It's true. Look here.
I want it.
Obligatory copying and pasting of info:
I’m posting this to enter a contest offered by MeridaHome at Design For Mankind! I want to win the iPad 2! (and I love Erin’s shoes!)
Let the games begin.
May 18, 2011
May 16, 2011
Six Months Old, and Some Rambling
Say hello to Simon. He's six months old today and feeling quite jolly about it.
So my baby is half a year old and I'm still kind of crapping my pants about it. Time is a tricky, sneaky bastard.
Simon is Mr. Happy (except when he's not). He puts his soul into his smiles. He laughs from the depths of his belly. He's super chubby, and I adore all his rolls. He got his first real taste of solid food yesterday (avocado). He can sit up unassisted for longish periods of time (but there are still plenty of faceplants). Crawling is just around the corner. Right now he's really into plank pose. Fine by me; I'm really not in a rush to have two mobile children. (Yikes.)
And his hair. Oh my, I'm so in love with his red hair. It just suits him.
It's been a fun six months. The things I've learned! I've been stretched way past the limits of my heart and I'm feeling good, really good, about this motherhood thing.
Today also marks my six month anniversary of exclusive breastfeeding. I never expected to love it as much as I do, but I find it to be an almost spiritual experience. When Simon is nursing, and he turns his bright blue eyes up to my face, I become small in the face of something that is so much bigger than me - but that is me. It's the best mindfuck ever. I'm so happy to be able to do this, and so proud of myself for sticking with it.
I really wanted to post Simon's birth story today. I was working on it last night and had to stop. I've found that I have to write it a little at a time. I end up getting distracted or emotional or something other than focused. There's much I have to say regarding that whole experience. Much to say about many things, actually, but somehow two kids is 500 times more work. And 500 times more fun. It's true. Life has been good to me, even when it's being a shithead.
A little birdie told me, in not so many words, that I need to update more often. It's true, I do need (and want) to update more often. (See above about two kids being 500 times more work.) The past few days have been filled with epiphany and clarity. I love both things. I love sharing about both things. So it's a good time to write.
I posted at the end of April about my overwhelming feelings of being overwhelmed. I was seriously overwhelmed. Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Because that was me - totally overwhelmed.
It seemed like everywhere I looked, aside from my little family, things were completely out of control, in the worst state of chaos ever. I couldn't find anything. I had no place to put anything. In our house, not everything has a place. Just take a look at the top of our microwave:
Doesn't look so bad, but when you list everything out, like this:
(a bar of lavender soap wrapped in purple tissue paper, the case for a Donald Duck DVD, a body butter container filled with change (and it still smells like shea butter), a CD of white noise, a bobby pin, two receipts, two halves of two separate plastic Easter eggs, a blank greeting card, a pen, and a copy of this biography)
you realize the need for order. That's a lot of stuff crammed into a really small space. So imagine the stuff we could cram into a whole room. Like our home office.
Ugh. This poor room. We've treated it so terribly. It's gone from pristine to dumping ground several times in the two and a half years we've lived here, and I'm just done. I decided on Thursday that it was time to treat it with the respect it deserved, so on Friday I had my mother-in-law come over to watch the boys. I hauled every last piece of crap out of there, and Roy and I spent the weekend going through most of it. I listed 33 books on Paperbackswap and about 15 CDs on SwapACD. I filled up a box full of things to give or return to others and another box of things to donate.
But it still feels like we have too much. We live in a state of information overload, and there is often too much coming in and not enough going out. Too much emails, snail mail, blogs, websites, projects, to-do lists, and not enough time, space, or energy.
I finally made a big realization, one that I've been inching towards for quite some time now. This whole time I have been trying to do things the same way as I did before I had kids. And it's just not possible.
I can no longer write out long to-do lists for each day or even each week. It's a recipe for failure.
I can no longer come home from yard sales with a big stack of books. As much as I want to, I don't have time to read them all.
I can no longer collect fabric, yarn, old clothes, or art supplies in the hopes that I will be some crafty mama. At this stage it's just not happening. Well, just kidding about the art supplies. I do tend to use those sometimes.
I have this tendency to collect ideas and thoughts (in addition to things), write them down, bookmark them, star them in Google Reader, and then not do a damn thing with them. I like to collect because I like to have choices and because I want to do everything in the world. (This is why Pinterest is like crack to me.) But oh, then I got smacked in the face with another epiphany.
All my choices are really what's making me distracted.
Sit down and think about that for a minute. Think about the internet (as an example) and how it's just this big black hole of options. Click here, here, here, and here, and next thing you know it's three hours past your bedtime and holy fuck, you're going to need a lot of coffee tomorrow, not to mention the fact that the kitchen is still a mess and you still need to take a shower and probably spend some time with the ol' ball and chain. Three hours doing absolutely nothing but fucking around in cyberspace.
But real life can be like that, too. Every Monday night Roy and I watch a movie together, usually something on Netflix instant view. We generally spend more time browsing through all the options than we do watching the actual movie. It's so completely frustrating and stupid.
I love options. But I'm also tired of them.
So I sat down and did some more cleaning. I unsubscribed (again) from Facebook notifications and a few other sites that were clogging up my inbox, and then I went into my Google Reader and mercilessly unsubscribed from 150+ blogs. I went from 284 feeds down to 131 in the space of five minutes. And it felt damn good.
(I still think 131 RSS feeds is fucking ridiculous, but give me time. I'm still learning.)
I know that I've talked a lot about purging and uncluttering and all that, but it's in my nature to be a packrat. I've always liked to hold onto things, particularly cards, photos, letters, and books. I am actually quite a sentimental person. But sometimes it gets to the point where all the stuff I have gets in the way of my life, and that's when I know things need to change. That I need to change.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm attempting to change, one box of crap at a time. I am not the same person who could read 15 books in a month, write for two hours every day, keep up with a shitload of blogs, and watch a movie every night. My life has changed.
I'm a mama. A mama! I still sometimes can't believe it. I've never felt quite so alive. But I can't do all I want to. In the middle of the day, I sometimes find myself glancing longingly at the bookshelf, or the bed, or the bathtub, wanting to take a nice hot bath with a good book, followed by a nap. I want a deep creative life, where I write and take photos and paint and do whatever else with wild abandon. I want to travel and eat good food and get massages and pedicures and eyebrow waxes on a regular basis. But when I chose to have kids, I said goodbye to some of that for awhile. Not all of it, but some of it. I've had to slow down and realize that I can have everything, but I can't have everything all at once. My brother told me that once, and I thought he was full of shit. But the older I get, the more I return to it.
I may not have everything, but I have more than I ever thought I'd get. I have my boys, I have my husband, I have love. It's all I ever wanted. And I've never felt so inspired. Happiness suits me.
So my baby is half a year old and I'm still kind of crapping my pants about it. Time is a tricky, sneaky bastard.
Simon is Mr. Happy (except when he's not). He puts his soul into his smiles. He laughs from the depths of his belly. He's super chubby, and I adore all his rolls. He got his first real taste of solid food yesterday (avocado). He can sit up unassisted for longish periods of time (but there are still plenty of faceplants). Crawling is just around the corner. Right now he's really into plank pose. Fine by me; I'm really not in a rush to have two mobile children. (Yikes.)
And his hair. Oh my, I'm so in love with his red hair. It just suits him.
It's been a fun six months. The things I've learned! I've been stretched way past the limits of my heart and I'm feeling good, really good, about this motherhood thing.
Today also marks my six month anniversary of exclusive breastfeeding. I never expected to love it as much as I do, but I find it to be an almost spiritual experience. When Simon is nursing, and he turns his bright blue eyes up to my face, I become small in the face of something that is so much bigger than me - but that is me. It's the best mindfuck ever. I'm so happy to be able to do this, and so proud of myself for sticking with it.
I really wanted to post Simon's birth story today. I was working on it last night and had to stop. I've found that I have to write it a little at a time. I end up getting distracted or emotional or something other than focused. There's much I have to say regarding that whole experience. Much to say about many things, actually, but somehow two kids is 500 times more work. And 500 times more fun. It's true. Life has been good to me, even when it's being a shithead.
A little birdie told me, in not so many words, that I need to update more often. It's true, I do need (and want) to update more often. (See above about two kids being 500 times more work.) The past few days have been filled with epiphany and clarity. I love both things. I love sharing about both things. So it's a good time to write.
I posted at the end of April about my overwhelming feelings of being overwhelmed. I was seriously overwhelmed. Have you ever felt overwhelmed? Because that was me - totally overwhelmed.
It seemed like everywhere I looked, aside from my little family, things were completely out of control, in the worst state of chaos ever. I couldn't find anything. I had no place to put anything. In our house, not everything has a place. Just take a look at the top of our microwave:
Doesn't look so bad, but when you list everything out, like this:
(a bar of lavender soap wrapped in purple tissue paper, the case for a Donald Duck DVD, a body butter container filled with change (and it still smells like shea butter), a CD of white noise, a bobby pin, two receipts, two halves of two separate plastic Easter eggs, a blank greeting card, a pen, and a copy of this biography)
you realize the need for order. That's a lot of stuff crammed into a really small space. So imagine the stuff we could cram into a whole room. Like our home office.
Ugh. This poor room. We've treated it so terribly. It's gone from pristine to dumping ground several times in the two and a half years we've lived here, and I'm just done. I decided on Thursday that it was time to treat it with the respect it deserved, so on Friday I had my mother-in-law come over to watch the boys. I hauled every last piece of crap out of there, and Roy and I spent the weekend going through most of it. I listed 33 books on Paperbackswap and about 15 CDs on SwapACD. I filled up a box full of things to give or return to others and another box of things to donate.
But it still feels like we have too much. We live in a state of information overload, and there is often too much coming in and not enough going out. Too much emails, snail mail, blogs, websites, projects, to-do lists, and not enough time, space, or energy.
I finally made a big realization, one that I've been inching towards for quite some time now. This whole time I have been trying to do things the same way as I did before I had kids. And it's just not possible.
I can no longer write out long to-do lists for each day or even each week. It's a recipe for failure.
I can no longer come home from yard sales with a big stack of books. As much as I want to, I don't have time to read them all.
I can no longer collect fabric, yarn, old clothes, or art supplies in the hopes that I will be some crafty mama. At this stage it's just not happening. Well, just kidding about the art supplies. I do tend to use those sometimes.
I have this tendency to collect ideas and thoughts (in addition to things), write them down, bookmark them, star them in Google Reader, and then not do a damn thing with them. I like to collect because I like to have choices and because I want to do everything in the world. (This is why Pinterest is like crack to me.) But oh, then I got smacked in the face with another epiphany.
All my choices are really what's making me distracted.
Sit down and think about that for a minute. Think about the internet (as an example) and how it's just this big black hole of options. Click here, here, here, and here, and next thing you know it's three hours past your bedtime and holy fuck, you're going to need a lot of coffee tomorrow, not to mention the fact that the kitchen is still a mess and you still need to take a shower and probably spend some time with the ol' ball and chain. Three hours doing absolutely nothing but fucking around in cyberspace.
But real life can be like that, too. Every Monday night Roy and I watch a movie together, usually something on Netflix instant view. We generally spend more time browsing through all the options than we do watching the actual movie. It's so completely frustrating and stupid.
I love options. But I'm also tired of them.
So I sat down and did some more cleaning. I unsubscribed (again) from Facebook notifications and a few other sites that were clogging up my inbox, and then I went into my Google Reader and mercilessly unsubscribed from 150+ blogs. I went from 284 feeds down to 131 in the space of five minutes. And it felt damn good.
(I still think 131 RSS feeds is fucking ridiculous, but give me time. I'm still learning.)
I know that I've talked a lot about purging and uncluttering and all that, but it's in my nature to be a packrat. I've always liked to hold onto things, particularly cards, photos, letters, and books. I am actually quite a sentimental person. But sometimes it gets to the point where all the stuff I have gets in the way of my life, and that's when I know things need to change. That I need to change.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm attempting to change, one box of crap at a time. I am not the same person who could read 15 books in a month, write for two hours every day, keep up with a shitload of blogs, and watch a movie every night. My life has changed.
I'm a mama. A mama! I still sometimes can't believe it. I've never felt quite so alive. But I can't do all I want to. In the middle of the day, I sometimes find myself glancing longingly at the bookshelf, or the bed, or the bathtub, wanting to take a nice hot bath with a good book, followed by a nap. I want a deep creative life, where I write and take photos and paint and do whatever else with wild abandon. I want to travel and eat good food and get massages and pedicures and eyebrow waxes on a regular basis. But when I chose to have kids, I said goodbye to some of that for awhile. Not all of it, but some of it. I've had to slow down and realize that I can have everything, but I can't have everything all at once. My brother told me that once, and I thought he was full of shit. But the older I get, the more I return to it.
I may not have everything, but I have more than I ever thought I'd get. I have my boys, I have my husband, I have love. It's all I ever wanted. And I've never felt so inspired. Happiness suits me.
May 6, 2011
this moment
My mother-in-law and I took the boys to Sea World this week. It was a wonderful, low key day, and we all had a great time. Above is my favorite picture from the trip. When I look at it, I know that it is a good picture of who Charlie is right now. He loves animals and is content to watch them for long periods of time. In this picture, he's looking at the "yions" (sea lions).
We didn't see much of what Sea World has to offer, and that was just fine with me. We let Charlie tell us what he wanted to do, and that's what we did. (We got the educational discount rate so the amount of admission was not an issue.) I've been feeling so rushed and overscheduled and overwhelmed that now, all I hear from my body and mind is "slow down." Our weekends into June have somehow filled up, but now I'm thinking of bowing out of some things in favor of some R&R.
For Mother's Day weekend our original plan was to go camping as a family in the mountains. Then we became a little concerned about the cold, so I said I wanted to spend Mother's Day out at the Mission San Juan Capistrano. But I got a killer sunburn at Sea World, and plus I'm just beat. So all I really want for Mother's Day is a nice, long, uninterrupted nap and perhaps a pedicure. I want to spend the day just relaxing. I really have no desire to go anywhere.
It's time for me to get back to the basics. Inside it feels like chaos and everything around me reflects that. So I'm taking a page from the Book of Charlie. I'm going to stop and watch the sea lions. Or, as the case may be, stop and watch the flowers bloom.
May 1, 2011
Nice work, Mr. President.
Our world is now a little safer for my two sweet boys and all the other children out there.
My humble thanks.
April 30, 2011
I give up.
It's been far too long since I updated. I've started several posts, only to be pulled away by one thing or another, and each post ends up in that graveyard of drafts, never to be touched again. I'd like to finish something, but perhaps all I really can do right now is start. And start. And start again.
There was a discussion about motherhood on one of my Facebook groups recently, and something profound was said (not by me):
I am trying to peel back the layers of pressure and emerge as MYSELF.
I've returned to this over and over since first reading it, and I've decided that it's just one of those things that I need to keep inside as a mantra, something to hang onto. A reminder that there is a self buried under all this stuff and I'd do well to honor her.
And so I give up. I can't do it all. I can't update here with the regularity I prefer, I can't keep my house clean, I can't keep the laundry folded, I can't seem to make family dinner happen, I can't make the bed, I can't pay the bills on time, I can't be away from Simon for more than a couple of hours at a time because he just won't take a bottle. This is chaos. I don't like chaos. I'm a big fan of order, of balance, but I just can't seem to find either. They are both elusive, like smoke burning through a life that looks nothing like this one.
And I'm lonely sometimes. I have so much to be grateful for, and yet the loneliness persists. I would say it's the human condition, but I don't know that for sure. So let's just say that it's my condition.
And yet I'm not unhappy. Because motherhood has stripped me of so much petty nonsense, and here I am, emerging as myself, with bags under my eyes, jeans that are way too big, a hopeless head of hair, unshaved legs, a runny nose (allergies? a cold brewing?), a novel writing itself in my head, lines of poems scrawled on random sheets of paper, stacks and stacks of books that I want to read, songs that play over and over in my head (including songs from Sesame Street). I am completely incoherent and that bothers me but at the same time I feel free. There is no time to doubt, only time to be and do and all those other weird verbs. Every day another layer is stripped away, because motherhood is an exercise in letting go.
Some big challenges are looming on the horizon, and I am anxious. Keep me in your thoughts? I'll try to report back more often in May. In the meantime, here's a picture of Simon, who is now five months old and just as red-headed and blue-eyed as he can be.
And let's not forget Charlie, who is (as you can see) so not a baby anymore.
I have never loved like this, nor have I ever felt so real or alive. It's love that makes me myself.
There was a discussion about motherhood on one of my Facebook groups recently, and something profound was said (not by me):
I am trying to peel back the layers of pressure and emerge as MYSELF.
I've returned to this over and over since first reading it, and I've decided that it's just one of those things that I need to keep inside as a mantra, something to hang onto. A reminder that there is a self buried under all this stuff and I'd do well to honor her.
And so I give up. I can't do it all. I can't update here with the regularity I prefer, I can't keep my house clean, I can't keep the laundry folded, I can't seem to make family dinner happen, I can't make the bed, I can't pay the bills on time, I can't be away from Simon for more than a couple of hours at a time because he just won't take a bottle. This is chaos. I don't like chaos. I'm a big fan of order, of balance, but I just can't seem to find either. They are both elusive, like smoke burning through a life that looks nothing like this one.
And I'm lonely sometimes. I have so much to be grateful for, and yet the loneliness persists. I would say it's the human condition, but I don't know that for sure. So let's just say that it's my condition.
And yet I'm not unhappy. Because motherhood has stripped me of so much petty nonsense, and here I am, emerging as myself, with bags under my eyes, jeans that are way too big, a hopeless head of hair, unshaved legs, a runny nose (allergies? a cold brewing?), a novel writing itself in my head, lines of poems scrawled on random sheets of paper, stacks and stacks of books that I want to read, songs that play over and over in my head (including songs from Sesame Street). I am completely incoherent and that bothers me but at the same time I feel free. There is no time to doubt, only time to be and do and all those other weird verbs. Every day another layer is stripped away, because motherhood is an exercise in letting go.
Some big challenges are looming on the horizon, and I am anxious. Keep me in your thoughts? I'll try to report back more often in May. In the meantime, here's a picture of Simon, who is now five months old and just as red-headed and blue-eyed as he can be.
And let's not forget Charlie, who is (as you can see) so not a baby anymore.
I have never loved like this, nor have I ever felt so real or alive. It's love that makes me myself.
April 2, 2011
Happy Birthday, My Love
Roy turns 32 today!
Charlie and Simon bought him some wood-carving tools and wrote him this birthday letter:
Dear Daddy,
Happy birthday! You are sooooo old! But you sing the best songs. And we love you. And we got you these tools because we know you like to make things. We know you are tired so we will try to sleep really good for you this weekend. We are so excited to go to see the aquarium with you and Mommy. You are the best daddy EVER.
Love,
Charlie & Simon
Smart kids, yeah? They sure do love their dad, and he really does love them, even though most of the time he's really, really tired.
We were musing this morning over how we met when we were 25, and we didn't know where we'd be at 32 (not that we really considered the age of 32 specifically anyway), but what a sweet (and sleep-deprived) place it is. Happy birthday, Roy.
Charlie and Simon bought him some wood-carving tools and wrote him this birthday letter:
Dear Daddy,
Happy birthday! You are sooooo old! But you sing the best songs. And we love you. And we got you these tools because we know you like to make things. We know you are tired so we will try to sleep really good for you this weekend. We are so excited to go to see the aquarium with you and Mommy. You are the best daddy EVER.
Love,
Charlie & Simon
Smart kids, yeah? They sure do love their dad, and he really does love them, even though most of the time he's really, really tired.
We were musing this morning over how we met when we were 25, and we didn't know where we'd be at 32 (not that we really considered the age of 32 specifically anyway), but what a sweet (and sleep-deprived) place it is. Happy birthday, Roy.
April 1, 2011
this moment
Last Saturday I accidentally ended up at a poetry workshop. I say it was an accident because there we were, minding our own business, having driven down to the farmer's market for our produce and a whole chicken and a rosemary plant (which I cannot say without singing in my head, "parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme"). We then walked to the library for some books; there was a conference going on, lots of cool booths set up in front of the library, and my mother-in-law was there. We all went inside, and I was nursing Simon in the kids section when she said excitedly, "There's a poetry workshop! You should go!"
"Cool," I replied, wanting to check it out but unsure of how to do that at that moment, baby attached to me and all. We talked logistics, I handed her Simon once he was done, and then I ran across the street to where the workshop was. My hair was unbrushed, I had no makeup on, and I was wearing the shirt I slept in the night before. There was a mistake with the program and the workshop was actually almost over by the time I showed up, but the poet running it encouraged me to stay. After everyone else had left, she let me pick a writing prompt from a list. The prompt was from Pablo Neruda's most excellent book The Captain's Verses: "We have changed a thousand times." I wrote for ten minutes without stopping, often surprised at the feeling of tears welling up in my eyes. At the end of the ten minutes, I had a few pages of rambling and a deep understanding of just how long it has been since I have really done this writing thing the way I really want to do it.
It seems that the universe really is trying to tell me something, what with hearing about the publication of my professor's book, serendipitously ending up in this poetry workshop, and then reading this just last night. The voice is telling me, "Write on, sister!" and so this week that is what I've been doing, pure unadulterated untamed writing. Finding the time is difficult but I'm learning to do this writing thing over and over; it seems like the process of learning never ever ends, even though I have been doing this my whole life. I told the poet who taught the workshop that I had been writing since I was a kid, and she said, "I can tell." And I said, "I don't know how not to do it. It's just what I do."
And that's true. It's just what I do.
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