Trying to be Perfect

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

Anna Quindlen (1953 – )

I wear many different hats… mother, yogi, wife, artist, friend, daughter, granddaughter, etc.  My latest endeavor is to try to prioritize these roles, most noticeably the roles of mother and wife.  Of course the MOTHER role seems the most important and I find that the WIFE role falls by the wayside if I don’t actively work at it.  It’s so hard to pay equal attention to the two most important people in my life.  If I had my way, I would dedicate all my time to each of them.  Lie in bed and cuddle with my hubby and spend all day just talking and hanging out… or get up early, take long naps and do crafts with my little girl all day.  Each are so important and yet each has to make room for the other.

I suppose my yogic training has made me even more aware of this balance that plays out each day.  Which is a good thing AND a bad thing. The best way that I have found to really make each of these roles apparent in my actions is to be present.  When I can truly be in the moment, I get more quality time than quantity.  At the present time, I work a LOT, so any time I get to be home and with my hubby and my daughter are precious.  Sometimes it only amounts to 3-4 hours of quality time during the week.

It is so easy to be overwhelmed by the lack of time that I sometimes forget to simply relax and enjoy my time with them.  I get home so anxious to make dinner for them, cuddle with my husband, blow bubbles for my daughter and/or try to get in a “relaxing” walk that run myself right into a frenzy trying to get everything done.  It is at these times that I really forget about the small things… like getting a kiss from my little girl (she has just started to do that) or making sure that she is nice and calm for bed so that I can curl up with my hubby for a movie after her bedtime.  This challenge, combined with all the other roles in my life, put a lot of pressure on me to handle every situation and every relationship with precision.  Often it feels that even one wrong move can turn a whole night into an argument or a meltdown.  I’m sure most of this is just my perception.

Looking at this expectation with my yogic eye… I see that the urge to be perfect falls with my own expectations and not with the expectations of others.  In order to truly be there for my family and to fulfill all of my roles to the best of my ability, I really only need to be the best person I can be and forget about the expectations of others.

 

Moving…. or Help! I think I’m losing my mind

Someone told me today, as I was dragging my butt out of my car, that moving is right up there in the list of most stressful events with losing a loved one and changing jobs.  This makes even more sense right now as our move is coming to an end and my husband have been on each other’s nerves all week.  Combine that with a 7 month old baby, a kitty, the fact that we only started moving about 3 weeks ago, and that we don’t have a subleaser for our old apartment yet and you have an emotional storm that closely mirrors the one hitting the east coast right now.

So, my days have been progressing as follows…

• wake up (trying hard not to wake the baby)
• go to work at 6am
• place various ads and talk to family about the apartment situation on my breaks
• leave work at 3:30pm
• go to the apartment and clean (while trying to spend time with little girl at the time)
• finally return to our new place
• attempt to find food and a place to eat or sit not covered with boxes or tools
• pass out
• start all over again

(rinse and repeat)

Sounds fun, huh?  Well, I’m sure I’m not the only one going through hard times right now.  In fact, I’m SURE of it.  I feel so horrible not spending a whole lot of time with Olivia right now, though.  We have had to leave her to play while we patched walls, vacuumed, and basically deep cleaned our whole apartment.  She has been pretty good about it, but I sure am glad she isn’t going to remember all of this.  She keeps crying and I keep comforting her and then leaving her to play again while I try, again, to get some stuff done.

Last night was our last night of cleaning and I think she had enough of it as well.  On the way to our new place she can usually pass out, but whenever I stopped to listen to her, I could hear whimpering and half-crying from the backseat.  So sad.  It broke my little heart.  So… when we got home we just did whatever she wanted to do.  Play on the bed… sure.  Eat a bunch… sure.  Play with the kitty… anything you want honey.  Hopefully this move will be the last REALLy stressful move for a while.

In the meantime… I tried my best to give her a good Halloween.  No, we didn’t get to decorate.  No, we didn’t get to  go trick or treating.  We did dress her up and take lots of pictures, though.  She was my cute little bumblebee…

 

Hopefully, we can give her a REAL Halloween next year… when she can eat candy and everything.

So, for now, I’m just trying to be grateful that I have a place to live and a family that I love dearly.  Life is hard right now, but in the grand scheme of things, I am doing pretty well.  I hope that practicing my yoga will give me some of that balance that I desperately need right now.  I might even just be able to pass that along to some friends and family that need balance as well.

 

Namaste everyone… Happy Halloween… and save some zen for the Holidays that are fast approaching.

Interesting “mom” things

So… things they don’t tell you about being a mom.  

*  You find yourself randomly looking at pictures of your baby and smiling (like a dork).  We went to the corn maze on Sunday, and I took a million pictures of Olivia.  Then, Monday morning, all I can do is sit and look at her picture and smile at my computer.  How dorky, right?  But in my defense…

How can you look at that little cute face and NOT smile?  Too hard… Can’t fight it.  

 

*  You become one of those moms that shows her pictures to everyone.  See above reasons… 

 

*  If you are breastfeeding… (noticed this one in the shower today) one boob looks normal and one looks like a dorky cousin that has to ride the short bus.   I seriously need a t-shirt that says.. “I’m with Stupid” and pointing to my left side.  The La Leche League lady said that it is totally normal, but I mean REALLY?  I truly hope that after I finish breastfeeding that the ladies return to their normal size.  

 

*  6 months after the birth… I am getting flashbacks of my labor.  Like post traumatic stress syndrome.  I keep remembering things that I guess I suppressed simply to be able to get through it.  Weird, huh?  I find myself getting mad about circumstances, like… WHY couldn’t it just have happened that way?  

 

In summation… I’ve come to the conclusion that there are WAY too many things that they don’t tell you about pregnancy, birth, and becoming a mom.  It’s like they WANT you to be ignorant, so that you can be fooled into reproducing.  And in all honesty, I probably wouldn’t have had my little bundle of joy if I HAD been told all of the strange things that occur.  Go figure.  I’m trying to be zen about this whole situation, and really try to live my yoga.  

Life is strange… that is for certain.  

 

 

I’m back… with new ideas… AND a baby!

Hello all… 

So I’ve been busy… First I’ve had an adorable baby named Olivia.  She is the love of my life (well, aside from my awesome and amazing husband, OP who is my first love).  We named her Olivia Peace, so she is my little O.P.  Yay!  She is just 6 months old and is such a doll.

Secondly, I have started my 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training.  I graduate in December.  Which is another Yay!  Can’t wait to start teaching.  I am taking it through Bliss Flow Yoga / YogaOne studio.  I have been blessed to meet such wonderful people through this program.  I can’t imagine my life without them now.  So awesome.  

My study of yoga has taught me many valuable things which I hope to pass onto others through this blog. I think I should not be doing How-To stuff anymore and should really focus on my approach to life that would make other’s lives better.  With Yoga, they teach you to listen and be happy with your “authentic” self.  So, this is my attempt to be more authentic to myself.  Yes, it may include some how to things and may contain some happy, weird stuff and playlists that I have created, but mostly it will be to express my authentic self and hopefully to make others a bit more happy.

The first thing I have started doing is cutting out the stuff I don’t need and really focusing on the everyday joys.  My current joy is stickers… yes stickers.  I was feeling down this morning, so I decided to offer everyone stickers and spread a little joy.  Worked like a charm.  Things haven’t really gotten better, but there are smilieface stickers on everything.  I even stickered some signs outside.  🙂  Then I named my little plant by the window, Kallie.  It’s a Kalanchoe… so Kallie it is.  

I’m not saying my life is perfect.  I have family issues and I have personal issues… and No, I’m not getting a whole lot of sleep these days, but I’m trying to have a better perspective.  And I feel that if others can see the world through my eyes, maybe they might find a little joy in their lives.  

That is all…  Be well all

 

the christmas present…

So…for Christmas I asked my husband for yarn and a pattern. I had found this awesome book called Greetings from Knit Cafe.

I loved all the patterns in here as soon as I looked through it, but I really wanted someone to just buy me the yarn for it, so I wouldn’t have to go through the normal wishy washy problems I have when picking yarn. What color to pick, what material, how heavy a yarn, what will drape well? All that stuff.

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<—This is the dress and also the problem…I have never done lace before. SO this presents an interesting challenge.

I have been trying to start this dress for a good 6 months now. The color that he picked out…jet black. He wanted me to have a little black dress to wear anytime I wanted that I had made myself. How sweet right? Little did he know that I would take one look at the pattern and get shell shocked.

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I think I have finally come up with a solution. I didn’t want to start the dress, become discouraged with the yarn and finally end up frogging it and warping the yarn he so lovingly picked out for me. So I figured the next best thing is to start something similar that would give me the confidence to finally tackle this project.

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This is where the fantastic rainbow shawl comes in. I have this lovely rainbow yarn, soft as anything and lace weight. I have this vision of a rainbow shawl that would drape across my shoulders and be beautiful yet functional. I finally found a pattern on Friday while searching through Ravelry.com’s free patterns that would be the perfect thing. I even surveyed some of the hundreds of people’s projects that were made with the pattern and found that for many of them, this was their first lace shawl.

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So my plan is to attempt this shawl and once finishing this, I can move onto the beautiful dress my hubby wants me to make. So wish me luck everyone…this be quite an undertaking…

After three days of crisco and frosting…

So it took a while, but I finally finished very late on 05/17/2010. I have found that with every cake I make…I always end up with unexpected problems. This time the problem ended up being the final layer of frosting. But I guess that is where good friends and strong problem solving skills come in.

This is how it all began…

After drawing it out, I figured that I would need at least 6 cake mixes to really be sure I wouldn’t need to make a last minute mad dash to the store in the 11th hour.

With 6 cake mixes, I figured only 3 huge cans of frosting, but really ended up needing 6 cans to finish the entire cake.

After finally assembling the cake, shaping and frosting…I just had to make up the fondant and cover the cake. By frosting the entire cake & allowing it to “crust” for a couple hours (or overnight), the finished product looks less lumpy than without this protective layer…

The fondant is an easy recipe that can be found online by googling “Marshmallow Fondant”. Plain white fondant is a pliable and wonderful substance. When adding color, though…this wonderful substance can start breaking apart, over sticky, and an absolute mess. In the past, I have used liquid food coloring, but this time tried ChefMaster’s Powdered Food Coloring. With the liquid food coloring, I find it becomes a bit overly sticky and requires adding more powdered sugar to get the right consistency… With the powdered food coloring, I found it harder to work into the fondant. The color consistency is about the same with both. But I think essentially a combination of both is what I will try next time.

After applying the fondant…the cake had an overly shiny appearance and, due to the large nature of the cake, many seams that were far from invisible. My husband eventually ended up with the winning idea to cover the outer layer of fondant with a layer of brush applied dyed frosting. This created a very realistic fur like texture on the outside of the cake. This application along with the gum paste feet & ears, and peanut butter bon bons for the eyes brought about the final result.

Now all that was left

was to apply the ears and

put on finishing touches.

and then I was finally finished.

One of the hardest things about this entire cake was putting a price on hard work & creativity. I have made plenty of cakes for birthdays, weddings, and work events. Unfortunately, I had never actually “SOLD” one… so what to do? I eventually came up with 150.00 for materials and labor. This may be selling myself short. I have always been more concerned about whether the end result turns out than how much I was paid to do it. I guess I will just have to do some research and find out how much an amateur cake maker can charge…

All in all, I was pleased with the result…and so was everyone at the party. Isn’t that what really matters in all of this?

Steel Magnolias meets biology lab…

so the next big project I am working on is a Mouse cake…Ace of Cakes Style

Requirements:  (you can’t make this stuff up)

• Must feed 20 people
• Red Velvet Cake
• Gray frosting
• Removable eyeballs

The girl I am making it for is having this for a biology work party.  I guess they use a lot of mice in experiments, (I don’t judge ok…) but I guess they wanted to do a Steel Magnolias homage and have it resemble the armadillo they had at the wedding.

I’ve done some interesting cakes before such as Bender (Futurama), Hello Kitty, Jack Skellington (Nightmare Before Christmas), and a Taxi Cab;  but this will truly be a first.  (Below you can see my Hello Kitty cake & my Taxi Cab Cake.)

So far I have just planned out the materials and calculated cost (TBA), but I truly can’t do any work on it until a couple of days before.  Can’t quite figure out the eyeballs.  Everyone has been telling me that I should do something prefab, but I really want to try some peanut butter bon bons…think that should work nicely and come out with the desired result.

Ahhh the morbid & creative side in me should have a lot of fun with this one.  The hard part will be the fondant.  I use a really good recipe… found here (http://whatscookingamerica.net/PegW/Fondant.htm)  This site is awesome & really comes out with a nice and good tasting frosting, unlike the prefab fondant stuff you can buy.  The hard part will be dyeing it gray…to get the right shade you practically have to mix in 1/2 a regular bottle of black food coloring.  It really does a number on my hands…not to mention the workout you have to do to get it all mixed. I am sure it will be worth it…

I guess I just have to remember to actually take pictures this time.  I am so into getting the product to the right people, that I usually just deliver & collapse.

Oh well, wish me luck…this one should be interesting.

so…here it goes.

hello people…

So all about me, right? Here’s a little background info to get us started shall we…?

I am crafty…and I mean in all senses of the word. I scrapbook, I sew, I cook, I take pictures, I collage, and most recently…I knit. In all of this I have started to embrace my inner dorkiness. I even bought a Martha Stewart book about sewing…(*GASP*)

I am turning 30 this year…in a couple of months in fact, and I figure the best way to document this strange journey into my inner dorkiness was express myself through a blog.

As I get older physically and younger mentally, (I once knitted a nose mitten for cripes sake) I find that most of my friends are moving up and on…having families & buying houses. Both of these are something that I am financially not even close to yet…

I begin/began/still trying to grasp how I have strayed so far from the path that I originally set out, but loving the journey so far. I married the man of my dreams…(we still laugh till we cry) and work at a job that lets me wear 0 guage earrings and dye my hair platinum if I want…what more could I want.

This blog will be mostly about my craftiness…and the strange ideas that pop into my head randomly; and my only goal is to reach out to other people like me who have taken the road less traveled and come out a little more dorky along the way…