myself

Wow, if I don't blog today, the month of February will pass by without a single blog entry! The horrors! I don't think that's ever happened to me in the eight and a half years of blogging.

January was a month of snow. Enough to keep our world magical and white, but not too much to overwhelm us and make us cry. In January we got rid of TV. We have plenty of other screens, but we watch a lot less. A LOT less. The TV corner is now a reading corner. Ellis sounded out his first words: "I am Sam. Sam, I am." And I became obsessed with knitting. I suppose it was only a matter of time. Look for me on Ravelry.

February was a month of friends. Friends visiting, visiting friends. Went down to DC to say goodbye to TulipGirl before their next international adventure. And my college buddy Joanna came for a week with twins and hubby. We played and her hubby conferenced. So much fun.

February was a month of waiting. I finished the last of my grad school applications in January. In February, I got my one accept and the reject that broke my heart. In March, I will move on and see what the next door holds for me, for all of us.

Yes, I knit their hats.

I'm so focused on GRE study. Friday is coming quickly. I'll be so glad to have it behind me. It's so frustrating, because I'm spending so much time on just inane stuff. You know, who wants to remember how to do quadratic equations again?! Studying for the GRE has no real product at the end. I'm not researching or writing. And it's just stupid.

Right now if I were on a reality TV show that was a GRE competition, my fellow competitors would be saying things like, "I really don't think Jnet has was it takes to really excel at the GRE," in their private on-screen interviews where they dish about fellow contestants, darn misanthropes rendering my efforts otiose and nothing can palliate their compendious invectives.

So inbetween my grousing about the GRE, we've hit up the Please Touch Museum a couple more times and the zoo once this week. And generally managed to carry on without enough sleep.

And tomorrow begins a new week. And pretty soon this horrible debacle will be fait compli.

Three things making me happy today:

1. Or rather making Marlowe happy. "Marlowe make apple pie!"

Thanks, Melissa and Doug.

2. Making GRE study happier. Khan Academy. I heard about it on NPR. Little YouTube videos on so many topics. Just breaking it down. Keeping it simple. It is fantastic! After this horrible GRE debacle is over, I may work through the Finance course, since my basic understanding of Finance is pay the bills and keep the number at the bottom positive. Ha!

3. Baby giraffes.

Did not have my head on straight today. But the day got progressively better. I consider it to be a win if I'm having a crummy day but don't yell at the kids.

And I had a nice walk this afternoon with M.

I managed to get dinner in the crockpot early. It was potentially a good idea, but kind of didn't work out. I needed to use up a lot of random veggie bits, so chopped them up and threw them in the crockpot with some curry. Well, really too much curry. Yes, there can be too much curry. That was the problem.

Marlowe's kitchen interest just really amuses me sometimes. He wanted to hold the whisk while we went on our walk. Sometimes he holds a lion or a hippo, but today it was the whisk. He then cried, "where my spatula!?" which he says "ba-la-la".

I'm trying to kick it into high gear with some GRE study. Less than 2 weeks. Went out to study. I think they're going to hold me back in community college once they see my scores. Can I be such an idiot in math!?

And hooray for the Chilean miners rescue!

Today we celebrate the great habit of those with more power triumphing over those with less power. Not to mix philosophy and history or anything... So why is it that we have Columbus Day? Did the powers that be miss having Fall Break or something?

Anyway, so no mail today. Or banks. Or school.

Nice for E to have a quieter day, because it's been a crazy weekend.

No soccer this weekend, due to tournaments, so we took the opportunity for the Great Upstairs Switcheroo. Something needed to be done about the Home Office aka Pigsty. The poor room that never really got moved into properly when we moved into this house a year ago. The room that had a table with my sewing stuff somewhere buried under all that crap. It was seriously scary. Hubby and I considered abandoning ship as one of the options. Closing the door and pretending it is a two-bedroom house. Or scooping it all out the window with a snowshovel.

But we took the upper road and tackled it head-on like responsible adults. After pondering the situation extensively, we decided to switch the boys' room and the home office. And to move the sewing into our large bedroom with wasted spaced. The middle bedroom is a bit longer and more narrow than the back one, and has a sliver of a window, so the boys are in a much nicer room for them now. Lots of natural light and a better floor plan. I'm excited to really settle them into it and decorate a little.

The front two bedrooms have an internal door, which makes for a fun sort of Suite for Adult Affairs. And after a couple of trips to IKEA for about 500gagillion KASSET boxes, I am well on my way to craft/sewing organizational zen. I'm really moving to another level here, and it's profoundly life-altering.

So that was Saturday. Sunday we went to church, driving down a very tidy street, since President Obama came to our neighborhood that evening. But we scooted out right after church to Lancaster, so now chance of seeing him. We went with pumpkin pies in hand to celebrate my Grandma's 80th bday. It was a beautiful, fall day. Albeit a very long day.

Today, I continued to master zen, and then took the kids to the park. Did a quick pop in to IKEA in the evening for my second installment of KASSET. And got up on Project Runway. And that's the news.

Happy Birthday to my mom!

Having a hard time revving the inner engine today. But I did make three pumpkin pies starting with El Pumpkin. And some laundry. And some phone calls.

Felt kind of blah, but redeemed hte afternoon with a little coffee/chocolate milk run before dinner.

And that's about it. The news

Am planning on watching this movie tonight: Sweet Land. I started it on my phone, but it's really great, so I'm going to watch it again on Netflix streaming. If you love great shots of the Midwest, this one is for you.

Felt extremely sluggish today.

Went to the gym this morning and took advantage of some childcare. It was a slow grind. Barely made 3 miles. I may or may not do another 5K a week from Saturday. Will pay attention to the weather forecast, 'cause I'm not going to run in cold, wet, rainy.

Went over to this place that sells gently used kids' clothes and got rid of some of M's old clothes for store credit. I don't need new clothes for the boys, but you get more if you get store credit (like 50% instead of 40%0. I've been getting these Lunch Bots (this store has a lot of eco friendly kids' stuff, too). Adorable little stainless steel containers!

I'm going to start packing E's lunch. School lunch just isn't healthy enough. So between the fun cloth sandwich bags and these lunchbots, we're on our way to an eco-friendly lunch box. Ha!

I kind of crashed this afternoon, though, and the kids watched too much tv. Shame.

This evening was Ellis's classroom open house. He explained in great detail every tiny aspect of his day. It was great fun!

And then GRE study time. I've been stalled in a morass of GRE hate for the past several weeks. But I stopped and got some index cards and new pens and pencils. I think I have a new strategy and hopefully can get some good study time in because the stupid thing is two weeks from tomorrow.

Insert Major Panic here.

I don't want to put it off, though. I just want it over with.

photo credit

EIGHT YEARS, peeps!!! That is eight years of blogging. On this day eight years ago, I wrote my first blog entry. (now forever lost in the cyber black hole of deletion.)

I had just started grad school (the first time) when I started the blog. It has taken me through grad school, the move from New Orleans to Philly, and the addition of two kids.

I was blogging before blogging was cool. Eight is like a 80 blog years. Ha! Ok, maybe that's a bit extreme.

So, today, the run-down. Kids slept terribly. I think between them, I was up from 3.30-5.30. Again. Blessed bus driver called to see if I wanted her to pick-up E. Love her. Cold and rainy this morning. Bus, please!

I went out and ran an errand for the lady from church who recently had knee replacement and lives near me, and I went to Target with M. We got a few bits of thing. Including popcorn to munch on. And I got the Magic Eraser for the first time, and now the dining room walls are kid art free. Love it!

Marlowe dumped about 2 c of salt on the last piece of apple pie. I yelled at him. I felt bad about it. Because it's not like he did something wrong. "Want make apple pie!" But, dude! the last huge piece of apple pie! (that was right after he played with eggshells and coffee grounds that are supposed to go to compost.) Sigh.

Delicious soup for supper: ground beef (yes, grass fed), stewed tomatoes, sliced cabbages, a dash of cayenne, salt and pepper.

And a good workout at the gym. 3.4 miles (incl the 5 min warm-up/cool-down)

___
So I was in the car listening to the classical station fund raise. I couldn't turn away, it was like listening to a train wreck.
So their promo for x level of donation was a 6 cd set of the top 100 classical pieces of all time or something like that. And, get this, they're organized by mood!!! "Uplifting" and "relaxing", etc. Groan.

But this is what I found really interesting. The two people were having this discussion on whether or not a few of the pieces really should be on the Uplifting CD, (the two pieces were he "Montagues and Capulets" from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and Sibelius's Finlandia). Sooo, I'm dying to know what these people consider is uplifting classical music. Because apparently minor keys don't make the cut. They did play an example of they considered to be very uplifting (the last movment of Beethoven's 9th), And THEN they said, "what can you possibly play to follow that?" Which was just the perfect thing to say. Because it is like the embodiment of the Beethoven complex of the 19th century, like how some people (*ahem*Brahms*ahem*) had a hard time approaching writing a symphony because of the Beethoven shadow. After that they moved onto the relaxing CD. Apparently "Casta Diva" is "relaxing." I pretended to be Maria Callas.

Today I ran my first ever 5K race. Pretty incredible to me still, especially considering that a couple of months ago, I would be huffing and puffing just walking that distance. About 8 weeks ago, I joined a gym and promptly started doing the Couch to 5K running plan. I was very Couch. It's a nine week plan, and I admit, that I got to week 6 and stalled out a bit with traveling and wasn't sure about this race I planned for. So I decided to just do the distance last Tuesday just to see if I could do it, because so far I had only made it to about 2.3 miles. Well, on Tuesday I did it and felt pretty good, so went ahead with the plan. Today I did the actual race.

Before the race the Philly Phanatic came to send us on our way. My kids loved him. I thought Marlowe would be scared, but he kept following him around saying "hi!"

My time was 34 mins, which I thought was decent considering that 8 weeks ago I was couch. That's about a 10-11 min mile. And I ran the whole time, didn't walk. My primary goal was to finish, my secondary goal was to run a steady pace the whole time, and I did both.

I was really glad that hubby and the boys came to cheer me on. I got a friend to come do it, too, and she has been running for much longer, so she finished much earlier. She took Ellis up a few hundred feet before the finish line to cheer me on, and Ellis grabbed my hand and zoomed me to the finish line. I was not prepared to go that fast. ha! He was adorable. When we were about to leave he said, "hey, where's your medal?" I'm not sure if coming in 127th warrants a medal, but at least I was comfortably in the middle of almost 200 runners. Not last place, considering my (non)athletic career thus far, that's a pretty decent place to be.

A bunch of my fellow mothering peeps have been writing posts every week about "real" moments, not just the shiny, happy blogpost-worthy moments, of motherhood. I fully intended to participate, but, to be honest, usually on Mondays, I don't feel up to facing reality. Either I'm in a really good mood, and don't want to think about "real." Or I'm too grumpy, I couldn't show that side of myself on the internet.

My true confession: most of the time, I don't feel cut out for the stay-at-home-mom gig.
It's complicated to say that. Because it doesn't mean that I don't love my kids or want to be with them. Nor does it mean that I don't embrace the ennobling aspects of raising children. It's hard to make the mothering jive with the other desires and gifts rolling around in my head. And I wonder how to play things out practically.

I keep trying to write a post about this, but I can't quite explain it. What IS real? The truth is, I'm trying to figure out a lot. It's part of the reason, I haven't been blogging so much. I used to just brain barf on my blog, now I don't feel so free to do that.

If we could just paint all day, I'm sure that would help. Who needs to tidy up and do laundry anyway?

For the rest of the peeps, check out the list:
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