The written word fascinates me. I’m a voracious, though often limited, reader. This has led me to create many pages of my own fiction writing that have never seen the light of day. I read them, and occasionally add to them, and they just sit on my computer’s hard drive gathering virtual dust.

A few months ago I kept seeing someone asking for writing help. Non-fiction blog posts. Paid. Extra money sounded good (and turned into a blessing) and I needed something to do that was on an adult level rather than the under age 5 level. So I gave it a try. And it was good.

But some days, despite my love for words and need for income, I find it difficult to write. I sit at my computer and stare at a blank screen. Or I’ll open WordPress on my iPhone with the intention of posting here and stare at a blank screen. And then I walk away and ignore one of the things I love, though usually in favor of another.

My husband shared a post with me a few days ago that hit the nail on the head when it comes to the difficulties of writing. How I Trick Myself Into Writing. I do SO MANY of those things, and have discovered that I can be very picky about my writing environment as well as my reading material.

I need a quiet environment and to be alone. Until I find the groove, even the cat yawning is a distraction.

But I have two young kids. And a husband who works from home. There is no quiet and alone.

So how else, in addition to the aforementioned post, can I trick myself into writing? How do you convince yourself to write?

It feels unnatural to come to this space, to write.

Not that I haven’t written. I’ve been working from home, writing mostly marketing copy for a social media advising company. It has really helped maintain a more adult vocabulary and interpersonal interaction way better than my usual stay at home mom activities. It is also helping to fill the income gap left when my husband accepted a lower paying job at a company where the owners and operators actually have souls and feelings, as opposed to his former employers who just wanted money, however they could get it, in order to maintain their cushy lifestyle.

Slowly, writing has brought me more into “true” adulthood. It filled the tiny gaps brought on by revisiting childhood with my own kids, just as I had begun to make forward progress into adulthood prior to their birth.

But there’s something else that feels unnatural, and leaves gaps of varying sizes.

It’s knowing that my baby, my first baby, the child who made me a mother, has begun to grow wings and fly.

She just finished her third week as a kindergartener. And, while it may be becoming routine, it is really no easier now than it was that first day. At least for me. She’s flourishing.

The time I have with her to teach and play is minimal, and always interrupted by the need to maintain our loose schedule for the sanity of all of us.

The time we have to work through her feelings has also diminished, but it’s obvious she has learned how to juggle them. It’s not perfect yet, and probably never will be, but she doesn’t need to lean anymore. She can stand on her own until she hits a bump that needs guidance. She is slowly conquering her emotions and anxiety.

And increasing mine. Anxiety and I are old “friends,” I’ve mastered those bumps. But the emotions? I’ve never been an outwardly emotional person, I tend to write out or bury my feelings, but there is so much more tangible emotion watching my babies grow.

Is this a quirk unique to me? Or is this something that mothers go through?

After a very long hiatus, Mama M has brought back 5 Question Friday! I’m so excited! These random questions really help me keep the dreaming part of my blog name alive. 😉

Here’s this week’s questions and my answers:

1. If I had 5 minutes alone with Mother Nature I would tell her?
I know Florida is a semi-tropical climate, but can we PLEASE have snow Christmas through New Year’s and real spring and fall before we melt all summer?

2. If you could eat only one thing for a whole week what would it be?
This week it would be Chipotle burrito bowls. Last week it would have been Thai food. And I’ll never turn down Mac n cheese.

3. What is your favorite season and why?
Fall. Hands down, no contest. The weather, the food, the holidays… And my youngest’s birthday!

4. Do you have a meal that you are AMAZING at making? If so, share the recipe!
Ummm… I love to cook and I’m good at it. So it’s hard for me to pick something. My husband’s favorite thing I make is meatloaf, so I’ll ramble about that for a minute.

I don’t measure when I cook, so I apologize for the lack of real instruction. First, melt a tablespoon or so of butter in a sauté pan over med-low heat. When it starts to get foamy, toss in a small to medium sweet onion, diced. Salt it liberally and add 2 dried bay leaves. While that starts to sweat, mince or paste 2-4 cloves of garlic depending on size and pungency. When onions are totally translucent but not brown, add garlic to pan. Keep cooking and stirring until onions and garlic start to take on a golden color. When you start to see gold, grab your bottle of ketchup. Pour enough into the pan to create a cup or a little more of “sauce.” Turn off the heat, stir, and allow to come to room temperature.

Once sauce is cool, get your ground meat. I use ground turkey, but have also done beef and beef/pork. Mix in enough sauce so that you can smell it when it’s combined with the meat. Often, there is sauce left over. Add about 1/2 cup of Panko bread crumbs to meat and sauce mixture. You need enough so that it keeps the form of a ball or loaf as you stir it in the bowl. Then dump it in a shallow baking fish, shape slightly and put it in the oven. 40 minutes at 350 degrees works for me with ground turkey. When time is up, let rest 10 minutes, slice and serve.

If you had sauce left over, you can make a great side sauce by adding 1-2 tablespoons each of brown sugar and your favorite hot sauce depending on how much sauce you had left ad how sweet/hot you want it.

5. What has changed in your life since the last 5QF? (8/2/13 was the last one! Wow…over 6 months!)
My oldest is in VPK this year and she’s become such a KID rather than my baby. Bittersweet. And my youngest, who can be a terror, is now so much fun and really blossoming in her Mom’s Morning Out program at the school big sister attends. It’s been awesome seeing them in the same school together, and I’ll miss it when big sister moves on to elementary school in the fall.

We set ourselves up for a busy month. We had a list of Christmas activities to complete. Of the 15 activities I could think of, we completed 12 and added making gingerbread houses out of foam and stickers, Christmas scenes painted with water, completed two rather than one round of Christmas cookies, and made Christmas trees out of chocolate and pretzels and decorated them with sprinkles.

I alluded to our new adventure and it is now complete with its own recap to come.

Now it’s time to prepare for the new year. What should we do? What goals should we aim for? I’m not big on resolutions, but every year we get older and it becomes more important to aim for a healthier lifestyle for the adults and teach a healthy, happy lifestyle to our kids.

It’s time to dust off the once a month recipes, eat more vegetables and get out there and be as active as we can in the coming year. This gets easier as the kids get older, as I have found out. 😉

Do you make resolutions? What are your goals for the new year?

In April of 2012, we bought a popup camper. Since then, we have only taken one camping trip to somewhere other than Fort Wilderness (where we’ve stayed 8 times that I can remember). That changed the day after Christmas when we left for Stone Mountain, Georgia.

The kids are familiar with the popup and they’re familiar with Stone Mountain. A friend and I took the kids there less than a year ago to participate in Snow Mountain. But when it came time to plan our holiday trip this year, our first choice – Fort Wilderness – was booked. And it was still booked when I tried to call over the next couple weeks. So we had to change our plans, and I mentioned this trip.

It’s a big trip. Towing the popup means you have to be careful where you stop and watch your speed. It may handle well, but you all know that occasionally you find yourself going WAY too fast on the highway and that won’t work when you’re towing something. It also means cramming the kids in the car for 8-10 hours. The trip up last time took 10 hours and the kids were fussy by the time we got there. The trip home? Took 7.5 hours. They knew what I meant when I said we were going home and they didn’t want to stop for ANYTHING. My oldest didn’t pee the entire trip home. It was a very odd adventure, but one my oldest and I really wanted to repeat.

So we did.

If you follow my Instagram, you’ve seen our adventures “live.” If you don’t follow me, but will start now, you can flip back through the pictures from the trip. They might appear here, they might not, but there will be a recap written at some point.

So, last year (when I was reading blogs) Carrots n Cake did 24 Days of Togetherness with her husband. I thought they were great ideas and would bring a lot more Christmas spirit than just floundering through the season – especially since it’s so short this year!

I decided to come up with my own list for the family and myself to work through this December. I’m still short a few activities, but I’m hoping that as I do the ones I have planned, I’ll come up with a few more! (And, if you’re looking for couples activities rather than family, Carrots n Cake is doing it again this year!)

1.  Make hot cocoa. And not the instant kind.
2.  Buy a Christmas tree topper for the mini tree that decorates our popup camper during the holidays.
3.  Watch a Christmas movie. (What’s your favorite? If we all go see Frozen, does that count? :))
4.  Take a drive and look at Christmas lights.
5.  Take a selfie
6.  Bake Christmas cookies (possibly gingerbread people)
7.  Sing and dance to Christmas songs (I’m thinking this will happen several times ;))
8.  Go for a nature walk. This won’t be nearly as pretty in central Florida as it would be in, oh, say, the Smoky Mountains, but we’re going anyway
9.  Have a fire in the fire pit.
10. Buy and wrap a present for Daddy
11. Enjoy delicious holiday beverages from Starbucks. Or Dunkin Donuts.  We love all things with a pound of sugar and caffeine.
12. Take an informal family photo
13. Make a foam wreath and stockings as interior decorations
14. Check out the tree and lights at Cranes Roost Park
15. Go to Disney and see the dancing lights at Hollywood Studios

What would you add to your list? I need 9 more ideas! :p

Follow our adventures on Instagram!

2 months have passed since I last posted here. I miss it, but I don’t want to recount every detail of our days. I want to post something that tells the story of us AND contains information that someone else may be looking for.

Let’s start with the general. Both my girls are in preschool this year. The youngest in a Mom’s Morning Out class two days per week, the oldest in a 4 day per week VPK program. (Let’s not talk about my baby getting ready to start kindergarten, mmmkay?)

While I do have more time to myself, I actually have LESS free time, do you follow? I’m doing more things for me and the members of my inner circle than I have in a long time. Also, my inner circle is the smallest it’s ever been. I’m not sure I like it, and am working on adding new members, but it’s so hard. Hard for any SAHM because you are most comfortable with other SAHMs but then you get sucked into the vortex of all kids all the time and it’s not healthy. So I’m trying to be a little (just a smidgeon) less introverted and homebody-ish. It’s hard.

But what really has brought me back to this space is two things.

1) We’re taking an awesome camping trip over the holidays. We’ll be taking the kids and the popup to Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I’m ridiculously excited, though I usually am about any form of travel. I’m hoping to learn some things and share them with others who might want to take similar adventures.

2) Instead of a chocolate Advent calendar, I’m trying to come up with 24 simple activities for the girls and I to do. And this leads in to my BIG question of the moment:

What would be on your family’s list? I have only 14 ideas so far!

As the summer season officially winds down, I find myself breathing a sigh of relief. Our plans didn’t happen, instead the girls had surgery. It was a rough morning, but they both recovered easily and finally returned to their normal selves 3 months after first getting sick.

Just in time to start school.

My oldest is in VPK this year and the change is amazing. Not one tear was shed over leaving me for school. When the weekend is over, she’s ready to go back and see her friends. She’s asking for play dates and to make more school projects at home.

My youngest joined the MMO program at the same school and her experience has been nothing like I expected. Last year, I’d have to drag her out of big sister’s classroom. She wanted to play like and with the big kids! But instead, she cries every time I leave and, while she does enjoy herself, is having a hard time adjusting.

I, once again, have 2 mornings to myself. It’s fabulous. My hobbies are resurfacing and my frustration levels are lower.

So why are the anxiety symptoms returning?

We have a ton of plans thru the holidays and I’m hoping they will help me to push thru and move past the anxiety. I’m not new to this, and I think that’s why it annoys me so much when I have these… episodes? They are so few and far between now that sometimes I forget it was ever an issue.

But that’s not why I’m here. It’s time to let anyone who’s still following that I haven’t dropped off the face if the planet, but did spend the summer caring for sick kids. And now I’m remembering who I am on my 2 free mornings a week.

How do you remember who you are in the hustle and bustle of life?