I can't remember who it is, but someone I talked to at some point, told me that they could always guess when I am pregnant because my blogging starts slacking off. My blogging has been slacking off lately...but let me just clear this up now:
I AM NOT PREGNANT :)
I hate when my blogging slacks off. Writing is one of my coping mechanisms. I cope with stress, and life in general by writing it out of me. I feel like once I have it all out on paper (computer screen?), I can peacefully leave it there, and not have to have it floating around in my head anymore. When I need more space in my head, I write. When I'm angry/sad/depressed/lonely I write. When I'm so happy I could burst, I write. I write to remember things, and I write to forget things.
Lately my blog has been lacking in emotion, of any kind. I've done all right at jotting down the basics of what's been going on in life, but it's been a long time since I just spilled out how I feel about anything. There are several reasons for this, one of which is NOT pregnancy. :)
-Canning. I have done so much canning this year. Wow! All the jars I own are filled. Yay for me. I've canned salsa, raspberry jam, peaches, apple sauce, apple jelly, and pears this year. I've also helped other people can things. Everything I've canned this year, I have canned in my own kitchen (usually I do at least some at my mom's) which means that the mess ends up in my kitchen. It takes at least two days to clean up after a canning session. I don't know why. AND, fyi, applesauce is the stickiest, messiest, hardest to clean up, spread from one end of the room to the other, thing I have ever canned in my life. Even worse than grape juice. I love to can, but I am pretty canned out at this point. As a side note, any of you who may (Aaron) or may not be in the market for a Christmas present for me this year, I would love to own an apple corer, a set of reusable canning lids, a pressure canner, a food dehydrator, a very large pot or bowl, or any other awesome food preservation equipment you think I might find useful. :)
-Preschool and Letter Day. I spend a lot of my spare time (and even some of my not so spare time) trying to prep for the activities I do with my kids for preschool and Letter Day. It takes a lot of effort so look for ideas, fit them into a lesson plan, and decide how best to implement them. One of the reasons I share all the things I put together is so that it might save someone else somewhere a little bit of time. Also, in November our Friday Fun classes with our homeschool group will start up. Basically they rent out a dance studio during the day, and split the kids up by age group and let them do to three different class periods once a week. I'll be teaching Science to the Littles class (ages 4-6) for the first session. So I've been trying to prep for that. Besides all the preparation for things, there's the actual events themselves. I try to do all our preschool stuff in the mornings. Letter Day is every Tuesday. Little Boys Club with our homeschool group is Wednesdays. Thursdays we go to story time at the library (and usually sometime before library day I have to look up on the computer all the books I want to check out and write down their call numbers, so that when we get to the library I can just look up what I need, instead of wasting a lot of time searching the shelves and trying to decide what I want). And Fridays we do Friday Fun with our homeschool group.
-Callings. I am in the Primary presidency and Aaron is in the Young Mens presidency. I have meetings on Tuesday nights, he has mutual on Wednesday nights. Also, any planning or preparation that has to go into a sharing time, or a lesson. We both come home on Sunday exhausted. We are both counting down the days/weeks/months until Adelia is in nursery (February!). This month is the primary program, so we've been a little extra busy. They've also put us in charge of the ward Christmas party.
-The Daily Grind. If there were no such thing as laundry or dishes I would have HOURS of extra time every day. :) And meal prep, which I have been awful at lately. You'd think I'd learn. My life goes so much more smoothly if I plan out a menu every week, make a grocery list, and get all the things I need so I have them already on hand. Then I look at my list to see what's for dinner that night and I make it. Simple. Do I do it? Not lately. And I frustrate myself because of it. Every night I'm scrambling to come up with a dinner plan. I make a million trips to the store to get something, and end up coming up with several other somethings that I don't need. I have a theory that the more often I go to the store, the more money I spend. And spending money is not something I want to be doing right now.
-Running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Do you ever try to do too much? Story of my life lately. There are so many good, fun things to do, and I just want to do them all and please everyone and it's so hard and tiring. But how do you say no? Someone please teach me how to say no, and how to decide which things to say no to. I am very, very, very bad at this. I don't like to let people down. I don't like to hurt people's feelings (by not showing up to a party or event, or something), I don't want my kids to miss out on opportunities even though they have too many to choose from. But I hate feeling scrambled. I hate feeling like I have something planned out for every single second of my entire day. I hate just wanting to drop and not do a single solitary thing that needs to be done after the kids are in bed. I hate not wanting to wake up because I know I'll have to start the rat race all over again in the mornings.
-Extra Curricular Activities. I'm in a book club. Not only am I in it, but I organize it and send out the emails for it. I enjoy our monthly enrichment activity at church. We do girls night out fairly often in our neighborhood. We have friends we like to schedule play dates with for the kids. Our homeschool group does Mom's Night Out once a month (speaking of which, I am hosting this month!). I write a column for The LDS Sentinel. Lincoln was playing soccer two nights a week (season's over now). Aaron does the web developing for flo-foto.com, he's also trying to finish a research paper he wrote to be published in a journal. I involve myself in a lot of these activities because I think I need that "me time" and these are all things I enjoy. But sometimes they add up. We have something going on every single night it seems. See paragraph above about running around like a chicken with my head cut off.
But even with all of that, I usually make time to blog, because, like I said, it's my coping mechanism. So really my lack of blogging all boils down to one thing lately. We have CRAPPY internet. It is so slow that sometimes it just makes blogging, which normally relaxes and re-energizes me, so frustrating, that I put it off because I can't just sit and do nothing while it takes 15 minutes to load a single picture. And the videos won't even load. The internet is so slow that sometimes I'll write an entire post, but the internet isn't fast enough to allow the save option to work correctly, so I hit post, and only half of the post I just wrote shows up because the internet never got around to saving the other half. So frustrating. We have DSL. We've tried everything we can think of to get cable internet, but our wonderful landlords won't let us install anything onto the house or around the house that would allow us to have faster internet. We even told them we'd pay for any installation fees or set up costs. Nope. Which I guess is their right to do, since they own the house, and they did put it in our contract, which we signed. But still, when we ask them about it, they treat us like we are so much more inferior to them that they don't even want to be bothered to hear our concerns. It's kind of annoying. But I don't see as there is a whole lot we can do about it. So there you have it. That's why my blog has sucked the last little while, not because I'm pregnant, but because we have a terrible internet connection.
3 comments:
I feel the same way about blogging. I write to clear my head. Hence the reason I started a private blog, because sometimes my thoughts are not ok for the general public, but I need to get them out of my head.
I have been slacking a lot too, but it is beacause I have been finding other venues to for my writing. As a good friend once said to me "It is innate for a writer to need to write, no matter the venue." Blogging is just usually my venue...
Sorry you've been so busy! Honestly I'm always surprised at how up to date your blog is, especially with how much you do all the time! You're pretty awesome! I hope you can figure out your internet situation. We did without internet for a while, and I would type up my blog posts at home and then take them to library and post them. Totally annoying and may not save time, but it's a thought...
I love making applesauce and grape juice! I think they are the cleanest things. I hate doing peaches - the fuzz drives me crazy. And tomatoes are pretty messy. Maybe we should exchange tips and then nothing we can will be messy and icky,
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