Sleep When you're Dead... Or Now, Please Now

Ok so it is 4:34 AM and I am WIIIIDDDDEEEE awake. It is so fun. Sam and I just decided this week to make a last minute trip to California for his birthday weekend. So instead of sticking to the plan of leaving Friday whenever we woke up well rested, I suggested we leave Thursday night. Well we didn't meet the lovely open road until pretty late, at which point sweet sweet Samuel fell completely asleep (read: he took a freaking melatonin!). However, I successfully drove all 6 hours and only took the wrong freeway exit once (after which I caught myself being soooo self deprecating and made a conscious decision to stop it and be nice to my poor little self.) Now that is what I call a win win. So now we are here and I am still wired from the caffeine I injected into my veins(jk I don't do drugs) and I am laying in bed next to precious sleeping Sam-seriously this guy can sleep anywhere-and I am also sneezing my brains out. The sneezing seems to be a new development writhin the last 45 seconds. Anyways, I am just going to get sappy for like one second and then I promise I won't do it again until I feel like it... I am just really grateful for my sweet, tender, loving, goofy husband. Not in some "I live the perfect dream life" way. But in a real, deep, sincere way. In a way that makes it ok for him to sleep through our entire road trip because he chose to do what I wanted to do for HIS birthday. It doesn't even include guns, ammo, atvs, or the hot hot Arizona desert-all of his favorite things. In fact it pretty much will consist of laying on the beach. Don't worry though (and don't tell!) I may have something a little more manly up my sleeve for his actual birthday. So there it is in all it's cheesy glory: Sam Fuller, I love U... And y and b and a are all good letters too. But seriously, as freaking hard as marriage can be every single day, it is also so incredibly worth it! And going to the beach with my BFF is just the cherry on top. Him hitting on my loudly in public, however, will be another story for another day.

The Little Engine that Could

Have you ever had one of those moments where you know you should do something and maybe you even want to do it but you are not exactly sure how? Well, this is one of those times. I got on and wrote this whole big post and immediately deleted it. Why do we do that? Reading over it, I told myself that I used too many words, that the point was not clear enough, and that the content was pretty boring-best to start over and write something people wouldn't fall asleep reading. Wow, I am self critical and pretty darn merciless. My whole life I have been this way. Telling myself made up stories of how much room I have to improve. At times I have realized it and tried to love myself a little more, but somehow I always end up right back in the same place deleting perfectly good blog posts and avoiding going bowling so nobody knows that I throw almost exclusive gutter balls. Just yesterday it was pointed out to me very bluntly that it is impossible to be perfect and it is impossible to be happy trying to be perfect and that I need to stop telling myself that my worth is dependent on others viewing me as such. So here I am trying to figure out how to not just acknowledge my imperfections, but to embrace them and love them. Imperfections are what make us human, give us depth, and provide for learning experiences. So why is it so hard to love them and be glad for their existence? Or to love myself and be glad for my unique challenges and shortcomings and quirks? I don't know the answer, this is not one of those things where I ask a rhetorical question and then give some sage answer. I am legitimately and very humbly asking how you find your own happiness in the face of reality. Don't get me wrong, my life is pretty good. I am just doing my best to grow and sometimes it takes a little help. I am taking it day by day and hoping that each centimeter will count. Just like the roots of my ever growing hair that are so starkly black against my dyed and fading platinum blonde locks. I think emotional growth is a lot like that. Day by day progress is hard to see but over the length of weeks or months or years we begin to see a striking difference. Today I had a win. In and of its self, it is a pretty little w but I know in the future it will build into possibly the biggest W of my life. I can't forget how much those count. I so easily could tell myself that it was an hour of my life doing something that could have the potential for major failure. Instead I am going to call today a glowing success and think about all of the wonderful possibilities and forget the past failures. Things can only go up from here. I can be real and expect things to be hard and know I will fall on my face but I can also be fair and know that it is ok to fail, life is allowed to be hard but that doesn't automatically make it bad. I have every right to be miserably imperfect and still choose not to be miserable. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.



 

it's normal

so i got a text the other day from my oldest and very best friend. she reminded me that i used to do this blogging thing and that it was maybe sort of therapeutic for me. well, it turns out that she is a very wise woman. it is in that light that i bring you The New Normal: a normal blog about normal stuff written by a normal person. 

i will spare you the gory details of why i stopped blogging in the last year (and pretty much doing most everything i enjoyed, for that matter) and instead will direct you to my previous blog for the somewhat sketchy yet way too personal details. if you are interested, http://thebakingbaker.blogspot.com/ would be the place to go. although a few important things such as getting married and moving back to arizona forever and always may have been skipped. 

anyways, "why start a blog about being normal and doing normal stuff?" you ask incredulously... well, because thats all i got, tbh. life is crazy and crazy things happen every day and all the time but really, it is all just par for the course. getting up in the morning and putting on the same jeans you have worn every day for the past week is not super exciting or blog worthy-but that is life and life is a beautiful and precious thing (queue tender sigh). 

in closing, i will leave you with a little story about my normal, normal life: once upon a time (read today) i ate a bowl of cereal, a couple of potato chips, and a protein bar. the rest of the day has been spent contemplating what to have for dinner and weather or not to eat the apple slices i brought with me to work and forgot to put in the fridge.**please read the following in a dramatic shakespearean tone for effect** to eat the warm apples now or to refrigerate them and eat them later, that is the question! the end. 

note from magnificent story teller: upon phrasing the last question of the story, a decision to eat the apples had been made. they were slightly warm but still pretty delicious. i also remembered about a grapefruit i had and decided to eat it for breakfast tomorrow. 

the actual end.