so here i am. last week was a bit rough so excuse the dramatics. i won’t trash this whole project (but you’re on notice blog! behave! if you hit, you sit!) but can’t promise i’ll update any more regularly than before.

the four year old’s are funny.  they say odd things, everything is a gymnastic challenge and they’ve started to, honest to goodness, play with each other. sometimes, i eavesdrop when they’re in a room by themselves and listen to them cracking each other up or having a yelling debate over the theoretical option of whose turn it is to play with something that doesn’t even exist. their imaginations have kicked into overdrive or maybe their language is starting to catch up because they like to tell detailed, made up stories- especially jack. he tells me the couch is a boat so he has to walk on the back of it or it will tip over when i tell him to get down for the 99th time. everything i tell him is negotiable and he considers a command a reason to think of possibilities before answering. this doesn’t work well when i’m commanding him to get out of the middle of the street but is entertaining/infuriating at other times. he is loving to the extreme, over-dramatic and LOUD. he howls and whines when he wants something. he knows how to annoy all of us into giving him what he wants. he throws himself on the ground in “pain” when he falls over but looks out of one half closed eye to judge his audience’s reaction to his performance. he fervently loves everyone he meets and yesterday i had to pull him away from a woman we didn’t know and whose knee he kept trying to kiss.

lily got mad at me the other day because i took something away from her. she scrunched up her nose and yelled at me, “daddy says you’re a stupid girl!” now, daddy may have called me stupid at some point in our lives but i know it wasn’t in front of her and he had been at work all day. she made it up! what verbal prowess! i was kinda impressed (and insulted) by her multi-pronged attack and tried not to laugh. right now, she doesn’t want me to type on my computer so she’s repeatedly kissing my knee (what is up with the damned knee kissing?!) which sounds cute but is really annoying-she’s only doing it because i told her not to and so she can block jack. jack is screaming and whining because it is his self-proclaimed turn to talk to me. they are rolling a play-doh ball on my bed even though i told them not to and ethan is playing alone in the living room. that’s often how it goes around here. jack and lily fight for attention while ethan uses the opportunity to play with all the toys without the other two bugging him. ethan is wicked smart.

oh. my. god. jack won’t stop screaming. lily is still kissing my knee. and this is when i have to stop (lily is also whispering “stop, stop, stop, stop” to jack over and over again. i don’t know which one is being more annoying). now ethan is in the room and is yelling something about being an acrobat. oh lordy.

this space, blog, blahg, ramblings, bullshit- whatever you want to call it- doesn’t seem to fit me anymore. it isn’t fun and that’s why i started it- for fun. in some ways, it feels dated. blogging is so 2005. microblogging is where it’s at and it fits my limited attention span. did i start doing this to reconnect with folks? well, i do that in spades on facebook (more than i even want at times). i believe one of my goals was to show my photographs but i don’t do it much in this space except to link to flickr where i actually store and “show” my photos. the photos are mostly of my children because, honestly, that’s what i have to work with a great deal of the time, and there are privacy concerns with posting those on public sites.

i have a lot i want to say and many photos to show but it doesn’t feel right to do it here anymore. i feel like a cowardly writer because i choose my topics oh so carefully to avoid offending or even discussing topics with those people in my real life that would make things more contentious. and what is so infuriating is i don’t even have anything all that damn important or scandalous to say so why should i care? should i shift to fiction instead of straight journaling? should i delve back into scrawled, cringy poems even though i hate them while loving the catharsis they bring? am i just a crap writer who will never go further in this journey because i just can’t pull it together? i can blame it on being busy, lazy, tired or many other things but lately, i just don’t want to do it.

the ad network sends me emails threatening to cut off my ads which pay basically NOTHING if i don’t post every two weeks and with each reminder, i grow closer to deleting this whole damn thing (yes, i would archive it for posterity’s sake). i keep asking myself why i want to keep this up and i’m starting to reach for reasons. one reason is because i use it as a long term memory but maybe i should start keeping journals like i used to- scrawled in half filled moleskine journals and composition notebooks. that shit seems more honest than my carefully chosen words and subjects thrown up on this site.

so what now? trash the whole damn thing? embrace the guilt of giving up? go on hiatus and tell the ads to go DIAF? reinvent myself? stick to status updates in other programs (i am great in under 140 characters)? i’m never going to be an A Lister Blogger and cringe at the mommy blogger label. i’m not doing this to make money. i started this venture five years ago to have fun, gain experience and see where it led me. it has led me to this place and i’m not sure where it is.

this may all be related to my turning 35 today– i am still considering it my birthday because i haven’t gone to bed yet– and it was one of the first birthdays in years where i didn’t go out at all. i didn’t see any of my friends, i barely saw my extended family (by choice- i decided this was a home based birthday) and heard from many, many random people on facebook wishing me a happy day (ah facebook, where people who didn’t talk to you in high school wish you happy birthday).

this morning, i played imaginary baseball with the triplets on an empty baseball diamond where i pretended to pitch the ball from the mound, they pretended to hit the ball and then rounded the bases while i waved them on and cheered. it was 78 degrees out, no humidity and just a few leaves have started to fall to the ground. the late summer yellow flowers were blooming all around us and the droning cicadas roar in the background. we went to the dollar store where the triplets picked out birthday balloons for me and laughed as they inflated with helium. i let them pick out the party plates so we walked out with Spongebob and Dora party accessories for my “closer to 40 than 30″ birthday. my oldest son helped me make lasagna until his friends wooed him away with tree climbing and bike riding (a situation that resulted in the 4 yr old neighbor boy getting stuck in our tree and our dogs fighting but all ended well). We ate lasagna and the most sloppily put together but delicious black forest cake* complete with curious george candles left over from the triplet’s birthday party. Mike brought me home a chiminea to replace our old one that broke four years ago and a laptop stand with fan to keep it from overheating while on my lap. We built a small fire and watched it burn while we held the kids and listened to jack explain what an awesome camp out we were having. The kids crashed and Mike and I furthered our Battlestar Galactica obsession (we’re finally at season 4. shut it- don’t tell us anything) until he fell asleep and I’m here writing on some kind of emotional adrenaline rush.

I wasn’t happy about turning 35 until I did and it has worked out to be a fairly wonderful day. I feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last five years and in just the past year. Tides are turning, kids are getting older and I am beginning to question what comes next. Maybe that is why the blog angst is butting its ugly head. Maybe I’m bored and looking for a new outlet for the person I am today. Maybe it is just time.

* I decided I was making my own birthday cake because Mike hates cake (freak), we have ice cream cake for the triplets’ birthday, I made apple pie last week and well, chocolate, cherry and homemade whipped cream cake is delicious. All was well until I turned on the mixer to whip the cream and powdered sugar (all you need to make whipped cream! so easy and much tastier than Cool Whip) before removing my finger from the beaters. I beat the hell out of my right ring finger. I howled in pain while thinking, “How on earth did you injure yourself making whipped cream? You have a special talent for accidental self injury.”

** Oh yeah, I have a blog to tell ya’ll how dumb I am sometimes