Official

Well y'all, I'm officially a Texan. So in your little minds can you stop reading y'all in the previously used ghetto accent and switch it right over to a down south drawn out y'aaaalllllll?
But on to the meat of this post. If I BS too much I'll miss out on saying anything that really matters. I'm sitting in the quiet of a hotel room, where my kids are asleep, seduced by the dark night and the time on the glowing alarm clock that reads 10:58 instead of being in sync with their internal clocks that are still two hours behind. I'm taking advantage of the stillness.
These last couple weeks have been go go go. Some of it had to do with moving; a lot of it had to do with me getting sucked into the eye of a storm that I absolutely couldn't escape. That storm being spending good, fun, quality time with my kids. I feel like it takes a very particular recipe to create the magic we've been experiencing. I happened to have real high energy, the kids schedules let up, I let go of Kaia's naps, and we war having pretty good weather. So the kids and have been kickin. it. The big boys have turned into beach bums and were always begging me to take them so we made it happen more than a couple times. I got in my tradition birthday Hurricane Harbor outing. This year ALL four kids got invited...and the nanny too! I may be 33 now but I ain't crazy! We've been doing a lot of hanging out with friends and just good, down togetherness. And I'm still lapping up the residue from those times that were created not all that long ago.
There were sooooo many of those moments where I got the paycheck, the payback, the pay it forward of.....this is what being a mom is all about.  

PS I got my IUD taken out July 18th. Curious to see how much that has to do with everything.
And then there has been a lot of saying good-byes. I'm going to confess something: good-byes make me very, very uncomfortable. Not like "oh, I don't like them." No, they make me uncomfortable. I'm starting to understand myself better. One thing about me is I like to fix problems, not create them. I have always felt like a burden when I create any kind of problem.  (BIG exception: when I was a teenager and causing my parents a million and two burdens!) And this whole saying good-bye deal makes me feel like I'm making people sad and that it's my fault they're sad and my problem and therefore they won't like me because I'm making them sad. I could go on and on about the fallacies in all this but I won't. But I think that primary concern leaves me unable to focus on my own emotions, which most possibly would've been sadness. All of that is really to say that realization came to a head these last couple weeks and I've been doing my best to deal with it with grace. After all, I had real good motivation to step it up and confront the awkwardness-- I've got a lot of good LA people in my life.
But now it's all done- the fun weeks with my kids, the good-byes, all the moving jazz. At least on the LA side of it. Now I'm onto the more fun part- picking out new rugs, finally putting on all the new bedding, deciding on paint colors, and SWIMMING EVERDAY... in my own pool. For real, first thing on my list is to buy me one of those mesh pool rafts. Have you all used those bad boys before? Straight heaven in a pool.

Anyways, I'm off to try to get some sleep. Even though my computer says it's only 9:27. Glad to see I'm not the only one slow to jump on this whole Texan bandwagon thing.