Oct. 17

At lunchtime I had a chiropractic appointment.  I've still been having a lot of pain in my left hip.  I know we need a new mattress (and I mainly sleep on my left side, although lately I have been determinately trying to sleep on my right side), but I was worried maybe I was getting arthritis.  He put that fear to rest, saying the pain was too high and not deep enough to be joint pain.  He worked on my hip for awhile, and while it definitely hurt then, it is feeling better now. 

Caleb has been thinking about possible careers recently, and since he is really a hands-on, "my love language is touch" kind of person, I had mentioned to him physical therapy or chiropractic as options.  So today I asked my doctor what he majored in, and what his path was to become a chiropractor.  His reply was very interesting.  He majored in kinesiology, and he went on to take physical therapy classes.  He thought he would become a physical therapist, but he ended up wanting to go a different direction, so he went to chiropractic school.  He said he still uses a lot of the physical therapy that he learned, and that also his dad was an engineer, so he was used to thinking of the body as a physical system, with levers, pulleys, etc.  This was so interesting because when people ask me about him, I usually describe him as a mix of a chiropractor and a physical therapist.  He has always given me exercises to strengthen areas, like my shoulders, that I have problems with, and he doesn't just adjust your spine.  Like today, for example, when he worked on the muscles in my hip that were out of whack.  For my particular problems, especially my shoulder problems, I really feel the Lord led me to the right person 5 years ago!

After my chiropractic visit, I headed over to Walmart to pick up a few things, like a set of metal shelves that will solve the organization problem in our basement storage room!!  Haha, how's that for high expectations?  Hopefully it will help anyway.  I have tubs and tubs of clothes, both boy and girl, all sizes, but because they are just stacked on top of each other in precarious piles, they are not as useful as they could be.  I think we will actually need more than one set of shelves, LOL.

I also spent quite a bit of time looking at carseats.  All our convertible seats are really old (one of them expired Dec. 2009 *cough*), so Drew needs a new one.  I've actually been looking at them for the past few months, but what on earth is up with these humongously puffy throne-like carseats?!  They are all ginormous!  That may work if you only have one precious snowflake, and therefore you can devote the entire back of your vehicle to one carseat, but I have 5, count them 5, kids in carseats, so seats the size of Lazyboys are simply not going to work!  Sams and Costco only sell one type of carseat, and it is too huge, so that left me spending a good 20 minutes at Walmart, measuring carseat width, and then trying to find the appropriate box underneath.  I finally found one that wasn't too huge, although it was the only one of its kind.  I really wanted 2, one for the big van, and one for the minivan, but at least would be a start.  I headed up to the cashier--where I found out that carseat had been recalled, and they weren't allowed to sell it to me!  Stymied again!  All that time for naught!  Actually not--I was standing in line, when a lady opened up a new register and called me over.  I walked over and noticed right away a folded $10 bill on the floor by the conveyer belt.  So I came out $10 ahead, LOL.

I drove home, nursed and did some school with the younger ones, and then I headed out again, since I really was ready to be done with carseats.  This time I went to Babies R Us, which I normally avoid like the plague because it's just too much.  Too . . . I don't even know what.  I mean, they sell $300 carseats!!  Who spends that kind of money on a carseat?!  But there I found a moderately wide Evenflo carseat on sale for $85, so I went ahead and bought 2.  Yay!  I even got one installed this afternoon, at which point Luke came out to remind me that Nathan's cross country practice start time had moved up to 5:00, because of darkness, and it was then 5:15.  Whoops!  Oh well.  Nathan ran on his own this afternoon!

While I was wrestling with the installation (I've never actually used the LATCH clips before today, so I had to learn about them--I've always just used the seatbelts because I'm so much more comfortable with them, and I think I can get them a lot tighter), I was thinking about the weird discrepancies our society has about children and safety.  We are SOOO wrapped up in safety for little kids.  I keep waiting for carseats that have their own airbags, plus little parachutes for if they ever get ejected.  But really, are these humongous carseats actually making a humongous difference in safety?  I mean, putting kid in seatbelts, and then in *any* carseat, as opposed to just having them float around the backseat, led to a *huge* decrease in fatalities.  But now I don't think the differences are that big, and mainly the carseat manufacturers are counting on the paranoid new parent readers of parenting magazines to buy whatever the latest "super-duper-DUPER" safe carseat. 

Even as kids get older, there is still like a badge of honor on message boards for how long you had your child rear-facing (up to 4 or 5 YEARS!!), and I have personally read people talk about how their *13* year old kid is still in a BOOSTER SEAT because they aren't 80 pounds or whatever.  Wow.  But at least they're safe!

But then your little snowflake reaches the teenage years (still in a booster, of course, since that is so safe), and all of a sudden, society assumes they are going to engage in very risky behavior, especially sexual, and the only things you can possibly do are dangerous, risky things like give them untested vaccines like Gardisil, where the bad side effects have about the chance of happening as the bad things they are supposed to prevent in the first place.  How is that safe?!  It's just so weird.  But then again, we have a trampoline and we let our kids play tackle football, so we're probably not really safety conscious (obsessed?) people, LOL.