Hello, Internet.  How are you?

So yeah, I’ve been gone.  For a long time.  But I have a really good reason!  See sometime back in November I got a call from Jon Bon Jovi and he said they had recently lost their tambourine player for the west coast leg of their tour, and they would really love it if I could fill in.  Of course, I had to turn him down because not a day before I accepted a starring role as Sandy in the big screen revival of “Grease,” co-starring Zac Ephron as Danny Zuko.  And even to do that, I had to do some serious schedule juggling… I mean, you can only turn down a lunch invite from Oprah so many times before she gets pissed…

…As Wayne and Garth used to say,

NOT!

Ninety percent of the truth is that I’ve just been really busy.

Where to begin?  Well, first Michael moved into his big boy bed…

 

Now, if you would have told me 10 years ago that I would someday have an entire room of my home decorated in “eau de John Deere,” fashion, that factoid alone would have been enough to convince me to hightail it to the nearest tubal ligation-performing doctor.  But here I am.  I read somewhere that in order to get a child excited about the transition to a regular bed, you should let them pick out their new bedding themselves.  Who knew they even MADE John Deere bedding!  Lucky us.  Michael has made the transition fairly well.  We put him down at his usual bedtime and after he gets up a time or two for a seemingly endless list of reasons (”I want water!”  “I want another story”  and even, “My butt is itchy!”) he sleeps for 10 or 11 hours.  Unfortunately, moving Michael to a regular bed has more or less been the death knell for naptime (cue screeching violins) which means that I am  involved in some form of childcare, sans break, from 6:30 am until 8 pm (unless of course, I’m working one of my other two jobs).

What else?

There was Christmas, lots and lots of Christmas.  Five Christmases, to be exact.  The holidays were everything one could dream of.  Lots of family time, lots of traveling, lots of decorations, lots of food, lots of presents, lots of joys, and just… well just LOTS.  Wonderful but hectic.  This is the first year Michael has really understood the concept of Santa, an idea we milked for all it’s worth (Santa can SEE you ALL THE TIME and he won’t bring you presents UNLESS YOU’RE GOOD).  Indeed we must have all been very good this year because Santa doted on us especially heavily.

 

 

 

And then, of course, Jenna turned one (!)…

Mmm… chocolate cake.  The verdict?  DELICIOUS.

Since we last chatted Jenna has started walking, taking five or six steps at a time before falling on her duff.  At her one-year doctor’s visit we discovered she is 20 pounds (30th percentile), 30 inches (70th percentile) and is well on her way to her terrible twos.  Yes, the temper tantrums have begun, complete with girly squealing, kicking and rolling around on the floor.  I simply CANNOT WAIT to see what the teen years will bring.

Hmm… what else?  Well, next came the EPIC SICKNESS…

The day after Jenna’s doctor’s visit she quite suddenly vomited all over herself (and her recently turned-around carseat… yep, we were in the car).  The poor thing followed it up with five days of vomiting and horrible, horrible, TERRIBLE diarrhea.  Just when things started to look up, Michael decided to get sick with the same bug.  And then, just when things were looking up once again, I got sick.  All told, we went through an entire case of Costco diapers, got very little sleep, and had a lot of laundry and mess.  I can recall one especially desperate moment changing my 23rd poopy diaper of the day, in which I burst into tears and begged the Muffin to have a vasectomy.

We are all healthy now, though, and are looking forward to Michael’s third (!) birthday in a few weeks.  Can you believe my baby boy is going to be three?

And as for me?  Well, you may remember that at the beginning of this lengthy post I mentioned that our relative busy-ness accounts for 90 percent of my absence.  I chalk the other ten percent up to a kind of existential funk that always seems to plague me at this time of year.  For some reason, every time a new year rolls around I tend to take stock of my life, of the things I have done and things I have failed to do.

Have you seen that movie “Julie and Julia?”  (If you haven’t, you should… it’s fab!)  We watched it the other night, and when I watched the true story of the movie’s heroine, Julie, I couldn’t help but think of how similar we are.  Bright but sort of not using our potential, interested in lots of hobbies and endeavors but  lacking the stick-to-it-ive-ness to see any of them through for very long.  And then, of course, Julie decided to cook every recipe in the Julia Child cookbook and start a blog about it, and the rest, they say, is history.  That was Julie’s “thing,” the thing she had been waiting her whole life to do but didn’t know it, the thing that helped her become, well, herself.

Perhaps it’s just optimistic romance, but I’ve always thought that I have a “thing” waiting for me too, something brilliant and new and original I’m going to do that will suddenly define me.  I am determined that this is the year I discover what that “thing” is and make “it” happen.

What is “it?”  I don’t know.  Maybe if I promise to be a better blogger, you can help me find out what it is?

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