Happy New Year! Yay, it’s January. The holidays have come and gone in a flash (at my house, anyway – seems like Christmas was over before it began) and we’re already a few days into this brand new year. I want to thank all of you who reached out to me with such kindness after my last post, which admittedly, was kind of a downer. I did feel relief from finally sharing it with the world and getting it out of my head, but this space has felt kind of squicky ever since. Time for some upbeat shit, yo.
January! New month, new year, and a new age for my younger set of twins in just a couple of weeks! My littlest girls, Nikki and Lexi, will turn ten this month, which is completely coconuts. They were just born, like, two years ago MAX. Right? It sure feels that way! Ten years old. I’m getting excited about planning their birthday party, which I am thinking we will do in some sort of Minecraft-meets-Roblox-meets-Adventure Time-meets Doctor Who theme. Not that I can ever top the epic birthday theme they had a few years ago, when the girls were in their We Love Movies phase.
I keep seeing Top Ten Posts and Top Ten Projects posts all around bloggyville, and I’m not even sure I wrote ten recap-worthy posts this year! My intent for 2015 is to actually write more. Throughout 2014, I spent a whole lot of time maxin’, relaxin’, and craftin’ with my bestie, Laura Kelly Walters, which was hugely reflected here on my blog. She brings out the crafty goodness in me (and in everyone, really) and I think that is a good thing. But my true love is actually WRITING, and sharing things from my authentic, true life. Not the clarified, sanitized, shined-up-for-Instagram life, but my actual, mostly imperfect but occasionally excellent life. There will still be recipes and crafty goodness, but it will be tempered with here is this hilarious thing that my kid just said about weiners and dear internet, i walked through old man fart clouds in the gym and i’m sad about it. Sometimes you need to just put it all out there. I do, anyway. Keeping all this shit under my hat isn’t good for me at all, I’m realizing.
This blog is just a toddler. I started it up in the fall of 2012, intending it to be a fresh start after 10+ years of blogging on another site, where I was pretty much an open book. Blogging was very different back in the early 2000s. Social media wasn’t really a thing yet, and people built true communities through their blogs, which were full of content that was heartfelt, moving, and oftentimes hilarious. I met some of the most amazing people through their blogs, who I am still close to, years later. (I’m talking to you, Debbie, Joelle, and Mike.) People followed along with my life as I went through a divorce, remarriage, two twin pregnancies, Kayley’s adolescence and early teens, and I shared every bit of joy and every struggle that I went through. To say I was a bit of an over-sharer is a massive understatement. Through it all, I received so much support and love, along with the occasional well-deserved ass-kicking. I got through the madness of having four kids in diapers by writing, all the time. Until I stopped.
When my oldest daughter, Kayley, was about 15 or so, she begged me to stop writing about her life. I took a hard look through my archives and realized that most of her life was right there on my blog, right down to the first time she shaved her legs – shared without any intention of upsetting her, but shared without her consent. Including lots and lots of photos I adored, from awkward stages that she hated. After a year or so of feeling weird about writing, I decided to shut down my blog – which I started when she was in kindergarten – and start fresh. And here we are. Unfortunately, it’s taken me two years to figure out that writing a picture-perfect blog isn’t really an outlet for me at all, and if I’m going to keep writing, I need to actually write. Sharing that post about Pablo’s near miss last summer was an aha! moment for me. If I’d written about it and processed the trauma of the event back in June, I probably could have saved myself an entire summer of sleepless nights, where I was kept awake by my anxiety.
So that’s my plan for 2015. I’m going to write my story. I hope you’ll stick around for it.
Distracted by social media, I almost lost my son.