T1D: Lockdown Edition
I think it probably goes without saying at this point that it’s been a bit of a year. January and February were hunky dory, but March was not our friend and honestly, neither were April, May, or any of the months that followed. Now it’s nearly November and this week our 4 year old made…
Opening Up
There are a great many things that I talk to my friends and family about. Happy things, sad things, memories, plans. The fact that we spent a whole hour recently trying to figure out what our 4 year old meant when he said he really liked “moon sex” (sorry, what?), until we finally realized that…
What I Wish We’d Known
This week has been a busy one for us. Our big kid celebrated his two year “Diaversary”, and, because it never rains but it pours (and this has never been truer for us than in August of 2018), our little guy turned two this week too. Our house has been filled with balloons and giggles,…
Someday.
One day back in the fall, as we headed down the street on one of our evening walks, I watched you running ahead of me, dinosaur tail waggling on the costume you insisted you wore. I watched as you ran in a wobbly path past the “Hate Has No Home Here” signs and the piles…
The Diabetic Starter Kit: Toddler Edition
Navigating T1D with a toddler is, I suspect, much like navigating T1D with several sticks of aged dynamite. You never know when they’re going to explode or what’s going to set them off, and they are fiercely unreasonable in basically every way. Our boy wasn’t what we might call the most reasonable of babies, but…
What I Wish I’d Said to You at 3am
Just shy of two years in, and some days I still don’t quite know how to explain this whole thing to you. You woke up to me changing out your infusion set in the dead of the night the other day, bleary eyed and confused. When I tried to shush you back to sleep, your…
Talking Type 1 with Your Type 1
At the hospital, they teach you how to give shots and juggle numbers and make life or death decisions, but the reality is that only time will tell how your little T1 will learn to navigate this strange world where not everyone has a verifiably hopeless pancreas like they do. He knew he had T1D…
Adjusting to the New Normal
This particular day was my husband’s first long day back at work after a brief but much-appreciated stint of paternity leave, and my first time solo-tackling the baby and the newly-diagnosed two year old. Life was pretty up in the air and to be honest, in the early days of life post-diagnosis, my way of…
Ice Cream in the Bathroom, Daniel Tiger Confusion, and the Importance of Self-Care
This week has been a bit of a doozy, and it’s left me thinking a lot about self-care. T1D is so relentless – so unforgiving – that sometimes it, coupled with an ordinary sort of difficult week, can be enough to really wear you down. There are no sick days. No vacations. No breaks from…
Making the Switch from Omnipod to t:slim X2
I have been meaning to write about this one for a while, mostly because when I was trying to research the switch, I read a bunch of testimonies from other people who’d been willing to share about their reasoning, and it really helped us. I want to preface this post by saying that in pretty…
Decorating Those Omnipods
Not so long ago, we made the switch from the Omnipod system to the T-Slim (more on that here). But before that, in the early days, pods were pretty much our life. The transition from injections to pods had been such an indescribable relief that we knew we’d never go back, and those little three-day…
The Juice Box/Library Battle
It was late summer, and my Mum had decided to take our T1D son to the local library for the first time. Our youngest was about a month old and I’d firmly left the “ohmygoodness how did we ever make something so cute” phase and had recently entered the “is it possible to die from…
With Diabetes You Can Be Anything You Want (Except for Anything a Four Year Old Wants to Be)
Cowritten with my (pretty ace) husband, Ben. We all worry about our kids’ future. Will they be happy? Kind? Financially secure? Often, we find ourselves wondering what they’ll do when they’re all grown up. The good news is that Type 1 Diabetes doesn’t close too many doors when it comes to potential careers. Except, of…
Type 1 Vs. Type 2: The (Exceptionally Brief) Lowdown
One of the biggest misconceptions about Diabetes is that it’s all pretty much the same. Or that of the two main types, one is the good one, and one is the bad one. Or one is the bad one, and one is the really bad one. I always sort of want to laugh at this…
Starting School
Our little guy starting school was a source of great excitement in our household, and a source of great fear. We’d lived in our small town for a few years by this point, and we’d heard wonderful things about both the school and the school nurse. Rationally, I knew he’d be in the very best…
The Awkwardness of the Early Days
The early days of our son’s diagnosis were filled with endless awkwardness. Awkward mistakes, awkward encounters. Our first was on our second day in the hospital (just before the whole labor saga began), when it was time for me to give the toddler a shot for the first time. I remember the nurse being like…
Guilt
One of the most important things I’ve come to understand since our boy’s diagnosis is that T1D is an illness of guilt. It’s an illness of “what if”s and “if only”s, of doubts and questioning. For our son, the diagnosis came almost a month to the day after a particularly bad episode of hand, foot…
Day One.
I struggled when I first started writing this, mostly because it feels arrogant, somehow, to assume that one’s story is of interest to anyone else. And so I wanted to start this by explaining why I decided to share what I have. I think mostly I just didn’t know where to look, but I know…
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