• There is nothing better than freshly cleaned carpets in a home.  It might be sad that I own two different types of steam cleaners but y’all, I enjoy lying on the carpet without having an asthma attack.
• I’m having a serious love affair with pennant banners these days.  I could decorate my entire house with them.
• A lot of folks have been asking me about my red lipstick, & the name has rubbed off on the tube but it is Clinique.  My best advice for finding a good red is to ditch the drugstore & see a makeup person.  I just feel like red lipstick should be taken seriously, you know?  Get your pink at Walgreens.  Get your red at a department store.  I tried on about 5 different shades before landing on “the one.”
• I’m so digging Taylor Swift’s new song “Ours.”  I’m a shameless T-Swift fan but the lyrics are so sweet & wonderful.  Just listen to a preview on iTunes & I promise, you’ll be swaying happily a wee bit.
• Harrison has started screaming every night when it’s bath time.  The crazy thing is, he LOVES a bath or shower.  I think it is him realizing that bath = end of the day & he doesn’t want the fun to end.
• As part of being “pretty” in 2012, I ordered two new pairs of pajamas.  So long, wearing ratty tshirts & cheer shorts to bed.  Hello, cozy & matching jammies.  They honestly help me feel more confident going to bed & getting up in the morning.  Weird, right?

Did you brain dump this week?  Lemme see!

(You know how I like to jump the gun.)

I spend my free time perusing the houses available in the neighborhoods we love, calculating mortgages & downpayments, wishing that our house would sell RIGHT THIS INSTANT BECAUSE DOUG! COME LOOK AT THIS HOUSE!  & then I hop on Pinterest & decorate the entire thing in my head.

Of course, my head doesn’t have a budget in mind which is a very lovely thing when I’m pinning Anthropologie & Amy Butler fabrics.

I’m in this awful stage right now of having so many ideas & dreams for decorating, but not wanting to “waste” them on the house we are selling.  Especially since the goal is to keep our current house as sparkling clean & sparse as possible. 

Sell, house.  Sell!

Yeah, they’re still happening two years later.

So I’m sitting there at my desk, happily tapping away at expenses & BAM! there’s a flutter in my uterus area.  It’s enough to make me take pause & freak the eff out that OH MY GOD, I’M GOING TO BE ON “I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS PREGNANT.” 

But then I remember that I’m already doing that female thing (send nachos & wine!) & we are staunch supporters of the Trojan man & there is simply NO WAY there is a bambino kicking away in my uterus.

But still.

Totally trippy.

Well, me & Mr. Darcy because I started reading the smut sequal to Pride & Prejudice, “Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife” & I’ve been pouring over pages & lovingly attacking my husband.

BLAME MR. DARCY.

.

(also, these are the books I currently have my nose in.)

isn’t my new rug mug mandie sent me just darling?  even the name “rug mug” totally kills me with the cute.

We began talking about blogging – conferences, sponsorships, traffic & posts & the urge to grow despite the pressure to succeed.  It’s a hard balance.

I worry about being irrelavent.

I fear nobody understanding or taking my words wrong; some nights, I feel anxiety over that blue “Publish” button.

I care about stats & yes, that summer slow-down where traffic goes belly-up while everyone is on vacation.  Even though I don’t want to care.

So I make resolutions not to check stats.  Then I break that resolution.

I doubt my ability by comparing myself to others.

I feel twinges of envy when a friend of mine gets a specific sponsor, opportunity, free lance gig, email, etc.

I hope to make Babble’s Top lists, even though I’ve never made one.

I tell myself that blog post isn’t good enough, funny enough, just…enough.  I get writer’s block from those thoughts.

I’m guilty of saying, “Just five more minutes…” on Twitter at the end of the night.

I think Neville is hot.  oops, I don’t know how that one got in there.

The point is, I think we’re all the same the moment we sit down to type out words.

I’m in that place of whirling chaos & craving a quiet day where the clock seems to move at a slower pace.  Where I can sew an advent calendar with warm coffee in my mug, or watch a movie with my boys, or maybe bake cookies from scratch.  Where I’m not sitting in traffic almost three hours per day, wondering how I will fit all my work in, trying to remember if I bought the right cream-of-soup for dinner.  I try to remember to be in the moment, to find specific parts of my day where I let my mind clear & I am deliberate in my thoughts – I chose the shower, which is odd to most people, but it’s where I feel the tension fall & I can block out calendars & deadlines & Excel spreadsheets.  On weekends, I find myself sitting at the table tapping out emails to my boss while Harrison sits to my left, elbows-deep in PlayDough.

It’s a weird work-life balance that always feels close to tipping clean over.

I try to train my thoughts, when I am thisclose to snapping at my long commute, but then I work to discipline myself to be thankful for the job to be leaving every night & the warm home to return to.  I am luckier than most.

When I’m stressed over a spreadsheet with over 200 entries & codes to enter, I remember that my boss gave me a shot only one month in & named me Project Associate to a huge partnership.  The flattery in it is both exciting & intimidating.  I want so badly to please them all.

I laugh at all the confessions in my post about aching hips & smelly feet & “ombre” hair & how motherhood makes us all feel kinda lumpy both inside & out.

I wonder what I will write next & worry my words will fall stale & my words my heart will become irrelevant.  I try to focus on the keyboard in front of me, but I worry that I will never know the secret knock to the cool kids club.  (is there a secret knock?)

I try to figure out a way to squeeze in the gym or a run or a stretch, but I’m not sure how to create an extra in my day without sacrificing something that can’t be sacrificed at this point.  Maybe some day, but not right now.

Most of the time, I feel like this:

 Only very, very oddly happy.

I started noticing it in pictures, first.  Then the mirror.  It’s becoming more blatantly obvious every single day but I feel like I need confess that my new hipster status is not because I’m listening to She & Him on repeat, but rather because my bank account is dangerously dry these days.

I agree with her. 

I am absolutely a fan of books being made into movies, which may sound traitorous coming from a book nerd like myself.  But I’ve always had this wild imagination & love seeing the scenes I play over in my head come to life, breathing words into the screen.

Sometimes?  It is done beautifully.  Like Gone With the Wind & Vivienne Leigh, who epitomizes Scarlet O’Hara down to her pinky toes.  Or a few of the Harry Potter movies, where you almost stand up & yell “Expelliamus!” with him.  But then, there’s the Twilight movies.

Oh, dear God, the Twilight movies.  I refuse to be ashamed for my love of Edward Cullen & how I want to have R. Patz’s vampire babies, or that time I might have asked Doug to pretend to be a vampire while we were having maritals.  But they are done just…horribly.  Kristen Stewart kinda sucks at being awkward, which is weird because she is so innately awkward.  It’s like this awkward girl trying to awkwardly pretend to be awkward & it just fails all over the place.  & then there are the telepathic wherewolves, which are already a stretch when you’re devouring the books like any normal twelve-year-old girl, but to see them on screen?

Let’s just say I burst out laughing.  All out, gut-busting hooted until Laura & I were burrying our faces in our handbags.

So let’s just hope that The Hunger Games appeases my wild imagination.

 & once you’ve read the Hunger Games trilogy in record time, pick up Veronica Roth’s Divergent.  TRUST ME ON THIS.

I seriously can’t stop laughing.  Which proves how easily I am humored, right?