Yesterday marked three decades

My 20's sang their swan song, sweetly before they went into that "cold, dark night".   I spent my 30th with my husband, children, dad and grandfather.  It went by slowly.  Started out with eggs benedict, though.  D is so awesome.

Secretly, I had hoped that my husband has some grand plan to whisk me away to the City.  But it wasn't so.  

My birthday was perfect.  My little girl started using the toilet, what a great birthday surprise!  My husband made dinner...well, actually, we both made dinner.  I made dinner for him and the babies and he made dinner for me.  Shrimp and pasta for them and homemade pizza for me.   So yummy.

Now that I'm thirty, I'm wondering what's next.  Is life just beginning for me?  Somehow I feel like I need to set my goals again and move forward.  My priorities have changed.  Life is amazing.  It continuously shifts, changing the climate of your living conditions, forcing you to make decisions and adapt.  

Goodness, I'm sitting here thinking of all the lessons I've learned wondering which ones to share, but I have to say that the one piece of advice I will always live by is this: stay productively busy.

You know, I was reading a book to my babies today and this sentence stuck out:

"Busy workers make a happy home."

It's so, so true.  Stay busy, stay alive.  I'm thirty.  It's not the end and I'm not dead.

I spent my Christmas in a cabin

35,000 feet in the air.

And, to top it all off, I think I’ve found my brain again.  It’s invigorating to have an intelligent conversation with someone about life, politics, education, books...you name it.  It’s been a while since I sat down and exchanged opinions with someone -- other than my husband.  Sat next to an older man on our flight back to PA.  It’s fun learning from someone who has been all over the board of life.  Had a great conversation.
With that being said:
At heart, I’m an academic.  I’m a little rusty, but I can feel the quaking desire to be sitting in class listening to an incredible lecture. 
    When we move, our youngest will be school age freeing me up to hit the books again!  How I can’t wait.  But what to study?  Somehow I think I’m waiting for an undiscovered talent of mine to surface and ...well, give me something to focus on.  But so far, I’m going back and forth between journalism and massage school.  Don’t ask. 

    If only I was into math.  Uhg.  I’m still young, right?  ...don’t answer that.  Being a mom I’ve discovered undiscovered parts of myself!  Yeah, I didn’t know that was possible either.  Somehow, in order to keep a sense of identity I needed to set up reasonable goals for myself to achieve.  And through the process of setting these goals I’ve honed older talents and discovered new ones.  It’s amazing.  Although, I have to admit that I wish I were better at certain activities.  It’s fun to be creative...but when someone wants to pay you for your creativity, that’s even better.  yes, yes it is.  Amazing how the Almighty Dollar can give this stay at home mom an upward lift in her mood swing.

So, before I get completely lost in all my day dreaming.  I’m going to focus on the immediate task ahead.  Raising my children.  Helping my husband get through school by cooking him lots and lots of brain food...like Julia Child’s recipes.  Faithfully teaching my Sunday school students.  And well, in general just being a responsible adult.  That’s pretty fulfilling in itself.

O, oo, oooh, listen to the music.

I love California.  It's in my bones.  It's in my sensory memory.  At times, I can smell the pine or the crisp mountain air.  My skin can feel the prickle of the sun warming it.  

What is it about this place?  Maybe some people have bad memories attached to their home, so they try to forget it.  And if they were to try and recall special moments in their childhood they probably couldn't.  But I can, even down to the smells.  It's comforting.

The woods in California are attached to a very bright spot in my memory.  I love the mossy, speckled boulders, the huge redwoods with their fuzzy bark or the expansive cascading oaks.  And the rives that race down the mountain and knock against the rocks...it's overwhelming and it fills me to my core.

Nature is a force to be reckoned with even if you're just standing still in a clearing of trees.

And, nature is therapeutic.  I've started to appreciate it more and more.  When you live in a metro area, nature can be scary.  HAH.  It is!  You know why?

Nature doesn't make noise, it's not distracting or busy, keeping you from yourself.  It makes music.  But, you can only hear it if you're quiet.  Not just with your voice but in your mind and heart.  Beautiful.

         By nature, no pun intended, I am not a person who enjoys solitude or anything close to it.  So learning to be still long enough to let the peacefulness of the trees, grass, rives and ravines speak to me was a hard lesson to learn.  I've learned to set the city in me at rest so I can hear the songs nature has for me.  

                                    
                                     They are beautiful and can woo even the restless of souls.

I have "control" issues

I do.
And I'm not afraid to admit it.  There are certain aspects of my life that I take very, very seriously and won't rest until I know that everything is just so. 
Right now, we're in California, my birthplace and home, we flew in about two hours away from my mom's place.  That being said, in order to ensure a speedy drive home we split the troops in half.  Three people in one car and three people in the other.  Carpool lane here we come.  Well, our "speedy" drive home turned into another long, arduous trip.  It took us five hours instead of the normal two. 
Car #1:  Me, my sister and Roma.
Car#2: My mom, my brother and Cylas.

This is where the control freak in me starts to get freaky.  My kid is not in my car, therefore, I am feeling out of sorts.  He is a couple of car lengths back and we're in the worst traffic jam I've seen since we moved away two years ago.  I mean, please, compared to where we live, the middle of nowhere, the only traffic you're bound to see is a horse and buggy trotting along, holding up four cars...yeah.  

Soo, here is my heart in my mouth.  Yes.  I'm controlling protective.  But, I make sure to balance it out with letting other aspects in my life hang loose for a while.  Some days I won't vacuuming obsessively or clean constantly.  My house isn't perfect, but I like to make sure it's picked up and if I'm not walking around with a broom and a vacuum the house would be three feet under toys and crumbs.  No joke.

And when my babies are older, I will still be concerned for their welfare.  I'm not going to let them know how my heart trips a beat when I'm not exactly sure where they're at...or how it makes me smile to hear their voices as they chatter, or when they confide in me their concerns.  

In general, I like to know what's going on with my household and I try to find ways to make it run smoother.  People are so quick to judge.  They see me as the one who "runs the house" and have even openly accused me of it.  And I don't mean in a nice way like, "Oh, you are so organized and your family is just so blah, blah, blah."  I mean, like, I'm this dictatorial person and my husband is just a trinket that I dust off every now and then.  Not so.  Our house runs just the way it needs to because D and I are...wait for it...a united front.  Wow.  Who woulda thunk?  Yes, I may be more vocal than my husband, but that doesn't mean anything in the world of a unified marriage.  Well, yes, it does mean something.  It means that I talk a lot and poor D has to sit through it all like and act like he's ReeeAaally listening to me.  HAH.

And please, get that look off your face.  If you're aware the state this world is in...you suffer from "control" issues, too.

In my spare time there are things I do.

Yes!  I do things in my scattered moments of "me" time.  Today I found three hours to sew!  It was a glorious feeling.  Cylas was playing with the neighbor boy, Roma was toodling around and D was doing homework.

It felt good to release my creative energies on something so cute.  I haven't had time, recently.  These little suckers took three hours to make and I enjoyed every minute of it.

 

...even down to the little carrot on the snowman.  These ornaments just so happened to be going to a friend of mine down in FL.  She saw I had made monogrammed ones for my mom and sisters and asked if I could do something similar.  What a great little project to put into the middle of my Saturday afternoon.

Hello, goodbye '10.  You were good while you lasted!  Only two more weeks and these ornaments will be a momento to 365 days passed.
But they're still kinda cute...

...and then I was taking the...

I'm starting to feel like my life is a bunch of unfinished conversations.

One of the most annoying parts of being a mom, yes, I just said annoying, is the impossibility of completely finishing ones thought out loud. with another human.  Let alone your own inner thoughts.  The other day it was really quiet in the car, like only two minutes of silence, quiet, and Cylas, having quite enough of that, broke it.
"Mahm, let's talk about something."
Me: "Ok, like what?"
Cy:  "Horses." (said with the cutest little lisp attached to the "s"s.)
Me:  "Ok."
Cy:  "Yeah, like if the horses went underground in a hole.  They would see all kind of bugs, like beetles, and lady bugs, and worms..."
Me:  "Wow, the horse would have to be pretty small then."
Cy:  "What?  Pretty small?"

I don't think he liked my answer because he stopped talking for a few seconds -- only to start back up again completely ignoring my input. 

So, he's allowed to have all these little running thoughts that manage to collide into mine, completely changing their course or making me forget what I was thinking about in the first place.  BAHhumbug.  Yes, I'm totally selfish and would like to have my inner AND outer thoughts to myself sometimes.  And if I had a genie in a bottle, I would totally wish to finish all my unfinished convos from the past.  How cool would that be?  I know there are some pretty interesting danglers in my conversational past.

Hah.
The voice of convos past.
Sounds like the beginnings of a good book.

But for now, I will have to live with digging into a good convo and being interrupted, constantly, by this kid or that, by this fight or that, by this crash or that...or that, or that.

Wait, what was I saying... ?

Getting over the small stuff

Unfortunately, the small stuff can be hard to "get over".  More often than not, it's the small stuff that ruins relationships.  It's true.  

a mistunderstanding

poor communication

assumptions

idiocyncracies

cultural differences

I can't begin to truly list all of the contributing factors.  Just know, that each of those listed I have experienced.  The past couple of months have been extremely trying for me.  The other morning I was having breakfast with D and it hit me.  

Just. get. over. it

But it's sooo hard!  The more I thought about it, the more it made sense.  If I let all of the little stuff bug me and bug me until I can't bear to look at the person, all that little stuff will soon big a big pile.  A big pile of messy, icky, bad, feelings.  No good.  

I am, inherently, a very forgiving and loving person, so it makes it very hard for me to be angry at someone for very long.  Please, don't think you'll escape my extremely point blank opinion, though.  I may not be able to stay mad at you for long but you'll know how I feel about ....whatever it is. 

But, I think that in order for me to continue to grow, as a mature adult, learning the lesson of "getting over it" is inescapable.  *slump*  And so, so hard. 

While I am forgiving and whatnot, I'm also quite high strung.  So, when conflict arises I tend to jump into the fray without completely thinking things through.  Lately, I've made myself stop, for at least a minute, before I pitch in.  And you know what, I find that I don't NEED to contribute as much as I'd thought!  Wow.  It's a total diffuser...this newfangled concept of THINKING THINGS THROUGH.  Sheeeesh.  Why didn't anyone tell me this before??  I'm kind of diggin' it though.  

Listen

Wait

Filter your thoughts

And then: pitch in -- or not.

It works.  Trust me.