I Wish I Had a Day

I wish I had a day to just blog.  To catch up on the mounting piles of photos growing on my hard drive.  Not because anyone needs to see them, but because I just feel the need.  But why is that?  To slow time, perhaps.  I feel like our family of five is throttling forward at warp speed in a way that I'm not used to.  After having a baby every other August since 2007, you may have noticed that we did not have a baby this past August.  And as crazy as that may sound to you, it feels very different to me.  The baby reset button was not pushed.  We did not spin the spinner and land on the chute that instantly takes you back to square one.  And I know that is a good thing in many ways, and it feels like "progress" in many ways - there are activities we can do together, gear we don't have to bring, and poopy diapers that aren't being washed.  But it also feels very different.  I've been noticing this foreign feeling since approximately December of 2012, when I first had the thought, "Oh.  So this is what it feels like to have a 16 month old and not be pregnant.  Cool."  Not pressing that baby reset button somehow makes me more acutely aware of everyone, including myself, aging.  Growing up.  It is beautiful to witness but sometimes painfully so.  Bittersweet for sure.             

The thing is, I also know that if I had a full day to myself, I wouldn't really want to spend it blogging.  (I'd want to clean the basement and go for a run or get a massage and go out to lunch with a friend; sometimes these options are equally appealing.  That's normal, right?)  There's this paradox going on.  Being a stay at home mom is making me take even more pictures than I used to, and making me have more stories to tell, simply because I'm there for more family moments and my former law firm yielded exactly zero cute or endearing tales.  (Part of me is itching to go back to work, in some kind of utopian part time arrangement, by the way, but that's a topic for a different post.)  Being a stay at home mom is also sapping my energy to do anything with those pictures or stories at the end of the day.  So much togetherness leaves me wanting a mental break from children in the evenings, and I think that's good and healthy for everyone.    

Yet... Yet there is still this part of me that truly desires to blog.  It's cathartic.  It is our scrapbook.  It lets me write whatever I want.  It is my personal choice over Facebook for most photos (though Instagram may one day edge it out).  It is also a form of backup for that day when one of us inevitably manages to destroy the computer.  (Yes, I use other forms of backup, but I'm bad about all of them, so I guess you could call my system loose belt and half broken suspenders.)

So, I'm embarking on a stretch of more frequent, but probably less thoughtful, blogging.  Photo dumping to play catch up.  Posts that aren't in perfect chronological order.  Nothing here will earn me a Pulitzer, but hopefully it will give me some pleasure.

If you're not related to me and these posts give you any pleasure, then be sure to throw me a bone in the comments now and then, because I could use the encouragement to keep going on my catch up project.  It's not as fun when no one has a word to say because my content is so outdated.  It's hard to wish someone a happy birthday a year and a half late, though, I get it. 

I wish I had a day, but better to eat this elephant one bite at a time and spend that glorious day doing something other than sitting in front of a computer.