And Adage and Two Ephiphanies

Adage: Absence makes the heart chill a bottle of champagne and heat up the hot tub for the first time in a year.

(I do love getting out of Dodge, but aaaahhhh, it’s good to be home too. Bubbly in the bubbly.)

Simon stayed in Oakland while the boys (the boys! still novel!) and I flew to Salt Lake to get through Wombat’s daycare vacation week with people who could entertain him during his waking hours far better than I can, infant or not. We hung with my parents and brother–dinosaur museum! zoo! community pool! porch swing!–and also got to introduce the new little guy to some of the extended family at an extended taco bar party.

Here are my two epiphanies of the trip:

1. Vacationing with kids–especially a kid who feeds off of your person–is no nap-on-the-beach kind of holiday, and less so when the other contributing adult is not around to help. Although Simon was home cranking out another stretch of 9-to-5s at the jobsite, it occurred to me very early one morning (SO EARLY) that he was also sleeping for hour upon gloriously uninterrupted hour at night while I was still getting up and getting up and getting up, even as the boys(!) continue to be star pupils in the Department of Nighttime Activity (or lack thereof). (I will not complain publicly about a six-week-old who sleeps for six hours in a row, but that doesn’t mean those 5 a.m. wake-ups suck any less.) Basically, she who holds the children is forever on duty, for better or for worse, or for some combination of the two, for instance: it wasn’t a total picnic flying solo with a preschooler and a newborn, but I do feel like a bit of rockstar having done it, and you can bet I’ll me milking that brag for a good month or two at least, and mostly after poking Simon awake in the morning to change a full diaper.

2. I’m not one for existential blog crises, but I do believe occasional self-examination of one’s relationship to the medium can be valuable (and who doesn’t love blogging about blogging?! wait, don’t answer that), and here’s what I discovered while turning over the idea of what exactly holds all of THIS *waves hands at the WordPress window* together. There are mommybloggers and craft bloggers and lifestyle bloggers and drama bloggers and social issues bloggers and photography bloggers and on and on, and everyone (or maybe just the “professionals”/industry folk?) seem to want us to define ourselves, to fall into neat little categorized boxes. Me? I LOVE categorized boxes. I love a good solid theme. I love WYSIWYG. But the older I get the more I’m coming to grips with the reality that reality isn’t so simple or organized or neatly labeled in a single, legible typeface. Lord knows I’m not so simple and organized and neatly labeled. As far as blogging goes, I’ve done a little of this and a little of that–look at this craft I made! here’s what I had for lunch! behold my FEEEEEELINGS!–and I’ve let this willy-nilly freakshow go on for YEARS. (Little agirlandaboy.com just turned NINE.) I’ve been calling myself a “personal blogger” for as long as the term has existed, but even that doesn’t always fit. As it turns out, in my estimation I’m not much of a genre blogger at all, and although this is very bad for my “brand,” it’s very good for me because–epiphany!–I Blog About What I Want to Remember. I put this revelation in all caps like that because it’s become a bit of a motto. A mission statement, even. I blog what’s important to me, or what I think will be important to me when I look back on these years and what I did/how I felt while living them. Is there a neatly labeled box for Memory Bloggers? Or is it more of a jumble of people sort of half in and half out, some of us stumbling around not sure what we’re doing exactly but, by god, having a great time? It doesn’t matter. (Does it?) I’m having a great time.

Here’s what I want to remember from our trip last week:

More memories here.