Okay, this is me with my undercut in Greece. The ramrod straight back and slightly manic smile is because I am scared to death of heights and that is a long way down. Back to the hair, I don't know that I want to go this high again, but definitely need less hair than I have right now.
All Points Bulletin - Missing Woman - one strange mamma, about 5'2", dark hair, declined to give weight (be sure not to ask her, she might take a swing at you), last seen heading off to help take care of her son's god-brother. I have no idea what I she was wearing because it was way too long ago. I mean, come on, you'd think that with exciting news like that and truly awesome photo ops she'd be blogging about it by now, bugging all her readers (are there any left? not you, Mom, I know you're still there) with how cute he is and how she got to hold him for two days straight and look at this picture, and this picture, and this...you get the idea.
I wish I had a good excuse, like no internet (okay, well actually I didn't have any internet at the godparents house but that was only two days and that was OVER TWO WEEKS AGO!! This is shameful I know. There is no excuse. So instead of continuing to moan about it, let me catch you up.
Mateo is beautiful.
I can't describe to you the honor it was for me to spend those two days with him and his parents. I hove how God's timing works out even the little things that we don't think to ask for. I half-jokingly offered to help out when I saw her Sunday, knowing her sisters and family would be bombarding her with wanting to come over, but as it turned out, she did need help and the others weren't free. So it was a blessing both ways. I tried my best not to gloat too much. (Did I do okay, Myrny?) I took tons of pictures but I'll leave those for their own post.
So what else happened? I got to spend some awesome time with very dear friends. We went to the Zoo with the other godparents.
I got to do a lot of shopping at an awesome Carter's sale for my every growing child. I got to visit AG for my Birthday present (thanks, Mumsy). I took part in a Zumba class. (go ahead and check out that video...see the dear heart in the I heart NY t-shirt? put 75 lbs on her and that would be about what I looked like. Ya.) I actually got to go to 3 movies!! UP with Asher and Janet, Star Trek with Myrny, and Terminator with Jeff. I have to say, I'd forgotten what really good popcorn tasted like. They don't actually make their popcorn in the theatre here, they pull it out of great big plastic bags already popped. Ugh. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed all of them and have made it a priority to find a babysitter for at least one trip to the movies a month. They say date nights are important, right?
What else? There was a bridal shower for my former Worship Leader (Congrats again Jenny!!). Saturday was spent helping Myrny run errands and such (really just an excuse for us to spend the day shopping ;) and then helping set up. Asher was a bit done in by the time we got there and decided to crash while the women-folk got things set up. I didn't tell him what he was napping on. I'll save this picture for his wedding reception:
Jeff arrived Saturday night from his conference in Minnesota. We got to share our favourite Chinese food with the couple-to-be after church. Jeff got his man-date with his chocolate bear on Tuesday after a much needed day of just resting and hanging out at our friends home.
Asher loves his Manny and Max. When I played this video he perked up and went running into our kitchen to see if they'd somehow materialized. Asher and I got treated to some Baker's Square as well that evening. Wednesday was organizing our suitcases and packing up so that we would be free to visit with the godparents and Mateo who came to visit us before heading to the airport.
Mary doesn't realize she's not actually tall enough to do that to Jeff.
For the most part, that was Chicago. Greatly condensed, but we're just playing catchup, right? The flight home was not bad, Asher slept most of the way, Jeff and I didn't sleep at all. We very much needed the weekend to recover from the jetlag. Monday, at our Toddle In, Asher fell of the back of a little plastic mini-slide. Very traumatic, but no damage done. Tuesday went into our local drop in play group and had a very interesting conversation with some of the ladies there, but that really needs its own post. Wednesday missed my Women's Group in favour of a nap since I'd been awake since 4:30. Woke up from the nap to find Asher covered in some mysterious blisters. If you followed me on Twitter, you heard about the whole miserable saga of finding out he had hives. Hives! Still don't know what caused them or why they hung on for 3 days. You notice how I'm talking of it the past tense right? Because today, he had a 3 hour nap and woke up almost completely hive free and in the course of writing this post, the last few marks have faded and nothing new has shown up. I'm tentatively calling it a win. If you want to see all the traumatic pictures you can go here. I'm just happy to be breathing again.
And if you're still with me, a comment on the post I wrote a few weeks back. Something else you probably didn't know about me, I went through psychoanalysis for almost 4 years. Honestly, I think everyone should do it. Incredible. Anyway, I always did this in my sessions. Right before either I went on a holiday or my Doctor did, I would get down to the nitty-gritty, the meat of things, those deep, inner angsts. And then my half hour would be up, we'd go our merry ways for a couple weeks and I'd come back and just play catch up for a few sessions. I knew this was my pattern and yet I couldn't stop. I had no idea that I still did it. So I'm making sure my catch-up is all done. I may expound on some things just cause they were fun and I have lots of pictures, but I won't feel like I can't write about anything else in the meantime. Like I said, I don't know where I will go from here, but I don't want to lose whatever was going on when I wrote that blog. I really appreciated your comments. Let's see if we can't get to know each other even better in the future. Which, uh, means, I should maybe stop lurking on all your blogs and actually commenting I guess. :)
Well, it's 6:45 am, I've been awake for longer than I want to think about. Mostly because as I lay in bed awake, thinking it was quickly approaching 7 and I'd had a nice little sleep in and so had Asher, I was wholly unaware of the fact that it was actually quickly approaching 5:30 and there had been no special sleep in and I would actually be waking up ridiculously early and feeling pretty good about it in a mere half hour. But the good news is, is that Asher did sleep through the night, no fever or coughing or whining or crying. Which means I also slept through the night. Even if that night for me was only about 5 and a half hours long. It's a longer night than I've had for while so I'll take it.
In case you were wondering, there won't be any Monday Meals while we're here. No way I'll be that organized. As you can see. What with it being Tuesday already. And yes, me being happy that Asher had no fever or coughing and all the rest of it is because the night before I got very little sleep thanks to all that going on. I had thought it was a cold, ther was some cloudy snot involved, but now I'm thinking more the snot was just all the recycled air of the plane and the wind and new pollen of Chicago upon our arrival and the fever was from his last molar. Either that or the shortest cold in history as this morning there's no sign of any of those ailments...except of course the molar.
Anyway, I'm very excited today as we are going to go help out Asher's godmamma with her brand new bambino. It all happened so suddenly she didn't have time to hand off her projects at work and so has a lot due this week (happily though she works from home). Then she'll be off on six weeks maternity leave and her husband is a school teacher and is finished as of Thursday. So in the meantime I get the wonderful job of hanging out and helping with the baby. Yay!
So for now, I'm off to pack up for the day, get some breakfast and go pick up the rental car. Will catch up on blogs as soon as I can.
We are off to Chicago in a few hours. I was looking forward to it before, but now I am completely over the moon. Two of our dear friends and Asher's godparents have been travelling a very long road and on Monday the will meet their new little baby boy. I am so unbelievably ecstatic for them right now. I'm sure they would be picking him up earlier, but she also happens to be walking the Avon 2-day walk for breast cancer starting tomorrow at 7am. I'm sure she'll have a spring in her step for all of those 39? miles.
So, I never really explained why I chose the title for my blog. Once I got it all set up, I simply took up where I had left off with my family's website blog. I really didn't mean to do that. In fact, in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell anyone I knew about this blog because I wanted to be free to write in it what I wanted without worrying who was going to be calling me up five minutes later wanting to know exactly what I meant by that. Apparently I forgot all about that between the conceiving and naming of my blog and writing my first post. And, as you can see it quickly became...well, a mommy blog (and I don't mean that nearly as sideways as it might sound), essentially a blog to share our family life with, whoever. When I set up the family website and then when I started to post here, I had hoped that my actual family would want to keep up on all things us and would read and comment and we could all keep in touch a bit more through the wonders of the internet. That didn't exactly happen. My mom reads this. And I'm sure my bestest Aunt reads it on occasion over Mom's shoulder. I try not to be bitter. Unsuccessfully for the most part. But I digress. Because I shouldn't really be bitter when I didn't want anyone but the anonymous masses to read this blog anyway. I can still be bitter about the website though. I pay money for that people! Moving on.
So who were the strangers and where was this normal land. I'm sure some people come across this title and think, 'ooh, nice literary reference'. I'm sure it is. I haven't read it. Perhaps others might think, 'ooh, nice biblical reference'. I was pretty sure it was in there but didn't really know where or who it referred to. Turns out it refers to Moses living out with the Midianites after he fled Egypt. Huh. So none of those references are really what I was going for. I just thought it was a nice turn of phrase. Some people might have thought it was in reference to Jeff and I, being Canadians, moving to the United States. If that were the case however, I think I would have kept to the original phrase, 'Strangers in a strange land'. And if that had been the case, I probably would have changed the name when we moved to the UK like I threatened to here. But we're still not there yet. See this is what happens when I'm not simply reporting the goings on of our, or more likely Asher's, day. I get really wordy. Moving on.
So what am I talking about then. Us. Me and Jeff. We are Christian. We are Goth (although some days could argue more punk than goth). We are just a little bit Crunchy. We are Geeks. We enjoy a good musical. We are tattooed. Well, I am. We are pierced. Again, me. We prefer our hair to be anything but a natural shade (although we don't always get our way on that). We have other preferences that we won't mention here because it is a family blog. And because my mother does read this. (There is just so much more that needs to be said on that topic, maybe if I start that other blog, sorry Mum, I probably won't tell you about that one) Us. Me and Jeff. We are strange. We don't really fit anywhere. (except maybe Africa, that was like coming home) We are eclectic in almost every sense. Probably more than really anyone around us realize. We have learned to fit in. We have let a lot of things go. For a number of reasons. Money. Time. Effort. None of them so that we could fit in and yet our goal was never to stand out. Just to be ourselves. Although Jeff probably enjoys the standing out a bit more. So we find ourselves amongst all manner of normal people (who by the way invariably say they wish they were brave enough to be not normal) feeling always a little...strange. Perhaps there is more strangeness around us than we think, we're just among the few who let it show on the outside. Well, when we can afford it at least.
This is what I was trying to get at, wanting to explore, when I thought up this blog. Somehow it didn't happen. I suppose life got in the way a little. But that's not quite right. It wasn't life. We haven't been so much living life as surviving it recently. I don't blame it on Asher, I blame it on me. I had only just got the hang of being me. Suddenly being responsible for someone else kind of threw me. Even if I did have plenty of warning. I forgot how to be me, I was so caught up with being Asher's mom. I still am to a large extent, but I'm starting to remember there's more to me and that it's okay to have more to me. I don't quite know yet, how it's going to look to be...incorporated, because I know that I'm not 'just' me or 'just' mom. I'm me and now being a mom is part of that. But I don't want to just survive. I want to live life with abandon. God knew what kind of mom Asher needed. Me. Not a shell of me, or a watered down version of me, but me.
I am a tattooed and pierced, Christian-Gothic-Hippie-Punk-Geek mom who loves broadway musicals, Funker Vogt, and collecting dolls (did I just say that? not an admission I meant to make) who currently hates her hair and can't afford to get done what she really wants so she'll probably settle for bottle black. Again. Ugh. Spent. Kind of doubt this makes much sense. Probably should draft it and post it later, but later never comes. Right?
So where does the newborn go from here?* Or in my case, the strange mamma? Wherever it is, there will be good dance music, funky hair, more metal, my strange husband by my side and my awesome little man on my hip. And who knows? Hopefully more awesome little ones along for the ride. Hopefully a few more. Oh. And there will be Africa. Somewhere in there, there will be more Africa.
*I will give an actual prize if you recognized that quote. I don't know what, but I will. Of course I would prefer that you actually recognized it and not looked it up on the internet. Is this what they call an honour code?
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