One Month of Parenthood

Tuesday, 5 March 2024Thursday, 7 March 2024 StarrLeave a comment

I have a pretty exciting reason for not blogging in a long time…

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve been thinking about the blog all year. All the exciting things I’ve done last year…

And my journey to get here~

And of course, it pained me to break my decade-long streak of annual recap blog posts, which I hope to still post very belatedly.

But the world kept spinning and somehow I am lucky enough to have become a mom to a precious life for one month now! I won’t be sharing too much about my baby on this blog (at least for now) but I hope to be able to catch you all up on my journey to get here. Pregnancy symptoms, several adventures, an out-of-state move, and then life with a newborn have made blogging difficult to prioritize, but there is a lot I have been wanting to share so I hope as I find my groove in this new chapter of my life that I get to do just that.

Happy 1 month to my bundle of joy ♥️
You have made me one of the luckiest people in the world and for that I will forever be so grateful, for this past month and the many months ahead of us.

I got COVID

Wednesday, 11 January 2023 Starr2 Comments

This year, after 2 years of spending my birthday mostly alone and at home, I decided to celebrate with my friends doing my favorite thing in the whole world: karaoke. In the days, weeks, and months leading up to my birthday, I hesitated a lot, constantly expressing to my partner that I should and would cancel any reservations and forgo having a social birthday for at least one more year. He talked me down frequently, reminding me that we are fully vaccinated and fully boosted as well, that our friends know how cautious we have been and especially how cautious I have been and would not risk infecting me if there was any reason to believe they could.

So I went and I had an incredible time on Friday evening. A staff member at the karaoke establishment recognized me from my previous birthdays celebrated there and pulled me up on the (new-to-me since 2019) stage to celebrate and pour sparkling wine into stranger party-goers’ mouths and generally be merry. It was a fulfillment of a wish I never even dared to make.

On Sunday, already a little hoarse and tired from an evening of singing for my life after having not sung for years, I screamed and cried and cheered as Argentina won their first world cup in decades, cementing Leo Messi’s status as one of the greatest to ever play the beautiful game.

On Monday, I went about my day and cooked a big pot of soup for myself, my partner, and my brother who was staying with us until his new lease started a few weeks later. I recall feeling the effects of all the singing and screaming of the weekend on my throat, and having been so busy with the day that I was uncharacteristically dehydrated. My lips and hands were dry, and my head was starting to hurt, not quite bad enough to call a migraine but enough that I realized I hadn’t had very much water at all that day, a bit embarrassing to realize as the person at work who reminds everyone to drink water. The three of us cleaned up after dinner and sat down to play video games together when I started feeling chilly. “Are you two cold at all?” I asked. Neither of them felt cold, but I had pretty distinct chills.

A knot of anxiety formed in my gut and I excused myself to take my temperature and also a COVID test, just in case. My temperature was normal, so I wasn’t experiencing a fever, but I wanted to see the negative test just to be safe. I swabbed my nose, set a timer for 15 minutes, went to the bathroom, and came back 3 minutes later to make sure the test was working correctly, bracing myself mentally for maybe that faint wisp of a line that you can barely see.

2023 Resolutions

Tuesday, 3 January 2023Tuesday, 3 January 2023 StarrLeave a comment

Dear readers, I need to be real with you.

Last year, I confessed that I felt less ambitious than any year before, and that feeling has only grown over the course of 2022. I looked back on my resolutions I set last year and found that my big, broad goals for this year have essentially not changed. So I’ll leave them the same, there is no point in twisting myself into a pretzel trying to… have different goals? I am disappointed to not have made as much progress on them as I was hoping but it’s not bad to want the same big areas of improvement as I did a year ago.

I do have new concrete goals (remember my concrete vs. abstract days, wow I aspired to so much) that I am looking forward to working on this year but the rest of my goals are going to look very familiar.

On realizing I was Skinny

Sunday, 15 May 2022Thursday, 30 June 2022 StarrLeave a comment

Content/trigger warning: This post may be difficult or triggering to read it if you are struggling with your relationship with food or your body and contains mentions of disordered eating.

I grew up skinny, most of my family did. But I didn’t know how abnormal it was for me to be so skinny until a specific moment in the 5th grade. I loved my 5th grade teacher, but I still remember — 2 decades later — being at an ice cream social with teachers and classmates and hearing her tell me:

I wish I could eat that much ice cream and stay as skinny as you!

I remember feeling immediately embarrassed that I was eating so much ice cream, especially because I was apparently so skinny that no one expected me to eat this much ice cream. This moment also contributed to an unhealthy mentality I think I adopted later, wherein I felt a need to prove myself as a “skinny girl who can really eat!” but I’ll get to that later.

Worn-Out Feelings

Monday, 14 March 2022 StarrLeave a comment

For a while, I’ve been the kind of person who spends a lot of time thinking about how I’m feeling and feeling about how I’m thinking. (Long-time blog readers know this well.) So it was nearly impossible for me to not notice a distinct… shift… in both over the course of this pandemic so far. And I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how to put it into words so I can better understand it myself, likely thanks to 2 decades of making a habit of crystallizing my thoughts into blog posts for a handful of friends and an unknowable number of strangers to read.