& then Instagram was all “WHERE DID YOU GET THAT DRESS?” so I thought I’d let you in on a dirty little secret:

dress:  JC Penney’s, $45 (& that was full price!)
necklace: Banana Republic outlet
shoes: mint green pumps, J. Crew

These heels might be some of my favorites & they were a steal for $20 at a J. Crew warehouse sale back in 2010 & it was pretty Shining-worthy of me to predict how trendy mint would become.  The unfortunate part is that they are a) hella uncomfortable for long periods of time & b) likely to get stuck in the slats of a wood deck during a baby shower while I’m holding a mimosa.

Total wear-with-caution label needed.

p.s. I’m not an artist.
p.p.s. I had way too much fun making bedhead & “highlights” in my hair.

There was no dinner in the oven, the child was shoeless & filthy, toddler bedding was strewn across the living room floor, & my hair was in a top knot with a bandana holding back my bangs.  In short?  We were a hot, hot mess.  If Doug had asked me what I did all day (you know, if he wanted to have his balls for dinner), then I would have simply said that I kept his kid alive for one more day.

Oh, sure.  I had plenty of aspirations including homemade chicken pot pie for dinner & dessert in the oven for the basketball championship game.  When I woke up that morning, I imagined booking an extra hour while the boys did their nightly game of chase in the backyard.  Then reality took over – Harrison slept in a little bit, I took him out for breakfast before we went grocery shopping & he was perfectly behaved the entire morning.  Then he dumped tomato soup on his head & needed a mid-day bath, my laptop battery died, & I found two molars blistering through his gums all before naptime.  We spent the rest of the day “camping” in a Thomas the Train tent & coloring (only making it into the coloring book 50% of the time, RIP Melissa & Doug puzzle).

Nothing that mothers don’t deal with on a regular basis.  Nothing that I didn’t face in the office with other work.  Nothing to complain about or make a fuss over, but just the little things that take away from the moments in the day & I look up & oh my, how is it 5:30pm already?!  I haven’t worked or made dinner or cleaned the house or done anything that leaves a tangible response.

I called my mother the next morning & she reassured me that in her many years at home, she had days like that where the clock flew faster than the to-do list.  & that there were many times where “Honey! The children are still alive!” was worth celebrating.

2)  Make a pony tail.  Make it high & dance to Girls Just Wanna Have  Fun or Love Is A Battlefield.  Take your pick.

3)  Pour a glass of wine.

4)  Spend thirty minutes attempting to roll your hair into the donut, starting at the tip of your hair & working towards your scalp.  Curse a lot.

5)  Take a shot of vodka.

6)  Half-drunk, finally get the bun rolled.  Secure it with bobby pins.

7)  Mother-effing win.

That goes under the blog “Lazy Girl Problems.”

That’s Morgan in one of the thousands of bathrooms at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville.  She’s not paying attention to me because a) she’s known me for 3 years & expects weird behavior or b) she’s also a blogger & understands weird behavior.

Huge bathroom, right?  Plenty o’ stalls but I still had beef with them.  See, Morgan is a short gal by tall girl standards & her head hits the top of the stall door.  This was my view:

Nope, I’m not standing on my toes.

It created an awkward moment or five after I used the facilities & had to scoot my shapewear back up over my rear.  & by “scoot,” I mean wiggled back & forth in a chicken dance until I was out of breath & my underwear was shoved up my ass, but my shapewear was on & up under my boobs so I just called it a success.  A panting, sweaty success.

That everyone got to witness as the top of my head bobbed around over the door & I looked like a drunk fish on the line.

Trout, anyone?

There’s this wild, wonderful heart-song that has been beating through me ever since I boarded a plane for Nashville & I have not quite found a way to piece it all together.

When I went to Blissdom, I found myself at an awful crossroads in my career.  I lost a job & gained contract work, but nothing felt secure.  I spent nights lying awake, ticking away the 18 months of COBRA coverage & worrying how I would find another job.  How we would get insurance or a home loan.  The anxiety crept up to my throat & I sat on the couch in my doctor’s office & she asked me to define the problem.

“I don’t know!” I wailed.  The control freak in my clashed & battled war on my spirit & everything inside me wound tight for no reason.  Why couldn’t I let go when I finally had everything I ever hoped for?

I have a job I love. It pays well. I am home with my son. I am writing successfully. I have insurance coverage for 18 months. We won’t be homeless.

Four days of wild creativity, of hearing lectures where I was told to admit that I’m a writer, to think of goals & pathways & to be okay reaching for them.  To  sit with others & hear that sometimes, they feel split one thousand different ways & they worry about the uncertainty of free-lancing, but oh, isn’t the free part of free-lancing so wonderful?  Yes, it is.    Jon Acuff spoke of the “reverse Superman” of changing into business suits from conference clothes & my heart hurt at my own memories of soul-blackening work  & somewhere in Tsh Oxenreider’s session about growing with quality, a wave of awesome slapped me upside the face.

Really, there’s no other way to describe it.

I have a job I love. It pays well. I am home with my son. I am writing successfully. I have insurance coverage for 18 months. We won’t be homeless.

I’M GOING TO OWN THIS SHIT.

 Finding myself writing for a living didn’t happen the way I thought it would, but then again, I never dreamed of an @microsoft email address either.  Potentially growing our family on COBRA isn’t something I would have ever considered before but being home with my littles is something I have considered often.  Selling our house & getting a home loan on Doug’s salary wasn’t our idea, but we will learn to live simply & install floors on our own & that will be just one more adventure to take on together.

When my friends ask me what Blissdom is, I smile.  It’s fashion shows in the bathroom with a friend that lives an entire country apart & a photo shoot in downtown at night & the words “I am a writer” scrawled across my journal with other notes but mostly, Blissdom is where I come alive.

It’s called a toddler that decided sleep is for the birds.

That was at 4am.  He finally conked out at 4:30am.

He has two nightlights.
It’s not night terrors (those have an entirely different cry).
He has loveys.
He’s not hungry or thirsty.
He really doesn’t need to drop his nap because he’s not napping 50% of the time anyway.

Basically?  He wants to eff with us.  Which might be a strong sentiment except I’ve only had one cup of coffee & four hours of sleep.

(also, the difference between a newborn being awake all hours &  a toddler being awake all hours is the amount of noise. when a newborn is awake, at least one parent can sleep.  when a toddler is awake, even folks in china hear him.)

It started innocently right around the time I lost my job & we feel for the little guy because it’s obvious he feels the stress in the house.  There have been a lot of changes in his wee world over the past few months & my heart goes out to him.  First Daddy was home a bit, then we were both at work, then Momma came home & he’s overjoyed but missing his Auntie & why isn’t anything the same anymore?!  But Momma needs her REM cycle back & more importantly, the kiddo does too.  After nights of rocking & rocking & rocking in the small hours of the day & Doug camping out on a pallet in his room, & purchasing a star turtle & giving him warm milk, we realized yesterday that it was time to pull out the big guns.  All three of us were at each other’s throats constantly from pure exhaustion.  I snapped at Harrison, something I very rarely do.  So Doug & I shook hands & decided that last night was the night.

We dusted off our Ferber book & got the stopwatch on my iPhone working.

We turned Harrison’s lock around so that we could lock him in, thereby taking back control of his ability to leave his room.  (shall I pause here & clarify that we still go to him, but it means homeboy can’t sneak out at 3am?  good.)

We took out his workbench & garbage trucks.

I turned off his light at the fan so that he can’t party all night long under a ceiling light.  (oh buddy, did that piss him off!)

& we hit the sack by 9pm.

I got a pretty awesome workout going back & forth to his room last night, calmly telling him to “Get back in bed, it’s night-night time.”  Tuck him in, give him a pat on the back, & close the door behind me.  I’m hoping that tonight it won’t take 2 1/2 hours for it to sink in that Momma ain’t fooling around.  Also, this is what we woke up to this morning:

I think it’s fair to say he was pretty ticked that Harrison Rave 2012 was thwarted.

____________________________

& in good news, the reason that Momma can’t hang at 4am anymore is because I got an offer from Microsoft as a contract for their marketing department.

SAY WHAT?!

It’s a contract so I’m still on the hunt for a full-time job with bennies.  The great news is that the contract is on my terms as far as how many hours I work per week & when the contract ends & they fully understand that I am still looking for a job.  So Harry is with his Auntie a few hours per week so I can log in some hours at home & take conference calls & keep interviewing with other companies.  What’s that you say, Charlie?  WINNING.

Remember how you didn't want me as an admin? That's cool. Microsoft thinks I'm worth bringing in to their marketing department. So have a seat, please.

Let me just say that I can stand in a board room or jet across the country, but I turn into a complete wuss once I step through Michaels.  All those women with glue stick burns on their fingers, willing to cut a bitch over the last vial of Martha Stewart glitter?  THEY TERRIFY ME.  Same thing with fabric stores.  Also, the strangest thing happens that once I hit the first aisle, I completely forget what I was there for.  Confidence takes a crash & burn so I stand there in the aisles, completely overwhelmed by the choices in felt.

In short:
Before Michaels:  BIG SPARKLY INSPIRATIONAL UNICORNS OF HAPPINESS!

After Michaels:  I WILL NEVER ACHIEVE ANYTHING GOOD IN MY LIFE.

yeah.

I’m standing in line with Harry in the push cart & a matronly lady turns to me.

“Is your mother’s name Karen?” she asks.

“No,” I say politely.

“You look like my friend Karen, so I figured you must be her daughter,” she explains.  I shrug.  Raleigh is a pretty decent-sized city.

“With two children, I figured you had to be her,” she persists.

Is this lady drunk?  I only have one child in the seat & I’m pretty sure the firstborn’s that were traded for Christmas Cricuts weren’t eligible for the 40% off coupon.  Like I said, I’m on a budget so if it’s not on sale, it’s not in my cart.

“You know,” she says.  ”With your boy & the one on the way.”

oh.

shit.

Awkward silence abounds.

Does this lady not know Rules of Feminism #253: Don’t ask a woman if she’s pregnant unless the fetus is 75% down the birth canal with a hand waving?

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.

Also, I don’t know if bile actually “chunks,” but I was typing furiously.

Dear Silver Fox,

For so many years, I swooned over you, applauded you, admired your journalism, & calculated the many ways to seduce you.  You are a smart hunk of fine man-meat. But I think I’m going to end this relationship and trust me, it’s you.  Not me.

Listen, this horrible battle between stay-at-home mothers and working mothers is just old and pathetic and so message-boards-circa-2009.  Nobody wins that war — we all just end up with cat scratches and hurt feelings to lick.  Then you had to sensationalize it by adding the title, “Are Stay-At-Home Moms Lazy?” and I swear, chunks of bile rose in my throat…

you can read more about why I turned down an invite to seduce Anderson in a coat closet.