Something that MUST go.

Blog soundtracks.

I'm sorry. I know many of you out there have a blog soundtrack. And I still love you. I promise.

But let me tell you people, when it's 9:30 PM and my nerves have been burned down to little black nubs and I'm settling down into the calm quiet of a house in which the children have been put to bed, I go to your blog. I pull up the page and am just settling into a peaceful read about your little Ian and his clever little antics when---out of nowhere and usually at high volumes-The Proclaimers bust out with "500 Miles" or Edwin McCain starts singing "I Could Not Ask For More."

It scares the LIVING BEJEEBIES out of me. Each one of my little nerve nubblies sits up like the woken dead, grabs both sides of its tiny head, and screams. This tells my hand to scroll down to the bottom of the blog and mute the damnable noise, which it does, thankfully, but for me, it's too late. My nervous system is now totally shot. I spent the rest of the evening throwing sharp glances over my shoulders. I find my can of pepper spray, lock all the doors, and fall asleep lying flat on my back so I can see if there's anything coming into the bedroom to get me.

It's all very nice that you want to add to the ambiance of your blog by sharing your favorite songs, ya'll, but it's just not working out. There is no ambiance, there is only blind panic. No one is listening to your music; they are only rushing to make the uninvited noise stop. Maybe if you put some sort of really visible warning on the blog somewhere it would be okay. Like, perhaps you could change your blog's name to "WARNING: THIS BLOG MAY BEGIN MAKING LOUD NOISES AT ANY MOMENT." Or maybe you could make the music optional, like something your readers could click on in case they wanted to hear the songs you'd been loving lately.

Just a thought. Now if you'll excuse me, It's time for bed. I've got to go lock all my doors and see if I can find my pepper spray.

Big Kid

Today Soren started preschool.

All morning long, it was "When do I get to go to preschool? How much longer 'til I can go to preschool? How much longer? When? How many minutes? Is that a long time? How much longer now? Is it time yet? Can we go now? Can we go nooowww?"

He ate breakfast. He had a bath. He put on his brand-new bumblebee t-shirt, chino pants, and light-up Lightning McQueen shoes.

At 8: 10 AM (almost an hour before preschool was scheduled to begin), he put on his backpack.

He waited.

And waited.

Finally it was time to go.

We walked four doors down to Little Russets Preschool, where Miss Misty and a very enthusiastic group of Lightning McQueen backpack-wearing kids greeted him from the landing.

He walked up the stairs and didn't look back.

I walked back home feeling a little weepy, a little proud. I fervently wished for a video camera in the preschool so I could watch his every move, see what they were doing, see how he responded.

When Liam and I came to pick Soren up two hours later, he was wearing a sparkly headband with his name on it. He said he liked preschool. He showed me the worksheets he'd colored. He wanted to know if Koen could come over to play.

I think it's going to be a good school year. I can't believe how big my baby has become.

Metablognition

When I was a kid, I would go for spurts of faithful journal writing. And then there would be a break. A few days, a few weeks, a few months. I didn't really matter how long-- I always felt guilty. Like I'd abandoned my journal. Like maybe it would need therapy to cope with its abandonment issues. So I'd always begin my return entries with a lengthy apology for the length of time it had been since I had written. As though my journal gave a damn.*

I feel compelled to do the same here, though in this context I suppose it makes a little more sense, as there are a few real, live human beings out there who read my blog. Or at least, who used to read my blog. Until I betrayed and abandoned them with my slow, infrequent posting habits. Which means that, while I am ready to break my long internet silence, I can't bring myself to just....start posting again, as though no lengthy absence had occurred. That would be like calling up someone you'd totally blown off for several weeks and expecting them to hang out again without some sort of explanation.

So, um, explanation.

I've been tired, mostly. My days go something like this: wake up at an unreasonably early hour with the children, make breakfast, get ready for work, take care of children, go to work. Work, come home, cook/eat dinner, cajole the children into bed, go for a run, pick up the house, chat with the husband, brush my teeth, wash my face, collapse into bed. If I'm reading something that's completely engaging, I might pick up a book between "wash my face" and "collapse into bed," or maybe Abe will connive me into watching three back-to-back episodes of The Mentalist. And then I'll get all excited about the novelty of doing something I want to do and end up staying up way too late and then be miserable and hypersensitive the next day. So when I'm choosing fun things to do in the fifteen minute slot between "wash my face" and "collapse into bed," I might think about blogging, but the thought of going through all the steps necessary to even get started (opening up the laptop, waiting for it to turn on, opening up the internet browser, going to blogger, logging onto blogger, creating a new post, and then stringing words together into cogent sentences.....good heavens, the toil! the travail!) just makes me tired.

And then I spiral into a doom cycle of insecurity: if I let myself go long periods of time without writing, I start thinking I have nothing to write about, and that if I did write about something, people would think it was boring/offensive/poorly written/too positive/too negative/too religious/too non-religious and then--please, no!--they might stop reading my blog. Not that they've been reading it anyway, as I haven't been posting. But such is the way of my irrational mind. Which means that I'm past due for a little reminder to myself that it's my blog, dang it all, and I'll post whatever I rootin' tootin' dang well please. And ya'll can take it or leave it. So there.

The truth is, though, that just getting on to participate in a little metablognition (blogging about blogging) has been enlivening for my inner writer, so much so that I think I might go through all the effort of turning on the laptop to do it again tomorrow.

We shall see.

*I've got this anthropomorphism problem. It gets so bad sometimes that I won't pick up a bottle of shampoo at the store unless I'm sure I want to buy it because I don't want it to gets its little hopes all lathered up just to put it back on the shelf. Once Abe decided it was time to throw away the microwave my parents let us have when we got married (a microwave that, mind you, had been in my family for years) and I cried hot, bitter tears because it broke my heart to think that all the microwave's years of loyal, faithful service would end in the cold solitude in a landfill somewhere far away.