Yesterday was an awesome day.  Busy, but awesome.  My mother in law, sister in law and niece came to town to do some shopping and Evie and I tagged along.  First, we met them for lunch at Mimi’s Cafe.  We used to eat there all the time and don’t so much anymore so it was a very nice treat.  After all, their french onion soup remains unparallelled.  SO GOOD.

Then we came back to the house so they could unload Kile’s new toy (photos to follow, I PROMISE).  I’m pretty impressed with how we got that done, considering the level of difficulty and angsting about it that went on beforehand.

We went to the Peppermill Hotel where the family was staying for the night and left the boys there.  They had big plans to use the pool while we went shopping.  After a quick yarn exchange at the yarn store, we headed to the Summit Sierra mall and Dillards.  Can you believe that was the first time I’d been to Dillards?  I don’t get out much, I guess.  We were there to look for a formal dress for my niece to wear to her 8th grade social in a few months.  And OMG, formal dresses are SO CUTE these days!  I saw many that I would have loved to have worn back in the day.  You know, back when I was thin and cute.

I also wanted to find a cute sundress for Evie to buy with her birthday money.  My parents sent it, requesting we find her something cute to wear on the cruise this summer.  I definitely found something to fit that bill.  The dress is pretty much PERFECT.  It was pricey but that’s what you get at Dillards.  And my sister in law was naughty and bought Evie a few things too so it’s not like we walked away with only the dress.  There were SO many cute things in that department though.  I’ve deemed it highly dangerous.

We had to rush to meet the boys and my sister in law’s friend for dinner at the Peppermill.  Dinner was fabulous.  Simply awesome.  I still feel spoiled by it the next morning.  It was almost a shame to come home from such a wonderful day.

But the good news is we’re extending the fun today.  They don’t have to leave town until 3, so I’m packing up the runts and meeting them down at the mall at 10.  More shopping!  Truth be told, what I’m really looking forward to is scoring a nice big cup of Starbucks coffee.

I’m not use to being out and about so early, you know.

The view from my in laws hotel room.  Nice!

Looking straight down from that same window.  It was a floor to ceiling length window which freaked Kile out but I thought it was sorta cool.

Their hotel room, which is officially far nicer than any hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.

More hotel room, and an adorable baby in a stroller.

Hallway to nowhere

Very cool chandelier.

Pretty lights.

I guess it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the Peppermill because all these fancy changes were news to me!

Hey, did you know I won a Pioneer Woman giveaway?  No it wasn’t for a fancy mixer or a fabulous camera or anything.  But I’m still excited because these measuring cups are TDF (that’d To Die For, in case you aren’t aware).  Aren’t you just insanely jealous now?  I can’t believe I finally won one of those giveaways.  I don’t enter all of them (a lot of them have very short time spans to enter and many times I don’t learn about the giveaway until the deadline is over), but I enter a lot.  Then again, a LOT of people enter a lot of the giveaways.  So the fact the fact that I was one of ten winners?  Makes me insanely happy.  You should have heard me shriek when I saw the post with my name on it.

I think Kile is still recovering his hearing.

***

Speaking of Kile.  He’s getting a new toy today.  I will take pictures.  I’m in turn glad for him because I know this is something he wants and incredibly annoyed because he’s been a pill about planning for this and stressing about it and generally obsessing.   I’ll be glad when it “arrives” and then maybe I’ll just shove it up his butt.

***

I haven’t shared some pictures in a while so I think I need to catch up.  Please refrain from pointing out if any one child is in more pictures than another, mmkay?  Otherwise I may feel obliged to thwack you in the head.

This is what we woke up to in Elko the morning we were leaving to drive back to Reno last weekend.  I call this “pretty snow” because it coats everything and looks gorgeous and then takes like an hour to completely melt.  Awesome.

Evie crapped out during breakfast and took a nap on her aunt’s shoulder.  Her aunt didn’t mind one bit.

Yes, Liam is short, but my brother in law is also VERY TALL.  His t-shirt this day was appropriate for pretty much anyone who stood next to him but with regards to Liam?  Doubly funny.

*cough*

This is what we call “fluffy mail” in the cloth diapering/knitting/sewing biz and it was GOOD. 

I love the sun shining through icicles.  <3

Yes, that’s a bruise.  And no, I don’t know how I got it.  Yes, it hurts.

Speaking of “fluffy mail” I was anxiously awaiting this diaper which I had ordered last week.  The above is what I got instead. SIGH.

***

So that’s it.  I’m going shopping today with my mother in law, sister in law and niece who came to town this weekendly SIMPLY to go shopping.  No boys allowed!  I am so THERE.

A blog is a funny thing.  It’s easy to read someone’s blog and because you are getting daily (or nearly daily) updates on this person’s life, you can therefore easily believe that you know more about this person and their life than you actually do.  It’s an easy mistake to make.  After all, you have no idea what details the blogger is leaving out.  A person’s blog is a VERY subjective thing.  There could be five major things that happen to a person that day and they could only mention one.  Or none and instead choose to talk about the weather.  As a reader, you are following what that blogger wants to share and are kept in the dark about what they don’t.

Such is the case with me as well.  Particularly when it comes to my children.

Don’t get me wrong.  I can understand the average reader wondering WHY I don’t talk about my oldest very often.  Does he even exist anymore?  Is she ignoring him in real life as much as she does on her blog?

And that’s the dangerous path right there.  Does love = blog exposure.  Certainly NOT.  You can hardly judge how much value is placed on a person due to how much a person talks about them on their blog.  I think of several bloggers who rarely mention their husbands because the husband has ASKED not to be mentioned.  And then the readers then wonder if she really is married, does she even care about her husband?  Is there DRAMA here that we can wonder about?

I hope you see how silly this line of thinking is.

I didn’t have my blog when Harry was very young.  But walking through our home, 90% of the pictures on the walls include him in his various stages of life.  Harry was the center of our world for MANY years.  And the harder it was for us to have another child, the more we held him to us.  I used to take him to get professional pictures done every month or so for the first two years of life.  I would take him to storytime at the library, MOPS, the park… He made me a mother and that holds a special place in my heart.  But he IS nine years old and in the third grade.   He needs more privacy now.  I don’t want something I write about him today to be the thing that gets him picked on at school tomorrow.  I make a studious effort to recognize and respect this.

I did have the blog when Liam was young.  If you notice the tag cloud in my sidebar, LIAM is the tag with the largest font.  Which means he has been mentioned more than just about anything else (at least since I’ve been doing tags).   Just look back at my archives for 2006-2007.  During his first year of life, my posts were filled with stories and musings and photos, photos, photos.  I love myself a baby, you know.  And I love photographing babies, while they still lay around and LET you photograph them.  I’d say about 10-20% of the photos on our walls have Liam in them.  I haven’t had as many professional pictures taken of him, but I did take a few of the photos I took of him, print them out and hang them up.

The thing is, Liam is 2 1/2.  He’ll be three in a few months.  This is pretty much THE MOST ANNOYING AGE EVER.  For any kid.  He is a challenge and a struggle.  This does not mean we do not love him.  It means he EXHAUSTS me.  I figured out that I spend the majority of my day dealing with him in one way or another.  Kissing his booboos when he falls (he is the clumsiest child alive), disciplining him when he deliberately disobeys me or thwacks Evie on the head for the 15th time that day, trying to get him to eat, changing him, dealing with naps, letting him sit on my lap when he’s feeling needy… He’s a different child than Harry was.  He requires a lot more energy.  And often, when it comes time to write on my blog, I don’t talk about him because I NEED A BREAK.  The mental break of not discussing him helps a lot.  Again, this does NOT mean that we don’t love him.  Quite the opposite.  He charms and delights us on a daily basis.

And, let’s face it.  Evie is the baby.  Like I said, I love babies and I love to photograph and muse about them until the cows come home.  I’ve often said that thank goodness Evie was a girl because otherwise she might not get any attention at all.  She would have the blog posts, the stories, the musings and the photographs.  Because I love babies.  But as it is she is in TWO photographs on our walls here at home and both of those are either family portraits or taken with her brothers.  She has zero representation by herself.  And I haven’t done a thing with her baby book in MONTHS.  And often I have to leave her to play while I deal with Liam.  And yes, I do generally work more with her than the boys but again with the BABY thing as well as the NURSING thing (she will NOT take any sort of plastic nipple, no matter how hard I’ve tried).  When we go out as a family on the weekend, I generally wrangle Evie while Kile wrangles Liam.  It works easier that way.  Which isn’t to say that if Liam needs me that I completely ignore him.  Just that Kile puts him in his car seat while I put Evie in hers so that we’re not standing out there in the parking lot all day while I do both.  Heh.  Makes more sense that way, don’t you agree?

When anyone suggests, no matter how benignly, that perhaps I have a preference for one child over the others, that hurts me deeply.  I’m sure other mothers who have more than one child can understand what I mean when I say that.  I doubt it is possible to love one child more than the others.  I love all of them and yes, in different ways.  The way I love Liam is entirely different than the way I love Harry or Evie.  This is because of their wildly different personalities.  Sure I feel different, but that doesn’t mean what I feel isn’t love.  And I simply cannot conceive of anyone even HINTING that a preference exists.  It is a cruel thing to say.  CRUEL.  Not just to me but to my children.

I have been wondering what the answer is, if any.  What do I do?  Not talk about ANY of my children, for fear of slighting one or more and thereby inciting the naysayers?  What would that mean to this blog as it is a mommy blog and I generally am here to talk about being a mommy and that sorta requires talking about children?  I’m not sure what to do.  How to evolve this blog while I myself am evolving as a mother.  No more babies, that’s for sure, so who do I talk about?  Do I “schedule” days that I talk about each child?  That sounds perilously close to work.  And if there’s one thing I despise, it’s feeling like blogging is WORK.

Ugh.

So I think the only thing I can do is to just keep on and talk about what strikes me.  Whether it be Liam or Evie or even Harry.  Or none of the above.  It’s all I can do.  But I never want to hear again that maybe I have a preference for any one child above the other.  Ever.

Soo…. remember when I woke up to find out that all my blog posts went POOF?

And then remember when I realized I wasn’t emailed any of my database backups after December 15 so I basically lost like three plus months of posts?

And then I took some posts off Google Reader but soon realize it was going to be a GARGANTUAN undertaking to go through and copy and paste them all?  And I remembered that I hate GARGANTUAN undertakings?

Well… that was then.

This is now.

I found my “missing” backups.  They were hiding in a folder on my server (naughty backup files!).   And lookie there, my backup from last night!  So I restored the database to last-night proportions and all was well.  Well… maybe not ALL because the post earlier today where I tore my hair out over my lost posts is gone but I CAN LIVE WITH THAT.

So it’s all back to normal.  We can breathe easily now.  Are you excited?  You should be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go have a post-stress headache.

I want to say for the record that I HATE posts like this.  Nothing bugs me more than a blogger who threatens to pack up her toys and go home.  Are they hoping people talk them out of it?  Are they being overly dramatic?  And no one wants to see someone leave, especially when you’ve gotten used to following their life day in and day out.

That said…

It’s no secret that I’ve been a baaaaad blogger lately.  And that’s mostly been due to being busy and wholly unable to properly juggle my activities.  It’s hard to blog and knit at the same time, after all.  I’ve been trying to remember to come here once a day, but it’s been hard.  I figure in my current state, if I’m blogging at least three times a week, I’m in good shape.

But lately I’ve noticed some other things too, things that more of a threat to my blogging happiness than knitting even (shocking, I know).  It’s attitude.  It’s snarkyness.  It’s pettiness.  It’s anger, judgement and DRAMA.  It hasn’t happened all at once, of course.  Little by little.  Bit by bit.  Comment by post by overtone.  And it’s built up in my heart.  And it makes my heart ache.

I don’t get a lot of drama directed at me.  I’m just li’ ol’ me, eeking out my existance on this small corner of the internet.  I’m pretty grateful for that.  But neither am immune from the drama directed at others.  Whether I know them personally or not.   Should it matter if I KNOW someone, to feel bad for them when mean things are directed their way?  No, it should not. And it does not.

Why are we as people so MEAN to one another?  Why do we say things that we know will hurt feelings?  Why do we judge others choices when those choices have absolutely NOTHING to do with us?  I don’t understand this way of thinking.  I don’t get it at all.  How does snarking at Dooce or any of the other “big name” bloggers improve me and my life?  How does it improve others?  IT DOESN’T.  But people do it all the same and it just DON’T GET IT.  Do people think that if you are a big name that you don’t feel hurt when people snark on you?  Or worse: that if you are a big name, you ASK to have people snark on you?  If you disagree or dislike a person or blog or whatever, then doesn’t it make more sense to turn your attention elsewhere?  Read a blog that you DO like.

I’m so tired of this.  This goes on and on and on… and I hear stories that make me ache.  I see things firsthand that make me scratch my head.  And finally it gets to be too much.  And before you know it, I’m writing a post like this where I wonder aloud if maybe it is time to pack things in.  That maybe the world of blogging has changed so much, TOO much, and that there is no place anymore for someone who wishes to perpetuate kindness to others in the community.

I’m not the sort that takes breaks.  For one thing, they don’t work for me.  If I take a break, then that means I’m that much more likely to just not ever return from a break.  I’m a slacker, remember?  And the laws of inertia are strong with me.  A body at rest tends to stay at rest.  A blogger on break tends to stay on break.  So I know that’s not the answer for me.  Either I blog or I don’t.

I still don’t know.  I’d like to think that there’s more good then bad out there.  I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that lately.  I don’t know what to think.  I would hate to lose my blog.  I would hate to lose the lovely people who come out to read even when I’ve posted nothing but drivel for the better part of a month.  But I hate to surround myself with negativity too. Maybe the answer is to delete my Google Reader.  I’d hate to lose some of my most favorite blogs, but I have to admit, I think this would definitely help.

Time will tell.