I’m a real blogger now.

Know why?

Because Courtney at JudithShakes Designs created for me a real blog and a real logo (and, therefore, a real identity). Thanks, Courtney, for that.

Not only does the woman [obviously] create badass websites, but she has a brilliant wry sense of humor, an approachable, totally not annoying communication style, and I’m sure if she didn’t live in whatever god-forsaken humidity-ridden state she’s currently residing in we’d totally be BFFs. Or some bizarre derivative thereof.

And not only that. I also have a Facebook page – you can also get there in the LOGO – how rad is that? (And I’d really really like it if you’d like me. Please like me. I need you to like me. I’ll die if you don’t like me. I’ll camp on your front lawn and weep until you like me. (I’m practicing my codependent routine. How was it?)).

Okay but seriously I only have 29 “likes” – kinda pathetic, especially considering I KNOW I have AT LEAST 33 readers.

Ha.

And you can follow me on The Twitter – (oh hells yeah I have a custom one). I go on The Twitter occasionally to say really profound shit in 140 characters or less. Actually it’s more like 136, since 4 are automatically taken up with the F word.

Or you can subscribe. Since I’m a real blogger now you probably feel compelled to subscribe or follow. No worries. Just go with that.

Also, since apparently when cool things happen they happen all at once…my new best friend nominated me for CBS Sacramento’s Most Valuable Blog Award…please vote for me by clicking the badge on the left or THIS LINK. I’ll owe you my life. Apparently you can vote every day. That would be totally fine with me.

And… I’m done with the shameless self-promotion. You’ll never ever see it again.

I lie.

But seriously, what do you think of the new digs?

P.S. If you hate it, I’ll tell you it’s fine and that I appreciate the feedback while simultaneously planning ways to quietly destroy you. (That’s my passive aggressive codependent impersonation. You like?)

What I learned this week…

1. The older kids teach Georgia all kinds of important, meaningful things. For example, this week they taught her to point to her nose when asked “Where are your boogers?”
2. We were all so proud.
3. Ava is pretty much exactly like me. I asked her how her first day of 4^th grade went, and she said “fine, except for the lunch situation. We all have to sit at these big tables together and most of the kids have really really, really bad manners. It was gross. The only thing that didn’t disgust me was the wall.”
4. Our idiot dog Pete knocks his water dispenser over pretty much every day, almost as soon as we fill it. So then, he has no water. Jackass. I don’t know what to do with a dog that dumb. I try letting him go thirsty so maybe he’ll connect the two phenomena, but that’s asking a lot from such a beast. Ideas?
5. Things like #4 fall into the “I Really Don’t Have Time for This Crap” category. Or the “Trivial Problems that Will One Day Push Me Over The Edge For Real” category. I mean seriously, it’s the little nagging things that assassinate me – the things that don’t have immediate answers, but matter, but not enough to be a priority…so they just sit in the back of my mind, bothering me.
6. Why do some people Capitalize The First Letter Of Every Word They Write? Is every sentence they write a TITLE? I mean even if you didn’t get that such behavior is weird, there would be so much effort involved. Why people WHY?
7. I’m so excited to go back to school I feel like throwing myself a back-to-school party. I know this will make some of you cringe, but I freaking LOVE school. I love it all. The classes, the campus, the desks, the notebooks, the highlighters, the weird-ass theory we’re forced to read, the crazy conservative born again student who just can’t help but integrate Pro-Life arguments into every discussion no matter what the context, the egotistical professors, the thwarted intellectuals, the hallways, the all-night writing sessions. I love it all.
8. In exactly 2 months, which will be one month after school begins, I will forget #7 completely and wish I still worked at the office.
9. I’m trying to remain calm about the fact that my son will be 6 years old next month and still only knows 2 or 3 letters by name and doesn’t know a single sound any letter makes. I’m trying, but it’s hard.
10. I realized I’ve been a real asshole for not responding consistently to comments on my blog. I was doing it regularly, and then I stopped. I am amending that behavior immediately.

Speaking of blogs, the super badass designer JudithShakes Designs (http://www.judithshakesdesigns.com/) finished my new blog and we should be launching it in the next couple weeks. Hope you like it. I do.

I wish I could do deep meaningful shit with my kids all the time. I do. I wish that.

But I can’t.

I wish when we spent special time together it was to knit and garden, sew pants out of upcycled wool, build things out of repurposed tires, visit abstract art museums. Paint, dance, frolic.

But I can’t.

I mean I CAN. Physically, I can.

But I can’t. Mentally. Ya feel me here?

Sometimes, I just need to pay money and do something easy with the kid – a guaranteed win. An outing that’s an “in the bag” kid pleaser with very little work on my part.

You know, like going to the movie theater to watch Transformers with your 5-year-old son, after purchasing on his behalf a large, buttered popcorn, one Sprite, one package of regular M&Ms and one package of Sour Patch Kids.

So it’s a PG-13 movie.

So it cost $40.00 we really didn’t have.

So he ate enough preservatives, sugar, additives and chemicals of unknown origin to destroy a few million brain cells.

So we didn’t really talk. Or learn anything of any use AT ALL (except, perhaps, that hot women can run full speed through a burning Chicago, dodging falling buildings and Decepticons, while wearing 3-inch spiked heels! Okay, seriously people, I gotta write a blog post about the way women are depicted in those damn action films. I’m vomiting a little just thinking about it.).

So it wasn’t deep or profound or particularly meaningful.

And I felt a little guilty that our special date together – our just he & I time – was a few hours sitting in a theater, watching large metal machines beat the shit out of each other and long-haired women with big lips dodge bullets and squeal.

But there was no preparation. No thought. No arguments. No cajoling. No disappointment when the child in question gets distracted after 10 minutes – more interested in gluing his finger to the table than furthering the objective of the well-thought-out, Waldorf-life craft project.

So it was perfect.

And halfway through the movie he crawled on my lap. And he sat on my lap the whole time. And I smelled his head and kissed his cheek and rubbed his bony little arms. And I watched him laugh when they laughed and get nervous during the fight scenes because you never know – this could be the first time the good guy loses…

And in the car we talked about who’s better: Optimus Prime or Bumblebee, and he reenacted the fight scenes and I realized I finally know the Transformers’ names like his daddy does, and he finally got an hour of uninterrupted mom-lap time.

And I gotta say, the whole thing blew wool-felting right outta the fucking water.

Well, yes. It was a really crap movie. Like bad.

1. There is so much going on in my life right now I can hardly breathe. I think I may be losing my mind for real, though I’m not sure.
2. Here are the things I’m facing this month. In August. Just this month (yes, I feel a little sorry for myself): Wrapping up an 8-year job/ Beginning grad school/ Ava starting a new school/ Beginning to homeschool Rocket/ First day with a new nanny for the baby (holy fuck that’s a big one)/ Going on a small but big-enough-to-require-planning vacation at the end of the month/Georgia’s 1^st birthday celebration/ Planning Rocket’s 6^th birthday party, which occurs the first part of September…
3. The only of the above-listed items I’ve completed is Georgia’s birthday party, which was a small, family-only affair (of about 12 people)…in which I for some god-forsaken reason decided to cook homemade carnitas, refried beans and tortillas ALL FROM SCRATCH – by myself, for the party. It was lovely but I swear I almost lost it due to the stress. I was flipping, delirious. Still am.
4. Georgia likes white sugar. She tasted it for the first time at her party. We cut her a little piece of cake and held it out in front of her…after she took a bite, she got this surprised look on her face and did a complete face-plant into it. As if her hands were just gonna take Way.Too.Long. It was beyond perfect.
5. It was a great party. It was at my mom’s house, and my brother and sister-in-law and niece & nephew came and my grandparents and my dad and stepmom and my in-laws – all of them came – and we surrounded the little Georgia with big crazy ass family arms.
6. And then we fell silent into a pork-fat coma.
7. Nature and I need to have a little talk. When we do, it’s going to go something like this: “Look, bitch, if you’re gonna give me pimples like when I was 16, you better hook me up with my 16-year-old body, too. You can’t pick and choose like that, yo.”
8. I guess I’m that stressed – I’m returning to having pubescent skin issues.
9. I’m afraid I’m going to lose friends this month since I most likely won’t be returning many phone calls, reading blogs, texting, Skyping, visiting in person (do people still do that?), emailing, Facebook stalking, Twittering, standing in front lawns peeping into windows, or any other variation of enjoyable social activities.
10. Please don’t desert me, people. I’ll resurface one of these days. Well in a month, actually. Seriously, though, months like this one should be illegal.

Cheers, all.

double-fistin' it, wondering "Mama, why the hell did you keep this from me for so long?"

lovely birthday girl, post cake face-plant

Yesterday was Georgia’s first birthday. I can’t believe it. It seems like yesterday I was going through this to bring her into the world. It’s amazing the way the universe gives you what you need. Whether I know it or not at the time, I am learning what I need to learn, gaining what I need to gain, suffering in ways that will help me grow the insight or perspective or balls to face something that’s coming my way…

Georgia’s birth was like nothing I could have ever imagined. (Read about it HERE.) I could spend a whole page or a whole day attempting to explain to you what it felt like, what it was from my perspective, but my words would fall short; they wouldn’t come close to capturing the experience.

I suppose the closest thing I could say is this: I COULD NOT DO WHAT I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO DO. I did not have the power. I simply did not have it in me. I had reached my maximum. My height. The culmination of all my strength – I was giving it everything I had – and my baby was not coming out.

And YET, there was nobody else who could do this work.

Nobody.

So I stood in excruciating pain, facing a weird sort of existential moment: do something beyond my capacity, or die, I guess.

We weren’t on the brink of dying, at least I don’t think we were, although the cord was around her neck twice and she came out blue, so perhaps I “knew” something without knowing it. But it was all very black and white: To be free from this pain, I must do this. But I cannot.

I felt somewhere deep inside me that one of us was going to die if I didn’t make this happen.

My terror was beyond words. I felt I had fallen into an abyss of black but was powerless to crawl out. I wanted out. I just wanted it to end. I wanted some other reality. I wanted to ESCAPE.

But I could NOT escape. The only way to make it end would be to birth this baby…but I could not birth this baby.

But I had to.

But I could not.

But I’m going to die from this pain.

But I can’t make it end.

I have to make it end.

But I can’t.

And on and on like this I went.

For hours.

Until finally I got insane. I simply lost my mind – pulled from the recesses of my soul. Pulled from everything I had ever known and ever lived – everything I ever faced and overcome – everything I had ever feared and conquered – every rage I’d ever felt – every furious moment of passion or disbelief or sorrow or joy – I pulled it all.

And I pushed that baby out. That baby who was “undeliverable”. That baby who was 10 pounds with a head cocked to one side and tilted up – a position that would have required a cesarean had I been in a hospital. She came out in such a weird position I thought her head was a rectangle as she was emerging – I remember thinking to myself as I touched her head “She has a rectangular head. Weird.” (That’s how out of it I was.)

But when was she born I was born.

When her body flooded pink with life, blood surged through my veins.

When she took her first breath in my arms she filled my lungs.

And I was ready.

Ready for that which I cannot do.

Ready for what it means to be the mother of three.

Ready for quitting my job without a safety net.

Ready to go back to school, follow my gut instead of my mind.

Ready to homeschool my son.

Ready for my life, that I didn’t know was my life…until now.

So thank you Georgia. Thank you, precious, sage little one.

You made me what I am. You showed me what I can do. You lifted me up. Made me a mother again.