Swan Song, Laughing.

Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today to get through this thing called life 
Electric word life it means forever, and that's a mighty long time, 
but I'm here to tell you there's something else.... **

A new site.  I mean, I'm in the process of building a new blog, a different sort of place all together, and so it's time to put NilsenLife aside for a season.  What a wonderful season it's been here!  We started when Lars was brand new - 3 months old maybe? And now we have the most gorgeous family of growing-so-fast kids, all 3 of them, and as they look forward their mom looks up and says what next?

Me, wondering What Next?

Who knows what next.  But it will be something new, something creative, something that asks me to think, explore, and grow.  Because that's the point of this thing called Life, isn't it?

As a last post, I'm giving you guys a list of things that make me laugh out loud.  Not LOL, not ha! but seriously, genuinely, laugh out loud.  In no particular order:

• the sun, after days and days of cold grey rain
• the logic of preschoolers
• a 10 year old's budding attempts at irony
• photographs involving angry dwarves
• terrible puns
• my husband - daily
• every single one of my close friends - we can't be tight *unless* you make me laugh
• Beastie Boys videos

Not even a Top 10 list, but enough to get me through the day.  Laughing out loud is as holy a thing as I know, and I am profoundly grateful to find things to laugh about every single day.

So with that I leave you.  NilsenLife will abide here as long as Blogger will let it, with its gentle posts on babies, and growing, and a parent realizing that so much good awaits.   On to the next. You will always be able to find us, and all of our laughing, here: at The Yellow House.

** total extra credit points if you finished that little riff at the top there, and then dove right in to enthusiastic air guitar.   For those who didn't, it's Prince and, the first cool song I ever memorized:  Let's Go Crazy.   Yes in fact it IS on my running playlist to this very day.

Going all Retro with a [gasp!] JOURNAL

Do you remember your first journal?

I'm not talking about a Dear Diary sort of thing, not one with dates and days of the week that required details of every day.  I'm thinking about the blank book - hundreds of empty pages waiting for anything that you're willing to commit to paper.

My first ever journal entry, dated June 12 1985, was 2 lists: Guys I Love and Movies I Love.  (Kevin Bacon & Footloose topped both. Sigh.  They're still up there.)

The very last entry in that same blank book was the night before I got married - in that one book I have documentation of the most intense, silly, and emotional years of my life.  (And no, now you mention it I'm not sure where it is.  Yikes!)

What, me? Write a lot? Um... maybe?

So I've been trying to unravel a bit of a knotty issue in my head in recent weeks. (Not naughty, sadly. Just...knotty.)  The sort of thing that's isn't front & center in your brain, but the kind of abstract thinking that pops right up if you have a quiet moment in the shower, or as you drive to the pool or wait for water to boil.

I find myself eyeing my current journal - the leather-bound thick-papered book that has laid on my bedside table since I was pregnant with Cecilie.  Haven't written a blessed thing in it since I was newly pregnant with Annika - almost exactly three years ago.  And yet my thoughts lead me to the creamy blank pages:  waiting for lines of slanting black ink in which I slowly untangle the mental morass.

Is there really a place for journaling when there's a blog?

Up to this point, I would've argued No.  I would've argued that blogging is quality-control - a necessary check on the maudlin, the whiny, the self-indulgent.  It forces a discipline on the writing that ultimately makes the content more interesting not only to a reader, but to me.

But awareness of your audience also forces the writer to leave certain content on the sidelines.  Believe it or not, even a blogger has limits about what she'll share.  Here is where a journal leaps up for its time in the sun:  a journal offers total, open acceptance.  It's just me, the page, and the pen.  Honesty - and ideally, a little clarity - is the only way forward.

Here's Why

Here's why I don't blog every night.  Or at least, here's why I didn't blog every night before November.

There are literally TEN baskets of laundry to fold.  Who knew I had ten baskets to even fill with laundry??  Who knew there was enough laundry to fill ten baskets?  Oh yes, now I remember - there are ten baskets because I skipped doing laundry last week because I was busy blogging my nights away.

There is an article I'm meant to be writing for a real company (yay! Another issue of Classic Play coming up!) - a real magazine with actual deadlines and paying advertisers.

There was a parenting moment that needed to happen tonight, a heart to heart conversation that couldn't wait.  It needed time, it needed focus, and it needed quiet minutes in the dark to allow the ideas to settle.  I'm entering the time of childhood where the hurts of the day begin to be measured in bruised feelings, rather than bruised knees, and that takes more than Band-Aids.

There are all the ingredients for bread pudding in the kitchen, but it needs to happen tonight if I don't want the bread to get moldy.  

There is the standard kitchen full of dishes, plus a few from the cookie baking extravaganza from this afternoon.

Oh, and My Show is on tonight.  Oh yes I DO think I can dance.

Before these NowNoBlam-O shenanigans, I would have thrown in the towel.  (Into one of the ten baskets.)  I would have agreed with the world that my house, my family, my marriage, and my TV addiction would absolutely take priority over existential, meandering meditations.  And recipes for Pomegranate Chicken. 

But honestly?  Having a reason to have a sit down with myself and demand to know what Self has been noodling over in recent weeks is HUGE:  holding yourself accountable, and reportable, is no small thing.    So I'm not sure what output December will bring (have I mentioned I'll have houseguests for almost 4 weeks?) but I do know that as long as Blogger hosts me, the ten baskets might as well keep breeding until there are twenty or so.