That's the catchphrase of the full-throttle-fun-all-the-time indoor waterpark "resort" known as Key Lime Cove.
Which is where we are right now.
Before we made the epic hour-and-fifteen-minute journey up here for our annual pilgrimage, we had to have the air conditioner repairman come. And he told us that the AC was pretty much totaled, and we'd have to get a new unit. Which costs, like, a lot. And furthermore, it wasn't just some simple fix, it would take at least a week. You know, because air conditioner repair services are busy right now.
Given the general sauna-like atmosphere of our home, I was glad we had a vacation booked. However, from a financial standpoint, you may not want to incur a costly home repair when you have a non-refundable vacation booked.
Not that this is some kind of fancy, finances-be-damned kind of trip. We're here for two days, and since we're here mid-week I was able to take advantage of a discount that I kinda-sorta got through my blogging connections, or maybe not so much but let me just pretend that I'm actually earning something from writing this blog.
And through my special connections with the grocery store, meaning that they gave me a special customer preferred card, I purchased breakfast and lunch food to bring with us on the trip. So we're vacationing like poor people now. I mean, we're vacationing on a budget.
We did agree to eat dinner at restaurants. Last night we went to ... The Cracker Barrel! It's always nice to get away and eat somewhere that you could have gone to fifteen minutes from your own home.
We finally made it to the hotel about 10 p.m. last night. We got Nathan settled down from his high by 11, and then we went to bed.
This morning we had our BYO breakfast, and then Nathan and I hit the indoor waterpark. We spent considerable time at the lazy river and the little kid slides, and then we took a break to go to the arcade. Most of the games are games of luck designed to win tickets, or as I call them "slot machines for children." I did make Nathan play skee ball, because, you might not know this about me, but I rock at skee ball. As a kid skee ball was the only game I ever played at Chuck E. Cheese, and I spent hours practicing that game.
Also, my dream home will have an indoor lazy river in it. The funny thing is that my brother also came up with the concept of an indoor lazy river for his dream home, before I even discussed my plan with him. NOTE: Neither of us will ever live in a home with a lazy river. Unless one of us wins some kind of lottery, and while I was pretty lucky to hit the 329-ticket jackpot on one of the redemption games in the arcade, that's probably the extent of my luck.
So, after the arcade Bill came down and we all went to the waterpark again. Bill and Nathan ran around the water playground, and I got massively dizzy on the giant slide that looks like a huge toilet bowl.
Now we're off to the outlet mall and probably Rainforest Cafe for dinner. I'll try to take some pictures for my next post.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
First Niece of the Summer!
I'm very excited to welcome the first of four babies to be born into my family this summer! My brother Tyler and sister-in-law Kasumi have given birth to:
I don't know if Sydney's parent's want pictures of her on the Internet, so I'm not going to post any. But just let me say that both mother and baby look like postpartum models. Like, they could be in a diaper ad and you would be like, "That's ridiculous, nobody looks that perfect right after giving birth, and why isn't that baby all squished up?"
I was talking to my mom about how bad I looked in my pictures in the hospital after Nathan was born, and she said, "You looked normal." Ahh, those are the kind of lavish compliments you can always count on from a mom.
And congratulations, Tyler and Kasumi!
I will get to visit Sydney in late July when I go out to California, when hopefully my other niece and the other the baby-of-unknown-gender will both be born as well.
Sydney Kate
June 8, 2011 at 4:14 a.m.
8 pounds
24 inches
I don't know if Sydney's parent's want pictures of her on the Internet, so I'm not going to post any. But just let me say that both mother and baby look like postpartum models. Like, they could be in a diaper ad and you would be like, "That's ridiculous, nobody looks that perfect right after giving birth, and why isn't that baby all squished up?"
I was talking to my mom about how bad I looked in my pictures in the hospital after Nathan was born, and she said, "You looked normal." Ahh, those are the kind of lavish compliments you can always count on from a mom.
And congratulations, Tyler and Kasumi!
I will get to visit Sydney in late July when I go out to California, when hopefully my other niece and the other the baby-of-unknown-gender will both be born as well.
We're Meeeeelllltttttttiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnggggggggggg!
I know I haven't been blogging as regularly in the past few days. There's only one excuse for that, and that is the all-consuming, searing heat. The temps have been in the high 90s for the past few days, with approximately 800% humidity.
Well, outdoors it's more like 60% humidity, but inside my house the air conditioner decided to stop working. So, and I hope you'll excuse my use of technical meteorological jargon here, we're sweating like pigs. And currently we're three hours into the four-hour window for the air conditioning repairperson's arrival. I'm starting to lose hope.
Meanwhile the heat has sapped all my patience, and I find every task overwhelming, including blogging. We're all struggling to sleep at night, especially Nathan, who hasn't been getting to bed until 10 p.m. And during the day we're all crabby, and we've been getting to spend a lot of time with "Mad Nathan."
I'm frustrated because I love summer, and I wait all year for the warmer weather. But a record-setting heat wave with no air conditioning? That ... is what the general Internetry refers to as a "first-world problem."
I feel sorriest for the cat. We don't leave fans on when we aren't home, so she's sitting in the hot house with her fur coat. I had to pick her up yesterday and I was like, "Eww, gross, you're all hot and furry!"
The good news is, I've had a really easy time achieving my goal to spend as much time as possible outside the house. Monday Nathan and I went to the mall on a Father's Day gift-buying mission. While there I bought myself this bling at Sephora:
Well, outdoors it's more like 60% humidity, but inside my house the air conditioner decided to stop working. So, and I hope you'll excuse my use of technical meteorological jargon here, we're sweating like pigs. And currently we're three hours into the four-hour window for the air conditioning repairperson's arrival. I'm starting to lose hope.
Meanwhile the heat has sapped all my patience, and I find every task overwhelming, including blogging. We're all struggling to sleep at night, especially Nathan, who hasn't been getting to bed until 10 p.m. And during the day we're all crabby, and we've been getting to spend a lot of time with "Mad Nathan."
I'm frustrated because I love summer, and I wait all year for the warmer weather. But a record-setting heat wave with no air conditioning? That ... is what the general Internetry refers to as a "first-world problem."
I feel sorriest for the cat. We don't leave fans on when we aren't home, so she's sitting in the hot house with her fur coat. I had to pick her up yesterday and I was like, "Eww, gross, you're all hot and furry!"
The good news is, I've had a really easy time achieving my goal to spend as much time as possible outside the house. Monday Nathan and I went to the mall on a Father's Day gift-buying mission. While there I bought myself this bling at Sephora:
It's a locket that has solid perfume inside. I'm a little bit concerned that Hello Kitty is not appropriate for a white midwestern suburban housewife, because I kind of tend to think the key demographic for Hello Kitty is little girls and tiny Asian women who are the size of little girls. And I'm thinking it might be a little bit too blinged-out for a white person who schleps around in jeans and flip-flops. But, as somebody told me on Facebook when I was contemplating some Hello Kitty Doc Martens, life is too short to worry about particular fashion items being appropriate.
(I will say that I don't think the "life is short" rule justifies completely egregious fashion choices, like the skin-tight pants with florescent splatters that I saw a larger-butted woman wearing at the gym yesterday. But hopefully it's okay for me to wear a simple necklace.)
In other "pointless spending" news, I highly recommend the Bath & Body Works products in S'Mores and Blueberry Waffle flavors. They only have the soap and hand sanitizer in those scents, but they are really good.
Yesterday we went to the pool. The pool is sort of the center of the social scene when you're a suburban housewife, so you always catch up on some gossip. However, as a side note, it is hard to catch up on gossip when you're experiencing the burning pain of sunscreen in your eyes, so I am not recommending Neutrogena Wet Skin sunscreen spray.
Monday, June 6, 2011
SuperIma Sunday Check-In: "Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend" Edition
Last night I asked Nathan if he possibly wanted to go to the pool or splash pad tomorrow, and he said, "I can't, I'm too busy with my work." I asked him what kind of work he had to do, and he said, "Math, writing my name, and making potions."
Now, first off, let me note for the sake of anybody new here that we are not homeschoolers, so it's not like my kid has assignments or lessons or whatever to complete at home. I think maybe he just watched a Berenstain Bears DVD where Brother Bear had to do homework, and so now he's pretending that he has homework, too. And the whole "making potions" thing most certainly came from a TV show, or else what Nathan overhears when I play my Billy Joel/Elton John playlist. ("If I were a sculptor/But then again, no/Or a man who makes potions in a traveling show ... ")
Anyway, this morning Nathan asked me if I could fish him out some underwear from the dryer, and he said, "Hurry up, I'm going to be late for work!" I asked him where he worked and he said, "Downstairs," with a slight tone of disappointment.
That's great, it's nice to be able to work from home. And speaking of, I have my own angst about professional endeavors coming up. But then I read original SuperIma Leigh Ann's check-in today, and she is so excited about her new job (which is sort of like her old job, but then she moved away and came back and things are different with the job now, in a good way), and anyway she inspired me to be more optimistic about my own work. Although any work I would get would be very part-time, I started to worry about the unpredictability and the juggling of it all. And, to paraphrase something my friend Farrah once said about one of her own career changes, there's a whole shift in how I define myself here. I'm going from "stay-at-home-mom" to "part-time freelancer," and change is always hard. The strange thing is that I never saw myself being a stay-at-home-mom, and the plan was always to do some sort of paid work, and then I got stuck and scared and ... there's a lot to be said here about self-actualization and stupid societal labels (SAHM! WOHM! PT WAHM!) but if I tried to transcribe all the drivel that's tangled up in a giant disorganized pile in my mind, this post would be incredibly long, and possibly not the slightest bit coherent.
(Also let me note that my brother and I used to have a sort of running gag/inside joke/tradition of calling each other every Friday and singing a very bad, high-pitched version of Lover Boy's "Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend." Now my brother is a clergyperson, which means he does his most important work on the weekend, and I am certainly not living the Monday-through-Friday-nine-to-five lifestyle either.)
So, with the stress of ch-ch-cha-changes in work-related matters, I admit that this was a pointlessly emotional week. At many points I just wanted to throw up my hands and say, "No, life, don't throw me anything more! No, no more! I can't handle it!" Which is ridiculously dramatic since the stimulus that produced this hand-throwing frustration was something like a stain on the carpet.
Yeah.
So, last week I said my goal was to establish some kind of plan for babysitting. I kind of sort of did something about that, in that there's a teenage girl who is in the show with me who seems like a responsible, take-charge type, and I told her she could babysit for Nathan sometime. And that was all I did about that goal.
But my goal to pet Leia went really well! It's really good to set goals involving pets, because pets generally don't let you forget about them. Leia would get to meowing and rolling around on the floor in her general "notice me" behavior, and I would be like, "Well, I did have this goal ..."
I thought it would be cute if I had some photos of Leia to accompany this post. Here's the thing about Leia, though: she is the least photogenic cat I have ever had. You see her doing something cute, so you grab the camera. Except she sees you and starts rolling around and meowing, and you get weird photos where her mouth is open and she looks like she's going to bite you. Or else she has the glowing cat eyes of death. Or she's in some weird, unnatural-looking position. Here are a few recent Leia photos to illustrate the difficulty of taking cute cat pictures:
As you can see, Leia gets plenty of attention. Goal achieved.
Moving on to this week's goals ... As I said yesterday, we're going on a small local-ish trip to a waterpark, so that pretty much takes care of the "letting things slide" part of my SuperIma goals. (Waterpark, slides, get it? No but really I meant "let things slide" in the figurative sense, because we're going to be on vacation.)
Also this week I'm going to try my best to be out of the house as much as humanly possible, because being in my house stresses me out. Messes get made faster than I can clean them up, and that is maddening.
The end -- and now it's not even Sunday anymore.
Now, first off, let me note for the sake of anybody new here that we are not homeschoolers, so it's not like my kid has assignments or lessons or whatever to complete at home. I think maybe he just watched a Berenstain Bears DVD where Brother Bear had to do homework, and so now he's pretending that he has homework, too. And the whole "making potions" thing most certainly came from a TV show, or else what Nathan overhears when I play my Billy Joel/Elton John playlist. ("If I were a sculptor/But then again, no/Or a man who makes potions in a traveling show ... ")
Anyway, this morning Nathan asked me if I could fish him out some underwear from the dryer, and he said, "Hurry up, I'm going to be late for work!" I asked him where he worked and he said, "Downstairs," with a slight tone of disappointment.
That's great, it's nice to be able to work from home. And speaking of, I have my own angst about professional endeavors coming up. But then I read original SuperIma Leigh Ann's check-in today, and she is so excited about her new job (which is sort of like her old job, but then she moved away and came back and things are different with the job now, in a good way), and anyway she inspired me to be more optimistic about my own work. Although any work I would get would be very part-time, I started to worry about the unpredictability and the juggling of it all. And, to paraphrase something my friend Farrah once said about one of her own career changes, there's a whole shift in how I define myself here. I'm going from "stay-at-home-mom" to "part-time freelancer," and change is always hard. The strange thing is that I never saw myself being a stay-at-home-mom, and the plan was always to do some sort of paid work, and then I got stuck and scared and ... there's a lot to be said here about self-actualization and stupid societal labels (SAHM! WOHM! PT WAHM!) but if I tried to transcribe all the drivel that's tangled up in a giant disorganized pile in my mind, this post would be incredibly long, and possibly not the slightest bit coherent.
(Also let me note that my brother and I used to have a sort of running gag/inside joke/tradition of calling each other every Friday and singing a very bad, high-pitched version of Lover Boy's "Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend." Now my brother is a clergyperson, which means he does his most important work on the weekend, and I am certainly not living the Monday-through-Friday-nine-to-five lifestyle either.)
So, with the stress of ch-ch-cha-changes in work-related matters, I admit that this was a pointlessly emotional week. At many points I just wanted to throw up my hands and say, "No, life, don't throw me anything more! No, no more! I can't handle it!" Which is ridiculously dramatic since the stimulus that produced this hand-throwing frustration was something like a stain on the carpet.
Yeah.
So, last week I said my goal was to establish some kind of plan for babysitting. I kind of sort of did something about that, in that there's a teenage girl who is in the show with me who seems like a responsible, take-charge type, and I told her she could babysit for Nathan sometime. And that was all I did about that goal.
But my goal to pet Leia went really well! It's really good to set goals involving pets, because pets generally don't let you forget about them. Leia would get to meowing and rolling around on the floor in her general "notice me" behavior, and I would be like, "Well, I did have this goal ..."
I thought it would be cute if I had some photos of Leia to accompany this post. Here's the thing about Leia, though: she is the least photogenic cat I have ever had. You see her doing something cute, so you grab the camera. Except she sees you and starts rolling around and meowing, and you get weird photos where her mouth is open and she looks like she's going to bite you. Or else she has the glowing cat eyes of death. Or she's in some weird, unnatural-looking position. Here are a few recent Leia photos to illustrate the difficulty of taking cute cat pictures:
This was an attempt to take a photo of Leia lying peacefully in the sun. Somehow I caught her mid-blink, so she just looks like an angry teenager.
Then I managed to photograph her while she was sneezing. I like how you can see her little pink tongue, though.
I call this pose "The Bambi." She looks very somber because the hunter just shot her mom.
In the end you just take something funky and abstract, because you figure you're safe if you don't include her eyes, her mouth, or most of her body.
As you can see, Leia gets plenty of attention. Goal achieved.
Moving on to this week's goals ... As I said yesterday, we're going on a small local-ish trip to a waterpark, so that pretty much takes care of the "letting things slide" part of my SuperIma goals. (Waterpark, slides, get it? No but really I meant "let things slide" in the figurative sense, because we're going to be on vacation.)
Also this week I'm going to try my best to be out of the house as much as humanly possible, because being in my house stresses me out. Messes get made faster than I can clean them up, and that is maddening.
The end -- and now it's not even Sunday anymore.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Oh yeah, I forgot I had a blog
Sometimes I feel like there's just so much to write about. Events I go to, bits of news in my life, photos I've taken ... not that I'm sure any of those things is interesting to the outside observer, but they're all good things to catalog for posterity.
And then there are weeks like this past one, where it feels like eight million little mundane things happened, but there's nothing really worthy of note. The phrase nothing to write home about comes to mind, because I guess a blog is kind of the modern-day version of one big, all-encompassing letter to everybody I know (and some people I don't).
And so, with nothing to write about, I found myself posting pictures or just incoherently ranting, or just skipping a day of posting altogether.
But maybe someday I'll actually want to go back and read an account of all those boring little things I did ... ? Maybe? I'm stretching here.
So, this was my week:
The public pool opened. This should not come as a surprise to you, but I love the pool. When it's the middle of January and I'm scrambling to find gloves and coats so I can get my stir-crazy kid out the door to go to some overpriced, crowded, hot indoor play area, I think, Why can't it just be summer so we can throw on our bathing suits and go to the pool for entertainment?
My friend Sarah laughs at me because once pool seasons starts, I try to be at the pool as much as humanly possible. So far we've been able to go twice in the 6 days the pool has been opened, the other 4 days being either too cold, too rainy, or too busy.
Wednesday was one of those non-pool days. Wednesday afternoon Nathan and I drove up to the north side of Chicago to be in a focus group being run by my bloggy friends Caitlin and Sara. The focus group was at Little Beans Cafe, which is a coffee shop with a full kids' play area in it. Nathan played with his friends Caden and Lucas (who are Farrah's sons), and he had so much fun that he was reluctant to leave. (And by "reluctant to leave" I mean "kind of had a meltdown.") While the kids were playing, the moms and I gave our feedback on Kidgrade, a new website where parents rate the kid-friendliness of various stores, restaurants, and attractions. (The site is still pretty new, so there aren't that many establishments in their database yet.)
I had rehearsal three nights this past week. In case you forgot, I am an emcee for the park district Beatles tribute concert. We're doing two shows at an art fair this weekend, two at a street fair in July, and some other outdoor thing in August. I am seriously bored to death by the script I have to read, and I'm the one who wrote it. It is so not funny.
In other news, I did manage to hammer out a post for Technorati yesterday. The post is about breastfeeding in public, about how we're getting mixed messages like "breast is best" and "but don't do it here." I always get a little nervous when I write about hot-button issues like breastfeeding because I don't want to make it seem like I'm at all judge-y of people who make any particular choices.
As for my own personal experience, I nursed Nathan for a year, but (1) for awhile his doctor said I needed to supplement with formula because he wasn't gaining weight, and (2) I felt horrifically guilty about this one bottle of formula a day for one month of his life, and also (3) I agonized on so many occasions about how little I was pumping out at work, plus (4) I refused to go on medication for my depression because I just had to breastfeed for a year, and in the end (5) I realized that there were very few people who never fed formula and that I shouldn't have spent so much time feeling guilty about Items (1)-(4). So, my point is, on the whole Breast vs. Bottle debate, my attitude is kind of like, whatever you pick is fine. I just wrote that article because I find it frustrating that new moms have the whole "breast is best" message drilled into them, and yet then they encounter some people who make breastfeeding difficult in public. (I should note that most women do not encounter obstacles to public breastfeeding, but when somebody does it gets a lot of media attention and thus the message reaches a wider audience.)
Anyway my Technorati article got a lot of Facebook likes, so I hope that means a lot of people read it. I hope so not only because I'm an attention whore, but also because I think it generates actual income in ad revenue for me. (Not a lot of income, mind you, and to be perfectly honest I don't understand how any of that works.)
Overall this week has been frustrating. I've found myself getting flustered by the smallest of tasks. For example, I have decided I never want to empty the dishwasher again, even though I've been doing it for years and you'd think it wouldn't bother me. The laundry? UGH. Cleaning and straightening? Why bother?
I'm unhappy with my eating, and my lack of exercise. So many days I eat so well all day, only to totally blow it at night by doing something dumb like eating peanut butter straight out of the jar. And then I feel so dumb afterward because if you're going to eat something high in fat/calories, it should at least be some kind of fancy meal prepared by a professional chef. But at the time when the food binge is going on, I can't possibly think of a single reason why I shouldn't just consume every form of carbohydrate I have in the house.
Exercise-wise, I had two good sessions with Trainer Jill this past week. And also I did the stationary bike once, seeing as my real bike got stolen. I ran/walked at the park on one occasion, and then I did a tiny bit of swimming. So, you know, my exercise wasn't terrible, but I just don't feel like it's up to the same standards as some of my previous exercise weeks.
Between my poor eating, my lackluster exercise attempts, and my complete and total frustration with anything I've written in the past two weeks, I think I might be in a bit of a rut.
The good news is, we are going on a small mid-week trip to an indoor waterpark hotel this week. Bill decided he wanted to go, and then I was able to use my stellar blogging connections to get us a discount. Or maybe everybody is eligible for that discount because it's not a weekend. I don't know.
And then there are weeks like this past one, where it feels like eight million little mundane things happened, but there's nothing really worthy of note. The phrase nothing to write home about comes to mind, because I guess a blog is kind of the modern-day version of one big, all-encompassing letter to everybody I know (and some people I don't).
And so, with nothing to write about, I found myself posting pictures or just incoherently ranting, or just skipping a day of posting altogether.
But maybe someday I'll actually want to go back and read an account of all those boring little things I did ... ? Maybe? I'm stretching here.
So, this was my week:
The public pool opened. This should not come as a surprise to you, but I love the pool. When it's the middle of January and I'm scrambling to find gloves and coats so I can get my stir-crazy kid out the door to go to some overpriced, crowded, hot indoor play area, I think, Why can't it just be summer so we can throw on our bathing suits and go to the pool for entertainment?
My friend Sarah laughs at me because once pool seasons starts, I try to be at the pool as much as humanly possible. So far we've been able to go twice in the 6 days the pool has been opened, the other 4 days being either too cold, too rainy, or too busy.
Wednesday was one of those non-pool days. Wednesday afternoon Nathan and I drove up to the north side of Chicago to be in a focus group being run by my bloggy friends Caitlin and Sara. The focus group was at Little Beans Cafe, which is a coffee shop with a full kids' play area in it. Nathan played with his friends Caden and Lucas (who are Farrah's sons), and he had so much fun that he was reluctant to leave. (And by "reluctant to leave" I mean "kind of had a meltdown.") While the kids were playing, the moms and I gave our feedback on Kidgrade, a new website where parents rate the kid-friendliness of various stores, restaurants, and attractions. (The site is still pretty new, so there aren't that many establishments in their database yet.)
I had rehearsal three nights this past week. In case you forgot, I am an emcee for the park district Beatles tribute concert. We're doing two shows at an art fair this weekend, two at a street fair in July, and some other outdoor thing in August. I am seriously bored to death by the script I have to read, and I'm the one who wrote it. It is so not funny.
In other news, I did manage to hammer out a post for Technorati yesterday. The post is about breastfeeding in public, about how we're getting mixed messages like "breast is best" and "but don't do it here." I always get a little nervous when I write about hot-button issues like breastfeeding because I don't want to make it seem like I'm at all judge-y of people who make any particular choices.
As for my own personal experience, I nursed Nathan for a year, but (1) for awhile his doctor said I needed to supplement with formula because he wasn't gaining weight, and (2) I felt horrifically guilty about this one bottle of formula a day for one month of his life, and also (3) I agonized on so many occasions about how little I was pumping out at work, plus (4) I refused to go on medication for my depression because I just had to breastfeed for a year, and in the end (5) I realized that there were very few people who never fed formula and that I shouldn't have spent so much time feeling guilty about Items (1)-(4). So, my point is, on the whole Breast vs. Bottle debate, my attitude is kind of like, whatever you pick is fine. I just wrote that article because I find it frustrating that new moms have the whole "breast is best" message drilled into them, and yet then they encounter some people who make breastfeeding difficult in public. (I should note that most women do not encounter obstacles to public breastfeeding, but when somebody does it gets a lot of media attention and thus the message reaches a wider audience.)
Anyway my Technorati article got a lot of Facebook likes, so I hope that means a lot of people read it. I hope so not only because I'm an attention whore, but also because I think it generates actual income in ad revenue for me. (Not a lot of income, mind you, and to be perfectly honest I don't understand how any of that works.)
Overall this week has been frustrating. I've found myself getting flustered by the smallest of tasks. For example, I have decided I never want to empty the dishwasher again, even though I've been doing it for years and you'd think it wouldn't bother me. The laundry? UGH. Cleaning and straightening? Why bother?
I'm unhappy with my eating, and my lack of exercise. So many days I eat so well all day, only to totally blow it at night by doing something dumb like eating peanut butter straight out of the jar. And then I feel so dumb afterward because if you're going to eat something high in fat/calories, it should at least be some kind of fancy meal prepared by a professional chef. But at the time when the food binge is going on, I can't possibly think of a single reason why I shouldn't just consume every form of carbohydrate I have in the house.
Exercise-wise, I had two good sessions with Trainer Jill this past week. And also I did the stationary bike once, seeing as my real bike got stolen. I ran/walked at the park on one occasion, and then I did a tiny bit of swimming. So, you know, my exercise wasn't terrible, but I just don't feel like it's up to the same standards as some of my previous exercise weeks.
Between my poor eating, my lackluster exercise attempts, and my complete and total frustration with anything I've written in the past two weeks, I think I might be in a bit of a rut.
The good news is, we are going on a small mid-week trip to an indoor waterpark hotel this week. Bill decided he wanted to go, and then I was able to use my stellar blogging connections to get us a discount. Or maybe everybody is eligible for that discount because it's not a weekend. I don't know.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
The Simple Life?
I woke up this morning with the feeling like a huge ball of snit was knotted up inside of me. There's nothing wrong in particular; just the dumb stresses of life. Maybe it's the heat. I know I have been whining about the cold forever, so it's not that I'm complaining that it's hot, it's just that ... maybe the heat takes awhile to get used to?
I told Trainer Jill that I needed to lift some really heavy weights to help break up the snit ball. But after my training, the ball was still there.
I had some emails to send when I got home, and they were vaguely of a professional nature, and I just sat there completely unable to send them. I clicked over to Facebook instead, then looked at some random websites, which is what I always do when I'm trying to avoid something. I thought about the people who were creating the contents of the sites, the people who were making things happen in their lives, whereas all I could do was sit on my couch and think about my own incompetence.
I used to be an overachiever, at the top of my class. I imagined I'd always be professionally successful, or at least competent. Now I just sit here sometimes and think, what has become of me? How has having a child changed me so much?
Earlier this week I had a most maddening conversation with another mother. She was talking about how she had chosen half-day kindergarten for her child, even though the norm at his local school was full-day kindergarten, and all the other kids in the class would be staying full-day. "I actually like being with my child. I don't want to send him away," she said, with all the judgment and condescension with which you would imagine somebody would say something like that. She went on to say something about how she made all these sacrifices so she could stay home with her children, and about how she thought full-day kindergarten is designed to cater to working mothers. She went on to cite some stupid study about how children put in daycares are more aggressive, and how families are so disconnected because kids are too busy with school and organized activities. I seriously didn't think there were people who still thought like her.
My point is, I don't see myself in her camp. I don't believe a woman should give up her whole career to raise children. And yet ... here I am. Feeling stuck. See, here's the thing I never realized back when I was in my whole "women should do it all" phase: somebody still has to care for the children. And I'm not saying that the "somebody" who cares for the children can't or shouldn't be a paid caregiver. In many ways, I think children are better off spending some time without their own parents. I'm just saying, once you have a child, you realize it's just never simple.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like having a child is like suddenly having to have the energy and emotion to run two human beings, yourself and that child. I imagine that if I had another child, it would feel like I was having to be three human beings. And no matter what kind of childcare setup you have, it feels like that child is still running on some level in the background of your being.
And I know I'm being weird and vague here, but I think the bottom line is that I'm scared to try to jump back into professional life. I'm scared of a life where I have to juggle a bunch of responsibilities and expend a lot of emotion and give up sleep because of all the unpredictability that comes from that child constantly running in the background (or foreground) of my life.
I can feel the Old Shannon wanting to smack me. But the Old Shannon didn't realize, it's just not that simple.
I told Trainer Jill that I needed to lift some really heavy weights to help break up the snit ball. But after my training, the ball was still there.
I had some emails to send when I got home, and they were vaguely of a professional nature, and I just sat there completely unable to send them. I clicked over to Facebook instead, then looked at some random websites, which is what I always do when I'm trying to avoid something. I thought about the people who were creating the contents of the sites, the people who were making things happen in their lives, whereas all I could do was sit on my couch and think about my own incompetence.
I used to be an overachiever, at the top of my class. I imagined I'd always be professionally successful, or at least competent. Now I just sit here sometimes and think, what has become of me? How has having a child changed me so much?
Earlier this week I had a most maddening conversation with another mother. She was talking about how she had chosen half-day kindergarten for her child, even though the norm at his local school was full-day kindergarten, and all the other kids in the class would be staying full-day. "I actually like being with my child. I don't want to send him away," she said, with all the judgment and condescension with which you would imagine somebody would say something like that. She went on to say something about how she made all these sacrifices so she could stay home with her children, and about how she thought full-day kindergarten is designed to cater to working mothers. She went on to cite some stupid study about how children put in daycares are more aggressive, and how families are so disconnected because kids are too busy with school and organized activities. I seriously didn't think there were people who still thought like her.
My point is, I don't see myself in her camp. I don't believe a woman should give up her whole career to raise children. And yet ... here I am. Feeling stuck. See, here's the thing I never realized back when I was in my whole "women should do it all" phase: somebody still has to care for the children. And I'm not saying that the "somebody" who cares for the children can't or shouldn't be a paid caregiver. In many ways, I think children are better off spending some time without their own parents. I'm just saying, once you have a child, you realize it's just never simple.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I feel like having a child is like suddenly having to have the energy and emotion to run two human beings, yourself and that child. I imagine that if I had another child, it would feel like I was having to be three human beings. And no matter what kind of childcare setup you have, it feels like that child is still running on some level in the background of your being.
And I know I'm being weird and vague here, but I think the bottom line is that I'm scared to try to jump back into professional life. I'm scared of a life where I have to juggle a bunch of responsibilities and expend a lot of emotion and give up sleep because of all the unpredictability that comes from that child constantly running in the background (or foreground) of my life.
I can feel the Old Shannon wanting to smack me. But the Old Shannon didn't realize, it's just not that simple.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
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