*Contest is now closed*

Congratulations Cynthia R: “Sigh…I think the only private time I get is in the bathroom. So, I call it the Me Time Moment. ”

I have never been very good with bathroom issues. Blood? No problem! Vomit? Not an issue! But the bathroom business? That was the one aspect of parenting and cleaning that I never really became comfortable with.

Bring travel into the picture and it creates quite a bit of anxiety for me.  I’ll admit that I prefer my bathroom at home.  I’m not usually comfortable with bathrooms in strange places.  You never know what condition they’ll be in, how clean they will be, or if they’ll actually be stocked with the supplies one might need in a pinch.  

This summer we are doing a small amount of travel.  We have a Labor Day beach trip coming up, my blogging conference, and several day trips with the kids.  Because traveling requires me to deal with my weird bathroom issues I try to bring a little something just to help keep everything neat and clean.  This way I don’t have to worry about a rest stop, a hotel, or even a gas station leaving me feeling anything less than fresh.  

Cottonelle has introduced a two-step system for bathroom business. As we can all imagine nobody wants to refer to anything in the bathroom as a ‘process’ or ‘system.’

When I travel I like to refer to it as the “Fresh-N-Flush.”  When I travel I know that I can freshen up, stay clean, and move on without any worries.  

Cottonelle is hosting a great ‘Name It” contest to come up with something witty and clever for dealing with this bathroom business. They are offering some great prizes (including a free supply of toilet paper for a year!) So what would you name this two-step process over the course of your Summer travels?

Beyond their official ‘Name It’ contest I am giving away a Clean Care kit from Cottonelle to one lucky reader, which includes the following:

• 1 tub of Cottonelle Flushable moist wipes
• 1 pack of Cottonelle Ultra Care toilet paper
• 1 travel pack of moist wipes
• 1 solo pack of moist wipes
• 1 pack of Name It post-it notes

I have always had a rather big fear of guns.  I was not raised around them and I’m not sure any member of my family actually owns a gun.  My brother and grandfather have experience with guns from their time in the military but that’s it.  My husband, on the other hand, was raised around guns.  His family had different guns locked in the safe and he learned to shoot at a very early age.

For years now he has wanted to invest in a couple of guns for protection but I have always put my foot down with a solid ‘NO.’  I didn’t want guns in my house and I was sure that these big scary things were too much for me to handle.

Tonight that all changed.

I went with my friend Carla to ‘Ladies Night’ at a local shooting range.  I was nervous and worried that I just wouldn’t be the type of person to feel comfortable shooting a gun.

Yea, that lasted all of 30 seconds.  Tonight I shot three different guns and loved every second of it!  It was exhilarating and powerful and a great way to exercise control and strength.  In just over an hour I shot over 100 rounds.  I was into it!

This was when the hot shell flew out of the automatic and into my bra. It was hot and burned my boobies!

And the icing on the cake?  Check out how many time this girl hit the bullseye her first time ever holding and shooting a gun:

Pretty freaking rad, huh?!

It took all my restraint not to buy a gun on the spot.  But I can say with absolute certainty that I will be back again and I can definitely cross this off the bucket list!

And I think I’ve found my post PhD hobby.

I’m such a Revolver Girl!

Today is one of the hottest days Georgia has ever had.  I think the news said the last time it was this hot was in 1936.

What did we do today?  We helped a dear friend and her two beautiful children move into their new house.  We packed and cleaned and loaded up their lives in the back of a few trucks – all to be delivered safely to their new surroundings.

The kids are sunburned and happy since they spent the day playing with their buddies while the grownups did the heavy lifting.

We are all exhausted.  I’ve been banished to the couch since I’m fighting one of the worst summer colds I’ve ever had – congestion, stuff nose, cough, sore throat, fever – you know, the works.

We’ll be spending the rest of the day sucking in as much air conditioning as humanly possible.

I had every intention of posting a pantry makeover this week but my summer cold made me pathetic and stabby and full of snot.  So I’ll post the makeover next week.

Here’s a little preview. In the meantime stay indoors – preferably with a frost beverage!

Tomorrow morning my husband and I are running away together.

To celebrate our upcoming 10 year wedding anniversary (June 25) we are abandoning our parenting duties, packing the car, and heading out to for a weekend of white water rafting.

photo courtesy of google

In the 10 years we’ve been married we’ve never taken a trip together just the two of us.  He’s traveled alone for work, I’ve traveled for blogging conferences, and we’ve taken a few family vacations – but we’ve never gone away for that special grown-up time.

I haven’t been this excited for something in a long time.  I can’t wait to eat good food, laugh together, and find a bit of renewal for my spirit so I don’t kill my children over the course of summer vacation.

I’m leaving the laptop home.  The camera will travel with us so we can capture every moment of our little trip.  I’m already imagining that it won’t feel long enough.

But I also know that this little trip is oh so necessary.

We’ll be rafting down the same river used in the film Deliverance (and it just so happens to be the 40th anniversary of the film this weekend so there is some kind of festival happening – yikes!)

I’ve actually never been rafting and the trip is mainly through Class IV and V rapids.  Right now I’m just glad they provide helmets.

Until Monday…

I’ve hit project mode.  I woke up Tuesday and had this sudden urge to find and complete projects around the house.  Before I finished school I knew I’d be back in the land of domesticity (at least for a while!) and I set a deadline for myself to have my house cleaned, organized, and projects finished by October 31st.  There isn’t anything really special about that day, but I knew that having everything done by the end of October would give me two solid months to jump in and embrace the holiday season.  Actually – the holiday season not being a student!

I’ve slowly been working through small projects: organizing all the medicine, cleaning out the coat closet, overhauling my cleaning products, etc.  But this week I hit decorating mode.  It’s that obsessive mode I get in when i want to change major things in the house – from paint to flooring to new appliances.  It’s always a bummer when I get in this mode because I’m more of a ‘Right Freaking Now!’ kind of gal and many of the projects I want to do take time…and money.

So I’m trying to start simple.  A few changes here.  A few changes there.

My first project involves the kitchen.  I am on this kick to make everything as clean and fresh as possible. So I decided to paint the kitchen a beautiful shade called ‘Simply White.’  Seems silly to do this with kids, but the paint I’m getting is extremely washable! The color in the kitchen now is a muted greenish grey.  I liked it when we painted it a few years ago but now I keep thinking it makes the kitchen look dirty.  So white it is…

Simply White by Benjamin Moore

Functionally there is nothing wrong with our kitchen.  It needs a bit of reorganization but I have plenty of space to satisfy my needs.  I have a project in mind involving vintage cookbooks that I’ll share later, but they’ll be making an appearance in the kitchen when I’m done painting.

My second project is to give the dining room a little spruce.  I love our dining room! It is the only grown up room in the house and it makes me feel connected to my husband’s family and my grandmother because it holds so much furniture that used to belong to them.

I recently switched out some artwork in the dining room and added a bright, neutral rug under the table to replace the dark one we used to have.  The rug was only 40 bucks!  I want to add new curtains in there in a nice off white, but they’ll be expensive.  Our windows require a custom length because the ceilings in the room are so high.  I may attempt to sew them myself. Our current curtains are a deep burgundy and I just don’t like them anymore.

I’ll be creating a new padded cover for the piano bench to pull in some color and I hope to reupholster the chairs myself in a coordinating fabric.

Some other projects include hanging a mirror over the fireplace.  I found this mirror in our attic.  It had a shiny gold frame but after a quick coat of paint it’ll look perfect hanging in the living room!

We are saving for a new couch and chair now that the kids no longer pee everywhere and the puppies are no longer lacking control of their bladders.  That will be a while down the road though.

In the meantime I’ve found enough to keep me busy for a while and my husband is probably secretly planning to travel for work to avoid my obsessive nature when it comes to projects.  But it’s amazing what a little determination can accomplish when he’s a work….

So I’m still transitioning back into the land of domesticity.  It’s been hard…and a slow process.  I’m job hunting a little, cooking a little, and tackling a few projects that were put on the back burner while I finished the dissertation.

With the kids out of school for the summer I’ve been inundated with all that quality kid time I felt like I missed while finishing school.  We spend all day together…from as early as 6:30 in the morning until I finally wrestle them into bed around 8:30 or 9:00.  We run errands, do housework, have art time, play in the backyard, and run to marathon karate sessions.  It’s exhausting.  Nice, but exhausting.

I mentioned to my husband tonight that I think I need to find a way to get some me time…and not the ‘me time’ that goes with taking a bath or running to the grocery store by myself – but the ‘me time’ that allows me to refresh and not snap and break down as I discover whatever this next phase is supposed to be.

But I don’t know what to do.  Sign up for a weekly yoga class?  Start walking by myself in the morning before everyone wakes up? Disappear once a week for some reading time at the coffee house?

I feel guilty even wanting and needing this time.  I feel guilty that jumping back into my full-time domestic roles is not as easy or satisfying as I expected.  And I’m not even sure I’ll find whatever it is that I need in a weekly yoga or sewing class…

But I guess it’s worth a shot. Right?!