OOTD: Not to Be Confused With an Alien Species

So after a waste of an hour at the car dealership in which my car refused to exhibit the symptoms it had been doing when I drive it, I finally headed to work and had lunch with my husband, picked up our new clothes embroidered with the company logo (exciting!), and then came back to the shop to spend some important blogging time before heading out to the bank and to pick up the kids. Except people kept giving me other things to do, like, you know, actual work. I know, right?

Life is so different A.T. (After Teaching), I'm telling you. Last year, I couldn't blog at all because I was so stressed. My one-sentence journal for one day read, "Two kids broke a desk today by sitting on it. This is my life now."

I don't miss that life at all. Blogging every day. That's my life now. How ya like me now, hooligans?

Anywho (and don't you hate people who say that, unless YOU, faithful reader, say that, in which case, I love you, but cut that mess out), I have some important info to share with you.

[Pause for me to picture y'all perched breathlessly on the edge of your seats. Don't disillusion me. This is my Purpose in Life now, remember?] 

This is my OOTD. 

 What is an OOTD, you ask? Yes, it does sound like a gentle species in Doctor Who, but this is not to be confused with the Ood. 

Dear merciful TARDIS, I hope no one confuses me with an Ood (shudder). Although their jackets are kind of snazzy. 

ANYWHO, one's OOTD stands for Outfit Of The Day, a term quite commonly used by fashion bloggers. Y'all were so kind on FB yesterday about my sloppy outfit (although the hat did add a layer of panache) that I  thought I'd show you an outfit where I was trying to follow the supreme guidance of Pinterest and wear the uniform of my species, the suburban mom. 

Unfortunately, that means I took a crappy picture in low light, but I was running late so I had to go with what I had. I'm really quite proud of copying creating a fashion-forward fall look all on my own! And note that none of this was Stitch Fix. 

The navy and white checked shirt is from the Ralph Lauren factory outlet summer sale and I snatched it up the minute I saw it. I love gingham. It's a little narrow at the bottom so I left the bottom button unbuttoned. It's a S and fits me perfectly in the shoulders and arms so no worries.

The olive green quilted vest is from Old Navy, a M so it would zip if necessary. Again, snatched it up when I first saw it instead of waiting for it to go on sale like a dummy because I knew (again from Pinterest, my fashion oracle) that vests like this are very "on-trend" and can be much more expensive. This is my replacement for the military jackets I'd been pinning for my Stitch Fix stylist, which I only wanted for looks and not because anyone NEEDS an actual JACKET around here. (Glares angrily at the weather report) Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Moving on! The jeans are Levi's Denizen from Target. They are probably the most comfortable jeans I have ever owned, and they cost $27.00. How about that, Nordstrom premium denim that doesn't even fit me anymore but that at least I wore enough to (sort of) justify the $100+ price tag? I need to get a boot-cut version of these jeans. These are perfect for rolling up. I'm wearing the "Curvy Skinny" fit and this completely eliminated the horrid gap in the waistband that so many of us pear-shaped ladies dread. Also also also, the "Denizens" have so much stretch that they don't gap at the knees or stretch out at the waist after more than one wearing. I normally wear a size 6-8 and I'm wearing a 6 in these. I'm 5'2" and they fit me fine even without rolling them up. If you are tall, I don't know what to tell you. Be glad for me, because usually everything is too long for me.

But of course I am currently rolling all my jeans up. Because Pinterest told me to. And although I don't have the right ankle boots (I refuse to call them "booties" no matter what everyone else does), I plan to order some tomorrow. If you comment here or on FB that you want me to, tomorrow I'll show you the options I'm considering. I mean, I'm 90% decided, so unless you agree with me, it probably won't do any good, but you can try to change my mind.

After all, Pinterest changes my mind all the time.

Comfortable, Flattering, Cheap: Pick Two

I got the idea for this post when I read Patience Crabstick’s post Building a Professional Wardrobe Part 1: What Doesn’t Work. She was a SAHM for 19 years after graduating from college, and then wore scrubs every day when she re-entered the workforce. When she became an analyst, she had no professional clothes, because if there’s one thing mothers do well, it’s neglecting to buy clothes for ourselves unless it’s absolutely necessary. And sometimes even then we moms manage to scrape by without buying enough clothes for ourselves. The kids always need something! 

It’s hard to shop when you feel you have to buy everything at once and money is an issue (money is always an issue for me). I do best when I accumulate pieces over time. This means I have to weed out some of the items I thought would work (or that my mom, my own personal shopper, found at a thrift store) but ended up not being comfortable or flattering. I almost added “or don’t work with my wardrobe,” but let’s face it, if it’s comfortable AND flattering, I WILL make it work in my wardrobe. It’s amazing how often I talk myself into letting clothes take up my precious closet space when they aren’t either one! 

However, it’s easy to understand why we keep things that are only one or the other. When something looks amazing on me and doesn’t cost too much, HECK YEAH, I buy it! Then wear it once and never again, because ugh, it didn’t feel good on, how soon can I get rid of this? Unless I wait long enough to forget how much I disliked it...wear it again, take it off as soon as possible… lather, rinse, repeat. 

For things that are are comfortable but not flattering, it often takes a moment of revelation to make me toss them. My husband takes his life in his hands if he suggests that those pants might be a little saggy--”I DON’T CARE, I’M WEARING THEM ANYWAY,” I have been known to snarl. I like to have a lot of clothes. I am not like the people who wear a variation of the same clothes every day--a capsule wardrobe, or “uniform” if you will. I respect their choices, I even envy them, but I wore a school uniform for 12 years as a kid and I don’t want to wear the same clothes every day. Yet I am also cheap (I believe I mentioned that) and will wear things that were a good deal if they feel all right on my body even if they make me look like a heap of discarded rags. So yeah, sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a full-length mirror, or see a photo which I can’t excuse as just a bad angle, and shudder. About twice a year I purge my closet, filling bags to donate to the local resale shop, and wonder why THAT made the last 20 cuts.  

I meant to discuss my current wardrobe issue, which is the opposite of Patience’s dilemma--needing to create a more casual work wardrobe, but I see I’ve rambled on enough that I would rather save that for another post. Readers (male or female), what wardrobe changes have you had to make when you made changes in your lifestyle? 

Finding Time

At the library, I recently picked up a copy of a book titled 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, by Laura Vanderkam. In the introduction, Vanderkam writes that you really do have enough time to do the things you think you are too busy to do, like exercise, a write a novel, build a successful career and a happy family, and even...sleep eight hours a night.

Well, that caught my attention. Because there isn't anything more important to me than sleep--and I include my husband and children in that equation. If I don't get my sleep, I am a rotten human being to be around, and it goes without saying, a terrible mother and wife. For a while, under the "Interests" part of my Blogger profile, I had "Getting enough sleep." And I wasn't even remotely joking.

I haven't finished the book yet, so this isn't a complete review. But I like the way the first few chapters have jump-started my thinking. The first chapter is called "The Myth of the Time Crunch." We all know how busy we feel, and how busy everyone claims to be. Yet the best evidence we have says we aren't as busy as we think we are. A third of Americans who work full-time claim to work more than 50 hours per week, and 12 percent say they work more than 60 hours a week. We tell pollsters that we sleep less than 7 hours per night; moms who work full-time and have school-aged kids claim to sleep less than 6 hours per night, saying there's just too much for them to do to spend more time in bed. However, these are self-reported estimates when a researcher calls and asks a person how much time they spend on each activity. People tend to overestimate how much time they spend working and doing chores, and underestimate time spent sleeping and watching TV, for example.

When researchers ask people to keep detailed records of how they spend their time in a day, it turns out that Americans sleep about 8 hours a night, even working moms with little kids. We also work a lot less than we think we do.The average full-time employee works 35-43 hours per week. Sadly, women who work full-time only spend 11 minutes a day on average playing or doing hobbies with their kids--but mothers who go part-time only make it to 21 minutes a day, and stay-at-home moms are about 30 minutes. Ouch! Dads aren't any better, averaging 15-18 minutes a day (I KNOW Justin does more than this; he and the kids wrestle every night!) Americans also watch a lot more TV than we think--18-23 hours per week.  It's hard to think of anyone who would say that's a good use of our time, yet  it's easier to zone out in front of the screen than do some of the activities we say we wish we had time for.

Vanderkam includes many stories of people who are achieving true work-life balance by choosing to fill their 168 hours with the things that really matter to them. They decide on goals they want to achieve, then figure out ways to fit the important activities into their weekly schedule and get those things done no matter what. Usually this involves minimizing time-wasters (maybe I should write more on this in another post, so that this one doesn't get too long). It's inspiring to read about people who are doing great things in their field while leaving the office at 5 pm, attending their kids' soccer games, and taking plenty of time to recharge.

Vanderkam recommends starting with keeping  your own time diary so you can see how you spend your time. It's like keeping a food diary when you go on a diet or writing down everything you spend before you make a budget. The idea is sound--how can you change your time budget if you don't know how you're spending your hours? I've been keeping a record this week, and it's not that hard--every time I get a break, I write down what I've done since the last break. I'm going to do another week, since this week was a little atypical in that it was the first week back after a break, so I was dragging around without much energy, and we didn't have students until Tuesday. Still, I can already see patterns in how I spend my time, and yeah...I take a lot more leisure time than I realized. I am perfectly capable of reading blogs for an hour and a half in the evening while ignoring pretty much everything around me. Although I still want to read blogs, I need to wait until the kids are in bed and not get sucked in to Google Reader every day. Because once I see all the posts waiting for me, I want to read them all! As Vanderkam points out, if I want to make some changes, I am the one who can choose to change how I spend my time.

Justin and I have also figured out how to incorporate regular exercise into our routine without having to give up sleep or family time in the evenings when we're already tired. Miss Pink has to be at school by 7:45 am. Normally Justin takes her to school and I take Mr. Blue to his before going (literally around the corner) to work. We realized that if one of us goes to the gym, the other one can take both kids to school. The gym is also right down the street, so after I worked out, I came home to get cleaned up and still had plenty of time to get to work. We're going to skip Mondays since Miss Pink has to be at school early that day for math club (and I can barely make it by 7:45), alternate the rest of the weekdays, and go together on a weekend day and let the kids go to the child care (which they are anxious to do). We've only used the system on Thursday and Friday of this last week, but so far, so good! Tomorrow night we'll go spend some time working out together (which we've never done before) so we'll be multitasking--keeping our bodies AND our marriage healthy! And that's a concept every time-management expert would get behind.

In Which I Explain How Much I Love My Job

Another week down! I have no idea how many weeks are left in the school year (I just know it's a lot, so why count?) and anyway, I feel like I'm getting in the groove. I am loving my job! It helps that this week we got the textbooks, so we could start teaching actual literature. Yay!

I love teaching juniors, too. I was right when I guessed that they would be much more cooperative than middle schoolers or freshmen (my two long-term assignments from last year). Yet the juniors do not have senioritis, so they still have some motivation to do the work. They also have to pass the TAKS test this year in order to graduate, which is another level of motivation.

The kids seem to enjoy being in my class, too. I know it's more important to be respected than to be liked, and this is something I have struggled with in the past ("If I punish this kid, they'll think I'm a MEAN TEACHER, oh NOOOOO!") but I also think that getting to know the kids and enjoying the things they say helps them WANT to be in my class and therefore they are more willing to learn from me. I love it when students share their thoughts with me, whether in class or in private; when they tell me about their extracurricular activities, whether that be sports, dance, or color guard; and when I manage to get the quiet ones to respond to my "good morning" as I greet them at the door.

My best compliment this week: the students were answering some questions that required slightly more higher-level thinking than just "What happened in the story?" and a few kids weren't getting it, so I was trying to rephrase the questions and lead them to come up with the answers themselves instead of just giving it away. One of the other students who'd figured it out herself said to me, "Oh my God, you are so patient. I would be screaming at them about now." I smiled and said, "Well, if I weren't patient, I'd need to get another job." More than once in my life I have felt as if I would never learn to be patient--when something comes easily for me, like my student felt about the questions, I have been like, "Why can't you just get this?!?"--and so this felt great, not just the compliment but also the feeling of being patient while not giving in to their transparent attempts to get me to just tell them the answer. I completely credit my children for giving me lots of practice in this area, by the way.

Labor Day weekend has been good too. Justin and I took Mr. Blue to my school's first home football game (Miss Pink was at a sleepover) and it was so fun. It was great to feel a part of the community, especially now that I'm a teacher (and also my ticket was free!) We ended up leaving at halftime, because it was Mr. Blue's bedtime and he was tired of sitting (relatively) still. He barely watched the game even though we had great seats right at the front, but he did like watching the mascot and playing with some other boys.

Saturday was...not so great. We got woken up twice, when Miss P was brought home from the sleepover (long story) and when Justin had to spend half an hour coughing up a lung. So we were both pretty sleep-deprived, but he still had to deliver some furniture pieces he'd built. I spent the day with a headache and the house looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Actually, a bomb might have been an improvement--maybe some of the dirt would've been blasted off the surfaces. I've never been a great housekeeper, but when I stayed home, I did do some cleaning. But last weekend I was recuperating from my first week of school and I didn't clean anything except the dishes and dirty laundry. So the house was truly disgraceful and I felt too yucky to tackle it. I did, however, manage to make some tasty chicken fried rice, so that was a win.

That evening, I complained about my face hurting, and Justin said, "Well, take some MEDICINE, then!" He said I always do that, and it's true. So I took a Claritin-D and slept wonderfully, and woke up refreshed, and all was right with the world. (Also, no one woke me up with his coughing.) I took another nap Sunday after lunch, heroically faced Wal-Mart to get much-needed groceries, and still had enough energy to muster the troops to clean most of the house. I still need to dust (seriously, I think nothing's been dusted all summer--hey, I wonder why I'm having allergy problems?) and vacuum, but it's mostly done, and we're having friends over for dinner tonight, and I don't even mind that I have to go back to work tomorrow.

P.S. If I already like my job this much, what's it going to be like when I actually get a paycheck?

I Don't Wanna Work Out Like That

Yesterday I didn't get called in to sub. Which surprised me, because I got called the first day back after the holidays (but couldn't go in due to a doctor's appointment.) Amazingly, I was a little disappointed since after two and a half weeks off, I am ready to get back to work (and to get paid!)

I did some things around the house. I couldn't waste time on the computer, because our church was having a Fasting Day. I had decided to give up caffeine and recreational Internet use, since I was planning to work, and I can't be responsible for what I might do to a class of little stinkers without ANY food in my stomach. I figured doing without caffeine and blogs (and Twitter and Facebook, yikes) would be hard enough.

It was. I discovered that almost every site I read on the Internet must be defined as recreational. I checked my email: nothing interesting (and FYI, Victoria's Secret and NY&Co, I have no money to spend on your endless sales anyway). I read some, but Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall, while very well-written, is the story of Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII who made it possible for Henry to justify divorcing Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. And not to give anything away, but I already know how it ends, and it's not good for the protagonist.

(Spoiler alert: anyone who displeases the king gets executed. I just saved you from having to read a book. You're welcome.)

So I decided to work out. I need to tell you that I haven't worked out AT ALL for three six months. I just quit the gym because I was paying $35 a month to never go there. And our DVD player is broken, so I couldn't pop in an exercise DVD. And did you know that it's currently very cold here in Texas? Yeah, I'm so not going out to walk when it's 32 degrees (and that's the high for the day). I got out my underused iPod and broke out the few aerobics moves I remember from my college days and the many DVDs I've tried to follow. I jumped rope (personal best: 1 1/2 minutes before coming to a gasping halt!) I did squats and lunges and crunches and some Pilates moves. And I did it all to songs like "I Don't Wanna Go On With You Like That" and "Owner of a Lonely Heart."

 I am positive I looked ridiculous. I do not know how to dance at ALL, due to being raised Pentecostal. Never have I been more glad that no one was around to mock me.

After I had done every move I could think of, I looked at the time on the iPod. Only 20 minutes had gone by.

Good enough, I told myself. After all, I haven't worked out in months. Gotta ease back into it.

And now that my job for today was canceled due to the district delaying school start times till 10, I have no desire to work out again today.