Oh, Laura, how stressful. (and Kudos for Bobby for being such a champ.)

Laura, I'm glad you were able to be there as the voice of calm and wisdom. I hope everything works out for your niece and the kids.

Teppy, feel better. I have to take 4 antibiotics on Thursday morning followed by 4 advil before I test I'm having done. I'm hoping beyond hope my stomach will survive it.

Laura, I'm glad you were able to be there as the voice of calm and wisdom. I hope everything works out for your niece and the kids.

This. So sad, and so stressful. I hope emotions level out, and the grandmother can accept the situation for what it is.

Protip - new iPhones are shipped with the volume down. I checked my alarms to make sure they'd transferred... but I didn't check the volume on the ringer. So now I'm over two hours late, and a panic attack is fomenting. I slept like crap last night, again. This hip pain is really a problem.

{{{smonster}}} Calm~ma and pain~ma to you.

{{smonster}} crap way to start the week. I hope it takes a turn for the better quickly.

Laura, what a mess. You did the right thing, but this doesn't sound like it's going to be over quickly. I'm curious - Grandma thinks Niece "isn't ready" to raise a 4-year-old, but Niece is currently raising a baby, and that's okay? If Grandma thinks Niece is an unfit mother, why isn't she trying to take the baby away too?

smonster, what a rotten way to start the week. I'd offer to start calling you in the mornings again, but I was 2 hours late this morning my own self. (Of course, no one noticed, but still. Not good.) My sleep cycle has been upside-down for weeks. I hope you can find something to kill the hip pain.

Gah. I am having dental anxiety. (This isn't on a par with spending-a-weekend-with-400-people-with-no-boundaries anxiety; if the weekend was an 8.5 on a scale of 0 to 10, my dental anxiety is...maybe a 4.)

Ever since I got my tooth pulled last year, every single twinge or not-right tooth feeling I have makes me paranoid that I'm going to have to have all my teeth pulled, right now. I totally get that it's paranoid, but I still have it.

Which is annoying, because I never used to have any dental anxiety at all.

My sinus infection is making my teeth hurt -- or, I'm *assuming* that it's from my sinus infection, but WHAT IF ALL MY TEETH ARE ROTTING?

I know sinus infections can cause tooth pain. I totally know this. It's happened before. But that was before I had a tooth pulled and now I am totally paranoid.

I have a dental appointment this afternoon for a tooth cleaning (I didn't make an appointment out of paranoia; this has been scheduled for 6 months; it just happens to coincide with the stupid sinus infection). And so I am paranoid as hell that the dentist is going to look at my teeth and scream in horror and/or grab a pair of pliers and start yanking.

This is what crazy looks like, y'all. (I think it might not be so bad if I hadn't just had a stressful weekend. But then again, I can compartmentalize my anxiety pretty well, so it probably would still be this bad even if my weekend had been stress-free.)

Gah. I just needed to get that out of my head. (Yes, I can take Xanax, but I need to wait until right before the appointment.)

Yeah, I don't blame you, Steph, you went through tooth trauma, so it's reasonable to be fearful at the next thing. It's really good that you had the cleaning appointment already, and the dentist will be able to tell you where things stand. It's probably just the sinus stuff, but if it's not, you'll be in the best place, where the dentist can treat you and get you healthy going forward.

Calm~ma Teppy. That type of anxiety, when you know logically you're more anxious than is probably called for but still can't calm down is so difficult. I hope the Xanax works wonders and the dentist visit goes smoothly.

It's probably just the sinus stuff, but if it's not, you'll be in the best place, where the dentist can treat you and get you healthy going forward.

Which is what I'm telling myself. I had a regular cleaning in July before the tooth was pulled, and he took a full set of x-rays (where they take, like, 500 x-rays) and said everything other than that cracked soon-to-be-pulled tooth looked fine, although one tooth needs a crown soon-ish so that it doesn't crack.

I know that all my teeth haven't suddenly turned to powder in 6 months, but I'm still full of the crazy.

(I think perhaps I am grinding my teeth from the stress, which can make teeth crack, which is as fantastic an example of irony as I can think of. I need to get a new nightguard thingie. I had one [which I didn't use much], but it was molded to my mouth back before I had the tooth pulled.)