Category: Confessions

Something about the sun shining on a Friday that always puts me in the mood to write. I’m not even sure how many people even follow this little blog anymore, or any blog, for that matter, because we’ve definitely become a society of 15 second computer attention spans.

But whatever. I’m updating. I need this.

I have a dry erase calendar on the door of my pantry that is color coded for the entire family. On Tuesday, I looked up and thought I had mistakenly written “Thanksgiving Break” a week too early, and began erasing.

It turns out Thanksgiving is not only early this year, but November is sprinting. I say this every year, the Christmas list getting longer and time getting shorter and Walmart putting up red and green stripes on their parking poles the day after Halloween. But for real, you guys. I’m treading water over here.

Fraudulent Credit Card Charges

We are currently juggling 6th grade basketball, running club, Thanksgiving, various holiday parties, and two birthdays before Christmas. (One birthday is semi-big and I’m totally dropping the ball, sorry honey, so glad you gifted yourself that fishing trip knowing how terrible I am at this).

But today, the sun peeked out for the first time all week, and somehow it feels like everything is going right itself in the next 8 weeks. Meanwhile, I’m also on problem solving mode, and I want to celebrate a few wins for my morning.

Win number one comes from a weird place, so bear with me. We have this one credit card we keep open for exactly three recurring charges: the YMCA, Netflix, and Amazon. That is it. The rewards are no longer worth using it all the time, but the hassle of changing these was worth keeping it open. That said, the only thing that changes from month to month fluctuates with our Amazon purchases, which are arguably minimal most months. The bill typically hovers around $150 and once in a while goes up to $250.

This month it was $700.

I apparently sponsored not one, but two Amtrak rides on Veteran’s Day, without my knowledge. Fine. But another charge that showed up was a recurring payment to a company called “Active.com” out of Texas. On my credit card it reads ACT* ACTIVE-NETWORK. Apparently, in a 5K registration from the Turkey Derby last year, we were auto-signed up for some bogus membership to this website that is $79.95 annually.

While John was busy disputing the Amtrak charges with our credit card (note, reasons we always and only use credit cards for everything ever) I was googling this company. I found a two year old comment on Facebook about a similar issue. Knowing what I do about crowd sourcing, I commented under that comment. No lie, within three minutes, a representative from the company was contacting ME and initiating a cancelation of my membership, with a refund.

Listen, for everything I hate about social media, days like this make me so happy to be alive in the year 2018. They really do. Anyway, here is the full response I got:

John actually registered for this race, but I promise you, if it had been obvious that he was signing up for a “free trial membership” of anything, he would not have done it. I’m telling you, this is scammy and weird and I exercised all sorts of self-control with the man on the other side of FB Messenger because nobody wants to be that guy when you work for a shitty company who does stuff like this.

But still.

My One New Habit

Meanwhile, if you follow me on Instagram you’ve perhaps seen pictures of my lunch-prep for the school year. At the advice of a particularly organized friend, I bought 21 of these boxes back in August:

On Sundays, I line them up and fill them all with lunches for the week. (It is November and I’m hereby admitting we’re still doing pretty good at this – especially on the weeks where John makes the kids participate.) The boxes themselves are a good size, the price was definitely right, at under $1 a box, and they stack really nicely in the outside fridge.

My only complaint is that the lids crack kind of easily, especially when Kindergarten boys are the ones opening the box. Okay, so you know what I did. I had a little tutorial with all the kids on how to open and close the boxes so they don’t bust through all of them. We practiced. Every Wednesday at Lunch Bunch Avery says to the teacher on duty, “Be very careful with this box, my mom doesn’t want it to break.” They are all doing a good job of being careful with them.

That said, they are considered “one time use” boxes and several lids have cracked. I get it. I’m not complaining that my cheap boxes are breaking, but you know me, I’m not going to order an entire new set of boxes AND lids when all I need are some replacement lids. The environmentalist in me simply cannot do it. So I sent an email to the company, inquiring about how to JUST BUY LIDS. I mentioned in the email that “I’m actively trying to reduce my carbon footprint…”

You know they are just sending me an entire replacement set of the boxes and the lids, free of charge. Because who cares about the landfill? (Again, I’m not complaining. And I’m still endorsing the boxes because I still like them.)

In Other News

In other news, for as many times as my Kohl’s account has been unlocked for occasional online shopping, it has been re-hacked and locked again. No changes there. The girls are running a 5K in 2 weeks and I am running a half-marathon, and we are all praying it is not freezing raining that morning. My training has gone exactly as it always goes when it is cold outside.

John and I have taught three enrichment day lessons together at the kids new school (our quota for the year) and are still married. Another win.

And finally, I leave you on some book recommendations, because if nothing else, the sudden urge to write has come from a couple of audio books I’ve been plugging through recently. The first author I urge you to check out if you haven’t already is Nora Ephron. I cannot even say my views and her views align very often (she wrote very political-, social-, and feminist-charged stuff). But her voice! Her voice is so raw and so real and so wonderful that I am loving reading her. Listening to her. Both.

The other is my old friend David Sedaris and most specifically, his recently published “Diaries.” Most are far more dark than humorous, but again with the voice. I’m also plugging through Book 5 of the Outlander series which is more than 1400 pages so I should be wrapping that up around Easter. Of 2020.

If you are in a reading hole and looking for some inspiration, these were good to me. Would love to say I’m going to be checking in more regularly, but we all know how that goes.

This post may contain affiliate links. Read my full disclosure here.

I am so ready for summer! I know it has been a while since I’ve done anything on the blog. Do you believe that I have written no less than seven drafts in the dry spell even though I’ve published basically nothing?

If we were having coffee right now there’s a lot that we could catch up on.

Health

If we were having coffee right now, first of all, I’d be drinking decaf. You know I went off it cold turkey about six months ago. Well, once an addict always an addict? Sometime around the new year, I went straight back to regular, and let me tell you, there was no withdrawal from the decaf and it was exactly as glorious as expected. Except that my sleep problems immediately returned. Also, things were happening digestively that just didn’t quite seem right.

The truth is, everything about the coffee ritual in the mornings (minus the actual brewing part because weirdly I’m terrible at it) is something that makes me look forward to waking up. Folgers got it so right! And arguably, the high from the caffeine was largely part of this, a detail I would not have admitted until I got rid of most of the caffeine and realized I wasn’t feeling quite as happy as I used to within a few sips. All that aside, I’m going strong with my decaf only, despite the madness of brewing two different pots in one kitchen.

I feel great. The digestive situation hasn’t been this good maybe ever. My eyes close within minutes of going to bed. And unless my two-hundred pound husband has suddenly taken to soft-stepping and leaving all cabinet doors open while he makes snacks for Sports Center (he hasn’t) I’m also no longer being bolted out of what crappy sleep I was in by every teeny tiny noise happening downstairs.

Accomplishments

If we were having coffee right now I’d tell you that I ran a half marathon about a month ago and am trying not to lose my endurance and stamina like I usually do immediately following a big race. But I’m also taking things slow, listening to my body better, and for the first time in my life, attempting to work out with better goals in mind. Goal 1: pain prevention. Goal 2: actual enjoyment. Goal 3: improving my speed. I’ve already signed up for the same race again next year, the Tobacco Road Marathon, because everything about it was exactly as enjoyable as the 2003 Motorola Marathon in Austin, TX. Something about well organized small races in cool cities.

We just said no to spring sports this year and I’m not sure I’ve fully realized the smartness of that decision, but every weekend has been fantastically wide open for making plans to do things we actually want to do. Much of it has been working in our own yard and garden, which means it was a record-breaking year for getting plants in early. One recent Saturday was devoted to cleaning up the yard of a dear friend who has needed help for quite some time at tackling a project that was simply too big for one person. I put out a very short-notice plea to a small group of cool people, and the help poured in. It turned out to be a fantastic day.

Kids

We have made some serious decisions about school next year and I’m pretty excited to say that three out of four kids will be attending Redeemer School in the Fall. It is a K-8 private school that I originally avoided because it is so small. However, after a few years at Calvary and a few years at Clemmons, somehow the size and environment seems to be just the right fit for us now. As a former educator and the grown up version of a kid who always loved school, I never dreamed of the challenges I’d face as a parent when it comes to educating my kids. Hell, isn’t getting rid of them for six or so hours a day the best part of stay-at-home motherhood?

I wish it were that simple.

And I wish I could say that making this decision has been a breeze. But you know me better than that. Decision making usually comes with a big fat slice of ongoing anxiety, the kind that has before resulted in significant losses of weight. I can’t say that I suffered myself into smaller sized jeans this time, but there were a few months there that I was in a fog of fear and apprehension. And I can’t say that I’m completely over it. Yes, the decision has been made, but looking forward to an entirely new routine and the usual amount of worry that comes with big changes still lingers.

I’m coping. I promise.

Meanwhile, we went to the beach, we’ve had Elementary Battle of the Books, are training for another Running Club 5K (as a family!), and are winding down to Preschool and 5th grade graduations end of an era ceremonies.

Totally Personal and Somewhat Spiritual

I’m currently reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and actually taking the writing tasks and time-commitment seriously. I even downloaded printable worksheets because you know how much I love an excuse to get out my 3-hole punch. It’s an old book and written from an openly spiritual but not necessarily Christian perspective. I realize there are those who would caution me to run, lest I should be tempted into something inadvertently pagan. I would simply say to these people, I’m enjoying the book. I’m enjoying the focus, the inward reflection, and even, for me, the decidedly God-centered spiritual aspect of it. (God: Jesus’ dad and the Creator of the Universe.)

Meanwhile, I also recently discovered Jesus Calling on audio book. If you ever considered meditation but don’t know where to start, I am simply throwing out there that this is an unexpectedly good stumble-upon. I’ve had the Headspace App on my phone for at least 2 years, and while I was really tapped in at first, I have admittedly lost interest. This one I downloaded on a whim, because it was available immediately from the public library on the Overdrive App.

If you know me, you know I am not into daily devotionals. Can’t do them. Don’t like them. Stopped pretending about this and haven’t picked one up since the Purpose Driven Life craze first hit in college.

But this is different. First, I most often put it on while straightening my hair, a task that arguably takes more time than I’d like to admit and renders me incapable of doing anything else as it requires the use of both hands.

Though I don’t actually straighten my hair every day, I do it often enough that in less than a month, I had listened through this entire book and now am circling through it again. I’m not just listening to one a day. Instead, I just hit play and let the thing go. One afternoon I heard the entire months of April and May. And here’s the thing. It always takes me a little while to get into an audio book. The voice and cadence of the reader are important. But there is a decided mental shift that takes place as well, and when it hits, it is the same kind of calm that I assume people talk about when experiencing a runner’s high.

It is just an all-over sense of calm. Well? Consider that this book is scripture, re-written as though letters to us from Jesus himself, and you can see where it would and could be a form of meditation that is a little deeper than the Headspace App alone.

I’m simply saying, if you were thinking about it, you should try it.

I hope to be a little more checked in and active around here but as usual I make no promises. If you made it all the way through my wordiness today, thank you. I am perpetually fighting the media driven societal beast that says, “Enough already get to the point too long we’re bored!!” and often delete the wordy posts for fear that everyone (including me) now hates them. I think I see some sunshine. Let’s get after it, shall we?

This post may contain affiliate links. Read my full disclosure here.

Part One

Did I almost get into a collision with you at the Clemmons Library just now? Tell me it wasn’t you. I’m not sure I conducted myself with very much politeness.

If it wasn’t you, there’s a lady out there who has an EERILY similar face to yours.

Response

I’m laughing so hard right now!!! No it wasn’t me.

Part Two

Okay then I’ll tell you. Was parked kind of wonky to let my eight year old run something up to the drop box. A small black car goes *whizzing* by me from behind like a crazy person and I think to myself, “Somebody is going to die today in the parking lot of the public library.”

A minute or two later, I’m creeping out to round the corner to my right and while maybe not hugging the parked cars beside me, I’m definitely not sticking way out into the center or even crossing over into the left side of my “lane” area. As I approach the corner to make my right turn, your twin sister comes FLYING from the front half of the parking lot and isn’t actually looking up or out or anywhere. I can’t tell if she’s yelling at a kid in the backseat or looking at something on the empty passenger seat, but at that moment she’s very quickly cutting a super sharp turn and time sort of suspends while I (in slow motion thoughts) think, “She’s going to crunch the front corner of my mini van in like three seconds.”

I don’t even honk, which I’m usually TOO quick with. I just hit my brakes and mentally brace for impact.

She looks up at the last possible second, slams on her breaks (my mouth is agape but I’m otherwise devoid of usual expression, verbal or otherwise), and she has the audacity to waggle a finger at me, right and left style, like I’m taking too much of the lane.

I just yell at her through my window as if she can hear me and she is also a pea-brained child, “You are driving WAY TOO FAST, LADY!”

I creep around. Halfway home I have a panic because her face registers familiarity in that way. You know. *That way.* And I think, “Oh God, did I just scream at Heather in the parking lot of the public library? And what was she doing in Clemmons? And why the hell was she going so fast?”

So obviously I’m glad it wasn’t you. The sad thing is that it absolutely was someone else who goes to the Y at the same time as me and probably has a kid who is the same age as one of mine.

This post may contain affiliate links. Read my full disclosure here.

I’ve done a lot of crying this week. And I know I’m not alone.

On a slight side note, I’ve been doing quite a bit of running lately, which is often, inconveniently, where many brilliant ideas for blog posts hit me. Of course, these ideas are gone as soon as my endorphins subside. I’ve sat down to write several times in the last few days and though the emotions ran high, the words just wouldn’t come. Even now, I’m hesitant, because everything is choppy and fragmented and there’s so much swirling in my head but nothing is landing.

I’m going to start with myself. I am supposed to be running a marathon in a month, for which I’ve been doing my usual type of training (which is to say, relaxed). My schedule as a stay-at-home mom of four kids has complicated things a little bit, as I knew it would, and was a pressure I was ready to work with. But the weather has been shit. Also, we’re apparently experiencing an unprecedented nationwide cold and flu pandemic which all the elderberry syrup in North Carolina hasn’t completely protected this house against. Then there’s this little business of my husband’s new part-time job, which he didn’t have a year ago when I registered extra early for the race, in order to pay the lowest price possible. Weirdly, all of these things seemed manageable, until about a month ago, when my knee started to hurt and swell after every run.

I haven’t made any major cancelation decisions yet, and I’m taking things one day at a time, adjusting training, nursing this injury, and pretending to have a mental toughness I’ve never had and probably won’t develop in life. But I’m also admitting that the entire thing has become a little more emotional than I wanted it to be. If you’ve ever dedicated a significant amount of time to something in your life that you then didn’t get to see come to fruition, you know the kind of emotional I’m talking about. Grief.

I say all this, selfishly, and transition to another topic that makes my suburban-stay-at-home-thirty-six-year-old-lazy-runner-grief seem exactly as big of a deal as it is. Because on Monday, John and I learned that our first friends in North Carolina (our longest co-friendship as a married couple) had given birth to a baby boy who died a few hours later. Complications in the pregnancy presented themselves at 20 weeks, and this family of faith shared their story immediately and moved forward in hopeful expectation of a miracle, medical or otherwise. It is my understanding that this was entirely possible, and John and I joined them and many others in praying with the same expectations.

This isn’t really my story to tell and I haven’t even asked permission to share it so I want to be brief and delicate in the telling of it. The boy was born a few weeks early and called back to Heaven a few hours later. This baby has three older brothers who were also eagerly awaiting his arrival.

Absolutely everything is more real because I am a mother.

And now, Florida. Another mass school shooting. The week of flooded news-feeds calling for action, activism, gun control, solutions, outrage, sadness, despair, and the promise not to be numb while we admittedly fight being numb. I’m a little numb.

But this is what we do, right? If we’re healthy? This is what we do when grief from any angle slams us on our butts and reminds us of our humanity, the ugly and difficult side of it. If we’re lucky, we turn outward and draw close to others. We talk, cry, hold each other, silently sit close to one another, pause a little longer with a little more patience and perspective than we had yesterday. Some people paint. Others sing. I write.

Then, one foot goes in front of the other. Grocery lists get made, school buses arrive, essays get written and papers get signed, and sock situations for the Daddy daughter dance are fought over but eventually decided upon. And the grief worm lingers, and creeps back at the weirdest times. For me, twice this week on a spinning bike in the middle of the fitness room while Lady Gaga blasted in my ear buds.

I don’t have any solutions. I don’t have any miraculous words of wisdom. All I have are some universally shared emotions that I hope bring me closer to others, expand my empathy, allow me to feel a little harder, a little deeper.

This post comes without any expectations. I am desperate to also ignore that creeping monster of snap-comparison. The one that says, “How dare you, your situation is nothing compared to so many others.” (Julia Cameron would label this a blurt and force me to face-it, then turn it into an affirmation.)

I’m by no means proclaiming my own inner turmoil to be any more or any less what someone else is currently facing. I’m simply sharing today because I’m grieving, and this is what I know how to do.

This post may contain affiliate links. Read my full disclosure here.

Last Wednesday I sat down and started a blog post with this: We’re having a snow day in North Carolina, which will inevitably spread into at least two snow days, and possibly three, because we really like to play things cautiously around here. And it only makes sense that Mother Nature would decide to give us such a gift for Martin Luther King’s birthday, because, you know, no school two Mondays in a row already on the calendar wasn’t really enough.

This is as far as I got. It turns out, we had an entire snow week, as predicted, and then didn’t, again, have school this Monday for a pre-scheduled mandatory teacher work day, which had stupidly not been slated as a potential snow-day make-up day.

Snow, without a mountain, is fun for exactly one day.

For exactly one day I don’t mind digging out the bibs and boots, and painstakingly working ten tiny fingers into too-big gloves. These are the same gloves which will fall off the minute the tiny hand reaches its first grasp of frozen cotton candy, and at least ten more times after that until the tiny hand finally goes numb.

For exactly one day, I nostalgically lounge in sweats and my Uggs from 2005, the ones I’ve attempted to get rid for several years now, and end up keeping just for such days. For exactly one day, I might even myself don a pair of snow pants and winter boots and trek outside to watch and take a few pictures of my kids. I nearly always have something ready for the crockpot and I nearly always have a half empty tin of powdered hot chocolate, and for exactly one day, I relish the opportunity to join the rest of the world in a giant pause.

We pause because it is quiet and beautiful and majestic and dare I say inspiring. But we also pause because it is nostalgic and all of us, even the parents juggling multiple children and possibly work and the uncertainty of the next day, relish just one day of feeling like a kid again. And truthfully, many of us pause because everyone else has paused, and though the 24-hour Walmart stays open, sometimes the 24-hour Harris Teeter does not. The roads are dangerous but empty.

Inevitably, John wakes up no matter the amount of snow, makes the trek downtown, remarks on the surprise emptiness of things, puts in a few solid hours at the office (commenting that the phones are eerily quiet), and then comes home early to take the kids sledding. Because even court closes in North Carolina for some snow.

These are our rituals. For exactly one day.

By day two, I’m ready for whiskey at 10am and looking at the hottest day in July with utter longing.

I did not actually grow up in the south, and the bulk of my childhood winters were much longer than my childhood summers. I admit I laugh and scoff at the way of things around here. I do not make snow cream. I am 100% at peace with the fact that I have not participated in the building of a snowman in over a decade. And I flip through Facebook and Instagram feeds for a few days without any guilt or longing for the bliss my friends are experiencing alongside their children as they play in the snow.

Despite my northern roots, I do actually avoid getting in the car and driving anywhere until I can see the road at the end of my driveway. I have a front wheel drive minivan that isn’t paid off. You know I’m not risking an accident that will likely hurt or kill exactly no one except my pride and my wallet.

So here, I must pause, and thank God for a husband who intrinsically understands the value of critical memory-making moments. Can I also thank God for the role distinction that Daddy equals fun? Is it okay that I’m actually okay with being the not-fun parent?

I think it is okay.

I’m okay with it, anyway.

My dad was also the one, big surprise, who played with us in the snow. He was up for building snowmen and igloos, and rigging the top of our turtle sandbox to a rope behind his Jeep Cherokee and engaging us in what would forever be deemed “Turtle Topping” even long after the sandbox lid had died and we graduated to using a toboggan.

This toboggan, in fact:

I should pause to credit my mother here for just a minute. She did ride along with a VHS camcorder on several of these excursions to document the opposite of helicopter-parenting for posterity. And knowing her now, as I do, I imagine this was with equal amounts hilarity and dread, because it was fun and it was was hilarious but it was also ridiculously stupid. And my dad was just the kind of man who laughed in the face of putting his four offspring in potential harm’s way, as long as fun was on the line.

Also, I’m not sure that my mom owned any snow pants.

This was exactly as acceptable to me then as it is now. I am, in fact, delighted about the freedom I feel toward my minimal participation in snow days in North Carolina, without fear that my children will grow up one day and blame me for a lack of fun in their childhood.

If their experience is anything like mine, they won’t even realize I wasn’t really part of it. And this is the only way I would have it.

Meanwhile, snow week was largely me losing my mind over incredibly tiny and insignificant kid things, because I had geared myself up for my usual nine hours of child-free time, and those nine hours were stolen from me last week. I know they will only be young once, dear ninety-year-old-reader-who-likes-to-remind-me-of-such-things. I will absolutely miss their cute pudgy red cheeks poking out from behind wet mouths and mismatched snow clothes. I will absolutely not miss the round-the-clock noise and neediness, nor the pile in my basement of things that now need to be washed and stored, nor the dripping of muddy melt at every entrance to the house, nor the whining, the fighting, the food prep and cleanup, nor the kind of hunger that is only born from boredom and schedule disruption.

Snow week was fun for exactly one day. And I made the most of that day. Then, I collected myself and began the process of re-scheduling the three dentist appointments I had written down in three different calendars but failed to show up for, the day before the snow hit. Failed because maybe I was losing my mind a little bit before it snowed, even. The process of rescheduling three doctors appointments (one mine) and the arduous and guilt-ridden task of pawning my children off on someone else during that appointment, because school was closed and I am a stay at home mom. This time, that someone else was John who put in two hours of double-duty at the Winston Salem Children’s Museum, because it was a day when neither of us could really swing things.

Forgive me for admitting that my psyche thrives on those nine hours of kid-free time each week. Forgive me for sacrificing what others might consider non negotiables to make the bulk of those nine hours all and only mine. Finally, forgive me for also admitting that I have a husband who gets this, and as a result takes virtually no time for himself the way I take time for myself.

This post took a somewhat serious turn there, and I am reluctant to hit publish on an entire page of what has become a blanket of self-wallowing. The truth is, my attempt to make a lighthearted jab at what amounts to a very common reality and struggle for many moms probably failed today, and I’m choosing to be okay with that.

I still love my kids. I mostly like my kids.

And because I express it far less often than I should, I’m ridiculously thankful for my partner in this life, who is more often than not, physically carrying the team because he is caring for me. Make no mistake kids, Daddy was the fun parent, but he did it because he loved me the best.