And Then I Blogged About It...

Every six months I take Jack to the cardiologist for a check up (which means roughly every five months and 29-30ish days I am in a terrible stressy mood and have to drink three glasses of wine or I am a beast) and so far, every six months have come with the very good news of, "No change." Now, with a situation that will not get better or improve, "no change" is absolutely what you want. However, the older Jack gets the greater the odds are that the message will become, "Some change" and eventually, "Change" and when that day comes my boy will need to have his pulmonary valve replaced (and I will need more than three glasses of wine). The goal here is to try and get him to the end of the growth spurt which is roughly age 18-21 which, for those of you doing the math, is at least five more years, or ten more visits, or thirty glasses of wine (6.5 bottles).

You're welcome, California wine industry.

Fortunately, Jack is awesome and healthy and right on track and there are some massive improvements with the sheer invasive-ness of the surgery he will need and so it isn't the type of thing I need to obsess about more than twice a year... but obsess I do and after every appointment I breathe a huge sigh of relief and then I go and purchase something stupid.

Today I bought a jumpsuit from the Kardashian Kollection.

Jumpsuit. Kardashian. Kollection with festive "K".

I love it. From the faux wrap top to the drawstring waist to the, wait for it, gathered ankles, I adore the damn thing and, as I have declared on Facebook (the Bible of social media), once it arrives I will take and photoshop a picture of me for your viewing judgement pleasure in all my jumpsuit wearing horror/awzumness.

And honestly, trying on a damn jumpsuit and modeling it for my kid who just got a clean bill of health and having him call me Mugatu is exactly the kind of laugh I need every six months.

Eventually, This Sort of Thing Will Humiliate Me...

This morning I had a very important discussion with the head of Jack's camp... he is at a computer camp which costs approximately eleventy billion dollars and there was a rather massive hiccup yesterday and for eleventy billion dollars, I get involved...

So I left the director a quite formal and adult voicemail last night and told him I would see him first thing in the morning and blah blah blah and Jack and I headed out a bit early so that there would be plenty of time for my very important discussion before the day started...

We met. We talked and I couldn't help but notice how distracted he was which got my back up a bit and I got a little "insist-y" but all was finally handled and I drove out thinking, "Well done, Kristin! You really had to work for that, but it's all good now..." and I smugly headed home.

Only to walk in and look in the mirror and realize that my morning ablutions had failed to fully remove a rather large dried swath of pink zit cream right in the middle of my nose...

Which probably explains the director's distraction...

I've mentioned I have a cataract, right?

Fits and Starts

I guess I've been in a "fit" phase which has nothing to do with "fitness" and everything to do with "snit" and am slowly falling back into a "start" but if I put one more thing in quotations this will be the quickest relapse into not writing in history.

And with that jumble of a run on sentence I welcome myself back to the wonderful world of blogging and hope that someone out there remembers that I once wrote on a regular basis and was occasionally funny, sometimes thoughtful and always loosey goosey with the grammar.

The heart of the matter is that I became bored with writing and just about the time Chevrolet sent me to Memphis, I burned out.

Lame.

The struggle of "mommy-blogging" was the transition. My kids weren't so little anymore that their life was free fodder for my blather and I've always been fairly private about my marriage and quite frankly, there is only so much the Internet wants to read about my dogs...

The dilemma of "what to write" coincided so neatly with my foray into Facebook that it was an almost seamless phasing out of blogging (something which had occupied a great deal of my time) right into a world of status updates... I was able to get feedback I loved from a line or two... FB was the methadone to my blogging habit.

And now it's been years. Seriously. Years since I wrote with any regularity and suddenly I miss it.

Blogging for me began when Hugh and I were considering a second adoption from China and my first followers were all fellow adoptive parents. Through them I branched out into the phenomena of mommy bloggers and found myself truly invested in the lives of women that while I had never met, I considered friends.

It was very much a community... we all sort of mucked in together.

Then the review requests and benefits started to roll in and I found myself on trips and red carpets and with free cars to drive all because I had an audience that corporate America wanted to reach - to be honest with you I found it overwhelming. The more blogging became a job and the less it became a journal of my family's life, the more I found myself not wanting to participate.

So I stopped. I didn't feel like opportunity knocking - it felt like what I never wanted: a full time job.

But now I am 41 (holy shit) and I really don't see myself on the Internet. I am well educated and funny (as far as I know) and I have teenagers and I don't work but with the exception of a few writers, I don't see myself or my life represented. There are design blogs and cooking blogs and beauty blogs, but where are the women in the throes of reinvention?

Those of us who haven't worked and now suddenly have time on our hands... with kids who are about to date no less! My days are now my own. The kids, all 3 of them, are on basically the same school schedule which means from 8 - 3, I can get my freak on.

Confession: I don't actually know what that means.

But if I did, I could. Instead I find myself overwhelmed by the very real possibility that I don't want to really do anything... that I don't have a secret desire to return to school for a Ph.D and become a traveling professor of post WWII modern art (which was my original plan and if you had asked me a few years ago what I was going to do with my time when the kids were in school, that would have been my answer) but now I realize, in all honesty, it just doesn't interest me in the same way... I love it, but not enough to devote my new precious time to it.

This is a very very strange time.

And I know I am not alone. There have to be many of you out there in my position - oddly enviable in it's possibilities and totally terrifying.

So I thought I would write about it.

It's a start.