The Blog That Won’t Die

Yes, I have neglected this blog once again, but now, I’m here to administer a dose of attention. No matter how many times I try to focus and make a blog that has focus, I can’t make it work  and wind up back with my trusty, well fitting blog.

Why can’t I focus on a single “topic”? Because that’s NOT ME!!  I need to remember this and do what comes naturally rather than what I feel I “should” be doing. When I don’t, I get frustrated and bogged down and wind up quitting all together.  From here on out, my focus is me, my family, my life, and whatever I feel the need to get out. Take it or leave it, I have to be me!

Psalm 109

To help me find my way back to God, I recently purchased a Bible that contains 5 minute Bible studies throughout the book.  Given my recent struggles to quit smoking, a study on freedom from addiction caught my eye.

“I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they shake their heads.” Psalm 109:25

This verse rings very true of many addictions and definitely leaped off the page to me.  Smoking is a dirty, nasty habit, and many people are quick to chastise smokers as though we don’t know it’s not healthy.  Even those who are “trying to help” tend to do so in a negative way.

“Help me O Lord my God; save me in accordance with your love.” Psalm 109:26

I know that quitting smoking is something I want to quit.  I also know how easy it is to find a feeble excuse to falter.  I pray that the Lord will be with me and help me through this.

Thankful Thursday 3/11

For the first time, I am joining in “Thank you Thursday” hosted by Bookworm from Our Imperfect Life.

1. Thank you to Blog Frog for some of the wonderful connections I’ve made since giving it a shot and trying to become more active!
2. Thank you to Mckmama for having a wonderful community of women who have followed you through the ups and downs of life!
3. Thank you to my family who stands behind me whether they agree with my choices or not.  You have allowed me to grow into the person I am, you have offered advice and loved me unconditionally.
4. Thank you to Lindsay for sending me a message and inviting me to join your company.  For two girls who couldn’t be happier to put high school behind us, we sure came back together! I don’t know that you will ever fully comprehend how much you have helped me in the past few months!
5. Thank you to my stepmom for taking K to church even when I didn’t go. Her faith is amazingly strong for such a young age.
6. Thank you to K for having no clue that some kids aren’t comfortable talking about God and not realizing that the day may come when someone shuns you for your beliefs.  I pray that I will be a strong mother and help you overcome any negative situations and that your faith will be as strong at 14 as it is at 4! You have taught me more about my own faith than any parent could hope for.  Because of you, I have invited two families to join us at church and I have spoken openly about my faith and my church family.
7. Thank you to my church family for accepting me, for standing by and helping raise my daughter as a child of God when my own faith was weak.  I know that our church is keeping their promise to nurture K’s faith and I am grateful.
8. Thank you Jesus for opening my heart and allowing me to hear your plan for me.  Thank you for giving me the strength to talk to others,  even when I was certain they wouldn’t be receptive.

I invite you to join me in listing what you are thankful for this Thursday. Don’t forget to stop by Our Imperfect Life and link to your blog!

A New Direction

When I was a child, my dad used to take the back roads as much as possible.  At any given time, he may not know where we were, but he told us that he knew which general direction he was driving and that was all that mattered. Lately, my work life has been much like those drives with dad so many years ago.

 A few months ago, I left my job managing a pizza restaurant to join forces with a school friend who owns a catering company.  It was a bit of a jump and it wasn’t easy at first, but now, we seem to be on the same page and that page is taking us in a completely new direction.

As parents of two small children, we struggle to make ends meet.  I can’t count the number of times a worthwhile cause has come into my focus that I wanted to help but felt I couldn’t afford to.  Lindsay is in the same position, but she is also dealing with being the mom of three little girls, one of whom is in treatment for T-cell ALL.  Caitlynn is an AMAZING little girl who inspires everyone she meets.

Because of Caitlynn’s illness, Lindsay was involved with Capital Candlelighters, a local organization supporting families of children with cancer.  I had the opportunity to see the group in action when we provided the food for their holiday party.  Since it was a Saturday, my husband was also working which meant we each took a kid to work with us.  Even though K isn’t a family member of a child with cancer, they treated her just like every other kid there.  She still talks about going to the party and seeing Santa and getting a Barbie bathroom set.

We decided that we wanted to host a pie bake-off to benefit this wonderful group.  What we didn’t realize immediately was that this is our calling.  We came up with the name Baking Magic for Kids.  We may not be able to give money to every group we’d like to, but we can help smaller groups raise the funds they desperately need to keep their missions alive.  Baking is what we do.  Lindsay started out baking pies and later opened a bakery and cafe, only to close them after her daughter’s diagnosis.  From there, she evolved into catering, but baking is her true passion! 

God has blessed me with two healthy children but I know that could change at any time.  I hope that if that was to ever happen, these groups will still be around to help us get through!  In the meantime, I am going to follow the path God is leading me on to help others.

Back to Basics

Have you ever noticed that life has a way of totally getting away from you?  Is it just me?  I feel like I try to get into so much between work, home, kids, and trying to maintain a sense of self that suddenly I feel like my life is a ball rolling down a steep hill and I’m trying to catch up with it.  Lately, this is exactly how I’ve been feeling.

The funny thing is, I know this feeling is going to make me feel like garbage and yet I struggle to stop adding things to my plate.  Right now, we’re gearing up for the busy season at work, we’ve been handed the task of planning our 15 year class reunion, the food cart is busier by the day, we are getting more catering inquiries by the day, and now we’re planning a HUGE charity event for the middle of May.  At home, I am trying to keep up with the basic work, clear out the clutter that is beginning to suffocate me, RJ’s baptism is next Sunday, and it’s time to start getting K ready for kindergarten.  I’m also trying to find time daily for meditating and knitting as they seem to be the two things that are keeping me sane.

Today, I’m deciding to be choosy about what I do and when.  K is with her Nana for part of the afternoon and RJ is sleeping, so I consciously decided to use this time for catching up on blogs and knitting.  Once K gets home, I will start cleaning.  This may seem backwards, but she likes to help me and while it’s incredibly stressful at times to have a “helper” I know her heart is in the right place so I’m trying to be patient with her.  There is much to do for work, but I’m not going to think about it today, unless I get another super exciting email and then I will jump to answer it!

For the past seven years, I’ve been a part-time follower of FLYLady.  She calls Sunday a day to “renew your spirit”.  Today may be the first time I feel like I am truly doing just that.  We started the day off with an amazing church service and now I’m taking time to recharge my personal battery.  As a mom, it’s something that’s far too easy to neglect!

The First Stumble

Remember that pack that I said I wouldn’t touch?  Well, I screwed up and touched it.  While I know this is bad from the sense that I have to start “the clock” over again, it’s good in the sense that it made me feel disgusting.  I hated the way it tasted, I hated how it felt, I hated how I felt both physically and emotionally.

So, now we’re at close to an hour.  It’s not nearly as impressive as it would have been if it was almost 13 hours, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it.  I’m simply finding things to occupy my time, preferably things that require enough attention that I can’t obsess over every single minute that it’s been.   Very few things in life are mastered the first time we try them and this is no different.  The trick is to not let myself get so discouraged that I say screw it and give up trying.

This is going to suck!

Smoking seems to be a taboo topic if you’re a mom.  It feels like you’re the only mom who has this addiction and you can’t talk about it because other moms will judge you, won’t want to spend time with you, won’t want their kids to spend time with your kids, and will talk until they’re blue in the face about how evil smoking is.  For those who don’t smoke, yes, we already know about the evils of smoking! 

The time has come for me to quit.  I really want to do this without Chantix or any nicotine supplements which means the next 72 hours are going to suck big time!  That’s how long it will take to have a nicotine free body. I know there will be rough times beyond that, but once the body is free of nicotine, it slowly stops wanting more, and then it’s the mental addiction, the part that may never fully go away.

Thanks to sleeping and the morning routine, I’m starting this journey with almost 11 hours smoke-free under my belt.  I have a full pack of cigarettes sitting here, but I refuse to look at them.  They can taunt me all they want, but I will not open them!  Well, I already did take the cellophane off, but then I got away from them as quickly as possible. I’m NOT going to cave! 

Over the next few days there will likely be many disjointed, rambling posts.  I figure I’m going to blog my way through this so I can keep my fingers busy, and maybe, just maybe, there will be a morsel of clarity that I can come back and read and get through the tough times.

“The Doctors” and Cloth Diapers

I have to say, I was thoroughly unimpressed with the bit about cloth diapering on “The Doctors” today.  Don’t get me wrong, any publicity on how easy cloth diapering can be is wonderful, but there were several things that didn’t set well in my stomach.  I also love the fact that they didn’t choose any of the “big dogs” in the cloth world, they chose Smartipants, an up and coming diaper.

First of all, why call them reusable?  Yes, they are reusable but that sounds kind of icky.  Even as a proud cloth diapering mom, I squirmed just a bit at the thought of reusing diapers.  Just because they’re not a flat sheet that you fold or a prefold diaper doesn’t mean they’re not cloth.  The beauty of today’s cloth market is the choices that are available.

Second, Dr. Masterson, an obstetrician, just had to open her mouth about how gross cloth diapering is.  Luckily, she chose to only make a couple of comments, but they seemed incredibly uninformed for someone who claims to have used cloth.  If you saw the show and are considering making the switch to cloth, please completely ignore the “buckets of crap everywhere” comment.  As another doctor said, you shake the poo into the toilet.  You don’t have to scrub it off, so it’s not “all over your hands” as she said it was.  A simple search for how to wash cloth diapers will turn up a plethora of websites that instruct you how to wash them.  And as long as you’re careful, you rarely even see stains!

Also, the show seemed rather disjointed.  I understand they have a wide audience to appeal to, but why give cloth diapers a minute out of the hour?  It would be nice if they could figure out a way to give topics more time and have a less generalized theme to the show.  I don’t care about staying sexy over 70, that’s 40 years down the road.  I don’t care if being a nudist will lower my blood pressure, I’m not doing it.  These don’t seem like the type of segments you would expect to see mixed in with ride-on luggage and cloth diapers.

Maple Sugar Designs Wet Bags

What do you do when you’re out and about?  At first, we used disposables, but then I decided that I wanted to commit to cloth diapering full time. At first, I just grabbed a plastic sack and put the used cloth in it just as I would have a disposable.  It didn’t take long for that to gross me out just a bit, so I went to my local cloth diapering store and picked up a wet bag.  I loved it and swore there was nothing that would beat it.  Being the completely unperfect mom that I am, I can admit when I’m wrong!

When I checked the mail and found my Maple Sugar Designs wet bag, I couldn’t wait to try it!  Well, life had other plans and we spent a while where someone was always sick and I was trying to keep Bubs at home as much as possible to minimize the chances that he’d get sick.  The entire time, my new “toy” sat on the desk, taunting me, begging me to put it to use!  Finally, the day came when we had somewhere to go, so I packed up, carefully folded the bag, and put it in the diaper bag, promising that its day had come.

Unlike my fully functional bag that I bought locally (and only considering price), this bag has a fun fabric outer.  I’ve quickly learned that awesome prints make everything in life better!  The Procare liner is a bit thicker than PUL liners, which makes me feel a bit more comfortable when I’m going to put the bag back into the diaper bag.  This bag has a loop at the top which helped me as I tried to hang on to a dirty diaper and open the bag which was incredibly helpful!

If you’re in the market for a wet bag, I highly recommend going to Michelle’s site and browsing her shop.  This is now our go-to bag.  Even my husband knows which bag to grab when he packs the bag and he’s “corrected” my mom when she grabbed the wrong bag. I have a feeling that before long, I’ll be talking to Mr. Unperfect to see if I can get a hanging wet bag for Bubs’ room!

Want a chance to try a Maple Sugar Designs wet bag for free?  Leave me a comment with which print you’d choose.  Want another entry?  Tell a friend to stop by.  If they say that you sent them, you will receive a second entry.  This giveaway will be open through November 9th at 9:00pm CST.  At that time, I will choose the winner at random.  Please be sure to leave a way for me to reach you in your comment!

Used Cloth???

Cloth diapering is an economical and green way to contain your baby’s “byproducts” until they learn to use the toilet. While you’ll save money in the long run, it can seem out of reach to many parents who are first starting out. Sure, you could simply use prefolds and covers, but what if you want something that offers the convenience of disposables without the cost and excess garbage?

The phrase “used diapers” is sure to turn noses and raise eyebrows at first glance. After all, why would you want to purchase something that another child, someone you may have never met, has used for up to three years? It’s an understandable feeling and one that many parents have. But as long as you’re careful, buying used cloth diapers can reduce the up-front cost and allow you to try diapers you may not have been able to otherwise.

Most parents who use cloth diapers take great care to maintain them properly to ensure that they will last through one or more children. Because of this, many used cloth diapers are sold and traded in nearly new condition. When you are looking online for used diapers, look for listings which are descriptive regarding the condition and include photos of both the inside and outside of the diaper as well as any inserts that are included. If a seller is unwilling to give you this information, move on to the next listing.

There are many sites out there which offer used cloth diapers for sale and trade by parents. One such site is Spots Corner. This is a good site as long as you do a search and remember to select the option to only show available items. There are also numerous message boards with sub-forums for selling diapers. These are generally divided by the type of diaper which makes it much easier to see what’s available. My personal favorite site for stalking cloth (and everything else) is Cloth Diaper Nation.

If you buy over the internet, Paypal seems to be the preferred method of payment. If someone requests a check or money order, this is another potential red flag. With Paypal, there is security for both the buyer and seller that doesn’t exist when paying by check or money order. As a buyer, you have the ability to file a claim in the event that you do not receive your cloth diapers. The seller can print a shipping label directly from Paypal and can choose to have delivery confirmation which they can give you as a buyer.

Using cloth diapers is similar to using disposables in the sense that the diaper one mother swears by will do nothing but cause frustration and extra laundry for another. This is another benefit to used cloth diapers. When you start shopping, you can buy a few fitted diapers, a few pocket diapers, and whatever else you think you want to try. Used diapers allow you to be open-minded when you’re starting out. You might find that the style you thought you’d love doesn’t work for your family or you may fall in love with something you weren’t willing to pay full price to try. And if you decide you don’t like something, you can sell them as long as you take care of them. You can’t do that with a disposable diaper.