Starting Over...Catching Up

I missed the 10 year Blog-iversary.  I actually did not miss it at all.  I was there.  I just wasn't here.  I haven't been here in a while...

I would like to catch up and keep our memories just like I did in the beginning, but I don't feel like I can put my whole self into the writing anymore.  It feels too vulnerable and public and I'm just not in that place anymore.

I was looking for old Halloween pictures last month and I brought up the blog to search for them.  While I was searching, Nathan came along and started reading old posts.  It was weird.  For both of us.  Later, I found him reading more of them and he said it was kind of "like reading a book about my life".  That is how it started for me and that is what I miss.  Capturing the memories.  I got too far behind and I felt overwhelmed, but I do miss it.

They are not as fresh as they were, but they are still there.  (I started this post in 2015--Never caught up--these memories are definitely not fresh anymore, but the pictures help.  I will do my best.)

I feel the need to write again.  Not really for public consumption, but for myself.  To release the stress and the anxiety I am feeling.  I don't even know where to begin.  It has been so long since I've been here and looking back at all of our young faces, I barely remember those days.  I haven't posted for almost 9 years.  When I left off, we were still in New Jersey.  Not even a glimpse of what lay ahead.  A summer later, we found ourselves moving to Charlotte.  And we're still here.  For now.  Another for sale sign adorns our front yard.  This one is the second for sale sign in the same place.  I guess we did this twice in Michigan as well, but very different circumstances.  We arrived with (as they say here) a rising 8th grader, a rising 5th grader and a rising 3rd grader--it was Father's Day Weekend in 2015.  Eight years later, most of us are leaving.  Our family feels so different.  It feels fractured, even though it is the natural progression of life and my last post with Nathan about six years away from starting college touched on how I was just beginning to realize what was to come, it feels hard and sad.  I'd be lying if I didn't say I feel a little broken right now.

Somehow we have ended up in this place where our oldest is living on his own across Charlotte in an apartment.  He will be 21 in just about 4 months.  He is taking five more classes to graduate with a business degree in July, before he even turns 21.  He has a career lined up that he is excited about and he has been doing big things for a while now.  

Hannah is 18--actually almost 18 1/2.  She is finishing up high school.  She has decided to go College of Charleston and has roommates all lined up.  She has a part time job serving tables at a local restaurant and this is her 3rd or 4th job over the last two years.

Sarah is 16.  Driving.  Also has a job as a cashier at our closest Harris Teeter.  I have said to my friends at work, how did my newborn baby Sarah get a job?  I don't feel that far removed from that mom, who in 2014 when I left off, was about to turn 39 and still living in New Jersey and Sarah was not a newborn then, but I had no vision of this future.  No idea what the future would look like for each of those kids, now essentially young adults.  

Looking back now on what our lives were then, I can hardly believe how much we have fit in--in less than 10 years.  I forget so often that we moved back from Belgium in 2010.  13 years ago last month.  Crazy.  It feels like we just got back.

So where did I leave off...

7th Grade Nathan.  Had just turned 12.

I titled this picture--"Girls Last First Day at Ironia"  Likely because I labeled most of those pictures in 2020 while I was making a Book of Nathan during COVID to somehow make up for his lack of a real senior year...I have not even started a Book of Hannah.  Maybe this can count?  Anyway, when this picture was taken we had no idea it was their last first day at Ironia.  Hannah was 9 and starting 4th grade.  Sarah was 6 and starting 2nd grade.  My heart.

Hannah had a brief stint as a cheerleader in Randolph.  She was adorable, but it didn't fit in her long term goals.

Sarah's soccer career has been much longer, but likely ended last fall.  Again, my heart.

Football was fun for Nathan that fall.  He did end up with a concussion that caused us all a little more stress than we would have liked, but he recovered and did end up playing at the end of the season.

A day off in October meant a trip to the Bronx Zoo.  No memory of where Nathan was this day.  Hannah & Lauren are still friends all of these years later.  Sarah & Georgia less so, but I talked to her mom yesterday.  One of my lifers.

All of these girls are going to college next fall.  Hannah has kept in touch with each of them over the years.  She loves these girls. 

Nathan was Tim Duncan with Donut socks that Halloween.  He seemed or felt too grown up for Halloween back then, but he continues to celebrate the holidays well.

November brought a new instrument into our home.  Another short lived phase of Hannah's life.

Hannah turned 12. All of these girls slept over and almost every parent wished us luck as they dropped them off...Then a group of them proceeded to go out together for a night of fun.  No one ever reciprocated that scenario if I remember correctly.  That summarizes how I felt about a lot of their moms. (But not all of them).

Nathan spent that year attending all of the bar/bat mitzvahs in Randolph.  It was a great time to have a boy and not a girl in 7th grade.  He wore basically the same thing every single time.  The girls had multiple dresses for each event.  That would have been so much more expensive a couple of years later for us.

We enjoyed hibachi for Hannah's birthday dinner.  I can't believe I don't look exactly like that anymore.  In my mind I do.  The mirror is a liar.

I don't remember December of that year.  Our pictures are weak in that department.  This is it.  Brownies celebrating a holiday party after school.

Maybe we were busy recovering from November.  We took the kids to see Aladdin on Broadway.  Nathan felt it was just "meh".  Not sure his opinion of the arts has changed too much over the years.  But Sarah has grown to LOVE these shows and her enthusiasm is contagious. 

And adorably, Sarah got her first glasses.  She just had an eye exam yesterday.  Still only wears her glasses on occasion. 

The photos I am looking through are only partly labeled and catalogued.  I remember growing weary as I sorted pictures for Nathan's memory book 3 years ago.  The hard drive has pictures through 2015 and as I looked ahead to January, I remember that some sad things and some big changes were ahead.  We had to say goodbye to our Max.  We started getting our home in Randolph ready for new owners and we started planning our move to Charlotte, North Carolina.  A new job for Joe.  A new home for all of us.  A lot of hard goodbyes.  And almost 8 years later, we are in a similar position, but this time we are not leaving as a family.  I feel like I am leaving little pieces of my heart behind with this move.  Again, a lot of hard goodbyes are upcoming.  But the hardest to wrap my mind around are the ones that mean I won't be seeing two of these little people every single day.  They are no longer little people and truthfully, I no longer see them every single day right now, but it is a change.  My heart.

I will just leave this here at the end of 2014 before I take on the big changes of 2015 and the ongoing changes up until now.  Hopefully I'll be back soon.  This has been good.  This has been therapeutic.  Maybe a tiny bit healing for my heart.

Five Years Ago...

I feel like the title of this post should read: "Five Years Later..."  Where have I been?  While it may feel like five years, it has actually been five months since I last updated.  I miss writing.  I miss organizing pictures.  Like I do with almost every other thing in my life, I let the pictures and the updates get so far behind that I just avoid it.  It overwhelms to be behind, so I ignore it.  I'm healthy like that.

I had started a post in May titled "Tired" then another one in June titled "Fail".  I've been thinking about it and I've been missing this, but I have just been busy and overwhelmed with the thought of catching up.  I don't think I can catch up, but I'm here anyway.

It is almost nine years to the day that I started this blog.   I had an almost three year old and a baby.  I was writing down every detail because it seemed like it was my story to tell.  As I have become the mother of an almost twelve year old going into seventh grade, the details feel less like mine to tell.  I finally get what was being said to me five years ago by a new friend I made.  She is a mother of four boys.  Her youngest was even older than my oldest and even though we haven't seen each other since the summer after we came back from Belgium, I will always remember her words of wisdom.  She was one of the many moms telling me how I'd miss those days.  How she couldn't believe how quickly time was flying.

Five years ago, I was juggling an almost 8 year old, a 5 year old and a 3 year old.  I wrote blog posts frequently-- with titles like "Long Days, Short Years".  They were busy and exhausting and it was hard.  Some days I felt like I couldn't wait for them to get older.  Some days I wanted to shrink them back down to babies.  I wanted five minutes to myself and date nights with my husband.  Sometimes I missed working.  Sometimes I was lonely.  Sometimes I was overstimulated.

I still have all of those emotions, but now I am just soaking it up.  Soaking up now.  Because I finally get what my friend was saying and a little of what she was experiencing.  At the time I did not get it.  She would often ditch plans with friends or her husband because she was feeling like they only had so much time together with everyone home as a family.  At that time her oldest was five years away from going to college.  Guess what.  Time's up.

That was it.  He's starting college now.  We are one year away from where she was then.  We have six years before Nathan is old enough to go to college.  I think five years ago, I just couldn't see past the long days to grasp the short years.  Now the days feel as short as the years.  The seasons (with the exception of this past winter) fly.  Summer has been a blink.

So I left off in March.  It was cold.

Sarah had artwork displayed at a local hospital.  She was so excited to bring our whole family to see it and her art teacher was very sweet about how Hannah's project wasn't quite finished yet.  It is now on display in our basement stairway.

We became guinea pig owners as opposed to guinea pig sitters.  Sarah's has officially been named: Ginny Hermione Weasley.

Nathan named his Samoa after his favorite cookie.  There was a little drama with Hannah's.  She had one that had to be returned and later, we came to own: Molly Weasley.

I am getting used to them, but some days I feel like a farmer.

Spring break took us to Philadelphia.  We had cheese steak, saw the Liberty Bell, learned about Ben Franklin and saw Phillies game.

Baseball started.  So much baseball.

We made time for facials though.

Hannah ran track.

Sarah played softball.  Dad coached.  He gave up his own softball season to coach both her team and help with Nathan's again.  They love that.  They need that.

Girls and I went to a circus.  A very weird experience I don't care to relive.  The highlight for both girls was this elephant ride.  Sarah dreams of having her own elephant one day.

We celebrated the baptism for the twins.  As of early July I am no longer the care taker of these two cuties.  I haven't even seen them in as long.  I miss them, but I know I was too busy to help them out as much as they needed.

Nathan's travel team played a tournament that same weekend and they ended up playing for the championship.  The girls and I missed all of it--it was too far away and we had too much else going on.

Hannah's class had a field trip.

And a late night track meet where Sarah got to hang with her friend, Georgia.

They did this for Mother's Day.

And then it was June.  And there were still track meets.

School Picnics.

6th Grade Field Day--which involved a last minute trip to two stores for the required eye black.

Sarah's Daisy Troop became Brownies.

Pool time.

Dance Recital.

Girl Scout Camp Out--Hannah & Mom overnight.

Daisies joined us for the day.

More Pool Time

Yeh yeh squeezed in a visit before school ended.

We celebrated the end of Nathan's Little League team's season before school ended.

Finally school was out!  Make up days in June are hard!  We welcomed our friends Howie the guinea pig and Alissa the hamster.

Then we had cousins in New Jersey!

And we ended June by celebrating Uncle Jay's 34th birthday.

There's more--July was full of visitors and visits.  We're already full into the swing of football, back to school shopping and calendar sorting.  I counted 22 more days of summer for Sarah.  We have just finished book five of the seven in Harry Potter's series.  Time flies and we're busy soaking because this is how we do.

Analogy

It has been awhile again.  I would be a better blogger if I blogged from my phone, but I'm not 13 and I like to type on a keyboard, so I'm not a better blogger.
I read an article from a friend of a friend on facebook about how moms with kids in middle school kind of drop out of the blogosphere.  It is a new frontier we've entered and although our house is primarily elementary, there has been a shift this year.  We have a child rapidly approaching his teens and it makes the challenges of a nine and seven year old seem far less challenging.  We have good conversations, but we have to be intentional about having them.  It would be easy to assume he is on autopilot and stick with the basics, is he eating, drinking, sleeping, breathing?

He's doing so much more than that.  Next week he will finish up the 3rd marking period of 6th grade.  We don't have much communication with teachers in middle school and we were warned of that going in, but our communication has been positive.  He handles his own issues better than I did at his age.  He finished ski club (which was really snow board club for him) a week before this picture was taken.  Squeezed in one more ski day before the season ended.

They all did great.  Sarah wanted to try out her dad's poles.  We may have to get them their own next time.

It was a beautiful day and we tried out a different mountain from the one on New Year's.  Conditions here are pretty icy and crowded, but it is nice to at least have the option to ski for an afternoon or a day without packing up and and staying away overnight.

We have re-entered the girl scout world again this year after taking a year off and we are having fun.  I'm attempting the leader thing with Sarah.  There are seven girls in her troop and four of the moms signed up to be leaders in the fall--pretty nice adult/child ratio, but things have changed in peoples' lives over the last several months as they tend to do and I have taken more of a leader role than I imagined I would be taking.  We're having fun.  It isn't perfect and there is that whole roller coaster ride that comes with every part of parenting, but we're doing okay.

Hannah was able to join a Brownie troop of her friends and is having a great time too.  I'm learning from watching her troop leaders and trying to help out when I can.

She was even able to help out another troop on a day that I needed her to be at an event I had to be at for Sarah's troop, but that her troop was not able to make.  She did a great job helping represent Greece for the World Association Day.

We girls were on our own that particular weekend while Nathan was on a youth group retreat in Pennsylvania and Joe was in Hong Kong paying his respects to our beloved Tai Tai.  We also said goodbye to our Aunt Frances.

I know we had seen her since this picture was taken in December of 2007, but I love this one.  Looking back at those pictures reminds me of how quickly time moves and how much we need to treasure those moments we have with those we love.  And how much Hannah has grown up.

What an amazing transformation we are seeing in her this year.  Last week she had her student led conference where she shared with me a second persuasive essay...she wants a rodent of some kind along with the replacement dog after Max "moves on".  She is fairly persuasive.

This is "Nibbles".  She is Hannah's friend, Rebecca's, guinea pig.  We had the privilege of guinea pig sitting while Rebecca and her family were in Florida for a few days.  We love Nibbles.  She's cute and funny, but messy and we're not quite sure we're ready to take on another living creature in this house just yet.

Our current living creature almost was not our current anything.  The day Joe got back from Hong Kong, I let Max out as I have thousands of times before, took a phone call, continued on with laundry and dinner and kids coming home from school....and just forgot him.  It was a jet-lagged Joe who asked, "Where's Max?"  At that point, my stomach dropped.  It had been at least 2 hours since I had let him out and I had no memory of letting him back in.  Because I didn't.  We searched.  It got dark.  And cold.  We stopped searching.  Then we got the best news we could get at that point.  He was ok.  "Bumped" by a car and in a vet overnight, but okay.  Much money and many vet visits later, we have him back and even better than he was before.  That vet was able to help his eyes which have been a problem for almost a year now.  He's still hanging in there, in spite of requests to find his replacement.

In other news, and after what feels like months and months of wiggling, this young lady has lost one of her top front teeth.  At her last dentist appointment, we learned that she is a tongue thruster and will likely have "early orthodontic intervention".  Awesome mother that I am, I think my exact words were, "That sounds HORRIBLE!" as the dentist described what might need to happen to keep her new front teeth from coming in completely horizontally...this is what happens when you have two parents who have never, ever seen an orthodontist.  I gave my seven-year-old a complex.  Now we have to save for orthodontics and therapy.  Mother of the year, right here.

Maybe instead of therapy, we can bribe her with a guinea pig...
She seems easy enough to please.  I started this yesterday, but took a break as soon as she returned from a play date because I needed to do something.  Last week, she called  me back into her room after I had tucked her in and asked, "Mom, are you ever going to take me to the public library again?"  Something we managed on a weekly basis in Michigan has become a rare occurrence here.  So sad.  So yesterday, the girls and I went to the public library.  Such a disappointing library compared to our luxury one in Canton, but a huge improvement over the sad little choice we had in Belgium.  Trying to keep it all in perspective.  Nathan has assigned reading these days and is looking forward to reading the Divergent series with me, maybe over spring break?  At the moment the girls and I are consumed with the Harry Potter books.  My first time reading them and I am hooked.  We're on book 3 and have watched the first two movies as well.  I think Sarah might be done after book 3.  They are getting a little dark for her.  Although she was wearing the witch hat and walking around with a pencil casting spells a couple of days ago, so maybe she is too invested to quit?

In fifteen minutes, I need to leave for my new "job".  That phone call I took when I forgot about Max, it was the mom of these little guys.  I have been taking care of them for almost a month now three days a week, three hours at a time.  Amazing family and adorable kids.  Although what I'm doing has nothing to do with NICU nursing, it gave the parents a ton of confidence knowing that I once managed babies for a living.  The next few months are up in the air as I'm sure their mom wants more care than I can give during the summer when my kids are home, but for now I'm taking one day at a time and enjoying these cuties while their mom gets a break from the 24 hour care they need and the sleep deprivation.

We're busy.  Plugging along with the usual dance, tumbling, baseball and homework and waiting to add in track and softball if the snow ever completely melts and let's spring arrive.  Trying to find the balance of managing the house and encouraging the other people who live in it to help manage it.  Weekend after weekend, I find myself in the same frantic state wondering how the place can become such a disaster after such a short time and try to talk myself down from the crazy place I go to.  Even after almost 14 years, my husband just does not get why I go to that crazy place.  I tried to explain with this analogy of what it feels like to be a stay at home mom....
The house is my office.  I am here all week, putting it together, trying to keep things organized and cleaned up.  On the weekend, I am still in my office, but try to pretend I'm somewhere else.  I asked him to imagine that he has made spreadsheets and written e-mails, scheduled meetings/held meetings all week long at work and then on the weekend, he went back to work, but there were all these people in his office deleting his spreadsheets and e-mails and canceling his meetings/making it like they never happened.  He could either sit there and watch it happen, yell at the people in his office constantly to stop undoing everything he did, or he could just go and re-do everything they were undoing at the same time it was being undone.
Does that sound like the kind of weekend anyone would ever want to have????  I think not.

I love being at home with my kids and just a tiny taste of being outside of the house during the week reminds me that I am very blessed to have as much time as I do have, but I still think I am entitled to a little crazy once in a while  I try to keep it to a minimum.

Time to run...