“Don’t believe me? Come with me to the library where I’ll yell out loud, throw a fit, hit some kids during story time and then fling my body down the stairs. I promise it will be convincing.” [Read the whole post at Parenting.com]
About Me
Lost in Fiction
Someone asked me recently if I’d gotten lost on Facebook because this blog has been a ghost town the past few months. Twitter and Facebook have changed things for me to some extent.
In some ways I think they bring me closer to the people I care about. In others I think they put a wrench in meaningful communication. I’ll see a tweet about today being the best day ever, accompanied by a picture, only to find out weeks later the blurb on Twitter was meant as a wedding announcement.
I’ll go a week without checking in on Facebook and find I don’t know what’s happening in my friends’ lives. Someone will say, “Oh, you know what’s going on, I put it on Facebook,” and I’ll think, “I’ve seen you three times in the past two weeks and you didn’t even tell me you’d changed jobs because you’d put it in a status update.” Weird.
In the past when I had an interesting little nugget to share, I’d sit down to write the one sentence and it would turn into a 400-word blog post. Now it remains an interesting little nugget, just a few characters long. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. It’s concise.
But no, I haven’t gotten lost on Facebook or Twitter. I’ve gotten lost in fiction. I’m working on a novel that I’m really excited about and I find that I pour all of my writing energy out into imaginary characters whom I love watching come to life on my computer screen.
I’ll keep you posted and I’ll keep blogging. I miss it.
For the past few months when I’ve gotten a bad case of writer’s block on the novel, I’ve just stopped writing and blogging altogether except for my posts over at Parenting.com. Then the longer I go without writing, the more I start to believe it’s because I’ve lost the ability to write at all. Like a castaway living in silence on an island with a volleyball named Wilson, I lose my words.
So my plan is to blog when the fiction world grows too thick to slog through. Whenever I’m not here, you’ll know I’m a step closer to delivering my project. Mom, I’m talking to you. You’re still reading, right?
And yes, this post will appear in my feed on Facebook.
Do Your Parents Lick You?
I should never be allowed to read books to children in public. [read more @Parenting.com]
Drowning in Cuteness
There is no shortness of cute at our house lately. There is no shortness of soccer, rain, dirty dishes, cheerios on the floor, or late nights full of homework and milk.
There is a shortness of time. Time is flying by too quickly. The Fatness just turned one and I thought I’d share some pictures I took today. Here she is paying oh-so-close attention during Sunday School.
Mothers who function and manage to look good, keep a clean house and care for your kids – I salute you. Sometimes I’m just barely keeping my nose above water here. But I am keeping it above water.
There’s sort of a magic to motherhood. Things always work out.
Just when you think all is lost because your son stashed his favorite blanket in a crevice outside an unnamed shop at the mall, you find that the sales clerk at Ben Bridge Jewelers has found it and put it aside for you.
When your 7-year-old is exploding with rage and attitude and you wonder if the teenage years are already upon you, you touch her back and feel her melt and turn to you for love.
When you’ve given up all hope of ever figuring out what’s wrong with your moody baby, a tiny white tooth pokes its way through her gums.
When you realize your umbrella’s really for real lost and that you must buy another one or sit drenched at soccer games, Nintendo sends you a back-to-school package with a new one inside. (They must know I live in Seattle or something.)
When the kids are cranky, the house mess is out of control and you can’t think of another nice thing to say, you find that it’s bedtime and you all hit reset for a few hours. Things usually look better in the morning. Well maybe the house doesn’t look any better but you all like each other a ton more after a nice rest.
Summer Swimsuit Challenge
I want to ask you to take a bold swimsuit challenge with me.
It’s summer and it’s swimsuit season and I am sick of hearing myself talk smack about my own beautiful body every time I slip on that little black swimming suit. Sick of it. I’m sick of other people complaining about their bodies. I’m sick of hearing everyone enumerate all their many flaws.
I’m raising daughters and I want them to love their bodies. I get angry at the way media portrays physical “perfection” and insinuates that anything less than a photo-shopped super babe is unacceptable.
For almost 30 years, I’ve been complaining about my body’s flaws and it needs to stop if I want my girls to have a fighting chance at loving their own bodies. I frequently look back at old pictures of myself 2, 5, 10 years ago and think how great I looked and then remember that at the time I thought I was a tub of lard.
Yesterday Laylee was in a bathing suit and she said, “I like my body. I like being skinny.”
I looked her in the eyes and said, “I’m so glad. I love my body too. All the little wrinkles and parts show the journey I’ve been on in my life. I think my body is beautiful.” She seemed surprised because I’ve so often talked about the weight I want to lose and the improvements I want to make.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yeah. Really. I’m grateful for this body.”
She told me she loved my body too and I decided that if I really want her and Wanda to grow up loving who they are, then I’ve got to stop putting myself down and start trying to really feel the love for myself and be confident.
Please commit with me this summer to not flinch, cringe, make faces or put down your body verbally when wearing a swimsuit. Wear it with pride. Have fun in the water with your kids. Remember that the people who you have fun with are not the ones constantly ripping on themselves. The obviously fat people are the ones constantly tugging and covering up and talking about how fat they are. Don’t be that person. Get your confidence on.
Leave a comment if you’re ready to join me in the swimsuit revolution.
Baffled by Facebook
I cannot figure out how to make a button to get readers of this blog to “Like” it on Facebook. If you “like” it with or without the quotes in real life, will you please go and “Like” it with quotes over on Facebook?
Thanks.
And if you know how to help me make a fancy button for people to click on and you feel fairly sure that doing so won’t steal the identities or souls of those who click on it, please let me know how.
Click here if you “Like” or like this website and then click on the “Like” button at the top of the page.
A New Profile Picture for Belle Babe deBoe
Little Wanda, AKA Belle Babe deBoe, AKA her real name is getting older and cuter and possibly just a teensy bit squishier. It’s time to update her profile picture on the sidebar and I’d love your input. Here are a few pictures my sister took when we were visiting last week. Which one should I crop to a head shot and use on the sidebar?
(Mouse over the picture you like and it should tell you the number.)
The notable feature of this one is the hair. It’s like a dip cone mohawk. I’ve actually started to crave DQ ice cream while holding her and staring at it:
And, sneer:
Don’t let this one fool you. She’s about 30 seconds away from being able to crawl and subsequently lay waste to everything in her known universe:
And those pursed lips say, “WHAT!?”
A nice feature to have in a baby dress. If she’s ever stranded somewhere far away from my mammaries, she can stuff this bad boy down her pie hole and have all the sustenance she needs:
No matter how tempting she may appear, this baby should not be eaten:
Not even her feets:
Ask me if I’m worried about failure to thrive:
When people say that someone looks “too innocent” they’re talking about this picture but she’s IV REAL yo:
And she carries the family genetic long-tongue disorder. We try not to hold it against her:
And one last piece of evidence that we really do need to feed her more:
What do you think?
Command Center Breach
While we were on vacation in Utah my cell phone disappeared. “Oh,” you might think, “That’s a shame. Good thing it was just a cell phone.” The problem is it was not just a cell phone. That little black brick was our family’s Mobile Command Center. Since 2006 I’ve used it and its older brother before it to keep track of and control nearly every aspect of our family’s lives.
I’m currently using my sister’s old Razor and although it’s very cute and I’m really grateful to borrow it, it’s missing a few of the things that I’ve come to feel are necessary in a Mobile Family Command Center. Here is a partial list:
-Auto-sync calendaring connecting my phone calendar with my home calendar and Dan’s work, phone and home calendars
-A complete list of every contact I may ever need with their phone numbers and addresses included that auto-syncs over the air waves as soon as I update it
-Documents and spreadsheets of just about any piece of information I could want
-Full-text scriptures
-Internet access
-All kinds of applications that do all kinds of things I don’t really need but have learned to depend on.
-Cool personal ringtones for all my family members and friends
-A slide-out qwerty keyboard for text messaging
-Navigation
-Digital UNO
Don’t forget the fact that I feel kind of violated that someone is walking around with pictures and video of my kids I don’t have backups for, all of my recipes, emails and a lot of personal information.
When we realized it was really gone, like gone gone, like obvious-someone-had-pocketed-it gone, Dan sent out a command to do a remote wipe of all my data from the phone. We got a message back saying the wipe was successful when someone turned the phone on at about 4:30am the morning after it disappeared so that gives me comfort.
Now I’ve got my Razor and a paper calendar that I’m madly filling in with all my info from outlook and I feel so old-school. Remember this? At that point I had just begun my dive into techno-mom-dom. I’m really quite dependent now and I’m actively seeking a new phone.
The PR people from Verizon asked me a while ago if I wanted to try out a few of their smart phones and possibly review them. Now that I’m actually considering which phone to buy I think that’s a great idea so for the next several weeks I’ll be trying out some cool new devices and if I find anything worth telling, I’ll let you know.
My breached Command Center was an HTC Touch Pro from Verizon running Windows Mobile. In our area we get much better reception with Verizon than our friends who have other providers. The customer service has always been decent and most of our family members use Verizon so calls to them are free.
I have to say I was not uber impressed with the customer service we got when I lost my phone. For one thing, they could not perform a remote data wipe or track the phone’s GPS. For another, the guy at the call center told me that if the phone were turned in, they had no system in place for finding me and returning it based on the phone’s serial number. Through further investigation I found out that this was false. A kid named Dean in the West Valley store told me that they always do their best to get returned phones back to their rightful owners.
They were also unable to reactivate my service to my new/used phone until the following day because we had already deactivated, reactivated and deactivated the stolen phone that day and there is a hard-coded limit on the number of times you can do that. Apparently no supervisor has the power to override this so I was phoneless on vacation for a full day. I know, WAAAH, right? Still, it seemed strange to me and no one could give a good explanation as to why the policy was in place.
Still, we’re fairly loyal to Verizon and to phones that can play nice with Outlook. So, I’m on the hunt. Any suggestions?
Being Fragile
Something happens to me after a baby is born. If you’re a mother, it’s probably happened to you too. I suddenly feel like the world around me is breakable, myself, my family made of shatter-resistant glass that’s fully capable of shattering if given the right opportunity. Like Corelle on a tile floor, we look sturdy but at any moment, SMASH! We could all fall to pieces.
With Laylee, it was a happy fragility, sort of a dreamy bubble where I smiled, clutched her fiercely and dressed her up like a doll, loving her and yet somewhat unable to believe that I had created something so wonderful. I was having the time of my life playing mommy and wondered if at any minute someone was going to wake me up from my reverie.
As I’ve documented here and elsewhere, the dish hit the tile when Magoo was born and then I spent 2 years seeking out every last shard of broken glass and painstakingly gluing them back together. There are so many happy memories from his babyhood but in between enjoying the kids, I spent much of my time searching for shards, painfully aware of just how breakable I was.
And now I’m on round three. I feel like I’ve got things together… a bit. Most of the time. There are sublime moments like last week when Laylee and Magoo cleaned the entire main floor of our playdate-trashed house as a surprise for me while I was feeding Wanda. Then there are moments like today when I found the big kids sitting with their arms crossed on the trampoline, facing each other and screaming until their brains were gone about who had won whatever game they were playing. In the end, Laylee tried to reconcile by saying, “I’ll teach you a new game then where there are no winners and no losers. It’s called Butt-Punch.” Magoo declined the game. I rolled my eyes and walked back into the house. Dan says that in a game called Butt-Punch, he’s pretty sure everyone is a loser.
Through the highs and the lows, I find myself managing but holding on to that glued-together plate just a little too tightly. Am I depressed? Tired? Afraid of descending into the pit I discovered Postpartum II? I’m kind of afraid to ask myself. It scares me a little that I have to try so hard.
My pendulum swings precariously. One day my house is a mess and I can’t force myself to deal with it. The next I’m cleaning and scrubbing like mad. Many days I feel like a hermit, not wanting to be bothered to answer my door or phone and the next I’m sad because people have stopped calling. I’m not doing the best in my church work or my role in the PTA. I’m letting things slip.
I tell myself that this is to be expected. The baby’s only a month old, two months old, five months old. Why shouldn’t I want to spend all day holding her and squishing her, playing cards with Laylee and Magoo and reading books at home? I should like my home, my little hermitty cave. Why would I want to go anywhere else?
I’m just holding on too tightly. There is a slightly strained sensation to the sweetness of this time. I’m cherishing the time with my kids because realizing that Wanda is our last has also made me realize that Laylee and Magoo are growing up too quickly and I don’t have a freeze ray. Heck, I don’t even have a time machine. I have photos and videos and the ability to make more. Dan just bought about a terabyte of storage space for our computers because I am on a memory-capturing rampage.
How can I make the most of every minute with my kids without squeezing the life out of those moments? How can I allow myself to just be the mother I am without questioning myself into a spiral of self-doubt? If I could just live in the moment, just be here and love it, love myself as much as I love these stinking wonderful Butt-Punch-playing, breast-sucking kids. If I could be as forgiving and gentle to their mother. If. I think I’d find that I could relax my grip and the fear in my throat and there’s a good possibility that nothing would break but my stifling itch for perfection.
Choices Choices
I just don’t want her to grow up feeling like she flipped the wrong page in her Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book when she was six and could never quite get to where she wanted to be. [Keep reading at Parenting.com]