On Being Content, and Miserably Failing at Doing So…. February 11, 2013

Ok, so I will be the first to admit that this is not the “dream” that I had years ago – you know, the one where Hubby and I are living it up in suburbia outside some major city with the kids, the cars, the dog or cat (or both), jobs we both love, and enough happiness that just “happens” because that’s how it’s supposed to be.

 

And while this is not that dream, it has become a new dream – spending the days with my kids and doing what I can to help them learn and grow, taking care of the house and doing my best to make it a home, learning new ways to cook and sometimes winding up with utter flops in my attempts to feed us around mine and Sissy’s allergies, learning to be content with where we are for the time being because time will make other opportunities come about……except that whole contentment thing, it’s a big fat joke.

 

Can I be frank? I want to get the heck out of here: out of this house, out of the South, and preferably out of this country. I want to have a farm with plenty of space to grow my own food and raise animals, big white farmhouse included of course. A place where I can teach my kids – not just in the homeschooling sense, but in the “getting your hands dirty, this is what we do to take care of ourselves and our home, can fix things when they’re broken, can cook a meal, can  do” sense too. I want to have a house that will be my “forever home” not this place that needs more work as the days go by, that I feel forever behind on because as much forward progress as I make something else is piling up and needing tending to. (That’s life, I know, but having a house in better shape would definitely help matters.)

 

I want Hubby to have the aspirations of something other than being here for our whole lives; right now I’d take anything as far out there as imaginable if it’d just get him wanting to get away. That, unfortunately, is so contrary to his homebody nature, I doubt it will ever happen.

 

And among a million other things that I want to be different, I want so badly to be able to go back to when Buddy was born and tell the doc not to tie my tubes. I want so desperately to have that third baby that I’ve always dreamed of having. I want more than anything that my own body wasn’t against me and made it life-threatening for me to have another baby. I wish that it were safe for me to give Sissy and Buddy another sibling, to expand our family again, and not even limit that to just one more. As much as I love Hubby, Sissy, and Buddy, there is a part of me that everyday aches for that third pregnancy, for that life to be inside me, to know that little one before anyone else and feel those movements that are unlike any other.

 

I know in my mind the logic behind all of it: my health (physical and psychological), how Sissy and Buddy need me more than another sibling, finances, space in the house, space in the vehicle, the logistics of actually keeping up with three kiddos. I KNOW it all, but that doesn’t change the fact that my heart isn’t convinced. 

 

So yeah, that whole contentment thing, thanks to my heart, I’m miserably failing.

The New Year is When? December 15, 2012

Oh wow, how I have neglected this poor little blog!

There’s just over two weeks left until 2013 arrives, and that’s a rather frightening thing. That means that my baby boy is closing in on his first birthday – it can’t be possible I tell you! He’s getting better at walking, always wanting to keep up with his sissy, and he eats ALL THE TIME. It also means in the next two weeks my daughter will celebrate her third Christmas, and baby boy his first, and my lands are they gonna be spoiled. Thankfully we’ve planned and set aside through the year in order to give them a great Christmas even though things are ridiculously tight right now.

One of those reasons is that I’ve got food allergies and buying groceries to avoid allergens is very expensive. Also these two kids of mine keep growing, baby boy more than his sissy, but they’re growing nonetheless and that means new clothes and shoes. I seriously bought him a new pair of shoes and within three weeks he outgrew them; that is slaying any semblance of a “plan” to buy for them and making me cut out other things – namely my groceries. I eat one good “meal” a day and have a few other small snacks here and there – it’s just too expensive to do otherwise, and I still can’t manage to swing the extra to put shoes on his feet. Sigh – talk about feeling like a mom failure.

Sissy is doing better with her therapies – she has more frequent babblings and some comprehensible, albeit inconsistent, words. She loves to color which is helping her out in OT, but she still is lacking a lot of the fine motor skills she should have at this point. I’m keeping tally of any signs that signal CP being the cause of all of her issues. She’s also going to have allergy testing done soon, and seeing how I have food allergies she’s a lot more likely to have them although I hope for everything that she doesn’t. I don’t want her to have to go through the craziness that I am with my allergies.

The Shame of Being a Bad Blogger July 3, 2012

Yeah, I generally suck at blogging. I often have great moments of inspiration of what to write for a post, but more often than not I’m tied up doing something with one of my two littles. Needless to say when I do make it to the computer or the iPad I’m not focused on blogging; I want some “me time” if there is such a thing and that usually means trolling Pinterest, hunting down recipes, or reading a handful of the numerous blogs that I follow. So now that I’ve managed to return to the blog world for a minute, I feel like I’m sneaking into a movie that started 10 minutes before and the only seats left are in the middle of a row so everyone is gawking at my awkward shuffling past others’ feet/belongings and whispering about the fact that I didn’t show up before the lights went down. Ok, I get it, the shame is all in my head; it’s not like anyone actually reads this blog anyways. Sigh……why do I do this to myself? Go away, shame, you’re useless and I don’t need you hanging around.

Moving on, it is HOT down here; like can’t even walk out to the mailbox without pouring sweat kind of hot. I don’t handle the heat well, especially with it being a trigger for my eczema. Someone please send a massive cold front to the Southeast and let it hang around, let’s see, I don’t know, FOREVER. I would much rather deal with cold weather than this heat. Cold weather also allows me to cook and eat lots of foods that I love that Nick has deemed “not hot weather food”. I’m talking soups and dumplings and turkey and dressing and pretty much any other traditional fall or winter food; I want these things year-round, Nick on the other hand wants them only once a year. And that translates to him not eating the leftovers of said foods too, boo to him and his pickiness. If you can’t tell I’m hungry, and I want to cook, but I also don’t want to heat up the house by cooking so I’ll probably opt for cold leftovers or a pb&j. Sigh again.

The nerd in me has been rather content for the past little bit due to my being able to play WoW. I’ve been seeking out rare spawns to tame as pets, working on lots of achievements, and, of course, expanding my companion pet collection. I set my mind on getting Sambas – a maned lion that hangs out in Twilight Highlands – and I was able to find him without any issues; I literally flew into the area and flew right over him. Once I landed I turned right around and ran down to him and secured him as my pet. My good friend Nicci declared his name Kitty and so Kitty he is. I’m still on the hunt for Aotona – a HUGE blue and purple parrot in Shalozar Basin – but she is also one of the kills for the Northern Exposure and Frostbitten achievements so she’s harder to find since other players kill her when she spawns. I’ve been getting achievements left and right because I have been running dungeons, but I’m still (ever so slowly) working on the remaining achievements to get the “Salty” title for Fishing. But as for companion pets, I was able to purchase the White Kitten from the AH and now have all the cats (unless I’m badly mistaken), and when I went out to Darkmoon Faire yesterday I caught the Sea Pony! Talk about a shock; I expected to have to “farm” for it all week and still possibly turn up empty-handed since I have tried for it the past two times Darkmoon Faire has run. My Sea Pony now accompanies me and Kitty in our adventures as we accomplish more in the game, and with that, I’m now off to play a bit more.

Around the House…..I have a list May 20, 2012

I have a thing about making lists. Lots of lists. I’ll get halfway through all the stuff on my list and decide it looks too cluttered, rewrite it to be neat and clean (and with nothing accomplished), add a handful or so more items to what I rewrote, and go on about my merry way. This list most often takes shape in a Five-Star college-ruled notebook, number of subjects vary by which on I happen to have pulled out of my stash of notebooks left over from college. *Confession: I have lots of “school supplies” around the house that are college leftovers. I have a thing about school supplies – they call to me, and I am weak and give in and buy way too many, but as a result, I’ve got extras for when the need arises…..it’s just getting around to finding that need sometimes…..*

Back to my list, it grows, gets revised, chopped, slashed, ripped out and crumpled, trashed, and born anew throughout the course of most any given day of mine. I’m notorious for listing something for a week on end before I actually accomplish it, but at least I keep putting it on there – a steady, albeit sometimes irksome, reminder that I’ve made a conscious decision to complete said task. It may take far longer for an item to get off my list – heck, I’ve got two kids under two and a husband who sometimes makes me feel like I’ve got a teenager in the house more than the grown-ass man that he is that should be fully capable of handling things if my hands (as they often are) tied up with more than I can attend.

Recently, however, my list making has been stepped up a notch. I don’t just have my trusty notebook on the kitchen counter, I’ve got an EverNote account. The folks who came up with this thing are brilliant, by the way. All my “way beyond long-term, will probably never occur in my lifetime stuff I want to do/make/see/work on/complete/craft/cook/whatever” list items finally have a home – a place where I can add a dozen ramekins to my kitchen wish list, make a note that I want to not only replace the mailbox but contact the postmaster to get the proper authorization to move it to the end of the driveway instead of where it’s currently off the backyard access drive, and make a running list of “projects” that happen to cross my mind or come across on Pinterest.

Yeah, it’s definitely taken my list making to a whole new level. There’s almost a rush to it. I’ve got it all there in one place instead of being ridiculously jumbled inside my head. It gives me time to hash out if I really want one type of decorating style or another, to weigh the pros and cons of all sorts of random minutia that flits across my brainwaves. It also has made the rather blah everyday stuff on my list weigh differently. Ok, so I’m stuck washing dishes for the 4th time today because the dishwasher is kaput, but I can daydream while washing dishes of a farmhouse sink with oil-rubbed bronze fixtures, quartz countertops, and bright, clean cabinetry in my “future-wishing but will never happen” kitchen.

When the dreams are in order – listed out in a logical, sensible fashion, the day to day grind that my list encompasses seems lighter. And with my hands as full as they are day in and day out, that’s a good thing.

Why Is It…… May 7, 2012

…… that for your birthday, everyone you are acquainted with crawls out of the woodwork to post “Happy Birthday” on your FB page? These are people you never talk to – haven’t seen in years in most cases, but because that lovely little notifier on FB points out that someone has a birthday, in comes the tidal wave of two word posts bearing well wishes for the day. I’ll be honest, it doesn’t sit well with me. It seems that said birthday posts are trite, forced, and hollow. If you can’t dig up five minutes worth of a conversation with me, why are you telling me happy birthday? If you never “like” status updates, pictures, or acknowledge me online, then what’s the point?

I guess I’m seeing this as a reevaluation of where I “sit” in regards to FB friendships. Why do I have so many people on my list if we never have anything to do with one another? I guess spring cleaning has hit my FB once again, because I’m tired of the off the wall ignorance some people show towards my life – if you’re really keeping track of things on FB then you’d know that all your assumptions are really making you look like an ass. I’m tired of the comments that I go through and delete because I “can’t” have an opinion that disagrees with yours; last time I checked, we’ve both got brains in these skulls of ours, and I’m not opting for a transplant anytime soon so you can keep your mindset and I’ll keep mine, TYVM.

My Fluttering Fledgling May 5, 2012

Hey there. I’m Melissa, and I’ll cut to the chase and tell you up front that I definitely don’t have a knack for blogging. I post sporadically at best, ramble quite often, and follow way too many blogs to ever give this fledging the time it deserves. You will find I’m very wordy, but it only serves to get every tiny bit of my thoughts on a subject conveyed in one fell swoop. I will try to keep my promise to myself to post at least once a week, so I guess we’ll see how that goes.