Well, haven't we been productive in the last couple of days!
Each day is another step towards accomplishments & better organization. The chaos of birth & bringing home a newborn is slowly wearing off. It took almost 6 weeks, but hey, it's happening. We mailed off the birth announcements, various congratulatory birth, Thank You & birthday cards yesterday. The birth announcements were a big deal. Bill designed them at home & made arrangements for a printer he knows to print them out for us. He was doing it for free. Well, you get what you pay for. Bill brought home 50 of the worst quality cards I've ever seen. Our photo printer at home does a better job. So that's what we ended up doing. The size of the card doesn't fit the envelope that I ordered, but oh well. They got mailed.

Having a baby has undoubtedly been helping me to become a better person. Not that I am a horrible person, but nobody is perfect. I've had ample time to reflect on my strengths & weaknesses & realize what I need to work on. These are aspects of my personality that I had accepted & really didn't feel the need to change. I was functioning just fine the way I was. Becoming a parent changes my perspective though. I am going to end up being an example to Logan & it's very true that parents want their children to become better people than they are.

I've already discovered the patience & frustration issue, which I now realize is an example & trait passed down from my mom. That is downright scary, because my mom is psycho. She really had no business being a mom. Becoming like my mother was one of my biggest fears when the pregnancy test came back positive. Fortunately I have the ability to understand & control this so it doesn't happen. Plus, the added bonus is that I'm not psycho. Then there is the trait that has been passed down from my dad.

There is a depression gene & an anti-social gene on that side of the family. I'm fortunate enough to have escaped the depression, but I have the anti-social gene to some extent. It's not as bad as my uncle, who has it to the extreme & has been a hermit for as long as I can remember. There is a lot that I don't know & understand about him because it was never talked about & he rarely came up from the basement in my grandparents house where he lives. He would come out to do the yard work & was kind enough to do the neighbors yards as well. The few times he surfaced while we were there, he played with us though & it was fun. I remember us roughhousing & jumping on the bed in my grandmas bedroom & breaking the bed. We all thought it was pretty funny.

It affected my dad in the way that it is easy for him to disconnect from everything. There's a lot of other stuff going on with him, but it seemed easy for him to abandon his children & the rest of the family. He has come & gone at certain times in my life & it's been 7 years since we've talked. A lot of that has to do with me not wanting to give it another chance though. I did decide to send him an announcement along with a note, so we'll see what becomes of it. This is a huge step for me. Trust & forgiveness are not my strengths (no thanks to many events in my growing up), but I have decided that they need to be for Logan's sake.

So how has my growing up & all of this mental crap affected me? Oddly, not so much. I've never needed extensive therapy or any medication (why, I can't say. Most people in my shoes do). I have always had friends, still keep in touch with the very close ones & I was popular with the kids that I went to church with (because I was a brat & didn't want to hang out with the kids that weren't LDS). I also have an outgoing personality that helped me in my careers. Overall, I consider myself to be a successful, stable, functioning & upstanding member of society. However, it has been easy for me to disconnect from my family & resist really any family relationships with the exception of Bill & Logan. I'm also pretty picky about who I'm friends with (not because of religion anymore though). Honestly, I would be quite content in my own little world with just the 3 of us. But really, how healthy is that. At least I realize this.

Thus in my "growing up" & wanting to be the best example I can be, I'm learning to become more patient, less frustrated, trusting, forgiving & by the time he's ready to go to play groups, I'll be more accepting of others so he'll have a lot of friends to play with. I'm sure he'll have his own issues & demons to deal with, we all do & that's reality. But I hope Logan grows up to be like Bill & myself, only better.