…until I saw this.

Comfort. love. life.

Keep reading.

I am not even sure what conquering the multiverse with laser kittens means, but it sounds like something good, something that needs to be on my to-do list.

I wonder how much shipping a sectional couch that will change the way I think about sitting to Philly from Wisconsin would cost. Probably too much considering I don’t even like the couch.

Maybe I should just pay the seller $100 to be my pen pal.

 

It all started with these two.

Our three gifts for Christmas include a gold gift, the pies de resistance. And, for Christmas 2013, the boys’ gold gifts were these little guys (which we later discovered were actually gals).

Yup. The little one there chomping on the weeds in my yard is named Jones. She’s a she despite her name (named after Indy, of course). I got that little lady off Craigslist from a middle school boy whose mom told him he had to sell off part of his zoo. $25 and a 45-minute drive got me a Western box turtle with tank, heat rock, light, and so forth for my middle school boy. But, the thing was…it was like September when I got him…and Christmas is in December. So, little Miss Shell moved into my laundry room for the fall because my children would never dare go in there. In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t know the laundry room in the basement even exists and that the tooth fairy visits their rooms occasionally to deliver their clothes clean again.

As I was mysteriously taking pieces of tomato and such downstairs every so often, it dawned on me that the other boy would really like one of these things too for his gold gift. So, back on Craigslist I went where I saw that someone had an Eastern box turtle who needed a new home…but they lived about 90 minutes away…but very near my sister. So, my brother-in-law went on mission to pick up the above larger turtle from a very nice man who was happy to hand it off to a new home for free. A late night drive to meet up with my sister and another turtle (now Timber named after the struggle Mark and I had bringing the tank up the stairs Christmas day) had moved into my laundry room.

Christmas morning did not disappoint as the boys went bonkers over their new roommates and all they came with. And, while the girls were excited about their gold gifts as well, theirs weren’t breathing. And, apparently, breathing gold gifts are all the rage. It didn’t take long for the girls to start begging for a boy box turtle to call their own because…of course…no turtle farm is complete without turtle eggs (and not just eggs, fertilized eggs…because we have also learned through experience that female turtles will lay eggs but that’s all they will ever be without a boy turtle to finish the job).

So, this mama did what any turtle-loving and child-loving mama would do. I put an ad on Craigslist titled: Desperately seeking box turtle. I got a few responses from people over time–most, however, had some cute shelled creatures they were offering up but no male box turtles. We even had a Facebook crowd following along (aka. thinking I had lost my mind) helping us hunt one down. But, alas, no male box turtle.

Then, at the end of last week, something magical happened and an email was delivered into my inbox.

We have a Russian Tortoise named Fiona that needs a new home. She loves attention and will eat from your hand. I can send a photo if interested. Michelle

I’m not kidding. Her name was Michelle.

So, yes, photos were sent. And, despite the fact that Fiona is seemingly yet another female and unable to breed with box turtles anyway, we welcomed her into our family. I mean, how could we not? She was free. And, despite what you may think, she is pretty cute…and very hard to photograph with her new turtle friends.

Turtles sorta do this (note Timber bolting for the great wild).

unless you do this and sorta hold onto them. Believe me when I say they are shockingly fast and we’re all not surprised at all that the tortoise beat the hare.

We met Michelle half way to assume custody. And, we also got this massive tank complete with everything a tortoise could ever want, extra bedding, a bag of organic farm-raised vegetables that are reported to be her favorite and bottled water, a heat lamp and cold UV lamp, and special nutrient rich food for extra treats. And, I may have seen a tear in Michelle’s eye as she explained Fiona’s (now Aslan) preference for women and how she bats her eyes at a gentle voice spoken to her directly.

Oh, dear Fiona, now Aslan, I’m sorry you have left Club Med and have now entered the Raudy house where you are being trained with a bell (not kidding) and will get a whole lot of attention from this little one in particular…and I’m fairly certain it won’t be in a gentle voice.

But, she’ll love on you a whole lot because you are way more engaging than her Lego turtle she insisted on bringing outside with the others for some exercise (and it apparently has laser vision).

Wonder if I can find one more turtle on Craigslist?

She’s the antiblog. She doesn’t read them, snickers at the mention of them, rolls her eyes, and shakes her head. Blogs have created a relational disconnect; women blog rather than pick up a phone or gather to exchange stories. Blogs are either ways women brag about their Pintastic motherhood, try to make themselves look like women they are not in a online-dating-service kind of way, or pitifully share about absolutely nothing of any interest. Never before have so many people with so little significant things to say said so much to so few people. Told you she’s the antiblog.

But, I blog. I really like to blog. In fact, I’m doing it right now. blog, blog, blog.

I was introduced to it all in 2007. We had just started the adventure of adoption, and I very likely wore down the keys on my keyboard that formed the words “china adoption blog.” I read every word of every blog I could find. I couldn’t get enough of referral pictures and current pictures, agency reviews, the how tos and how not tos, attachment woes and success. Blogs became my personal library with unlimited volumes of reference material all contained on the 13″ screen sitting in front of me.

While nail biting the initial steps forward in adopting, I wrote my first blog post seven years ago on an old blogger site with a cluttered and distracting design that I loved at the time. I wrote a little and someone other than my mom and husband may have read it every so often. My voice was guarded and the lack of any readership reflected that. A few years into it, our family grew as did my need to have a voice and my “stats” as they are called grew as well.

Hi, how are you? How is your family? How is your daughter doing? Oh good. That’s great.

With a child on my hip, one clinging to my leg, and two more either arguing, needing a wipe, or dying of thirst, that was pretty much the depth of my in-person conversations for years. Some days, that was generous; I was lucky if I was able to say hello and smile.

But, in the afternoons when there were some moments of quiet sandwiched between chaos or in the evenings when all were tucked snug in their beds, I had my overthinking and this blog. In a season that could have been isolating, I found companionship, not in Times New Roman and words in front of me but in the women who started to read those words and who responded in kind. Far from creating a relational disconnect, blogging has connected me. The clicking of the keys and the final click on “Publish” have been nothing short of keys to connection.

And, even when they are not and the words I put out there seem to be tossed out into an Internet abyss and come back void, I keep clicking because (a) intentionally taking the time to put my overthinking into semi-intelligible words forces me to overthink even my overthinking and process things I would have left swirling around my head and heart AND (b) my kids will thank me one day. Alright, maybe they won’t. But, I would be thanking my mom right now if she had blogged and I had an ongoing record of her overthinking and how she made sense of life and responded to our everyday.

It’s not about showing off. It’s not about making myself look like I’m someone I’m not. It’s not about stats. Blogging is becoming a volume in that reference library that is pulled out every once in a while and cracked open wide. Maybe I’ll never meet the person who reads the words on my these virtual pages or maybe the one reading will end up joining me on a service trip to China and become a dear friend. Better yet, maybe the reader will be my son or my daughter tracing the heart and thoughts of their mother. If no one else, the one blowing off the dust and clicking open the pages will be me so that I can remember where I’ve been and how I got to today.

Antiblog, go ahead and roll your eyes. I’ll just smile and shrug my shoulders and then go blog about it.