My Super Secret Blog

Happy New Year Snappers! Welcome to 2015! This new year means different things to different people.  To me it is my first year in my forties, beginning a fourth year with out my mother, and the year my baby is in the first grade. The year(my fortieth) that I have vowed to live completely out loud, be myself one hundred percent, and make no apologies.

This past year, I took a step back from the blogging world, and decided to breathe. I decided that I am tired of  'blogging on eggshells' so to speak, so I set up a super secret blog.  Anyone in my real life that is close to me, knows all about my blog.  Therein lies the problem. So I have a completely anonymous super secret blog.  Or two.  These are a place where I can go to write about my frustrations, my peeves, and to let it all out.

Why do you need a secret blog you ask? Because my husband, my kids, my in-laws, my husband's entire ginormous family, my extended families(there are several by marriage), my friends, other bloggers and people I have never even met, occasionally read my blog.  We all break out our brand spanking new blogs for the first time, proud to call ourselves bloggers.  We start writing for various reasons, for an escape, a release, because we like to write, because it gives us stay at home moms a hobby or something to make us feel 'heard'. You become part of a silent sisterhood of bloggers. Our blogs pick up steam, we aspire to be the next 'BIG" blog, and dream of one day getting published.  We design our blog's look, participate in or sponsor blog hops, write guest posts for other blogs, create our buttons, invest in one or more self help blog advice books, or bloggers how to guides, set up our Facebook fan pages, our blog's Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Bloglovin, and various and sundry other social media tie-in sites, get everything all set up and running smoothly, some even get published, make some bloggy friends, ... and BAM! Then it happens, writer's block. 

Then we pick ourselves up and start writing again.  Eventually we rediscover our voices. We get back into the rhythm of blogging. Then again, over time, we begin to find what once was so much fun, becomes monotonous again.  We find ourselves slaves to the numbers, where the numbers are more important than what we actually have to say.  How many views did this post get, how many comments did I get last week, so on and so forth until we lose sight of why we first started blogging.

Why did you start blogging? I started blogging after I became a stay at home mom, and to spend time with my sick mother(who passed four months after I started my blog in July of 2011). I used to entertain classrooms full of people on a daily basis, and now there was an audience of my mother, myself, and my two year old. So I needed to talk, to write, to vent.  To get the "ME" out. I used to tell my funny kid stories to my classes, and now I tell them to my blog. I have always been a social person, and the slower pace of my newfound life took a lot of getting used to. I wrote because it was my outlet, my release.  Then after my mother died, I started a blog about Grief, The Grief Chronicles

The other part of setting up a secret blog is that there is more than one side of me.  I am by nature a people pleaser.  I am the peacemaker of the family. I was raised a lady, and remain a lady.  That being said, I also have a wicked sense of humor, a naughty side, and have been know to have quite the potty mouth when I step out without my child. We each have many roles in life.  When you are setting up a blog, you must choose which persona you present to the public. For this blog, for example, I have chosen to be the cool mom, homeroom contact-person-ie 'mom', dutiful, fun loving, happy go lucky wife and mother, who gives you a peek into my at times airheaded, fun, crazy, less than perfect, wild and wonderful life. I do not choose to share all the other sides of me publicly on this blog.  And trust me, there are many.  So when I feel like not keeping my mouth shut, and writing a scathing, bitchy piece, I go to my super secret non-censored blog and voila! I feel all better!

Does it bother me that it is not wildly popular like this blog?(Well, to me 50,000+ is wildly popular in these here West by God Virginia hills) Nope, not at all! That means I don't have to promote it! And let's all be honest, it takes a lot of self promoting and time to rack up the numbers! SO I recommend that everyone has a super secret blog! I love mine! A blog free of scheduled in advance writing times, scheduled this and scheduled that! And only a handful of people who know of it's existence! A blog for just me! That being said, I love you guys! And you can't get rid of me!

The Chinese Torture Device

     Hello dear readers.  Oh that's right, I don't have any subscribed readers yet! Ha ha! My bad!  Todays blog is brought to you out of domestic  bliss, cough cough, what I really meant was, frustration.  We are in the process of moving.  Not packed.  Don't have boxes.  The husband expecting me to move all of the small stuff out of the way so he can move the big stuff.  What about no storage in our current abode, did he not understand/ where precisely am i suppose to put all the little stuff?   I have consolidated storage boxes and cleaned out the three year olds closet.  Went through her  stuff, stuffed animals, weeded out toys she dosent play with anymore, all done.  Ran out of storage tubs/boxes.  There are now garbage bags of keep and not to keep stuffed animals sitting in our hallway, as well as the gigantic tubs full of stuff.  Stuff to keep, stuff for a yardsale, stuff to give away, stuff to save for my brother and his pregnant wife, all taking up the way too small hallway between her bedroom and ours.  She could not navigate the piled up hallway if she tried in her fuzzy half awake state of wandering from her bedroom to ours at 3am, if her life depended on it.  So guess where she is sleeping for now?  EVERY night?  That's right.. in dear 'ol mom and dads bed.(Thank goodness for a king size!)  The reason we are moving,, is that we need more room.  We have outgrown our current digs.
     So you ask why dont I move the space obstructing bags and tubs to our new home?  Aha, this is where it gets good!  There are spiders.  The omghuge-o-mongosizedspidersthatUncleDonniehadtospraywithWD40togreaseitoffofitswebsohecouldsmooshit spiders, that even old Uncle D was afraid of.  Yep!  That's right!  How did you guess?  I hate spiders.  I am afraid of spiders.  I scream like a little girl if one drops down in front of my face while I am driving in the car.  I accidentally was not thinking one day when I had such an outburst in front of the 3 year old.  Dad has the same affection for spiders that I do.  AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  That we have now by proxy transferred to our precocious child.  So now she has an anxiety attack every time she sees a bug, spider, or especially flies.  We are working on correcting this.  Ooopsie! My bad! Got the picture now? Ok great.  Lets procede.  So the news says there are unusually huge spider infestations this year.  Oh really? Well thats just freakin spectacular!  They must have looked at our new house before we did, and run screaming.  So we go over to clean the new house.  My husbands grandmother goes along to help.  She is a 70-something lil tornado, a dirty houses worst enemy, cleaning hell on wheels so to speak!  So I am spring cleaning the kitchen, she goes to work on the cobwebs.  She kills at least 40 itty bitty spiders in every room.  Then she pulls out the windows to rid them of said infestation.  Better her than me!  She showed me two days later her wounds inflicted during combat!  Her entire forearm was covered in spider bites, and all red and swollen.  I felt awful.  So she says if they come back, let her know,we will have to spray or set off bug bombs.  Ok.  I thanked her profusely.  She saved my life and all, ya know?
     So I mop,dust, wash the fixtures, paint the three year olds room, etc, to get our new house ready to move into.  Then all of a sudden, they are back.  A few at a time mind you, but they are back.  So we have also discovered that the air conditioning is cooling underneath the house, not the actual inside of the house.  So while we wait for that to be fixed, we have to hold off on the bug bombs.  Fast forward to my frustration.  I cannot move the small stuff, the bagged stuff, the dishes, the anything, until the ac is fixed, and the bug bombs have exploded.  Period.  So I am frustrated.  The three year old wants to play in her room, which is remniscient of a hurricane disaster sight, so she cannot.  She is more demanding of my attention now, than she ever has been.
      Did I mention that in the middle of all this unorganized chaos, that I am suppose to be washing and packing to go on our first ever "family"vacay with my parents? Um yep, right-o.  My parents want to see my precocious three year old at the beach.  So we were suppose to leave tomorrow, and bam!   My mom got sick again and ended up back in the hospital.  Vacation=cancelled.  My momma has more frequent flier miles at the local hospital than anyone can possibly imagine.  She has spent the better part of the last year in the hospital, as well as doing a two month stint in the Cleveland Clinic.  She is a walking medical miracle I tell you.  Plus the hopital should have perks for frequent guests.  Like a points system with rewards, like American Express.  They need to provide a rewards bedside shopping catalog with prizes to those who have accumulated so many million points, from forty some odd hospital stays.  Yep.  But thats a whole 'nother blog!   Ok, suspected it was going to happen, but still stinks.  I wish my poor mom could catch a break.  So I have to call the UHaul people for dad and cancel the pull behind.  Yes I said pull behind.  My parents know how to pack...I mean full luggage, makeup case, jewelry case, bag for front of car, bag for overnight motel stop, snacks bag, cooler, kites, sand toys, pool toys and floats, puke bucket, wet-wipes, and everything else one would or could or possibly might deem necessary for the beach or pool experience(also the stroller, wheelchair, and walker must all be accessible for bathroom and food stops..thus the need for the pull behind.) So like I was saying, I get sidetracked easily ya know?  Anyway, I have been a little busy.  Throw in three birthday dinner celebrations for my dear ol hubbies 37th birthday, and having a broken car, along with everything else, and kapow, welcome to my life.(see In Exile post for birthday celebration detail) So my darling daughter has been acting her age.  Three.  They say the terrible twos, but then the twos fly by and you are smacked in the face with this three year old adorably sweet demon child, who secretly grins when not obeying.  Also secret grin emerges when manipulating to get what she wants, and trying out the hitting, scratching, biting, kicking, poke you in the eye-ing, finger up your nose-ing, in your mouth-ing, in your ear-ing, and the discovering of parents body parts that make them squeal and pinching them(elbows,nose, arm,leg, knee, etc.)  Where oh where did my sweet perfectly behaved child go?  My younger brother told me yesterday that he and his wife are expecting.  Yaaaaaay!  I am so excited for them.  And then it hit me!  No one tells you it's the terrible threes.  Every parent in the world has experienced them.  It's the best kept secret on the planet.  Every child goes through this stage.  But we do not discuss it.  Only the "bad" parents cannot at some point make their child mind.  WRONG.  Every child has periods of growing and independence, and tests their boundaries.  These periods suck.  The adorable demon child that has possessed your lil one, wears down your tolerance and patience so thin, that several billion dollar companies, have created chinese torture devices, to restrain these little hellions, and hold them still while parents lay down the rules!  Thats how they have become billionaires!  By mass marketing the best restraining system in the entire world!  Every parent has one, and it has a rather common household name.  The highchair.
     So this afternoon, I hita breaking point.  I did not yell, I did not cry, I did not scream, or talk until I was blue in the face.  I calmly went over, picked up my precious, and deposited her in the highchair.  She had no idea what was coming.  I made her eat her lunch.  Every bite.  Normally shse waits until everyone is finished, and then eats.  She sometimes still asks me to feed her, or drops her food to get a reaction or a laugh.  Sheis quite capable of feeding herself without making a mess.  She is very smart for her age.  So this afternoon, I shut her down, and laid out the rules.  I told her, while restrained in her highchair, that there would be no more whining or crying to get what she wants(I had to stop an attempt at both), there would be no more mommy or daddy asking multiple times to get her to do something, if she did not obey on the first request, then the consequence was time out.  I also told her that on very important things, like walking in a parking lot and not holding someones hand, that there would be immediate consquences.  So this afternoon, I had a very well behaved child.  She picked up her toys, and laid down for a nap without incident. Yay me!  I have taken back control! With the,assistance of my mass marketed chinese torture device(because it holds the toddler still and they cannot go anwhere and must sit and listen to you..ie torture), the good 'ol highchair! So, now while she naps I have gotten several things marked off of my to do list, and am going to take a soak in a scalding hot bath!  I deserve it!  Then, when my husband arrives home from work, he is going to dye my hair red.  He just dosent know it yet!