Recent Epiphanies

1. I realized this week that with six people in the house who usually wear clothing, we produce a load of dirty laundry almost every day. Nudism is suddenly looking more appealing.

2. I was sitting on the couch, rocking a bit in discomfort, and wondering what fresh horrors my period was going to visit upon me this month, when something occurred to me: I'm only thirty-six. That means I have ten years more of this, give or take. Ten. Years. I just ... bleh.*

3. We do not have a psycho neighbor who keeps sawing away our aluminum ties that Brice keeps putting on our fences. Hooray! Apparently squirrels like to chew on soft aluminum. Squirrels. Sigh.

4. Other things that happen when you have six people: You can easily eat an entire cantaloupe in one meal. You have to peel more than three clementines. You go through a LOT of water. Also, dishes. You rarely have as many leftovers as you think you will. Your dining room table that seemed so big when you first bought it now seems like a regular size. There is six times the amount of fun and silliness, chaos, and laughter, and tears, and joy.

5. Today is the day that Mormon Lit Blitz posts my story! That means I should be putting some sort of effort into advertising it, right? Because writers need to practice self-marketing? So here's me advertising. (I'm sorry to say that I'm going to send you on a link parade because it's much easier for me than re-copying all the pertinent info here, so ... sorry, not sorry.)


*Warning: In case you were considering giving me all sorts of wonderful advice about how to make periods less awful, probably don't bother. Either I've already read and dismissed it, or it would require suddenly becoming a new person (e.g., drink more water, eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, etc., etc.--all good advice, but all obvious, and if I'm not succeeding at these things for general health purposes, it's not going to suddenly happen because I have lousy periods).**
**Double extra warning: Really, really don't comment if you're just going to say how wonderful periods are and I should really embrace them because womanhood! motherhood! yada yada! If you are going to say something like this, you should just be grateful that you're saying it from a safe distance.

Scattered Thoughts

I’ve started avoiding blogging again because I only have little bits and pieces to tell, not any sort of coherent narrative of really anything. But that means stuff is piling up, so we’re doing another random pile o’ junk post. (Also, I started this a week ago, so it’s all old news, but I’m not going to try to fix any weird verb tenses or time references. Ptui.)

Major Minor Miracle. Yes, I know “major minor” doesn’t make sense, but here’s the thing: it was a total miracle to me, and really huge for that particular moment in my life, but it’s also ridiculously small. Yesterday I was so stressed out over preparing for our co-op’s class fair that is happening tomorrow. I had a list of performances on a sheet of paper, and I needed it so I could type up the programs for the fair, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I’ve been on high stress about this activity for a while now, and this was the last straw. As I searched, I prayed—please, please help me find it. I looked in every spot I could think of that it could have possibly ended up, and I finally hit the last spot—the car—and it wasn’t there.

I came back inside the house feeling utterly defeated and on the verge of tears. Again I prayed. Please. Then my eyes wandered over to our fireplace mantle, where our family yearbooks are lined up, and there was the paper, sitting with the yearbooks. Exactly where I had put it and completely forgotten it almost a week ago. I was so grateful.

Koa the Earthling. This just barely happened—Koa walked out into the living room with a box on his head. He told Brice he was an earthling.

The Anthology! My latest gigantic and insane project is finally finished and printed and distributed! I’m enormously proud of it. It’s a collection of stories written by the teens in the writing class I’ve been teaching at co-op this last year. I’ll be posting more about it on my other blog soon and I’ll link there if I can remember. But let it just be said that it was a large undertaking and I am so thrilled to be done (but also thrilled to have done it).

Short Fiction. Speaking of writing, I have been returning to short fiction a lot lately and really enjoying it. It’s been so much fun, and I think I’m going to spend more time in short fiction for the next little while. I have several places I’d like to submit things to, so we’ll see.

Mormon Lit Blitz. Also speaking of short fiction, go look here! Pay particular attention to the entry for June 10th.

Mother’s Day. Brice is so wonderful. He made Mother’s Day quite lovely, as he always does. This year he made me a delicious breakfast frittata and said, “Fri-tada!” Complete with a “tada” gesture. It was pretty great, but it doesn’t translate on paper very well. Also, he bought me a lock-picking set! Yay! Now I can start learning a new skill. It comes with a see-through lock, which is pretty cool because then you can actually see the mechanisms, which I’ve never really understood before.

I love this about Brice—he is always supportive of my whims and desires to expand my learning, even when it’s silly.

Compliments. Okay, this is probably weird, but I keep two compliment files—one is informal, in my memory, and the other is actually in a file in my email. The email file is where I put emails or facebook messages or other communications that people sent me that were really touching and made me feel all glowy and happy. I get to go back and refer to it occasionally when I’m feeling particularly crappy. The other file is my internal list of the weirdest/funniest compliments I’ve ever received.

This last week, I got to add two potential compliments to the weird file.

1. As part of our class wrap-up, I was asking the teens what their future plans were with writing. Many mentioned how they felt about the class (overall positive), but this was my favorite: “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

2. Driving home from church on Mother’s Day, Brice and I were talking about how our various parenting abilities had improved since the beginnings. I mentioned that I was much better with small children than I used to be (though still not very good), and he replied that he thought I was “pretty decent.” Which was both honest and amusing, given that he said it on the day we’re supposedly telling all the mothers how incredibly awesome they are. But actually, “pretty decent” felt like a pretty great compliment. It was real and completely believable (not like “you’re the best with babies!” which would just be a lie).

Must update photo! Holy crumbs, I just looked at the photo that’s on our blog header, and we are two babies behind. Yikes. I really need to fix that. Someday...

The end. Oh so many times in the past little while I’ve thought of something to add to a blog post, but I never do remember them long enough to add. So we’ll just end here.

Meta

"I don't know what to write," I tell Brice. I have a goal of writing every day, you see. 

"Write about how the baby was crawling down the hall and how we are all crawling down the hallway of life. We can choose to laugh and giggle as we head into the darkness, or we can turn back in fear."

"Brice, I love you. You are a source of endless delight."

And also, I think to myself, I'm totally not writing about that. Because that's weird. 

This used to be fun.

It’s been almost four years since I started writing on our blog. I don’t remember exactly the process of deciding to share my now-infamous Mother’s Day thoughts here, but I do remember how wonderful it felt to write it all down and hit that “Publish” button. It didn’t matter that maybe only one or two siblings would read it. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t pretty. All that mattered was that I’d thought of something and wanted to put it here, as a record, almost a public journal.

It continued to be that way for a long time. I would write sporadically, whenever I came up with something that I thought was funny or silly or thought provoking or interesting. Confessional: That time I admitted that I’ve used my babies as napkins. Frustrated: That conversation with my hair stylist about motherhood. Assorted: The animal antics, the sartorial experiments, the food! And, honestly, who could forget the six geese-a-laying?*

But somewhere along the way, I started thinking about numbers. And pictures and readability. And making sure every post mattered somehow and was totally representative of the important things in our lives. And was complete. Was worth posting on Facebook. Deep, meaningful, worth advertising to friends and family. Blah blah blah.

I got so concerned with curating the blog perfectly, making it just so. So now every time I think about blogging, I think about all of this stuff.

And it’s just not fun anymore.

And because it’s not fun, I’ve missed out on sharing things I really wanted to share—big things like Coriel’s epic Muddy Buddy obstacle course race that we held in our yard last year, little things like the time I broke out into uncontrollable laughter when Koa peed on his own face.

So ptui! on all of that. I want this to be fun again. So, from here on out:

~ I may or may not notify the world of Facebook that I’ve written something here. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending wholly on my own whims. If you actually want to read my posts, you’ll just have to figure out how to follow me from the blog. Or figure out how to get carrier pigeons to bring you notifications.

~ There may or may not be pictures.

~ I will make little-to-no attempt to present a complete picture of my life here. For my foo who live far away, sorry. I’d love to say that I’ll try harder to keep you up to date on our lives, but that would be a bald-faced lie.**

~ I will continue to write sporadically—I mean, really sporadically—but I will no longer feel guilty about it. If you want to hear from me more, I write equally sporadically at Callooh Callay Callay and fortnightly-ish at MMW (and here’s a handy link to just my posts).

~ I will not apologize for occasionally being badly edited or long-winded or whatever. Because it just takes too much time sometimes, and I get all perfectionist-y, upon which I spit!***

And I think that covers it. If I sound cranky, it might be because I slightly am. I don’t like that I have let blogging turn into drudgery. I want it to be fun again!

On that note, I will leave you with this: (It is most amusing if you flip quickly back and forth between the two pictures.)

* The answer to that question, I am well-aware, is everyone on the planet except for me.

** Is that the right expression? Bald-faced? Because that seems ridiculous to me.

*** Okay, if we’re being honest, I will undoubtedly continue to apologize for ridiculous things like missing smart quotes and badly used semicolons, but that’s just how I roll.

Fortune Cookie (and Other Oddments)

It’s that time again, that time when I write a whole bunch of random bits that have no relationship to one another. They also correlate with the size of my current attention span for blog topics—which is to say, short.

A while back, I got this fortune from a fortune cookie. I really like getting fortunes like these because they just feel like the universe laughing and I think probably the universe deserves a good chuckle once in a while.

Addra drew this portrait of me, and I think it’s the best picture of me EVER. Please note my awesome high heels. You only wish you could have high heels as cool as mine. (The drawing to the left was her first effort, which she was not happy with.)

 

 

I am officially due to have a baby next month. I am kind of all-around freaking out, but oh my goodness I will be so glad to not have all this wretched soreness. I mean, I’m happy to have a healthy baby and all that jazz, but I also kind of enjoy walking painlessly occasionally. Also, recently I’ve been going through some old family photos and I really look forward to having a (semi)visible waistline again someday.

As of today, 1 June, I am taking part in a 100 words for 100 days challenge. This is good because I haven’t been writing a lot lately and I could use a kick in the pants. I am, however, going to give myself a pass for the baby’s birthday.

Also speaking of the baby, we still have no name for him. I’m still going with He Who Shall Not Be Named, partially because now Coriel has caught onto that and loves calling him that.

Addra has a whole beautiful closet and several drawers full of wonderful, cute clothing. . . . She will only wear three outfits. She often wears at least two of them in one day, with her sister wearing the third one. When she does not get to wear one of these outfits every single day, suffering ensues. I am usually the one suffering. I am sincerely hoping this phase passes soon before one of us explodes. 

Add a skirt to either of these leotards (only two possible skirts,
though), and you have all of Addra's choices for outfits except one, her
"Hawaiian ninja" dress--which is really a sailor dress. Technically
I suppose that's more than three outfits.

Also, as always, I occasionally post at MMW and CalloohCallay Callay, but I don’t really bother to mention it here. So if you’re interested, go follow those blogs too. :)

And that’s it for now.

 

Another Blog!

As if you didn't already have too many places to try to keep up with my random writings, here's another! I have joined another blog, called Mormon Mommy Writers. I will be posting there every fortnight (I love that word) on Thursdays, and today is my first one. So go check it out. And, you know, you could just decide to officially follow their blog, or mine (this one), or my other one. Because, it turns out, sometimes writers like to feel like someone's reading them. :)

And now I will bite the bullet and inform you all in one mass sweep that the two agents who I was most likely to get a response from have now officially rejected my manuscript. So, onward and upward, I suppose. [Insert rueful smile here, but not an emoticon, because that would just annoy me here for some reason, although apparently it doesn't annoy me in the previous paragraph.]

Also, in the event that you haven't read the said rejected manuscript and are still somehow dying to, I have the latest "final" version in actual regular kindle format. Well, it's not fancy, and the chapters are currently listed in the table of contents as "unknown." But still, I learned to convert to kindle, and that was just plain fun. And wow, let me just clarify that just because I said I liked being read doesn't mean you have to read my whole book. Blog posts are nice, though.

Okay, now I think I'll go crawl under a rock and pretend I don't sound pathetic, weird, and scatter-brained at the moment. And you can pretend too!

Parenting Win!

Today I was handwashing a few dishes, and Coriel came over to see what I was doing. Then she asked if I could teach her how. I certainly wasn’t going to say no to that, so I gave her the scrubber and explained how to wash the plate. Afterward she worked on a cup that had some stuck-on goo, and I told her that sometimes you have to really, really scrub—do “epic battle” with the gunk. So there we are, me watching my daughter scrubbing dishes with relish and saying, “Arrrr, epic battle! Epic battle!” It was awesome.

In other, unrelated bric-a-brac:

If I didn’t mention it already, I have a bunch of updates on my writing blog. Also, one of the agents that I queried asked for a full copy of my manuscript! This is extremely exciting, and I’m pretty sure that after I freaked out a little, I squealed and jumped up and down a bunch. And then of course I resumed a very professional, calm demeanor that said, “Of course I expected this. I’m just that awesome.” Please note, however, that giving a full manuscript to an agent is a little like being pregnant. It takes forever for anything to happen. Also, you start feeling a little twitchy when people repeatedly ask, “So, any news yet?”/“So, have you had that baby yet?” In other words, if I have good news, believe me, I’ll share. In the meantime, feel free to not ask.

Also, let the bloodletting begin! In the ten minutes I was out in my garden this afternoon, I acquired four mosquito bites.