Strap in for Jason’s ongoing story. Once a tech obsessed writer/photographer/speaker, treatment he thought he had it all under control – until his family grew six sizes. Now he’s trying to fuse everyone together into a single family. This is Family Sized Blender.
Jason also blogs about making better memories with your point-and-shoot camera. Check out Frame One on Facebook.
I wasn’t prepared for what happened after the thing that happened.
We’d been all under one roof for a week when the thing happened. We’re fusing together a single family from one mom, pharmacy one dad, five kids,* who report to three other families at different times during the week. Over the last sixish months, I’ve spent the majority of my time at mom’s house in Guelph. There, we spend our time with three of the kids – an eleven-year-old girl, a four-year-old boy and a bouncy, bubbly six month old (the math makes my head hurt too).
If you ask Emilia what she’s most looking forward to about moving to New York, she’ll tell you that there are five things that she’s most looking forward to: ‘the lady statue,’ ‘having an elevator,’ ‘new friends,’ ‘the toy store with the Ferris Wheel,’ and ‘new bedroom.’ What’s the thing that she most most looks forward to? ‘The lady statue, if my new bedroom was inside it, but it’s not, so the Ferris Wheel, and also my new bedroom.’ (The ‘lady statue’ is, by the way, the Statue of Liberty, because ‘why do they call it a statue of LIBERTY of liberty, Mommy, when it’s a statue of a LADY?’)
Needless to say, if there were a Ferris Wheel in her new bedroom, that would be a hands-down win.
I left my house for the last time yesterday. I slipped away, under the cover of dark – which is to say, at an unreasonably early hour, to catch an unreasonably early flight – and left for good. Kyle and the kids are still there, and will be for another two weeks as things get packed and readied for the move, but me, I’m gone. It feels very, very strange, to have finally just left that life behind. Not in a bad way, even though I might have teared up a little as the car pulled away from the house. More in a, ‘wow, this is disconcerting, in an exciting and also kind of terrifying’ way.
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I put the kids to bed the night before I left. I kissed them and I cuddled them and I promised them that the two weeks until we’d all be together in New York would pass quickly. “But will they, Mommy?’ Emilia asked. ‘Will they really? Because you keep saying that it’s going to be really really soon but it feels like a really long time.”
Oof.
To say that we’re all pretty excited about moving to New York would be an understatement. If excitement could be measured on some sort of excitementometer, the levels in our household might cause it burst. Our household thrums with excitement. Even though we’re tripping over cardboard boxes and dealing with epic chaos and wrestling with my increasingly frequent and lengthy absences (I’m more or less resident in NYC now), we’re happy. This is an adventure. This is exciting.
That excitement, however, is not evenly distributed among everyone within the household.
Strap in for another chapter in Jason’s ongoing story. Once a tech obsessed writer/photographer/speaker, cialis he thought he had it all under control – until his family grew six sizes. Now he’s trying to fuse everyone together into a single family. This is Family Sized Blender. (Psst… Jason also blogs about making better memories with your point-and-shoot camera. Check out Frame One on Facebook.)
There is a lot of projectile vomit.
Figures that I’ve just made the bed spent the half hour wrestling with the duvet cover. Our seven-month-old has no problem announcing that I’ve fed her a lot too much.
Now, overnight cheap don’t get me wrong here. This isn’t your typical “we have a new baby and diapers are weird story.” I’m no stranger to barfing small fries. Our newish-born is our sixth (and final) small fry.
Nancy’s been checking out apps, you guys. Read on for her take on a few awesome ones. (As it happens, I have the first two of these, and love them, like, a lot.)
Scheduling Nightmare Buster!
I have a very busy life like all my friends do trying to keep all the balls in the air. Between kids, work, finances, taking care of my Mom, just trying to keep everything straight can be a real challenge. Who’s got soccer practice or drum lessons tonight and what time was the dog suppose to go to the vet?
The post that follows is a revised version of a post that I wrote last year. I had been considering writing a new piece about the term ‘mommy blogger’ and to what extent I see that as part of my identity, not least because Kyle and I have been having conversations – partly in jest, partly not – about him becoming a dad blogger when we complete our move to New York and he becomes, for the most part, a stay at home dad, and those conversations raised the question: why ‘dad blogger’ and not ‘daddy blogger’? And why not ‘parent blogger,’ or some other neutral term?
I haven’t sorted out my thoughts on the daddy-blogger question – stay tuned – but reflecting on that question brought me back to this post, which still stands as a pretty accurate statement of my feelings on the term ‘mommy blogger.’
Dear Internet: I am not a mommy blogger.
Yeah, I know. There’s a baby in my header. There are lots of pictures of my children here, including that one, right there, on the upper left-hand side of this post. (Aren’t they cute? I let them call me Mommy.) But still. I am not a mommy blogger.