Month End Review (with kegger afterwards)

You hear that??  THAT, my friends, is the sound of a cork popping and me doing my little happy dance that I actually Finished. Something.  

It's the LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER, and yes in fact I DID blog every day.  It's cool,  you don't have to be impressed.  I'll just sit here and be impressed with my own bad self.

Here's a few things I noticed along the way.

1) Apparently, I had a fair bit on my mind.  Astoundingly, there seems to be no end in sight.  (Indications to the contrary, i.e. the Wayne's World Haiku post notwithstanding.)

2) There seems to be a very ineffectual self-edit mechanism on my stream of consciousness.  As such, most of the time I am in mortal danger of seriously over-sharing.  Luckily, the lice outbreak at preschool happened last fall, and I have an incredible editor over there at the end of the kitchen table who is willing to say, in the nicest of ways,  um, Kirsten?  D'ya think that might be a little.... too much information?

3) While we're on the subject of that lovely Editor Man o' Mine, this month really wouldn't have happened without him.  Well, it might have, but we would have spent the month eating off paper plates, the kids would be comatose from too much Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving, and well, basically our lives would be falling around our ears. Torbjorn was there to do the dishes almost every night, was there to proofread and bounce ideas around, and was always willing to hide out in the basement scanning, for example, random J Crew catalog pages, without even the slightest amount of snark.

4) At this point, I might as well go ahead and admit the kids watched waaaaaaaaaaay too much TV this month.  And us with no cable!  Luckily for them they don't mind watching certain DVDs 486 times in a row, and as such I am now able to recite whole monologues from Little Bear, Caillou, and Sid the Science Kid.  In fact, we've watched so much Sid that Annika screams in protest the minute she hears the theme tune.

5) Since we're talking bad habits, or maybe the lack of good habits, let's just reflect for a moment on how my backside is now the shape of my kitchen chairs - lovely proportions for dining, not so lovely for cramming into jeans.  In October I was slowly working my way back into shape, getting to the gym every other day or so, and feeling a little bit chuffed that I might look like a human again sometime in this decade.  And then I decided to blog.   So:  many hours thinking in front of laptop + many hours typing in front of laptop + many hours surfing the web for trashy gossip inspiration = ass the size of Texas. And not just the panhandle.  Keep that equation in mind, aspiring bloggers.

6) Another note to aspiring bloggers:  go ahead and cancel that Netflix subscription now.  YOU WILL NEVER WATCH WHOLE MOVIES if you try to blog every day. Although strangely, you will find time to watch the dance show that makes your husband bonkers with boredom.

7) Coffee.  I will simply say that coffee is what bore me upon wings of eagles on the mornings where I was using both pointer fingers to hold up both left and right eyelids after staying up until midnight or later to sort out a post, crawling into bed at 1am, peeling a preschooler off me at 3 am, and then rolling out to the shouts of a toddler at 6.30 am. 

So.


Kegger at the Yellow House!!!!!! We're done, baby, we're d.o.n.e with this NaNoFamMoDingDongDo palaver. 

Except of course, we're not. Not done.

There are...... twenty one drafts still in my folder, waiting for their day in the sun.  These would be the bloggie equivalent of notes 'scribbled on the back of the fag packet' (as they so quaintly put it in the UK.)  But rest assured, there are those scribbled notes all over the house too - I've got 3 different Moleskine books on the go at any one time, and all of them have ink-scratched pages with BLOG circled at the top.  My little kitchen notebook where I keep track of my personal three-ring circus has notes scribbled in the margins - "?? The Gift of Nothing??" .. "Schedule Moms - i always thought i'd be the mom whose kid could sleep anywhere"... "the goal of storytelling is to create storytellers"... "how should a reformed Spender 'treat' herself?"

Here's the funny thing that happened this month.  I think I got my voice back.  You know the one, the one that used to stretch around multi-syllabic words, that used to utter quirky little in-jokes that made you snort, the one that I used to take for granted.  And the funniest thing of all?  That voice sounds different than I remembered it - softer on the edges, a little more forgiving of all the frailty that is out there - gentler.  Yep, that's the word I like best.  Gentler.

I've got no illusions.  I'm not on the cusp of Dooce-dom.  But I love that I can write, and that my people, be they the peeps up the street or the peeps Down Under, can check in with me and know what's in my head today.  I will change no lives with this little endeavor, but I will change minutes:  minutes we have for hanging out together.  In the struggle to reconcile the life I have with the life I'd imagined, I love that the friends I have ARE the friends I've imagined, and that so many of you are along for the ride.

I came across this quote today from another blogger, and realized this online community, as faceless and LOL-filled as it is, is a new way to be friends:   We open ourselves up to strangers. We show our vulnerabilities, our faults, our strength and our passions. We share, without really ever knowing with whom, or how a little piece of us has touched another.

As I listen to the first Christmas tunes of the season, I really can't tell you what December will bring.  I do know that I will be reclaiming my Saturday nights, and will be obliged to do a little bit of this whole Holiday nonsense the TV keeps going on about. But I also know, that having found that voice, I'm damned if I'll let it slip under the minivan carpets like so many Goldfish crumbs.

See you tomorrow then.