So, because this blog is in honor of my daughter, fellow moms and future moms, I need to start at the beginning with some storytelling. This background stuff has to be done. Maybe Bea will read this in 25 years and see how much we went through to have her. Maybe she’ll feel the wee-est bit guilty and instead of putting us in the cheap old folks home, her guilty conscience will get us into the Ritz Carlton for old people. See me? Always thinking.
How did I come up with the name of this blog? Well, I have become fond of several mantras in life: Dance like no one is watching, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, always walk home in groups, etc. But I really caught onto the “Live, Laugh, Love” thing after Bob and I were married. Is that copyrighted, I wonder? I mean, its three words put together, it’s not even a grammatically correct sentence, so I don’t know if anyone can actually take credit for writing that. Its more of an arrangement, and not so much a phrase. I should look into that. Anyway, whatever it is, it seems to have gained popularity and I see it a lot on mugs, kitchen towels and the like.
So, never really being able to find the simple words to sum up what I stand for (brevity is not a strong point… apologies in advance), I felt this one summed up my feelings on life. Live life to the fullest, laugh hard and often, and love unabashedly.
When dear Beatrice came along, these verbs were amplified times a thousand, but my view on life also got shifted just a bit. After a rough start (much more on that later), I quickly adapted a new attitude that was necessary to survive with most of my sanity in tact. I had to inject humor into my every day life, because in the end, what’s the point of all this if we haven’t laughed and shared good times?
For those that know me, you know I’m fairly baseline uptight. I am anal-retentive, orderly and organized. So having a baby, as you can imagine, threw my world upside down. “Going with the flow,” was hardly in my vocabulary. I suppose I could have tried to fight the forces, but I was given some great advice: “Embrace the chaos.” Easier said than done (much more on THAT later), but I somehow came out the other side of this a much more relaxed person. We can’t control the crazy things that come with having a child. We can’t have the same life we used to. So, we adapt. I used to be the person that stayed late at work and agonized over work-related stuff even on the weekends. After having Bea, it put things in perspective. I can’t possibly get stressed out at work now, because I see how there are so many more important things in life. Work is just work. And if we get some poop stains on something, we just have to clean it up the best we can.
So, I settled on that for the title of my blog. Live, Poop, Laugh, Love. Poop represents the child in my life, but also all the dirty, yucky, gross things that go along with having a child, and the crap a mother goes through in general. Poop can also stand for the crap in life that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, that, hopefully with the right attitude, we can look at with humor. We all have Poop, I guess is my point. The figurative and the literal.
My little darling (who I think may be lactose intolerant and is now having no fewer than 6 tantrums a day), is sleeping soundly, and its a school night, so I’ll have to go leave it at that for now. Next up…. the fertility journey!!! 😀
Live Poop Laugh Love 