Dawn

Since I have been a slacker on this blog and I don't think I've started out in a very good way, I am going to introduce myself in this post and then each of my family members in a post titled with their names. Here goes:


My name is Dawn. I am a wife and a mother of three beautiful kids, two boys and a girl. I am 40 years old.


I am categorized in between stay-at-home mom and working mom. I work part-time, but I am home most of the time. I am a court reporter. Right now I own a company that has a contract with the United States District Court to provide court reporting services when they need extra people, but as of June 1, 2007, I am going to be free-lancing and doing mostly depositions. When I go out on a job I am usually there for a few hours and then I am at home for the rest of the job editing it. I would say I work outside the home an average of 10 hours a week, although some weeks, like this one, I don't work outside of home at all. My mom babysits when I go on jobs, so, number 1, I don't have to worry about my kids, and, number 2, it is free. I am very grateful to her for doing this, especially since when I was pregnant with my first she said she wasn't going to babysit all the time. I don't know what changed in her, but she loves my kids and does fun things with them. My husband's work, our house, my mom's house and the kids' schools are all so close in proximity to each other that it is easy for either my mom or my husband to pick up the kids' from school if I am working, or sometimes my husband takes the kids to work with him for a while. I am very lucky about our situation. As far as working part-time, I would rather not work at all, but since that isn't an option I feel like I have the best job for a mother. You don't have to work 40 hours a week, but you still make decent money. The only hard part is trying to organize my time so I can edit with the kids around. Usually I do most of it after the kids go to bed, so I am up late some nights. I know there are many different situations of moms: stay-at-home because they want to, stay-at-home but they would rather work, part-time workers, full-time workers who choose that, full-time workers who would rather stay home. I don't judge anyone on their decisions. I wish everyone could do what they want, but it doesn't always work out that way. I think most moms do the best they can and do a pretty darn good with their kids. I wish the stay-at-home moms and the working moms would quit judging each other and acting like they are better than the others for their decisions. I think both situations have good and bad about them. Stay-at-home moms get to be with their kids all day long, but I think sometimes they can feel cooped up and not have a lot of adult contact. Working moms get to be out in the world meeting people and making money, but they don't see their kids as much. I think stay-at-home moms need to make sure they do something for themselves with friends so they don't feel alone. I think working moms need to make an extra effort to make the time with their kids quality time. I know stay-at-home moms who are excellent moms and are really nurturing. I know stay-at-home moms who sit on their butts all day eating and watching TV while their kids play alone. I know working moms who are very involved with their kids from the second they get home from work and on the weekends. I know working moms who still pawn their kids off on the weekends and don't see them very much. It doesn't matter if you stay at home or if you work. What matters if that your kids know you love them and love to spend time with them. I do have one comment on the subject that I know people will not like, and that is that it bothers me when people say that stay-at-home moms have a job. Does that mean that working moms have two jobs? Staying home with your kids and keeping the house taken care of is not a job. It is life. People that work and have kids don't have two jobs. They have a job and life. People that don't have kids still have to keep their houses. That is not a job. If people don't want to take care of kids and clean house, don't have kids and go live on the street; otherwise, live your life and do the things people need to do when they have kids and a home. Enough on that sore subject. I have wanted to say that for a long time and this is the perfect place because I don't risk offending someone I know. I just want everyone to do what makes them happy, and stop judging everyone else.

My interests are my kids, watching movies, reading, cake decorating and golf. I love doing things with my kids. They are the cutest, funniest, silliest, and sometimes most aggravating, kids I know. I have a Netflix membership and watch movies all the time. Now that school is almost out for the summer I am starting to get a lot of kids' movies so I can watch them with the kids. I don't read as much as I would like to, but as soon as I pay off my exorbitant library fines I am going to start up again. I took some cake decorating classes about five years ago. I had wanted to for a long time and then one day a friend said she wanted to take them (she didn't know I did) and so we did. I make cakes for all my kids' birthdays, any family members that want one, holidays, and actually have done two wedding cakes; although those were for free and were total favors and I don't want to make a habit out of it. They are too stressful and I'm not that great at it. I guess since I didn't get paid for them and never even got a thank-you for each of them (same groom for both of them) they got what they paid for. My friend that took the classes with me did most of the work, anyway. As far as golf, I used to golf a lot before I had kids, even though I was never great at it. In fact, the best I ever golfed was when I took lessons when I was six months pregnant with my first child. Now I belong to a women's golf league and we golf once a month at a different course each month. Each tournament we golf with different people, which I like because then you get to know more people, and we can win money as a team if we do good, or if we take last place (which my team did this month). I don't really care, as long as I have fun and win some money. Once a year we go to Elko, Nevada for a golf tournament and it is really more of a social event than golfing. That is one of the highlights of my year. I would like all of my kids to grow up learning golf and liking it (I hope) so we can all go golf as a family some day; although, we don't have a perfect foursome anymore since our last child.

I am an extremely unorganized person. My house is always a mess. I clean every room every week so it isn't dirty, but it is very cluttered. It takes me forever to get anything done or get ready to go somewhere because I am always losing things. I know why I am like this: it is because I am a perfectionist. I know having a messy, cluttered house doesn't sound like a perfectionist, but the reason I have become this way is because if I can't have something perfect, I kind of give up on it. I figure, "If I can't have things look the way I want to, then why bother?" I am slowly changing that thinking and realize it may be years before I can fix up the house the way I want to, but that I don't have to give up until it is. We live in an old house and it needs some work done, but we are slowly trying to work on it. I'd like my kids to grow up knowing how to be organized and not worrying if things are perfect.

I am a bit overweight. I would like to lose between 40 and 50 pounds. My kids eat very healthy. From the beginning I made sure they all ate healthy because I don't want them to grow up with the bad habits I grew up with. I think if you start out as kids eating healthy and knowing that treats are an occasional thing instead of all day every day, it is easier to eat that way as an adult. When you develop bad habits from the beginning it is very hard to break. I limit the amount of time my kids watch TV and play video games so they don't become couch potatoes. They love to play outside, so so far we haven't had an issue with them not getting enough physical activity. Besides they are all extremely active and sometimes I have to threaten them to sit down and relax or I am going to have a heart attack. So even though I have my kids developing healthy habits, I haven't gotten myself there yet. I can lose weight easily, it's just keeping it off. I just need to learn that eating healthy isn't a diet, it is a lifestyle. I have the book You On A Diet and I think it is an excellent book, I just haven't been able to make the changes I need to yet. One reason I want to lose the weight is so I can go to a public swimming pool with my kids. Right now if the kids want to go swimming my husband takes them and I stay home. I don't want to be like that.

I don't know what else to say. I don't think I'm that interesting of a person. The best thing I have ever done was decide to have kids. They are the best things in my life, and I hope I can raise them to be happy, responsible people who know they can do almost anything (I want to be realistic) they want to. Enough about me. By the way, most pictures of me that I may put on this blog, I have taken myself. I take a ton of pictures of my kids and husband, but nobody ever takes pictures of me, so if I want proof that I exist, I have to take them myself.

I Finally Did It

I finally decided to do a blog that is available for anyone to read. I have another blog that I've had for a while that is private for only my family and friends to read, and I am going to keep that because I can let them know everything that is going on in our family's life and so they can see updated pictures of the kids almost every day. I have been tempted before to make it public, but there may be some things on there that I have written that I don't necessarily want everyone to see and I don't want to go back and change anything.

I've been thinking lately about doing a public blog just so I can participate in some of the fun things that go on in some of the blogs I have come across. Also my other blog is mainly for family and friends to know what is going on in our family. Here I will put some of that stuff, but some of it I won't because it is too personal or too boring unless you know us.

I'm not quite sure how to go about this, though, because I know some people are very private on their blogs in that they use different names than their real ones and they don't post pictures of their kids. I am going to use our real names because I know if I picked fake names for us I would forget sometimes and put our real ones and then no one would know who I am talking about. I am going to post pictures of my kids on here because they are one of the reasons I am doing this, so I can talk about them and show them off, because I think they are some of the cutest kids I've every seen (and I'm trying not to be biased.) I don't know if I will reveal where we live or not, and I will not put our last name on here. If I decide sometime in the future that it really doesn't matter, maybe I will, but for now I won't.

I have become somewhat addicted to reading other people's blogs. It seems strange to get caught up in someone else's life when you don't even know them. There are some that I have come across and read for a bit but just don't connect with and so I've stopped. There are some that I read all the time and plan on reading them as long as they exist. I think it is a good thing for me to read some other blogs because I have really learned a lot from some of them. Some of them I read because they are extremely funny and entertaining, some of them I read because they have things in common with me, i.e. children, adoption, etc., and some of them I read because they have good information on them. Unfortunately, I don't think I am as great a writer as others out there, nor am I quite as witty as others out there, but I am going to try to not be so boring that no one wants to read it.

I am going to have one of the most boring looking blogs out of the ones I read, but since I know nothing about design and don't know anyone who does it, I will have to stick with this for now. Hopefully in the future I can find someone to do a cool design, but for now this works.

Well, I hope this works out and I can come up with some interesting things to say once in a while, but if not, I guess I can just practice my writing skills.