I am the queen of not-getting-to-it

I am a procrastinator. This is not a secret. As a matter of fact, I've simply lived my life with the full knowledge of this quality of mine and worked with it/ around it.

However, as a homeschooling-stay-at-home-mom-with-a-toddler-a-blog-art-projects-and-a-neverending-book, I kind of hate myself right now. Seriously. I haven't graded Elijah's math in weeks. Rather than mop, I made cupcakes. Rather than watch my Netflix, I shopped etsy for a week straight. Rather than work out an awesome-holy-crap-I'm-the-greatest-Mom-ever art unit on Van Gogh, complete with mimicry painting... I took a bath and read an entire YA novel in one sitting, er, bath.

Do you recognize my pattern? Put off one project for another? The upside is that my apartment is cleaner now than it has been in years. The downside is that there are a dozen dropped threads (metaphorically) all over said apartment.

The worst part, the reason I hate myself at this point in my life for a quality I've always possessed? I haven't had a quiet time all week. It's the easiest "task" to push off. It requires quiet and the idea of not being interrupted. Sounds simple, but you obvious haven't met my non-sleeping children (that's right, I included Elijah in that because lately he's decided to have a whole lot of sleeping issues), who feel it within their right to wander into my room at any point after bedtime, burst into tears and make me shriek and jump out of my skin (I startle easily).

I don't know what I'm waiting for. Everything else to become still maybe. All I know is that I look over at my journal and Bible and suddenly can smell the mildew in my shower.

Sigh.

p.s. Speaking of  both art and procrastinating, what's this painting missing? Technically, it could be done, but I look at it and know that it's not. I just can't figure out what's missing. Thoughts, comments, suggestions? Someone? Anyone?

Anonymity

Here you go. You ready?

My name is Jessica. I am 31. I am married and have been since 1999. I have two boys, and their names are Elijah and Asher. We live in Atlanta.

There. Who's reeling?

Let's strip off a little more, shall we? I have a few internet aliases which shall now be revealed so that those who might have stumbled upon me elsewhere might know me for who I am. Here they are: Punk, Chahhead, Jolliebell.

Hi. *wave* I'm Jessica. How's it going?

I need to be honest; that's what this comes down to. I need to be able to say the names of my boys and reference our setting and speak of myself in the third person if I so desire because sometimes, I so desire.

So, in all honesty, I swore I wouldn't open a blog until I finished writing my book(s), but I'm so burnt out, writing thousands of pages over the last nine and a half months, and I'm starting to turn my attention elsewhere, mostly Twitter, and my head is becoming full of things I wish to say but have no outlet from which to speak. Write. You know what I mean. Stop nitpicking.

For instance, I noticed lately that the statuses I post for Facebook and Twitter are never duplicates, one to the other. NEVER. And there's a reason for this: audience.

My husband -- whom we shall refer to as either Bryan or the Mister from here on because that's who he is -- once described Facebook as a big room of our friends and family, just hanging out and chatting (and farming... you know who you are). That's who my audience is there: friends and family. I post dorky things my kids have said or done and update those who live far away (everyone) about what's going on with us down here in the ATL (See? Like how I referenced where I live? Nice, right?). But I never post the more random thoughts that slip through my head. Those I save for Twitter.

I only have a small following, and most of those are either family or nearly-spammers (you know who you are), but I have a couple of people who follow me (whom I also follow) that are neither, and these tend to be the people I'm thinking of when I very carefully construct the tweets that I post. They're a different audience, and, in a way, I'm giving them a different character, another side of me than those on Facebook see. I'm not a mom & housekeeper & homeschooler; I'm a music snob & caffeine addict & writer. It's freeing in a way, but, in that same way, it's just another pigeon-hole.

Here, I'm laying it out. I'm all of me, and I'm not sure how well I'm going to do with that since I don't know who my audience is and I myself am still trying to figure out how all the pieces of myself fall together, what the whole picture looks like. But, in the meantime, I'm going to write as though you, the audience I someday might have, is seeking the whole picture.

Welcome.