It's Your Worst...

It's your worst... Fill in the blank. Worst nightmare because... Living the hardest day of your life because...

Like anyone else, I know people who are having struggles with their health. I know people in the midst of horrible custody battles. I know people who are in financial trouble. And there's always a sob story in the news about someone who has it worse than anyone I know in person. 

People open up to each other, people lend a sympathetic ear to each other, and we tend to say "it would be worse if..." I think that's human nature. It's supposed to make someone feel better, and it often does. I've  spent a little extra time in doctor's offices and hospitals with my daughter because she was born with a relatively minor birth defect. In the grand scheme of life, it's been a really little, little, tiny extra time. Parents in pediatric OR waiting rooms are some of the chattiest people I've ever met. I guess it's a way of coping. Some of them talk about why they're there while hoping that the next time the door swings open, it will be their child's surgeon or nurse with an update. In my case, the other parents in the waiting room helped me put things in perspective. The cinnamon roll from the cafe downstairs sure didn't. It was one of the worst cinnamon rolls I've ever had. (Not a metaphor, btw. Too much frosting.) I knew that in all likelihood, my husband and I would be going home with a drugged, uncomfortable, but overall healthy baby in a couple days. (Spoiler alert for what could be a future post: the first 24ish hours post-surgery were rocky, then our daughter turned a corner and amazed us with her adaptability and remarkable recovery.) 

There's a phrase I've been trying to get myself to stop saying to friends and family members in certain situations over the past several years. "At least you don't..." It's a hard habit to break, and I still say it quite a bit. But it doesn't always help. Lame example with no bearing on real life... Let's pretend I have a friend whose current worst struggle is having a hard time getting her teenager to unload the dishwasher. I could say, "At least you have a dishwasher." No kidding. Dishwashers are amazing. But it would prob be more sympathetic to say, "yup, that sucks. Get that kid to unload that dishwasher. Here's a tissue to dry your tears when you have a meltdown of your own because the dishwasher still isn't loaded tomorrow. Do you want a dog biscuit? I can give you that, too. After the kid loads the dishwasher, reward him with a dog biscuit. Sage advice."

Bringing myself back to "your worst." Regarding whoever is opening up to me at any particular time about the worst thing they have going on, I try to remember that's it's their worst. When we were in the hospital for my daughter's surgery, and I saw a friend mention online that his child had the flu and his wife was out of town, I thought to myself, "Huh. You know what really sucks? My child just had a hard time coming out of anesthesia, spit liquid narcotics on me, and has no way to tell me where it hurts and how badly it hurts. The surgeon told me that my baby has 'too many stitches to count' in her mouth. Oh, and I've been awake for about 36 hours now. My husband is holding her while I change out of my narcotic stained shirt and waste a little time on Facebook." Nah. I scrolled past. I didn't bother thinking of the friend who was going through something even worse than the whole baby surgery thing. Just scrolled, because now and then, I'm mature like that. My friend's current worst day was pretty bad to him at that moment of venting online. He had a sick kid, another one to get to school, and no adult at home to help with the morning routine while he tried to get things in order, call in sick to work, etc.

I'm smart enough to know that right now, your worst possible nightmare would be me ending this post without a picture. So here's the flip flop pic I mentioned yesterday. They're sweaty. I'd sprinkle glitter on them for you, but then I'd have to clean it up, and glitter is a pain to clean up.

Want a question to talk about in the comments? Hmmmm. Either talk about your worst, or don't. Tell me about glitter. Tell me about sweat. I don't care. Or read and don't comment. Shocking news: you not commenting isn't really my worst nightmare right now. :-)

My Google Identity Crisis

No, it's not some weird internet troll story, and it's not about the time hackers repeatedly got into one of my most often used email accounts. It's even more boring than either of those things, which are pretty boring on their own. Although the email one is mildly amusing, in retrospect, so maybe I'll blog about it one day. I could blog about nothing substantive forever! Magical!

Since deciding to give blogging a try a few days ago, I've used three different Google profile names. No, this isn't part of my super-secret effort, I'm just wishy-washy about my silly username.

The first Google id I blogged from sounded a little funny (to me), so I chose it, and was based on my slightly funny (to me) blog name. The second one was also based on my blog name, and I accidentally forced myself into changing my profile name because I wanted to change which email address I was blogging from. My third, and current, Google profile id name is my first name, because several times over the past few days, I thought to myself  "I'll change my profile name to my first name when I'm more comfortable with blogging." When I commented on a friend's blog, yesterday, it was odd to feel like I was hiding my real first name on that blog, when I used to comment on her blog with my first name, but no Google account. And I most definitely wasn't talking about sweat or glitter when I commented on her blog. So I changed it again. I'll probably change it at least a dozen more times before I quit blogging. Add that to the list of things you don't care about.

A lot of this is really because I had several old email accounts, two of which I'd pretty much forgotten about, and now I'm in the process of getting all my random email accounts cleaned up and into something more usable. I found a 2010 invitation from a friend to join a site called Fitocracy in one of the accounts. Oops.

I'm not currently sweating. You also didn't care about that. No glitter going on in my world right now either. There were two cute stock pics in this post, but I'm having a hard time getting the photo credit links to work, so I'm giving up for now, finally releasing this incredibly fascinating post from the draft folder, and am about to go live with it.

I've noticed that several of the blogs I enjoy reading end the post with a question, and I think it's a pretty good way to get online conversation going, so here's one to end this post with. No shiny pennies, or other prizes, if you answer or don't. 

How do you decide on usernames, user ids, Google profile pics, and all that stuff? 

Mother's Day Monday

I'm fairly certain no one really celebrates the day after Mother's Day. But I'm up early (no surprise there, more on that in a future post), and had half drafted this blog post in my mind yesterday, so am here to ramble. You're welcome.

Let's back up to last Wednesday night. My daughter is long past the age of being able to sleep through the night, yet chooses not to on occasion for various reasons: teething, being overtired and unable to go back to sleep without a song and snuggles, the situation in Ukraine on her mind, etc. Her night waking is less than once per month now, so it's not really a big deal. Also, she's a really good kid. Despite currently testing her limits as a toddler, she's easygoing, happy, and fun, so I honestly don't complain about her often. Sappiness alert: every day, I remind myself of how wonderful it is to have her in my life. Anyway, last Wednesday was one of her flashback nights. She did a flashback to being a newborn. Up three times, standing up in her crib, bawling, and clearly needed 17 verses of the same kiddie song sung to her while I held her in the rocking chair in her room. So we did that. Three different times.

On Friday afternoon, a box from Proflowers arrived on our doorstep. It was also my dad's birthday, and we were hosting a little family get-together for that, so I assumed they were for him. Really, what 73 year-old man doesn't want flowers for his birthday? Nope. It was my lucky day.

For me? You shouldn't have! Actually, you should have. Toddler offspring, you're much more awesome today than you were overnight. I'll sloppily blur your name out here so the online creepers are less likely to kidnap you. 

The flowers made a lovely addition to the coffee table, side table, and dinner table. My husband rightfully assumed they'd be a welcome addition to our home during the birthday shinding, so had them delivered a couple days before Mother's Day. We moved them around throughout the weekend. I'm currently looking at them on the coffee table, out of the corner of my eye. They're still beautiful. 

And this. Why take a pic of a full box of chocolates when you can eat a few right away? Delish.

Yeah, I could have picstitched these three together. Or placed them in view for one photograph. But I didn't bother. Eh. Maybe blogging isn't for me, we shall see.

That was Friday. Saturday evening we went to church, to free up our Sunday morning for my Mother's Day plans. I'm sure you were dying to know when I went to mass over the weekend. We almost didn't. We walked in to church to see we were going to have two baptisms, a first communion, and the full choir. With our active toddler? We braced ourselves and persevered through the 75 minute mass. Not that I was looking at my watch. Nope, never in church. Not me.

Yesterday, on the actual Mother's Day, I got to go running sans stroller (always a real treat) with a group of friends. We usually run, then go about our merry ways for the rest of the day, but being Mother's Day, we treated ourselves to this. Yeah, someone's name is pictured, but that's after we joked about picturing names and linking blogs, and since I'm not saying anything with much meaning aside from "Kara had iced tea yesterday," I'll abstain from linking her. For now. I'll think of a decent reason to link some of the blogs I follow eventually, once I'm more into the whole blogging thing.

The green one must be healthy. Pretty much like drinking a multivitamin.
(Truth: I ordered a green one, after my friend did, because it sounded so good, and couldn't decide which coffee drink I wanted. It's just easier to be a follower than make your own decision sometimes. And, yesterday, totally worth being a follower for a green drink.)

Then, my morning o' fun continued, and I ventured to Target and Lowe's sans toddler. A dream come true. I was overflowing with glee to be buying diapers and light bulbs without my 22 lb sidekick. Side note: she loves to shop. I could take or leave it. Since she loves it, we do run a lot of errands together. It's easy entertainment and keeps me from having to tell her "no" to opening the snack cabinet for the 17th time in an hour. As I mentioned above, she's testing her toddler limits.

I don't recommend waiting until Mother's Day to buy a hanging planter basket for your mom. They all had similar brown accents to go with the green foliage and colorful flowers. Fortunately I was buying really exciting stuff like light bulbs and peat moss, and just stopped to look at the flowers on the way out.

My day continued in a fairly ordinary fashion, so I'll start bringing this ramble to a close. As I suspect will be the case for quite a while, many of my posts will end up longer than I planned them to be. Eh, why ponder on a good way to shorten when you can post and be done? No one's forcing anyone to read my ramblings.

On celebrating Mother's Day: my family didn't really celebrate the Hallmark holidays much when I was growing up. Consequently, the celebrations aren't important to me, and I often forget about them, but I happened to marry someone whose family is much more "celebratory" on those kinds of things. Lucky me: I get to enjoy flowers, chocolates, and a card. My husband, though, better send me a meeting maker to remind me Father's Day is coming up if he wants the baby and me to remember. Honestly, I'm most looking forward to getting the cards and macaroni necklaces she makes herself in a few years. I'm a silly sap like that.

How does your family typically celebrate (or barely mention) Hallmark holidays?

Final end note for this post: If you read this whole post, you deserve a prize. I don't have any, so go find a shiny penny or something for yourself and call it your prize.

Muddy Waters

Despite once holding a job doing IT 'stuff' many years ago, I've fallen out of practice of the ways of the IT savvy, and have been slightly slow to embrace some new technology. I've never looked at MySpace or Tumblr, didn't try Facebook until 2009, and just got into Instagram in 2013. I didn't get a smartphone until 2013.

And now, I'm finally dipping my toes into the muddy waters of blogging. Why? Well, if you're friends with me on Facebook, you know I frequently ramble and blog on there. If you follow me on Instagram, you're wondering what I could possibly contribute to a blog aside from barely recognizable pictures of random road signs, and another, yes, another picture of some craft project or delicious (delicious looking, anyway) food I've made.

I've decided to dip my toes into the muddy waters of blogging anyway. Muddy because I still have a little bit of internet stranger danger after a few weird incidents a few years ago. Muddy because it's going to take me a while to figure out all the settings and not get the eeby jeebies every time I think about posting a picture. Muddy because... have I mentioned I ramble a lot sometimes?

About my blog title: Facebook friends, Instagram followers and IRL friends all know I'm not glam. At all. But I do like glitter, because I like craft projects. I also like sweating, because I like exercising. So let's just pretend I'm glam, because the thought of me being glam is amusing, and I'm easily amused.

Yeah, I know pictures help a blog. So for now, I'll leave you with a picture I took a few years ago on a cloudy day in our nation's capital. There's some mud in that water. That's not a metaphor for the state of our nation, or anything else, it's just a statement. The Tidal Basin has mud. Maybe also some glitter. Who knows? Not me. Just as I don't really know in what direction this blog will go.