the other kids so my wife could work.  That lasted 2 years to the day and I cannot for the life of me decide why I never got into blogging before.  I had looked into several “make money on the internet with my scam” programs but didn’t find anything useful.  I had heard about blogs, I was writing several times per month on a blog (I didn’t put the two together before.  I had a blog in my thoughts as a bad thing).  That whole time in the hospital and through dialysis to her kidney transplant is all recorded at www.carepages.com with pagename ameliarosematthews.  That should have been a clue to me that I could do something else and blog elsewhere.

Now all of the doctor visits are once a month and not too big of a deal to get to.  I am still home taking care of the house because I still haven’t finished school.  We are trying to decide now what to do in July when baby #4 comes.  I think I will have to work for a while to pay the bills and leave the wife home and maybe I can get back to school.  That is why I have started working so hard here, on this blog.

I can see there is money making potential.  I don’t need much, just to be able to pay the bills and some tuition to an online college.  I still want to stay home.  Who in their right mind wants to go work if they don’t have to?  If it takes 3 months to start being successful as a blogger, then I am 1 month into it.  I have taken loads of expert advice and I think I am doing the things that need to be done.  I love to write and am still writing a couple of books but they are not going to be published any time soon.

I think I have what it takes to break that 3 month “barrier” and be successful.  I don’t have many distractions, no work to get to or a pile of things to do.  I will still be here in April, well past 3 months, and then well past then.  And I plan on making money about that point so that I can still stay home.

I am a stay at home dad.  I am a blogger.  I will be good and successful at both.

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