Wednesday, September 23, 2015

I'm still alive after all

Why hello there.

I don't know what to say. I've abandoned this enterprise for quite a while. I figured no one noticed, but then I see that some of you have been checking on me. So sweet of you, Internet.

Well. I guess I owe you an explanation for my absence. Here goes.

Reason The First (this is a big one): Karma died. My rotten-dobie girl got the exact same type of bone cancer as Odin, almost exactly a year after he died. Her's was even faster growing and we had little time between her diagnosis and having to say goodbye.

I'm not going to lie. It was awful. Made more awful by having to explain it to our son who super loved his doggy friend. And we botched that. Badly.

We thought he was too young to explain what was going on. We told him Karma was going away and we wouldn't see her anymore. Then, he freaked the F out when my husband left for work. Whoops.

So when we found a dead ladybug I got a chance to make it right and explain death to my 21 month old son. I let him touch the ladybug, and we talked about how it was dead and didn't move anymore. When it broke, I told him that was okay because dead things fall apart. They aren't alive and they don't hurt anymore. Then I told him that Karma was dead...then, for months, I had to navigate his random comments about how he didn't have a dog anymore, his dog was dead.

This parenting thing. Whew.

And I couldn't write about it. It was all I could do to hold it together around my son and then cry big crocodile tears after he went to bed.

After 11 years of having a dog in the house, it was so quiet.

Reason The Second: My "real" job, as in the job I work consistently throughout the year, both when and when I am not working on my personal business, got crazy busy. Well, actually, it was already crazy busy but then an extreme workload intersected with an incompetent group of subcontractors and my day-to-day situation got all hair rippy. And I spent many hours trying to help these people while simultaneously keeping myself from screaming, "WHY CAN'T YOU JUST DO YOUR DAMN JOB?!?!?"

And that went on for several months.

Someone owes me a trophy for getting that project completed.

Reason The Third: In the midst of all the extra hours I was logging in my "real" job to keep things from exploding like a meth lab, one of my clients for my personal business contracted me to complete two major tasks on a restricted timeline. Then, just to spice things up, my only other client contacted me and begged me to squeeze a grant in for them, too.

My work life hit record levels of business.

Reason the Fourth: The weather got nice and when I wasn't working, we were exploring the great outdoors. We maintained a social life. And, when the school year ended, my husband became full-time parent while I worked like a crazy person. Our plans of spending a leisurely summer swapping parenting duties and allowing each other some free time dried up, where ground into dust, and swept away by the flurry of my fingers on the keyboard.

Poor R needed any break he could get because our precocious 2 year old (yes! that totally happened and he turned 2!!) is SO VERY 2.

I'd like to deviate from this record of events to say that while having a very verbal toddler does reduce tantrums, since he can express what he wants, it does increase the number of headaches a parent experiences. For instance, just last night this conversation happened during dinner:

Me: Please keep your hands off your head at the table.
2 yo: (look of disdain on adorable, cherubic face) They not on my head mama. My hand is on my cheek.

And that's how stress and limited time sucked away my will to blog.