Feeling the Burn

I've started the blog again!

I have said this very statement a couple of times since leaving Paris, but... I mean it now! I wanted to mean it then. I had good intentions. Like, when you tell your kids, "Of course we can make sushi together next week." And then, after you say it, you know you were lying (sorry Jet....). Sometimes it's simply easier to get them out of your hair (or kitchen for that matter) so you can just focus on tonight's dinner. But I cannot avoid that damn sushi dinner anymore. I am being held accountable for my words because the kids are getting bigger, thus, smarter and I am beginning to feel like it's making my life more complicated than it already is.

I don't really want that! I'm so over "the complicated"....

On the last Boots for Breakfast blog, its was simpler. There were no recipes, just fun stories comparing my life to food in my own, witty way. But that life is gone now and I feel that the best part of my writing has potentially gone with it. It seems so boring to force people to read posts that compare my kid-filled life with food. My single-life-in-Paris and then, falling-in-love-with-Ivo life was way more exciting, right? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, "I'm totally fucking sure that this has been a reason for my 8 year-long bout of writer's block. But I am gonna try....I'm still funny, right?

But really, I feel a slight struggle with finding the balance of what to write about, in the way that I used to compare food and life. I could try and compare the art of a quickly rolled lunch wrap to the ever constant wrapping of my kid in a diaper, but I won't. I'll spare you that post. Or I could write a scandalous exposé on the amount of previous in-house, kitchen fighting that used to occur over the dishes and how since kids, I would do anything to clean them myself, so Ivo could do the heavy-hitting of getting the kids ready for bed without me, but I won't. It wouldn't be much of an exposé seeing as the point was reached in one sentence. On the other hand, I could also compare the chopping of an onion efficiently, to wanting to "chop" my kids out of my life for a couple of hours a day, but I w.....well that one actually sounds funny!

But to get to the point, cooking is easy for me, even with the insanity of the kids. But since their existence, I do find it harder to write and appeal to an audience in the same way that I used to. It felt so much easier 10 years ago, because pre-kids, my body & brain were free to move about at any time of day or night and get inspired by everything in my surroundings. And, now, my energy, time, brain power, creativity, and well.....everything is sucked dry sometimes before 11 o'clock in the morning!

The silver lining is they will go to bed eventually (thank God!). But then most of the time, I am too tired to stay up much later than they do anyway... But, in my defense, it's 9:30 pm. Since Covid-19, these kids seem to think they get to live my Paris life, which contained no bedtimes.