Vortex, at this point it looks like we'll just miss you in New Orleans. :-(

Boo! But yay for new opportunity.

msbelle, pray you don't have my experience! Almost 20 years and im still having hot flashes. Not as intense as they were, but I still always have a fan and ice water at hand.

I haven't started having hot flashes per se, but in the past several months, it just feels like my internal thermometer has been turned up 5 degrees, permanently. (And it's not because it's summer, because that's never happened before. I'm inside the house with central air all day long, and I'm still overly warm.) But if I would stop getting my dang period, I'd be happy to launch fully into menopause.

I've put in 10 hours of work today and I am still not done for the night and I have things waiting on my desk that have to be in before 10am.

I really hope my boss has his 1 on 1 with me tomorrow, because no one doing any of my entry work while I am on vacation is bullshit.

That is bullshit indeed, msbelle. If "vacation" just means "do all your tasks when you're back" it doesn't really count.

It's late here (I'm on east coast time) and I'm trying to go to sleep and failing. I have a tickle in my nose or the lady upstairs keeps walking around or I start thinking about something or...ugh.

I too am in the hot flash brigade. I ended up buying all new pyjamas (bamboo) and a small-profile vertical fan to blow on my bed all night. It helps... some. What would help more is if I would cut out all red wine and sugar from my diet, but really, I have to have something to live for. (Although whiskey is better than wine for hot flashes apparently...)

Sheryl, great to hear you've gotten to a diagnosis, which is key to making strategies for corrective action. Fingers crossed!

I'm well over the hot flash stage which is great, except that the (ahem) Change left me incredibly heat-sensitive. I sweat so much more now. It seems ironic that I spent the first half of my life too cold, and now I'm going to be too hot -- there should have been a couple days in the middle where everything was nice, you know?

Crying at work before 10am. BINGO!

Overwhelmed with minutia that no one else pays attention to. Discovered errors on all the data put into my daily reports while I was on vacation. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

UGH msbelle. Just UGH.

ltc is learning that mommy is not making empty threats.

I honestly think that's one of the most important things a kid can learn.

I agree.

A related idea I learned fairly early on was not to "teach" your kids to whine (or otherwise act up) to get their way. Parents accidentally teach kids to whine by saying, "No," and then later giving in, because the kid is whining so much. They get positive reinforcement for being a persistent whiner.

It took a while to build the habit of considering my answer (and if it was "No," whether I'd eventually relent), but it made my life easier once I got the hang of it.

I also read, a million years ago, to disarm whining etc. with humor. One day, when the kids were all whining about something, I said (kinda yelled, but not in a scary way): "Hey, help! Help me! I need your help."

This got their attention. Once they asked me what I was talking about I pushed my hair back and asked them to look in my ear. Once they were all looking, I asked if there was blood -- if they could see any blood.

Even though they couldn't, they were riveted by the possibility and wanted to know why I thought my ear could be bleeding. That's when I told them that whining makes my ears bleed, which they thought was hilarious.

I think I got away with the full schtick one or two more times. After that, it got shorthanded to, "Hey quick, quick! Are my ears bleeding?" They would get the point, and it disarmed the situation without me losing my cool (or without them escalating).

And now I'm having to chase the insurance company to get them to authorize the Botox I'm supposed to get on Monday. Fuuuuuck our healthcare system.

Oh, god, whining. Twelve-year-olds whining. I just want to look at these kids in the supermarkt and say "Aren't you too old for this?" I've just realized that one reason I went to weekly grocery delivery was to avoid kids.

I need a bigger lawn so I can yell at all the kids to get off of it.