I'm ba-ack

No, really. This time I swear. My neglect of this blog, while just one more thing to add to the list of the many, many things I fail to give an adequate amount of time, energy and attention to, has been particularly haunting to me of late since I mailed nearly 100 Christmas cards last week and included a letter encouraging people to check out this blog. What a sad and disappointing thing to find my last post was in October! Some family chronicler I am.

But I do have two excuses for my long absence. Both are somewhat life changing events that drew my time and mental focus far from this whimsical little blog for the last few months.

The first is I took a new job. Sort of. Or rather, I took the same job, only for a bigger, more profitable product line that is exponentially more demanding than the one I had before. Not that I ever blogged at work (okay, I sometimes blogged at work), but I did get to leave by 3 every day and had room in my brain to think of things to write about and time in my longer evenings to capture them. Since taking the new job, I've been working 10-11 hour days and some evenings and weekends just to stay afloat. It has really cramped my blogging style.

The second is that I found out I was expecting child number 5 (and, yeah, I know I may need to rename my site if I ever take the time to figure it out). So even though this has been the breeziest, most symptom free pregnancy in my long, storied history of pregnancies, it still sort of knocked me flat for awhile. All of my limited, remaining brain capacity was more or less devoted to adjusting my lifelong plan as mother of 4 little ducks to mother of 5 little ducks. It was a little, what's the word? disconcerting, to say the least.

Nevertheless, I swear, I promise, I assure you I really am back. I've also recently declared my freedom from scrapbooks and the unspoken mama obligation of family photographer. I love writing about my ducks. I hate trying to photograph their every move, and I hate even worse trying to keep track of 8 bajillion photos of each child in any sort of organized or coherent manner. I'm done. Which makes me even more determined to keep some documentation of these months and years that are flying by at a dizzying pace. I really am back.

Which reminds me, here are a few of the future posts I'm stewing over:
1. Congratulations, you're crazy
2. Happy
3. Grown up girl (the story of a store bearing her name and the hello kitty earrings of destiny)
4. My declaration of independence (from scrapbooks)

See? Come back often. I'm back.