Unblocked

It has been a crazy couple of months, and sadly I have completely lost my writing routine. I have a long and ever growing list of posts that I want to write for this blog, and yet every time I sit down in front of the computer, I feel completely blocked. I was in a great blogging rhythm right up until I took a break from my blog to participate in National Novel Writing Month in November. Clearly, I should have made more of an effort to to stay current on this blog, because I completely fell out of the habit of posting here – and I really love continually posting new content here. I did finish the first (very rough) draft of the story that I have been promising Ryan I would write though!

As I tried to get back into the swing of writing, the holidays snuck up on me so quickly, I barely had time to blink. Then, once we were done with the holidays, it seemed like we were thrown right into crunch time for Ryan’s Destination Imagination team. I helped coach his team, something that ended up taking up a lot more of my spare time and energy than I had initially anticipated. Although it was busier than I expected, helping coach his team was a really fantastic experience. For Destination Imagination, the kids choose a challenge, work together to complete it, and then present their challenges at competitions. It is a great opportunity for kids to learn together and use their imaginations to solve problems, without an adult sitting there telling them exactly what to do. As a coach, it was my job to serve as more of a guide and help them stay focused, but all of the work and ideas came from the kids.

The regional DI tournament was the culmination of everything that the kids had worked on. I was excited to see them get their chance to shine, but also excited to finally be done with the time commitment for a while. The kids had to perform a skit that represented their hard work and met a handful of challenge requirements. They did a great job and came in second place in their category. This meant that they made it to the State tournament, so the time commitment wasn’t quite over yet.

For the State tournament, we traveled down to Nashua and the kids gave another amazing performance – their best one yet! I didn’t feel great throughout the day, but powered through. This was a big day for the kids I had been working with, and I didn’t want to miss a second. After about 8 hours of running around, the general abdominal pain that I thought was indigestion felt pretty bad. I was sure that it was just indigestion exacerbated by being on my feet nonstop and wanted to go home and sleep it off. The pain was pretty bad though, and my sister offered to watch the kids if I wanted to swing by urgent care and just make sure it wasn’t anything more serious. I have a tendency of avoiding doctors, but I ended up going to urgent care. To my disappointment, they told me that I had to go to the emergency room immediately because they could not rule out a problem with my appendix.

I felt so silly walking into the emergency room. I didn’t want to go at all, but Cal and the people at the Urgent Care center insisted. As it turned out, not only did I have appendicitis, but my appendix had already ruptured. I ended up having to have emergency surgery and the surgeon said that my appendix was one of the worst he had seen in a long time – so I suppose that it is very good that I went in after all. Sine it had ruptured, they had to put a drain in because they couldn’t get all the debris out in surgery. While all of this was happening, my sister still had the kids and she made sure that they had a fun Boston vacation while I was in the hospital.

Recovery from surgery took a while, and as soon as I recovered, it seemed like I was sick again – this time with strep throat. It has been a pretty sick spring for me, but I am finally feeling better, and hoping to stay that way for a while. Over the past few months, we have also made many new friends, gone on adventures, and come to love and appreciate our newfound home even more.

My only hope is that I could get back to writing more regularly again. I think that the biggest barrier to writing that I have felt recently is my perfectionism taking over. The longer that I have been away from writing, the more that I want to post the perfect, polished content – and the harder that seems. So I suppose that is the purpose of this very mundane and unedited post. I am hoping that by writing this (or anything), I can kickstart my blogging habit again and maybe lower my perfectionist expectations a bit.

Stay tuned for many more posts! They may not be perfect prose, but I still have a lot to say and share.