Controlling my Blood Pressure

It's pretty hard to control your blood pressure when you have three young children but that's exactly what I need to do.  I went off my blood pressure medication several months ago mainly due to the fact that I never made an appointment to get a new prescription.  I'm having a hard time finding the time to see a doctor never mind a new doctor that I haven't met before.  I never really bonded with my last new doctor and so I have allowed my health issues to really spiral out of control. 

The last time I've had "the test" was 4 years ago when I found I was pregnant with O.  It's a good thing I've had three children or I probably wouldn't have submitted for "the test" in the last seven years.  I struggled with mood swings, irrational bouts of anger and anxiety and yet.... I've done next to nothing about it.  We pretty much figured it's the stress of having three kids under 5 (at the time) and hubby losing his job and us trying to sell our house and living with our inlaws for the past three years.  Yeah... that would do it.  So when my blood pressure elevated after I had O and never really came down again... we put it down to stress.

Now we're in our own home and while the move was stressfull, you'd think that the stress would be gradually wearing off.  How do you cope then with the every day stress of life?  Still, the hot weather has not helped and this past weekend my husband moved his video store to a new location, which meant that he's been hardly home for the last week.

So it should have come as no surprise when I felt a tightness in my chest as if I was losing my breath and a weird foggy, fainting sensation come over me while cleaning up after supper Monday night. What did amaze me was that nobody even noticed.  Later when I went upstairs I took my blood pressure and found that it indeed was high  154/108. 

I'm reluctant to go back on a prescription as one of the side effects is headaches.  It's pretty hard to want to interact with your kids or even want to exercise when your head hurts.  Plus, while the medication helped bring it down most of the time it still was a little too high.  So K went to the health food stood and bought me a bunch of natural stuff to try and lower it.

So far it hasn't helped much but I realize that it will take some time.  I have learned that lying down and taking deep breaths actually brings it down quite significantly.  Of course, as soon as I start getting more active it creeps up again.  Especially when I'm getting after the kids. 

But really how can I keep my temper and my blood pressure down when it seems like I literally have to sit in front of them and stare at them to get them to behave?  Last night I'm cleaning up after supper and hear a crash in the living room.  I discover J had been doing acrobatics on the coffee table and completely up ended it and herself. I'm surprised she wasn't hurt.  They've discovered a new trick of hanging over the edge of the pool and sticking their faces in the water, which no matter how many times I told them they weren't to do this, the minute my back was turned they were back doing it again.  They see no harm in it whereas I can visualize them leaning too far and getting themselves stuck face down in the water.  Before it was sufficient enough for the ladder to not be in the pool and they obeyed the rule that they weren't to step into the pool without one of us being in the back yard but now... like I said they don't think it's a big deal. 

Then E decided to paint. That's fine, she's 7.  I sit down on the couch try to relax only to find 15 minutes later that after she spent all the time putting the acrylic paints into the paint dish, she decided not to paint and left it for her brother and sister to paint... unsupervised, while she watched t.v.  J is 5 and O is 3.  The mess they created was neither little nor was it pretty.  I go from cleaning orange and blue paint which has now stained my table protector to having to clean up gobs of paint in the sink to cleaning O's face because he always insists on sticking felts, crayons, pens, paints etc in the vicinity of his mouth.  Yeah... momma was not happy.

And those are just some of the crazy things they do.  I'm proud that they are active, creative little beings but man oh man parenting these active little beings can be tough.  Still I shouldn't lose my temper so quick or so much and yelling never really does any good.  It seems pretty stupid to yell at the kids to stop yelling. 

All I can do right now is to try and keep calm, breath deeply and tell myself "this too shall pass". In another month or so I'm sure all this stress will be behind me.