Monday, February 27, 2012

dear time: SLOW DOWN!

life is going fast these days. i like fast better than mind-numbingly slow and monotonous, but sometimes i just want to process one experience at a time. tell things to stop. wait. it's not your turn. but that's just not how it goes.

:: right now we are in the midst of packing up some very dear friends and shipping them off to the north. it is a hard thing to do-help someone you love (or 7 someones in this case) leave you. but it must be done and so we do it.

:: last week a new little lion cub joined our big family. i'll admit: i made them dinner that second night after his arrival, even though my day was hectic, so that i'd have an excuse to go meet the long awaited fella. so handsome.

:: it is on my mind most days that we are home-ben leaving us in the fall for all day kindergarten. there were months there that i would have happily sent him off. and he would have been happy too. he'll still be happy. and maybe by then i'll be ready. or maybe we'll do something else.

i've been wanting to carve out some time in the last couple days to really sit down in this space, but it just hadn't quite happened. and then tonight, as i was winding down and all most ready to log off, i tapped over to apartment therapy for one last visual kick, one more clever idea to file away in the "home" file in my brain, and i saw this post: Pondering the Meaning of the American Sofa. i didn't even read the npr article, but i liked the thoughts of the a.t. writer. i too ponder and mull a lot about our home. not just the way it looks, but the way it works and feels to us and others. i figured that if i shared it here, it might get me going a little bit. it worked.


Saturday, February 4, 2012

*dusting off cobwebs*

so now it is february. as the sidebar will show for all of posterity, i have neglected this space for all of january, almost like january 2012 never existed. accept for the fact that, quite the opposite, january was a very full month.

so full in fact that i decided to live it instead of write it. my mom's birthday, a million family birthdays, a tea party, an awesome gathering of friends, lots of work days, days spent at the park (in january!!!), the arrival of chickens.... a very full month indeed.


so yes, i was busy in january, but i would say my bigger reasons for not writing are:

1. tim acquired an iphone for me in december, so i do most of my at home computing on that. i can read blogs and check facebook, but it helps me from getting sucked into the internet for hours at a time because staring at the tiny screen gets uncomfortable after awhile. since i spend my work time in front of the laptop, i don't really want to pull it out and fire it up when i'm not working. this is good for my life, but bad for blogging.

2. as i've said before, i'm not a brief person. obviously, you know this. so i don't really care for posts that are just a picture and a few sentences. and even doing that would probably take me at least 30 minutes by the time i fire up the computer(because i think it takes all of 2 minutes. i'm just that blessedly impatient!), upload the picture, etc.

3. i feel like other people are in my head stealing my material and writing it better than i can. so why bother.

i remembered that i had written a post back in yonder days entitled, "why i blog" so i looked it up to remember, why did i used to blog more?

well, i still find those things to all be true-i find writing to be therapeutic, i like to put on a good show, and i think honesty in the blogosphere is important, even if my part in that space is a teeny, tiny speck. but my life has changed a lot since march of 2010. max was 1 1/2 when i wrote that, ben was 3 3/4. ben is practically a grown up now and max sometimes goes whole afternoons without throwing a major tantrum. and max used to nap back in those days. and tim's work schedule was different. while he still has crazy hours, back then he often wouldn't get home until midnight or later. and i work a couple days a week and get to interact with other adults who i get to joke around with. and at least from what i read online, i find a lot more honesty than i used to. way back when, it seemed like everyone else had the perfect husband, the perfect kids, the mostly perfect under control lives, and the perfect food, crafts, etc. i felt the need to express that, while my life was good, it fell short of perfection every once in awhile.


i really like writing, but, most of the time, i have other things that i'd rather be doing at the end of the day. this post resonated with me on the feminist housewife-the idea of prioritizing. while tim and i fantasize about days that have 30 hours, or even just 26, i don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things that i'd like to do, and at this stage in my life, i've found sleep, time with my husband when he's around, and a clean house are more important to me than writing.

that being said, i'm really going to try to carve out some time to share a few things that have been in my brain and not have to spend each blog post explaining why i haven't been blogging.

until then, over and out.