Girls

Heading to my sister’s to have a girls weekend with her and my niece. Who is so popular, at 6, that she has been invited to three birthday parties on our girls weekend! Which is ok, more sister time for Shannon and I. Topped off with a basketball game for Caleb. I can’t wait!!

Art. And business

I’ve been a social worker for a long time. If you ask when I knew I wanted to become a social worker, or how I knew- I just knew. I have known since sometime in high school. I always knew I wanted to help. I wanted to do something with my life that gave to others. I didn’t really want to teach, and I’m too squeamish for nursing. Or to be a doctor, for that matter. And as much as I love school, at that point I didn’t want to do that much school. 

It was just a few years ago, maybe three, that I started thinking I really liked photography. I liked the feeling of holding a camera in my hand and envisioning pictures. I loved capturing people’s personality on camera. I especially love capturing children’s personalities on camera. There’s something incredible special that I love about that. Posed pictures are nice, and there’s certainly a place for them, but it’s doubtful I’ll ever open a portrait studio. I’d prefer to catch people being who they are, living their life. 

The thing about photography that is different from social work is that it is art. You take a piece of yourself and create something else. If you are brave, you put that piece of yourself out there for the world to see, and judge. People may love what you love, or they may hate it. Doing photography has opened me up in a way nothing else has. It has allowed me to express myself in a whole different way. It has given me a way to grow, and learn. 

I am a good social worker. I’m not perfect, and I will always have days where I wonder what I am doing and why. I love what I do, and I’ve spent a long time getting better at it. I hope I am always learning and growing as a social worker. But it’s something I’m confident and comfortable doing. While there is always room to grow, I’ll never be a complete novice as a social worker again. 

There’s something to be said about being a novice. It’s humbling. I’ve learned SO much about photography in the last few years. I am at the point where I can even show other people things about photography. But I know there’s so much more I have to learn. And that, while overwhelming at times, is so exciting. I love the feeling of learning, and being challenged. I like to overcome challenges. 

And talk about overwhelming. Turning your art into a business. I tried this once, and I failed miserably. I never got past the point of making business cards for myself. I never handed them out. It never went anywhere. This time I have a partner, someone who knows what she is doing business-wise. She has many things to teach me. And thank God for her, because I’d probably just have new business cards and do nothing with them. There’s so much to do when you start a business. And it’s scary! Did you guys know that, apparently, it’s expected that you report a loss your first year in business??? Like, you’re not supposed to make money the first year? How do people without jobs do it? Then there’s contracts, etc. It’s all just overwhelming. 

But so, exciting. It’s challenging, and fun, and overwhelming, and quite possibly one of the most exciting things I’ve done in a long time. Just for me.

Photo

I’ve been trying to get things up and going for a Real. Live. Business.

Evidence: www.phphotography.net

We’re hoping it goes somewhere! And that somewhere does not include: tanking!

Normalcy

It’s been about a month, of just the two of us. 

Friday night we picked up dinner to-go from our favorite chain restaurant. Ate with the cat, in our pajamas, in front of the TV. 

Saturday we went to the bank, then drove around, something we used to do all the time. Went to toy stores, targets. Got lunch. Got me a second lunch. Picked up the pottery I made. Did more shopping. Came home, worked. Ate leftovers. 

Today he went and did laundry. I had a photo shoot, then came home to clean. Skipped eating out with a good friend to clean. When he got home we had chinese for dinner. 

It’s boring, I know. The post sounds boring, I know. It’s boring. Mundane. 

Wonderful. Blissfully wonderful.

Same stuff, different day

Before she came, I blogged about what I was struggling with on a regular basis. My weight and body issues. Our infertility. Grief. 

When we got her, I blogged about her. Even before she came, I stopped blogging because my whole life was centering around her: seeing her, supporting her, visiting, talking with DCF about taking her, going to meetings about her, getting her room ready, etc. I didn’t want to blog about it here, and so I stopped blogging, as I am wont to do when there is something going on I don’t want to blog about. 

On some level, when we decided to make her part of our family, the other stuff… kind of… faded. It’s not that it went away, I just didn’t have the space in my brain for her and all the other stuff. So I put the other stuff away and maybe pretended like it wasn’t there. Kind of like that closet you have? The one with all the junk that falls out every time you open it, so you stop opening it in hopes that one day you will open it and it will all be gone? And you put that chair in front of it so no one else opens it, either? Kind of like that. My brain was the closet, grief, weight/ body image, and infertility was the junk, and she was the chair. 

When she was here, it was all I could do to focus on anything else. It is not that I was obsessed. It is that she required every last bit of my energy. If you were a friend or family member or both during that time, I am sorry. I was probably pretty neglectful. It was all I could do to pay attention to her and my husband at the same time. Never mind myself, or anyone on top of that. I was trying to deal with constant chaos and trauma, parenting a teenager, having a new person in our home, learning how to deal with schools and doctors and sports, and a myriad of other things. 

The good stuff faded too, to be honest. I never pulled out my camera. I rarely baked, especially during the first few months she was here. I would only see friends if I thought she would be otherwise occupied. 

I literally gave her everything. I know- she didn’t ask for it. But to be honest, it felt like she required it. 

A few months into it, I started making a concerted effort to bring back the good. We had a family therapy session and her wonderful therapist reminded me that it would be good for her to see that I have a life, and things I enjoy doing outside of her. She asked both Khalil and I to do that. That weekend, I baked again for the first time in a long time. I started picking up the camera again. I booked photography gigs. I spent time editing and told her ‘no’ when I needed time for myself. 

No one tells you to make sure to pay attention to the junk in the closet. No one says- hey, while you have this needy child in your home, why don’t you also try and pull out all those old issues and sort through them some more? Nope. What you do is you just pull that chair in front, make sure it’s secure, and leave them there. They peeked through occasionally. Whenever things weren’t going well at home I would cry when walking through the baby clothes section at Target. Vacation in the summer was difficult because we went to see my dad’s family… and my dad was not there. As it turned out, he hadn’t been hiding out where they live all this time, waiting for me to come find him. But I couldn’t put the time and energy I needed towards sorting through things like that, because she needed me. All the time. And she got very resentful when I had things of my own, other than her, going on. So I shoved them all back in the closet. She needed me. 

Then she left. Abruptly and with no warning. We never once planned for her to leave. There had been times, months before, when we weren’t sure how much longer things were going to last. And then we kind of settled in to things. Which may have been our biggest mistake. I started to think of having her in terms of permanence and forever. I think she may have, too, which probably scared her half to death. All that to say- I didn’t expect her to go. I did not see that one coming, at all. It was jarring, to say the least. 

But when she left, other good things came, too. Peace. The time to pay attention to my family, and my friends. Quiet. Energy. 

However, she was the chair. The chair moved, and things have been falling out of the closet again. I wrote the post about weight. I am now no longer sure if I really feel ok with my body, or if it was easier to ignore not feeling ok when I didn’t have the energy or time to sort through the questions. I went to a baby shower, and it was the first one I have been to in a long time. And it was very, very hard. Which kind of smacked me upside the head, because I didn’t really think about it being hard. Even if I am making peace with our infertility, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still lash out at me and slap me across the face. Infertility, she is a bitch and hard to make peace with. The grief is the grief. I may have gone much longer between times of thinking about missing my dad and grandma, but it’s crossed my mind more. 

In some ways, I feel like my life, both good AND bad, stopped nine months ago, when she came. (the irony of that amount of time does not escape me.) As I pick up the good pieces again, and embrace them, the more difficult pieces with the sharper edges creep in as well. 

You have to take the good with the bad, but I did like that closet. The chair was sure tough, but the closet was kind of nice.

22 Crazy Googlers

Listen, whoever is searching for me using “paige twenty two” in 18 million different ways, could you let me know why?

It’s driving me nuts.

What started me blogging in the first place

I still get hits from searches for fat girls want to be cute all. the. time. 

I wrote a post on it once, the pain and tribulation of searching for cute clothes as a girl who is… not exactly skinny. 

The whole blog over here was started as my journey to lose weight, hence the name ‘less of paige’- I wanted there to physically be less of me. 

I went through alot of ups and downs. Most likely, my battle with food addiction and weight loss isn’t over. However, these days, it’s at a standstill. At some point last year, though, I made a decision. I was figuring out that many of the weight battles were, for me, control issues. I was a very ‘good girl’ growing up, and I think food, and eating whatever I wanted, was the one way I rebelled. My father hated that I overate. It comforted me. As I got older, I continue to be someone who generally likes to follow the rules. Even as an adult, food is one of the ways I rebel. 

I have been through a lot of ups and downs in my relationships both with food and my weight. I have fought them, I have worked with them, I have hated and loved both. I’ve eaten well and not, done crazy diets (hello, fasting every other day??), done reasonable non- diets (weight watchers, you ARE a diet no matter how much you try to say you are not), tried all different kinds of exercise. And not. Let it all go. Gorged on huge amounts of horrible food. 

Then I made a decision. The decision was: I’m not fighting anymore. At least for a while. Instead, I’m going to accept who I am. I’m going to love myself: inside and out. In order to not punish myself for being fat by eating, I’m going to start by accepting myself. Hopefully, eventually, I will love my body and myself enough to want to make healthy choices for it. Hopefully I will want to take better care of myself. Maybe I will remember that I feel so much better when I’m making good choices, and that it is indeed worth all the ’sacrifice’. 

Because what happens instead is that I get on “the wagon”, but my head is resisting all the way. I’m fighting myself with every bite, with every early morning to exercise. I love the results, but the process to get there is excruciating. So much so that I eventually give in, and when I do I get completely out of control. 

So how has it worked? Well. I’m not a size 8, or 10 even. But I’m not at my highest weight either. I try to recognize how certain foods make me feel, and if it’s icky, I try not to repeat that. I try to eat and enjoy fruits and veggies, but if it’s a fight, that’s ok too. I’m definitely not the healthiest person around, but I’m still working on accepting myself. I can look in a mirror and think I look pretty good. I can look at the fat and think, well, it’s who I am. It has to be ok, because right now I’m still not willing to put in a monumental effort to change it. I sometimes make healthy choices of my own desire to do so. I’ll order a salad, I’ll choose fruit, I’ll drink some water. I’ll walk a little. 

And that is the direction I want to keep heading. I don’t get upset that I don’t fit into smaller clothes. Instead, I focus on finding what I can in my size that is cute. And it’s there, it’s just harder to find sometimes. I’m ok with the fact that for me, this is going to be a long process. Telling myself I’m good just the way I am- that is not easy all the time, and it’s a change to try it. So I have to let myself have the ups and downs. Knowing that, eventually, I really will want to take care of myself. 

I wanted to recognize that this is where this blog came from. Right now I feel like I’m only writing about one thing, and when I go to write, she is on my mind, but there are still other things in my life, other things about me that I want to share. I won’t write about food, and weight all the time. Because it’s not something I battle. Just like I used to write about infertility all the time, and right now not so much. I guess it’s life- you fight certain things at certain times, and then those things get overshadowed or die down. And so we work them through to the point we get to, and leave it, and come back to it. 

So that is where I came from. Where am I going? Only time will tell.

The difference

I got sad about putting up Christmas tree decorations, because she really had no desire to be involved in that. Through a combination not her fault, of bad past experiences and of being a teenager, doing something so tradition and family oriented just didn’t work. 

My niece and nephew, on the other hand? At 6 and 10, and growing up in a loving, nurturing family… they are happy to be with us. Happy to do things with Aunt Paige and Uncle Khalil, and I know this is not unique to the experience of visiting us. If they can get family to play with them, they are thrilled. If family will involve them in tasks and activities, they are thrilled. 

It was such a different experience.

 

Look at Caleb's face. He is too funny

 

Caleb with my mother-in-law, he is explaining his DS to her

Who's seen that look on his face before??

 

The cuteness. It is unbearable.

She's so excited to be in the snow

 

Caleb. Ready to throw his "snowball"

I think they were singing "she's coming round the mountain"

 

waiting for hot chocolate, in from sledding

 

He's always so excited for hot chocolate, here he is waiting

I think this is the only sip he took.

Those eyes! Look at those eyes!

 

Ellie beating me soundly at Go Fish

I am not very good at Go Fish. he beat me too

 

A good weekend all around

Best moments of the day

Ellie, to Uncle Khalil, as she is wandering through the grocery store with him, “I don’t think staying up until midnight was such a great idea.”

Ellie, to Caleb, “Come on Caleb! Let’s go make a plan!”

Caleb, while I was getting my eyebrows done, to the person doing them, “Stop hurting Aunt Paige!”; accompanied by loving pats on the head, kisses on the cheek, instructions to close my eyes and think of good things, and careful supervision of what was going on. 

Caleb, at dinner, hating lasagna. Five minutes later, asking for more and declaring, “I LOVE lasanga!”

Ellie, to Caleb, “I don’t think this plan is going to work, but it’s worth a shot!”

Ellie and Caleb, to me while in the kitchen cooking, “We’re on a mission! To find Uncle Khalil!” (who would think it would be hard in a 800 sq foot 2br apartment???)

Ellie, “Now, how are we going to do this? Are we going to take turns? I know! Think of a number, Aunt Paige!”

 

Come on Caleb, Let's make a plan

 

Cmon Ellie! Kitchen! Plan!

You know you want one

Random

I can’t stop listening to the new Pink CD on iTunes.