Comedy Through The Chaos

Hello, Cadre friends. Happy Thursday to you. I am Ms. Shannon and my hair is doing something insane today. But I am here to hang out with you for Ms. Shannon's comedy through the chaos here on our caregiver Thursday. I will continue to fluff as we catch up to everybody and oh, I look tired, but appropriately so. That is fine. That is fine for today. Just to bring everybody up to speed, we always appreciate you joining us here in the Cadre sphere. I usually hang out here on Thursdays where we have a variety of caregivers and caregiver related subject matter that we kind of pull all into Thursdays here.

Hello, Lauren, thank you for joining and we appreciate you being here. Just kind of bringing people up to junk food Junkie, I appreciate your name. Good to see you as well. Just kind of bringing everybody up to speed on what we do here. Amar, thank you very much for joining. Appreciate seeing you here. Um, so to tell you a little bit more about myself, Good morning, Good morning, Good morning. Um, and good afternoon. If you are still in the afternoon part of the country as I am. I hub out of the great state of Minnesota.

I know that we have some people normally that join us from here as well and today it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. So hopefully it is similar in wherever you're joining us from. Briana, thanks for joining us as well. So what I thought I would share with you today, I am home this afternoon. The last couple of calmed through the chaos live streams. I was either walking to get something or on walkabout over someplace. But today I'm home. And before I get to the the subject matter that I planned on talking about today, I just want to give gratitude to all of you caregivers that join us here.

It is an interesting journey. We know that it is a an adventure some days. Today the adventure was that I got my kiddo off to school school this morning. He was seemed okay, kind of was in a funky mood and that funky mood escalated and they called me and we decided that it was probably best so I went to go pick him up because he was very sad at school today. We managed to make it out without anything serious happening. But he was not in a mood to be able to be appropriately productive in his school setting.

Just let you know. I do. I, I quote Mr. Rogers a lot. I actually just use the theme for Mr. Rogers Neighborhood in a social media post earlier this week and I'll get to that story in a second. So. But it was just interesting. As I've mentioned before, I have an adorable 17 year old boy that happens to be high sports on the autism spectrum. So we have our ups and our downs. There's some days that there is a lot of autism in our day. There's some days there's a lot of teenager in our days and some days it is the overlapping of both.

But I'm really glad that I was in a position to go and pick him up when it seemed like with the best course for him. I was actually vaguely in the neighborhood because I was running some errands somewhere close, close by. So he needed me, I needed to make a pivot today and it was a good day for us to be able to do that. So I'm glad that I was able to do that. So back to what I wanted to talk about today in the Cadre sphere. Back to beautiful things in the neighborhood. If you're like me and you circ search, I'm sorry, surf social media a lot, you can see that there's a couple of trends.

And one of the trends that is out there is I follow this one guy named Derek Downey and he's one of those people that has some adorable neighborhood squirrels that he has turned into a sitcom in the front of his home. And I think that is great. I think squirrels out in the wild are perfectly lovely. What's been happening at my house though. And I'll make sure that I put these pictures in the chat. I meant to do it. I'm sorry in the the I didn't get a chance to do this. So earlier this week what happened is I was outside with my kiddo and my sister who lives on the other side of this duplex with me, came over and she is the sweetest one in my family and she came over and my sister Casey, who also is my backup caregiver for my kiddo, came over with a look of distress on her face.

And the reason she was in distress is because some of our neighborhood squirrels has managed to get into her side of the house and we're camping out in her basement. So she asked me to come over and dispose of these squirrels. Now I'm the oldest one in the family. I'm usually the bug killer and the disappearer of rodents. That is what I do. I'm usually the brave one that goes to do this. But I'm not used to dealing with squirrels that have decided to move into the house. So I went and grabbed like a net from my kids hot tub that I put together for him in the backyard and a box and went over there, really hoping it was a mouse because I don't have a lot of.

I grew up of. I'm a lady of a certain age, so I grew up watching Tom and Jerry cartoons. I know Tom and Jerry. That's cute. But I have a lot less emotional attachment to mice that move into the house than if it really was a squirrel or a chipmunk. I was not looking forward to that. They have a better lobby that makes you want to hang out with them. And so I went downstairs. We heard a little noise. I was still really hoping that it was a mouse. And. And I managed to move a box. And then it turned out that it was a squirrel.

And I'm not normally a jumpy person, but I even was like one of those clutch your pearl moments because there really was a squirrel in the basement. I have a very broad skill set. I am very brave. I do not know how to get a family of squirrels efficiently out of a house. So I ended up calling pest control. Yeah, it was a very squirrely situation. I see what you did there. Junk food junkie. So then once we knew that it was a squirrel, I ended up calling a. A pest control service to come out. And what it turned out was it added to the list of things that I had meant to have to mark off my to do list.

Things that had been sitting on a to do list. And one of those was I had a variety of woodpecker holes in the house. So, like to tell you the story back, we had a bunch of woodpeckers have just been one really hungry woodpecker. I don't really know. I didn't, like, track them. But there was a woodpecker or family of woodpeckers that was devouring the shingles on my house. So I had some holes in the house. I fixed them on one side. I've meant to, over the summer, fix the holes on the other side of the house.

And I did not know this, but what can happen in the great city of Minnesota is that these woodpecker holes can then become little tunnels for the squirrels. So then the tunnels were moved into and the squirrels made up getting in the basement. So now we got squirrels. So because I also need to get this taken care of, and it needs to be efficient because, you know, I'm a full time, you know, special needs mom. My kids with me all the time. Plus I have to work, and I love being able to talk to you.

It's a matter of using your time the way that you were. I had to hire somebody to come in and take care of these squirrels and. And get them out of the house. And I was talking to the gentleman from the pest control service, and I was talking from this position of feeling bad that we needed to evict these squirrels and not want anything bad to happen to the squirrels. And so the guy is looking at me and he's doing that you're such a nice lady, shake of his head, and then start showing me pictures of what the squirrels had done in other people's houses and how they had chewed up the wires or they'd done this stuff high spe wonder.

It was good to see you earlier today. I'm talking about the squirrels that moved into my house, so. And you'll be able to read the full version on my substack later today. So he's showing to me that although there are lots of situations where these squirrels can be adorable, I've watched all those videos, and I feel bad about them coming to any harm if it's on my watch. But he reminded me that although that was cute in other settings, although it could be cute in the right situation, in this situation, it wasn't cute in this situation.

It was actually harming me and harming my family and harming our house and had a problem. So thank you very much. Speak Wonder. I appreciate that, and I think that that is a wonderful reminder that we have that there may be some things in our life that we have said that is an adorable quirk that I have or an adorable quirk that my. Someone in my family has. And maybe it is in certain sections, set settings, it might be very adorable. But for you at this moment, maybe it's a problem. Maybe it is.

You know, I mean, I. I like the word squirrels, but maybe they are also rodents. Maybe they're my friends, as my friend called them, tree rats. They don't have as much, you know, courtesy about these squirrels as I do. And maybe it's something that you need to evict from where it's living in your life. It's okay if it is able to do whatever adorable thing it does someplace else. It doesn't have to do that in your life right now. And that was a lesson that I had to remind myself this week where it's not about the fact that I dislike squirrels.

I think they're great, but they can't be great in this particular scenario. They need to be great at outside in the wild, not in the basement, not in my attic, not eating holes in my house. So what is your version of this? Squirrel eating holes in your house. Is there something, as I said, that's an adorable quirk that is slowly eroding the security that you need in your house? Is there something that is an adorable quirk that is actually. Ah, you should probably address that because maybe it's just a little thing that's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually it'll be even more expensive.

And we can use expensive in a lot of different ways. Expense isn't always about monetary needs. Expense sometimes is your mental health, your physical health, your adrenal exhaustion, all of these things that layer. So maybe this thing that is adorable is really something that you should spend some time evicting while it's easy. So what we ended up doing, I end up. Oh yeah, a mouse problem. Yeah, it's a lot sometimes. So at least what we're able to do, the company that did the pest control for me, they came to the house, they closed up all of the holes that they found so that actually now I don't have to end up on a 20 foot ladder and do it myself.

I can go back to things that are easy for me to do. Like one of these days you're going to see that I painted in here and I haven't painted yet. So I can go back to the things that are within my current capacity versus spending time on this thing that is outside of my current capacity and maybe outside of my skill set. Maybe it's something that's best to hand off to some professionals. And that's the same thing that we talk about. Maybe you need some supports in your caregiving. Maybe you need some support in your mental wellness.

Maybe you just need to have a better team of people around you that you can go, hey, I need to be able to workshop this idea. That's a lot of what we do here in the Cadre sphere is help be that person and that support. Maybe that's something that you need to do. Maybe you sitting there and glamorizing the fact that you had mice is actually doing yourself a disservice and you have to actually deal with it and go and get some traps. What we ended up doing, they're gonna put some traps out. So we got that.

Yes, buddy, I will be there in a minute. I'm being. Yes, mommed. So the beck and call of an adorable 17 year old autistic kiddo. So maybe you need to put some traps out and start collecting these things. So once they closed up all of the holes, it seems like most of the squirrels managed to make out and kind of get the hint. There was one that yesterday my sister and I ended up cornering it in a part of her bedroom and then opening the windows and then managing to get it to jump up and run away into the wild.

Good on it. It's fine. I'm glad that we were able to like. I didn't want to catch and release it, but I also didn't want to have to like, unalive this squirrel in my presence. I'm glad that it managed to leave the house. And hopefully that is what you get to do with your adorable quirks. You. Maybe you don't have to squash them out completely, but there are ways that you can go, I'm going to turn this in and put it where it needs to go. It's fine from a distance. I'm going to go ahead and address it so that it doesn't turn into a problem and you can figure out how to do that.

Maybe you're like, speak Wonder. I don't know what you did to get rid of your mice, but I hope that they're like, if they're not dancing, like tap dancing mice, just get rid of them. Figure out how to go. Don't feel guilty. Speak Wonder. Don't feel guilty about getting rid of them and not allowing yourself to feel bad that you are going, you know what? That quirk doesn't serve me anymore. That's not something that really is helping me get where I need to go and it's not adding value to your life.

And that's okay. You know, if you are one of those people that you're like, hey, I can make catfish out of caviar. I mean, caviar out of catfish. If you can do that, do that. So that's fine. If you end up with squirrels in your house or whatever your variety of that is, and you can figure out a way to make it actually beneficial to you, do that as well. But if you can't, I'm not going to redesign all of my social media so that I can have a sitcom of squirrels and then follow that along. I'm just going to let them move around and go back to what I'm good at.

So I encourage you to do that. So, yes, best of luck with your pest guy. Speak Wonder. I now have a pest guy. Who would have thought? We're twinning. We're doing all this stuff. We're on the same page. So everybody find your version of a pest guy. Hopefully that is either a real pest guy in real life, if it's an actual physical pest that you're dealing with, or it is a mental wellness provider that can help support you on this thing. Maybe it's a really good friend that can help you workshop some things so you can go, you know what?

I noticed this thing and it's something I want to address. Let's figure out a way to work on that together. Uh, and if we are that for you here in the Cadre sphere, thank you very much for sharing that with us as well. So feel free to let us know if there are any pests in your life, any adorable quirks that actually might end up chewing through your walls. Feel free to share that with us. You can drop that in the chat. If you're watching us in the watching me in the replay, you can put that in there.

Well, we'd love to support you and celebrate any of the changes that you have going on. I also encourage you to go back and watch my friend Speak Wonders Replay from this morning. It was good to see you. I saw you at the very tail end, so hello. Now again, for the second time this day, Speak Wonder. I am going to do my best to be here next week. We are in the point where we are wrapping down the school year and so I'm always curious to see how my kiddo adjusts to that. So hopefully we end up checking in together and he is on board for mom doing that.

Thank you. Speak Wonder. I am glad that you see why I do stand up. If I had talked this long and you're like, oh, she's a comedian, that would feel worse. So I'm glad that I'm glad I am validating why this is a job. So over the summer I'm hoping to be able to continue checking in with you on Thursdays. We'll see how it goes because sometimes my kiddo is not in the hey, I'm in a divided attention mood, but every day is a different day, so we will see how that goes. We encourage you to pop around here in the Cadre sphere.

There are so many different contributors that are talking about a variety of different content that are here to support support you and change the conversation that we have about mental wellness. And you deserve to be able to have somebody in your back pocket and hopefully we are that for you. So in the meantime, I will remember to put some before and after pictures of the woodpecker holes and the great work that the pest control people help me do. I do not have a picture of the squirrel, but I'll find an approximation out there.

I'm sure there's lots of one, so we'll see how that goes. So be safe, everyone. Have a great rest of your week. If it's not perfect. Hey, it's still progress, so don't worry about it. And we will see you again next week.