hello like before

Consider this an awkward throat-clearing on a dreary Monday. I want to write again so I’m just going to…begin.

I’m dropping back in here after a generally insignificant weekend that somehow feels momentous. Perhaps the actual nothingness of it is what makes it feel so important. Our spring seasons always experience a hard shift into fifth gear near the end, with school, work, sports, and music colliding into a breathless combination of activities and obligations. Not having to really go anywhere these last few days and actually seeing each other for more than 10-minute bursts at a time almost felt odd.

But this weekend contained a lot of the activities that I’m hoping will make up most of our Saturdays and Sundays these next few precious months.

The husband and I slept in to a somewhat vulgar degree on Saturday. I always feel guilty for not getting a somewhat early start, but we needed the sleep and the time together. We’ve both been going pretty hard the last few weeks and are both still battling the lingering side effects of a nasty head cold.

After getting up, I worked on some laundry, which is an area of my life that is just thoroughly out of control. There’s just so much of it all over the house and I don’t understand how three people can have so much clothing. I also did a really half-assed job of putting away winter clothing and bringing out summer clothing. (Read: both types of clothing are sitting in piles all over the place.) We also have a large cabinet sitting in the middle of our bedroom that was displaced when we got a new washer and dryer and actually you know what let’s stop discussing laundry.

The kid and I have danced around encouraging each other to be more active. I have increasingly become a slug over the past year and it’s pretty upsetting. In my previous job, I was fortunate enough to be able to work out during my lunchtime. My new job, while being wonderful in many ways, does not really have the flexibility to duck out for an hour in the middle of the day. Not regularly, anyways. So, I’ve really struggled to figure out how to get back into a good routine. Aside from the obvious physical, uh, softening that has accompanied this new schedule awkwardness, I’ve noticed that my anxiety has gone way up. Not getting that 30-45 minutes a day to wear myself down means that I get wound up and stay that way.

I’ll come back to this because there’s a lot of unpacking that I want to do about it. But for now I just wanted to mention that the kid and I took two really nice, long walks on Saturday and Sunday. During those walks, I kept thinking about how ten years ago I would take him for a walk in his stroller everyday when the weather was nice. Then one day I started working and that more or less stopped altogether. Back then, I would narrate our walk to him and he would babble back at me and point excitedly at school buses and construction vehicles. This weekend, we discussed how he felt about his now completed sixth grade year and paradoxes. Yes, paradoxes. We’ve cautiously allowed him to venture more onto the internet the past year and he finds some interesting stuff. We had a pretty in-depth discussion about the omnipotence of God which…what? Weren’t you just a squealing toddler who subsisted solely on PediaSure a few hours ago?

Sun's out guns out

Goals for the summer (to be discussed further in later posts):
– Work on establishing a new workout schedule
– Incorporating the kid in this schedule as much as possible
– Writing
– Reading a book (I’ll come back to this, but any time someone mentions a statistic about how some depressingly high percentage of Americans haven’t read a book in the past year, I get pretty red.)
– Get this blog fixed (something became borked with WordPress on here like two years ago and I can’t figure out how to fix it. Help?)

6 Responses to “hello like before”

  1. Tracey Says:

    Good goals. I’m with you on the working out and reading. I actually started reading a new book this weekend – the first in an embarrassingly long while, because work has been insanely busy and by the end of the day I’m zombified, and on the weekends it’s time to scramble on the household chores. (God, I’m so fucking boring these days.)

    I should also put on my list: stay in closer touch with Diddy, because damn, girl. 🙂

  2. kdiddy Says:

    Tracey! Likewise on the “damn, girl.”

    The reading, much like the writing and the running, feels like I’m learning to do it all over again. I’m going to write about it more, but it’s like I have to remember how to immerse myself in a book and be okay with just doing that for a chunk of time. It’s really weird.

  3. Kizz Says:

    All great goals. I’m always saying that if I didn’t have a half hour train commute every day I wouldn’t read a fraction of what I do now. I love to read but…it would fit so easily into my day.

  4. kdiddy Says:

    Taking the bus to work has definitely given me a good designated time to read. And I think because I’m heading to work, I feel like I’m getting something done while reading, which seems to somehow be important to me. Ultimately, I need to relax a bit but this is a good step.

  5. jodifur Says:

    Nice to see you back around these parts.

  6. kdiddy Says:

    Thanks, Jodi!

Leave a Reply