This could be the last alone moment to myself where it’s just you and me in my body. Where I wonder how could you actually be in there and how you can actually get out. I feel a full awake human body moving all parts. I feel a head moving in my pelvis and knocking against my tail bone. I feel feet in my ribs and hands in my hips. I feel an elbow in an organ. It’s incredible. Looking forward to holding you on the outside but will always remember holding you on the inside.
Author: ksnapp
My home and heart is all over, mostly dreaming about far away places and working on being present constantly. No real topic flow here, just a random fleeting thought, letters to people they may never get, poetry if I’m feeling brave. Coffee- Babies- Whisky- Sunshine❤️
Note to self
List of things not to say to your partner moments before she goes into labor:
“Why are you being so nasty?”
List of things to do once baby is out:
Drink as much alcohol as everyone else does in front of you for a whole year while you feel “nasty”.
The End
Noahs Birth Part 1
Writing this here so its saved in a somewhat secret space, so I don’t loose it, so I continue writing it. Its only taken my 5 years.
My dearest sweet boy. You made me a momma. I always want you to call me that even as an old lady. I hope you always know how much I love you and I swear I am trying my hardest everyday to be the best I can be for you. Some days I feel completely worthless to you. I feel I’m a horrible mother and that my dreams of what I would be as a mother gets caught up in the chores of keeping up with our home and also making everyone happy. I look at you and you make my heart full.
You are 4 and a half right now. Your sister is just over a year and I just found out I’m pregnant with your next sibling. I am feeling all kinds of feelings in every direction. When I was pregnant with Isla I didn’t know how I would love her as much as I love you. Turns out it doesn’t work that way. Love is all encompassing and just expands. It isn’t necessarily shared or divided. I have my own separate love for you and I will love and support you until long after I leave this world.
I wanted you long before I had you. It took a long time for you to be real. I saw an acupuncturist 5 times in one month to help you along. It worked. Your dad was at work when I found out and I wanted to tell him in a special way. I wrote out a story with stick figure pictures on about 20 post it notes describing our life and love and at the end there was a pregnant stick figure me (haha).I put it up on the wall and took a video of each post it, pausing a moment at each one so he could read it. He read it out loud to me several times because he didn’t get it at first. He was so excited. We all cried when we found out you were a boy. We were so happy. I knew your name right away, although it took a while for your dad to get on board. Two days after you were born he said it just seemed to fit.
I remember my whole pregnancy with you. You were so easy, I thought you were going to be this quite calm being. I had no real complaints and I worked throughout my whole pregnancy taking care of elderly people with dementia. We lived in Maryland at the time, in a very small apartment surrounded by a lot of trees. We moved into a bigger condo when I was 7 months pregnant with you. Your dad was on the ship so uncle Stephen and his friends helped. I was ripping out carpet and painting and trying to get our new home perfect for us all to live in together. Everyone kept asking if I had the “nursery” ready. I didn’t do any of that. Somehow I knew you would sleep with us and it turns out you needed that more then anything the first year.
Your due date was October 17, 2014. I didn’t feel any real contractions with you. You were perfectly happy in my womb and you wore born October 30th at 11am. The doctors kept trying to induce me, but I refused until the last possible moment including the latest time of day. They told me If i didn’t agree to be induced at that point they couldn’t admit me. OK FINE, you could come out. I was happy that you were happy and I was enjoying it being just you and me for a few weeks longer then expected. Nona came out on the 18th to be there for your birth. She waited the 2 weeks for you to be born. I told your dad and Nona to leave the house one day and I turned up the music really loud and tried to dance you out. To this day you love having dance parties!
I was induced on the morning of the 30th and I had the hardest fastest labor I thought was capable. I hated the induction. I was hooked up to tubes and wires and I couldn’t sit still. When it was time for me to push I remember I couldn’t breath and I was focusing so hard on just breathing. I didn’t open my eyes the whole time. I didn’t make a sound (your sister is another story). The nurse handed you to me and as you were being carried over my body to my arms you pooped all over me. I held you shaking and crying. Someone fed me a turkey sandwich. You were perfect. You weighed 7lbs and were really long. I couldn’t sleep, I just had to stare at you. Every eye flutter and noise. Nothing in the world mattered and I was lost. Your dad held you and cried, everyone did. You were, and are, amazing.
Milk Dreams
Lost in the jungle
Deep
Pouring from the sky
Rain
Alone in the sea
Green and blue
Distracted in every foreign city I’ve never been to
Listen
I am here milk flowing
Hands grabbing
There
Where my mind goes
Free
Returning to duty
Love
Teaching me concentration
Time
A tunnel of black
Unsure of distance
Continue
Soon to be looking back
Stay
Break
Build
Crumble
Repair
Try harder
Build again
Again
Again
Again
Sand
Warms my cold dutiful
Feet
All grown up
Shedding a few tears realizing I’m more grown up then I realized I was. And more alone then ever without one blasting minute to myself. I’m sure this has been written before. Where is that woman? My mother 30 years ago? She hasn’t forgotten, how could you? She has moved on, kind of. Want to have a glass of scotch with that woman, any woman at this point. We are all so hard core and bad ass and no one will ever really know it but us. Make sense? No fucking one, but us.
Remembering when I was 23 acting like I was 30 now just wanting to act 23 but be 30. Nope.
Drop mic.
My life is a Sundance film
Yours probably is too. You do theses things, however normal they seem to you, and while you do them, you narrate the scene like you are watching it from a completely different life.
You don’t have to not love the life you have to dream of new ones. There are no rules here.
As I drive through dense fog of Northwest winter to the “farm school” where my sweet, always perfect 4 year old goes for 4 hours most days (do teachers and kids have to be there too? HAH!), I find myself slamming on my breaks for the same old yellow light because I was day dreaming about the small winding streets of Italy or many places I have yet to visit where I can’t understand a damn fucking thing and I don’t have to worry about the weight of life in chores when I go home. When I go to bed at night and my feet ache from wandering aimlessly and thinking “I should hand wash this shirt so it looks better by tomorrow” instead of hurting from the 3000 wood stairs I have st home where I run up and down doing who the fuck knows all day. First world problems. It’s a hashtag I know.
Back to Sundance. I narrate. And sometimes I am totally hilarious. But I am worried I’m the kind of hilarious where you try and break the silence at the grocery store by saying something to connect and the checker looks at you(Beep. Silence. Beep. Silence) and you look at them like “ok then” and maybe say something in a British accent as you walk out of the store with your random collection of items.
The person watching this whole exchange is blissfully spacing out in the comfort of wherever they are doing life however they do it.
*not sure what I was trying to write here, but I was waiting for my tea water to boil and thought I would put it down into words that don’t much make sense. And I thought all my fans would possibly get a kick out of it. You know who you are. Too tired to drink the tea I made.
Until next Sundance moment..:
Boobs
Me, a 3 year old, a 7 month old, and a 13 year old dog. Sometimes (now) I’m fully dressed (in pajamas) at 11:15am, with both my boobs out, my stomach several inches in front of me(still skinnier then most people in general), walking around cry nursing the baby through a bad teething moment. This is real life. I have company now, so naturally I thankfully just had sparkling rosé (not real life but it sure feels good at the moment).
#growingteeth #breastfeeding #fml
Trying to live in the moment
Adult Birthdays
Adult birthdays are just days. Days that remind you that you once where a child and you knew nothing of the weight of the world and just knew of the solar system. Days where you wondered “what’s for dinner?”, then you just ate. Days where cake had no calories and you didn’t know how much wine was too much for a day after head throb.
Birthdays are just days we feel all the feels for all the reasons while at the same time burying all the feels until the day is over and you can feel “I made it”.
Happy adult birthday.
Enjoy that cake.
Morbid
It’s 9:30 PM on a Sunday.
My kids are in bed and I am standing at the far window across the room looking around wondering if I should run around and clean up the house just in case.
Should I grab some trash bags and throw out all the miscellaneous things that we tend to think we need in life?
If I died tonight (hopefully someone would know to check in on me and get the kids), they would walk in and they would see my dog probably frantic by the door but the locked from the rest of of the house by a window screen.
The kitchen would have pasta sauce on it- amazingly I made three meals today. The couch cushions are in disarray, some on the floor from the toddler sporadically throwing them off, the kids table has crumbs all over it just because ‘why wipe it off if I can do it in the morning after breakfast?’
Walk up the stairs and there’s laundry literally on the stairs, I don’t really know if it’s clean or dirty so I just left it there and I will decide tomorrow. The kids room has clean laundry piled high on the bed.
There’s an old toilet seat sitting outside the bathroom door because it took me three hours with a fussy baby to put a new toilet seat on the second floor bathroom toilet. There are matchbox cars, books, laundry mats sitting right outside the laundry basket in the stairway.
Down the hall is the guestroom where somehow I have also made it a place where the baby naps during the day. There’s a bag of diapers opened on the guest bed along with my mom’s clothes that she left here that I’m going to put away. There’s a clean sheet then I’m going to put on the pack and play mattress on the floor. There’s a pacifier in the pack and play and maybe some socks that the baby kicked off.
Our passports are on the file cabinet at the end of the hallway right in front of the printer. I passed them maybe 40 times today and I just haven’t gotten around to putting them back in the file cabinet. I had the thought “what if I need to flee the country really quick? I need to keep them in a place where I can grab them”. Yes… I actually thought that for what seems to be no reason at all.
At the stairs in the master bedroom we have the nicest furniture. It’s covered with laundry, toys, the bed wasn’t made all day, my water bladder is hanging off my side of the bed along with all the shit on my nightstand… My breast pump and all of its parts, nasal spray and a snot sucker for my baby, A book and a cup of tea. My nightstand looks like I am not expecting anyone to look at it anytime soon.
My bathroom has three different types of toothpaste on it, more breast pump parts, a teapot, random essential oil’s and vitamins, candles, and bra inserts (the bra itself is hanging on the door knob).
Pretty sure there’s a day worth of toddler urine in the toilet…
The baby monitor nearby, and mirror I haven’t hung up yet, and a bathtub full of toys. Not to mention if you opened any drawers what you might think of me. I have all the tools to be organized and I always have been until now.
Instead of wrapping all of this up today like someone with OCD or Martha Stewart definitely would, I decided to actually watch a movie. It took me all day to watch it because I could only sit down to watch it for maybe 15 to 20 minutes at a time but I was determined to get through the whole thing.
And instead of doing anything about everything I just wrote I decided to write about it instead to try to break this cycle of my creative silence.
So if I die tonight, God bless the sucker who has to clean up my mess. (I rewrote this last line 3 times. The first time it was way more crude but just in case it someone I actually really love it would be a bummer that I actually called them that and I wasn’t alive to tell them it was a joke).
Not sure why am really feeling this tonight. But it got me to write it down.
Here’s to many more days alive and to many more blog posts that are much more interesting!
Goodnight messy house, goodnight dog, goodnight kids, goodnight moon, goodnight laundry all over.
I read a book.
One year later, I’m finishing a book. I’ve watched many Netflix episodes. I have had no time for reading. But to be honest, I haven’t really. Every book I’ve read has been for a much younger reader. And I’m usually doing voices. But people… If you haven’t read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, DO IT. Men and women. It was actually my brother in laws brother in law who told me about it years ago. And since a cute man told me I needed to read a book the title stuck in my mind. When a friend gave it to me to borrow a year ago, I was thrilled. I had no idea having a baby then toddler would push me off the edge of society and make me illiterate. I feel accomplished and wonderful. Also, the last half, couldn’t put it down y’all.
coffeebabieswhiskeysunshine 