A decade ago...

 James took this video of me on September 7, 2014 (and for the record, I can rotate videos now!):

I guess I was maybe having Braxton Hicks contractions? I don't remember this at all, but I do remember that we were still A FULL 2.5 WEEKS AWAY FROM DELIVERY.

I don't know whether you've been around long but for you newbies, I'll tell you that I was pregnant for 42 weeks and 6 days. The last month was just crazy. I kept going in to see the midwife and she'd look into my eyes and say, "You don't have 'the look' yet. You're not close." 

Anyhoo, I will be on vacation for Mal's birthday and might not have a chance to pontificate here about how the past decade has been one of the most challenging and delightful of my life. Having a kid in your 40s is no joke, and having a kid who is as emotionally complex as Mal at all is also quite the parenting honing adventure!

I'm pleased to say that Malcolm has changed from a constantly-crying baby to an easily-upset toddler and into an incredibly sensitive, clever, and fun-loving kid I'm so happy to have as the second child I never knew that I wanted.

Ha ha... I assumed these pictures would upload in chronological order but they did not! So enjoy some randomly-placed photos of my sweet almost-10-year-old!

Summertime Blues (instead of reds)

It has been 103 days since the onset of my most recent period. (Editor's note: Made it 108 days and started on our way out the door to a water park. Happy birthday to me!)

Lest you have the urge to start doing the menopause dance, allow me to share with you my experience over the past 3 summers:

In 2022, I stopped having a period after July 10, only to pick back up on November 2 (116 days). After that, my cycles were fairly regular (for me), about 22-40 days in length.

In 2023, I stopped after June 6 and picked back up on November 5 (153 days). The periods leading up to that were wild. In April, I had a 10-day period! In May, we were in Montreal and it was only three days... but like, still as much as the 10-day one. Mal and I were on public transit for hours sight-seeing, and it was not tidy but it was our last full day in town and I didn't want to cut anything short!

It was this day. Man, I am ready to go back!

This year, my last period before summer break was absolutely terrible. It was again short, maybe 2 days, but it was so much in such a short time frame that it was overwhelming. I had lots of things to do, but if that ever happens again, I'll just stay home. I couldn't keep up.

Will I beat last year's record? I hope so. If ya gotta bleed, you could do it in a worse place than Montreal, but I don't want to be dealing with that on our vacation next month! So hopefully we again make it to at least November before anything happens.

What I do notice is that each year so far, the period before the break backs up one month: July in 2022, June in 2023, and May this year. Wish me luck and all that.

Then again, I did have my thyroid removed so who knows if or how that might affect it. My thyroid was functioning normally before, and now things are slightly "hot" until we make sure my antibodies are gone and start dialing back the dose.

Regardless, wish me luck... This process is very annoying and I'd like to be done with it!

What a difference a decade and a half makes!

This morning, Mal wanted me to come sit with him while he woke up. I love to do that, but I'd already been up, walked, and made breakfast and I was ready to sit somewhere comfortable, which his bed is not (it's under a window, so there's nowhere to rest my back without the window pane cutting into my upper spine).

I asked if he'd sit on the couch with me instead, and he said it was too cold. So I got him a blanket, he covered up, and we snuggled for a bit.

After he was up and around a bit, I started to fold up the blanket to put it away. 

"I still need that! I'm a little chilly."

I suggested that he turn off the ceiling fan, which he did.

Now I'm going to interrupt this story to go back in time to the late aughts, then we will return to this morning.

When we were living in Sherman ("we" being D and me), we'd had a fellow homeschool family over for dinner. Their three kids and my one were alternately playing in D's room and hanging out with us adults. As their departure drew near, the dad went back to get his youngest, Rebekah, from D's room. Rebekah was on D's top bunk, which was very big and only about 2 feet from the ceiling.

Rebekah was talking to her dad over the side of the bunk and said, "Watch this!" She then proceeded to manually turn the fan, whose blades overlapped D's bed by several inches (we never turned the fan on when it was bedtime!). The dad started to reprimand her, then said, "Oh! Dust doesn't fall off of your fan blades." 

I didn't say anything, but the reason it didn't was that I dusted the fan blades every single week.

I dusted everything every single week.

Bookcases, end tables, the fireplace mantle, door frames, air conditioning vents, computers... I dusted once a week, every week.

Coming back to the present time, I have to confess that when I turned the fan off this morning, I was appalled by how much dust was on the blades! I cleaned it, and dust definitely DID sheet off of the blades. It was too much for the wipe to hold, and it all fell to the floor like giant dust-bunny snow.

Things have changed. 

At some point, I stopped my old cleaning routine where Monday was bathrooms/kitchen, Tuesday was dusting, Wednesday was vacuuming, Thursday was sweeping/mopping, and Friday was laundry and catch-up on anything else that needed to be done. 

At some point, I stopped having families over for dinner. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I would *love* for my house to be super clean. I enjoy looking at old pictures and seeing how tidy and spotless everything looked. But I don't have the will or energy anymore.

I don't have a kid who wants to help Swiffer anymore, either!

Also, I remember from the time always feeling "behind" in house-cleaning, like I couldn't keep up. Once, I expressed this frustration to my ex-husband and he said, "The house is never clean, so why are you stressed about it right now?"

I guess maybe I decided to stop worrying about it so much and just sit down and play on the Switch sometimes. I still want my house to be very clean as much as I ever did. I just don't feel like it's possible so I don't strive as much. And consequently, my house gets dusty. If you're ever over and it bothers you, you are more than welcome to fix it!

A (pre) Christmas Miracle!

Hiya, toots!

This summer in central Texas has so far been seasonal from the before-times of the late 2010s. It is just now consistently getting into the 100s during the day, whereas last year that started in May. We were saved from like 10 weeks of the blistering heat of the recent past, and I appreciate it!

We've had enough rain in the general are that the lake is 8 feet up (though it's still just under 40 feet low) in the past 2 weeks. 

Mal and I have been taking advantage of our PogoPass, glad that we paid for those before James got laid off. 

Last Sunday, Mal's friend was out of town so instead of meeting him like we always do, we went to Typhoon Texas. It was raining when we arrived, and there weren't a lot of people there. We were able to have the place practically to ourselves!

 

I got to use my awesome new shrug to protect my scar from sun exposure!

Then later in the week, we went to the LBJ Library. That one wasn't on the PogoPass last time we had it, so this was the first time Mal's visited. He loved it as much as I expected he would. Given his Five Nights at Freddy's obsession, the LBJ animatronic was one of his favorite parts.

We've gone to Indigo Play, Inflatable Wonderland, The Thinkery, James took Mal to Pump It Up Round Rock... we still need to get down to Wonder World to take the cave tour, and to San Antonio for the Witte and Zoo. Did I mention that I only paid $50 per pass? Just going to the water park and kids museum paid for it!

One down side to the great weather is that the mild temps and rain have super-charged the grass. I mowed on a Tuesday, and needed to do it again by Saturday. Then I made it until yesterday (Friday) and mowed a third time in under 2 weeks! I was thinking, "That's it! It's all going to go dormant now!" because we're heading into 100s every day and no rain in sight. But then this afternoon, it poured rain out of nowhere for an hour. Good. And bad. But mostly good. And also, I should be grateful for an upper body workout; pushing a giant battery up the hills of our back yard is not a joke (and, yes, it could be self-propelled but that drains the battery faster).

Mal's homeschool gymnastics class starts back at the end of next week, and his classes start back in just over 4 weeks. He's ready to get back into his schedule and so am I.

Of course, he'll miss a couple of weeks of everything when we go on his 10th birthday trip. Please send us your good vacation mojo because our travel is exactly as far out right now as it was in 2020 when we realized that Covid was going to cancel everything. And, yes, I got travel insurance this time! We were lucky to get back every single penny we'd paid 4 years ago, but I don't anticipate businesses doing that again. (Also, the CrowdStrike outage freaked me out about flight stuff; fortunately, for this trip, we're on Southwest.)

 

 

I used to be fun

I was sharing a funny old (14 years) photo with my family this week, and it reminded me of this old (30 years) song by Rockapella:

This song has always reminded me of someone specific in my life (from the picture that cracked me up) and it got me to thinking about something...

I used to be somewhat of a goof.

I had a reputation as someone who was funny, and in fact would often do unwise or immature things because they amused me.

I was never mean (except for maybe that one time I put toothpaste in a sausage for a specific person to eat, and if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't) and usually the joke was on me, but... It was kind of my "thing."

Remember that time at my 20th high school reunion when I had gone to the trouble of memorizing the entire dance scene from "You Can't Stop the Beat" in "Hairspray" the movie and I requested the song and did the dance all the way through even though no one joined me? (If you watch it all the way through... yes, I was getting tired at the end, but that floor was SLIPPERY. The fact that I didn't land the cartwheel was a great personal disappointment that stays with me to this day!)

Or like that time that a cold snap hit the Sher-Den area and when I was driving by the newish giant bust of Eisenhower, I thought, "He looks cold. He should have a scarf." I told several people about my idea until it landed with a talented seamstress, Juanita, who took YARDS of fabric and made a scarf (wisely with weighted ends so we could put it on and it would stay), which another friend, D, Juanita, and I all tossed on the former President in the dark of a chilly evening.

The talented aforementioned Randy Sedlacek took this shot a day or two later.
Stately AND warm, no?

I don't know. My habit is: I have a stupid, silly idea and after I have it, I just do it. It happens because my thinking something odd makes it a reality that there's no denying.

Or at least that used to be the case. 

What happened? 

I was married to someone I embarrassed a great deal with my exuberance, mischief, and general loudness. Now I'm married to someone who would absolutely revel in any silliness I might come up with, and I just... don't? Why?

When I was mowing the other day, I had the thought that my life used to be similar to a person at a funeral: I absolutely should not have been laughing, but it was a coping mechanism. And maybe now I'm just happy and don't have the highs and lows? 

Or like when I had an eating disorder and LIVED for vacations, when I let myself be free and eat whatever I wanted: I'd plan meals down to the menu item, and almost cry at every meal because everything was so rich and tasty. Now that I eat whatever I want to, I still enjoy food, but not like that. The scarcity is gone, and somehow that blunts the joy of "forbidden fruit," I guess.

Maybe this is just a natural outgrowth of maturing, and if that is the case, I HATE IT. I can extend my sincerest apologies to the target of my ill-conceived meat/toothpaste prank while also acknowledging that most of the time, my humorous impulses were a lot of fun for me and the people around me.

Can't think of a good way to wrap this up, so... Mal's up and I'm out. Miss me!

Spilling Some Tea (it's old, but it's still hot)

This morning, I remembered something that unlocked a deep resentment I'd forgotten about, and it is just another thing I look back on and wish I'd done differently.

First, I have MANY regrets about how I treated people, and I know I owe a lot of people apologies. If you're one of those people, please feel free to reach out to me. I am not reaching out to some folks because I don't want to reopen wounds that might have healed. But believe me, I know a lot of the junk from my life is my doing.

THIS EXAMPLE is not, and I regret so much that I did not stand up for myself at the time.

I filed for divorce on March 14, 2011. At the time, I was going to Sherman (TX) Bible Church. They found out almost immediately and pulled me off of a project I'd been working on for the Easter service. I had written a script and was supposed to be in the film for the weekend. The church said that they were giving me "time off to concentrate on your marriage" (they pulled my ex-husband off of his weekend camera service, too) but it was really because I had been too visible to be allowed to continue while going down the path of leaving my husband.

I'm going to address what I wish I'd done here in a moment, but I have to tell you the part that REALLY bothers me:

The short film that the team produced was based on something that really happened to the pastor of the church at the time (Dennis Henderson, who is currently serving in a support ministry role to his son's church, which just happens to be a few miles from here) who had been a police officer in Dallas and had sort of "befriended" a woman he'd arrested multiple times for prostitution. He and his family had welcomed her into their home and really extended the love of Christ to her. She kept telling him that she was going to leave her pimp and live a "clean" life, but in the end, she was murdered before she could get out.

Obviously, the Easter story didn't include the part about her killing. He wanted it to show that Christians could win people over just by loving them, no matter who the person was. Not a bad message, and honestly we should just extend love to people regardless of whether they ever believe in a god or not. But our task was to create a 15-minute video that would be shown at the Easter services.

At the time, the church did quite a lot of video production and live "skits" during church. I had been on arts planning teams for about a decade at this time. The arts minister; a lady I thought was my friend until my life got too "messy" for her; and I came up with an outline to the story we wanted to produce, and I went home and wrote it.

Not including listening to Dennis's story and collaborating with the arts team, I spent probably 20 hours at home working on and polishing up the script, then editing it after feedback.

Fast-forward to the part where I get kicked out of the process. They started filming it on a night when I was out of town with my kid at a gymnastics meet, anyway. I was texting with a friend who was involved in the filming and it sounded typical of shoots: fun. But not for me.

In the end, the project was completed and shown on Easter weekend, and people loved it. They made CDs of it available and gave them to the people who had been involved. Someone who was truly a friend, Randy Sedlacek, made sure that I got my copy, and he even invited me to the party the church was hosting to distribute the copies of the video. I couldn't bring myself to go, even though he encouraged me to ("you earned it!") because he's a solid guy. I'll always remember him fondly.

Here's the kicker: I found out that when people would ask Dennis who wrote the script, his answer was, "It wrote itself... it was a true story."

Now, if you're my mom and you're reading this, maybe close it out. Because I'm about to use a very un-Christian phrase: That dude can go fuck himself because what did he mean "the script wrote itself"?? Even if he DICTATED IT to someone, it had to be typed up and formatted. But he didn't. He gave us an idea and a partial story-line, and we turned it into something. Using my words. I was the conduit that took his words and stories and translated them into a film-able format. That is an art and a skill, and the absolute lack of respect for it and for me is astounding.

I'm literally shaking right now, just thinking about it. This guy who told me to stay in a doomed marriage because "what if Jesus is going to save your marriage tomorrow and you gave up one day too soon" wanted so badly for me to disappear when I didn't submit to the benevolent and wise male leadership of that church that he actually made me invisible. I wasn't someone who contributed heavily to the aesthetic appeal of that church for years. No. The stuff just wrote itself.

WHAT I DID: Nothing. I mean, I complained to close friends who were in the know. But at that point, I'd already been made to sign a thing that I wouldn't blog about what was going on between me and the church vis-à-vis my divorce. And I wanted them to realize that I was still the exact same person I'd always been and approve of me and accept me SO MUCH that I tried my absolute most sincerely to comply. To kowtow. To crawl through every single hoop they put in front of me to prove my worthiness of continued participation in the church. UGH. I did basically NOTHING. And they were still very angry with me about it.

WHAT I WISH I'D DONE: Revoked my permission for them to use my script. At that point, they probably already had it. But I wish I'd written certified letters to every member of leadership demanding that they write another script and not use mine because if they didn't want me involved, that was the only honorable thing to do. That they would use my work that was invisible while making sure my face didn't show up anywhere is vile. 

I don't think it would have changed anything, but I wish I'd expressed my anger and wish to be absolutely removed from everything. And then when they used it anyway, I wish I'd written about THAT. I wish I'd written about EVERYTHING in REAL TIME. I wish I'd had the strength to say,"If you don't like what I'm making public, then maybe don't do it in private."

They were a bunch of bullies who genuinely thought they were shepherding me in God's will. This is one reason that I will never EVER spiritually submit myself to another human as long as I live. It's one thing to make stupid decisions for yourself and get hurt, but to think that you can try to persuade someone else to made bad choices because YOU feel like there's some edict from above that it's your calling to enforce? No. I'm sorry. Not this lady. Never again.

First Summer Camp!

Yesterday, we dropped Mal off for his first week at summer camp! D went to almost-week-long gymnastics camps for several years, and to long-weekend worship camps. They were much younger than Mal when they started attending summer programs, but it just came up for Mal this year.

Honestly, I think Mal got the idea to do camp because of the SpongeBob show "Kamp Koral." I know this Texas over-water camp will be nothing like that, but I do hope he enjoys it! He initially picked a music camp in New Mexico which would have taken us 18 hours to reach! Eventually, I talked him into somewhere closer, knowing it would be SO HOT, but telling him that it would be a good idea to make sure he loved camp before he went so far away from home.

He was EXCITED to go and dumped us the second he got cleared from his lice check.

We oopsied it, and I'm glad we live so close because one of the counselors texted me and asked if we could drop by a pair of closed-toed shoes. I'd meant to pack Mal's sneakers, and that's the one thing I forgot! Well, that and headphones. Hopefully nothing is too loud, but if it is, that's someone else's problem for a few days.

In the meantime, I've been doing loads of relaxing stuff like power-washing our front walk, scrubbing both bathroom floors, cooking for the family, washing our linens, and getting my car inspected. You know, vacation stuff! And tomorrow, I'm getting a tooth fixed! (My old amalgam filling is cracking my tooth, so they're going to dig it out and put a cap on it.) I'm actually very glad that I was able to schedule that for when Mal's not here. I know he's fine when I'm out and about, but I still prefer to be in the vicinity unless James is able to be the "default parent" for a bit.

James and I might go to Rosa's tomorrow night for Taco Tuesday, though. We've meant to several times in the past and we just forget about it until after I've already eaten. Whoopsie. 

I don't have anything on the schedule for Wednesday yet, but Thursday, my sister and I are going up to see our parents. I don't think we've gone sans kids to visit them in years. Good times.

Okay, I'm going to indulge and give myself a "manicure" (nail stickers) now!