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!