A Mom's Life

I am a big facebook user. No, I don't play Farmville or Candy Crush Saga but I spend at least 15 minutes on the site daily. I have read many articles about how facebook kills one's self esteem because people use the site to boast and brag about their awesome lives, which in turn makes others feel badly about their own. We all know that facebook is a slice of one's life or maybe a projection of the life they want to live. Anybody who isn't a fool should realize that. As a frequent facebooker and hardcore extrovert, with a lack of a strong filter, I find this whole situation to be a dilemma. What is worse, reading about someone's awesome day and seeing a picture of how fabulous they looked during their awesome day, or reading about their terrible day, looking at angry political memes, or rants about the bad customer service they received? Do you want to read about how someone had the best night ever with their bestest buds (you not included) or that they have been

I have always loved to swim. Every since I was a little kid I just wanted to swim. At five years old, my heaven on Earth was a body of water. Whether a lake, a pond, a pool, the ocean, or an extra feeding trough for cows, if there was water and I was in it, I was happy. I looked for every opportunity to swim. I carried my little bikini with me in my jean purse so that I was always prepared if I was presented with the opportunity to swim. I asked my mom, regularly, to buy us a pool and I dragged her to our neighborhood pond every day in the summer. I took swimming and diving as gym classes in college. I love to aqua jog at our gym pool. I still feel a sense of deep calm when I walk into the pool area there and also when I crest a hill on a country road and see our town's beautiful lake glimmering in the sunlight. To me, it's just not a worthwhile summer day if we aren't swimming. Over the last six years I have figured out where all of the local beaches are at our lake, th

I traveled, sans kids, over the recent holiday weekend. As it happens when one lives for years up state, being around so many people in one place is difficult. The thruway was bumper to bumper and the rest stops were crawling with travelers headed off to a weekend of R&R. However, anyone who travels often, particularly with children, knows that you have to go through a bunch of H&H (hell and horror) on your way to R&R. I noticed such a family at one of our rest stops. They had two children, presumably twins, and presumably about 18 months old. The kids were little cutie patooties. They clutched their parents' hands as they toddled excitedly around the restaurant. They sat and ate, their tiny heads barely looking over the table. Then, they started screaming. I noticed all of these details- except the screaming. A hundred concerts and an equal amount of running miles sporting ear buds has made me a little deaf, and background sounds are often a dull buzz for me. Plus,