Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

  • When It’s Time To Change, You’ve Got To Rearrange

    Monday, June 8th, 2009

    Oh Brady Bunch, truer words were never sung. My thoughts are so jumbled up right now that I’m having trouble even figuring out how to explain what I want to explain. This is one of those posts where I try to unravel the tangled mess inside my brain by attempting to channel the flow of thoughts from my head down into my fingers, so that maybe if I get the words onto the screen they will stop buzzing around in my head and let me get a freaking good night’s sleep for a change.

    I spend entirely way too much time thinking about blogging. Hi, my name is Elizabeth, and I’m a blog-a-holic. Hi Elizabeth.  I lay in bed at 2:00 am, 2:30 am, 2:40 am, etc., and flying around in my head like annoying little bees are all these thoughts- I wonder how many new emails I have in Outlook? Oh crap, I forgot to start the Lands’ End giveaway! They are NEVER going to want to work with me again.  Shoot, I was supposed to post that review of (insert name of book/CD/DVD/appliance/food product here).  When am I going to do that? I already have so much to do tomorrow. Etc. Etc.

    If it was just a time-management problem, that would be one thing. The real  problem, the problem that doesn’t just keep me up at night but swirls around at the edges of pretty much my every waking thought, is that what I’m really not paying attention to is priorities.

    Let’s take a look at what my priorities should be, off the top of my head:

    1. My husband and my kids.

    2. Keeping my household running.

    3. Taking care of MYSELF.

    4. Spending time with my real life friends.

    5. Interacting with my blog friends.

    6. Writing blog posts because I enjoy creative writing.

    7. Reviewing products and hosting giveaways.

    That’s approximately the order that those priorities SHOULD be in. And hence the title of the post, because the truth is, I’ve been giving almost all of my waking time and energy to blogging and almost none to my husband (or to myself, for that matter).

    In fact, I was laying there at 3:00 am on Sunday morning, looking at the back of his head as he slept, and it hit me- my god, this is the man who has stood by me for over TWENTY YEARS, who has given me everything it has been in his power to give, who has put up with my depression and anxiety and PMS and grumpiness, who has continued to love and desire me despite the ridiculously large amount of weight gain, and how am I repaying him?

    By jumping out of bed every morning and giving everything I have to my blogs. I’m being brutally honest here, this is not an exaggeration- I’m putting my husband last in that list of priorities. I’m taking him for granted.  I’m relying on the fact that he will just always be around and will continue to put up with my shit, and even though that might be the case, it doesn’t mean that our marriage doesn’t need to be nurtured at LEAST as much as my freaking blogs do.

    Before I started blogging, I had spent seven years as “just” a stay at home Mom. I wanted something that I was good at, that was enjoyable to do and produced some kind of satisfying result. I tried scrapbooking, I was awful at it. I tried to learn to crochet.  Even worse. I felt like I was never going to find something that I was good at that people might remember me for.

    And then I discovered blogging. And turned out to be sort of good at it. I was finally putting all those years of creative writing in high school and college to good use. My husband and kids were supportive and understanding when I suddenly wanted to fly off to blogging conferences and events. They listened to me babble on about what was happening in my blog friends’ lives at the dinner table. Finally, I had something that was just mine.

    But now here we are 3 1/2 years later, and it’s taken over my life. I never wanted it to be like this! I never wanted to feel like I was drowning in my own blogs. I want it to be FUN again. Something that Jenny from Absolutely Bananas wrote in a recent post has stuck in my head- every time you post, you have to imagine that it will be the first post a new reader encounters. Is that post going to make them want to come back and read again?

    And you know what else? I spend so much time thinking about product reviews and giveaways and stats and traffic and search engine optimization that I have forgotten how to just BLOG ABOUT MY LIFE.  In fact, I think I’ve forgotten HOW TO HAVE A LIFE. How pathetic is that?  I used to have all kinds of things to say about my kids and my life as their Mom, because I took the time to slow down and pay attention. I don’t have time to pay attention to my own kids right now. And THAT, my friends, means it’s TIME TO CHANGE.

    In the next few weeks, I’m going to be participating in some really exciting campaigns. I’ve got products to review and give away that I am personally thrilled to be associated with.  But in order to save what’s left of my sanity and my marriage,  the rest of it, the stuff that is just stuff, that’s going to have to drop way further down on the priorities list.

    Because otherwise I am going to burn out in a big way, and I’d prefer to avoid that happening altogether.

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    14 Comments » Filed under: Born to Blog, Personal

  • Gosh, it’s fun to fly.

    Thursday, April 30th, 2009

    I’m home from Stouffer’s! I have a pile of mail and packages to go through and I have to take Nathan to “Meet the Teacher” night at the school he’ll be going to in the Fall, plus I’m so tired that I fell asleep on both flights home today.

    Speaking of my flights…I headed to the airport from the hotel this morning with Carmen, Lisa, Deb, and MJ.  Carmen was on a different airline, but Lisa, Deb, MJ and I were all flying from Cleveland to Detroit before splitting off for separate connecting flights home. 

    We missed our flight. We got to the gate and the door was closed, the agent had left, and we could see the plane out on the tarmac headed to the runway. An airport employee pointed us back towards ticketing where we had to go to rebook our flights.

    So there the four of us were in ticketing, MJ on the phone to Northwest, Lisa on the phone to Simon with Publicis PR, and miraculously, there were four unsold seats on the next plane going to Detroit which was in less than an hour. We printed our boarding passes, went through security again, and then went to the gate. Yes, we made the flight :)

    So, we get off the plane in Detroit, and I’ve got about 25 minutes until my connecting flight is boarding. They made us gate-check our rolling suitcases, so we had to wait for those. And wait, and wait, and wait. By the time I got my bag, I had 15 minutes to get from the end of C terminal to the other end of B terminal.

    At least I didn’t have to go to A terminal like Deb, which involves escalators and the supremely annoying tunnel with the flashing lights and loud music.

    So I make my connecting flight, we board the plane, push back from the gate, and then stop. The pilot comes on and says there’s a “mechanical problem”, and we have to go back to the gate for it to be fixed. And it could be anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes until we take off. Yippee.

    I promptly fell sound asleep, barely registered take-off, and woke up with a start when we landed and the pilot slammed on the brakes (or whatever they do to stop the plane) making everyone lurch forward in their seats. I was just glad that my Dad and Stepmom were at my house and that Ryan could stay with Kaitlyn so they could come get me.

    I want to tell you a lot more about the event itself, but right now I have to take Nathan to this scavenger hunt/get to know your new school thingy, so Nathan can learn how to open a locker and whatever.

    Also? I am SO looking forward to sitting on the couch with Chris tonight watching DVR’d “Lost” and “Rescue Me”.  If I don’t fall asleep, that is.

    2 Comments » Filed under: Personal, Stouffer's Let's Fix Dinner event

  • Here’s the story, of a lovely lady-who-couldn’t-keep-up-with-the-bill-paying

    Friday, April 10th, 2009

    This is the story of how I lost my “job” as the family bill-payer, and how my husband switched from paying bills online and over the phone to writing actual paper checks. Which he put in envelopes with actual stamps and return address labels. Return address labels that I got for free from VistaPrint after choosing from nine pages of designs, all I paid was shipping. It had been so long since I wrote a check, I’m surprised our credit union’s fraud department didn’t suspect the checks had been stolen from us.

    For the last, oh, 20 years of our relationship, I have been in charge of paying bills for Chris and I. I used to have this obsession with keeping the checkbook in pristine order. So much so that if I messed up a line, I would make a big X through everything and start over on a new page. I am so not kidding.

    When I worked at the credit union, I had the perfect setup. I could access my own checking account record from my desktop terminal, so every morning I would meticulously record every cash withdrawal and written check, marking off the ones that had cleared. Once they introduced debit cards, I would go through any receipts in my wallet and record those transactions, marking those off when they posted.  You would have thought that my checkbook WAS my job.

    Even after I left the credit union, I kept it up thanks to the home banking site. I had a spiral notebook where I made budgets for each upcoming paycheck, which bill we were going to pay when.  Right up until this past year, in fact, I was doing a wonderful job, if I do say so myself, at keeping our bills paid and our checkbook correct.

    And then this past November, everything kind of fell apart.  I posted a request on Help A Reporter Out for products to review for Christmas, and had no idea what I was getting into. I could barely, BARELY keep up with the wave of emails and products and boxes that were piling up, and I just plain stopped paying attention to the mail. Like, at all.

    Until one day near the end of January when the phone rang and it was Comcast. We were three payments BEHIND and they were going to shut off our service unless we paid something. I was HORRIFIED.  This was part of my JOB as the stay at home parent, keeping the bills paid. And I had blown it.

    Now, you all know I love my husband. You know he works hard at a job he has to commute to, that he comes home and does things like cook dinner or do dishes, that he does all the laundry. You know he is a freaking AWESOME father. And now? He is a freaking AWESOME BILL PAYER.

    That’s right. He took away my “job” as keeper of the bills and checkbook. He piled up all the bills, made a list, and instead of paying online and over the phone like I was doing, started writing actual paper CHECKS.  Within three pay periods he had us completely caught up with Comcast and well on our way to being completely caught up with everyone else. He started a spreadsheet on our shared drive and kept track of what he paid, the check number, when it cleared.

    In a word, he ROCKED our budget. We are caught up! And I swallowed my pride and admitted I made a big mess of things and have thanked him profusely and repeatedly for pulling us out of what could have been a big disaster. We didn’t have anything shut off or sent to collections or anything.

    And so that is the story of how my husband took over bill-paying and went back to the “old fashioned” way of paying them. I don’t have an affiliate account with VistaPrint (although that would be awesome since I love them so much), so I won’t get paid if you click, but take a sec and check out their site. 140 return address labels are free, you just pay shipping! Free is good. Having the bills caught up is EXTRA GOOD.

    7 Comments » Filed under: Personal

  • For Maddie

    Thursday, April 9th, 2009

    I only knew Heather Spohr from her hilarious tweets and her blog. I knew she had a daughter who was born prematurely, named Maddie.  Maddie had huge blue eyes and a huge smile that made me smile right back at every photo I saw.

    Maddie passed away on Tuesday. I learned about it Wednesday morning and spent the day reading tweets and blog posts. My heart aches for Heather and Mike Spohr and their families. The world has lost a bright ray of sunshine, a beautiful little girl who loved Matt Lauer (yes, the Today Show’s Matt Lauer) and was beloved by many.

    In lieu of flowers, the family has asked for donations to be made to either the March of Dimes page they set up for their walk, or you can make a donation directly to the family through this PayPal page to help with their expenses.

    Something Casey said at Hallmark on Tuesday has been echoing in my head since yesterday. She said “we (meaning Mombloggers, but it certainly applies to every blogger) are a community. When one of us is in pain, we rally around that person”.  She had no way to know how true that would be.

    So many people visited Heather’s blog that it completely crashed and had to be rebuilt.  Retweets on Twitter and blog posts have resulted in over 18,000 dollars being raised since Tuesday night for the March of Dimes, and over $3,000 for the family.  We can’t hug Heather and Mike Spohr in person, but we can send them a collective wave of virtual hugs and hope that it helps.

    Please donate something.  And please say a prayer or whatever it is that you do for the memory of Madeleine Spohr.

    maddiespohr

    4 Comments » Filed under: Personal

  • Shocking News of the Death of Natasha Richardson

    Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
    NEW YORK - DECEMBER 04: Actors Natasha Richar...
    Image by Getty Images via Daylife

    At 5:02 PM PDT, E! Online reported that actress Natasha Richardson, age 45, has passed away after being taken off of life support. She suffered a head injury on Monday in Montreal during a ski lesson, was flown to New York’s Lenox Hospital on Tuesday, and was pronounced brain dead. She is survived by her husband, actor Liam Neeson.

    I first saw Natasha Richardson onscreen in the film adaptation of  Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. She also played the mother of one of the twins (played by Lindsey Lohan) in the 1998 Disney movie The Parent Trap. In 2005, Richardson was in a film called The White Countess that also starred her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her Aunt, Lynn Redgrave.  More recently, she appeared in Wild Child which also starred Julia Roberts’ niece Emma Roberts.

    I feel…shocked. She was only 45, just three years older than me. I still feel like I’m about 25 inside, I bet she did too. You figure you’re going to live another 40 years at least, so you do things like go skiing, never thinking that it could end your life. But then again, if you live in fear of dying, you’ll never really live, if that makes sense.

    My sincere condolences go out to her entire family.

    293richardsonnatasha2031909

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    6 Comments » Filed under: Being a Mom, Personal