family « Donia’s Blog

Bad Blogger. Bad, Bad Blogger.

December 18, 2008 at 9:00 pm (family, husband, kiddos, philosophy)

I’m not a good blogger. I admit it. The fact is, I compose blog posts in my head all the time, but then I never really want to sit down and actually type them out. Lazy? Scared? Mostly apathetic, I guess. I’ve mostly just been apathetic about life in general these days. Which I guess beats being depressed, but just barely.

For weeks and weeks I’ve been thinking I need to post something, and each passing day puts more pressure on it to be a good one. But it won’t be. This will just be a whole lot of randomness. So here goes:

Tomorrow is my husband’s birthday (32, for inquiring minds that want to know). Happy Birthday, my sweet. I can’t imagine my life without you.
We returned from a (roughly) 4-day trip to Disneyworld, aka Parental Masochistic Capital of the World. It’s not so much the idea of a trip to a bunch of theme parks or that the vacation is geared toward the children. It’s that it gets taken to ultra-nauseating levels. I won’t confess to going quite that far, but it did seem depressing to watch it play out in other families. (It probably was us, too, but I don’t want to believe it.) Parents dragging their kids around, trying to ride as many rides as possible, get as many character autographs as possible, remortgaging their houses to pay for the flight, hotel, and theme park admission, then remortgaging them again to pay for the collectible/tradeable pins. They were $6-$15 each, and there were many kids wandering around with at least 25 on them. I don’t know. I can’t really find the right words to describe it, but it was sad. And it feels like a lifestyle being jammed down our generation’s throat. Child worship. I mean, I don’t want to go back to the “old days” when children couldn’t speak at the dinner table until spoken to or when they were expected to go away and play somewhere – anywhere – to be out from under their parents’ feet. But now with the world trending toward more danger for children every day, I don’t even dare let my kids out of my sight. I know I’ll have to let them be more independent at some point, but it’s scary to think about right now. So I clutch them to my chest, and alternate between feeling like I spoil them and feeling like I neglect them. Our culture really jams the child worshipping message down our throats. Ah, I’ve digressed. But I can’t help but feel sad at the things I witnessed at Disneyworld (Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, thank you very much). Trying to buy happiness for our children, when often times all they want to do is sit down and play a board game with us.
P.S. If such a thing exists, I am to a vacation what a party pooper is to a party. Seth informs me I was better this time. But here is a picture of me, and I’m pretty sure this is how I looked the whole trip:
Bitchy me at Epcot

Don’t believe me?

Bitchy me at Magic Kingdom

I actually find this one quite humorous. I had to crop the picture so my facial expression would show up better, but in the complete picture, my scowl seems to be directed at my mother-in-law.

My goal, though, is to try to document more of the good things in my life, in the hopes that writing about them will help me savor and appreciate them. Examples of this include:

When Quinn and I were having a conversation, and he cocked his head to the side and said, “Well, you could just stonk it.” He had a very clear definition in his head of the word. It cracks me up even writing about it now.
When I was carrying Paige down the stairs, and she reached around and hugged/patted me on the back and said “We friend.”
When Kate offered to shovel the driveway for payment. When finished with the driveway, we asked if she was going to do the sidewalk, too. She asked if she would be paid more. (After all, we had agreed on shoveling the driveway, though the implication was the sidewalk, too.) When we agreed to pay her more, she went to work on the sidewalk. We have a LOT of sidewalk. I sent Seth out to offer to help her, and before agreeing to it, she wanted to know if she would still get paid the same amount. A shrewd businesswoman already. Good for her.

That’s all for now, but I’m going to try hard to write more often. Hopefully lots of good stuff amongst my ramblings on the state of my little part of the cosmos.

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Ah, Now I Remember!

April 12, 2008 at 8:11 pm (family, things you should do)

After my train of thought derailed last night, I did finally remember what I meant to blog about. Sorry you didn’t get the full version then! Here goes.

We sometimes will rent a movie, get Chinese food, and sit in front of the TV and watch a nice G movie as a family. Feeling particularly lazy last Sunday (well, we had already played tennis for an hour as a family!), I wasn’t in the mood to cook. Quinn and I ran to HyVee (a local grocery store) because I knew they had $1 movie rentals. They were out of a Red Box machine. This is the only place I’ve seen them, but I suspect there are more around. So, comments:

One dollar. One dollar! Can you believe you can actually rent fairly new movies for one dollar (per night)? I’m not saying this is going to replace NetFlix, or that they have a huge selection, but hey, there was enough of a selection to get us a couple movies. And we knew we weren’t going to keep them long.
The entire transaction was done by machine. Selecting a movie, swiping the credit card (altogether cashless system), dispensing the video. This is not phenomenal technology, no, but this is what I expect from technology. Yes, using bar codes, a machine should be able to file and then display the movies it has inside it. It should be able to reach in with its little mechanical gizmo and grab the one I want, then shove it out the slot (or is it elves?). Upon returning it, it also took it from me and re-filed it in its stock; it didn’t just drop in a slot to be hooked back on by a person. * sidebar below about same technology used in an irritating manner
We rented a Bob the Builder movie, which was not for family time watching, and we rented Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. I thought it was a terrific movie. Seth thought the ending fell apart, but I was more concerned about Natalie Portman’s ugly hairdo. And I was just enjoying the movie. I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed (and still enjoy) reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The original movie was hokey, and I haven’t seen the newer one (and don’t really want to). I must digress and make a comment about the sequel to the book, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I read both to Kate, and I must say, I didn’t remember the second one being so disgusting. But it is. The Vermicious Knids are truly disgusting, and let me tell you, I was glad I was reading it to her, rather than her reading it herself, so that I could skip large segments. Roald Dahl, what happened? The BFG, the first Charlie, and then this nasty stuff? So back to the Emporium. How is it Jason Bateman looks the same age as when he was in Valerie (or The Hogan Family) in the 80s? Is it the freckles? He is almost 40 people!!!! Anyway, he was an accountant, and as the magical people in the movie deduced, that was short for “A Counting Mutant”. So the entire movie they called him “Mutant”. It was hilarious.

So go out and rent it (preferably for $1 from a Red Box). You’ll be glad you did. And that will be about the only movie review you ever read from me, because I watch very few movies.

That’s all for now. I need to write about some picture sometime…

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Not That Easy

April 2, 2008 at 7:42 pm (family, kiddos, web design)

I’m finding out quickly that blogging is not that easy. Prior to actually setting up the blog, I was composing blog posts in my head ALL the time. Then I set up the blog and proceeded to wait approximately a month before posting. And now it’s been about 3 weeks since my last real post.

So here’s the thing. I do have a full time job, which is staying at home to take care of my 3 kids. Oh yeah, and running a house. For instance, there was a sale at Target this week, so I went on a paper supply buying spree. We have enough TP and paper towels to last us – well, for a little while. Now I could get into how society doesn’t value it, that I’m wasting my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, etc., but all I will say is that it really is a full time job. I can sit down to send off quick emails here and there throughout the day (and in fact, I find it keeps me a little more sane), but can’t sit down and actually blog. That involves Thinking and Concentration, and those things don’t happen in a house full of children. Lots of things don’t happen in a house full of children. Like having a few quiet minutes alone in the bathroom. The 2-year-old doesn’t like me to shut her out, so the door is often open. When it actually is shut, one or more children will come up to it and start a conversation. Me: “We can discuss this when I’m out of the bathroom!” Lots of things do happen in a house full of children, though. Like chasing a 4 1/2 year old little boy around the house to catch him and count off 10 kisses, and then having him return the favor. Like having a toddler who, when trying to teach her where the parts of her face are, decides the way to show me where her nose is is to poke her finger way up it. Or having a big girl who writes funny messages to herself on her white board.

But additionally, I have a part time job doing web design work from home. It involves me sitting in front of the computer in the evenings, starting from about 7:30 on. Not every evening, but with that and other activities away from home, most of my evenings are filled. By the time I’m finished working, I want nothing more than to veg out on the couch watching TV with Seth. And I think he would like me there, too. So blogging takes a back seat. But I’ll work on getting into a routine. I promise.

Now, there is a berry crisp calling my name, as well as a new episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern (though eating while watching that show is not entirely pleasant).

Future blog topics will include – pros and cons of getting married at age 20, pros and cons of having your first child at age 22, post-partum depression, funny things the kids say/do, funny things I say/do, life in rural Minnesota (not as bad as it sounds, due to the fact that Rochester is a highly intellectual community because of the Mayo Clinic and the large IBM presence)

Throwing a Dart

March 14, 2008 at 7:23 pm (family, philosophy)

How does a person figure out where s/he is going to live? I think even since before cars allowed people to live farther apart but still be able to reach things conveniently, it was a tough task. There are the biggies, like religious persecution, that cause people to seek other places to live – maybe even found new countries. There is the hindrance of money. I’m just never going to be able to live in the Hamptons (and I think I’m ok with that).

But let’s begin at the beginning, with a scene played out hundreds of thousands of times a year probably. A bright-eyed college grad (and in this case, her husband) open up a map (maybe figuratively) to decide where to plant some roots. College grad couple is in Georgia, family A is in Minnesota, family B is in North Carolina. Both members of couple have good degrees and can get work in virtually any major city in the US, and not barring language issues, the world. Hmm, there’s our first stumbling block. Will the first narrowing of options be based on language? Given that neither spouse is bilingual, it’s probably a good idea. It’s not necessary to eliminate every non-English speaking country. But it seems a logical way of narrowing the field. There are certainly a lot of countries still left in the running, though.

Well, about those countries, a lot of them are kinda far away. Like Australia. And winter is summer and summer is winter there. I think that might confuse our college grad. Or maybe it’s actually that here winter is summer and summer is winter. Don’t get me started on the haughtiness of us Northern Hemisphere-ians. But maybe that’s an opportunity again to make some eliminations. Yes, a lot of people emigrate to new countries (and then I think they immigrate, or else they would be stuck like Desmond was stuck a couple weeks ago – well, you know). I’m aiming for why the average Joe ends up where he does, and I don’t have any hard facts to back me up, but I still think the majority of people end up living within a few hundred miles of where they grew up. Or at least in the same country and part of country (not at all vague). But you know what I mean. The majority of people (over 51%) still go to college nearby where they grew up. Hey, state schools are cheaper and still pretty good! I – er – our college grad above flew the coop over 900 miles.

So somehow the average person has decided really to just search the current country s/he lives in. I don’t know why! Comfort, I guess. Life here is probably as good as life way over there; pretty comparable, probably. It’s tricky to move furniture, it’s tricky to learn a new language and/or culture, stressful to get used to a new way of life. Again, I stress that life here is probably different stylistically from over there, but the basic premise is the same – sleep, eat, work, play. There are more things to keep us here, like family and friends. Not that you can’t make new friends elsewhere, but watching people, it has been my experience that people have a hard time parting with old friends. Of course you have to make new friends, but old friends are deeper and harder to break from. You have history with old friends. You start making history with new friends, but it’s still less history than with old friends. And family. We’ll, you can’t really make new family, even if you wanted to (which we all sometimes do).

So let’s face it. Even in this global age, we still like to be physically close to those we care about. It’s just not the same hugging a web cam. In some ways it’s better, because your grandma can’t kiss you on the mouth (luckily my grandma doesn’t own a web cam, or she might try). But in most ways it’s worse. There is still this huge familial pull. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. There is certainly a lot of good to it, but I think people tend to underestimate the bad. Back to our happy couple for a moment. They decided that New England sounded nice, so proceeded to procure jobs and move to Vermont. Well, lots of things happened to make that not work out once there, but a biggie was being a plane flight away from BOTH family A and family B. Besides the lack of hugs, that just costs a lot of money and vacation time! So, slightly-less-happy couple moved to Minnesota, and is currently there. Spouse B would like to be closer to family B, and it is a huge pull. Why? Why why why? Frankly, I think there are better places to live than Rochester, Minnesota and Raleigh, North Carolina – weather-wise, standard of living, etc. But I don’t know that those other, better places are even options. And that makes me mad! I don’t want to have to factor in where all 50 of our combined extended family members live (combined in a sense of adding his to mine, not in the sense that we’re related other than via marriage). Why can’t we, as a couple, say: “City X, State Y is the place we want to live, work, play, and raise our kids. We would rather live there than anywhere else on Earth.” (And there are a lot of other anywheres, let me tell you.) It. just. doesn’t. work. that. way. I say again, that makes me mad!

Someone – anyone- who is fairly close to their family, tell me how one balances that family pull with asserting one’s independence and being in the place that makes them happy?

P.S. It’s not that I don’t like Rochester. It’s got a lot going for it. It’s quite a tech-y place given that it’s in rural Minnesota. But you know, the winters are a little long and the summers are a little short. It is a bit smaller than we would like, though Minneapolis and St. Paul are only an hour and a half away. But. Well. I think there’s more out there for me. And I want to have it. Maybe that’s selfish.

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