Living better? Challenge accepted

Did you know there's something called referring spam? I don't understand the whole of it, but from my experience so far it makes it look like you have a ton of pageviews when really NO ONE is looking at it. My ego burst when I realized that, no, it's very unlikely that so many people in Russia and Germany would give a shit what I'm writing about and all these "pageviews" I was suddenly getting were probably due to this random website that kept showing up as a traffic source.

Fuck you referring spam. Instead of 600-plus pageviews, I probably have something closer to like 300. I'm guessing. I hope it's more than that, but truly have no idea because there are rarely comments and I have a grand total of three public followers.

I'm done letting something as ridiculous as pageviews get me down, because that's exactly what happened. Considering my livelihood once came from a byline, I have a tendency to thrive on and feed off of the knowledge someone is reading what I write.

Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I feel better.

In search of positivity and space

I took a break — from here, from the gym, from feeling like a useful member of society.

In all honesty, I needed it. The morning after my last entry, I packed the kids in the car and took off for my parents house about two hours away. We only stayed a couple days, but it was enough to make me realize things weren't going as planned around here. I was truly beginning to feel overwhelmed again. If you've been keeping up with me and my stories, you know this feeling started a while ago and I've been trying to get back on track. Bad weather and bad attitudes (mine and Josie's, which has likely been caused by mine) have been blamed.

So has the furniture, the dog, the car, the money ... You get the picture.

I decided earlier this week to nip it in the bud. We've been talking about what we need to do to fix the house up and potentially sell it and that has put me in full on "show ready" homeowner mode. I sent an unused television stand home with my parents on a recent visit and then took the baker's rack down — we used it to hold bath towels and toiletries in the bathroom — and repurposed a basket already in the bathroom for the newly homeless towels.

My cesarean revisited

She's almost 3 years old and I still mourn my birth experience.

Every time I see or hear a friend or family member is being induced, I cringe. When an induction of a loved one fails, I weep inside because I know what that feels like. And when they're taken back for the ultimate sacrifice to meet their child, I pray ... that they heal quickly, are able to handle the pain and cope with the emotional turmoil many, like I, have encountered on the path to postpartum new mommy bliss.

Recently I linked a blog post from 2011 that a few of my friends had also linked to on Facebook. I tagged other c-section moms because I wanted them to know we all are courageous to have undergone major abdominal surgery to get our babies out. We are awesome because we risked everything to meet our children.

I didn't expect I would get so emotional after posting it and then reading their responses and what they wrote when relinking to the same blog post. Rarely do I open up in an open format to express, in part, a condensed version of my five-day hospital stay when Josephine was born. I often feel like the past should be just that; the past.

Crazy lady with a green thumb

Composter- 1, Gardener- 0

I was so excited about my new composter. Who am I kidding? I'm still excited despite having to shovel decomposing vegetable matter off the concrete slab we call a porch when the door flew open and popped off spewing the contents. I'm slightly surprised the neighbors didn't call over to ask what that smell was — because it was wretched.

So now the goal is going to be to move this mammoth tumbler from where it is to somewhere else once the weather breaks and the ground is a little less spongy.

My spring time "to do" list is slowly growing. As I write this, I can think of at least three things I want to be doing outside. First and foremost, playing with the kids. A close, very close, second is getting the garden tilled and expanded. Third, I want go crazy fixing the flower bed out front, but I'm not nearly as excited about that because I'm self conscious about people seeing my gardening tactics. They're fairly stealthy and not an exact science, and on occasion naughty words fly out of my face and I hear my older child repeating them later in the day. It's not a pretty sight.

Compost this! And that. And everything else.

Why, yes, I am sitting down with my feet up, drinking a mug of tea and kind of watching Camp Rock.

The house is a disaster and has been in a constant state of disarray for  nearly two weeks.

Tonight, I'm giving myself permission to not let it put me in a bad mood. The husband is off at some nerdy computer geek thing for the evening so it was me, my girls and the bad dog — she's been stripped of good dog status for the night because she stole food from the kids and then ate hard boiled eggs off my plate while I was away from the table during dinner.

After pissing and moaning about the dog and throwing a tantrum because the kids splashed half the bath water onto the floor, I said the hell with it. If I had any energy left, I would get off the couch and reward myself with a bottle of wine ... maybe even a glass to go with it. Maybe.

You see, I was productive for the first time in at least a week, and it feels good to sit down and really think about what I got done.