So, yeah. It’s been awhile. Interesting maneuvre on my part to write about quitting and then just stop writing. After awhile, I bet a handful of you started to wonder if there was any subtext hidden within that message. Newp! Not quitting. Just busy with a few other things in my life.

Speaking of subtext, though…

I have a habit of obsessively trying to solve the daily Scrabblegrams in the newspaper. For the most part, I tend to do pretty well at it but every once in a while, the fine Scrabblegram people like to throw me a curveball.

Take a look at this one. Can you figure it out?

One highly improbable possible solution jumped right out at me the moment I saw it. Unfortunately, I doubt the solution my eyes saw is what the puzzle-makers were going for…

There’s just no going back after something like that. I converted into a 12 year old boy and giggled maniacally. I showed Lucky and had him snickering too. I couldn’t look at the anagram objectively and ended up cheating using an online anagram finder to figure out what the actual solution was.

Any ideas?

No, go on. Give it a try.

Did you figure it out?

It’s SUBTEXT. Heh. Appropriate.

** In my best old perv voice ** Yeah. I’ve got your subtext right here…

Filed under: Me, Random by WWS (Lynn) - 3 Comments →

I am six years old. After two years, I decide that I don’t like ballet class and so I quit.

I am seven years old. I beg my parents to take me out of French Immersion and put me into an English-speaking school. I don’t like the lunch room volunteers or the pressure of speaking in French all the time and I quit.

I am eight years old. I decide that I don’t want to continue on to Guides after my last year of Brownies. And so, I quit.

I am ten years old. I have gotten all of my swimming badges and now is the time to decide whether or not to continue on to a higher level. I decide I don’t feel like it and I quit.

I am eleven years old. I have just finished a season of basketball in which I sucked quite magnificently. I don’t want to play anymore. So I quit.

I am twelve years old and in junior high. I would like to join band. My parents, figuring that it’s a lot of money to spend on something I will likely not continue on with, say no.  Can’t say as I blame them.

I am fifteen years old. I try out for the basketball team and don’t make it because I am not aggressive enough. So I wash my hands of it altogether and never again try out for a sports team of any kind.

I am sixteen years old. I am on the track team. I am not bad but lack motivation. I pull a muscle in my leg and, though it isn’t painful enough to stop me from running my races, I decide to quit and have someone else run in my place. I don’t join the track team again.

I am seventeen years old. I am on the yearbook committee. It kind of sucks and is pretty boring, so after completing a couple of layouts, I let it go.

I am nineteen years old. My great aunt has moved into the house and is driving everyone nuts. I am distracted and, for the first time in my life, I need to open my books and study if I want to do well in school. I don’t. I fail biology and economics. The university puts me on probation. For the first time ever, I am shocked into action. I pull myself up by my bootstraps and do the work necessary to bring my grades up to where they need to be. I don’t quit this time, but it is an isolated incident.

I am twenty-one. I have just finished a gruelling semester in which I am doing a full-time practicum while working nearly full-time at a group home. I barely know what day it is. The semester ends and I have graduated university.  I am finally ready to start breathing again. A few days later, my live-in boyfriend of two years quits me. My first thought is to run back home, where I can quit my life for a bit and regroup. I quit my group home job because I didn’t really like it all that much to begin with and spend the next three months sleeping on my parents’ fold-out couch.

I am twenty-three. I have been working on a children’s writing course for the last several months. I am starting to lose interest. With one unit left to go, I put the course materials away and don’t look back.

I am twenty-four. I am married and own my own home. I have a car and a full-time job. After a lifetime of quitting, I don’t see the problem with quitting my job because I don’t like it. My tenacious husband and my practical mother talk me out of it and so I stay. I complain mightily, but I do the work. I am relieved to find out that I am pregnant and the life-span of my job has instantly gotten shorter. Only a few more months before I can quit!

I am thirty-three. I have been married for nine years to a man who is remarkably adept at handling me and my many quirks. I have two amazing children. Both are now in school, although my daughter goes only in the mornings. I am attempting to volunteer more. My husband has suggested that I go back to work part-time in a year. I am comfortable with my life as it is and wonder if I have what it takes to start a career and actually stick with it. After a lifetime of not following through with anything, I have no talent to speak of.

I have no talent.

I wish I had talent. I wish I had followed through with something. Anything. Sports, ballet, music. Whatever.

And so, I find myself wondering how I’m going to instill in my children the qualities that I sorely lack. My daughter is in dance and loves it. My son loves softball and will be starting indoor soccer next month.

If the time comes when my children decide they want to stop a particular activity, what do I do? Do I let them? Or do I encourage them to keep trying, to not quit? I honestly don’t know. I just pray that my children have more self-esteem and tenacity than I ever did and find a way to develop their own talents. To stick with it long enough to know with certainty that they are good at something. To take pride in their abilities.

I will not quit at this endeavour. I will do everything I can to help my children understand the vital importance of following through. Finally, I get it.

Filed under: Confessions, Keepin' it Real, Me, Offspring by WWS (Lynn) - 4 Comments →

I’m tired. Really tired.

Tired enough that my four year old daughter told me point-blank at lunch today, “Mommy, are you tired? You have HUGE BAGS under your eyes.”

Tired enough that not even a giant mug of coffee each morning is enough to keep my eyelids from drooping automatically to half mast and staying there for the remainder of the day.

Tired enough that I wrote on a friend’s Facebook page, “I’m not good at being awake in general” and meant it.

So tired that even though I have the best of intentions to get off my PCOS-widened behind and join a gym, I can’t seem to clear the cobwebs out of my head quite enough to actually do it.

Tired enough that after eleven plus years of sleeping on a continually deteriorating queen mattress, I’ve started nagging harrassing begging suggesting to my husband that we purchase a new one. A girl needs some quality sleep, you know.

And so, in an attempt to help my tired ass not to be so tired, I made an effort to go to bed early last night (with early being defined as before midnight).

(I’m not completely masochistic. I do make an attempt every now and again to take care of myself. Occasionally.)

About an hour and a half after settling into as comfortable a slumber as I could manage, given the state of my mattress, I woke myself up by screaming like a crazy person. Lucky jumped three feet in the air and landed in front of the bedroom door, equally wild-eyed and sleep-mussed. The poor guy has learned to expect this type of behaviour from me (the antics I pull in my sleep are considerably more entertaining than anything I do while I’m awake), yet it can’t be easy to be stuck sleeping next to a night-screamer night after God-forsaken night. Especially when that night-screamer tends to launch into sleep-talking tirades before, after and sometimes during each screaming fit.

Whoa. Sorry. That was me. I don’t know why I screamed.

Just go back to sleep.

(Moments like these are exactly why I decided to name my husband Lucky on this blog. He’s a lucky, lucky guy to be married to the likes of me.)

We both fell back into an exhausted slumber only to be awoken again in what seemed like only minutes later by a loud thump. Lily fell out of bed and because I’m a mother and felt all responsible for her and crap, I went in there to scoop her back into bed and make sure she was okay. (She was.)

I woke up in the morning feeling like I hadn’t slept a wink.

(Frankly, I think it’s the bed.)

(I’m sure that the screaming has nothing whatever to do with the quality of my sleep.)

The one thing that saved my morning was that the weather was warm enough for me to wear my most favourite shorts ever in the whole entire world:

I bought them at Old Navy a couple of years ago and I love them because they have a drawstring waist kick ass.

Unfortunately, Lucky doesn’t feel the same unbridled passion for the shorts as I do. He, in fact, hates my favourite shorts. Hates them! He thinks that they’re putting me on the fast track to wearing Mom Jeans and otherwise dressing like a complete bum. He’s the guy who actually says things like, “you’re not wearing those, are you?”

What Lucky doesn’t realize is that I’m already there. Almost every tee and tank top in my closet came from Old Navy, and they cost me between $2 and $3 apiece. Thanks to my ever-expanding waistline, I have absolutely no desire to upgrade to something more expensive. Instead, I’m going to wait until I’ve got my PCOS under control before committing to an attractive, non-bargain-basement wardrobe.

Plus? I don’t really care what he thinks about my shorts. I’m tired, they’re comfy, and besides, what exactly am I doing during the day that would require me to wear anything more fancy than this? Picking my kids up from school is hardly a business-suit-and-heels type of occasion.

Plus, anyone who can hang up a shirt like this and think it looks okay clearly has a warped sense of what is acceptable when it comes to clothing:

So, yeah. I’m wearing my shorts until they become so old and worn out that my underwear becomes visible underneath. And, if Lucky has any desire to question me, I’m just going to refer him right back to this:

And then I’m going to request a king-sized bed. Because if I wasn’t so darn tired to begin with, I’d probably be seeing clearly enough to realize that I’ve deteriorated into a slummy-shorts-wearing, cheap-ass-tee-shirt-hoarding, thisclose to Mom Jeans wearing woman with suitcase-sized bags under her eyes.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I’d like a new bed? Because I’m tired.

Filed under: Keepin' it Real, Me, PCOS by WWS (Lynn) - 2 Comments →

… I have now lost both of my children to the institution of learning.

Today was Lily’s first day of Kindergarten. She was a little nervous before we got there and made me promise that I would stay with her, but thankfully she has an older brother who went out of his way to explain what Kindergarten would be like. He made her feel much better about the whole thing.

When we got to her classroom, Lily got immediately into the swing of things. The first thing the class did was sit down for circle time. Having gone to preschool last year, Lily knew all about it and was quite comfortable sitting with her legs crossed and paying attention to the teacher.

And I saw first hand that the girl is a Class A, certified chatterbox. Each of the teacher’s sentences was followed by a, “You know what?” from my daughter. In the approximately 30 minutes that I sat in the classroom, my daughter managed to tell her teacher that she is four years old, knows how to sit straight and tall, is allergic to peanuts, sometimes her brother poops a lot, she has a pink room (and her brother’s is blue), she already knows the ending to the story but will keep it a surprise for the other kids, she loves to colour with markers and, well, you get the idea. She’s going to have to work on the whole mouths-closed-and-listening thing, methinks.

After awhile, the parents were escorted to the office to fill out a myriad of papers. When I filled out the same papers for my son two years ago, I remember being a nervous wreck. Was my baby okay in the classroom without me? How on earth would I be able to leave him? Would he be safe at the school, both inside and (more importantly) outside on the playground? Should I have made the choice to homeschool instead? With my daughter, it was old hat. I personally knew several of the other moms. I was comfortable with the office staff and the school principal. I knew the layout of the school well. I even knew what was happening in the classroom, right down to the hunt through the school for their runaway gingerbread men. I knew that, with no younger children left at home, I was free to volunteer for more duties in the classrooms of both children. I felt secure and comfortable. I was just fine.

The relaxed feeling continued as I finished up the paperwork, as I went through the instructions for my daughter’s EpiPen with the staff at the front desk, as I listened to my daughter and her classmates play happily in their classroom from my spot hidden beside the door, and as I headed out the front door toward my car.

I felt fine as I got in the car and drove to Second Cup for a “I survived back-to-school” mocha (skim milk, no whip.) It wasn’t until I realized that I was now driving aimlessly, purposelessly, that I started to lose it.

With nowhere else to go, I decided to head home for an hour and try to shake off my sadness. After a few sips of my mocha, I began to feel decidedly ill and I realized that I wasn’t quite as ready to let my baby girl venture off into the world of school as I had thought.

After a weepy, self-indulgent 45 minutes at home, I pulled myself together and headed back to the school to pick up my girl. She was, naturally, a happy little ball of enthusiasm, full of tales to tell about her first day at Kindergarten.

My girl is going to do just fine at school, even if her mother has been spontaneously ovulating all day. Must. Have. More. Babies. Once I get into the swing of my new morning routine, I’m sure I’ll be just fine as well. Right?

Filed under: Offspring, Out of the Mouths of Babes, Random by WWS (Lynn) - 2 Comments →

Today is Logan’s first day of Grade Two. My sadness over the fact that my children are continuing to grow up at an alarming rate (and without my permission, might I add) is tempered by the fact that the poor boy was getting so bored and antsy toward the end of the summer that he was starting to drive me bananas. School is a good thing for a kid so full of energy.

Logan got the teacher he wanted and exclaimed, “I’m so excited! I’ve never had a man teacher before!” Although his best friend is in a different classroom for the second year, Logan didn’t seem bothered by it and has lots of his Kindergarten and Grade One buddies in his class this year.

I can’t wait for 3:30 to come so I can hear all about his first day. Then tomorrow, Lily heads off for her very first day of Kindergarten. I’ve packed an extra box of Kleenex because I’m pretty certain that I will end up crying an ocean of tears when it’s time for me to leave my baby girl in her classroom and head home alone.

Today, though, I’m going to concentrate on my boy and his excitement. Have a great day at school, honey!

Filed under: Offspring, Random by WWS (Lynn) - 1 Comment →