Five Year Plans

I woke up this morning thinking about 5 year plans. I always have goals and plans in the forefront of my mind. I like making lists and goals fit perfectly into lists.

We've been married for 9 years now, we're almost at the end of our second set of 5 year goals - which happened to be pretty much the same as the first set. It's safe to say our years together have not gone to our plan. It's weird not being where we expected to be at this stage, weirder yet it feels ok. We never planned to go to school, get a degree, move, move, go back to school, get half a degree (and a painful amount of debt), move, move, go to school and start from scratch.

It's strange to see friends married less time than us have more kids, less moves, a home, career etc. I long for the opportunity to have those things but it's ok for now. Somehow, it's ok.

We never planned to live in Utah. We like it here! We never planned to have to wait for whatever reason to have a baby. We wouldn't change it or her for anything. We never planned to have a home birth. We loved having a home birth! So many unplanned events, so many abandoned and postponed goals but so much gain and adventure too.

Stuart has a plan (ha!) to be done with school in 18 months. Either way the end is in sight. It's exciting to look at jobs, places, homes that could be in our lives shortly. I get itchy for change every so often and right now feel like settling down somewhere will be a really lovely change.

Speaking of change, this Pumpkin is getting ready to go into nursery in a few weeks!

Normal

I never enjoyed school. I remember lying in bed as a little 5 year old, before my mum would come in to wake us to get up for school and feeling sick to my stomach thinking about the day ahead. I remember pulling the "I feel sick" from that age right through to when I finished high school. It was always true too. The anxiety and pure dread came from a real place and I didn't know how to communicate it, which made it worse.

One of the things about growing up is that you don't know what "normal" is. I remember sitting in a doctors office once and talking about details of my reproductive system and all of a sudden feeling scared that what happened to me every month was not normal, that it didn't happen to any other woman. That was me as an adult and I was still scared. What the heck is "normal"?!

As a child I had serious problems with numbers. I still do. I never spoke about it because I didn't know it wasn't normal until much later when it was too late. I remember sitting in my Primary 2 classroom with two sticks of linking cubes on the desk in front of me. We were learning our 2 times tables. I had to count every cube every single time. The numbers never stuck in my head. The 3 and 4 times table don't even exist to me. 5 I can do on my fingers. The six times table though was my biggest achievement for about 18 hours.

The day we were assigned to learn our 6 times tables I started right away on the way home from school. By bed time I had run it through my head so much that I actually remembered it. I knew we were going to stand in front of the class the next day and the teacher was going to ask us a sum. I was going to do it, for the first time I wouldn't have to go to the nurse or out for fresh air because of feeling sick right then.

As I stood with my class the anxiety came and the 6 times table went. I was in front of the class and had no answers any more.

The more I think back and remember these situations the more I recognise that this really wasn't normal. I'd lash out in ways that were not normal to me. One time at a school sports day my mum was talking to my teacher. They wanted a moment without me so my mum handed me some coins and told me to go to the tuck shop and get some drinks. Handing money to me like that and expecting me to remember a number and to handle coins like that scared me to death. I barked at my mum, "Get it yourself! I don't want one!" My teacher looked at me and then said "I would never have expected that from you, Laura."

No, that wasn't me. That was a cry for help that went unanswered. Like the time I was doing my maths workbook and got so frustrated I decided to take a break and scribble over the page number in the top right corner of my booklet. I scribbled so hard you couldn't see the number any more. No more numbers. That'd be perfect. I handed it in to be marked and it came back with a note in the corner from my teacher telling me to clean it up. I wrote "NO". My parents were called in to talk about it.

Another time, when I was 11 my class was raising  money by doing a sponsored times tables. I came fully prepared to cheat through it but got so sick I had to leave the class. That was the same year I had homework that was taking me hours to do. My mum thought my teacher was some kind of bully and went in to talk about why I was sitting doing 2 hours of homework multiple times a week. My homework was taking other kids 20 minutes to complete.

As a 18 year old I decided to be an Avon Girl. I had to take my dad with me to count change. He came with me after I explained a calculator could only do so much for me. I can't read the number on it AND I certainly couldn't physically count the change into a customers hand. I didn't last long as an Avon Girl.

I've been thinking about writing this post for a while now but have dreaded reliving those humiliating and uncomfortable experiences. When it comes down to it though, I know what normal is now, and this is normal for me. Everyone is normal in their own ways.

Just don't ask me the time or to tell you my phone number. Social security, forget about it! I don't even know how many letters are in the alphabet! And I'd rather you didn't ask me over to play games, or to join the choir... It's normal for my brain not to know how to do these things and I'm ok with it now.

If you want to learn more about Dyscalculia you can read a bit about symptoms here and what is in general here.

When I was wee: Travel and McDonald's

My brain is awful. It's never stored things like I'd like it to and I worry that by the time Autumn's asking me "what were you like when you were my age?" I'm going to have absolutely nothing to tell her. It's already almost at that point now! So here I am going to share little snippets of memories I still have in my head. Maybe they'll spur other memories but at the very least hopefully this will help preserve what's already there, fogging away...

When I was wee, around 7 I think, my family got a car. An ice blue Fiat Tempra that my oldest brother crashed years later. It sat 5 like a normal car but we were a family of 8. When we strap Autumn into her carseat I always make sure it's secure, that the plastic thing that connects the straps is at armpit level etc. Thinking back on how we traveled as a family in a car made for 5 it's a wonder we're all still alive.

I remember traveling to Paisley from Irvine the 45 minutes perched on the lap of a sibling as we all were going to get a treat at McDonald's. Sometimes, before we were too big we'd (Beki and I) sit at the feet of siblings behind the driver and passenger seat, curled up in little balls that would very likely be crushed to death if an accident happened.

I remember not loving having to be squeezed into the car like that, no seatbelt - no seat! But I also remember not even having a car. Catching buses, trains, walking, lots and lots of walking... Things really are so different now.

Now I love walking but there still isn't a McDonald's in my hometown.

Autumn outtakes

I get so many funny outtake pictures of Autumn that I want to share but I know I already over share on my facebook, my photography facebook, instagram (my own sister stopped following me :-| ), and likely my photography website. No likely about it. It's definite.

This is my last channel to over share on. These are those pictures that are brilliant but not professional and yet are completely Autumn. Expressions overload. And teeth too.

are those not just the cutest, cheekiest teeth? she looks like she has a mouth full but there's still only 8.

"no no no!" this is when she scolds me for telling her to stop doing something naughty.

still scolding. she's goes for a while. dunno who she gets that from...

Of course, the less cheeky ones can be seen on my website: here

3 years

6:30am on March 10th 2010 I left my little bungalow, and my little husby in California and flew home to Scotland on my own. It wasn't my first time traveling like that by myself but the circumstances made it scarier.

I don't know what I would have done if it had been ovarian cancer.

Three years ago I weighed 55lbs more, Stuart was 5 months into his now abandoned Chiropractic degree, we lived in California just the two of us, I was at the beginning of my online degree in graphic design, we had been married for 6 years and 5 days...

It seems like only yesterday I was saying "no thank you" to my aeroplane meals (I don't eat on planes), I was anticipating that first breath of salty air as I stepped off the plane. Home.

It seems like only yesterday. Now we're in Utah, 3 of us. We're a year into the 3 1/2 degrees we'll have between us when this one is completed. We drive a mini van! 

Living the life... but I'm ready to go home again.