Why I Blog (And Why You Should, Too)

I originally started blogging because my friend Jesika convinced me to give it a try.

I admit it.  I thought it was totally lame.  Kind of like when I first learned about digital cameras, I just didn't get the point.  See, when I first saw a digital camera (at Carrow's in Orange, CA, and this also relates to Jesika because it was her friend that showed it to me) I just didn't get it.  What was the point of having all of those pictures stored in a camera and who cares if you could delete them?  I didn't realize that there was (or would be, this was back in the day...probably 1998) the capability to print them.  I just saw it as a way to take pictures and look at them on a computer (I was barely getting into email back in '98, people!).

Once I realized, several years later, how AWESOME digital cameras were, I was quick to toss the old school camera and never look back.

But back to blogging.

When Jesika told me I should have a blog I thought, "Wow, that's really lame...I am not an angst-ridden emo-listening teen with dark eyeliner, I am an adult who does not need a Web Log.  What moron would publish their diary on the INTERNET??"

As it turned out, I was missing the point and the scope of blogging.  It's not just about putting yourself out there and having random strangers feel sorry for you.  Shocking, right?!  Ha!

I like to write and so I finally caved.  Here is my First Blog Post.  Wow, when I was inserting that link I realized that was almost exactly four years ago today!  I learned that blogging was kind of fun, and it was even more fun to read other people's blogs.  I was surprised to learn that people blog about everything...their personal cause, kids, parenting, horses, and of course everything else under the sun.  And this led me to learn that there is a whole blogging community...and then I realized that blogging is actually relevant to *me* and not just for teenagers.  Sometimes I am a bit slow on the uptake.

But here is why I just recently (as in, the last couple of weeks) decided to take my blog seriously.  It is not only my story, but the story of my family.  Although I am famous in my little ring of friends for my ridiculous memory, I sill forget things.  My blog lets me capture those thoughts and then...they are there forever.

For example, I definitely would not remember that I actually thought having a baby would be easier than being pregnant if I hadn't written this little post.  Yeah, that one makes me laugh.  I might not remember the time it took me four hours to get out of the house when Jack was a baby if I hadn't written this.

You get the idea (oh, and the reason I abandoned that blog and started a new one is because my family found the old one and it was annoying to have to talk about it at family dinners - who knew the internet was, you know, public...ha!).

Someday my kids will be able to look at this and say, "Mom lived in a house infested with scorpions?" etc etc...

But also, this has been a great way for me to gain some perspective.  I guess it's not unlike a paper journal...the kind you actually write in, with a pen and all (which I kept religiously as a teenager but would hate to get back into now...my hand cramped up the other day after filling out a form at the doctor's office).  But it's easier than keeping a "real" journal.  I can type faster than I can write, and I can easily browse old entries that make me realize how much things have, or have not, changed, or how silly it was to worry about something that at the time seemed like the end of the world but that turned out to be...nothing.

It was one such browsing experience that prompted this post.

I was looking through some "old" entries and I found this post, written when I was six months pregnant and living in the Scorpion Ranch (six whole months ago).  Here is the specific paragraph that I can't stop thinking about:

For one thing, the house has not sold yet.  This puts a damper in my pre-conceived images of life after baby.  We are all supposed to be moved into some cozy little house in a nice town with a Target and a Kohl's and a Chick-fil-A.  Jack will have his own room, right next to our room, where I don't need to worry about him getting stolen or trapped in a fire (yes, those are legitimate concerns I have and one of the reasons I don't want to even think about transitioning him to "his" room - which is all the way across the house).  We will have our nice King size bed back together again, as in actually lifted off the ground and with a headboard, and Baby Girl will sleep peacefully in her Arms Reach co-sleeper next to our bed.  We will have a teeny little yard that Jack can play in and a bathtub that doesn't rival a jacuzzi or a shower in a cruise ship (we currently have both).  I will put Jack in the stroller and the baby in the Ergo and walk to the park in the mornings.  It will be perfect!


Guess what?


We are in a cozy little house with Target, Chick-Fil-A and Kohl's down the road.  Jack has his own room, and while it's not next to our room, we have an alarm that beeps when any door or window is opened so I feel safe with him in it (not to mention the pit bull who lives with us and is on guard 24/7).  Our nice big bed IS off the ground with the headboard attached and Baby Girl DOES sleep in her co-sleeper for a portion of the night.  We have a teeny, tiny little yard that Jack plays in and our bathtubs are all normal-sized bathtubs.  And,  I put Claire in the Ergo every morning and put Jack in the stroller and we go for a nice walk on the nice walking trails we have access to.


Literally, everything I wanted...we got.  Without my blog, I would remember the stress and uncertainty of selling our old house, for sure, but I don't think I would have remembered exactly what I wanted.  And if I couldn't remember exactly what I wanted, how could I ever know and appreciate it when I got exactly what I wanted?


My mom and Charles were both right when they told me it would all work out in the end.  They were more than right.  It did work out, and I am grateful to them for their words of wisdom.  


And now for my words of wisdom (to the non-bloggers/journal-keepers): Start a blog.  If you already have one, keep up with it.  Or, if your hand is in good shape, get all old-school and write in an actual journal with real paper and pen.  You can thank me later.  ;)

House Happy

Claire is seven weeks old (how did that happen so fast....!!!).  

This means we've been in our new home and in our new town for six weeks.

We are mostly moved in to our new house.  There are still boxes that have to be unpacked, but they are tucked away in closets and their contents are mostly items that will go in said closets.  There aren't any pictures or art on the walls yet but the ideas are forming in our brains and we have a batch of things we are going to get framed next month.  We are sitting on folding chairs in the backyard but hope to get some nice outdoor furniture when the sales start.  

Our new house?  Awesome.  

Yes - if you told us our new dark wood floors would be a pain in the ass to keep clean, you were right.  But guess what - they are a hell of a lot easier to keep clean than our stone floors in the old house!  And yes, our neighbors can see into our bedrooms if our windows are open at the same time, but that's an easy fix.  

I do miss some of the things I knew I'd miss -  the "compost pile" in the back pasture and the dog poop-removal non-issue...but the trade off is immense (this morning, for example, we jumped in the car and drove less than ten minutes to a restaurant that serves Eggs Benedict - my favorite breakfast ever).  Charles can make a Starbucks run, we can bribe Jack to poop in the potty with a trip to the toy store down the road (it worked!) and we can load up and drive two minutes to one of the seven parks in our neighborhood.  

I feel so lucky to be here and so happy with our house.  I wonder when/if the newness will wear off.  I am guessing it will take awhile.  In our last house, Charles removed the toilet in our bathroom when we were tearing up the floors and he didn't replace it for, like, six months.  Well, when he finally did replace it I was so grateful to have a toilet in our bathroom I think I said a little prayer of gratitude every time I used it for the next two years.  Seriously.  So if I was that happy about a toilet (and I was pregnant and peeing a lot when we were sans toilet, so I reallllly did miss it after a few months of walking down the hallway every time I had to pee), I imagine I will be grateful for this home and happy to be here for a long time.  I hope so anyway,  I don't want to sell a house/move again for a long, long time.  

I should also note that no matter what, the grass is always greener...yesterday I made Charles drive down the road behind our community because I spotted some jumps in an arena down one of the roads and I wanted to check it out.  Sure enough, there are lots of pretty, well-maintained, smallish (2-3 acre) horse properties.  I said to Charles, "If we have horse property again, this is what we need!"  He could see that I was serious and said "I'm going to pretend you didn't even say that." I guess the conversation he had with his cousin yesterday about hay prices being the highest they have ever been due to the drought was still in his mind.  Or maybe he was thinking about taking fresh water out to three horses and two donkeys in 18 degree weather because their water was frozen.  Or maybe he was thinking about the unexpected vet bills.  Or the manure. 

I stand here again (yes, STAND, baby in Ergo!) and write this because I don't want to forget how happy I am with this house.  When I start bitching about this thing I would change with the house or that thing I would change about our area, I want to be able to read this and remember how hard it was to get here and how happy we were once we got here.  I want the "new car smell": to stick with us for a long time to come.

Packing and Moving and LIKING It!

What a whirlwind of activity the last few weeks have brought! 

To recap the last couple of weeks and project the upcoming weeks: Charles started a new job, we signed a contract on our house (WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOO), we signed a contract on a new house, and are closing on both houses on June 30th.  And to add to the mix: our babysitter and my mom are out of town for the next couple of weeks, I am wrapping up things at my job of over 5 years, Charles is getting geared up at his new job, we are packing, annnnnnnd I am 34 weeks pregnant.

But the real reason I am writing this post is not to whine about all of the eight million things we have going on right now but instead to express my gratitude for the timing of it all and to say something that you probably will not hear most people say: I LOVE MOVING!  :)

No, really.  I do.  This has been a long time coming and even though a lot of the packing process is not exactly my idea of a fun family activity, there is a very bright and beautiful light at the end of this tunnel and I can finally see it.

The other day I was at our new house (yay!) - signing papers - and the lady asked me when I was due.  Technically I am due July 28th but in my head, this baby is coming early, like Jack did, and I want to be prepared...and that is what I told her.

"Not very good timing!" she said (as if, you know, we just randomly decided to sell our house last month and it sold right away and we were moving this close to our due date for the fun of it).

"Actually," I told her, "at this point, this is the best possible timing I could ask for."

Because you see, if it had just taken one (or two - or three!) more weeks to sign the contract on this house, we would be moving *that* much closer to my due date and worst case scenario - moving with a newborn and a postpartum new Mama.  Not fun.

I would much rather spend the end of my third trimester packing boxes and shuttling back and forth between our current location and the "big city" to sign paperwork than even think about doing the same with a newborn in tow.  So for me, the timing is nearly perfect (completely perfect would have been selling two months ago and being settled in to our new house already, but that's not the way the cookie crumbled).

So that brings us to the packing part. 

We have a lot to pack.  I have done the official math (see below):

2600 square foot home + garage + barn + 15 acres = a Lot of stuff to pack.

June 30th closing date - today's date of June 16th = not a lot of Time to pack.

So basically, every second when I am not working (or sleeping or eating or entertaining a two-year-old or, umm, blogging...) is spent packing.  Box after box after box of clothes, books, toys and kitchen utensils are packed, taped, labeled and stacked in the appropriate room.  Bins full of exciting things like diapers and postpartum girdles (that's right - a girdle - you watch this belly shrink down to it's original size in no time after this next kid!) are organized and stacked so I can see what is in them and access them easily should we still be unpacking when the baby is born.  Things I don't want to deal with when we move - like where Jack's clothes will go between moving and buying him a dresser - are being addressed and solved with genius solutions (me being the genius, of course...hehe) like putting them into a plastic bin with drawers that I can tuck into his closet in the new house.

The dumpster is being filled with junk.  The donation boxes are so heavy I cannot lift them.  The stack of stuff to be returned to my Mom's house is growing but neatly contained in a Thomas the Train duffel bag.

I am telling you - I AM ORGANIZED and I AM HAVING A GOOD TIME PACKING!!

Maybe it's the memory of my last big move - from California to Texas - that has inspired this fit of Extreme Organization.  I am pretty sure that process started off on a good foot.  But I do remember a cry for "All Hands on Deck!" at the eleventh hour when I realized that we only had about eight hours to get out of the house and there were odds and ends laying all over the house without a box to go in.  And I really remember unpacking those boxes a few months later in Texas.  Let's just say that if you pack a box of candles, cat food, socks and books and ship it in a moving van from California to Texas in July it is very likely that the candles will melt all over everything else in the box.  Lesson learned.

Maybe it's the fact that we're downsizing to a smaller home and a smaller lot (smaller by about 14.90 acres).  We don't have ROOM for all of this junk.  This is a great time to trash or donate 50% of the contents in this home.  I mean seriously, do I need to take the statue of the mating donkeys (yes you read that right) that I bought in Cancun six years ago??    Do I even want to take that with me?  If I have to ask myself twice the answer is probably no (but on a side note here - I can't bring myself to throw that giant marble monstrosity away - yet). 

Maybe it's my extreme gratitude and the realization that this really could not come at a better time and we are getting exactly what we wanted...a new house before the baby is born.  All of my backaches and out-of-breathness and frequent potty breaks pale in comparison to the end result here...new home, new baby - all in a matter of a few short weeks! 

Or maybe it's the nesting instincts kicked into high gear.  I'm 34 weeks pregnant!  I have a baby on the way!  I want to be settled in.  Badly.  So badly, it consumes me and even right now I am thinking, "what should I pack next?" 

The moment I am waiting for is the moment when I sit on the couch in the new house and put my feet up and...have nothing to do (OK, stop laughing already!).  Even though I know that moment will likely never come, it is my inspiration.

Yesterday I had an appointment at the Birthing Center and the midwife sternly told me, "No moving boxes around or heavy lifting!" and I assured her I am not doing any heavy lifting (ask Charles, who moved about eight large boxes of books from the bed last night).  I am not lifting boxes, I am not reaching up into the cabinets to pack dishes or crawling around in the cabinets on the ground to pull out all of the baking supplies I never use that need to be packed. 

I am leaving that for Charles. 

This leaves me a bit worried because he operates on an alternate plane of reality where he thinks everything is going to take half as long, or be twice as easy, as it really is.  I cannot tell you how many times I have told him, "We have so much junk, I think this is going to be a bigger project than we realize," and he responds with, "It's really not that bad."  This from the man who has not finished the one and only packing project he has started - several days ago - and who apparently has not ever peeked into the giant cabinets that are in our garage that came with the house when we bought it (hundreds of Christmas decorations from the 70's, anyone??).

So, maybe there will be some boxes packed with candles and cat food after all.  But not if I can help it.  I will keep on truckin' with a smile on my face and keep dreaming about that day in the very near future when I put my feet up and think, "OK, I'm all moved in...now what do I do?"

OK...I actually just envisioned that scene in my mind and, no joke, it was interrupted - even in my fantasy world!! - by Jack yelling "MAMA!" at me and demanding some sort of Todder-demand.  :::SIGH:::