My First Post! HUGE Pressure!

OK - so this is my FIRST post. Huge pressure - right? Why am I even doing this? Well - I have this friend - let's call her Jill. (Which is a crazy funny name for her, since her name is so exotic that calling her Jill is completely ironic and literary and so completely clever and all author-like of me. But I digress) So, anyway - Jill is going thru some stuff right now and needed a bit of friendly, motherly advice, and like any good friend - I doled it out. And she said - "Wow - you are so clever and wise" - I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but you get the drift - "you should write a book or something". Which is something that I really want to do - but as I am one busy momma - I don't have the time to sit down and write a book. So, I decided to start a blog.

So the immediate question that comes to my mind - and I'm SURE the question that would come to my MOTHER'S mind should I ever even mention that I started a blog - would she even know what a "blog" is - is "why would ANYONE care to read what I write?" Well, to be honest - I live a pretty interesting life. And because I live a rather interesting life - some funny and interesting things happen to me and around me as I go about my business.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. First of all - I have 2 kids. My daughter Bella is almost 9 and is in the third grade. She is smart,witty, artistic, sensitive and has a hell of a case of ADHD. Which makes our life really interesting at times - like 99% of the time. My son Jack is almost 6 and is in kindergarten. Like most 6 year old boys, he is obsessed with the Wii and his DS. He plays baseball, soccer, football, swims like a fish and has a pretty serious speech delay. He also has an annoying habit of sleeping in his mom and dad's bed - which as you can imagine makes for a rocking love life for mom and dad. (I've changed everyone's names in this blog for the sake of their privacy.) My husband - who we will call PC - for Prince Charming - is truly a prince. He's a great guy. Brings home flowers for no reason, thinks I'm HOT in flannel pjs and granny panties, doesn't get mad when I spend too much money on shoes, doesn't give me guilt when I go out with the girls...over all he is an awesome guy and I don't know what I did to deserve him. That's not to say that he doesn't have his flaws - because we all do - and GOD knows - I'll exploit his funnier ones in this blog. But - he's really the salt of the earth and I love him more than I could possibly ever express and I think he knows that. And as for me - well, that's where the crazy comes in.

I work full time on the business side of education. I used to be a classroom teacher and after teaching for a few years, I left the classroom to become a national consultant for a publishing company. I travelled around the country training teachers who taught low-income students who were at-risk for academic failure. Now that I have two children, I can't work on the national stage anymore. So, I work more locally, still with a publisher, still with teachers. I love what I do. I found that I like working with teachers far more that I like working with kids. I feel that I can make much more of a difference working with teachers. However...working fulltime means sacrifices on the homefront. I was fortunate enough to stay home with my children for 5 years. I did the whole stay-at-home mom thing for 5 years. I baked the cookies, I painted the pictures, I made the play dough - I made the freaking play-dough, people. I MADE it. With cream-of-tarter and everything. I was GOOD. I was earth mom. Never mind that I gained about 40 pounds in the process...that's another post. So, needless to say, going back to work was a HUGE change in our lifestyle. I'm not on the playground for school pickup anymore. I am not making homemade, organic, spinach-hidden-in-the-brownie-batter-brownies anymore. (Those are really good, btw.)

These days, I am sending in Little Debbie for Bake Sales and doing certain Parent-Teacher and Team meetings from my Blue Tooth while driving to a meeting. I've become "that" mom. However - I have 2 kids with special needs - and special needs require special services and special schools and special stuff - like piano lessons to help with math skills and the requisite PIANO that goes with them. And private speech sessions over the summer that the school system says that you don't "qualify" for even though the other kids are starting to make fun of your kid. So - I'm "that" mom so that I can pay for the piano lessons that are supposed to somehow magically help with the math skills that my ADHD kid can't seem to master and the private summer speech sessions that will help my six year old stop sounding like Elmer Fudd. And although it sounds like a drag - it's not. I like it. I like using my brain for more than third grade homework and projects. I like having something for ME. The only thing that I really miss about being back to work full time is not being able to be a birth doula anymore. While I was home with my kids, I went back to school and became a certified birth doula. I'll write more about that later, but it was one of the most enriching experiences of my life. Unfortunately, my schedule prohibits me from taking on any clients at this time. And I really miss it.

So why start a blog? I don't know. To give me a place to rant. To give me a place to chronicle all of the daily craziness that goes along with working full time and parenting a gorgeous, wonderful, talented kid whose brain doesn't work like everyone else's. To tell my story - because it's a pretty good story. But I'm afraid that like any good story, if I don't write it down, record it somehow, life will happen and it will get lost in the shuffle.