Today is my birthday. I had planned on spoiling myself with a spa day, but instead I decided to spoil myself with time to write, which these days is truly a rare treat.
You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been off the blogging and writing radar since this summer.
Not many people know about the challenges that we had getting pregnant with my son, (who I typically refer to as “The 5 Year Old” in my posts.) In fact, before reading my story, “The Pluses & Minuses of Pregnancy” in the new It’s Really 10 Months – Special Delivery anthology, even many of our friends and family had no idea that we had dealt with secondary infertility and suffered through a series of what our doctor called ‘chemical pregnancies’ before finally getting pregnant with the 5yo.
Like many women in America, last week I loaded up in a car full of suburban moms and went to my local movie theater to cheer and whistle at a screen featuring the projected images of several half-naked (okay, mostly-naked) men, aka Magic Mike XXL.
When my daughter was four years old, we went to a friend’s cabin for the weekend with a couple of families. My friend and I went for a morning run and when we returned the other mom rushed out to cut us off before we got to the door with a panicked look on her face.
“Everything’s okay now,” she said, which of course makes us instantly start to panic. “We called 911 and the paramedics said everyone should be okay.”
What the?!!!
My husband and I aren’t big on giving gifts. We already have a lot of stuff and we’re both really bad about buying things when we want them so not only is there nothing that either one of us really needs, there’s not even usually something that we want that the other could buy.
For a while we tried to make gift buying more interesting by creating gift-giving themes like, “Spend $10 at a Walgreen’s” or “Spend $10 on something that could be featured on Antique Roadshow someday.”
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Do you have a little Toy Story fan in your life?
A couple of months ago I did a post about how excited I was to have one of my stories selected to be included in an anthology called “Martinis & Motherhood: Tales of Wonder, Woe & WTF?!”
Today I’m even MORE excited because at long last, the wait is over, and the book is available at Amazon.com.
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I had the weirdest dream:
I’m sharing a couch in a hotel bar with “I Just Want to Pee Alone” NYT Bestselling Author, Jen Mann. Our conversation meanders from our mutual admiration for Hugh Howey to me giving her shit about the fact that her rental car has manual roll-down windows. We then somehow make the connection that I was in the PTA with a book blogger that she follows. The next thing I know, Kim Bongiorno (Let Me Start By Saying) is next to me dressed up as Urkel performing a “Dancing With the Stars” worthy number with Frugie from Frugalista Blog.
Almost two weeks ago I challenged myself to do something that I never do: Go shopping.
I detailed the ‘whys’ in a previous, “Dusting Off My Parachute” post the night before my adventure. The boiled down version is that I hate shopping. I find it completely overwhelming both in terms of the sheer number of choices available and also because I am incredibly thrifty (okay, cheap).
I’ve been reading a lot recently about the comeback of the 70s summer: Unscheduled summer breaks forcing kids to use their creativity to fill their “I’m bored!” hours instead of having their parents fill their hours for them with $200/week camps.
Our unscheduled summer will be officially be held the week of August 17th, which is the only week this summer that I do not have filled with some sort of travel or insanely expensive camp for my kids.
