I keep trying to like LJ but I keep ending up wandering back to my tried and true favorite, Blogger. So... come visit me there instead.

http://kcmomommy.blogspot.com

It's been a while since I did quizzes. Here are a couple. They're dumb.

Your Rockstar Name Is...

Princess Firecrotch

You Are a Dash

Your life is fast paced and varied. You are realistic, down to earth, and very honest. You're often busy doing something interesting, and what you do changes quickly. You have many facets to your personality, and you connect them together well. You have a ton of interests. While some of them are a bit offbeat, they all tie together well. You friends rely on you to bring novelty and excitement to their lives. (And while you're the most interesting person they know, they can't help feeling like they don't know you well.) You excel in: Anything to do with money You get along best with: the Exclamation Point

Paul left around noon to head to Saint Louis, to start his new job tomorrow. The kids were OK all afternoon, they both went to bed fairly easily. We'll see what happens tomorrow. Wish me luck. I expect that as the week progresses, they'll become more and more irritable and they'll be fussy and miss daddy.

I'm still going through boxes and bags and junk and finding more and more things that should have some meaning to me, but don't. I am seeing small things that are stirring up long forgotten memories, thoughts, dreams. But so much has changed that I don't really know what to do with these things.

Do I throw them away? If the memories no longer bring back any feeling... just the fact that it happened, is the memento worth keeping? My freshman year of college I was obsessed with a MUD called Viking. I met huge numbers of guys from Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and over time, a couple of them even came to Missouri to visit me. I have piles and piles of postcards and photos from all these people who were such great friends at the time... and now I don't even remember their names. Do I keep the pictures and postcards? Or do I toss them, since they don't hold much value to me anymore? Maybe I'll keep the postcards, put them in a scrapbook so J and E can see the pretty pictures someday. Or not.

This brings me to another tricky question. What do I do with the debris from my first marriage? It was the dumbest thing I ever did, though in a roundabout way it did lead me to meeting Paul and the life I have now. But really, I got married at that time because I didn't think anyone else would ever ask, so I should say yes to keep from being lonely. I ended up more lonely than I had been before, because I was isolated from my friends. He didn't really like me to spend time without him, and my friends and most of my family really didn't like him. They tried. They pretended, for my sake, but he still didn't care to have me out with friends. So, when I made some friends at work and started hanging out at their apartment, I realized... there was so much more to life than I was being allowed to live. That attitude shift has shaped my life for the last 9 years. I didn't like who I was at that point, either. It was a very confusing, upsetting time.

Back to the topic at hand... do I keep the items from that marriage? The photo albums, the wedding invitations, notes and letters from his parents, Christmas cards from his friends that made their way into my card box... and things of that nature? They are meaningless to me now. If anything, they bring up feelings of regret and even a bit of anger. But they are a part of my history, and one that I don't want my children to ever repeat. Will these little trinkets help me explain the situation to them in a few years, or will they just take up space that I don't need to waste?

I think the decision has already been made. We have said all along that this move was going to be our chance for a fresh start. If we want everything to be new, these old things don't need to make the journey with us. And I feel lighter already for having typed it out here for the world to see!

Happy Valentines Day! My husband and I went to dinner at the Olive Garden, then we stopped in at Walmart to get more reasonably priced desserts and such. I mean GAWD, I was not gonna pay $6 for a slice of cheesecake when I could get a whole one at WM for that price. Not that I need a whole cheesecake. I want one. But I don't need it. Ah, the story of my life.

So, what do I really love? I love my husband and my kids. I don't always act like it, but I promise I really do. I love that I can stay home with the kids and only have a minor amount of financial stress. I love Zoloft.

As I've mentioned umpteen times now, we're preparing to make a major move. From a house, to a townhome. Actually, the square footage of the townhouse is greater than that of my house... but that doesn't include our large unfinished basement where we have amassed huge quantities of junk.

I've been going through said piles of junk and trying to throw things away, recycle things, find things to donate to charity. I've come across a lot of things that are stirring up memories, emotions, thoughts.

I've lost track of my best friends from high school. Well, I take that back - I stalk the blog of one of them, but the other doesn't answer my emails anymore. I've got another friend who I send a message to once a year or so and get a responses from... and a few others who I don't contact at all. I do keep in touch with two orchestra buddies through email, mostly to announce moves, births, milestones.

I'm sure I'm hormonal or something. Emotional, certainly, because this is a huge change. I have lived in KC for my entire life, except for a brief ill-advised stint in Oklahoma City, and the time that I went to college in Kirksville. Moving to Saint Louis is a major, major change for me. I fear change. I loathe change. I love the status quo.

However... something I have noticed, looking through my "senior book" as I did earlier this evening, is that I have changed. Who'd have thought? I recall my senior year of high school (1992-1993), Bill Clinton was running for president. I wasn't going to be able to vote, darnit, but I sure was interested in how things were going. I was a very liberal democrat type.

Something changed when I got married and had kids. I'm actually... gasp... conservative now. Maybe the fact that I couldn't get pregnant when I wanted to has made me reject the pro-choice argument? I was such a strong believer in "the right to choose" and "the embryo is a parasite" and now... the thought sickens me. I never wanted to have kids. Now I have two. I expected to be a scientist... I'm a stay at home mom who does some digital scrapbook designing.

There isn't enough money in the world to make me want to relive my teenage years. Or most of my 20's, really... through about age 24, 25. I made mistakes, I did stupid things. I have great memories of friends and fun times... but I wouldn't want to do it again. Looking back, I really don't like who I was. I didn't like myself at the time, and I don't like that person now. Sure, today I have some issues with myself... who doesn't? But I'm much happier, much healthier mentally. I think. But, as everyone always says, who I was has shaped who I am, and though I wouldn't want to repeat, I'm glad I lived through it all.     

See? I make no sense. I shouldn't be allowed to write. :)

No one really taught me to cook. I just learned. When I was in my 'tween' years (which didn't exist in their current form in the 80's), I believe my mother was suffering from a bout of massive depression in which she didn't do much cooking for us. So, I began existing on ham and cheese sandwiches, cookies, chips, and bags of Lipton (now Knorr) rice/pasta side-dishes. And fast food. This did not bode well for my future... with PCOS and its complications. I don't really blame my mom, though. As time has passed and I've had to start feeding my own family on occasion, I've taught myself some basics. I can chop veggies with my Vidalia Chop-Wizard! I can bake chicken like a pro. I can brown hamburger, though the smell nauseates me. I understand her dislike of cooking. I hate it when it takes longer to prepare a meal than it takes to eat it.  I've called her a few times to ask things like "how do I hard-boil eggs" and "how long do I microwave this potato?" but in general, I just read the directions, or follow what a recipe says. 

This afternoon my parents came over to watch the kids for a bit while I did errands. It wasn't exciting. I put gas in the car, went to the post office, the bread store, the $1 place to get their cheap oxygen bleach, and Save-a-Lot. Wow, that's a laugh a minute.

Right before I left, I got out a book and had J show my parents how well she reads. It's amazing. She's not even 5. She sits down with a book she's never seen - as long as there aren't overwhelming numbers of words on a page, she'll try to read it. Today was "I Wish That I Had Duck Feet." We read it to her before but it's been a long time. She was obviously not reciting from memory. She follows along the words with her finger and stops to sound things out. She's amazing.

I'm in several different email groups for moms. In these groups, it seems a lot of children are being diagnosed with learning disabilities of one kind or another, and being provided with IEPs (individualized educational plans) to help them. This is wonderful, and there was no such thing when I was in elementary school decades ago. However... it leads me to think about one of the main reasons I want to homeschool my children.

Individualized educational plans. I want my kids to have them. I want every child to have them. But in a public school it's just not possible. Let's figure that in a good classroom, there are twenty kids. I'm being generous, because we all know that many times there are many more than that. You have a teacher, and perhaps an assistant in some cases.

Let's say ten of the children have IEPs. This means that the teacher has to tailor the lessons to at least eleven different groups, because you've got the 10 with IEPs and the batch without. How much time to teachers have for this? Very little. How long does it take to teach something eleven ways? Too much. How likely is it that ANY of these kids are getting exactly what they need? Not likely at all.

It really makes me sad because every child deserves a wonderful education. I don't think it's humanly possible for today's teachers to provide it. It's not their fault, either. They try, and so many of them go into teaching with the best of intentions. But there has to be a limit to the number of individual education plans in a classroom because one teacher cannot spread herself in so many different directions at once. I realize that it doesn't mean that each child necessarily needs their own lesson. I understand that maybe it just means that Joey needs to sit by the teacher's desk because of an attention issue, and that Jimmy might need to be kept away from anything shiny so he doesn't stare at it instead of paying attention. For example. But really, for public education to work the way it was designed, it needs to be cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all and it just doesn't work that way.

This is such a poorly written post that it appears to me that maybe I shouldn't even be trying to homeschool. I can't seem to put together two or three coherent paragraphs anymore. Oh well... at least I don't misspell them.

Ok, so one of my friends in an email group mentioned some things about LJ that sounded like what I've been trying to find in a blog for a while now, so, I'm going to test the waters here. I am currently on a dialup connection until further notice, so this may not go smoothly. We shall see.

WHAM! and Duran Duran. Those were the first two tapes I ever bought. I don't have them anymore though, they've disintegrated from over-use. I have replaced them with CDs but it's just not the same. Those bands were followed by an infatuation with the 80's hair bands like Bon Jovi, Poison, Winger, Europe, etc. Ahhh... beautiful music and beautiful men.

Wow, since last time I updated, I've totally changed my blog addresses.

DigiScrap: http://brandiwhitedesigns.blogspot.com

Stop by and visit sometime. There are digiscrap freebies on the BWD blog. :)

I've edited this post because it was no longer relevant, but I wanted to leave it here to show that I've been on here longer than it appears. :)