About Time

I haven't blogged in a week because one thing got in the way of another. It started with the Noodle getting sick for a couple of days, and the cats getting sick, and then everyone just generally being under the weather. As I result, I did everything I had to do, but not everything that I wanted to do. 

It might seem hard to understand how two days at home with a five-year old could be so much less productive than two days working from home. I mean, most of the time she just lay around on the couch and watched TV. But that is not how that works.

Why? 

Because time, man. 

I just started reading this book my dad recommended called About Time, by physicist Adam Frank. I'm only a few pages in and think that it's heading in a sort of "OMG why does math explain reality?" direction (could be wrong; I'd read the blurb but you know, Kindle and apathy). 

But as of whatever page I'm on, it is about how time is mediated by our (culturally-determined) interaction with the material world. How we engage the world determines how we slice up time--which in turn affects our culture. For example, early farmers realized that celestial events could show them the best times to plant. This discovery then affected their mythologies about those celestial events, which in turn shaped the way they spoke of and measured time. The division of time into night and day, into growing seasons, into multi-year planetary orbits, into hours and seconds, was brought to us by our own cultural evolution. 

What's my point? Good question. I wrote that last paragraph before cooking and eating dinner so I need to group...Okay. My point is (and I may be making a jump here) kids have time and I never have any. For example, having just asked my kids to "give me ten minutes"--they have returned every 5-10 seconds, which has made the last three minutes feel simultaneously like no time and also like infinity, depending on who you ask. 

So last week, time was but a treacly morass for my poor sneezy Noodle, an eon of daylight followed by an age of darkness. Whereas I, a modern woman, was trying to get ish done by CoB. At my workstation at the dining table, I had to-do lists and deadlines and appointments (now cancelled). Instead of doing those, I kept hopping up to fetch water or cut fruit or dispense medicine or read books or move handfuls of clothing from station to station along the Infinite Laundry Loop. ("Hey, what did you last week?" "Nothing.")

Over in Noodle World, the afternoon was measured in cartoon episodes, each one simultaneously a whole lifetime and also the mere blink of an eye. 

I glanced at the clock. "We have to leave in a minute, sweetheart," I said.  

"I have to go to the bathroom," she says. 

"Huh?" I'm in the middle of an email, talking and typing. "...You have to what? Oh, that's perfect. Let's turn off the TV, you use the restroom, I'll finish this email, we'll get dressed and pick up your sister, then we have to stop by the post office and the grocery store, okay?

The Noodle's eyes open...and close. And open...and close.

"I have to pee," she says. 

"Great!" I grab the remote and turn off the TV. "You do that, I'll wrap up this email, I need socks, you start getting your shoes on, let's not forget the bag for groceries, and then we'll head out okay? It's quarter to, so we should get going." 

I return to my email, stopping on the way to register that the hotel confirmation arrived (sweet!), shoot a "haha" back to a mom group on FB messenger to indicate that I've been paying attention, and also answer a quick question on WhatsApp because it's been like 7 minutes since they wrote and I don't want to be rude. This is adulthood. Our seconds have seconds. Our effing downtime organizes itself into micro-draining micro-obligations, which take up micro-time in our micro-schedules. Micro-ha!

Boom! Email done. Close laptop, grab socks...

The Noodle is on the couch. Her eyes open and close. 

I say, "Babe I know you're not feeling well, but we have to just power through and actually we really need to get going so can you get your boots on?"

"Mom!" she says. "I can NOT get my boots on. I still need to pee!" 

"Dude! Go pee! We gotta go!"

Her eyes open. And close. 

"I'm tired," she says, and looks at me with big, weepy eyes. Every time she breathes, a little rivulet of snot jerks back into her nose. She's so fragile, like a baby bird. 

I sat down on the couch and gave her a hug. We missed the post office and the grocery store, CraftyDad picked up the other kid, we ordered in and it really didn't matter. I didn't get s*** done last week, and actually, come to think of it, it's FINE.

It's also FIN.  

And the moral of this story is (gird your loins): I've taken some time to realize that we have to to make time to have time. Now is the time to take a time out, lest we run out of time to take time in. I forget that, like, all the time.  

Alex, #CraftyDad King

I am not feeling very well and so, after an ill-advised and generally very weak sauce effot to work out this morning, I came home in defeat and took a super long nap, kindly sponsored by my husband. 

When I finally lumbered out of the matrimonial cave, these were the first words I heard: "Well, the panda bear idyll is finished."

#CraftyDad and the kids were sitting in the family's usual rainy-day position around the coffee table, surrounded by half-used packages of FIMO, a near bucket of clay tools, and a bunch of knives. Alex was putting the final touches on a bear. Noodle was rolling out the trunk of a tree. The Nugget was hacking away at the corner of the table with a blunt knife and saying "Oogie woogie oogie woogie"; it's the thought that counts, I guess. 

These are idyllic pandas baking in the oven.

If you've never played with FIMO, you definitely should.

These are the technical drawings on which they are based (#CraftyDad initial draft, and then his apprentices' versions. The last one is crumpled because the Nugget, in the spirit of Gerhard Richter, initially showed it with pride but then, after I said she did a great job, thought I was lying, freaked out, balled it up and threw it away). 

You may have gathered that this post has no real point other than to show off #CraftyDad skills. But they are kind of amazing. He has an unlimited capacity to delight little children. It's amazing. 

Last night, the Noodle's bff slept over and he made all three girls FIMO bracelets with jewels in. 

Also FIMO

And most importantly, last week he made <3 ME <3 a present. I know why I married him, everyone. Why he married me is a mystery beyond all comprehension, but it happened and he's f***** now, so no one tell him that he has made a terrible mistake. 

Here is the gift he made me. It lives physically in our most overgrown orchid, but its spirit dwells in my heart until the universe returns to darkness.  

Constructed of a purple button, red silk flower and more FIMO

And now, I'm off to vegetate. 

I hope to regain the powers of higher-level cognition, sentence construction and blog post composition very soon. Until then, me and the little button nose dude are resting. Thanks, #CraftyDad, for the little dude (anyone have a name suggestion?) and all the other things. I love you*.

Foreground: Bubblebears. Background, from left to right: foot of sleeping Nugget, Noodle face, and a pic of me that is pure fire

*#CraftyDad, if you're reading this: Every word of this is meant from the heart. Also, I could use a tea. Those are totally unrelated comments. 

The Nature of Fun

Weekends are sacred, and not just for adherents of Abrahamic religions. That precious Friday-evening-through-Sunday space is, for many of us, the only time that we can briefly return to our senses and perhaps remember that we are alive, actually alive. On the weekend you can spend your hours attending to the feel of air on skin and ground under foot. Communing with God(s). Noticing this our only world as if its lifeforms were alien and new. 

Or, or, OR... you can hang out with your kids. 

We went with option B. 

On Saturday, we went with old friends to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. We did NOT go see the Bruegel exhibit, because that's just played out and overrated (by which I mean we couldn't get tickets). 

Instead, we saw All the Art in the World Except Bruegel, and let me tell you, our children did not give a flying banana. The field on which their given f***s grow was utterly fallow. They were briefly intrigued by the vast age of Ancient Egyptian artifacts and slightly horrified by the smallness of baby heads sculpted in Rome, but they yawned their way through Ancient Greece, were actively complaining at the Wes Anderson exhibit, and were downright surly by the time we reached the great Italian and Dutch masters. These kids did not care, and may actually hate art for the rest of their lives. 

My friend's four year old, who is a hero, bore up stoicly under the strain. My elder daughter looked terribly, terribly sad, held my hand limply and, every gallery or so, would whisper plaintively: "I wish we could sit down, mommy." 

The younger daughter actively wept. "I want to go home, mommy," she said, over and over, in tones best suited to a WWII drama. "Please, please let me go home." And when we wouldn't take her home, her skin turned green, her eyes bulged out of their sockets, her head rotated 180 degrees and she crab-walked up the wall while vomiting bile. Something like that, anyway. 

The grownups did their very best to absorb culture with appropriate interest, but frankly success was limited, at least for this grumpy grownup. But afterwards, we all agreed we had had a lot of fun!

This is the gang taking a break from culture, photo courtesy of Dushan the Great, who taught me something super interesting about Vermeer and the camera obscura but my kid was tugging on my sleeve the whole time so I couldn't fully get into it. Thanks anyway, Dushun. And Denia and Mimi and Alex!

On Sunday afternoon we bundled the children up like wee turduckens and took them out of the city and into the woods in Purkersdorf. By the time we got there it was about 2pm, which at this time of year means we enjoyed the very last rays of light before sunset. But with the sky a wet eiderdown of clouds, instead of the golden hour we enjoyed more of a freezing, tarnished silver. 

We parked in the wrong place. This meant our woodsy adventure actually started with a 15 minute trudge along the end of a country road down a sodden path of mud and leaves, with the air cold and wet and our hands freezing and the children asking if we were ever going to be there yet. 

At first, Alex and I tried to keep spirits high for the sake of the pumpkins. But after about the fourth time trying and failing to get the kids excited about something that was in no way remarkable ("Look, girls! I see a bent braaa-aanch!"), I grumped something at Alex who snarked something at me. 

It was in this mood, weary bordering on foul, that we finally reached the entrance to the nature reserve. The path in was at a 45 degree angle, consisted entirely of iced-over mud, and spelled utter defeat for our youngest child, all 14 kilos of whom we had to sort of throw up the hill. My stupid shoes were soaked through and I couldn't feel my feet. The snow was ugly, the sky was ugly, the trees were just sad. 

This particular park has roomy and fairly wide enclosures for a couple types of local fauna. It being winter, the animals gathered by the fence as we arrived, doubtless hoping for a snack. 

"Look, it's a reindeer!" said the Nugget. "Like the kind from Santa!"

"It's a deer," I said grinchily. "A regular old middle European deerus normalus."

"Do we have any apples?" asked the Noodle, her face a picture of precious anticipation.

"Nope," I said. Then I felt like a jerk, so I tried to muster up some cool facts about antlers, since one of the herd had a big pair. Turns out I don't know much about antlers. My children looked small and cold, and one of them said we should just go home. 

But we couldn't go home. We hadn't done anything yet. The deer lost interest and wandered away, and we kept plodding uphill and into the park.

I was particularly annoyed because walking in the woods was my stupid idea. Alex suggested ice-skating, but I foolishly said we ought to get away from people and into nature. Well here we were, wet and frozen and miserable, having fun. 

And then Alex spotted a fallen tree. We love fallen trees. You can climb them, balance your way down the trunk, pick grubs out of their mulchy ends, lay down on them to stare at the canopy AND--if your pops is Alex and the tree is sufficiently far from the madding crowd--you can even pull down your pants, sit on them with your butt hanging into space, and do your business like the Lord intended. 

Something about playing on this tree turned the tide. We started to warm up. We were laughing. And then I remembered that maybe, just maybe, fun isn't about remembering to bring apples, or seeing something amazing, or doing something you've never done before. Maybe fun doesn't come from a store--maybe fun means something a little bit more! And my little cold heart grew three sizes that day. The minute my heart didn't feel quite so tight, I started to relish the weakening light.  I stopped being a d***! I started to beam! Everything wasn't as crap as it seemed! 

We wandered on down to the wild pig enclosure. The swine showed up in force and smelled pretty unkosher! (I'll stop now). We cooed at the piglets, swung on the swings, met an apparently lost house cat and, when we were basically 10 minutes from dying of exposure, we turned around and trooped all the way back to our car singing "The Ants Go Marching Two by Two" over and over, with everyone (even the Nugget) coming up with lines about what the littlest one was doing ("making a poo! HAHAHAHAHAHA!").  



So I have to say, all in all, the weekend was a lot of fun. 

The weather was super duper!

The Ballerina Nugget

Yesterday our Nugget participated in her first ever extra-curricular activity: A ballet class for three to four year olds. Y'all, my heart nearly exploded.

It was the Nugget's Schnupperstunde. A Schnupperstunde is a free trial class, but Schnupperstunde is one of those examples of a foreign word being so vastly superior that I've decided it needs to enter the English language, like Doppelgänger or Schadenfreude. A Stunde is an hour (or a session), and schnuppern means to snuffle or nose around, like a puppy in a pile of leaves, so your Schnupperstunde is where you get to sniff it out. 

It smelled like roses, dude. 

The studio is less than a mile from home as the crow flies, but sort of silly to reach via public transport, so I brought a stroller and the babe took a power nap as we walked over. This was great news, because she's a (big) toddler and toddlers who are tired after a full day at preschool can really bug out if you plop them in front of a group of all new people and tell them to, you know, dance. 

So I was braced for everything to possibly be a trainwreck--not least because that morning Nugget had informed me that she hated dancing and didn't want to go--but it wasn't! It was a straight hour of cuteness. Right before class she woke up, ate a banana and said, "Thank you mommy for this delicious banana." I beamed. 

We went inside and she told the teacher, "Hello, I am the Nugget and I am three years old." I beamed some more. 

Because she doesn't yet own the standard pink outfit that the other kids have, I let her change into this horrifying tutu thing with Elsa's face on it that she loves with all of her heart. And the other kids goggled at her, so she beamed. Most importantly, her outfit gave her strength, because the branded crap kids wear somehow imbues them with the powers of the characters represented on it. 

I think this is why when little kids watch TV they'll tell each other which character they are: "I'm Daniel Tiger"; "I'm Ladybug"; "I'm Cat Boy no no no no I mean Gecko". While watching Frozen, all kids are always Elsa -- I mean duh. Anna doesn't have ice powers. And then kids will Rocky Horror mime out the cartoons they are watching, too. (By the way, if you think I just made up all those characters in this last paragraph, you clearly need to get out more, you philistine.) 

Also, I wonder to what degree a kid in her favorite Spiderman jammies is or is not different than a person who wears e.g. a silver picture of a saint on a chain around their neck. That's not meant condescendingly at all, by the way. Me, I buy products because famous people advertise them, and that seems like just a more abstracted form of the same impulse. On the more concrete end of things, some people kill and eat the toes of the ones they love most, or honor the greatness of slain enemies by cannibalizing them. People want to consume the people they admire, sometimes literally, in order get a little of that ineffable something extra. I bet this urge to absorb admirable others, if not physically than at least by using their lip liner, is some weird evolutionary holdover from humanity's most infinitely distant past: Once upon a time we were globby, Jabba-like cells, picking not just nutrients but also information from the bacteria we subsumed. As humans that behaviour would be pathological, so instead we try to channel others by surrounding our bodies with their trinkets. 

(Did that last paragraph sound convincing, like maybe there's a straight line from the evolutionary imperative of single-celled organisms assimilating bits of genetic information from one another straight up to humans wearing religious icons? I want to be clear that I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, so #FakeNews. Get media literate people.)

Also ALSO, I wonder what would happen if I gave my kids T-shirts that had me and their dad's smiling faces printed on them --in large size, in full color--presented as if they were cooler than a Hatchimal. "Sorry, kid," I'd say. "They were all out of Elsa. But here's a dress with MY face on it!" Imagine the side-eye we'd get from other parents. Ha! 

Anyway, back at ballet class the kids were taken out of the waiting and changing area into the studio and the heavy wooden door was shut in our faces for the duration, but since I was the new parent in the group I'm ashamed to say I spent a few minutes with my eyeball pressed against the keyhole, where I watched the children warm up by pretending to be the tiniest cats and the jumpiest frogs, and by golly it was effing adorable. Equally adorable is the idea that three year olds need to warm up. They are warmed up from the moment they pop out of bed at the crack of down until their bodies pull the emergency brake on their consciousnesses some time at night. I guess it's more like burning off the extra energy so they can focus for the rest of the class. By the way, I'd share pictures, but this is the Internet and those are other people's kids, and if I ever stoop to photographing strangers' children through a keyhole, I invite you to beat me about the head. 

So my view was mainly of the waiting area, which had soft, colorful couches and poufs. Mid-way through the hour all the little girls thundered out of the studio because they simultaneously realized they had to pee, so that was ten minutes of unpacking and repacking them in their outfits, and like three extra minutes of all the kids un-wedgie-ing themselves. At one point this kid wandered out of class, singing to herself, suddenly realized that class wasn't over and that she'd temporarily lost her mind, shrieked and ran back in. Another one came out of the class about five times so her mom could blow her nose, equally mad at her mother each time that her nose was still running (geez, mom, you're such a d***). There was a one year old in the waiting room who grinned at me the whole time while bopping to the music emanating through the classroom door. And when it was all over, there was a bowl of small apples for the kids to take, which brought both joy and sustenance. It was perfect. 

As we were leaving, I told the Nugget she did a good job listening to the teacher, and that I bet she danced well even though I couldn't see her. "What did you think about it?," I asked.

"I danced gweat," she replied. "It was much gweater dancing than I 'spected. I didn't thought so it was going to be good but it was!" 

What I said was, "Mmmhmm, you didn't think it, honey. You were gReat."

But what I meant was that I was proud as punch and I hope we can go back.  

Daily Door Doo Doo

Wise men say only fools rush in. Nowhere is this more true than when crossing the threshhold into our lovely apartment in Gumpen Village Street. That is because of the daily door doo doo. 

What is a daily door doo doo? 

This is a daily door doo doo: 

THIS: 

I understand that all misplaced cat turds are inconvenient. Some are aggravating. But a daily door doo doo will you drive you to despair.

I bet YOU like getting home. I used to like getting home. 

When a person arrives at their front door after a long day at work...

Or when a person arrives at their front door after an awesome, life-giving day in the sunshine...

Or when a person arrives at their front door sweating inside their winter coat with 25 kg of groceries cutting into their fingers and two crying children (The fingers are deep purple and have lost all circulation because it has literally taken 20 minutes to go up two flights of steps, and the reason it took 20 minutes is because the three year-old keeps crying and sitting down, and the reason the child is crying is because you will not carry her, not even if her shoes feel funny and her knee hurts and she is so very tired, and you will especially not carry her because you are lugging enough f***ing milk to bathe Cleopatra (cow! skim! almond! rice!), and now all of this arguing and starting and stopping and sweating inside coats has caused your formerly sanguine five year old to also sit down on the steps and cry, and both kids' mother is just about ready to sit down and cry too but she doesn't because that would be the beginning of the end of all things)... 

No matter in what condition you arrive at your front door, what you want is to come home. To throw open the door, toss off your shoes, and flop onto the nearest upholstered surface. 

The act of coming through your own front door is SUPPOSED to unleash a little prickle of heart joy. The smell of candles and cookies and your own laundry detergent. Warmth. Your people, your things. An invitation to hang up your sorrows along with your hat.  

Daily door doo doo is why you cannot have that. 

What you can have instead is a rainbow shit smear that smells like what it is, and that is too sticky to be removed by paper towels alone. What you can do is tiptoe and lift your whining children over it, and undress them hastily in a deeply funky cloud of cat dung. While they scamper off, you can storm around gathering paper towels and Windex, and spend the first few moments of your arrival at home cussing and scraping up poop, and then trying to get a fine mache of poop and paper out from under your fingernails. And the next time you leave the apartment, you get to do it all again! 

F*** YOU

This is only my second blog post in a while. I should end on a positive note. Negativity is super alienating. 

So: It's not all bad! 

Like, the way the poop smears can really teach us a lot about how circles work. 

Secondly, understanding Schrödinger, but with the poop instead of the cats! Is there a doo doo? Isn't there? Perfect ambiguity, until you open the door. Thanks, cats!

Thirdly, it's not EVERY time you open the front door. It's like 70% of the time. And today I left the apartment late enough to catch a daily doorway doo doo on the inside (that's what inspired this post...I'll take what I can get), so there's only like a 25% chance that the next person to come home will face the rancid rainbow. Grace is real, guys.  

And lastly, doo doo teaches us not to take the joy of home-coming for granted. Ain't nothing in life comes free. And believe me, once you've finished cleaning up the daily door doo doo and its consequences, and possibly given the cat a harder-than-necessary prod with your toe, and apologized to your very strict five year old for having dropped an f-bomb or two, you will flop onto that couch knowing that you absolutely deserve to be there. 

I'M BACK! To the FUTURE!

Well, fancy meeting you here. In the unlikely event anyone is reading this, please know I am honored and delighted that you are here. Stay! It has been a long old time since I wrote anything on this here dusty blog, and a sight longer than that since I updated it regularly. I have a long list of excuses reasons for this, but this new weight loss app that I just downloaded has educated me to understand that being super f***ing busy isn't a thing, so let us put down the cookie and face the future together. 

All blog entries need pictures. It's like a rule. Today's images are brought to us by InspiroBot, the AI bot that randomly generates inspirational memes. They often make sense, but they never have meaning. Thanks, InspiroBot!

Here is the current state of affairs: The Noodle is five, is in kindergarten and will begin the first grade this coming September. I'm trying to think of how best to describe how she's changed over the last year. I guess you could say that she is old enough to have a private inner life now. She has thoughts that are her own, and she is better able to control who sees these. She is a happy, laughing kid 95% of the time. She can be super silly (she thinks it is hilarious to pull down her pants and fart in our general direction, for example), but she's also very intent and serious about coming to grips with the shadow side of life, like why people have to die or why cupcakes taste good if they're bad for you. She is the bright full moon, a magical and joyful gift.  

The Nugget -- who is arguably more of a noodle than a nugget herself these days -- is now three years old. She walks (runs), talks (a lot) and has a great number of opinions. She is still charmingly transparent in her id-driven ways. Cupcakes are bad for you so you cannot have another; but they are yummy so I want one. If you get out of bed you shall not get a sticker in the morning; but I don't like stickers at night except now I want a sticker in the morning, mommy.  She is laughter and bubbles, a dinosaur fairy superhero. She also continues to literally think she is a mouse, like an actual furry cheese-loving rodent, but that's another story. 

As you can imagine, every room in our home now carries the spaghetti stains of our little glitter monsters. The noise is cacophonous, the clean-up sisyphean, the vocabulary resplendent! We wouldn't have it any other way. And as of this morning,  Christmas break is over and they have been safely stowed in kindergarten. THANK GOD. 

Superdad, heart and soul of this here operation, continues to be Superdad, and in particular has turned out to be a live-in website's worth of ideas for arts and crafts. Who knew? He also continues to have a job and run a business, so if he was a Care Bear his tummy would have a picture of a giant platinum motor on it that spits out toilet paper roll kaleidoscopes. Or something. In any case, I love him. 

Think how profoundly silly humanity must be for our version of AI to come up with this. 

And on to me: I am now officially (big gulp) not working -- which brings me to why I have time to blog this morning! Until the end of December I had a busy and fulfilling role at a great organization, working with awesome people doing something I loved to do -- and for money, too! But for a list of reasons I won't be discussing here, I felt it was time for a new adventure. 

A large part of that consideration was this: Professionally (and personally), I've had the great luck to walk through open doors one after the other -- but a tremendous amount of my energy has been spent on how to do my best in the room I'm in, which is fabulous and important, but which hasn't given me a lot of time to think about what might be behind those other doors, and how to find the keys. 

Because I am 35 years old and the boss of me, and because neither of my kids wear diapers any more, I am giving myself permission to think about it. Thus it has come to pass that for the first time in many a year, I have left a job without having another one lined up. It is utterly terrifying but also exhilirating. With friendship and joy I said goodbye to a fabulous bunch of colleagues whom I wish only the greatest success (and they don't need my wishes to get it, trust me), and I'm ready to see what's next.  

I need a new position. Or maybe a couple jobs, or consultancies? Or maybe some additional education in a field related to but different from the one I have been working in? Can I do that and still work and still be a mom? Do I even want to? What is most important to me right now? 

Crap. InspiroBot has put its finger on my deepest insecurity about my new life phase. It's cool, this is just a random meme generator, this doesn't mean anything. It doesn't KNOW things. I'm not gonna let this get to me. Pff. Bots.   ...    *hides in closet* . 

All of these questions and life-models are now officially, as of today, under exploration.  I need to do some budget, schedule and activity reshuffling to make sure that we start living way more cheaply (because for now I'm living on savings) but also continue to also offer our kids (and ourselves) an interesting and stimulating life. Basically, I'm project managing a readjustment of my personal operations, but this time I get to start at the outcome level: What do I want? What do we need? 

My eyes are open for new prospects, and meanwhile I need to do a bunch of research and have a lot of conversations with clever, wonderful people I look up to. I also need to take a deep breath and a deep look inside myself and figure out how I should best balance a lot of competing personal priorities. 

LIke everyone else, I get caught up at work and in projects, and everything else kind of falls away. This makes me a great team member (and you can find my LinkedIn here...just kidding), but sometimes it means I forget that I love to blog and experience art and take long walks and sit under a tree and stare into space for a minute.  

Having time for that other stuff while working and raising children is luxurious, and I know it's not possible to have all the things at the same time. But if I could make some time and mental space for a few more of these finer, funner things, no matter what I do career-wise, I think it will be a life better lived. So I'm going to try to use this self-imposed down time to really, really think about it. 

Not to worry though. 

I promise I will NOT be using this space to set personal goals and indicators and mark achievements or any of that, because there is nothing more tiresome than using social media as a space for accountability or personal growth when it was clearly designed for sharing videos of floating hedgehogs or whatever. I am merely explaining all this as a basic framework for the stories about my children's antics and my general personal disarray that are to follow. 

And on that note, I literally have a laundry list of ish to do. Happy Tuesday and if you have read this far, gold stickers and gratitude!