The Thankful Project: Day 20

     So I kind of fell off the grid for the past two weeks, I apologize. Between the baby and prepping for a Thanksgiving dinner for 11 and a Christmas dinner for 18, the sewing, crafting, cooking and cleaning have been taking a front seat over blogging. I haven't even had time to obsess over Pinterest in forever, "First World Problem" if I ever heard one. I have put together a quilt for baby this past week, all I have to do is tie it and bind it, which may even get finished today....how exciting! Since I had a loosely based Harry Potter "nursery" area, this quilt is also a little Harry Potter themed, it has little owls all over at least. But I am going to pair it with the first Harry Potter book for Steven's Christmas present from just his Momma. I am also half done with handmade curtains for my nephew, they were supposed to be for last year but the pregnancy made me so tired that I made very little last year. Potentially foolishly, I also singed up for an ornament swap that I have the idea and all the supplies, I just have to sit down and make them to send them out by the end of this week! So, I figured that the only way that I would get back on the figurative horse was to buckle down and dive back headfirst.
     I love this Thankful project so thank you so much Chasing Happy for linking everyone up to share the ideas, people and things that we are thankful every single day of the year but giving us a platform to shares those thanks. I don't know if anyone else has seen on their Facebook pages that people are actually complaining that others are listing the things that they are thankful for this month, but I have had a handful of complaints (none directed to me) but I am a little shocked on how critical people are about other sharing their thoughts. It is a little confusing how we seem to have a culture that needs to constantly put others down for something, real or imagined. But anyways....on to today's Thankful Project prompt: Something about your significant other or best friend.
     I absolutely love James' sense of humour, all the way down to his gorgeous crow's feet by his eyes from smiling so much. When he smiles and those crinkles are thrown up, its perfect. I am not a funny person, I can't tell jokes, I can't tell stories and I do not have the quick wit that can make up for it, when we met, I was still stuck in the "older sister" humour of just poking fun. It is a work in progress. But James still finds me funny and he more than makes up for my lack of humour. When we go out, I try and play off of him as much as possible, but he is quick on his feet. He takes jokes like a champ and has no problem making himself the butt of jokes to get a reaction from the people around him. I am sure part of that is his amazing self confidence that I am completely lacking but he runs with it like no one that I have ever met. This pure self confidence in his own humour is something that I admire so much. He will laugh so hard that he cries, until his stomach hurts and I love that. It is dorky and the internet has not helped his humour of silly videos at all. He is perfectly happy watching hours of America's Funniest Videos and youtube videos of cats falling off of tables, and while I sometimes find it confusing how it can continue to entertain him for hours, I appreciate that he just enjoys life enough to still find these things funny. He helps me keep it real, however much that sounds like a cliche. I can get so wrapped up in everything that I think needs to get done that I forget to enjoy life a bit. He helps keep me grounded and to just smile.

Thank you, James, for keeping it fun, no matter what!

   

Mayhem Fest

piano bar in Orlando where we got the singer to play the Time Warp and did the dance...embarassingly awesome

A movie theater standie that James had to fit into....with me assisting and eye rolling

The Thankful Project: Day 3

Thank you again to Chasing Happy for hosting the Thankful Project. 

Today's topic is to discuss a place that you are thankful for. I was kind of unsure exactly what that even meant to me, so I took a bit longer to even come up with a list of places that I could be thankful for. 

As quiet and blah as it looks now, in the beginnings of winter, this I will miss.

When it comes down to it, as tumultuous as my childhood may have been, I think that the place that I am most thankful for is the backyard of my parents' house. This was, hands down, the place that spend the most time growing up. My father's somewhat extreme style of parenting during the summer, after my parents were divorced, was to send us outside at 830am, we were able to come inside to use the bathroom, to eat at noon, and then not until 6pm. We were left to, mostly, our own devices to amusement and to not injure ourselves. I can't imagine sending our kids outside now, unsupervised, for hours on end but my brother and I had no complaints at the time about it. 

Marley playing on a fallen tree during Hurricane Sandy, thankfully none fell
on the house, but we lost three trees.

Up until I was in middle school, my brother and I would pretend that we were Native Americans. We built teepees out of old sheets and giant branches that we pulled out of the surrounding woods, branches that were six to eight feet tall, all tied together with old clothesline and childish determination. We would collect acorns and chestnuts and poisonous red berries, pretending to eat them all. We would make bows and arrows out of yarn and shoe laces. We glued empty water bottles to the bottom of a piece of wood to make a raft to navigate the stream in our woods, treacherous as that stream was, we could have managed the two foot wide by six inches deep stream without the raft. Also, side note, Elmer's school glue is not water resistant, do not use it for rafts in the future. 

Then in sixth grade, I met one of my best friends, Ryn and we had history class together where we learned about Ancient Egypt and I read The Egypt Game.( I highly recommend that book, like insanely so, that and The Phantom Tollbooth) Then our native village turned into an ancient Egyptian palace. My little brother was a pharaoh, we made robes out of sheets, headdresses out of cardboard, memorized hieroglyphics, mummified a doll and buried her in my backyard under a dogwood tree, complete with turkey dinner and silver plated dishes. 
We fullfilled our Harry Potter fantasies by building a Hogwarts out of plastic milk crates and handmade wands and spellbooks. Under the pines trees we would relive all our favorite moments from the books and wonder why we never got a letter delivered by owl messenger. 
This was the yard that we had a pool in for a long time, that we were allowed to spend entire days in, until we were wrinkly and uncomfortable. A yard surrounded by woods that fed our imaginations, we created cities and towns, jurisdictions were separated for my brother and I, territorial boundaries that we were not allowed to cross, marked by swept up leaves and pricker bushes. 

As a mostly adult, I have our kids now play in the yard. We continue to have bonfires, whether they are legal fires or not, I am not sure still. James, the kids and I built a giant Wicker Man one year and lit him on fire. I picked flowers to weave in and out of the branches and we stared at the giant wooden man until he was ashes. My brother and I would try to keep a single fire going to weeks at a time, cooking hot dogs and waffles over the flame for our amusement. We had random gardens that never amounted for much food outside of the dozen or so tomatoes we would eat as soon as they ripened. We have always ate summer dinners outside, have hung hammocks between the trees to laze about. This is the first place that I ever "laid out" in the sun to actually try and tan. It was this yard that my brother was stung over two dozen times because bees hate him and he was a clumsy six year old. This was the yard that we had my two ever birthday parties in, one in first grade and one in sixth grade, were a girl stepped on a nail and it went through her foot in the woods. This is where we had my graduation party, where my grandmother parked her RV when my youngest brother, Colin, was born so she could spend time while my parents were in the hospital. This is where I kept my first ever pet rooster named Dani California and where he would chase Colin down because they were the same height. 

 This is the red maple that my brother and I would climb right before a thunderstorm to ride the storm winds in the branches before it started raining. And under these same branches, all lit up with holiday lights, is where I said yes to my wonderful and amazing Hubby when he asked me to marry him. 
So this yard, above all other places so far in my life, I am the most thankful for. 

The Thankful Project: Day 2

Again thanks to Chasing Happy for hosting this thankful linkup. 

Today's prompt, "A role that you've played," was a little more difficult for me then yesterday's prompt. I am thankful for being able to be a partner to my wonderful fiance, thankful for being the "favorite" granddaughter to my Pappy and Nana, thankful for being the only sister to six brothers and mother to my wonderful baby, Steven. But I think the role that I am most thankful for is that of stepmother.

I met James' two children when they were two and four year of age, so I wasn't there when they were babies but I have seen them grow over the past five years. It is the hardest thing that I have done, almost harder then being a birth mother, is carefully treading the water of being a stepmother, especially when their own mother is very loving and very involved. I had a really hard time coming to terms with being the stepmother for the first two years that James and I were together, I loved being the fun person but I am a strong believer that children need schedules and routines, which turns me into the strict, mean one (according to Hubby). I have my own Type A, obsessive personality that does not coincide well with children to begin with, but I have grown so much as a person, become so much more patient (I had none to begin with), understanding and I listen so much better then I did when we first met. 

James' daughter, (my stepdaughter or my soul-daughter, as James calls her) was the easier fit when we first met. I was fun, with crazy coloured hair, cool clothes, danced in public and I wore a cat collar as a necklace so for a two year old girl who wore tutus and pink cowboy boots regularly, it wasn't hard to get along. As she has gotten older and started acting like much more of a teenage, we have conflicted a little more. James says that I am harder on her, more strict and hold her to high standards, which may be true. I worry about the culture of lowered expectations for girls, that it is okay to just be cute or pretty, but I want her to know that it is just as important to be kind and to be smart. I am thankful that she has taught me how important it is for girls to have positive role models, she has taught me to see the world through the eyes of a little girl (I hated pink, glitter, and dresses as a girl) and I hope that she has the patience in the future to help me learn more patience and to breathe before acting. 

Hubby's son, on the other hand, was a much harder sell. I was scared to push too hard, he was quiet, a little angry and very set on being with his father, understandably so. I have six brothers, so I always figured that I would sync so well with a son, but it was so much harder than I had expected. It wasn't until recently that he and I have started to have our own inside jokes, our own conversations, our own little system and agreement on how our relationship should be. It started with him learning how to spell and we would play the spelling game. Hubby or I would give him a word and he would try spelling it. He wanted harder and harder words, to the point where I was just reading words out of the dictionary to challenge him more. Since then, we have settled that we are both good spellers, so we have that in common. He and I both get ready quickly when we have somewhere to do, while James and Eve take their time. Griffin and I call them the Delinquents now, because of their shared lackadaisical attitude sometimes. Grif and I both tend to be a little more serious and introverted naturally so I know where he is coming from. As I have gotten older, I am trying to become more of an extrovert, but naturally I just need quiet me-time. I am thankful that Grif has taught me that boys come with their own basket of problems, but none are insolvable. He has taught me how much fun video games can be, that sometimes it is okay to just wear sweatpants and no socks every single day (it is no reason to increase blood pressure over) and that being a stepmother can just be as simple as being companion souls sharing life's journey together and not overbearing, anal retentive craziness, at least most of the time. 

So thank you, Eve and Griffin, for helping me to learn how hard and how easy it can be to be a stepmother, that we aren't all evil, and that there is always enough room in my heart to love our happily blended family. 

The Thankful Project: Day 1

 While planning out the next month for  my blog, I stumbled across Chasing Happy and her wonderful Thankful Project and the prompts with link-up of everyone else sharing what they are thankful for this month (and hopefully the rest of the year as well). My new year starts on November 1st after Samhain, so a month devoted to things that I am thankful for sounded perfect and then it will work right into the holiday season and the time that I get to spend with family. So here we go:

Thankful Project: Day One: A person

Hands down, the person I am most thankful for is my fiance. My family helped shape me into the person that I am, but Hubby has made me into a person that I am happy with and can make others happy. Like more young girls than most would care to admit, no matter how smart or pretty or accomplished I ever was, I battled with self-image and self confidence. While I am not saying that Hubby has cured me and that I am now a ferocious, confident, devil-may-come kind of woman that I would like to be, I am so much more confident in being comfortable as a person than I was before I met him. As scandalous as it sounds, we met while he was my boss at a past job. I took the job seriously enough to move from part-time to full-time but he motivated me to become a manager, and not the benevolent despot manager that I had known previously but a fun, understanding but down to business kind of boss that encouraged workers and still impressed upper management. I took jobs with people that I didn't know, in towns that I had never been in before, managing an entire store of people that I had never met and aiming to be knowledgeable in every area of that store. It made me see that retail isn't all bad and that I had the ability to be a leader that I had never really felt before. I would love to say that everytime he tells me that I am beautiful that I agree, but I don't but I walk every day with the confidence that he thinks that I am beautiful and smart and worth all the grief that I cause him. He makes me thankful for our family, for my family, for friends and for my ability to love someone so much that I miss him every morning from not seeing him while I was asleep. 

He will kill me for this picture, but this man helps me make bread...he is wonderful!!! 

I'm Back!!! (hopefully, barring Life)

     Hopefully, I can get back to somewhat regular posting, it's fun and relaxing and gives me something to feel responsible for on a daily basis that doesn't need a diaper change. I have been lax in posting because we have had a very busy past month or so, we:

     1. Wrapped up an in-law visit and the subsequent       recuperation that I needed. We visited the Statue of Liberty, FAO Schwartz, Central Park, Empire State Building, Times Square

2. We celebrated Griffin's 10th birthday with a day in NYC and a day at home playing video games!

3. Went to a cousin's wedding with baby and no Hubby but I did get a great LBD that was nursing friendly and hid my baby belly enough for me to feel comfortable. 

4. Steven learned how to laugh, sit up, have a relatively set bed time. He also enjoys baths, reveling in the idea that his feet come into the bath with him and that he can splash. He also had his first bottle!!!

5. We went apple picking with a great friend and her two girls, the youngest is only two weeks older then Steven so we were already planning the wedding!

6. Fall television started. While this is no excuse to avoid other responsibilities, it gives me something to watch while I am rocking the baby to sleep. I am watching, with the loyalty that I can spare: Walking Dead, Witches of East End, Bones, Castle, Sleepy Hollow, Dancing with the Stars, SHEILD, Supernatural, American Horror Story and Dracula. Most of these are watched during nursing or putting to sleep the baby...and it is way more tv then I have ever watched in my entire life. 
7. My best friend and I are planning a joint family Christmas dinner that we have been planning and preparing for and getting six separate households to agree to a time and place. 
8. To tie into Steven's accomplishments, I started pumping! It took me a solid day before I got the band of how the manual pump even worked and then I realized that I have never bottle-fed a child before and that I would, after three months with a baby, now have to learn a basic skill. We did it though, he ate and I almost felt insulted that he took the bottle so easily. 
9. Hubby and I have started looking at houses in a little bit more of a serious manner, although still deciding between Florida and Georgia, my money would still be to go to Texas!

10. Hubby and I finally are officially engaged!!!!!! After five years of the ups and downs of a relationship, he put a ring on it and I said most definitely yes! No date yet, but house first!

So a very busy month, but November is the start of my new year so posting will be on my new year's resolution list! 
Happy New Year and bring on the next adventures!