kdiddy.org

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?

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?)

I don’t know where to begin. How about, “Hi?” Hi!

When last we spoke, we were stuck in the depths of winter. And now it’s June, my favorite month, and everything is different. I had started to feel weird about this space. There seemed to be only a few of you still checking in and while I wish I could be nonchalant about audience, I can’t. “Know your audience” has been drilled into my brain by every writing instructor I’ve ever had. Not knowing who was still around made me feel odd. Then one day the “visual” editor in WordPress was no longer working and life got really nuts and I thought, “That’s that. Taking a break. Not thinking about it until I think about it.”

I haven’t really missed it here, partially because I really needed a break from being the writer I had become, and partially because I needed to focus on other things. A few weeks ago, a writer who I respect and admire complimented what I had put here, and it got something stirring. It wasn’t ready yet, and I’m not sure that this is really my jump back into this space, but this awkward re-entry seems necessary.

So much has happened, and all of it required my full brain. It seemed like there was no room for immediate reflection, so I didn’t even try. The biggest thing is that I got a big, new job that is really perfect for me. I was really scared, though, to go from the job that I’d had for over 9 years to something completely new. But with each day I realize what a positive thing it is and it’s disarming to see how good things are, to see some really hard work and a lot of difficult years pay off.

My husband and my kid are amazing. I’ve been letting this particularly good patch just ride, maybe snapping the occasional picture or posting the occasional tweet. I’ve always liked being able to read back through time, and it seems like documenting good stuff would be helpful, especially when rough times inevitably return. But I don’t think I’ll regret just living without simultaneously writing a rough draft of a recap in my head.

All of this meandering is to say that if you’re still here, cool. If not, cool. I’ll be tinkering more and more and I hope to hear from you now and then.

Here are some fajitas smothered in cheese that we got in Detroit:

I’m a terrible blog mommy (note: not mommyblogger, though I don’t care if you call me that, but mother to this blog, as I gave birth to it and whatnot…had to get an episiotomy and everything). On August 3rd, this little blog of mine turned four! Prior to my first real entry here, I had been slinging words around on LiveJournal since 2002. That means that I’ve been oversharing on the internet for 9 years. If there’s a strata to the internet, I’m silt…or something.

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks to anyone reading this for indulging me, supporting me, calling me out on my nonsense. It’s cool to have people to talk to.

I posted on MamaDojo the other day that I’ve been putting some effort into my appearance. For me, 32 has been a particularly shifty year when it comes to my self-image. I’ve never been so at peace with my body, but I’ve also never been so proactive in changing it. Well, changing probably isn’t the best way to put it. I think I’m finally at a point where I’m recognizing how good this bag of bones has been to me and I want to treat it right. I eat well, making almost all of my meals with a focus on what my body needs, what will make it feel good. I exercise, but not so much that I risk hurting myself. I regard the tiny lines that are quietly etching their way around my eyes with a sense of, “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

Pretty much the opposite of what I was doing 15 years ago when my body was, outwardly, Holy Shit Amazing to most standards.

This is not to say that I’m “cured” of all of that nonsense. I still fret about the size of my belly and how weird it is that the meat on the side of my left knee is so much bigger than that of my right. Stuff like that.

But I’m noticing that I want to be more…visible? Like I mentioned in my MamaDojo post, Joan from Mad Men rocks my world. She’s got boobs. She’s got hips. She’s got an ass. And we know all of this, but more importantly, we know that she knows it. I’ve been trying to adopt some of that attitude while remaining true to the fact that I like being comfortable and somewhat conservative.

So, today, I was a little apprehensive about my outfit, especially when the husband sized me up and said, “What…what’s with this outfit?” I then peppered him with questions, paranoid that I was, to use a somewhat offensive and not at all feminist word*, skanky. Of course, this recalled another hilarious exchange between the two of us when I had some anxiety over a pair of shorts that were shorter than I usually buy.

“Are they skanky?” I fretted.

“I think you and I have very different definitions of skanky,” he replied. “You look like you’re about to go golfing.”

“But not, like, skanky golfing?” I confirmed, because you know how skanky golfing is totally a thing.

I just want to make sure that I’m not overdoing it and that I’m projecting a relatively youthful vibe without looking like I’m denial over the fact that I’m 32.

So, here’s me in the bathroom at work this morning while our network was down. (What else was I supposed to do? Write things down on paper? Pssh.) I’ll provide the inner monologue.

Conservative shot…terrified someone will walk in.

Try to emulate one of those ladies who document their outfits everyday…ow, I think I pulled something.

Getting really daring now. Attempting to look up without falling over. Oh, why does my posture look weird? Can you tell that I have a wad of paper towels in my left hand?

I need to stop messing around. Jaunty, flirty pose. Vogue.

Not pictured is a bracelet I was wearing this morning…until I remembered that I really don’t like wearing bracelets.

It’s shorter than I would normally go for and the addition of a belt was, to me, completely impulsive and weird. And I would have worn a necklace but I was so thrown off by the belt and the bracelet that I was worried my head would explode. But how do you think I’m doing?

* I’m usually really conscious of my language but sometimes I just have to go there.

One more thing before the weekend…

Reading this post on Gin and Tacos led me to this video on AT&T’s archives.My grandparents still have their rotary phone, which I regarded with disdain when I was young. If I was spending the night there as a kid, I had to think long and hard about how badly I wanted to call my parents, because our phone number had 8s and 7s and even A ZERO AND DEAR GOD LIFE IS TOO SHORT. Now, it’s kind of cool to use it. The whirring zip of the dial gives me the tiniest thrill and the action of moving it around with my finger makes me feel like I possess some mysterious old skill.

The husband and I were watching Adaptation the other night, which we love and I was struck by this scene in which Meryl Streep’s character, deep in an experiment with mind-expanding orchid powder and finally fascinated by something, has a winding phone conversation with her article subject and soon-to-be lover.

I remarked to the husband, somewhat sadly, “People soon won’t remember what dial tones sound like. Cell phones don’t have them.” I never noticed it before, but it really is quite a beautiful sound.

I did something really immature about two months ago and unsubscribed from a blog in a huff. The author, who I have never interacted with, had hurt my feelings by posting her thoughts on recreational runners: people who set out to run a 5k during some crisis period in their life. It’s not that activity that bothered her so much, it was the perceived oversharing of said recreational runners, posting their results on Twitter or Facebook and proudly displaying their post-race pictures with their participation medals. She assured any recreational runners reading the post that this was highly irritating to everyone and anyone who hadn’t pointed that out to them was just being nice. She also informed them that real runners, those who had been doing it for a long time, thought they were a huge joke. The comments validated her, with both friends of recreational runners and “real runners” confirming that such people were both irritating and full of it.

It made me feel very sheepish and upset. I have no evidence that anyone in my life, either online or in meatspace, is actively irritated with my jogging and the fact that I share my jogs on the internet. However, to the above blogger and her supporters and anyone in my life who feels that way: it is not the mark of a good friend to mock their efforts at turning their lives around or literally slogging through a dark time. You are doing them and me no favors, so please remove yourselves from our lives.

Like I said, this is immature and overly sensitive of me, but that’s just kind of how I am these days.

ANYWAY.

For those of you still here, I’ve been shuffling on treadmills and around Pittsburgh for over a year now and on Sunday I’m going to participate in my very first 5k. I’ll be doing the Race for the Cure. I’m extremely anxious about this. I’m afraid of making a fool of myself because, honestly, I’m not very good at running and I know that I’ll have to walk at least a little bit of it. So I’m doing the non-competitive, un-timed run/walk.

I’m excited about it, though. I’ve been feeling really, really down on myself lately and I think being able to do this will give me a little boost. And I’ve heard lots of stories about how cool it is to experience an event like this.

It’s for a good cause, too. So, hopefully I won’t be too irritated with myself for voluntarily getting out of bed so early on not just a Sunday but Mother’s Day.

It occurs to me that a lot of stuff happened in October that I didn’t write about here. Nothing life-altering, but events that would normally go here if I had time to write about them. I was frustrated by my lack of down time, but it’s good in a way that I wasn’t able to document anything. I was too busy living.

So, back at the beginning of the month, Frank got married. I didn’t take any pictures of that, but I did take a grand total of two at the rehearsal dinner.

There’s the bride and groom, a large centerpiece, and the best man. I believe I took this during the father of the bride’s “toast,” which was more of an undulating monologue about his job and his recent birthday and I think snails or something. After meeting Andrea’s dad, the picture that she had shown me of him in which he had fallen asleep while repairing the kitchen sink suddenly made perfect sense.

The next weekend, my cousin Jeffrey got married. The ceremony was at Heinz Chapel on the University of Pittsburgh campus.

Yes, I’m wearing the same dress that I wore to Frank’s wedding. It’s my new October Wedding Uniform.

I had never been inside Heinz Chapel before. It is indeed gorgeous. But I found that my attention span during Catholic masses is approximately the same as it was when I was six. I kept staring at the stained-glass windows and going, “Mom, look. Look. Look at those stairs! Mooooommm!” And then Jeffrey and Kristy were married.

Newton’s like, “Tsk! Stupid apple done messed up my coiffure!”

Their reception was in the Carnegie Museum Music Hall, which is also insanely gorgeous.

Carnegie may have been kind of a jerk, but he had awesome taste.

The next day, we celebrated my mom and grandfather’s birthdays.

My kid is so sweet.

The weekend after that, our friends Jwan and Karen got married.

It was a really nice time. Our group of friends doesn’t have a chance to get together that much anymore and the wedding was really casual so we spent most of the evening talking, drinking, and dancing. Afterward, we went to Jwan and Karen’s house were things got progressively sloppy.

That’s Jwan’s brother on the right, who is a very nice guy, but also very blunt. Late in the evening, he sat down next to me and explained that he could tell I was, “kind of insane.”

Tiny dogs attacked the husband and not long after this, said husband had some, er, digestive issues and we had to leave abruptly, though our buddy Alison protested vehemently. The sister-in-law and her boyfriend had to chase our car down the street. It was all very goofy.

Then there was another weekend, and I know we had some kind of social obligation but I can’t remember what it was at all. We also went roller skating. And I think this was the weekend that we made our annual trip to Trax Farms. I forgot to bring my camera so I don’t have any adorable pictures of my kid frolicking in a pile of pumpkins. I’m pretty sure that means my mommyblogger membership is revoked. However, Michelle was there at the same time and she took pictures of her cute kid. So I’ll just piggyback on to her post and say, “Yeah, us too. Also: petting goats.” I also forgot cash so we couldn’t buy a cup of feed to give to the animals in the petting zoo. We kicked it old school and just petted (is that the proper conjugation?) the animals. I want an alpaca. Aside, goats’ eyes, or their pupils anyway, are rectangular.

This kept freaking me out because goats and their rectangular eyes would silently appear beside me and, in the absence of the feed cup, would start gnawing on my hoodie or my purse or my hair. Surreal.

Then came last weekend. Saturday was the Halloween parade in our neighborhood. The baby’s costume was inspired by the hopping vampires in this old, Chinese vampire movie called Mr. Vampire.

Obscure interests much?

When the husband and the baby were in New York this summer, they visited Chinatown and found various elements of the baby’s costume. We basically just had to take care of some makeup and the little prayer sheets.

It turned out pretty good, though nobody knew what he was and…well, I’ll come back to that in a sec.

The other big thing that happened this past weekend was that I turned 32 on Sunday. We celebrated at my mom’s house Saturday night.

I got some really nice stuff from Anthropologie (swoon!).

And there was cake and champagne and then my dad made the most absurd argument about how people can’t truly enjoy sports if they haven’t played them because they don’t appreciate how hard they are and for some reason this leads my dad to dismiss the entire Pittsburgh Penguins’ fan base (but no other sport) because he believes none of them/us have played hockey. Does your brain hurt after reading that? Yeah, imagine hearing it live. I pointed out that I’ve never practiced medicine but I appreciate it any time a doctor, like, gives me an emergency C-section to save the life of me and my child.

Sunday morning at 8:30 am (ugh) the baby had his last soccer game of the year. His team has had a rough season, winning only two games. It was a tough lesson for them, understanding that if you don’t try (which they often weren’t) you don’t get the results that you want. However, they were awesome during their last game, and even though they still lost, they looked pretty bad ass.

Their coaches gave them all trophies for their hard work. And though they were disappointed that they lost, I was secretly pretty glad that we were done for the year.

Sunday night was trick-or-treating. Now, we didn’t expect anyone to know what his costume was and I was really apprehensive about the assumptions that people would make. A lot of people responded simply, “Oh. Okay!” when he told them he was a Chinese, hopping vampire. But plenty of other people took a guess and said…sigh…”Chinaman.”

I know people get all irritated about political correctness, which is stupid because political correctness is just an admittedly poor term for a good thing: treating people with a equal amount of respect and not calling them things that they don’t wish to be called. There’s no legislation, there’s no censorship, it’s simply, “Hey, could you do me a solid and not be a douche and refer to my ethnicity/sexuality/religious/etc group as…?”

So, really, if you weren’t sure, “Chinaman” is not okay to say anymore. So stop.

Anyway, trick-or-treating went well. We had a perfect fall night and we’ve all been gorging on candy ever since.

And that was October. The end.

I sat down at my desk last Wednesday morning, tired, sore, and frazzled from sleeping through my alarm and having to rush out the door. The familiar sounds of my daily life made their way back into my brain and I became kind of sad. I was glad to be home, as I always am, particularly because my back could not sustain another night in our discount motel room bed. But having spent so many days in a row with some of my favorite people on the planet made settling back into the normal groove of things difficult.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we were in Detroit over Memorial Day weekend for the music festival and its related events that we attend every year.

Probably only the folks who have at least a passing interest in the music featured will care about my evaluation, but those of you who don’t might appreciate a glimpse into the subculture where I spend part of my time.

To sum it up: Nothing gold can stay. I don’t think anyone really believes that the accidental beauty of the first few years of the festival could ever last and I don’t think anyone is opposed to change, but there’s a difference between changing and blatantly going down the quickest path to the most possible money, all while spewing empty platitudes about “internationalism.” If the only way to have a festival every year is to churn out such nonsense, then it’s best to let it die gracefully before it’s too late.

People like me and my husband and many of our friends got into dance music in various ways. At the time that we all met, the best way to hear dance music in all of its genres was at raves, which at the time (the late 90s) were already past their prime. Occasionally, there was an all-ages night at a club, but those were never that great. Whatever half-hearted interest that I had in the culture of raving was pretty much gone after about a year and a half of going to them. I liked staying out all night, I liked dancing, I liked hanging out with my friends. I didn’t care for the pseudo-infantile behavior that began to dominate the culture. But, and I still maintain this viewpoint today, just because I think something is dumb, it’s not hurting anyone, so you go ahead and cuddle your teddy bear and suck on lollipops, even though I’m pretty sure I just saw a grey hair on your head.

Music and culture changes and out of the quintessentially 90s and neon versions of house and techno and the like, a new version emerged. One that was more grown-up, deeper. Baby-making music, if you will. Or perhaps just a mature and refined iteration of what came before it. There was no particular culture attached to it. Adults who still preferred to dress like Rainbow Brite were welcome to attend clubs where this kind of music was played, though the spectacle of, “Look at me! I’m shiny and glittery and dancing with glow sticks! LOOK AT ME!” had definitely been replaced by a feeling of letting only the music be the focal point, allowing listeners to truly lose themselves in it and dance and be free. Letting go of the ego and letting the id rule for a bit, if I may draw on my Psychology 101 class from 1999 (gulp).

Going to the festival for the first time was a revelation. Here we were, outside, in the daylight, surrounded not only by people from all over the country and the world who had emerged from rave culture into the same general moment in dance music, but by families and “regular joes” from Detroit, by raver kids whose devotion to moments of a technicolor existence was almost endearing, by musicians of various levels of fame and infamy. Through the awkward adolescence of raves, we had grown up and were comfortable listening to the weird, the deep, the soulful, the rambunctious, the political, the luscious beats of a generation of people, no matter what their age, who were finally comfortable in declaring, “This is the music that I like. This is the music that helps me to define who I am. This is the music that I hear at my most joyful and my most desperate. This is the music that will be played at my wedding, at the births of my children, at my funeral. This is the music that will be played in my next life.”

I had a transformative moment in 2005 when some of the Underground Resistance guys closed the festival on the main stage. They played “Transition,” while images of people like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Albert Einstein flashed behind them. The crowd of thousands around me melted away and I was alone when I heard the lyrics, “Point yourself in the direction of your dreams…and make your transition.” From that day on, I did, freed from the notion that I needed to worry about the uninformed and frightened opinions of people who would dismiss this music as silly and scoff at my inspiration.

Transition or not, my annual trek back has changed a bit each year. The cost of admission goes up, a necessary evil that we’re told is the only thing keeping the festival going year after year. A cost we’ve been happy to pay to support the work of the people from that city who have helped so many people figure out their lives through music. Something else changed, too, though. Artists from Detroit are bumped from better time slots and given lesser areas to play in favor of their more European counterparts, those who make and play the same music that got old 15 years ago, the music that is almost rhetorically composed for the Rainbow Brite crew who fork over $60 for the opportunity to feel like they’re getting away with something. They parade in front of each other, eager for reactions, armed with an arsenal of camera-ready poses, dying for that first moment when someone points and finally, finally notices them. In the background, the music could be Carl Craig or it could be Linda Ronstadt. They would scarcely notice the difference. They pay good money and lots of it for admission and shirts and blinky, shiny things that vendors sell because they know an opportunity when they see it.

This year, nearly all of the Detroit artists were shuffled unceremoniously to an underground stage that, despite the organizer’s best efforts, still sounded like listening to an off-balanced washing machine while nursing an earache. The glittering kids danced outside, in the sunlight, to tracks that they couldn’t name to save their lives, that could very well all be the same record or mp3 for all they know. They formed dance circles, breaking up whatever collective energy had been present on the dancefloor, so that they could stand and watch one person dance. If that isn’t the saddest goddamned thing ever, I don’t know what is.

Again, they are welcome to. I am happy to share that experience with anyone. But I didn’t feel like I was in a position of sharing this year. I felt like I was stuffed in a basement while the higher bidders enjoyed what used to be our moment in the sun.

I don’t want to focus entirely on the negative. We did hear some good music at the festival and even more at the after parties that we attended. The husband has a good round-up of the music that we saw/heard/got down to while we were there. Not surprisingly, his criticism of the unprofessional and/or just plain shitty aspects of the festival management are drawing ire. The organizers had previously agreed to sit down with him for an interview, but later recanted. I, however, as a professional writer, offer up my tape recorder for any statements that they want to make. If people like us, a numerical minority, who are genuinely passionate about the music and the experience of it, are no longer important, dropped in favor of the wealthy and serotonically tweaked, then just say so and we’ll stop bugging you with all of our demands for care and quality and respect.

Sigh.

Aside from the fact that, last Wednesday morning, I pried my eyes open and stared, confused, at the numbers on my alarm clock which read “7:55” aka The Time at Which We Should Be at the School Bus Stop Holy Crap You’re Late as Hell O’Clock, getting back into all of the aspects of life seems to be increasingly difficult every year. Only this past Monday did I cook a meal and pack my lunch. Over the weekend, I got most of the laundry done (but not all of it). There are still several bags of random travel things gathering dust in our entryway. And I still poke around my office, unsure of what I normally do during the hours of 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. I’ll figure it out eventually.

When I was a kid, I had a Cabbage Patch Kids calendar. If I remember correctly, it was for 1987. The calendar had Cabbage Patch Kid dolls posed in situations appropriate for each month: a Kid in rain jacket, galoshes, and umbrella for April, two Kids exchanging valentines for February. My favorite was May’s picture: one Kid in the kitchen, flour splattered everywhere, working diligently on a Mother’s Day breakfast while around the corner his sibling tiptoed down the stairs in footie pajamas, early morning light pouring in from a window, looking cautiously (er, well, as cautiously as one can look when one’s head is made from molded vinyl) behind him in the direction of his Cabbage Patch Mom’s room.

I don’t know why I liked it so much and why it’s remained so perfectly preserved in my memory. Perhaps I was drawn to the intricate short story that the producers of the calendar created with just a couple of dolls and a miniature kitchen. Maybe something about the set reminded me of my home, with its sunny stairs and dated carpeting. Maybe I liked fantasizing about my future kids working hard on a special breakfast for me on Mother’s Day.

I can’t remember if I ever attempted any such grand gestures as the Cabbage Patch Kids for my own mom. In fact, I can’t clearly remember anything that I did for my mom, so I can only hope that at least some of those days made her feel special and loved, especially since I know most of our usual days did not, an unfortunate circumstance that continues to trouble her to this day.

My life as a mom is less tumultuous, though still difficult for different reasons, mostly due to the degree of uncertainty that we feel about life and the shape of our future. Something that I’ve been working on recently is being okay with the fact that things don’t always turn out the way that I had hoped or had pictured it, and that doesn’t necessarily spell failure.

When Mother’s Day comes around, I often indulge in fantasies inspired by those Cabbage Patch Kids and, I don’t know, Hallmark commercials or wherever the lore of picture perfect Mother’s Day mornings comes from. I sleep in and wake up to breakfast that the baby and the husband have made for me. Some nice gifts and sweet words about how swell I am.

This never, ever happens. I mean, sure, I get gifts sometimes and cards sometimes and heartfelt wishes of Happy Mother’s Day, all of which I love and cherished, but they’re never encased in a perfect, soft-focus, ready-made memory. They’re always tucked in between rushed drives to various mothers-in-law and grandmothers-in-law’s houses to wish them Happy Mother’s Day and errands that must be performed on weekends, because our need for groceries and clean clothes doesn’t keep track of holidays and whatnot.

This Mother’s Day, I write to you from the couch. The baby came down with something last night and didn’t sleep much, which means I didn’t sleep much, either. He made sure to give me my cards before collapsing in my lap so that I could thump on his back to break up the junk in his lungs. He’s resting beside me, not himself, and I’m waiting to see if he’s sick enough to warrant a call to the doctor. The husband is still asleep.

Not picture perfect. Not by a long shot. But not a failure. Just how life is sometimes.

Our home computer died and our wireless router crapped out weeks ago. Did I already tell you this? I can’t remember. Anyway, I’m tapping this post out on my phone, which is miraculous, technologically, I guess, but mostly a pain in the butt…er, thumbs. This morning, I trudged the baby through the snow to the library so that I could at least pay the bills and write my posts for MamaPop and We Covet. So my real live Internet time was perforated by, “Mum, I’ve looked through all of the cool books. Can we please go now?” and a sickening squirt every time the guy at the next computer spit his tobacco juice into his coffee cup. (I really could not believe the librarian was cool with that. I know I wasn’t. But then my Master’s is in Professional Writing, not Library Science and Tolerating Repugnant Habits.)

I will tell you more about Christmas and show you some pictures the next time I have some extra minutes online. For now I have to get back to cuddling on the couch with baby, the husband, and his ManCold and waiting for what seems like an acceptable amount of time before eating some of the brownie bread pudding that I made (oh my god SO GOOD). Stay warm!