Oh, to be 2 Again...

Where can I bottle the confidence of a two year old?  Ethan wakes in the morning asking for "D" cereal and his cup of milk.  Unfortunately for Mommy he seriously discovered the candy this Halloween season.  My insistence of:  We'll eat lunch first, and you can have a piece for dessert...  is met with "NO!  No lunch."  He'll enter the room and turn off the television for you.  He turns into a baby yoga master of epic proportions if he really doesn't want to be buckled in a car seat.  Today he spent part of the afternoon in a winter coat riding his "schlow-schlow" (big wheel) out on the deck since he simply had to, even though it was 46 degrees out.  The toddler negotiations are rampant around here these days.

And yet, I can't help but admire my boy's confidence in the rightness of his world.  And hope to take a page from his playbook for myself from time to time.

Busy, Busy

Where is the summer going?  Somehow July just got crammed with busyness - the Fourth led to a week of Cub Scout Adventure Day Camp.  Daniel had a blast outdoors all day getting to try stuff like archery and BB's... and get a little braver about his swimming.  Directly following camp we spent 9 days to and from visiting Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Andy in Wisconsin.  Always lovely and relaxing, if only it weren't bookended by 2 days each way of hard driving.  Upon our return we began vacation bible school.  That was capped by a weekend of "family camp" with the cub scouts.  (In the rain.)

I just looked it up.  School starts August 29th.  Eeps!  I need some serene lake time for an eensy bit longer.

Testing the water...

Ah, me.  Absent again.  It has been a rough winter, with two kids and two adults seemingly cycling from one illness to the next.  I've felt closed off.  Constricted.  All about the putting out of the fires and not about the savoring the bits of life.  It's a vicious circle - as I've pulled in, I can feel my self-talk gremlins speaking up.  You've got nothing to write about...  nothing to talk about...  nothing to do but complain...

And so I don't write, and I don't get to feel creative, and the tides pull me under one more time.

This needs to change.  Daniel is almost out of school for the summer.  I want this to be a summer of fun, for me and all three of my boys.

Weaving

Somehow, I didn't anticipate leaving this space for so long.  The end of 2011 and the ushering in of 2012 seemed to be determined to kick my behind.  The croup/hospital stay morphed into a round of colds for everyone.  Getting better led us into a round of a nasty stomach virus for all four of us one by one.  And I started allowing some of my gremlins to creep in.  Mired in illnesses and the day-to day dealings with them I started wondering if I had anything to say.  My voice felt whiny and complainy and "poor me"-ish.  I didn't like listening to myself, let alone put such stuff out there for others to have to deal with.  This naturally led to my perfectionist gremlin rearing his pointy little head.  If I couldn't write perfectly then it just wasn't happening.  Frozen.

We've been finishing out January of 2012 with all of us coming out of yet another nasty cold.  And rather than the balance that I used to try to achieve, I'm struggling with the varied threads of my life.  Sister, daughter, wife, mother...  aiming to weave the bits into the creative soul I'm reaching out to become.