keelyblog

After the last few posts, my mom suggested that people are going to stop reading my blog if I get too mopey all the time. I have thought about that for a couple weeks and decided I don’t care. This is the place to rid me of obsessive thoughts, and currently they are all mopey. Do nice things happen every once in a while? Sure. But I seem to only be motivated to write about the muck. If you want to stop reading until after November, well so be it. This is your warning. Mopes ahead….

Tuesday I had to watch my daughter get rejected by a couple of girls. It hurt me to the core. They started to play with her, but they were older and it just didn’t work out. So then T would follow the two girls around while they tried to brush her off. Luckily, M needed to use the potty. After that we just went back to the car.

I am not getting enough real social adult time. I can’t remember having a nice chat in person with anyone other than my husband in at least a week. I do get lonely. I miss the phone calls I got last winter in Austin. Warning calls that I better get dressed because a friend was on her way. Or invitation calls to come and play. Or calling friends to see if it’s a good time to drop by since we are in the neighborhood. Most people I know keep their schedule kinda loose and fluid, so spontaneous meet-ups just work out. I haven’t figured out the key to that here.

Lots of people here keep to a schedule. They do things that take planning ahead. This is pretty necessary, since most people’s back yards aren’t big enough to be entertaining in themselves for too many days in a row. That’s if it doesn’t rain–haha.

I have had no success meeting people at parks. Now the whole PNW park community just turns me off. We look for parks that are usually abandoned. The one we went to on Tuesday is often vacant. It just didn’t work out that day :( Bad news is, that with school letting out soon it is going to be near impossible to find a vacant playground. I do get lonely just sitting there watching the kids play, but at least if we are alone I can daydream. When other adults show up that don’t want to talk to me, I just feel uncomfortable.

I just put out an invitation on a mama’s group for someone to meet me at a calm–small and vacant–park tomorrow because I NEED adult conversation. One lady can’t meet me tomorrow, but suggested her favorite parks in the area to go to. They are all popular, full of people all the time, parks. She probably thinks I’m a weirdo because I declined wanting to meet at any of those parks because there are always too many people around. I want peer conversation, but not to have too many people around. Is it really that hard to understand?

I do not handle isolation well. I have tried to wrap my mind around it so that I can make things better for the kids, but it doesn’t work. Isolation is my mental enemy and I spiral downhill into subhuman.

It’s hard to really imagine that my father is dead. I know he is. It is just that he has not been a major part of my life in the last few years. The last couple of days, including 5 minutes ago, I had a flash about him and had to remind myself that he is gone.

It was a beautiful winter day today in the “Eastside”, although most locals would probably call it spring or summer… Sunny and 70 degrees! :) It’s almost impossible for me not to smile at those conditions. We tried to enjoy it while it lasts.

Mark left us with the car again today. We really enjoy going to pick him up after work, as it is a motivator to get out of the apartment. Before picking him up today, we first went to Michael’s to get some needles and embroidery floss to finish revamping the orange fuzzy. Then we went to one of the older playgrounds nearby. I have discovered that the snoody moms tend to gather at the newer playgrounds. The playground we were at was totally vacant for at least 30 minutes. Then a French lady and her boys showed up. I am not sure they spoke any English, so that was fine. However, my kids started to get shy and hover around Mama. Then a big dog, a set of twins in carseat buckets, and a couple of girls showed up and that was are limit. Still too early to go get Mark, we wandered along the path back to the car picking up things. There were a bunch of these really cute, tiny pinecones I intend to share amongst my crafty friends in the fall :)

We ended up getting to MS way earlier than I intended, but Mark was able to leave about 15 mins early. So we only had to wait about half an hour. And since it was sunny and 70 degrees, we ran around the grassy field across from his office building. T dug up some rocks. We definitely enjoyed the afternoon.

Things I have noticed that are making these sunny days easier than the sunny days last “summer” here:
1) kids are both potty trained! hooray! and M is even using public restrooms :)
2) we didn’t spend the last 6 months in grey. I am kinda thinking that by the time the sun came out, I was already too sick. Sunny and 70 degrees was too little, too late.
3) kids are front facing and there is substantially less car screaming! :) they can even have snacks and beverages in the car!
4) sharing a car and having to pick Papa up forces outings. So far the worse days have been the ones when we don’t have the car. Getting out of the prison cave apartment is basically essential for a sane day. I am working on setting up more, easy access, easy clean indoor activities. However, my wild kids need more freedom than are inside these walls! Plus, sunshine puts us all in a cheery mood!