Proof of Life

I had no intention of disappearing for weeks on end after writing my last post. And I so appreciate those of you who reached out and checked in on me (I'm here! We're good!), but for the first time since I started this blog in 2006, not-writing has felt good. Freeing, even. I've thought a lot about this, because for so long the urge to write was a mental and emotional imperative. The time stamps on most of my posts are between 11 p.m. and midnight because I genuinely needed to write down the day, to share the funny stories, to put words to the tough ones, and to connect with all of you. To restart the cycle of sharing stories before bed and waking up to comments from my friends I'd never met spread all over the globe. And the best I can figure, without sounding dismissive of the enormous and vital role you played in my life for over a decade, is that I have that feedback loop in my real life now. When I have a shitty day or a difficult marital or parenting moment, I can text my mamas and meet them at a restaurant or patio down the street to hash it out. As the stories invariably get more personal, and the key players grow to be less of an extension of me, working through them in an open internet forum isn't really appropriate or even all that tempting.

When the kids were babies and toddlers, when we moved to a new city where we didn't know a single human being, this blog was a lifeline. I'm not exaggerating. When we were going through hell with Landon in Chicago, your comments- comments from people I didn't know who believed me when for the first time in my life I wasn't being believed- were precious and make me cry now just thinking about them. When James lost his job a few months after moving here to Fort Worth, I spent Landon's whole soccer game that next morning just reading and re-reading your comments, feeling the support, and winning my war against breaking down and sobbing on the side of the field because I was so stressed and overwhelmed and utterly alone. When it took six months to find a job after I had calculated we had seven months we could continue paying our mortgage, when James fell into a depression it took us years to pull out of, when I had no one in 100 miles I could talk to about how fucking hard it was getting to just come home at the end of the day, I had you all and I cannot put into words how important that was. The word "lifeline" is frankly perfectly accurate. And through all that, to also have this forum to share our joys, the funny moments, and the love I have for my life and the people in it, was just as vital. I am someone who needs a community. I need to share. I crave connection and I love stories. Through my ancient blogger "compose" window and the magic "publish" button, I was able to have that at any hour of day. To share, to connect, and to put to words- with much deleting and re-writing and editing until the words matched the emotion behind them, whatever had happened over our last few days. I used to attempt to keep a journal, but always abandoned them despite a deep love of writing. I need an audience. And you provided that for me.

I know this reads like a goodbye, but it is in no way intended to be one. I think I just needed some time to process what this blog was, what it is now, and what I want it to be in the future. One of my great joys when I can't sleep at night is re-reading old posts, reliving the mundane and the wonderful of my children at different ages and James and me at different stages of our life together. I love this archive and am so grateful for it. I also google my own dinner recipes to figure out what to make in the future and refer back to vacation dispatches on a regular basis when trying to remember something I want to recommend to others. I still need this space. But as our days grow busier, our life wonderfully fuller, and the allure of keeping the laptop closed sometimes at night grows stronger, I needed to recalibrate what I want to do in this space (and to push through the overwhelming guilt I feel when I go to bed having not written anything; clearly I found a way to make some peace with that one).

So before I get to the updates and snippets from the last 17(!) days, I want to say thank you. In my usual nighttime musings where I pre-draft a million blog posts in my head and wake up the next morning remembering none of them, I always circled back to an enormous feeling of gratitude for this little spot in the interwebs. For the people who found me and have read my ramblings for so many years. It is with a sense of wonder that I think of you, caring about me and my family and reaching out with love, support, laughter, and grace so many times through the years. I am deeply thankful for you.

xoxo,
Rebecca/LL

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And now, some snippets:

In a preview of what I expect our next decade of life to look like, the last 2.5 weeks have been a blur of school stuff, sports stuff, work stuff, fun stuff, date stuff, and friend stuff. And cooking, photo booking (2016-2017 COMPLETE!), TV watching, reading, wine drinking, and raining. SO MUCH raining. We've made the most of it with lots of movies (Flubber was a huge hit, along with Enchanted, Brave, The Descendants, and The Descendants 2, plus Jurrasic Park The Lost World and an Indiana Jones with Landon spread out over a few nights after the girls went to bed) and games (Candyland for Cora ALWAYS; Jenga, Trouble, and Memory with the big kids) and the building of gigantic forts. It's been fun and cozy but I would really like one dry weekend to kick them all outside for a while.

We've hit the ground running with school stuff. All three kids love their classes, teachers, etc. The homework level has increased dramatically- Landon actually has to do homework at home this year (in all his years of schooling we've never seen his work; he would just magically do it early in class or in the line to go home) and Claire had to make a chart assigning her work to various days so she could keep her beloved gymnastics class after failing to do her required book reports the first week. (Claire, shrugging, "I just forgot mom, but it's okay, I sat out at recess and finished them." Me, inner monologue, "Ahhhh, you got in trouble, from an authority figure, and had to SIT OUT, and were LATE on an assignment, omg you will dwell on this forever." We are so different and I am so grateful.). She crafted a lovely schedule on green construction paper that lives on our fridge so she knows what she needs to do each day in a way that works with her activity schedule (i.e., accepting that no homework will get done on Wednesdays because she has gymnastics early in the afternoon) and it's been working out great. I don't know what Landon's doing, but I assume it's all as it should be. Cora continues to color with GREAT concentration and only do "HARD WORK" at school and scoffs at all other practical Montessori activities.

Landon is LOVING his climbing team. He had his first competition this past Saturday and we all piled in the car at 6:30 a.m. to drive across town in pouring rain to cheer him on.

3.5 hours later we were driving back home, still confused at how exactly climbing competitions work, but with a very happy kid with very red hands. He placed 13th out of 23 which he found acceptable since it was his first one and he's young (the age range is 11-13), but he has big plans for improvement. He remains sociable, busy, sweaty and sweet, and his hair continues to always be perfectly combed.

At 11 years old and 5 feet tall, I feel like he's basically ready to go to college, so James and I have been trying to fill in gaps in the practical knowledge we take for granted. He started doing all his own laundry at 10 (conveniently timed around the time his dirty laundry wasn't anything I really wanted to go near), we've recently had many discussions on the difference between fact and opinion, and, in a surprise bit of real-world learning, last week he mastered the nearly overwhelming task of calling a third party on the phone.

We don't have a home phone. Very few people we know have home phones. When my kids want to play with a friend, I generally text that friend's parent, or now that Landon has one of our old iPhones hooked up to wifi and an icloud email address, he can "text" a small group of friends on his own. When I was 11 I had been using our home phone to call other friends' home phones and talking to the humans on the end of it for years. My child does not have this specialized skill.

Last week Landon left his climbing shoes at climbing practice. "Okay," I said, "why don't you just call the front desk to see if they have them and can hold them somewhere until you go back for your next practice."

"Wait, what, ME call them? ME?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SAY?!"

"Um, exactly what I just did. Introduce yourself, explain what happened, and ask if they could set them aside for you somewhere. You know, just what you'd say in person. But into the phone."

The next 10 minutes were tortuous. He couldn't hold the phone. He tried to yell into the speaker instead of talking at a normal volume into the microphone end of the phone. Every time he'd speak he'd then pull the phone away from his ear and look at us with wide eyes, like "what do I do next?!" while James and I were pushing the phone back to his ear while mouthing "LISTEN TO THE PERSON RESPONDING TO YOU!". The call ended with 50% of the information being conveyed and the person at the front desk saying she'd look around for the shoes. "Okay great," I told him, "we'll eat dinner and then you can call back to see if she found them, but this time make sure to give them your name and and see if they can hold them for you." Landon looked like he was going to pass out.

He made it through and has improved dramatically in the phone calls since (I'm now always actively scouting phone call opportunities for him). Claire will be next. I'll admit I don't talk on the phone a ton in my personal life anymore, but I do it all day at work and there are still MANY things that need to be done over the phone and I just hadn't realized that training is completely absent from my children's lives. Twenty-first century problems indeed.

On to Claire, she is LOVING her gymnastics class and now alternates between playing gymnastics coach and school teacher for most of the weekend. Cora is her semi-willing student/prop, but she frequently recruits her baby dolls to participate. And speaking of her renewed affection for her dolls, she told me the other day that, “Mom, I’m going to try playing with just one baby today. Three is just too many. They need too many things.” She cracks me up.

James is the President of a wonderful non-profit, The Fort Worth Drowning Prevention Coalition, and we all attended their banquet two weeks ago. The kids were thrilled to hear James speak (Claire turned to me in awe and whispered, "I can't believe he's talking in front of all these people." and Cora yelled out "YAY DADDY!!" at the end) and always enjoy a social occasion. Claire loves to dress up and hopped out of the car once we arrived announcing, "Mom, do I look AMAZING? I put on makeup. That’s okay right?” and then flounced off to climb a piece of equipment with her brother.

She begins volleyball in a week and is SO excited. I never played volleyball (or really any sport with a ball) so I'm excited she's trying it out. We are beginning to see in her the emotional volatility of her older brother about a year early. The good news is, we totally recognize it. The bad news is, it's here. The other day she was upset about something I couldn't figure out and she marched off to her room, closed the door, screamed into the void, and then marched back out. "I'm sorry," she said calmly, "I'm not sure why I was so mad," and went right back to playing. I waited a few moments and walked over and hugged her and said I understood and I loved her. Landon looked over and said "yeah, but you handled it well." I feel like we're a little better for this being our second time through.

The two girls are playing together more and more as their interests begin to overlap and their conversations are always a delight. Claire, the fairly grounded and mature 8-year-old, and Cora, the I-want-a-pet-unicorn 4-year-old.

Claire: "Mom I really hope I can be a teacher one day."
Me: "You definitely can if that's what you want to do!"
--
Cora: "Well, I'm going to be Princess Elena."

Cora, our nearly FIVE year-old, remains a joyful spirit with a surprising backbone of steel and ability to get around doing almost anything she is supposed to. We're working on it. Our biggest problem is recruiting her pushover big siblings to back us up.

She completely believes she still fits in our laps and should be carried anytime her legs are tired. I've tried to explain that at her age her older siblings already had a 2-year-old younger sibling but she can't imagine why that would matter.

She is very smart, very fast, and very funny. She takes the things that are important to her seriously and nothing on earth can make her care about what she simply doesn't mind. She holds her own in our nightly dinner conversations and likes to intersperse our discussions with random declarative statements that make a strong, unrelated point.

She adores gymnastics and focuses VERY HARD while there. She is filling up stars in her chart and continues to finish all activities in her life with a beautiful salute to the (invisible) judges.

On the family front we've had PTA Meetings, Board Meetings, fundraiser nights at local restaurants, and a wonderful date night for James and I last Friday. Nothing special, just a babysitter and 2 hours away at our favorite local place up the street.

I pre-gamed with some mamas at our favorite taco (margarita) place because James coaches until 6:00 and I was home from work at 5:00. It's like being in college, you drink the $2.50 margarita before you head to the tasty restaurant with the expensive drink menu. Some things you don't grow out of (not yet, anyway).

We were home from dinner a few minutes after 8, gave our kids kisses, and curled up on the couch to watch something good. I don't remember what (maybe the last few episodes of Jack Ryan?), but it was good and I was happy and it was all exactly what I love right now. Picking up the kids from school (just on Fridays, but I love it), chatting with them and their friends, getting dressed up, drinking margaritas with my mamas, eating a delicious meal with my person, and then being home in time to soak up as much post-bedtime-couch-time as possible. I didn't know that was everything I'd one day want in life. And then teaching a barre class on Sunday that made all my students yell at me (with love, and sweat) and spending the rest of the time at home, finishing photo books (VICTORY IN OUR TIME!), and making the most delicious beef stew (the temperature was below 80! maybe it was 79, but it was stew weather!).

I need to do a menu update because there have been some GOOD recipes lately (I love fall, even when it's Texas and it's fake fall), I spoke at Texas A&M Law School yesterday and had the best time- it was like a grown up career day, and I'm presenting a recommendation to the Commission on Thursday which is always exciting and fulfilling. Life is good. I've missed you. James was working on the couch next to me and said, "oh, are you blogging again?" Only here do my fingers move this fast. As I said, I've missed you.