Change.. good Bowie songs

David Bowie is a strange dude.. but one of the best songs of all time was recorded by him in April of 1971 in London. It's one of those songs that you just crank to 11 and it makes the world's unknowns make sense.

Plus.. it was quoted in the movie The Breakfast Club in 1985 when I was about 11.. and I'm on a kick of 80's movies lately.. they all seem very deep.. maybe I'm just REALLY ready for my extended vacation.

From the Breakfast Club opening

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through...

Seriously.. download the song to your ipod and crank it on your car stereo with the windows open while stuck in traffic at rush hour and you'll get it.

So... I digress.. My blogging frequency has declined lately.. I've been busy. I keep wanting to write.. and need to find a way to write while doing other things.. easier said than done. Maybe I can hire someone to walk behind me and take notes.. or hey.. I've tried from the cell phone.. but it's too hard to keep a 3 year old from running into the street (his new hobby) and/or drive while blogging.. so you all will just have to wait until I have ten minutes in the evening after Benji is asleep and before I have crashed for the night.

In my last post, I made a mention of "How much change is too much change".. I suppose most of you assumed I was talking about the huge ass changes I have that are all obvious and right out in the open.. like leaving my career of 15 years to be a stay at home mom and all the upheaval that goes with that decision. To be honest.. I'm at peace with all of that. I've felt better in the past two weeks during brief periods between panic attacks than I have felt in years. The panic has started to decrease as I've wrapped more and more things up at work. The more that is no longer unknown makes me feel safer..

At the same time.. everything seems to be coming together in a weird strange nutty sort of way that you'd never plan for. I just have this feeling that we'll look back in five or ten years and think "damn.. that was nuts.. but that was the beginning of everything really settling down for us".

Could I ::BE:: more vague?

Some random items. We're moving. We won't be renewing our lease at the end of June. That, in itself, is huge. I get very attached to my home and it means a LOT that I consider the building and the street and the town that we're living in right now to be "home". Moving from "home" is hard. At the same time.. there are some things about where we live now that we are very very VERY ready to distance ourselves from. City living is not for me. City living is not for Shiel. Some of our friends who actually live in Boston and not in the suburbs laugh at us for calling Arlington, MA "city living". We live in yuppie-ville.

For comparison.. we've been looking around at apartments. One of those apartments was in a town with a population of just over 1000 and it doesn't even have a middle or high school.. the elementary school has 100 kids.. one class per grade. There is no trash pickup. There IS electricity. It's in the middle of a forest.. literally. The outside of the house is nothing special.. it's another duplex. There aren't really other houses around.. one or two.. then a forest.. then another one or two. It's a ten minute drive to anywhere. But... BUT... when you stand out in the dirt driveway in the evening and look up at the sky? There are more stars than I remembered even existed. Will we go that drastic.. who knows.. we have several months to figure out where we will make our new home.. but it's exciting to think of the possibilities.

We're also ditching the minivan. It's on the expensive side and we're trying to cut costs where we can. Wanna know what we're looking at? A ford eff-ing pickup! I was the proud owner of a Ford Ranger XLT ("Harvest Gold".. i.e. tan) before Benji was born. Now we're thinking of going with the next step up.. an F-150. Part of the logic behind this is that we may move to no-man's land and need to haul our trash to the dump. Since I married a dirt worshiping granola crunching tree hugger.. we don't have much trash (besides diapers).. we have a LOT of recycling.. but that stuff still would require hauling.

Plus... we're lesbians. The minivan has been a hoot.. we played the soccer mom thing for a bit.. but I want my truck back. The truck was more "me".

In other news... I have TWO days left at work. Then I'm out of there. The next chapter will be starting soon and I hope to blog as much of it as possible so that I can look back and remember this time years from now.

I have very few memories from Benji's first six months. I was very ill when he was born and we had the hectic crazy world of NICU time and by my two week post partum check, the post partum depression had started to kick in. It wasn't until March when things got really bad, but still.. I look back over photos of Ben's first months and while I remember some of it.. I don't remember so much. It's something that I still grieve.

Shiela is giving me an incredible gift of giving me time to be with Benji now.. I won't be able to reclaim those first few months.. but I will be able to go an explore the world with him and collect rocks and feed ducks and play with trains and all sorts of fascinating wonderful things that I wouldn't have the time to do if I was working 40+ hours a week and racing on the weekends to catch up on housework. Shiela came right out and told me, a few weeks ago when I was worrying about money, that this was something that I needed and that she needed to give to me. I can't tell you how much it means to have a spouse who gets it. We have to make a lot of life changes (like I can't get an iPad) to make this all work.. but we have a plan and to be completely honest.. I feel like we are hitting the "restart" button and the entire world is in front of us.

Oh.. and I get to go to Kentucky for 3 weeks to visit Grandma and Grampa Illick with Benji.. that will rock.

Now that I'm starting to ramble.. I'm going to draw this to a close and let you know that next week my camera is coming back out and our new life starts..