Fresh off the wave of Mother’s Day greetings, salutations and a slew of Facebook posts, I thought I’d share a little about why you saw no mention of Mother’s Day on my Facebook page. It’s simple, really, I’m just not that into greeting card holidays.

If you’re not familiar with what a greeting card holiday is, or more often known as a Hallmark holiday, the name is pretty self-explanatory. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:

“Hallmark Holiday” is a term used predominantly in the United States to describe a holiday that is perceived to exist primarily for commercial purposes, rather than to commemorate a traditionally or historically significant event. The name comes from Hallmark Cards, a privately owned American company, that benefits from such manufactured events through sales of greeting cards and other items. Holidays that have been referred to as “Hallmark Holidays” include Grandparents Day, Sweetest Day, Boss’s Day, and Secretary’s Day. Some people also consider St. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day to be such days.

Sweetest Day is an interesting holiday, one I’d never even heard of until I attended college in Northwest Pennsylvania — yep, it’s totally a greeting card holiday.

Anyway, I just don’t feel the need to make a big deal out of many of these holidays because a.) they’re commercially driven, and b.) why don’t people celebrate others all year round? In fact, my husband and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day, at my request (plus, our wedding anniversary is two weeks after V-Day).

I’m grateful that my husband shows his love for me year-round, and doesn’t need a special day or occasion to send me flowers — we work well this way. However, I do understand that for many women, and many of my girlfriends, Valentine’s Day is one of the only days a year that their significant other bestows flowers upon them, or goes out of his way to show how much he appreciates his wife or girlfriend. This makes me sad, because if you only do something once a year, the concept seems special or even foreign, instead of just being a natural occurrence in daily life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had friends be disappointed with Valentine’s Day because their significant other’s ministrations did not meet their fantasy or expectations (or that they didn’t have a special someone to celebrate with). And then there’s the whole oversharing bit on social media, wherein my feed is populated with photos of bouquets and jewelry for the entire day.

Mother’s Day is an especially strange “holiday” because children should show their appreciation for their mother year-round, no? I don’t know about you, but I’d like more than one day a year. Perhaps the best part of greeting card holidays is that they often serve to enforce quality family time, in an age when people seem busier than ever. And really, the best part of my Mother’s Day was the fact that my husband did not work Mother’s Day for the first time (since I became a mother), and we spent the day hiking and enjoying each other’s company. That’s what it’s really all about, right?

So, my thoughts on greeting card holidays can pretty much be summed-up in one word: “meh”. Give me “just because” any day. How do you feel about Hallmark Holidays?

The past month has been an incredibly busy one for both myself and my family. Not only has my workload increased, but we’ve been busy making plans for the summer. Big plans.

We’re not planning a vacation, we’re planning a move! It’s all been hush-hush, waiting for pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, but I’m now able to share. My husband was offered a position in Baltimore, one that was too good to refuse. After years of working 12+ hour days, and often weekends, he’s been offered a position allowing him to work fewer hours, spend less time commuting and, most importantly, a quality of life.

While it was not an easy decision, my husband’s leaving his company of 10 years, being out of operations was a goal. For the past 4 years, I’ve been left alone with my son during Hurricane Sandy, severe storms, power outages and snow storms, as my husband set up camp at work to ensure that everything proceeded smoothly. Now, if a snow storm hits, my husband will be able to play in the snow with our son AND I won’t have to shovel the driveway by myself!

Fellow moms will understand this — the week my husband interviewed, I researched schools in the area where we’ll be moving and registered my little guy. Not only does my son need the stimulation and socialization provided by preschool, but I need those hours to get freelance work done. School spots fill quickly, as many of you well know, and he is currently on a waitlist for a 4-day program. I’m a little bummed because he was enrolled in a 5-day program here, and may now only be in a 3-day program, but I’ll figure out a way to make it work…so that I can work. Shoot, I may be back to 4am wakeups!

With schooling taken care of, housing was next. We spent several weeks researching areas to relocate, and looking at hundreds of homes for sale, so when the job offer finally came, we were ready! So ready, in fact, that my husband received his letter of offer on a Friday and I had arranged an appointment for him to look at one of the two homes we were considering on Saturday.

Friends, we are set to close on a beautiful home May 31…and I’ve never stepped foot inside! I was out of town conducting a writing workshop when my husband looked at the house. Having viewed around 40 photos of the home, I gave my husband the go ahead to submit an offer if he felt that it was the house for us. Here it is:

If all goes well, this will be OURS May 31! (My husband said that the perfect room for my office is the one where I’ve drawn the arrow – I can’t wait to check it out!)

Thank goodness for smartphones — I was able to sign legal documents while I was on the road and get the process started. When I got home I hit the ground running! I lost a day of work to scanning and submitting documents for our mortgage, and then dove into writing my first piece for an awesome new client — Net Nanny.

I’ve also been trying to unload all of my son’s baby items, which is not a task for the feint of heart. Honestly, local donation centers are getting some AMAZING clothing and gear donations! I’ve posted in online sale groups, Craigslist, and have been spending the last few days entering items into the system for my local consignment sale — Growing Express — which takes place this weekend.

This is basically my long-winded way of saying that the quiet around here and on my Facebook page is due to me being insanely busy planning, plotting and organizing, and will likely continue through our move. So, forgive me if you find typos and egregious errors in this post — I’m on deadline for a client and just wanted to publish an update…

I distinctly remember conversations with one of my “regulars” at the college bar I tended (I’ll call him Bill), and his words have remained with me throughout the years. I was twenty-one at the time and recall alumni coming into the bar for homecoming weekend, a weekend consisting of college friends partying from Friday through Sunday. Most of the alumni were in their late twenties and, egads, early thirties. They were drunk, they acted like jerks, and in my twenty-one-year-old mind, they were pathetically aged. I mean, who wants to relive their drunken college days?

Bill was a University administrator in his early 40s, and we often chatted about school and life during my bar shifts. On this occasion we were trading stories about the crazy alumni antics of the previous homecoming weekend, of which he was one (alumni, that is, not crazy). In a moment of seriousness, Bill turned to me and said, “You know, your 30s are better than your 40s, and your 40s are better than your 30s.”

I smiled and gave him an “Ummkay,” quite possibly accompanied by an eye roll. Bill went on the explain all of the ways life got better when we aged. Our thirties presented us with family, financial freedom and a greater sense of self, while our forties were filled with even greater career/family/financial satisfaction. I likely shook my head and carried on tending bar after that conversation, but Bill’s words resonated somewhere in my subconscious.

At the time of the conversation, I was putting myself through college by tending bar on weekends and doing clerical work in an insurance office during the week. When I wasn’t at work, I was at school (or doing schoolwork) and vice versa. I was in a state of continual motion, so the thought of reaching a state of stability, in both my career and finances, was a goal I had yet to achieve – I could only dream of working a 9-5!

When I turned thirty, I thought about what my twenties had held – ten years of transition, career-building and uncertainty. I had a Master’s degree under my belt, was in a stable job at the time (the best I’d had to date), so Bill’s words did make a great deal of sense. I was living in Baltimore, discovering more about myself, earning an income greater than I had expected, and enjoying a healthy social life with other single thirty-somethings in the city. I was beginning to plant geographical roots for the first time in my life (I’ve lost count of the number of times I moved in my twenties). Life was good and I couldn’t imagine it getting better, apart from rising up the corporate ladder.

I met my husband-to-be when I was 33 and he was almost ten years my senior. If I had any preconceived notions of how forty-somethings behaved, my then-boyfriend shattered every one of them. He was fun loving with a great sense of humor, in a solid career, and possessed a zeal for life. In essence, my husband shattered my idea of one’s 40s being boring, tired, stuffy and routine.

I turned 38 last summer, and the thought that I’m creeping closer to 40 crossed my mind without inducing any type of panic or triggering a mid-life crisis. I’m pretty happy where I’m at and am stoked to turn 40. The strangest thing is that I often feel like I’m still in my twenties, with my youthful attitude towards life and in my sense of humor — the only difference is the life experience I’ve amassed, which causes me to proceed through life with a bit more caution (parenthood will do it to you). At 38, I’ve reinvented myself and my career, successfully navigating through the identity crisis of motherhood. My husband and myself both love parenthood, and all of the ways it’s changed us, yet we still retain our youthfulness (some may call it immaturity).

While I’m not yet 40, I have a sneaky suspicion that Bill was onto something when he told me that my 40s would be better than my 30s. I won’t use the “fine wine” cliché, but I will say that I’m looking forward to entering the next decade in life. You know what I say? Bring. It. On.

Scroll On

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen —political rants, cringe-worthy personal posts and adverts for whatever overpriced product people are selling [at that moment]. What I can tell you, is that none of these things would drive me to ‘unfriend’ a person. I like the fact that the people who comprise my Facebook friend list are diverse, and while I may not agree with their political leanings, want to see the play-by-play of a nasty divorce, or purchase their overpriced STUFF, none of this would lead me to abandon our online friendship. At the end of the day, I do want to know what’s new in their lives and see updated photos of their adorable children. However, I frequently utilize my right to “scroll on” when the fifteenth adorable child photo is posted in a day (making said child not so adorable anymore), or when I see another advert for a ‘special’ on the bags they’re selling. Let’s be honest, I’m a rubbernecker, so I typically don’t “scroll on” when I see a bad breakup taking place live.

Unfollow

Remember the days when your Facebook feed only showed witty third person one-upmanship amongst your friends with clever status updates? “Lauren is trying to figure out how to post a status that doesn’t fit in the present tense.” These days, I’m lucky if I even see a quarter of my friends’ updates, given the sheer number of Pages I’ve “liked”, likely from my drunk Facebooking days of old (sure _____ sounds fascinating, why not follow them?).

When I was pregnant with my son, and after he was born, I had a minor obsession with parenting pages on Facebook, blogs mostly. Once I became a more seasoned parent (read: worn out and caring less about how I was ‘doing’ the whole parenting thing), I found that many of these pages were downright obnoxious AND full of terrible advice or information. I had a run in with one of these pages on a bad day, fed up with the mommy wars, the infighting amongst mom bloggers, and the overwhelming misinformation being spread by parenting bloggers with an agenda. This particular day I decided to speak my own truths, not caring about the veritable shit storm it may create because a.) I didn’t want new or expecting moms to receive false information, and b.) so many people were agreeing with this particular stance like a herd of blind sheep. To summarize, the blogger in question posted that sleep training sabotaged breastfeeding (in response to an article promoting sleep training for babies).

The fact that my husband and I participated in sleep training with my son, and I shared openly about my positive experience with it (I’m no martyr), made waves in my little ‘natural parenting’ community and was a cause for controversy and outrage. I was accused of neglecting my son (not true) among other very false accusations, intimating that I was a bad mother.

This is how it went down on this blogger’s page. I shared that I had done sleep training with my son, and that it did not affect breastfeeding…at all. In fact, my sleep-trained son nursed until he was 21 months old AND slept 12-14 hours a night. BAM! How dare I? The blogger chimed-in, a midwife/lactation consultant threw statistics at me (none of which applied to my situation, as I had already stated). What they were doing was fear-mongering, just like the naysayers who tell expecting mothers that c-sections will sabotage breastfeeding (proved those women wrong, too – BAM!). The fear-mongers turned into cyber-bullies after I voiced my own experience, and remained firm in voicing the fact that sleep training with your baby does not definitively ruin breastfeeding. I should have known better than to open my trap and engage (something I typically do not do), but I really felt that I needed to chime in about the misinformation being disseminated, so that new moms wouldn’t be bullied into thinking that they had to enter into sleep-deprived-martyrdom. This encounter inspired my post, The Dark Side of Mommy Bloggers, that eventually ran on The Huffington Post.

Step Away

You know that the only proven way to prevent pregnancy is abstinence, right? Well, that concept also applies to social media. When you find that social media is no longer fun or serving a purpose, and is instead causing stress, anxiety and even anger, it’s time to step away. But, don’t be one of those people who post a long rant about how they’re done with Facebook, or going on a hiatus, only to appear two days later. Just step away quietly, no one needs to know — it’s between you and your social media accounts.

I go through periods where I absolutely loathe social media, honestly, and often dread the act of opening my web browser when I’m at my laptop. But, the very medium that allows me to work from home, network, connect with “colleagues”, and find new jobs or opportunities is, you guessed it, through social media platforms. In fact, you’d be surprised (because I often am) by how many professional connections and employment opportunities I’ve unearthed through using Twitter. Absolutely amazing.

So, when I take social media breaks, I tend to stay out of my personal feed or account, avoid any groups that are bugging me and take care of business. And let’s be honest, Facebook can be an insane time-suck. You wouldn’t believe how many writers I see in groups talking about how they don’t have time to write, or that they’re obsessively monitoring email inboxes, bemoaning rejections, or just gabbing when they could be spending time…writing! Yes, it can get lonely working from home, and it is definitely nice to connect with other writers, but do yourself a favor and set a strict limit on your social media time…or else you’ll find yourself looking at the clock a few hours later, reflecting on the conversations you had about your favorite pens, what planner you use, and how you don’t have time to write around your children’s schedules.

How do YOU reduce your social media-induced-frustration?