I'm Still Alive!

As I sit down to write this blog entry (old school with pen and paper, as I do from time to time), I struggle to find a blank sheet in my one-subject spiral notebook. I’ve just realized that Makensie has taken it upon herself to create “art” on nearly every page. Never a dull moment!

I haven’t blogged in quite awhile, and there are many reasons why, the most obvious being the holidays. You know how hectic they can be. My brother’s family was in town for two weeks, which meant we had three children under the age of four, one married couple (my brother and his wife), one divorced couple who lives together (my parents), and a single mom (me) all staying in a four-bedroom, three-bath house for an extended period time. (Did I mention the three dogs and one cat?) You can see how the logistics of lodging could get complicated (and it did). Privacy and quiet time were nonexistent.

Another obvious reason: I’ve been spending quite a bit of time looking for jobs and trying to build up my freelance business. (Check out my Web site.) Of course, getting a job is my top priority right now, so I have to spend any extra time I have on this endeavor. In the same vein, I’ve been trying to figure out what the next steps in my life will be. I had hoped to pinpoint where I want to raise my daughter, what I want to do as far as my career (if I even have a choice in this economy), and how I’m going to achieve all of my future goals. This is an extremely transitional period in my life, and I want to make the right decisions for myself and for my daughter, which takes time and a lot of soul-searching. And boy have I been soul-searching!

A new project I’ve been working on with my mother is writing a series of children’s books, which has been a lot of fun and a welcomed creative outlet for me. Unfortunately, the books have trumped my blog the past few months because of an end-of-February deadline. Three books are written, so now we’re in the formatting and editing phase. At the end of February, my mother and I are attending a conference for children’s books writers and illustrators, where we hope to learn a great deal about the next step in the process—finding a publisher. It could be a long road, but we’re hopeful that it will be a fruitful one.

Getting myself back into shape (two years is plenty of time to have lost the baby weight, so no more excuses!) has also been a top priority in my life the past few months. I’ve changed my diet extensively. I did Extreme Fit Training’s Boot Camp for three months (miss you Coach Val!), which helped me get back on track fitness-wise. It also provided yet another creative outlet for me: I was the Boot Camp Blogger, in which I chronicled the ups and downs of my three months of extreme training. The training was tough but exactly what I needed at this place in my life, and I hope I’m able to go back soon. For now, I’m going to the gym five days a week and trying to keep myself fit on my own. It’s harder without being held accountable by others, but I’m working on it.

Finally (as I run into another “doodle” of Kensie’s in my notebook), being a full-time mom is hard work! Don’t get me wrong: I love being at home with Kensie and am fortunate to be the one who’s teaching her and playing with her and cooking her meals and brushing her hair and bathing her and wiping her bottom now that she’s potty-trained (well, maybe I’ve gone a bit too far on that one) and molding her into the extraordinary person she’s becoming. It’s just hard to find the time for all the things I need and want to do in a day with a kid at my heels buzzing, “Hey, Momma. Hey, Mommmaaaa. Mommy! Mommmmmmaaaaaaa!!” But I’m getting better at organizing my and Kensie’s time. I never thought I’d say this, but working full time as a journalist is waaayyyyy easier than being single and a SAHM. Thank you universe for my wonderfully supportive family and friends! Without them, I don’t know where we’d be.

So, I’m hoping to beef up the number of Single Mommylogues entries in the next few months while continuing to look for jobs in multiple areas of the country and build my freelance company, write children’s books and explore getting them published, work out five days a week, figure out my future quickly so as to begin my life again, travel a bit here and there, and raise my child into a grateful, gracious, grounded human being. Oh, and did I mention trying to keep up with a couple of prime-time shows I’ve recently gotten sucked into that leave me feeling as if my day is incomplete when I miss them? I won’t tell you what they are for fear of losing one of my two readers, but I will say that one of them forces me to cover my eyes in embarrassment from time to time and the other has brought me to tears on multiple occasions. Yes, I should "just say no," but what else do I have to do with the two hours of time I have in the day for myself? Trashy TV it is!

My Life as I Know It

It’s been awhile since I posted, I know, but sometimes life just gets in the way of the things you love. So, where to begin? Well, let’s start with the most significant incident in my life in the past couple of weeks: I’m unemployed again. The job I took recently suddenly fell apart last week (after less than two months), so I’m on the hunt again. Long story short: The company wasn’t bringing in enough money, so they had to lay off a bunch of people. Enough said.

So I’m looking for jobs again (if anyone knows of anything, you know where I can be reached), and I’m trying my hardest to get myself back into shape. Which leads me to significant incident No. 2: I pulled a tendon in my right foot. To most people, this might not be such a big deal. But for me, it’s a huge deal! I just started a fitness program three weeks ago (shameless plug here: Extreme Fit Training), and it’s an extremely tough program, but even tougher when you can’t use your feet. I’ve gotten used to burning 800 or so calories a class, and I can’t figure out how I’m gonna be able to do that without the running, jumping, hopping, and lunging required to get my heart rate up. But I’m trying to stay positive while also staying off my injured foot for the next two weeks (I’ll still go to class and do abs, arms, squats—whatever I can to burn, burn, burn!). Luckily, after this final week of Boot Camp, our next class doesn’t start for another week.

On to Incident No. 3: My car flooded last week. As long as I’ve lived in the South, I can’t remember a time that we’ve had so much rain! It lasted for more than a month, and it rained every day! And I don’t mean a few sprinkles in the afternoon; I mean full-on, heavy, coming-in-from-all-angles, drops-as-big-as-walnuts rain! It’s only now gotten to the point where the sun peeks through now and again. So last week, Kensie and I were going to a friend’s house to hang out and have lunch, your typical Mom/Daughter play date. So I open the door to my car (not raining at this point, amazingly), and it smacks me in the face. A smell so awful, so rank, so gnarly that I wanted to turn around and run the other way! I literally thought something had died in there. I pulled everything out and began my search. Did I leave a dirty diaper in the car that had rolled under the seat? I’ve never changed a dirty diaper in the car. Was there a bag of groceries filled with fruit and meat I’d forgotten about in the trunk? Not that I could find. Had an animal crawled up into my engine and died? Well, I’ve heard of that happening, but I could find nothing. So, against my better judgment (but with few other options), I rolled down all the windows and threw K in the car to go meet my dad so he could check it out. Almost immediately, he noticed the soaked mats and floors. What I smelled in that car was mold. MOLD!!

So, you know I watch HGTV. And one of my favorite shows is Rental Property. Inevitably on that show, the basement of the subjects is completely swamped with mold. They wear masks whenever they enter the dwelling, especially when they’re working on pulling out the moldy carpets or sheet rock. They make it very clear that mold is not something you mess with; it can make a person very sick. All I could think was that I’d been putting my kid in that car, and that mold could have been in there a month! I mean, how long does it take mold to get to the point of smelling like a dead sea lion that’s washed up on the beach and decomposed for a month? I sure don’t know!

So K and I get to my girlfriend’s house (we were already close, so why turn around now), and I was nearly in tears. But thanks to the level-headedness of my friend who’d just been through a bunch of craziness herself and had learned to deal with it, I called the insurance company who instructed me on what to do. File a claim. Take the car in. Rent a car (thank goodness for reliable car insurance). Move on.

So today, I’m driving a cherry-red Jeep Liberty rental while waiting on my car to be fully cleaned and de-molded. Though the insurance company won’t fix the problem (they say there’s no way to identify it; huh?), at least by day’s end I will be driving a mold-free blue Tucson with my butt imprint in the driver’s seat and the light above Kensie’s head that I can turn off and on at her will (it didn’t go over well that there was no light in the Liberty for her to control). Maybe after a week of me exercising like a maniac hopped up on speed while my car was in the shop, that butt imprint will be just a little bit bigger than the actual thing. A girl can dream!

New Digs

This weekend I decided to go ahead and convert Makensie’s crib into a toddler bed. I’d asked some of my mommy friends about it, and most of them said to wait until she showed interest in a big-girl bed or started crawling out of her crib. Well, she’s definitely shown interest in big-girl beds (she loves crawling in and out of my bed and her buddies’ beds), and I don’t think she will ever try to crawl out of the crib being she’s quite careful by nature and knows I’ll come running if she calls. So, with little possibility of her crawling out and her desire for a bed she can climb into on her own (and my desire to not have to lift her in and out all the time when she’s “playing” in her bed), the decision was made.

A week or so ago, my brother called and told me that they had moved my nephew into his big-boy bed, and that’s what got me thinking. My nephew is three weeks younger than Kensie, and although they’re quite different (Bryce was crawling out of his crib) in many ways, I figured if B was ready, so was K. (Turns out B is just on a mattress on the floor right now, which is a bit different than the journey on which we were about to embark.)

So early Saturday morning, I sat down with the conversion instructions and got to work. I assumed that since it was a “toddler” bed, there would be a bit of a rail on the open side so Kensie wouldn’t roll out but could still get in and out on her own, but the further I got into the conversion, the more it looked as if one side was going to be completely open. And sure enough, it was! At first I wasn’t too worried. This is a big-girl bed, after all, so I guess it’s time for K to be a “big girl.” But when my baby looked up at me and said, “Mommy, what happens if I fall out?”, my heart sank. What happens if she falls out!?!

So I went on the hunt (knowing full well I was not about to convert the toddler bed back into a crib, because what I had just done was hard work, and K would never let me change it back now!) for something that would deter her from rolling right off the mattress and onto the floor next to her bed (which now was covered with a doubled-over rug for extra cushioning). I dug through closets and the garage and just about every cubby in the house until I finally came upon my Total Body Pregnancy Pillow, which I slept with in the latter months of my pregnancy. You know, the full-body pillow that looks like a snuggly snake with a hook at one end? Anyway, I pulled that out and stuck it into the slats and along the open side of K’s bed, and voila: instant guard rail (as long as she doesn’t thrash about too much, because it is, after all, just a pillow)!

So at naptime, K was really excited to get into her new bed, but was not too happy when she saw my guard rail invention. “Whazzat, Mommy?” “Nooooo, I don’t want dat piddow!! Move it, Mommy!!” She wouldn’t go down with the snake pillow up, so I had to let her sleep with no protection. I went to my room, listened to the monitor, and waited. Nothing. First attempt in the big-girl bed sans a guard rail: success!

Saturday night, after I put K down (with the pillow rail installed after much back-and-forth between us), I sat down to watch some HGTV and to listen. I was still stressed that she’d fall out because I know what a restless sleeper she is. I went in her room and checked on her at least five times throughout the night, but she made it again! Sunday nap and Sunday night, same. She did great, no falling or rolling or jumping, she didn’t even get up and come into my room (another of my initial concerns—waking with an extra human being in my bed every morning).

So, needless to say, we’ve made it through the weekend and beginning of the week in the big-girl bed, and it’s amazing how “big” Makensie seems to me now. She’s not a baby anymore! She tells me exactly what she wants or needs clearly and concisely (“No Mommy, wait right they-a!” she says with her pointer finger right up next to her chin). She runs and gets things on her own without me having to do it. She’s using the potty (when she wants to, but she’s still doing it). And now, she’s sleeping in a regular bed. When did my baby transform into this little human being?

I’m excited Makensie is growing into such a fun and beautiful little girl, but I’m sad that it’s going by so fast. I guess what Mom always says is right on: “Enjoy your child every single day, because one day you’ll wake up and she’ll be sitting across from you with a glass of wine explaining why she’s chosen to move across the country with her boyfriend of six months who waits tables for a living and can’t wait to teach you how to surf.”