Hello World

How the hell am I going to do this?  How am I going to work, be a decent mother and have some sort of life?  I am beginning to question whether all three of those options are even remotely possible.

Well, that is not entirely true.  If I can combine “life” with “mother” then it works.  For instance, I’m now taking my jog stroller to Conor’s school and after I pick him up, we go on a run around the neighborhood.  I’m not sure that counts as quality time, but it’s at least together time.  And then when we come home and I water around the parched landscaping, I’m counting that as a Horticulture Lesson.

And Dave and I have now started shift parenting and work.  One of us leaves early for work, the other takes the baby in “late” and comes home “late.”  The early bird leaves work early to pick the baby up out of daycare early-ish. 

But there’s not a lot of wiggle room in my day for other activities that mean something to me—like witty blogging.  It’s not that I don’t think about you, Internet.  It’s not like I don’t have something funny to say about life around here.  I’m just too damn busy to do it. 

Nonetheless, this is not a “Goodbye, sweet blogging world.”  It’s a “Well, F*ck.  I am DAMN busy.” 

So here are some abbreviated insights that at one point in my blogging life would have warranted a full entry.  And there is more cussing than usual because that’s the mood I’m in.

*Gardening is a bitch.  I know, I know.  It’s the journey, not the destination.  Well, screw that.  I want to Arrive Somewhere in my gardening and landscaping.  I want to check something off my list.  1)  Kill ivy.  2)  Water plants.  3)  Make sure scraggly shrubbery in front are not so scraggly. 3)  Weed landscaping beds.  4)  Decide when to replace scraggly shrubbery with neighborhood-typical English boxwood shrubbery.  6)  Weed garden.  7)  Harvest rotting vegetables from garden.  8)  Move dying daylilies out of shade into full sun.  9)  Smack husband for not agreeing that finding the right sunny spot for daylilies IS a life or death decision.  Well, of all of those, I can check off #9.  The rest are on my never ending To Do list outside.

*Getting Pregnant.  Yes, the first T in TTC is a lot of fun.  And there’s been more T in the last two months than there’s been in the last year.  And yes, that does help with the stress level.  But why does every month have to be different with my body???  It’s had years, YEARS, to figure this out.  Why does it have to fuck with me with 3 positive OPKs this month (2 were, in retrospect, false positives), and a slow temperature rise after ovulation thus freaking me the heck out that I’m having an anovulatory cycle when I’m TTC and does that mean I am approaching perimenopause and how is that possible when I’m still breastfeeding????

*Enjoying Motherhood (Disgustingly cute alert):  We’ve been going on family dates lately.  Two weeks ago, we took Conor on a trolley ride in Charlotte.  (fun)  We also discovered that Reid’s Grocery in Uptown Charlotte is encased in a musical building.  That means that if you touch the multicolored lit panels all the way around the building, they will make sounds.  Essentially, you can play the building all the way around the block.  That is fun.  And for a baby, hell, that’s just one more new thing in this world that’s cool.

But that’s not the cute part.  The cute part was last weekend when we went to dinner with another family and on the walk back from the restaurant, Conor and the other little boy kept reaching out of their strollers to grasp each other’s hand.  I thought I was going to die.  We moms struggled to keep the strollers aligned so we wouldn’t break their hand holding which is hard on a narrow sidewalk.  But I could not stand the cuteness of two babies who met each other in utero liking each other so much they spontaneously wanted to hold hands.  That is too much. 

OK.  Back to work.  My blog break leaves me behind.  But my mind was going to explode if I didn’t write down what is going on in my way too tightly wound up head.  

10:25:14 AM