The Pagan Mom Blog

I know I haven’t blogged in awhile on Saturdays but here I am. I totally OWE everyone the opprotunity to check out todays special blog. Cattails.me: The crazy stops here…every fifteen minutes is one I hold dear to my heart. Slight disclosure, I totally hang with the author of the blog. So call me biased if you must but seriously she writes with such raw passion that I am left with jaw wide open and wishing I was only 10% as eloquent as her. Sometimes I am left with a serious stitch in my side from laughing really hard, other times I am reaching for the tissues, and yet others I am nodding my head yelling “I get you sista!” So please, check her out. You won’t regret it!

How is the weather by you??? It began to snow here yesterday around 3-ish. At 5:30 it looked like this:

It’s dark right now (5:50 am) so I can’t see much to see if we accumulated more overnight like the were calling. I also need to check weather channel again, last night they were saying it was going to snow all day long today.

So I am snowed in and not too interested in going anywhere. Perfect day to catch up on my blog reading. And since it’s Saturday it’s time for me to share with you the Blog Of The Week! I wish I had theme music for that slight announcement, lol.

Bringing Up Salamanders is so amazingly wonderful! I first met her on another blog when we consistently kept showing up in the comments and then responding to each other in the comments. Before you knew it we were visiting each other often. My fave thing about her is that she is in another country. This means she is on a different calendar than the pagans in the US. It’s a nice reminder of what else is out there. And her blogging about her son is simply adorable. Sometimes i just want to fly on down to Brazil and hug him to death. He is such a sweetie! Nadia has this vibrancy about her that I am so jealous of. Even when times are hard she has this life force that is so strong and remains positive. So if you need a new pagan blog to read or you want to see another slice of life, hit up her blog. You won’t regret it!

I have decided that today’s post will feature no bitching, crying or moaning. May be a short post but I am sticking by that lol!

First my girls got more college invites yesterday. This program is called Super Saturdays and is offered at University North Carolina – Asheville. All kids enrolled in the gifted program in the city schools get the invites. They get to choose a class to take and every Saturday for 6 weeks and I take them over for that class. Last time Molly did Physics. This time they aren’t aiming as high. Molly wants to take a cartooning course where they learn animation. Claire is opting for a sculpting course. This is Claire’s first year being in the gifted program and oh my is she so excited. Molly has been mean and told her she isn’t smart like Molly. While that is sort of true, Molly made it sound like poor Claire isn’t smart. The reality is, they are smart in seperate ways so I am really glad she is in the program holding her own. Anywho this program is $69 per class. We e-filed and got our bank loan yesterday so I am paying off a bunch of my own personal debt today. I should be able to pay for their classes next week. They don’t start until April or May I think.

Work has gotten busy. It amazes me how it almost seems like overnight when this happens. One week I am struggling to find anything to do and then BAM I am struggling to find 2 minutes just to pee. But this is good. I should be making lots of money and stowing some away for a rainy day. I have decided anything over my normal weekly pay (from the last few months) will go into the bank between the joint and personal accounts. That way I am contributing to both household bills and stocking up.

With the rise of work comes the lack of internet time. Since I still get up at 5 am I have an hour and a half before kids are up to spend on email and blogging. So the blog shouldn’t be affected but I might decide to stay in bed on occasion and skip out being online all together. If you follow me on twitter, I probably will respond to @replies during the work day (if I see them) but I really won’t tweet until I get home in the evening and after the kids have their computer time after dinner.

I am also currently working on a local commentary about our transit system. This will be published at Associated Content. I got in a bit of a tiff yesterday on Twitter with our transit system. I won’t go into detail but I think that they just absolutely ignore the needs of citizens and whoever I talked to doesn’t use transit to understand. Plus I was in ’super bitchy overload’ yesterday and they got a real nasty side of me.   A bit unfair and I am feeling better today so it will be time for me to be objective and maybe get them to understand what I was saying. We  shall see.

So that is all I got going on here at the moment that won’t reduce me to tears. Check back tomorrow for my Twitter Five!

This week’s Blog Of The Week is Bex’s Hexes. I love her blog. In alot of ways it reminds me of my own. She features her witchy side along with her normal everyday side. In addition to her blog at Bex’s Hexes, she writes at four other sites. On top of that she does podcasts. I thought I was busy but I think she puts me to shame!

P.S. I know I haven’t left any comments to the blogs that I read as of lately, but I am reading. I really wanted you all to know that!

I figured I shouldn’t leave you all hanging after a particularly dismal blog post last week. It wouldn’t be fair to make anyone wonder if that was the bipolar in me coming out or if I was dead serious. I am going to say that it was a bit of both. When I say that I mean that the intensity of how I felt was tripled. I spent several days crying and wondering what the hell I was going to do. I am dead serious about leaving. I just don’t want to leave unprepared. My usual reaction would be to spontaneously just leave. But I reacted that way when I didn’t have children. I need to make sure I do this so that they are cared for. So I decided to take baby steps. Whenever I sit here and think about what all I have to do in order to leave I get overwhelmed and very panicked that I can’t do it. I am consciously making an effort to not think about it. Yesterday when I got paid I went to the bank to take care of several things. I lost my debit card sometime Friday and spent the weekend looking for it. I went ahead and reported it lost and checked to see if it had been used over weekend (nope!). Then I got a new bank id card (I go to credit union  and I love having that card, makes me feel safe). I had already decided to open a savings account. The original purpose was to put money in it for my trip to Egypt. At last minute I decided to set up my own checking account as well. I never felt so free in the last several years as I did in that moment. I had empowerment, I embraced it, and I loved it. My only mistake was that I did all of this at the branch my sister in law manages. I didn’t think about that at all, I am just used to going to that branch. As I ran on an errand to a client in the county I realized I probably should have done it at one of those locations instead of the one by the office. But I blew it off. When I got back to the office, the sister in law’s car was out front and I was parking in the back. By the time I got a bunch of stuff out of the car and got up there she was gone. Perhaps it was another reason for her being there, it is tax time after all. But I couldn’t help but wonder if she was telling Mr. P about me opening my own accounts. And of course I thought that because I was being sneaky. I know at some point he will know and that’s ok. I just really needed that moment.

What I haven’t done is talk to him. The biggest reason is that he is so non-confrontational that I would have to bring it up. He would get defensive and then the finger pointing will start. It always happens this way. I figure that this time he needs to really step up and fight for me if he really loves me. He knows that there is an issue since I rarely say anything to him throughout the day. The only time I talk to him is at our office and that is because my job will require it of me. So yea, he knows we have a major problem. And knowing him he will blame it on my menstrual cycle instead of realizing this problem isn’t all in my head.

I have one other problem. At Christmas time he kept telling me he didn’t know what to get me. So I literally sat with an order catalog and tried to hint at what type of things I like. Seriously, I am not hard to shop for. Crafty stuff, horror movies, books, canning supplies, etc etc. I got so frustrated with him that I ended up having to pick something out for myself just because he was being so difficult. This something was on back order and will be arriving in the next week. It’s some pendant that has some crappy romantic wording. I don’t want this shit now. What am I supposed to do? I really was hoping that we could deal with shit maybe AFTER tax time but ugh…..I dunno.

Anyhow. I am not sure if I am handling anything the “right way”. I don’t know what to do. I am taking it day by day and seeing what opportunities pop up. After tax season I will think of what major next step I will take and go from there. I may move out this year or maybe next. Regardless, it will happen.

So for those of you who don’t know, I love tea. Not a coffee drink, nope. I am a tea drinker. Not one of those dainty women with a frilly pink roses teacup either (no offense to those women who are). Anyhow today I thought I would talk about my favorite teas. I was inspired by a blog I found through a tea group on Ravelry, the blog is Hot Tea Month. I had no idea January was tea month but it is. And each week the blog is hosting a challenge for us tea lovers to blog about various tea topics. This week it is our favorite teas.

I started out drinking black tea as a child. It’s still a standby favorite but I really adore herbal teas much more. I have two that I really cannot say that one is my more favorite than the other. I like to start out my day with some mint tea (peppermint, spearmint, any kind of mint!). I always feel like it really helps wake me up. I also really really love lemon and I use that for a pick me up during the day. You know how people call orange juice “liquid sunshine”? Yea, that’s what lemon tea is to me. Once in awhile I venture outside of my norm. When I am sick I like to drink green tea with lemon balm. Lemon balm really helps me to relax and drift off to sleep. And with colds it can break up mucus. Now if I am just in the mood for a new flavor I will do Orange Spice. Sometimes I break out some Earl Grey, English Breakfast, or Chamomile. Sometimes I think I need to be more health conscious with my teas and when that strikes I add green tea to whatever I am drinking. I just cannot do green tea on it’s own, tastes too muc like grass or bushes or something. I am often asked how do I take my tea, cream and 2 sugars? No. When I would sit with my Nana and drink my hot cup of Lipton tea in the morning I always had sugar and Coffeemate. It’s what she had in her coffee and I wanted to be just like her so yea that’s what I did. But when I got introduced to the world of herbal teas in my teens (yes, amongst drug addicts I was introduced to herbal tea LOL) I didn’t need anything in it. It felt like if I added anything I would be destroying the tea. Then a few years ago when I first did South Beach Diet, I started drinking my iced tea (yea I drink LOTS of tea) without sugars or any substitutes.  Now none of my tea has additives. That’s me being hardcore lol.

So…do you like tea? What is your favorite tea?

So I got an email that let me know that the captcha I was using was not working properly and therefore not allowing comments to get through. WHEW! I was starting to think my posts were boring lol! Anyhow I have gotten rid of that program and installed Akismet in hopes of making commenting easier and keep the spammers out. Anytime you all have a problem here at the site please email me and let me know!

I haven’t really gotten into doing some New Year’s Resolutions before but  I am going to kinda do some this year. Sort of like “Resolutions that won’t really kill me if I don’t do them”.I think I did something similar last year. Anywho I am definetly not going the route of “lose 40 lbs by my birthday” or “get rid of credit debt”. No, cause most people make those kinds of resolutions and only manage to do it for a month. No I am looking at some minor small changes that really won’t matter if I don’t complete and won’t crush my heart with failure. So here we go:

1. I think I am going to come up with themed days here at the blog. I have been struggling with topics to talk about. Fortunatley the holidays provided for a lot but then what? Yea, I need some more motivation. So I am thinking maybe once a week I show off whatever crafty thing I am doing. Another day I might do “Blog Love” where I share with you a blog I frequent. I still need to work out how I will break up the week, I don’t want to do Wordless Wednesday like so many do. Yea, I want some originality.

2. Organize my craft stuff and actually set a schedule for what I am going to make and when it must be done by. Seems like I get way in over my head and all of a sudden I need something done by last minute because I haven’t gotten to it because my  10″ dinner plate cannot hold a 50lb turkey. This will also keep me from overbuying craft supplies that I end up not using. Maybe I need to break this up by each day also? Maybe jewelry on monday, knitting on tuesday, sewing on wednesday…etc etc.

3. Use my calendar extensively. My husband doesn’t get this but he isn’t bipolar either. I literally thrive much better and get more done when I sit down each night and plan out each day. Matter of fact, most times I get more “me” time because I put everything in 30 min or more increments and something might only take me 10 min. I need structure and my calendar gives it to me. I might just die if I ever lose my phone.

On Ravelry there is a thread where we made resolutions in regards to our yarn habits. Mine are:

1. I think I need to organize my knitting better. As of right now I have twelve projects set up for next year and I am not allowed to add anymore until I complete something. Then I only can add one project to replace the one I finished.

2. I also need to organize my stash and needles better so I am going to spend the next few months gathering up some clear storage totes to put my stash in and keep it all in ONE place lol!

3. I am going to start knitting with more eco friendly yarns. But first I have to use up the stash I have.

So far I have stuck to the first resolution. As soon as I got the last scarf done the other day I jumped on my first project (baby bibs) for the month of January. When I started that project I added one to replace it. Then I discovered that those were easy knitups (got 2 done in a day and a half) and started my February project and added another in it’s place. So I still have 12 projects lined up while working on my current one. Also I have sorta stuck with #3. I haven’t bought any yarn but rooted through my stash and used what I had. Which is good because I finished off some yarn.

Also on the knitting front, Santa brought the girls some knitting books that have patterns for them to try out. Molly hasn’t taken to it but Claire has. She is going to start her very first project today. And she chose a pattern to make a sweater vest for her Christmas Bear (which is just a plain bear with a red bow around it’s neck). I am also going to have her go through my yarn and pick one out instead of taking her to the store. She really wants to buy her own and I have to remind her that eventually she will. It thrills me that she is becoming a yarnie!

So plans for today: work until noon then head out to the inlaws farm. Not much into New Year’s Eve so I will probably be asleep my usual time of 9 or 10 lol.

So in my everlasting battle to have an organized day, I am doing something new. I got one of them smartphones (an Omnia) and I basically sat down for 15 min last night and mapped out my entire day for today. And I stuck by it. Not only was I productive but I got done things early and had some downtime to just relax. This blog post is the last thing I am doing for this evening. I actually will publish this in the morning. Anywho I have been on a bloggy roll. I got a long overdue  article for Modern Pagan drafted and I submitted my very first article to Associated Content. As soon as I am done writing this I am mapping out my day for tomorrow. Including more writing. Associated Content has me excited. Not only is there some small cash making to be had, I can opt for assignments or come up with my own topics. I am doing what I love in my spare time. Just an hour a day and I can have something cranked out. At the same time, I am nervous. What if my content isn’t as good as I think it is? I haven’t had to submit anything written in a long time and I am not sure how to handle the criticism. Oh well, I am sure that this is just “first time, possible paid publishing” nerves.

In the meantime, I am going to keep on trying to be productive and look around me for inspiration.

I don’t know if you have heard of this blog but 2 Witches Blog is pretty cool. For any newbie they have a wealth of info on witchcraft, paganism, and Wicca. For parents they have lots of info on pagan parenting. And  they even include some links to activities for kids and info on raising kids withing paganism. I plan on returning often to read up on their info and get some activities for my own so they can learn more about my celebrations and why.

Also right now they are doing an awesome giveaway featuring a witches calendar for 2010. I highly recommend you head on over and check them out!