Last fall, Jim bought a new flat screen for the family room (barely being able to contain his glee, because hey! fancy new teevee! just in time for football season!)
The other night we were getting our Top Chef on and Jim was all “What are those smudges?” Little has this obnoxious habit of putting her face about two inches from the screen – I think she is trying to actually get inside Sesame Street. I told him it was just sticky little fingerprints and I’d get to it the next day.
In the morning, I got a towel and a little windex and went to clean it off. Upon further inspection, it was NOT sticky little fingerprints.
No.
Yellow Crayon.
All. Over. The. Screen.
A while back, in preparation for biting the bullet and just potty training already, we took the front railing off Little’s crib and converted it to a toddler bed. She was a little nervous the first night, so Big graciously agreed to sleep on her floor. For about two hours they alternated slamming out of the room and running downstairs to complain that the other one was preventing them from going to sleep. Little’s feeling the freedom now. I have been putting a gate at the top of the stairs so she can’t get up in the middle of the night and eat all the ice cream while placing bids on eBay.
The other night we went upstairs to do the final tuck-in before we went to bed and she had FALLEN OUT and was sound asleep on the floor. Is it mean that it was funny? We were laughing so hard, I thought we would wake her up.
I was all, “Oh - I guess that’s what that big thump was.”
All right, so let’s get some of the mind-numbingly boring basics out of the way. My name is Deb and I live in Colorado. I have been married to my husband Jim for sixteen years. I have an Engineering degree and I worked in that field until I got laid off from The Best Job Ever in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Obviously with one person unemployed, the only logical thing to do was have the other person quit his job, move across the country, buy a house and start a family. We have two fantastic kids, my son Big who is 5, and my daughter Little who is 3.
I find being a mom similar to having a tiny herd of Miniature Vikings roaming freely around my house, demanding food every fifteen minutes and leaving a trail of dirt, empty juice cups, and foot demolishing Legos. But in a good way.
Not Inadequate is a running joke in my house. After college, I got a job working as an estimator at a construction company. It was one of those I-took-the-first-job-I-was-offered jobs out of the panic that after 5 years of school I still had no marketable skills, just a big old pile of student loans. It was the most boring job I have ever had. I got stuck in a teeny office in the back corner with a ruler and a big set of drawings. After a few weeks, I asked my boss how I was doing. After a brief pause, he gave me the best answer ever, “You’re not inadequate.”
It probably goes without saying that I got sacked.
So now, of course, whenever my husband and I ask each other things like How Was Dinner or What Do You Think of These Shoes or How Was Last Night, you can guess what answer comes back.
The first blogs I discovered were knitting blogs. The Yarn Harlot was the first one, followed by Crazy Aunt Purl, Mason-Dixon Knitting and tons more. These women have really inspired me in my knitting. I might have never moved beyond scarves and hats if I wasn’t always reading about Certain People taking their socks-in-progress on road trips or knitting thousands of mitered squares for blankets.
I thought about writing my own knit blog. I even had an awesome name for it. I was going to call it What Would Stephanie Do. (Is that the best or what?) Eventually I decided it was a bit too stalker-y (and plus because what if I convinced my husband to move to Canada and live right next door to her and she and I became bestest friends forever… a name like WWSD might throw her hint that it wasn’t all totally natural). Then there was the fact that a knit blogger probably would have to do more than just start a bunch of projects, get bored, and then start some more.
Then I discovered homeschooling blogs and thought maybe that was the direction I should go. I homeschool my kids and am very passionate about it. But there are probably only so many salt-dough maps a person could talk about. And even fewer a person would be interested in reading about.
Plus there are other things I might want to talk about. Like bread making or potty training or The Real Housewives of New Jersey. So we’ll just see where it goes. Maybe I’ll get a book deal and become Independently Wealthy.
What? You have FOURTEEN chapters about your daughter peeing on your foot?!?! THIS STUFF IS GOLD, MAN! GOLD!
I found the world of blogs a couple of years ago and they were a revelation to me. There was a whole world out there – and some of those people were a lot like me. Crazy interesting people who were obsessed with yarn and confessed that they threw out their children’s preschool fingerpaintings to make room for more of it. Weirdos Parents who educated their children at home – some of them even without wearing denim jumpers. Cheapskate hippies Frugal, health conscious moms who made their own bread and snuck veggies into their kids’ food. Suddenly, I wasn’t alone in all my Knitting/Homeschooling/Organic Cooking/Love Being a Mom But Hate Potty Training quirkiness.
And so finally, I have been inspired to stop highjacking the comment sections of other bloggers and start my own.
