kiwords

Oh, hi. Sorry I've been so gone here. Suddenly it's been over a week, just like that - POOF! - it's gone, and I haven't blogged even once. In that week we drove back to pick up my suddenly huge eldest son, and drove home, and dove head-first into a week of VBS, and Sophia learned to blow raspberries, and Tre turned 14 (!), and the boys had a piano recital (piano parents, back me up here - that alone was seven hours of forced labor, can I get an amen?), and all of this happened against the backdrop of baseball, the endless practice and games and my appreciation for the sport has officially gotten to the level that can best be described as white-hot hate.

Too much. I know for certain it's too much stuff in my life, and do you want to know HOW I know?

I'm having The Fantasy.

It's not "a fantasy" or even "the fantasy." It's The Fantasy. I'll be driving somewhere and stop at a red light, and the next thing I know, the light is green and the car behind me is honking like some madly maladjusted goose, because I am sitting there, lost in The Fantasy. Or I'll be chopping carrots for dinner, and I am lost in the images, a soft-focus slide show of the beauty that is The Fantasy, and I come to and discover I have reduced a perfectly respectable carrot into a pile of juicy orange shavings. Such is the power of The Fantasy.

Should I share it with you? It's rather personal...and sort of embarrassing...

Oh well, it would hardly be a blog without the personal and embarrassing, now would it? Fine then, it goes like this: *cue wavy lines and mystical music*

I have a pendant that I wear all the time. It's a heavy, ornately detailed golden locket. When people ask me about it, I smile enigmatically and shrug their questions away. Because only I can know the truth of the pendant. Every so often, when I'm all alone, I carefully click open my locket to reveal a gleaming mother-of-pearl button. All I have to do is sneak away, for just a moment, and press this button, and in an instant...everything stops.

The world goes instantly still, no wind, no traffic, no voices, no cars. Birds freeze and hang in midair, the dog barking incessantly two yards down stops mid-bark. The whole world has been put on pause, and the only moving thing is me. I take a deep breath, and curl up for a nap that will not be interrupted. When I awake (not a moment before I want to), I roll over and pick up the book that has been being  neglected beside my bed. I read and read and read, stopping only to pad out to the kitchen and gather snacks that I won't have to share.When I've finished the book, and not a moment before, I push out of bed, ready to engage in some sort of invigorating activity. I wander out to the yard, where I pull weeds for a while. The mosquitoes that dot the air around me, in suspended animation, can't bother me, and for once I don't feel like the weeds are growing faster than they can be pulled. When I'm done, with that happy sweaty soreness of satisfying achievement, I dump all the weeds in a bin, dust off my hands, and move back into the house...

It's at about this point that I snap to, suddenly aware that I'm fantasizing about SLEEPING. And DOING YARD WORK. Y'all, sometimes, in The Fantasy, I get caught up on laundry. I am not even kidding about that. It is PITIFUL.

So that's where I am, people. Running thither and yon, spinning plates and listening to my baby blow raspberries, and mentally escaping to a bright world where no one interrupts me while I...uh...weed the garden.

It just makes you proud to know me, doesn't it?