A glass half full of good vibes and frisky kittens

I have to say, having a niece who’s absolutely in love with her toddler cousin is such a nice thing. Last week Ashley sent us a message over the Wii and offered to watch Autumn some weekend if we wanted to bring her over. It only took us a matter of seconds to decide this weekend would be the perfect weekend since we’re all going to meet up for a family reunion on Sunday anyway. That means Nathan and I will get another 36 hours of toddler-free living. Life is good.

My mind is not quite functioning beyond anticipating the euphoria of a child-free weekend, so I really don’t have much to post today. Instead I’ve gone back to my journals and pulled out another masterpiece that will no doubt earn me the distinction of “most boring self-obsessed yammerer ever.”

I usually write in my personal journals to sort things out (read:. to whine) and rarely is there an entry in which I’m celebrating life. My challenge today was to find an entry that abandons the usual fare of lonely tears and dead kittens and actually focuses on the positive. The entry I chose starts like this: “I guess I can say that I’m pretty happy. I could be happier…” Believe it or not, this works for me.

While I wouldn’t say I’m actually celebrating life in this entry, I do find out that life can be full of welcome surprises. It was written November 15, 1992, just over a week before my 21st birthday.

A nice thing happened to me at work the other day. I was in a bad mood. Not for any particular reason, it was just one of those days. This guy I work with named Kevin asked me if I was in a bad mood and I said that I was. He told me I should be in a good mood, so I asked him to give me one good reason that I should be in a good mood. He thought about that for a few seconds and then said, “Well, you’re not ugly.” I immediately burst out laughing and thanked him for the “compliment.” He said, “I thought it was obvious.”

“What’s obvious?” I asked.

“That you’re good looking,” he said. “I mean you’re not fashion model gorgeous, but you’re not ugly.”

That started me thinking that maybe guys notice me after all, however I don’t think I want Kevin to be the one who notices me.

While this may seem like another silly entry from a silly girl, I still have a vivid memory of this moment. I remember what Kevin looked like, I remember how long my hair was and where we were when he said this to me. Even though he was by no means an ideal suitor (pervy little guy who told inappropriate jokes), Kevin’s compliment was very empowering. Kind words can do that, even if they are followed by a qualifier that puts a cap on the amount of your awesomeness.

So, in an attempt to pay it forward, let me say you all are beautiful. Go forth and be awesome.

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Finding my voice

Internet, I am tired. Very tired. I’m to the point where sleep deprivation is affecting my home life and my job so I really must find it in me to get to bed early and not stay up until midnight writing today’s blog post. Instead, I’m going to cheat a little and insert a bit of something that has already been written.

A few weeks ago I published a journal entry I wrote the summer before I started my sophomore year of high school. I thought I’d post another one because it was fun, albeit frightening, becoming reacquainted with my teenage self. This time, however, I wanted to post something a little more recognizable. The fifteen year-old who wrote about listening to George Michael and needing a boyfriend to feel validated is someone I probably wouldn’t know today if I passed her on the street.

As I was skimming through the 161 page Word document that is my current journal, I realized how much my writing has changed over the years. Most of my entries are unreadable by anyone’s standards. At least 75 percent of what I wrote was about my weight; losing it, gaining it and hating it. What I wanted was to find something that sounded closer to the voice that winds up on this blog. You know, the one that’s all Sloth and Gluttony and isn’t afraid to admit she weighs more than a Giant Panda.

Interestingly enough, that voice did not emerge until I became pregnant. My personal journal entries were pretty sparse during my pregnancy and I didn’t actually start journaling about the pregnancy until I was half way through it. Sometime in July I decided to open up the Word document and start writing again. It would seem my girl had already become the muse who inspires me to this day, because when I found the following entry I thought, “Oh yeah, I know this woman very well.” She’s the one who started this blog less than a month later.

August 30, 2005

I had quite a few strange dreams last night. In one, I lost the diamond out of my wedding ring. I found it in my bed, but it wasn’t the bed I sleep in now. It was the bed I slept in growing up in my parents’ house. I thought it would be lost forever because my mother lost the stone out of her engagement ring many years ago at the grocery store. In another dream, Nathan and I were helping my uncle sort recycling. For some reason we were at my parents’ again. We were just sorting his trash and wondered why mom and dad couldn’t sort theirs, too. And finally, I dreamed that I was breastfeeding my baby. That was nice. Christopher Plummer was also in one of these dreams as Captain von Trapp, but I have no idea how he fit in or in which dream he had his cameo. All I know is that he was an ominous figure and appeared in the same dream in which I stepped on a scale and had no idea how to make sense of all the spinning dials.

As of today, I have 68 days left until my due date. Less than 10 weeks. I’ve been having trouble with my back since this weekend, the cause of which I think was lugging the vacuum cleaner upstairs. Nathan chastised me for doing that, but if I had to wait for him to do something that I asked, I’d never get anything done. He exists in his own time continuum.

Take the laundry for example. I’ve been toting full baskets up and down the stairs all throughout my pregnancy but was having a problem this weekend because of my back. Nathan asked my why I have to do everything so I told him I don’t like it when he does the laundry because all he does is wash the clothes, dry the clothes and leave the clothes in baskets to wrinkle. He never hangs them up. So he said rather adamantly, “I can hang up clothes!” I said, “Fine, take this basket upstairs.” I started another load and walked upstairs to find him sitting in front of the TV playing his X-Box with the basket of laundry sitting on the couch. “Oh, sure you can hang up clothes,” said I. “You want me to hang these up?” asked he. “I thought you just wanted me to bring the baskets upstairs.” Arrgh! I just wanted to strangle him. Why is it that men lose brain cells once they get married? It’s as though the wedding band has some kind of kinetic power that instantly zaps the man once the ring is placed on his finger. Bye-bye brain. So long independent thoughts.

(2008 Heather has to interject here and vindicate her husband because he is totally not the lazy pile of flesh depicted here. Internet, my husband is a house-cleaning GOD. Let’s just blame pregnancy hormones for these libelous accusations and move on)

We attended a child birth class this weekend. If I thought I had everything regarding the delivery figured out, this class made me realize I knew nothing. I felt as though I was sitting through 9^th grade sex ed again while all my beliefs were shattered one by one. For example, I thought the epidural was good. The epidural is something I want, no question. During the class, however, I found out that the epidural actually slows down labor, and once it’s administered you are stuck in bed until that baby is born. Now I am an impatient person and really don’t like the thought of things taking longer than they should, not to mention having a catheter inserted to relieve my bladder because I can’t get up to pee.

I was able to visit one of the labor rooms. It was nice and roomy, but still not some place I want to spend the majority of my day. My only concern now is that I don’t know if I’m physically able to handle hard labor. I haven’t exercised much since I found out I was pregnant. I certainly could not spend 45 minutes on the elliptical like I could before. I guess the best way to handle it is to keep my options open. For all the planning I can do, I’m sure nothing will turn out the way it’s supposed to.

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A day in the life

Have I mentioned how much I like Henry David Throeau? When Nathan and I visited Boston a few years ago, we took the train out to Concord and saw just about everything there was to see in that town. We took our tour on foot and our first stop was Walden Pond. Well, we actually stopped at Starbucks first and then walked to Walden Pond. We hiked to the spot where Thoreau’s cabin used to be, the one in which he lived during his year of solitude out in the woods. While were where there, I dipped an empty juice bottle into the water and capped it with a hope my contraband wouldn’t be confiscated by airport security when we left for home.

I could go on to explain why I like Thoreau enough to keep corked bottle of green pond water on my bookshelf, but that’s not really the point of today’s post. The point of today’s post is to have a little fun, and Thoreau just adds a bit of history and is a good setup for having that fun.

It seems someone out there is also a big fan of Thoreau and has posted his journals online. If you click on the link, you’ll be treated to a brief account of what he was doing 150 years ago. Today’s post has something to do with birds and a turtle. A lot of them are like that. The man really loved nature.

I’ve been keeping my own journals for about 25 years now and thought it might be fun to look back and see what I was doing so many ears ago. It turns out my own journals are about as mundane as Thoreau’s . There’s nothing about turtles and birds, but there is a lot about food and diets.

My idea was to search for a journal entry from June 10th and post it here, but the one entry I found was excruciatingly boring. I wrote it after finishing a Spanish exam and gave a vivid account of how I had to pee. I also documented exactly how many candy bars and ice cream cones I had eaten in the previous 24 hours. Yawn.

But then I found the following entry. It talks about music, friends and boys. It’s full of silly girl-like dreams and ends with a stereotypical lament about needing to lose weight. It’s undated, but I know it was written sometime in August of 1987 shortly before my sophomore year of high school. If Donielle can wear her New Kids On The Block badge with pride, I can certainly offer you this:

Right now I’m in my bedroom listening to George Michael sing “I Want Your Sex”. I love this song. I’m thinking of school right now. I must be crazy! Right? Naw, I’m actually anxious to get back. I have so many things I want to do. One major thing I want to do is get a boyfriend. I don’t want to force myself on someone like T- does. Oh boy! I have my eye on someone but he doesn’t even know I’m alive. Oh yes, he did hit me with his trombone at Band Camp, but that’s as far as it got. I have dreams of him noticing me, then one day he gives me his ring and asks me to go with him. This only happens in teen romance novels though, and life is not a teen romance novel. Maybe I’ll get a boyfriend next year, but it won’t be this guy.

When I get back to school I intend to be more outgoing and friendly and not so shy. I guess I didn’t get very involved last year because I was a weenie freshman and I didn’t know anybody. A- and I agreed to be more outgoing.

Another thing I intend to do is lose weight. I know I say this every year, but this year I really need to if I expect to get a boyfriend. I wear a size 16 in jeans right now. I intend to get down to a size 9 before school gets out.

Well I better go, it’s 11:06. My bird needs rest and so do I.

You want to know what’s funny? I remember that guy’s name. I have no idea why I crushed on him, though. I think maybe it was because he hit me with the trombone. I’m sick that way.

And the bird was a cockatiel, my condolence gift for failing driver’s training.

There’s a lot I could say about this entry; how sad it was that I wanted a boyfriend so badly and how sad it was that I thought I had to lose weight to get one. A lot of girls are like this though and it’s wrong. It’s very wrong and I hope I can help my daughter be strong enough to realize that some day. I don’t know when it happened, but I eventually learned that people who aren’t willing to take me as I am just aren’t worth my time.

And I also learned how to drive because you know you can’t snag a man without some wheels.

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