Seven years of blogging; or, have I really been doing this since 2007?

WordPress’s anniversary award

After more than a month of not posting (thank you to Tessa, daughter who even at 7,457 kilometres distance can still get me to do what I’m supposed to be doing but are not) I got a little award thingy in my blog mail—see above.

I am, I stress really am, working on my fatigue by sitting with it in guided meditation, and slippery brain, and self-massage with skin care and compression garments, and lymphatic openings and exercise. I know I said I would post more often, but I am exhausted, and I honestly don’t have anything interesting to say. Sorry Tessa.

So, for this post, which WordPress marks as an anniversary, I’m going to re-post my first entry to this blog. It had a far larger audience than I now have, because I was the Mom Blogger for Canadian Living magazine then, and eyes were reading from across the country. In this post I introduced myself to them:

 

Mom blog: All about Jacquelyn, the mom blogger

Posted on September 21, 2007 by itsbecauseisaidso

 

Hello. If you are reading this, you are the witness to the very first words of Canadianliving.com’s Mommy blogger. I am thrilled to be here – winning the reader poll to become the Mommy blogger is on my Top Ten List of Achievements, along with giving birth to my three incredible children, beating back my son’s leukemia, being nominated for a National Magazine Award, hanging on to a marriage for 19 years, quitting smoking, and the rest are state secrets.

THE REMAINING ITEMS ON MY TOP TEN LIST OF ACHIEVEMENTS
One thing you’ll learn about me is a secret is a secret. And a state secret is even more sacred. Don’t ask me how old I am.

LET ME INTRODUCE MYSELF

I am a mom (I prefer mum – my kids call me “Mummy” not “Mommy”) (when they’re not calling me Goofy-Head, or Boss, or Mummy-Dearest, or Slave-Girl-Mummy – this is only allowed from my six year old). I have three kids whom I am currently in negotiations with regarding their privacy, the parameters of their exposure in my blog, any possible compensation – this is where I start laughing hysterically and negotiations predictably break down. The cat, Angel, who is nothing like her name, lives here, as does Nibbles the hamster.

NIBBLES, OR SHOULD I SAY NIBBLED??
When things were getting very stressful in our home a couple of years ago, the kids thought it would be good to get a hamster. They actually thought it would be way better to get a dog, but I’m not that crazy. I was crazy enough to be talked into not one hamster, not two, not three, you get the idea. We had six hamsters at the height of our love-in, in five cages. We were told that sisters could live together in the same cage. Miss Jellybean and Princess Lou Lou shared a cage for quite a while, until one day we thought Jellybean had escaped. But how could she escape when the door was near impossible for us humans to open? Realization dawned ugly when we spied a wee half-square-inch of Jellybean-coloured fur. Hamstericide!

THIS IS TAKING A CREEEEEPY TURN
Suffice to say, Jellybeans’s piece of fur was carefully wrapped and boxed and shrink-wrapped and triple Ziploc-bagged and put in the freezer alongside Hammy Yu-Gi-Oh, Crazy Connie, Victor and Ooch, to wait for the spring thaw for appropriate internment. We got a few more hamsters, among them Nibbles and Bunny. Sisters. Did we put them in the same cage?DID WE PUT THEM IN THE SAME CAGE????
Read my next blog to find out.

Illustration courtesy of Juli Waller at www.grrrdesign.blogspot.com.

You can go here too: https://itsbecauseisaidso.wordpress.com/2007/09/21/canadian-livings-mom-blog/

 

Now, I will aim for an original post in less than a week. Promise. 😉

It’s my mum’s birthday today!

Happy Birthday to the most Internet-savvy, Macbook-toting mother, wife, grandmother, potter, meteorologist, doctor, advisor, nutritionist, caregiver and animal-lover in the world!

Thank you to Cecelia for such a perfect image! http://craftingcreatures.wordpress.com/2007/09/24/happy-birthday-mom

My workplace sends a gift!

When Luka came home from school yesterday, he carried in a huge box (he has a backpack: I do not send him to school with his stuff in a box). It was a plain brown box, making me wonder instantly if someone at this address had ordered something dirty super-private and too big for a padded envelope. Cool!

It turned out to be far more thoughtful and useful than that stupid blow-up Ron Burgundy doll—a gift basket from my office!!!

(While I am playing catch-up to present day with the C ride, doing backfill with content, I’ve been saving the little medical updates that I’m not convinced friends and family actually want to know about. If you don’t want to know, skip this italic section. Even I cannot believe that I already have mouthsores from the chemo—feels like the knife-in-the-throat sensation of untreated strep throat, only over the surface of the inside of my mouth, making toast, bread, crackers, cooked edges of meat, fish, roasted vegetables, rice, blah, blah, blah, torture to eat. I’m doing the warm salt rinses and will move to prescription rinse today, BUT the fact some genius at the office actually chose soup as the theme of this basket is either all-knowing, prescient or very, very lucky.)

Now that the photo is taken, I will dismantle and post a “haul video,” usually teenage to twenty something girls ripping open bags from Victoria’s Secret or H&M or MAC or Forever 21 to inventory their goodies, go to to YouTube, there are thousands. Mine will be a look at the gift basket under the cellophane. And until I can figure out how to bluetooth a video off my phone, you will have to wait in suspense to see the contents of my basket and my in-between pixie cut.

Thank you very, very much to all my friends and colleagues at CAMH, supportive as I discovered this crappy situation, and from e-mails and this gift, supportive still! Thank you, thank you.

A soup-themed gift basket custom-made for someone with mouth sores: how could they have known???

300th post!

I just posted the previous entry, and when I did, this announcement bounced over to me—I just published my 300th blog posting.

Even I am impressed. 

I started this blog after winning a competition to write the Mom Blog for Canadian Living magazine, still one of my all-time favourite Canadian lifestyle magazines, and I admit that I’ve grown too busy/lazy/tired/scattered/otherwise occupied since then to actually keep up a blog that was interesting enough to engage followers.

Recent events have brought me back to thinking about blogging, so over the next while I’ll be doing some thinking and writing to see if a blog is a good fit for what’s going on now. I’ll let you know how it goes.