50 random thoughts on a Saturday Morning

1. I'm laying in bed eating a bowl of peanut butter cup ice cream for breakfast.
2. I can practically feel it settling around my thighs.
3. This breakfast totally cancels out my run last night.
4. I made it to 2 miles!
5. With some hills!
6. My friend Jami (who runs marathons) is trying to get me to sign up for the Broad Street run.
7. Let's not go crazy.
8. I'm obsessed with Lisa Leonard jewelry. It would love to own one of her pieces someday...
9. The weather has been extremely icy here lately.
10. When I said "No more snow!" this isn't what I meant.
11. Ice is so much more dangerous.
12. Will we ever see sun/spring again???
13. We have book group this week. I'm pretty excited.
14. Although I really should join one that has people I don't know.
15. This one is with my coworkers.
16. Who are all fabulous people.
17. But I feel like I need to make some new connections.
18. And push out of my comfort zone a little more.
19. I didn't mean to offend anyone in one of my prior blog posts.
20. I don't think 30 is over the hill by any means!
21. Or even "old".
22. But it is a milestone birthday, that (in my opinion) marks a new chapter of adulthood.
23. I have been wearing my blue infinity scarf like crazy.
24. I had to order a new bra and so I got the scarf for FREE.
25. Who doesn't love FREE?
26. Isaac's school is starting a kid's Zumba club after school.
27. He is ridiculously excited to join.
28. He knows I love Zumba, but I'm not sure he knows it is essentially dancing.
29. We had an in service day yesterday at work. The presenter asked our (totally non-responsive) group if anyone enjoyed writing or did it for fun. I raised my hand and she totally called on me.
30. I was like "Uh... I have a blog I write in...".
31. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy.
32. And one person was like "What's a blog?"
33. I managed to pull out of the recesses of my brain that "blog" was short for "weblog".
34. Which didn't seem to clarify anything for them.
35. All righty then...
36. If the roads aren't insane I'm venturing out this afternoon to get my hair touched up.
37. Although my current color is much closer to my natural hair color than the blond I was rockin all summer, I have visible 2 inch long roots.
38. My friend in Pittsburgh told me that the schools there are having a 2 hour delay Monday morning, in anticipation of people being hungover from the Superbowl.
39. Kind of ridiculous.
40. I was going to go to New York this weekend.
41. To visit my friend, the fabulous Nicole Newcomer.
42. But I decided to cancel my trip and go some other time when the weather is nicer.
43. For those keeping track, this is Isaac's weekend with his dad.
44. We still had the usual drama before the drop off.
45. We will see if pick up goes any better.
46. Well I should probably get out of bed and actually do something today.
47. I have a huge pile of mail to sort through.
48. Laundry to be done.
49. The car needs cleaned out.
50. Have a great weekend everyone!

More from the E-Harmony reject pile

It's a free communication month, so I hopped by over to the site...

like a month to a flame.

So here's some more lovely people e-harmony thinks I am terribly compatible with.... enjoy.

Last book I read and enjoyed: 'Twilight', It was very intriging how a man and a woman so different love one another so much. It was their differences that made them love each other so much.

Maybe I'm too picky... but I don't want to date any guy who read/enjoyed Twilight. Good grief. That being said, at least he filled in the question. I despise when someone says "I hate reading" or "Not so into books". At least say something lame like "Training manual for my work" or "I only have time to read stuff for school". Saying you hate reading is an instant rejection. It automatically gives the impression that you are a couch potato and unintelligent. Ridiculous spelling mistakes are also grounds for immediate deletion. Sure, we all make occasional errors or typos but words like "sense", "friends" "Jesus" and "Philadelphia"(!!!!!!) should be spelled correctly. Also axed a guy who had on flannel shirts in all of his pictures. Probably petty, but yikes.

Which, let's talk about pictures. Don't put pictures of yourself with your arm around some girl who has been awkwardly cut out of the picture. Get a friend to snap a decent picture of you. Come on.

And for heaven's sake, do NOT put a picture of yourself next to a guy dressed as Pikachu.

And this guy... I don't even know where to begin.... You pay a significant amount of money to have an active online profile on the site, and you choose to make the old Washington Monument penis joke for your profile picture? Good luck finding your soulmate, jackass. (Although, at least the last book he claims to have read was 1984... small redemption)

Free communication week goes on until Valentine's Day and I have over 300 matches to slog through, so there is plenty more where these came from...

I'm a big cliche

Firstly, I've been reflecting a lot on motherhood lately and started pounding out a huge manuscript on the topic. After some reflection, I have decided to break it up into different posts. Saturday I watched FoodInc, a really insightful documentary on issues in the food industry. After that, Netflix realized I like documentaries and it recommended more in spades. It seems NEtlfix knows me better than I thought. One recommendation was a documentary called "Babies". Here is the trailer: It follows four babies from different parts of the world (Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and the USA). It was very charming and cute although I found myself tearing up/crying all through it. This is the theme in my life lately I see. Dads in the mall wearing baby Bjorns make me teary. I see a smiling pregnant woman in the grocery store and I feel physical pangs of jealousy. And yes, I am well aware that this makes me sound psychotic but I guess it is safe to say as I creep closer and closer to thirty my biological clock is pounding in my ears. I think I feel more anxious to find "the one" less from a desire to not be alone, but because my desire to have another baby before it's too late. The average 30 year old only has 12% of her eggs left. I am terrified that I won't ever meet someone who wants to have kids, or that by the time I do, I won't be able to anymore. And I'm not the only one apparently. There's even an acronym for people who feel this way: SADFABs (single and desperate for a baby). Which, isn't that the most depressing label ever? My pregnancy with Isaac was unexpected and a time of high stress, shame, and anxiety. It was not something I savored, it was something I detached myself from and endured. I was hit with a barrage of messages that I would have to sacrifice all my dreams and goals, that I would end up collecting welfare, that my kid would be maladjusted, When Isaac came, he became the light of my life. For all of the turmoil of the pregnancy, I can state with absolute certainty that Isaac is the best thing that has ever happened to me. Although a major theme of my blogging over the years has been my regret and guilt at how quickly his infancy passed in a the delurium of working full time, grad school, field experiences, student teaching, etc. Now all of a sudden he is this grown little boy with no traces of babyhood left. Selfishly, I want to do it all again when I can really delight in the experience of it. Also, I feel a lot of sorrow that Isaac will not have the experience of having a sibling close to him in age. My siblings are all two years apart and I am very close with each of them. Anyways, I certainly do not want to a rush a relationship forward toward love and marriage as a result of these overpowering maternal feelings. Seriously. But it is sort of hard when you imagine things in your life unfolding a certain way and all of a sudden you are almost 30 and nothing is the way you envisioned it. Stayed tuned for more thoughts on motherhood including recent conversations on dating a single mom, and the annoying tendency of childless people to compare having children to having a pet.

A few new things

I actually took this down yesterday. It's very cute (made it myself!) but I have had enough snow. Perhaps something Valentine's related will go up in it's place.

This cute pear bowl found when I was thrifting with my mom...

Also, I finally got some curtains for the living room (although every picture I tried to take of them was too dark or too light).

Sarah's Key

The story is set in Paris and has two interweaving stories revolving around the French roundup of Jews in World War II. One is told from the point of view of a 10 year old Jewish girl Sarah. She is awoken one morning by French police and taken with her parents. Thinking she will be back in a few hours, she locks her four year old brother in a closet. She is taken to an internment camp in a sports arena for several days and then to a work camp and the reader wonders if she will be able to escape and what will become of her brother. You can probably imagine the awful gut-wrenching places her story goes. The other story is set in the present and is narrated by a (two dimensional) American woman, Julia, who lives in Paris in an unhappy marriage. She is writing a newspaper article on the events detailed above and becomes (oddly) obsessed with Sarah's story. Unfortuneatly, about halfway through the novel, the author reveals the brother's fate and fades Sarah away. Julia is a less engaging narrator and the second half of the novel felt a little bit like a letdown. Although the plot at some points really makes no sense, it was a page turner. I had a snow day and knocked it out in 24 hours. I was definitely ignorant of the specific events that took place in France. A major theme of the novel is remembering horrific events, not simply sweeping away past history. It's a compelling story, even if the writing is a little weak.

random, shmandom

Okay, not to be a negative Nancy here, but I'm pretty much over the snowy weather. I'm also over my school district's unwillingness to ever give in a give us a snow day. When it's my time to go, I would rather it not be on my way in work on the sidestreets of Pottstown's North End thankyouverymuch. I like one or two big snowstorms, enough to use a few snow days, and then that's it. No more. For a girl who never picked up a snow shovel until last year, I have become a snow shoveling expert. I'm over it. There is a crapload of snow on the ground already and it's still coming down. Both of our districts have called for a delay, so I guess there is more shoveling in the near future. Booooooo. Here is the pile of work I took home with me from our 12:00 dismissal, ever the optimist that I would sit at home and continue forging on with lesson plans, IEPs and progress notes. Yeah right. It hasn't been touched and probably won't be unless we end up with a snowday tomorrow. We're also going slightly stir crazy. I am totally content to waste away a snowy weekend laid up in bed with a cup of lemon tea and a good book*. Isaac, not so much. There is only so many hours we can log on the wii or enduring the tedium that is Scrabble Jr. Even when we are not snowbound it is a struggle to come up with fun (and cheap/free) things to do in the winter. If anyone had any ideas I would love to hear them. *Incidently, I finally started Sarah's Key for book club. It's very riveting but might be too emotionally heavy to plow in a hurry. It might have to be one that I break up, like I did with Three Cups of Tea. I can't remember if I blogged about this yet or not, but I had a lovely time in Lancaster shopping till I dropped with my mom. I returned home and tried to make plans again with friends but again no one was around. I was determined not to sit in my house alone for the second night in a row on my weekend "off". I ended up texting WJM to see if he wanted to meet up somewhere. Turns out, he was out at his parent's house (like ten mins away) and said he would come over in about an hour and a half. That was the impetus I needed to get my house whipped into shape after turning a blind eye to the clutter and dishes for several days. I ran around like a crazy person and totally cleaned my house from top to bottom, even doing crazy stuff I knew he wouldn't even see like corralling the laundry in my closet and changing Isaac's sheets. It was lovely to wake up Sunday morning to a totally clean house. It was funny too because when I opened the door he was all, "Who shovelled this walk?!". I'm like "I shovel now!!" He came over for a little bit and then we went out to the Epicurean in Phoenixville for a bit, which was one of our old haunts. The conversation again was good. Equal parts reminiscing and catching up. I know I have written this before, but it is a very weird thing to hang out with him: a stranger who knows all about your past. It was actually nice though and better than staying home watching Netflix. Anyways, enough about that. This page fell out of Isaac's Kidwriting Journal at school so he brought it at home. I love, love, love, to read his writing. I just wish I could get him using more lowercase, especially for his name. "I saw a rainbow and there was a pot of gold and a leprachaun". Lastly, a friend recommended Ellie Goulding and I have been loving everything of hers. Here is her cover of one of my favorite songs. Hope things are well for all of you. Leave a comment if it's snowing where you are!

monday, monday

Hey, thanks to everyone who commented, e-mailed, talked to me in person or sent me private messages with your thoughts and advice on my previous post. I sincerely appreciate it. M is a good dad. He may not be very demonstrative but I know he loves Isaac very much and really wants Isaac to enjoy coming to his house for visits. I wish kids came with instruction manuals. It seems like there are so many potential ways to screw them up. Being a rather catastrophic thinker, I always tend to envision Isaac on a couch in a shrink's office in his early 20s recounting the endless mistakes I made during the formative years of his life. It's a hard pill to swallow that certain things that influence him (like the fact that he is shuttled between two households) are completely out of my control. In other news, I made it to yoga tonight for the first time in ages and it totally did a number on me. I was already so sore it hurt to even laugh a bit stiff from pilates yesterday. By the end of class my legs were shaking from trying to hold the poses that were so easy for me all summer. I should get back in the habit of going weekly again. It's so good for your body and your mind. It's so easy to find reasons not to go, but I when push away the excuses and just do it, I wonder why I don't make time for it more often. I wish I could learn that lesson for good. Taking it a step further, there are so many things in my life I dread and actively avoid and when I bite the bullet and just do them they are not nearly as awful/time consuming/scary as I built them up to be. I must be hardheaded because it never seems to sink in. My mom was here tonight and Isaac was reading books out loud to her. Not like "See Jane run" either. It's like all of a sudden he is a real reader and I couldn't be MORE proud. Anyways, I'm about out of things to say and I have my last Emily Griffin book calling to me from my nightstand. Good night all!