Oil Can

It's Thanksgiving eve, and as my boys watched all 2 and a half hours of the first Harry Potter movie, I somehow ended up on my old blog... this blog... and decided that I want to resurrect it. I have no idea how this will go, but I definitely need to use my brain again. Because raising children doesn't require my brain. Bahaha. But seriously, my brain has lost some neural pathways. It's time to blaze some new neural trails.

Today while I was walking into Costco for some last minute Thanksgiving dinner shopping (because you can spend $200 last minute like that), a gray-haired man had that familiar smirk on his face as he was leaving... that smirk where I know he's about to say something about my kids. "That's like herding cats right there!" I smiled and said, "Exactly right!"

I've become a cat lady, apparently. And I thought you had to be single and alone for that to happen.

Life, man. My life is like Groundhog Day, as I so often tell Nate. How many times have I cleaned up spilled milk and cereal during breakfast? How many times have I told the boys to not jump on the couch? How many times have I wrestled with Ruby while changing her diaper? So much of what I do is repetition that I feel like a robot. Words come out of my mouth before I've thought about them. They are already there, ingrained in my brain as the default response to a, b, and c. This is just reality. In some ways I don't feel present, but I think I have to exist this way in order to stay sane. I have to retain some control over the monotonous chaos by disengaging from the mindlessness that is repetition. I exist in my head during much of these moments, but my kids pull me out as soon as they break the expected pattern. It's all a bizarre interplay of being reflexive and being engaged.

Having so many cats has given me cat-like reflexes. Have I completed any thoughts here? I usually like to make it full circle, but I think I'm a bit rusty. Until next time...