Kid Pix - July 2011

Love how these turned out! www.breezee-bluebird.com

September

Is by far the best month of all the months. Really. It's beautiful. We can sit outside and go on walks and be the perfect temperature. It's the beginning of fall, which is my other new favorite. Just this past year I realized how awesome fall was. Where have I been for the past fourteen years? Utah truly is beautiful right now.

Why else we love fall: peaches. I refuse to can peaches this year. Why should I when my mother-in-law has 200 jars in her basement free for the taking? We have a beautiful tree that produced buckets of deliciousness. We ate fresh peaches by the loads. Plain or with cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, and milk. I made peach pie, peach tort, peach tart, peach ice-cream and now I'm thinking peach crisp and peach shakes. Yum.

Then there's the back-to-school part, which speaks to my teacher side. I have zero regrets about not sending Gavin to preschool. There were two days there, right at the beginning of the year, when I doubted myself. But now I'm convinced and holding strong that this was the right thing for us. We have been loving story and music time at the library. It gives us enough of an out and Gavin loves it.

I'm just hanging on to every day that is beautiful as this. Glad to not be sweating and walking around in a swimsuit (yuck) and glad to not be snowed in yet. I am trying hard not be getting nervous so soon about the snow.

Technology

I have a little beef with the world these days. It's technology. The reason I am writing this is to remind myself that life without computers, phones, and Facebook is possible and actually quite fulfilling. (Just in case someday I am persuaded to turn into that person who is texting and apping and whatever else it is people are doing on their phones 24/7). I feel like I'm single-handedly trying to stop the world from evolving and it's just not working.

It was nice to open my Parenting magazine and read an article that supported everything that I believe. Like this:

Our collective whatever-ness about technology has become a smidge scary. Roughly one in five adults admits to poor mobile etiquette but continues the behavior because everyone else is doing it. It's time to rediscover undivided attention, eye contact, stillness, the nothings that happen between the somethings.

I love that! I totally agree - so many people are not looking at each other or even talking to each other because they are so busy staring at their phones. We have more than once walked into a restaurant and seen a couple sitting side by side working their phones. I don't know why I care what they are doing, but it irks me. Brian and I had a long conversation and wondered what we can do to stay focused on human beings and how we are going to raise kids in a time like this. We always have said no kid of ours is going to have a cell phone, but I am beginning to wonder. I'm the one who forgets my phone half the time. And I still take our phone off the hook every day. Am I the only one who doesn't want people to find me at a moment's notice?

Last week, after reading this, I took a week long break from Facebook. It was not a bad thing. I love FB for the networking part - and less for the I-need-to-know-what-my-2nd-grade-best-friend-is-doing-this-minute kind of thing. It's love/hate, I guess.

The article also talked about stay-at-home-moms who need some social outlet. Someone to talk to. I think that's me. I have a few favorite blogs that I love to read and somehow that makes me feel more connected or that I'm not doing this mom-thing all on my own. But then just today one of my favorite blogs wrote about the need to sometimes be bored here at home. That's just how it's going to be. And I think I'm starting to get it. For me, it's the need to not be plugged in all the time.

This is a whole bunch of randomness about nothing, but that's all I've got right now.