For a girl...

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and give myself some advice. Just to tell myself things that I know now. Things that would have made things WAY easier....

1. The cool kids aren't really cooler than you. They're just more confident. They have bad things in their life, too. Their parents are divorced, they have doubts about themselves. Some of them are bad at math just like you are. Just keep your head down, focus on getting good grades and being a good friend to the people who don't care if you're not popular. 
2. You don't need all the boys to think you're pretty. You just need ONE boy to think you're BEAUTIFUL. 
3. Some girls will get boobs WAY sooner than you, and you'll be mortified when it's time to change for gym. Quit worrying about it and develop confidence. The boobs will come later on their own. 
4. Don't let people tell you you're bad at math. If you think you're bad at it, it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
5. Enjoy eating whatever the heck you want while you're a teenager. Go to the store immediately and get a McCain Deep & Delicious cake and eat the whole thing with two big frosty glasses of milk. You're welcome. 
6. Keep running track & field through high school. There will be a day when you wish you hadn't stopped running. 
7. If you're not happy being single, you'll never be happy in a relationship. Get your own life first, then share it. I really wish I'd known this earlier. I think I finally figured this out a few months before I met Kevin. I think I felt like at my age, I was supposed to be headed toward getting married, so I compromised and ignored the nagging feeling that I was in the wrong relationship. Once I ended that one, and got my own life, my own interests, started going out into the world and making new friends and having new experiences, I really was happy with just me. Shortly after that, I met Kevin, and the rest is history. 
8. It will all be okay. I recall freaking out about something or another every week through adolescence. I don't remember what any of the actual things were that I was freaking out about. Moral of the story: most of what you're freaking out about won't matter in a week, let alone 10 years. 

So what advice do you wish you could give your younger self? Leave me a comment below - I'd love to know!

Sometimes....

Sometimes I don't blog regularly. Maybe I should change the name of my blog to "Ruby Sometimes", or "Ruby Periodically When Diana's Not Too Tired".

Sometimes work is CRAZY, and sometimes it's not. I love it when it's busy and HATE when it's slow. 

Sometimes I just have a HUGE overwhelming urge to make and eat a whole giant mixing bowl of chocolate Jello pudding, fresh from the cold cold fridge. It just tastes to me like velvet would taste. Sometimes I imagine sprinkling fresh raspberries on top, along with a nice big dollop of Cool Whip. Usually at that point I wish I actually HAD fresh raspberries and cool whip on hand. I never do. I should keep them on hand for just such an emergency. They should be in the fridge in a glass box with a hammer that says "break in case of emergency". 

Sometimes I go to websites that have cute clothes, and I put EVERYTHING I want in the cart, and then at the end I just close the whole thing without buying anything. It's my equivalent of window shopping, without actually having to go to the mall. I don't like the mall because of those aggressive sales people who work at the kiosks that sell weird things like fake hair extensions, and electronic cigarettes, and bejeweled cell phone cases that instantly make your phone three times thicker once you put it on. 

Sometimes I just like to talk to my mom. Even if it's just for a minute on the way home. 

Sometimes I wish we lived with the characters from "New Girl". Zooey Deschanel is adorkable, and I love that. 

Sometimes I have CRAZY dreams. I had a dream last week that my coworkers showed up in my office carrying their dogs, telling me that they were giving me their dogs to keep since they were too busy. Crazy. Last night I had a crazy dream that Kevin and I were house hunting (what?) and somehow we ended up looking at what was quite possibly the most awesome apartment in Oakville (Ontario, where I am from). Except the whole place was decorated all dark and masculine with leather and dark walls and stuff. But in my dream I was psyched about painting the whole place shades of pale aqua and light gray. I was going to plant marigolds and basil on the balcony. Also I was going to find two cute chaise lounge chairs to sit opposite each other facing in opposite directions so Kev and I could chill out but be facing each other. I'm not sure what the dream meant. 

Also in the dream there was a baby nursery decorated with boy colors, but the closet was full of pink baby clothes. Maybe that means our future child will have gender confusion issues. I don't really know. 

Sometimes I realize that I'm scared of making pie crust. Joy the Baker makes it seem so easy, but I think she's just a pie crust Jedi who makes everything look easy. 

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Diana

Mom knows best....really....

I look a lot like my mom. A lot like my mom. People just know that I'm her daughter, even people who don't actually know me. It's crazy.

My mom just never gets tired. We're different that way. She just keeps going like some crazy person who never runs out of energy, while I prefer to mix productivity with little breaks to check twitter, and stand in front of the open fridge and eat things before getting back to work.

Last week was a breaking point for me. I love love love our little home, but the kitchen was making me want to pull my hair out and scream incomprehensibly. It was a disorganized mess. I had moved in without having very much stuff to put in the cabinets, but slowly over time with the addition of some of Kevin's stuff, plus what we got from wedding registries, our cabinets began to burst with disorganized junk. It was so bad that I just about stopped using Tupperware, because all my containers and lids were mismatched and piled up haphazardly in the cavernous cabinet next to the dishwasher, and if you opened the door even just a LITTLE bit, everything would fall out, and I'd just get angry and sad and throw everything back in and jam the door shut in a cloud of frustration.

I was blorft about my kitchen. Blorft is a Tina Fey word. It basically means that you're completely overwhelmed, but are proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum. Blorft. I dare you to use it in a sentence tomorrow.

Then I remembered. My mom's kitchen is always TOTALLY organized. Plus, she's one of those weird people who actually like to organize messes. For some reason, I'm good at organizing messes at work, but terrible at doing it at home.

So I called her. She came over. From 10am till about 3pm we went through our kitchen and organized the heck out of it. At one point I was sitting looking totally freaked out on the step stool in the middle of the kitchen, surrounded by a pile of mismatched/broken/gross Tupperware containers, and a shockingly large collection of travel mugs that were either broken, had no lids, or leaked like crazy when you put liquid in them. PLUS, I had sent Kevin to the store to get things for our dinner with friends that night, and insisted that he bring me home a big bag of walnuts so I could make walnut orange Gorgonzola salad. Turns out I had like 6 bags of walnuts. I also had an absolutely obscene amount of chocolate chips. Do you like chocolate chips? Do you need any chocolate chips? Because I have about a trillion of them. Also I seem to be a powdered sugar hoarder. I had about four bags. There are chocolate chip cookies in my future.

Needless to say, the kitchen is super clean now. And I seriously couldn't have done it without my mom. I told Kevin after she left that if I had even attempted it by myself, I would have pulled everything out of the cabinets, crumbled under the massive overwhelming feeling of what a gross person I am, and walked out of the kitchen to go cry on the couch. My mom is just that cool for helping me all day. So much so, that I can almost overlook the fact that she seemed to be having a crazy amount of fun doing it.

My mom is the best. There's a lot that I just couldn't do without her, and I'd be a hot mess if she wasn't my mama....

On the bright side, everything is TOTALLY organized now. Kevin and I are even looking around to price out brand new cabinets and counters for the kitchen (eek!) and even though this project won't happen right away, I'm VERY excited about it.