Because so many things. Are happening. Right now. Oh my.

I keep thinking/hoping/wishing that I’ll wake up one morning with more time, but instead, I woke up one morningcame back from my trip to California to find that T had taken out a wall in our living room. Yeah. So. That goal of painting a corner of our house aquamarine that I made for my 35/35 list? Check. Flexibility as a personality trait? Check.

I’ll totally post pictures just as soon as there is some semblance of semblance. My entire house has a new wide-open floor plan. Removing the wall caused all sorts of re-painting to take place. The dining room is a different color. So is the living room. The kitchen remains, for now, the same. That it will persist that way is doubtful.

I love my new job. It excites me. It uses all the parts of my brain: strategic, creative, emotional, practical. It challenges me in all the right ways. And the days pass in a blink. I watch the light move across the sky from my office window; head out for a run at lunch, and then drive home, eat dinner, put the kids to bed, and hit my thesis. Or at least, intend to.

And oh, hey! I have two birthday boys next week. When did that happen?

Exhibit A & B:

They are pretty much the coolest. They’re funny and full-tilt and totally, completely different. I intend to write each of them a love letter, or at the very least, share snippets of their Birthday Interviews that I always conduct. Of note: Bean is almost as good as me at snowboarding now. I can still beat him down the mountain, but I have a sneaky suspicion it’s just because I’m heavier. The kid was born to ride. He has a sort of effortless grace that I can’t help but be a little bit jealous of.

This past weekend we also put Sprout on a board for the first time, and wouldn’t you know, he didn’t fall at all. He had crazy balance. Rode perpendicular to the slope, laughing his head off. The only problem: He had no clue how to stop.

“When you tell him how to stop Mommy,” Bean told me while riding the lift, “He doesn’t believe you because it just looks like magic.”

“Is that how you felt when you started?” I asked him.

“Yeah, but then my body learned the magic.”

Exactly.

Somehow, the days fly by. I do as much as the hours allow, and am learning to let the rest go. I’ve started running again and it is definitely a key sanity and wellbeing. Today I hit my 3mi/25minute goal. Another thing on my 35/35 list. I think I may need to revise that one.

Did you see how I tossed that link to twitter in there? Yeah, I’m on twitter a lot, and it’s one of my very favorite places to share, and find insight and be inspired. It’s also a place where I’ve been sharing little in the moment updates, at the speed of life as it’s happening right now. Won’t you join me?

My nearly three year old Sprout settles into my arms in a familiar way that I can’t even describe. It is a language we share, between our bodies. Another way of saying LOVE, this thing that we do, folding into each other, his small arms and legs wrapped around my torso, the heft of him against my hip.

We haven’t seen each other all day, and now he reaches up and brushes my bangs out of my eyes and says, “I want to rub noses.” And so we rub noses like seals.

Across the room Bean is drawing on an index card. In another minute he brings it to me. On one side: a red heart with an arrow through it surrounded in blue. On the other, a cheetah with brown spots and a yellow sun.

“You are the cheetah, Mommy,” he explains.

He’s right. I am. I am going thisfast.

T is at the stove stirring tortilla soup. It smells heavenly, and when he looks up to greet me and his smile turns my heart into helium.

Bean shows me the picture he’s draw for T. On the front, a heart that matches mine. On the back, a tall tree with the sun above it.

“Daddy is a tree with big strong roots and he reaches up to the sky and he’s surrounded by the sun. I’m the sun, and Sprout is a lion who plays with you.” He explains happily.

Sun, Tree, Cheetah, Lion. I love how he’s captured some small truth about each of us exactly.

So. I started a job this week that combines my love of story and creative work, with my superpowers in strategy and social media. I am now the Emerging Media Strategist at a super cool design firm here in Vermont. I’ll be almost full time until I graduate, and then definitely full time after that. It’s a new position, with a lot of culture changing momentum behind it, and I’m surrounded by some of the best and the brightest people imaginable. I’m thrilled.

It is also, of course, a shift for our little family. I had every intention of working once I graduated, but none of us expected the right opportunity would arrive right now. We’re making a new roadmap. Finding a part time nanny. Exploring ways to make everything that needs to happen effortlessly and well.

And the truth is, I’ve always been one of those people who loves to work; who wants to be full time, full on, engaged, motivated, connecting, moving and shaking things up. And when n I think about what they’re getting, my two boys, by having a mama who sparkles when she talks about the creative, awesome work she does… I know it’s the just right opportunity to do this now.

And of course, I’ll be blogging about the process pretty regularly here: about the choreography of equipoise—of making time for the things that count, and doing them. And I’m curious about your stories…

I want to year more about your experiences navigating work and parenthood in whatever context you navigate that. What do you love? What makes your heart ache? What are your truest insights?

Also… PART 2 of the CREATIVE PROCESS post is coming up on Friday. And a post very soon about my 33 before 33 list progress. Also expect some news and sparkle and possibly even a love letter on my birthday. GRIN.

I’ve been wanting so very much to show up here and tell you things, but with the new year came a fever—the kind I remember having as a little girl, and all I was able to do was curl under thick down covers and sleep.

It’s not something I make time for readily: resting deeply, and I think my body knows this. I think it staged a mutiny just as soon as my very last project for the semester was finished and I crashed hard: first a chest cold, then a brief respite right over Christmas at to ring in the new year, followed by a fever that when it broke, left me feeling like a knobby kneed colt, my limbs somehow new and unfamiliar as I woke from a day of sleeping. I felt unbearably grateful to find my hands again, my arms, my kneecaps, scapula, ribs. What a glorious blessing to arrive with these fragile lungs still intact to suck in the cold air; with eyes to watch the birds lift and dive from branch to feeder; with fingers to type these words!

And so I woke, sipped tea, and wrote in my notebook 12 things to manifest in 2012 and a word to true towards, my own inner north.

I’d been thinking of EASE, and VITALITY, and AFFLUENCE, and about the way those words called to mind a certain blooming of soul and career and creative work that I want to dream real this year, and then flourish found me, somewhere between dreaming and awake, while the puppy was on the bed, and the boys too, and it felt so right and true that I laughed.

Flourish (v.) 1. to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way; thrive 2. to develop rapidly and successfully; to achieve success; prosper 3. to be in a state of activity or production 4. to reach a height of development or influence.

For 2010 I chose action; for 2011, fruition, and each word speaks more truth about its year than I could have ever imagined.

Big things came to fruition in 2011. I wrote my first book, completed my fourth semester of graduate school, got a dog, made incredible + soulful creative connections, watched my six year old become a first grader and my two year old become a talking, singing, dancing boy.

And now to flourish in this new life I’ve dreamed possible: doing work that I love as a writer, an artist, and as a social media strategist.

I haven’t shared as much here as I intended about my journey through graduate school, or about my growing love for social media strategy, and the way this field combines storytelling and conversation. It’s been so intense and full velocity and transformative in ways I’m only now able to put my finger on. It has reshaped my view, reframed my capacities, and honed my passions. It’s been pretty cool, really, and I’d like to share more here about that process this winter and spring as I finish up my thesis, and about the process of being a mother while also doing these things.

This is something I’m becoming increasingly aware of, how this truth, more than any other thing, is my trumpeters call, my purpose, my passion. To tell you this: you can do what you want.

Choosing is a myth. Being only one thing or only another isn’t a requirement. And manifesting what you long for has everything to do with finding your true velocity: your right tempo at the borderline between self and world; between mamahood and career; between soul and body.

I don’t always get the tempo right; and there are many days when I’m reminded once again that I’ll always be a novice at my life: new to the curveballs, the passions, the possibilities that come my way. But I’m joyfully committed to the process nonetheless. And that, my friends, is my way of way of telling you: I have big plans for 2012. New offerings, new directions and new adventures. And I can’t wait to share them!

xo,
Christina Rosalie

“Hello,” I say, as the boy looks up at me. “Do you like matchbox cars too?”
He nods. “Yeah,” he says, fingers running lightly over a blue and white race car.

I sort of hesitate there until I hear his mother. She’s walking backwards, still talking with the pharmacy clerk, but at least she’s moving towards her son like a reluctant magnet, and so I go on my way in search of the batteries I’ve come for.

I can’t help but hear her say,

“But Gage always fills four, and lets the prescription roll over to the next month.”
“Well I’m not Gage,” says the pharmacy clerk.

The woman is wearing dirty pink sweatpants. Her hair is pulled back into a disheveled ponytail that matches my own on many too-busy days. Her face is ashy. She has a bronchial cough. She’s holding cigarettes in one hand, her cell phone in the other.

I walk on, ask a boy with barley enough facial hair to warrant his attempt at a beard where the batteries are, and then make my way to the register.

And then I see her.

“Noah Jeffery!” She is yelling in a tone that sounds more angry than anxious though I know what she must feel.

She moves down the isle quickly, and then reappears soon after, biting her nails, quiet now, looking. She walks up and down the front of the isles past the displays of stocking sized bottles of wine, and Russell Stover chocolates, and fake poinsettia plants. Then she goes out of the store and I hear her calling into the night. “Noah! Noah!”

I wait. A new register opens up. It’s the boy with the barely beard. I say, “There is a woman who has just lost her child in your store, is there anything you can do to help?”

He looks at me and says “Oh.” And then, “Debit or credit?”

As I run my card I say, “I’m a mom, I get it. Can you make sure no little boy walks out of your store. I just saw him in the toy isle.”

He gives me the vaguest of smiles, the slightest of nods as though I might be asking him to feed his cat bonbons. Like nothing I am saying computes even remotely with the gravity of the situation. The woman dashes back in even more frantically, still empty handed.

I linger as long as I can.

I do a sweep of the store. But with my paid-for merchandize in a sack it feels like contraband walking back through the isles. I do not see him. I do not see her.

Maybe they’ve found each other, I tell myself hopefully.

Still I plead: “Really, there is a little boy who got lost in your store. Please watch the door.”

And then reluctantly I go, looking up and down the street, and into the parking lot, where what must be her car stands with all it’s doors wide open, left abruptly when she didn’t find him there. It’s an old Chevy, the dents in the hood glint in the lamplight.

And this is what I pray will happen, despite the seemingly obvious odds: That when she finds him she will wrap him in her arms, that there will be soft voices and tender kisses and hands held and cheeks pressed close to cheeks.

Bean is watching my every subtle move. We are in the middle of a game of “alligator” and Sprout, perched on the couch cushions above us launches himself suddenly through the air, chubby thighs bare, and lands between his brother and me, straddling my chest, laughter erupting.

Alligator is a game that Bean invented. It requires certain might and restraint and all the physicality that little boys crave. The rules are simple: I catch him and wrap in my arms and legs, my fierce alligator jaws devouring his lithe little body, and then I hold him tight regardless of any plea, or request, or peel of giggles as he tries to wriggle free.

Sometimes I follow the rules. I am a fierce and steadfast gator, remaining unswayed until just exactly the right moment when the wiry-mulled little boy I’ve trapped is clever enough to outwit me, or strong enough to slip between clenched biceps. Other times I add a twist: I pretend to be asleep and snore, and he slips out easily, much to his delight and my pretend chagrin. And then there are the times, when it takes everything I have not do not to devour him whole: soft cheeks and sandy hair that smells like honey and milk.

Today he’s already made his first escape, and has immediately clambered on top of my ribcage for more. His weight familiar. I’ve always carried him; always held the heft of him close; always been the cradle for his small knees and elbows and belly. And thisI think, is part of what I do that makes it possible to sustain this full velocity life. Of doing the work of my heart in all the ways that I must: writer and mama, strategist and artist, graduate student and runner, all in unequal measures as the day demands. No matter what the day holds, it will always finds us like this, limbs colliding in this certain and unequivocal choreography of love.

I watch him watch me, imagining what he must think of me.
My own childhood was far less physical. There was no puppy piling, no running through the house, no yelling. I remember often being told to be quite, to find the boundaries of my ebullient self and rein them in. I praised for my intellect, never for my ability to make people laugh; and other than sitting on my father’s lap to listen to a book read aloud, or hugging my parent’s goodnight, or holding hands when walking along a busy street, love was never spelled limb against limb, twirling in giddiness, kissing like blowfish, or howling like the pack of wild hyaenas always on the loose and restless in my soul.

Which is why his answer delights me deeply when I ask:

“If you were to describe me to someone who has never met me, what would you tell them?”

He tilts his head to the side and looks at my face.

And then he says, “That you’re strong…. that you’re funny*….and that you stay up late.”

Then he adds, “And that you wrestle with me.” As if this is the most important thing of all.

It’s such a gift to catch the tiniest of glimpses into how he sees me.
It’s a gift, always, when you can get a glimpse of how anyone sees you. It broadens your view of yourself; increases your imagination of what you think is possible, and makes you lean into your potential differently. Give yourself this gift today: go ask someone how they would describe you to a stranger. Bask in their reply.

xoxo!
Me.

*FUNNY made the list! Funny. You have no idea how over the moon that makes me.