Donia’s Blog

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.