I have so missed writing in my blog. I think about writing all the time. It's just that most of my outbursts are focused on Facebook; it's quicker, easier, and I get a quicker social fix since people respond more quickly than they do to clicking an outside link and then commenting. But I do realize the need to compartmentalize the busyness that goes on in my mind and direct more to my blog. That way people can have a choice in the verbal vomit I subject them to. Mothering has been very tiring recently. Still one of my top fav things to do, but being 20 weeks pregnant and experiencing the lovely fatigue that goes with that is pretty limiting. For example, a month and a half ago, decided to try preparing for a piano competition that is in my current state of Texas. The only issues I saw were that I had JUST found the competition, and just shy of two months to prepare for it. That means an entire 40 minutes worth of memorized music by a composer I have habitually avoided in th

Tonight I'm writing about a topic I've struggled with for some time, but never really pinpointed because I felt it was petty and kind of childish. Funny considering I'm almost 30 years old. Yet I didn't really have any siblings around when I was a child. I was raised as an only child from about age 5 and upwards after being adopted by my adoptive parents. I guess I lived the life some kids dreamed about; I was afforded many presents on Christmas, private school education, music lessons, nice clothes...I was the only one so I would assume spending money on one child was easier than multiple children.  Besides being lonely and making up imaginary friends and being the weird kid I was, there were times I wished I had a sibling to take some of the pressure off of me...some of the heat from time to time (Even with my own kids, I find myself asking the oldest for the most help since he is older and the most reliable, but I've realized I need to make sure that all the ki

I feel like I owe you all some kind of written explanation of where I've been and what I've been doing since I disappeared off the face of the Earth in August. Actually, my family moved across the country, from the state of Michigan in which I was born, to Texas, an unknown land that I imagined to be full of desert, dry and hot. Hotter than I cared to suffer through. My husband received the promotion he's been waiting for for a long time. This past year, I've watched him switch to sales, something he's never done before in his life, and work his way to really learning the company, going to training, and finally being able to be offered a position as assistant manager of one of the company stores. The only catch is that we needed to move to get this opportunity. Which I was fine with. I was tired of Michigan (no offense, boo) and really have had a traveling and adventurous spirit since I was young. When I was in grade school, I would go to the library and pick ou

Many of you have noticed I took up the moniker "Moni" a couple years ago. To be honest I was going through a change in life of learning who I was after being reconnected with my birth family, and that was a nickname my natural parents called me. In my eagerness to be connected to who I was before my adoption I decided to try basking in that name for a while. Then when I felt "full-grown" and was ready to step back into life as "Monica", damned Facebook decided to limit name changes. So I am stuck being "Moni" when I really want to be Monica. Everyone has adapted that name and it has definitely stuck, so I'll let it lie. To be honest, it's kind of sweet that everyone has accepted my different changes of growth and is just going along with my flow. So I don't really mind. Just know that Monica is the fierce outer shell protecting the inner child "Moni." As I've been getting to know "Moni," I've been very

The past two months of our lives have looked completely different. I'm laughing inside at the idea of "perfection" we all have of others...perfect marriages, perfect families, perfect pregnancies, perfect hair, perfect bodies, perfect schedules, perfect perfect perfect...Can I call it? It's all BS! We all have to do the best with what we're given, and we're all given some of the same things: brains. mouths. butts (ok that was pointless). opportunities (although not identical). Here's what has changed for us, and WHY I'm happy with it. In March we became completely debt-free. Nothing owed to any collectors, creditors, parents, NADA. We worked our butts off for this to happen, had some arguments, the whole 9. When we made it I was so relieved and could barely believe it. I felt free. We were really happy. We felt to RICH not owing others. Then we worked on building up our emergency fund. Dave Ramsey suggests a 3-6 month fund, Suze Orman suggests

Today I realized that I am loved and that I am blessed to be able to have children, watch them grow, and stay home mostly full-time to do so. My youngest son Kendrick, who just turned a year old a couple weeks ago, is now growing into his personality and it's such a treat to see. I love this part of child-rearing!  I really do believe the first five years of our babies' lives are the hardest because they are almost 1000% hands/ears/thoughts-ON. So much micromanaging, effort, strength, stress, and speculation goes into their care. From discipline to schooling choices to nutrition to personal energy stamina it's quite the tilt-a-whirl. Sometimes I feel for myself because of the hustle and bustle and energy required and expended and other times I feel grateful, mostly the latter. Especially during nap time. But those little moments-the laughs over shaking our heads "no" over eating pureed bananas, talking about butts inappropriately at the dinner table, heavin

Oh sh**. It's really time to get up again? Why do I feel like crap? Oh yeah, I got up with my daughter who awakened me with her terrible squeals in the middle of the night because she had to go to the bathroom but seemed to forget how to get up and walk in there. Then proceeded to whine and cry for God knows why even after I led her by the nose pretty much to the toilet and cleaned her up. Then I couldn't go back to sleep. Oh shoot, husband has to work today? Nope, didn't make a lunch. Too tired to make one at night and can't drag myself out of bed to do it in the morning. Good luck fending for yourself, dear! You could take the leftovers from last night, but oh wait! You don't like leftovers. Tough luck.  Oh why dost my body betray me? Too much stress makes my chest tight and it travels up my throat. Dear God, please help me get this under control before I get throat cancer from always carrying my stress there. Researching as many stress-relieving breathing ex

Since I came out today, I figured it is only fitting to organize what I do believe since detaching my tentacles from the organized religion of Christianity. Here is what I do believe, with no evidence, just feeling what my spirit feels: I feel there is a Creator. Actually I choose to believe this because I cannot wrap my head around any kind of notion that the beauty we find in nature, children, love, and the connections of spirit with others  is just by happenstance or evolving biologically. There is no way this just "is". I can't tolerate that concept. There is something bigger than this universe that has taken time to deliberately paint flowers, design body systems, and provide emotions. That I feel in my spirit for SURE.  I feel the closest spiritually to my creator when I am in nature. When the sounds and music of nature are playing I can almost tear up for the sheer beauty of it all. I feel healing happen naturally in nature.  I believe that when someone is ha

I must be crazy for doing this. No, actually I must want to be silently (or maybe loudly) slaughtered by judgmental minds and peering eyes, crazed holy folks who will not, not NOT tolerate any type of diversion tactics, alternate theories, or openness to other levels of spiritual living. And I'm okay with that. Because I must be honest. I can honestly say I feel like I'm getting ready to "come out" to the world, and although I don't know what that's like for those who are homosexual, I know what it feels like to "come out" religiously, and I'm about to do just that.  Deep breath, you can do this. Just tell them what's on your mind. Just tell them...tell them... I don't think I'm a Christian anymore, guys. Instead of trying to beautifully articulate gluttonous paragraphs trying to sanely explain what goes on in my noggin, I'll just write a quick annotated list of what has spiritually been happening inside of THIS woman. I w

To my lovely readers, I want you to know that I'm still here. I have been avoiding writing because my life is a little imperfect right now, and to share it with you would be very risky for me because it would mean being honest. As you know, I am very insistent on honesty. So since being honest would be hard, I decided to wait until I was confident enough to share this honesty with you. My life is such a grand mural, and a new paint or pattern may become splatted on it at the drop of a hat, with no warning and certainly no opportunity to wipe it off or rearrange. Once it's there, it's there. Displaying right on my heart. There's no way around it. I want to be responsible in how I share the new art that's been done, so that my words will paint an accurate and, again, confident portrait of what is now.  I find such an escape through writing, painting, playing my instruments. But I have to remember not everyone understands and unites with my soul. And I'm okay

This was a requested blog topic:  America's (tainted) view of the Mother's Body.  I have a couple of websites I want you to go check out before you read the rest of this. A complete visual guide of mothers and their body-battles BabyCenter polls 7,000 who "tell it like it is"...the truth about the postpartum body Check out this comment from a body image expert about what women think about themselves postpartum: Joan Chrisler, a body image expert who teaches at Connecticut College, isn't surprised. "Lots of studies have shown that women think men want them to be thinner than men really want them to be," she says. "Researchers will show women sketches of female figures and ask, which do you think men believe is the ideal? Men always pick significantly bigger sizes than women think they want." So if your mate says you look great, believe it. Check out this comment from the BabyCenter article about what OTHER people think about women p

I am musing today about my evolvement. At 10, I thought I could befriend everyone. I knew nothing about petty nonsense except that certain girls in my fifth-grade class would sometimes tease me. My mom thickened my skin by telling me they were jealous. In fact, anything that happened in which I was teased was always resolved by "they're just jealous." Thanks Mom. No, seriously. At 11, I went to music camp (Blue Lake) and made friends with a girl named Tiffany Yang. She was a better pianist than me, quiet, and kind of weird. We became friends. I wonder if I can find her on Facebook now? At 12, shaving legs was a GIGANTIC deal. I wasn't allowed to. I felt like the Yeti. At 13, I returned to music camp. I fell in love for the second-ish time. The first time I had no clue what was going on. This time, I never got to say good-bye to my new flame. I was depressed over that for a little while. At 14, I went to CMU's music camp and met an awesome girl who was be

My mom always said, "Always tell the truth. Even if you think you're going to get in trouble. I need to be able to trust what you say, because one day you're going to need me to trust when it looks like you're lying." I never forgot that, and I began my truth-telling as a young lady. Even when I was telling the truth, I still sometimes was perceived as lying. But I held to that code of honor 99.9% of the time for the next years of my life up to this day. There were times I became defensive and eluded an honest view of myself and something wrong I had done, but I came around. The lie I most regret is the one to Mrs. Rabeler, ninth-grade algebra teacher. She was a very smart, sharply-dressed woman who taught at Lansing Christian High School. Man, was she brilliant at math. She wrote neatly on the overhead, and nobody even thought to disrespect her, I don't think. The one rule we all had is that we could NOT chew gum in school. We had a brand new school and e

This reflection quickie is inspired by something I said to my son regarding food. Take a peek: Me: "What did you have for lunch at school today?" Son: "I didn't try it, I didn't think I would like it." Me: "Son, you're not always going to like everything that's placed before you. What if we didn't have any food at home and that's all you got to eat for a few hours, is what was offered at school? You'd be pretty hungry." **Deep breath to think of how to organize subsequent thoughts into preschool-friendly terms** Me: "...sometimes you can't think about the future, that you'll just eat when you get home. Think about the present, what's happening right now. You won't always like what's in the present, but sometimes you have to accept it whether you like it or not." Did you catch it? I immediately ingested my own words, and they're still digesting. I realized that the pain and hurt I mu

I am a very interesting individual. I have been told by my therapist I'm very unique. I'm different. I'll paint a quick picture of what she means by different so that I don't scare you into thinking I'm psychotic-different, which I may never convince you of but I feel responsible to at least handle some information with care since our society likes to suspend little five-year-old girls who bring "Hello, Kitty" bubble guns to school and pretend to shoot. You know what I'ms sayings! I used to practice piano a lot. My mom made me. I used to get very bored practicing piano, and as a result I unknowingly began dabbling in improvisation and challenging my ear, although I was terrible at it for a long time. I had to use very special mental powers to force myself to play something over and over monotonously without stabbing the piano and deflating it. The upside is, I became very good at sight-reading and became a tad bit virtuosic.  This said-virtuosity p