Excited! And Not.

I can get excited about a lot of things. Such as:

• School is starting in about six weeks.  This means I've survived half of the Summer, and we haven't all lost our minds yet.
• We're going on our first family vacation ever, next week, to a resort by a lake, and we are pretty gosh darned happy about it.
• Liam is starting to jump, and so, while he's currently screaming at his siblings for no apparent reason, I'm going to focus on the positive here, m'kay?  Jumping is a big deal developmentally!

But you know what I'm not excited about?

Changing my blog design.  Seriously, it makes me nuts.  Like pull my hair out by the roots, cry, and yell at inanimate objects kind of crazy.  But I did it anyway. This is the new layout.  If you hate it, please, lie to me.

I need to do this every so often.  I mean, granted, there are like two of you out there who read this, and even you go away when I neglect if for a long time. But while Facebook is great for keeping up with my mom and such, this has always been the place where I've written down the most important events in my family's life.  I want to write here.  I need to shake things up a little bit, sometimes, and get inspired.

Here's the thing with blog design.  It used to be free.  But now everyone is selling their designs on Etsy.  That's a giant pain in the ass.  Also, the thing with blogging these days, especially mommy blogs, is that they are Picture. Perfect.

I kid you not, from what looks to be a professional photo in their sidebar (as opposed to my iPhone selfie with a nice Instagram filter) to the perfect images of their impeccably dressed children, running on the beach.  These are perfect women, with perfect lives.  Or at least that's what a casual passer-by might think.  Okay, maybe it's just what I think.

And good for them!  I'd be perfect too, only I'm too busy magic erasing crayon off the walls.  And I'd look professional too, except I need a good filtered selfie so you can't see my wrinkles.

I'm comfortable.  I kind of want my blog to be comfortable, too.  I think I got as close as I can without paying someone hundreds of dollars to custom design something for me.

Anywho, the dog is barking that plaintive bark that sounds like a lower pitched version of your smoke detector warning beep.  You think she's done and then, nope, another bark saying, "please let me out so that I can eat the pork chops off your plates."

That probably means I should go eat dinner.  Keep reading, please, it makes me write more when you read it.

And you can comment.  I totally like that, too.