Hello me time. It's nice to see you.

     At some point during the holidays last year I dropped off the planet, or the realm of the blogosphere anyways. I kept telling myself, that after we got through the new year madness, I'd find the time and motivation to sit my sweatpants clad butt down and start typing, but that never happened. Until now! 

     After what felt like an entirety of a summer break, Flash Speedman has returned to pre-preschool (what I call her daycare in a classroom like environment) two days a week! Last year I was only rid of her one day a week! Then the other day I was sitting next to a very nice lady on a plane who I chatted with for a couple of hours, mostly about our kids. Several times she made the comment "After having your daughter around all summer, you must miss her when she's at daycare." Ha! Don't get me wrong, spending time with a now 2 year old Flash is fun, rewarding, inspiring and just about every other positive adjective under the sun. However, it is also exhausting, confining, limiting, and, more often than not, thankless, as I know many other parents are very much aware. To add to my frustrations, my brain tends to not work as well as I would like and multi-tasking is not something I excel at. So, throughout most of the summer I teetered on the brink of a meltdown (fairly often crossing the line) as I tried to focus on the needs of my kid and whatever else I might have a moment for. When that one day a week of kid-free time came around I was generally found running from one frantic errand or appointment to the next. Now I suddenly have two kid free afternoons! Count em... one... TWO!

     Granted one day is still dedicated to what I need to get done and let's face it, I rarely complete everything I need to so some of that will spill over into day two. But that leaves me with at least a few precious hours to do something just for me. My mind spinning with how to spend that time! Maybe I'll actually get back to working out on occasion or I'll take a photography class like I've been wanting to do for years now. I could take some classes at the local community college and see if anything inspires me continue my education that was left by the roadside long ago. Maybe I'll set some time aside to work on turning our unruly puppy into the perfect dog if more time and energy was put into training. I've always liked the circus, perhaps I'll look into what it takes to be a trapeze artist or an elephant tamer. Then there are those private companies that are sending people into space, surely they need astronauts one afternoon a week, that could be cool. 

     With the unlimited possibilities I'll probably need to take my free time, snuggle up in my sweats that the puppy will undoubtably be chewing and dream of everything that available to me.


     
    

    

It's Friday. I need a bottle of wine and a priest.

     It's Friday morning and just like all Friday mornings recently I've woken up afraid. Afraid of what exactly?

Afraid of this ->   That folks, is the face of evil, at least on Friday's. It began a month ago when Flash Speedman started going to daycare every Thursday. Now Flash loves going to daycare. She gets so excited when we pull up and the second she gets to her class room I'm a distant memory. When I pick her up later that afternoon she is all giggles and smiles and an all around happy kiddo. 

    

     Then Friday morning arrives and my sweet little girl goes missing and is replaced by a kid I'm not all that fond of. She whines. She screams. And if I'm not paying attention to her every second and doing everything in my power to keep her entertained then she whines and screams at the same time at a super sonic pitch, it's not a human sound. Heaven forbid I have to tell her "no" or take something away from her.

     All I want on these Fridays is for it to be nap time so I can guzzle a bottle of wine and rock myself in the fetal position, but nap time never comes. It seems this evil that over takes my child needs no rest and thrives on sleepy grumpiness. 

     I can only come to one conclusion, on Fridays, Flash is possessed, it's the only logical explanation.  I'm not sure what one does for a possessed toddler. Should I call that priest from The Exorcist? All I know is if her head starts spinning 360* I'm gone. I'll be back tomorrow when my happy baby girl returns.

Apparently I'm a Creepster

Holy cow Flash, let's get out of here!

Me at the park.
Hey, at least I'm out
 of my sweatpants!

     The park that Flash Speedman and I usually go to is never busy, in fact more often than not we're the only people there. This seemed a little anti-social of us so yesterday we decided to venture out to a park that we had never been to before, it may have been Mistake #1. This park was busy, like insane children in every direction, wondering if the play structure was designed to hold that many 40 lb kids at one time, busy. It seemed like the majority of kids there were older, rough housing, screaming, hitting boys and Flash was obviously overwhelmed (honestly, so was I) so we hung back for a little while, taking in the mayhem from afar. 





     Luckily, I had brought along my camera hoping to get some cute fall pictures of Flash, so we started having a little photo session, Mistake #2. It's like every mom/grandmother/nanny radar in a 10 mile radius went off, "Stranger at OUR park with a camera! DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!" To the best of my knowledge I am not a threatening looking person. I can't imagine that I looked like some pervert, skulking around, trying to take pics of kids I don't know. I was just a mom taking pictures of my kid playing in leafs, to send to the Grandparents. 

    Finally, a large hoard of possibly psychotically deranged boys were rounded up for volleyball practice and we made our move to the playground. Flash instantly took of to exploring leaving me to take my mothers advise and "go meet other moms", Mistake #3. The other moms obviously had not yet forgotten that I was a possible child snatcher and suddenly I was the pimply faced new kid surrounded by the popular girls in a weird high school flashback. I was not to be associated with. Lesson learned, from here on out we will do nothing to call attention to ourselves, especially anything that might brand me as belonging on some sort of registry for felons.

Introducing Flash Speedman

Flash Speedman at her finest!

     Today feels like a good day to introduce the person that makes me qualified (however little) to write a blog about my experiences with motherhood, my baby girl, Flash Speedman. Flash will be 16 months next week and she is the reason for most of the joy and most of the stress in my life. You hear people with kids say "I never knew I could love somebody so much" and I always thought 'Yeah, sure. You know what I really love more than anything? My collection of LAMB sneakers." And then Flash came along and everything else went out the window (not literally, throwing my LAMBs out would be tragic).

     Now before someone feels the need to contact Child Protective Services, because generally only an unstable person would bestow such a name upon a child, Flash Speedman is only a moniker for the sake of this blog. While I was still in the early months of my pregnancy my aunt Ellen suggested we name our little fetus so we could stop referring to it as "it" in that pre-knowing-the-sex stage. I don't remember how Flash Speedman came to be that nickname, something tells me The Handy Man came up with it. Anyways, once we found out we were having a girl and after the painful process of choosing a real name, Flash sort of fell by the wayside, forgotten until last night when I realized it needed to make a come back. 

    Flash Speedman fits her perfectly now, she is constantly on the go! After months of insisting on holding our hands when she wanted to walk around she finally realized that we were slowing her down and has been walking on her own for about a month and staying still is not an option. She wants to be involved in everything that she shouldn't be and wants nothing to do with the thing's you'd like her to be. She likes rearranging all the furniture and emptying drawers and cabinets. She can spot an unbaby proofed area from a mile away and has a radar for trouble thats always spot on. And you know what? I love it. Just when I think I have managed to keep her away from something she figures out how to get it and I realize what  learning process it must have been for her and what a learning process it is for me.

What begins with an A?

Yep. Just about have the whole thing memorized. Just try me.

     I can't read. Well, technically I am fairly literate but I physically can not read a book cover to cover unless it's Dr. Suess's ABC book. 'Big A, little a, what begins with an A? Auntie Annies alligator. A...a...A.'

It's uncanny the similarities between Auntie Annie and and Baby Girls Granna Anna.

 Now don't get me wrong, I love reading to Baby Girl. She's just recently started to get into it and I love when she toddles over to hand me a book and awkwardly tries to figure out how to sit down in my lap. I don't mind that she only wants me to read the same three books to her over and over again, all. day. long. I do however miss reading a book for my own pure enjoyment. I even bought myself a Kindle for Christmas last year in the hopes that my new gadget would get me excited enough to read a book. How many books have I loaded onto my Kindle? Four! How many of those four have I completed? Zero! And it's not like I'm trying to fit in a few chapters of Ulysses or War and Peace before bed, I'm choosing easy reads. I think I got one chapter into Tina Fey's Bossypants, which I assumed would be a quick fun read, temporarily forgetting that nothing is quick or fun when a toddler is screaming at you to play peek-a-boo. I had almost entirely forgotten that I even had the Kindle until I stumbled upon it in our living room fire place. I don't even remember deciding the fireplace was the best place for me to keep it, thats how little I think about it. So, as a sign of respect to this abandoned device, I'm pledging to wipe the sticky goo from its beautiful screen (again, no recollection that my hands were covered in jelly the last time I touched or maybe licked it) and finish reading Bossypants before Baby Girls starts college.


'Big Z, little z, what begins with a Z? A Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz, as you can plainly see.'