A blog seemed too hip for me. I must admit, however, that this blog proposal seemed slightly more realistic than inviting cameras into our home to film our uproarious lifestyle. More than one person has quipped that we would be prime candidates for reality TV. Our life already has a circus quality, we don't need a reality TV show to highlight our three-ring-like-edness.
Eventually, when the nonsense continued to erupt around me and I found no other suitable outlet for it, I became convinced that blogging was in my future. What better way to record all of our shenanigans? The more I learned, the more energy I gave the idea.
After particularly eventful days, I even started singing to my best friend, Fozzy, 'If I only had a blog,' to the tune of 'If I only had a Brain.' If I could just get this thing up and running, I reasoned, perhaps I could someday get a book deal, not unlike the popular 'Marley & Me,' without the emotional death in the end of course! After all, there may be times when my kids are as cute as puppies, but they certainly aren't any more trainable than an unpredictable dog. Perhaps we have the right equation here: cute + untrainable = adventure!
Once the idea took shape, I began to plan it out. These planning stages have no doubt hindered the creative process. There were so many 'what ifs.' What if the kids ceased in providing humor and wreaking havoc? Silly me! That thought is ripe of wishful thinking. Exciting events crop up willy nilly each and every day.
Last Spring for example, Reggie and Curly (who were 6 & 4 respectively) began moving the bottom bunk mattresses off of frames, through hallways, around bends, past stairways into one bedroom. Their final destination was a trampoline-like room, that impressed their older siblings after school, and left me frazzled trying to correct the mayhem before bedtime.
The older kids have me wondering if other families have kids who eat like a pack of wild dogs in any room in the house, and then stuff the evidence above ceiling tiles, and into potted plants, or between the couch cushions. (Do they not realize that throwing wrappers and pop cans in the garbage is far less likely to draw attention?) Even everyday items find new life in their inventive little (and sometimes big!) hands.
Recently, I was having trouble locating a handset for our land line. We pay for our cell minutes as we go (a future blog post topic!), so our land line is still our main form of communication with the outside world. Phones get misplaced in our house all the time, but on this day as soon as I found a phone it would go missing again. One of the boys finally admitted under duress that they were using the phones as walkie-talkies. Their talkies were missing, and they realized that our telephone was equipped with an intercom button. Clearly I will be surrounded by a plethora of writing material for years to come considering the youngest just turned five, so on to my next concern . . .
I seriously couldn't wrap my brain around how I would find time to write for a blog, when I struggled to find time to email a teacher, sign my name to a field trip permission slip, or pick up my own dirty clothes off of my bathroom floor.
How would I choose a name for a blog, and what if the name I liked was already taken? Would I reveal our identity? . . . that question was quickly answered by Fozzy, who is much more world-web-ified than me. No one would need to know our true identity - how would the kids survive having the real world know the many places they stick their dirty socks and other (more embarrassing) dirty secrets?
I began to stockpile stories. As a result, I have small scraps of paper retrieved from my pockets in my bathroom drawer, full pieces of paper hidden in the back of my daily-to-do-list notebook, and more defined memories saved as files on my computer.
So, while my blog might have as slow a start as some of my kids do when preparing for school in the morning, I hope to gain speed by
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