BJ is Coming Home

Yes, that's right, he's on a jet plane right now. I believe that I can safely say that he has been out of town without fear of some crazy person coming into my house, because here and now I will tell you that I am the proud owner of a 38-special that I affectionately refer to as "Old Blue," and I'm not afraid to shoot it. In the words of Scarlett O'Hara, "I can shoot straight if I don't have to shoot too far." This has officially taken a forbidding turn. What I meant to say was, BJ is coming home! And to make things even better, we are already officially on our weekend, which extends all the way until next Tuesday. We may not have internet access on these days, so don't think this blog has died if you don't hear from me for a few days, reader.

While I'm glad that BJ is coming home to us, the anticipation of traveling is always great for me. This year BJ and I have been on trips to Chicago, Indianapolis, Dallas (a few times), Kansas City, Minneapolis, and a couple of in-state trips. BJ has also traveled a few other places for work, but I didn't get to join so those don't count in my book. We're also planning two trips in early winter, one to L.A. and one to the Big Apple, since it's on my bucket list to see the Rockefeller center Christmas tree. I have become somewhat panicky lately that this particular wish may never be fulfilled, thinking for some reason that having children makes this dream much more difficult, which I suppose it does. I thought, better to tackle this goal now when we have only Silas, versus next year when I hope to be delivering my second child at that time, and versus the few years after that when I hope to have little ones swarming at my feet. God willing, I would have time to see this Christmas tree after the kids grow up and are eventually adults, but for some reason I keep envisioning this time as some sort of invalid or nursing home resident. Clearly, this is likely not to be the case, as my parents seem to be in the prime of THEIR lives right now. Still, I'd like to take the trip now instead. And maybe then too. Poor Silas tolerates us well. He's taken four trips and we plan to have the little guy in tow for both the NYC and LA trips too. This boy will have seen coast to coast by the time he's 8 months old, and probably all he really wanted was to be at home in his own crib. Good thing he is a laid-back kind of guy.

Mommy Mathematics

Today was one of those days in which, with BJ gone, time is of the essence. Not all single-mother days are like this, but some of them are, and indeed today has been. If I think of it as an equation, it goes something like this:

x + y = day in mommy life,

where x may equal all of the things that need to get done in a 24 hour period. Please note that x cannot = sleep. This being said, x = first and foremost, duties such as working, pumping, paying bills, cooking dinner, laundry, dishes, other sundry housework, packing baby's milk bottles, restocking the nursery caddies, etc. Once these tasks are accomplished, x may then = things that mommy may want to do with her spare time, such as eating, watching television, taking a shower, reading, blogging, or breathing. However, one should never quote me as complaining about this schedule. Why, you may ask? Ah, reader, because of the factor y. In a nutshell,

y = time spent with baby, and therefore:

y > x

in nearly all cases. (This equation refers to quality of time rather than quantity, but it should be noted that the overall quality of the day becomes greater as the quantity of y increases in the original equation.) There are a few exceptions in which y may possibly be < or = to x, and they include changing diaper explosions, soothing your baby after hours of him screaming, and the ninth time of being up in the middle of the night with the baby. And that, my friends, is what I refer to as mommy mathematics. What what.

Fall has arrived!

Nearly two months ago we were visiting our friends Billy and Heidi in Minnesota, and fall seemed like it had set in there. The windows were open, we wore hoodies when we ate dinner outside, and I ate pumpkin pancakes for breakfast. It was with great procrastination that we dragged ourselves back into the Oklahoma heat, a whole 30 degrees warmer at home than it was up north. But alas, finally, we have the same weather here at home in Oklahoma now that it is October.

Can I just take a minute here to extol the virtues of my favorite season, the fall? With the fall comes many fantastic advantages, the least of which is the omnipresence of my favorite color orange. Cooler weather, football, pumpkin pie, football, Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas, football, 7-11 pumpkin spice cappuccinos, football. I'm telling you, now is the time. In my humble opinion, it just doesn't get better.

In other news, I am now running 8 minutes at a time without stopping, and having the additional bonus of not feeling like I might die right afterward. Also, Silas is eating vegetables and doing a heck of a job of it. More to come on that later.

Have a great day, and for those of you in Oklahoma, enjoy this beautiful fall weather!

Turkey Trot

Well, Silas turns five months old today. He's precious. However, that's not the point of today's story. Today's story deals with the sad fact that I have not run in Silas' lifetime, nor in the nine months that I was pregnant with him, which for all you non-math majors means that I have not jogged in a total of 14 months. This equals me being in the worst shape of my entire life, and with ten long pounds to go until I'm back at my pre-pregnancy weight.

In addition to this realization is another conclusion that I have come to about myself. With my 30th birthday on the horizon, my soul-searching has led me to understand that I simply adore food, and I'm not willing to give it up. I love eating it, tasting it, smelling it, cooking it, baking it, planning my next meal, you name it. I eat when I'm happy, when I'm bored, upset, stressed... eating is tops. And one thing that I know about myself is that I don't plan to stop eating whatever I want, at least until the doctor tells me I have diabetes or some other similar fate. So to counter-balance the insane amount of food that enters my body, I'm simply going to have to exercise it off. I realized that I am okay with being the 40-year-old lady who runs 15 miles a week if it means I get to say "I'm eating that piece of chocolate cake and I refuse to feel guilty about it."

So begins Project Turkey, which is my exercise plan that is so aptly named after a delicious form of food. Jogging has begun this week and I don't see it ending for a long period of time, as long as I remain stubbornly opposed to a no-sweets diet. My first stop is a 5K on Thanksgiving morning (of course, after I log in those 3.1 miles I plan to eat to my heart's content at meal-time). This is my first week of training, and I actually feel motivated to get moving. I have a long way to go though... I only ran for 7 minutes today and it damn near killed me. Better than nothing though. November 25th, here I come...

Hello and a Laugh

Hi reader. Welcome to this, my new blog. I hope to maintain this blog regularly, unlike the last joint one that BJ talked me into and then we subsequently neglected. While I realize that large numbers of people are not interested in my daily affairs, the fact remains that I literally have dear friends and family sprinkled all the way from Maine to Hawaii, all of whom I miss and each of whom I wish had a blog so that I could keep up with them more regularly. So here is mine.

Let's kick this party off with my favorite-ever book quote, a bit of writing which I believe has got to be the funniest thing I've ever read. Now, understand here reader, that my sense of humor doesn't always align with others. But the book Travels in West Africa by Mary H. Kingsley is simply hilarious. In case you're not familiar with Ms. Kingsley's work, she was a Victorian spinster who left England in the 1890's to venture into West Africa and set foot where no white woman (and sometimes no white man) had yet to explore. This book is the account of her travels and her observations of the cultures of the different tribes that she encountered, all told through her hilarious humility. The viewpoints are antiquated, no doubt, but Ms. Kingsley's regard for the African natives is certainly more respectful than was the majority white viewpoint of Africans at the time. I'm going to include my favorite paragraph from her introduction, which makes me laugh out loud every time. I'm sorry ahead of time if you are one of the many people who I've cornered and read this aloud to as well, because this will be the second time you hear this piece:

It was the beginning of August '93 when I first left England for 'The Coast.' Preparations of quinine with postage partially paid arrived up to the last moment, and a friend hastily sent two newspaper clippings, one entitled "A Week in a Palm-Oil Tub,"... the other from The Daily Telegraph, reviewing a French book of "Phrases in common use" in Dahomey. The opening sentence in the latter was, "Help, I am drowning." Then came the inquiry, "If a man is not a thief?" and then another cry, "The boat is upset." "Get up, you lazy scamps," is the next exclamation, followed almost immediately by the question, "Why has this man not been buried?" "It is fetish that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed with nothing on him until only the bones remain," is the cheerful answer. This sounded discouraging to a person whose occupation would necessitate going about considerably in boats, and whose fixed desire was to study fetish. So with a feeling of foreboding gloom I left London for Liverpool--none the more cheerful for the matter-of-fact manner in which the steamboat agents had informed me that they did not issue return tickets by the West African lines of steamers.

Have a great day everyone!