In December, I tried my best to give my kids a “normal” Christmas, but of course, I overdid it. Even though I kept cutting back my ToDo list, I couldn’t keep up. Of all my ambitions, many weren’t realized. For instance, I had planned to put an adorable hand-knit hat (or scarf) on the head (or neck) of many many a close friend’s young child! But I only ended up finishing 1 scarf in time to give for the actual day.

I did most of my shopping early, I did a lot of it online. I started wrapping early. I set lower standards for myself (like “only” making 12 handmade cards). I tried to “pace” myself as much as I could (I still have not learned if that’s an official thing you can learn and apply to pain in a unique way, but I just spread things out in a common sense way!). But still, I totally crashed…

Week before Christmas, I was in bed to pull myself back from the edge of total breakdown. I camped out there for a few days, starting with the Sunday after our annual open house, which was so wonderfully busy and FULL (of caring and dear friends, of busy children, of sweet babies, of adorable toddlers), it made me feel real happiness, which cut sharply and bravely through the pain and exhaustion. I hung onto those feelings, even the next day when I barely left my bed or my room.

Christmas Day, my son woke insanely early and was in and out of our room. We got up with him and went downstairs at a more reasonable hour and I put on my usual happy face for the kiddos. I’m so very very good at that now. Not first thing in the mornings, usually (my DS has literally screamed at what he calls my “scary morning eyes” – bleary, dark, can-hardly-open-them tired eyes), but as I get going, I can look almost normal. I dressed all up for the traditional brunch with the family. It was nice except that I missed handing out half my cards when I went to lie down in my parents’ spare room bed.

A few days after Christmas, I found myself having severe chest pains. They lasted hours and hours, even when I took myself right to bed at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. It was hard to tell if I had any other new symptoms – after all, I frequently experienced headaches, was sometimes short of breath or dizzy, was always having aches and pains, was exhausted round-the-clock and had been regularly suffering from increased nausea for weeks due to medication changes anyways! Still, when my DH looked up the chest pains, we became worried my heart was involved and most of the information out there will tell you: DON’T take the risk, get to a hospital right away!

My heart passed all the tests there, which was a relief but also meant I would get bumped down the priority queue and would wait for many hours to find out what was actually wrong with me. I finally got an answer at around 10:30pm (still having these severe extra pains this whole time!). The doctor was very informative – she gave a Dx of Costocondritis, which is apparently very common for women who have Fibromyalgia, especially women who have larger breasts (and my DDs hadn’t exactly been well-contained in my bras with all the fighting against gaining extra weight as of late!). She advised me it would take a few days for that particular episode to calm down and prescribed heat and ibuprophen (while dropping my regular anti-inflammatory medication to not destroy my stomach too much).

I did get that episode cleared up, but it has been back very regularly since over the past 4 weeks. Lovely! Isn’t another side effect of everything I have going on *just* what I needed? An online friend in a Chronic Pain group used a term that I am totally adopting now because it is just the perfect word to describe everything that has happened to me the past few years: collateral damage. This domino effect of all these events and circumstances that have followed the collisions… like those cars didn’t just hit me: they bumped into my LIFE and started knocking over everything, piece by piece, area by area. Health, fiances, parenting, marriage, volunteering, hobbies, social life… and now nothing remains untouched.

Anyways, I hadn’t intended to vent about how miserable I am (I’ll save that for my therapy sessions, which I’m finally finally doing at long last – carving out time for myself to heal a little!). Point being: I went through this and it sucked, and I wish I’d know about it before. Obviously I’m not a doctor so even if you are someone suffering from Fibro, if you think you have something going on that could possibly involve your heart, you need to get checked out! But now you can have this to hold onto like “maybe it’s just this…” so you’re not, say, worried the whole time that you might die and leave your husband and children behind to look after themselves without you. And that maybe they might not do that very well because even though you *think* you only take up space on the couch knitting all the time and not cooking anymore, you actually do a lot for the family with planning and organizing and what not. Just for example, if you were someone like that.

Next point is that I can barely crawl to my home office to update my blog. Or post pics of my knitted works. Or pics of cards (not that I have created all that many new ones lately anyways). I have been considering closing or changing it again, just as I have been considering closing or changing my small business, KStar Design. I’m so behind on life things and health things and real things that I don’t know why I would want to keep trying to keep up online as well. I officially stepped down from my Young Mommies Boards recently and it felt so sad but it was also very necessary.

More on all this later (hopefully?), but change is in the air…

ETA: the original version of this entry was glitchy, only the re-posted version (Jan 31st) is the full copy

Firstly, it has been more difficult than average to try to crawl to the keys to write (if you need the back-story, I refer you to my general posts on coping with chronic pain and disabilities + the most recent addition to the “people-like-to-hit-me-with-their-cars” lineup).

But added to this factor, I’ve been having computer issues the past many months as well. We’ve been switching things around and it has just been such a slow process to get things all moved around the way we’d like them. I still do not have Gallery Remote set up on my new laptop, and that was the program I was using to upload all of my new cards and other creative project pics to my Scrappy & Stampy Gallery.

Also, I’ve tried to add various spam-blocking filters and what not, but nothing has been that effective so far. The one I was using for my Young Mommies blogs (very effective one!) seems to have been discontinued! Things seemed fairly “under control” with my own spam filter settings, so I opened things back up to allow people to comment without being registered and logged-in. Well, this led to 5,000 spam comments within a few weeks. I have yet to find a legitimate one, but I’m hoping there might be one or two or else the whole expermient was for nought!

It’s very strange, because my stats seem to indicate I have a fair amount of visitors… I was surprised to find out that Creating Kris is getting an average of 100-200 visits a day (up to 2800 unique people a month!). BUT most of these people are only discovering the gallery portion or are only reading the RSS feeds. Hmm. So I need to get at my Gallery to customize it a little more. You know, let people know “Hey, the artist is talkin’ over here… please swing on by!”.

Anyways, if there’s anyone real out there reading (that amount of people can’t all be spammers and solicitors, right?), please be patient as I get everything here sorted out (as a far-down-the-list priority in the scope of getting many aspects of my life sorted out at the moment!). :S There’ll be some changes, but mostly it’ll still be just me putting my creative works out there.

Thanks for reading! <3

Nonetheless, I have not been ignoring this craft completely! Even though I only created maybe one or two cross-stitch patterns last holiday season instead of the usual “bunch” of them, I’m never without a project in the works. I still find it to be one of the most portable crafts to take on the go; I do most of my stitching while waiting in doctor’s offices and in the car and things like that!

Right now, there are a couple of birth announcements in progress for babies born in 2011. I like to give them no later than the baby’s first birthdays, so it helps to start them way ahead of sched! These little boys were born in April, 2 days apart even though they were due more than a month apart! They are also cousins so I made them matching designs. I’ve mostly finished the main part of the pattern but now need to add the birth details.

Last year I only had to do a couple birth announcements… a cute horse and frog. I didn’t get a chance to grab a photo of the Rocking Horse one (maybe next time I see my friend I’ll ask!) but here is the Frog one…

I also did some designs for our new home: a “Welcome” sampler for our front hall as well as small Springtime and Halloween patterns I could put up seasonally…

Last fall, I created a fall-themed wedding sampler for my cousin and his new wife, Alicia, who has been a close friend of mine since high school (no, it was not a total coincidence, they met when they both helped us move!). Their pattern had a set of leaves and I found a really great frame to match it (see below). Then in February, I made a stitched pattern for my sister-in-law’s wedding! I found a really pretty pattern with a “tag” base and added metallic threads to give the eyelet a very real look. I like how it turned out and I hope she did as well.

Wow, digging up all these projects and pictures makes me feel like I haven’t been too neglectful of my stitching projects after all. I guess they were just much more spread out and smaller than similar projects have been in previous years.

Although I did just start a pretty ambitious (big) project for my daughter’s 13th birthday (yes, we’ll have our first teen in the house, I’m pretty terrified!)… it’s a very awesome butterfly pattern that I hope she’ll think is pretty cool even though she’s really not much into all this crafting “stuff”. She’ll probably just be glad it’s not something knitted.

I’d also like to do something for my son for his room, but a lot of the patterns I have in mind are very small (a Mario guy, a LEGO guy), so maybe I’ll do a set or a few different ones. Or I might just wait until he’s older. For the LEGO person idea, I would need a full copy of the PCStitch program in order to create one based on the little LEGO figure I designed myself. I previously had created this other cross-stitch pattern with the program: Love Lives Here but I don’t know how I did it without being able to put the design underneath the pattern? Maybe I was able to transfer it over side-by-side but I don’t think I’d want to sign on for something that time-consuming and mentally draining again!

So those are the stitchy projects for now! I think I will rename my “knitting” category as Knitty/Stitchy so I remember to include my cross-stitch projects as well and so they are kept separate from my scrapbooking and card-making blog entries for easier searching.

Thx for reading and happy crafting!