"You are my honey pie octopus" and other ramblings

Random 1: This is what my husband told me last night. I was flattered but understandably confused - it sounds like a nice thing, right? He reminded me that it comes from a canvas I did of Grace-isms last year. I'll try to take a picture of that when the sun comes out.

Random 2: I woke Grace up early this morning and she grumbled about being woken during her bestest dream ever. And the she saw me and said "I know you are going to tell me to hurry up because you have your going to court clothes on" Grumble grumble. We are both predictable.

Random 3: Did Michelle Bachmann really tell Michael Steele that he "be da man"? Really?!!? Maybe there should be a mental health evaluation before Congressmen/women are permitted to be sworn in.

Back to Random 2: She did hurry up so now I have a few extra moments to blog.

Random 4: The kids asked to go to the "sticker" store yesterday and instead of stickers, Charlie came home with Barack Obama and US Capitol scrapbooking paper. He then spent the rest of the evening re-writing the US Constitution for fun. Until American Idol came on. He is also kind of predictable.

Random 5: I decided yesterday that David Cook's debut album may be my favorite album ever. I'm worried about what that means and if I'm descending into middle-agedness more quickly than I should.

Random 6: Grace is wearing her sparkly black and silver Christmas dress with her pink and purple argyle tights. She objects to the term "fancy" however and prefers "beautiful". It's probably a good thing that beautiful girl is spending the morning with my secretary and not anywhere out in the world where other people would question my mothering skills.

Random 7: And Sarah, the snowflake paper is KI Memories.

And now it's almost March

I'm getting creative with the post titles, eh? Soon it will be nothing but an update on the weather. This may be a sign that it may be time to retire the blog but I'll have to ponder that for awhile.

This month did end up being about getting things back under control in many ways. Mostly every way except for my eating because I discovered this month that I am a stress eater. I'm sure that is something I can deal with now that I've acknowledged it but for now, I'm leaving that to be a battle fought at a later time.

We undertook several home organizational tasks this month, especially in the children's rooms and it has made an enormous difference. I also made an effort to get the books on this level of the house put somewhere and it's shocking what a difference that makes as well. I love books but piles of books everywhere on every surface and hiding in every nook and cranny and Christmas decoration box is just not a good way to live.

And while it still feels like there was a lot of stimulation of the economy going on in our household in February, we did not spend like drunken sailors so I will count that as a victory.

Which leaves the eating and the stress. The stress is mostly out of my control due to some health issues which are also out of my control. It's mostly frustrating to me that over a month after I set out to figure out what is going on, I still have no clear cut idea whether it's serious or whether all the stress will be over nothing. Long waits for tests, doctors who go on vacations, nurses who don't return phone calls - I'm going to blame my exploding chocolate cookie addiction on these things which means that I don't have to blame it on my own lack of self-control. In the end, I'm hoping I can talk the doctor into a tummy tuck and the extra cookies won't cause a longer term problem.

It's February?

I had a dream a few days ago that it was June. It was a happy dream until the moment that I realized it was June and then I started to cry "but what happened to all of the months I missed?" And that's how I feel about January.

It was a completely unfocused, chaotic and, honestly, wasted month. I feel like I lost control of just about everything in January from my eating to our spending to putting the socks away. There are lots of reasons the month went the way it did but excuses are just that. I felt it most acutely this morning when I pulled on my pants and they were snug. Again. All of those months of diet and going to the gym and I just blew it this month.

But as Anne of Green Gables liked to say, "tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it... yet." And so tomorrow I will start again with an intention to get things back under control. (Ignoring for the moment that my need to be in control is part of what created this mess in the first place!)

Really, I think there are few things cuter

than my five year old, trying to wave the terrible towel above her head, hitting everything in sight, including her own head, while trying to sing "Pittsburgh's going to the Super Bowl" even though she gets almost every single word wrong. It's cute, I promise.

American Idol

Grace has cried twice tonight contemplating how much she would miss me if she did well enough on American Idol for the judges to send her on to Hollywood. I honestly don't even know where to begin talking her down.

"It's like reading your journal"

Not this layout. This one is just fine because it doesn't say anything at all.

Charlie was looking through some recent layouts last night and ended the evening sobbing in my lap because of the journaling he read on two of them. I don't think I do a lot of layouts with deep journaling; most of them are bland and boring and it's my biggest obstacle when scrapbooking. I don't have a lot of patience for trivial details and I don't tell stories very well. In fact, I'm taking 3 classes right now (the Sense & Sensibility workshop at Debbie's Hodge's site!) to try to overcome that problem.

But back to the tears. I guess I do a fair number of personal journal type layouts, I just don't post them publicly very often. I can remember one that I posted here about my issues with not being able to have another baby. But mostly I do the page, say what I need to say, feel better after I get it out and tuck them away and forget about them. I don't have a writing journal so I guess Charlie was right about the content of these pages.

So he read two of them, not very deep ones or on a sensitive topic - just ones where I reflected about changes he has gone through, changes we have gone through as a family - and the tears started. He has always struggled with getting older; for the most part he's not a kid that is eager to reach new milestones. He likes things to stay just like they are. He is still upset that we got rid of my old Subaru with the worn through carpet and sand in the joints and hole in the seat. He already worries about going away to college and not sleeping in his own bed. He didn't want us to paint the house a new color. So I might have guessed that pages about my feelings watching him get older wouldn't go over very well.

As I tucked him into bed, he told me that I could scrapbook about the fun stuff and the silly things we do but that he doesn't like the other kinds of pages. So maybe it's time I get a journal after all.

Resolutions

Resolutions don't start in our house until January 7th - the day after Justin's birthday. Last year I had a very long, ambitious list of things I resolved to do better and I did okay on some and not okay on most of them. Having such a long list of resolutions was probably not a great idea since my one little word for the year was "focus".

I've decided to approach it differently this year. I am going to continue to "focus" on losing weight and getting in shape; I still have a long way to go but I am very proud of what I did accomplish in 2008. As far as new resolutions, I am going to reprise one from last year - write - but with a twist.

I'm going with the photo-a-day approach to resolutions this year. So I'm going to incorporate things I already do with things I would like to do, or at least do better. And I'm going to try to be realistic about what can actually fit into a 24 hour period, week, month, etc. So without further ado... the list of resolutions for 2009

1. Photo-a-day. I think this is the only resolution I can reasonably commit to doing once a day.

2. Write one hour per week. And that may be a stretch. But writing everyday clearly was not practical so I'm going to try it this way.

3. Read one "good" book every two weeks. I do want to read all those classics, and my pile keeps growing. But practically I can't survive on a trashless reading list, I need some fluff and some new stuff in there too. That pile is also growing. (Rereading the Twilight series three times between November 21 and Christmas didn't help shrink the pile any.) So my goal is to finish one good book every two weeks and as long as I do that, I can squeeze some just for fun reading in there as well.

4. Layout a week. I really, really loved layout a day for the year that I did it. But my life is different now so one a week it is.

5. The just for fun one. Download one new itunes song a week; also with a twist. I'm going to expand my musical horizons - U2 and whiny boy songs are not permitted in my song-a-week playlist. It will be all new songs that I take the time to learn and savor; blues, jazz, classical.

So that's it! Nothing incredibly ambitious this year, just bumping up a notch things I already do.