As a mom of 4, alone time is hard to come by. Not so much with the oldest two. Hell, Gianna and Scarlett spend their entire lives in their rooms so even when they are home, it’s hard to tell. They very rarely hover around me anymore. But the “second half kids” as I like to call them, are always up my ass.

This lack of alone time includes any sort of privacy when taking a shower as well. Since Evie has claimed ownership of mine and Vince‘s bedroom and closet, this of course also includes our bathroom as well. It’s very rare that I will get a shower at night without her in tow, asking to play Paw Patrol as I wipe the grime of motherhood off my body each day. Marina will often be perched in her bouncer, a spectator to our nightly routine.

Showers in solitude are not something I get very often.

We have two cars in our family despite having three drivers. We’ve been wanting to get a third car for a while now, however life is already too expensive and Florida …

After living in Florida for almost 8 years, I finally invited our nearby family over to our house this past weekend. There’s no real reason why I’ve never had them over. I simply get caught up in the day-to-day of our lives. Plus, entertaining house guests is literally not my thing at all.

But my in-laws were visiting and we had no big plans going on so I figured why not invite the cousins over. The extended fam came over and, as we were all chatting in the kitchen, someone mentioned doing a tour of the house. Immediately, my stomach sank. A house tour, really? Must we do this? Let’s just stay in the kitchen and pretend like the rest of the space doesn’t exist.

I’m not a rookie. I have raised 3 babies so far. I consider myself somewhat of a pro if you can ever truly be that as a parent. But, looking back at pictures of Marina from a few months ago, I can’t believe I let her get so skinny. Her scrawny legs and arms are so obviously wrong to me now, but then we joked about how she had bird legs. Of course, all my babies were tiny. I don’t make giant turkeys. But I don’t know how me back then thought she was fine when I was allowing my baby to basically starve to death.

Oh, I know what it was. It was sleep. Glorious sleep.

Ok, first, let me preface this entire post with the fact that I am not basing anything that I write with pure facts. This is all based on my life, Facebook rants, and what I’ve heard from people in the housing industry.

If you live in Florida, you might have said this yourself in the past year or so: “How are people going to afford to live here?” Our housing market has been absolutely insane since 2020. COVID caused an avalanche of people from out of state to move to our area. Sure, folks move to Florida all the time. But it’s been crazy the amount of people that have flocked to this state since COVID. And I think there are two reasons for this:

On October 19th, my husband Vince had a vasectomy. Despite this being a personal event, I of course shared this with flourish on my Facebook page. For a few reasons:

1. It’s real life. Men get this done and don’t let others know about it. It’s a secret surgery for most. Why stigmatize or hide it? Just because you are now shooting blanks, that doesn’t make you any less of a man.

2. Vince doesn’t care that I shared it. He likes to “bust my balls” about it, but in truth, he loves the attention. He is, after all, an attention whore. And I say that with all the love.

3. It’s funny. Anything pertaining to balls is. Sorry. I may be over 40 and some might see this as vulgar and immature, but sometimes I’m vulgar and immature. I’m not for everyone and that’s ok.