Life has been incredibly busy lately. Besides being a full-time stay-at-home mom, I often find myself thinking, "Wait, I thought I graduated college." I feel like a college student with a life full of deadlines and due dates. I love keeping busy and having so much going on.
But if I'm being honest, sometimes I feel like I've bit off more than I can chew. My recipe blog has gone farther than I ever thought. Regularly posting recipes, as well as promotions and reviews for other companies, gets a little crazy sometimes. I love it though, so I can't complain. And that little bit of extra cash isn't so bad either! Amber and I recently finished one of the biggest projects I've ever taken on. Ever. That includes college stuff. We were both getting migraines from staring at the computer screen for so long. That project was completed yesterday, and when we were finished I didn't know what to do with myself. Then I remembered that I needed to start planning my very first relief society lesson ever, as well as decide what recipe I'm going to feature on Mom It Forward next week. And just when I thought I could start one of these new projects our furnace broke and I spent most of my day trying to keep the kids warm. What a disaster! It got down to 61 degrees in our house. Thank goodness we have a gas fireplace in our living room that we could camp out in front of till the repairman could come and replace the fuel valve. We were without heat from 7:00 last night till 3:00 this afternoon. It was a cold time for the Millers! Poor Brycen sure had the sniffles this morning.
Ok, I'm done complaining. I really am enjoying the hustle and bustle of life and trying to keep up with everything. And I wish I could say the above is all that I have to do. But whatever! It's fine and I'm pushing through it all.
Rewind back to Monday afternoon: Amber and I had been working on this big project for over two months and we were about to wrap it up. We were going through it making sure all the details were finished and there were no errors. (I can't go into details on what we were doing or I'll spill the beans on a Christmas gift!!) This project was seriously a beast, but quite a joy to work on. I can't wait till I can tell you about it. Amber and I had spent a lot of time on the phone that morning. The afternoon came and it was time for Brycen to lie down on my bed and wind down a little bit. He was watching a Disney Junior Channel show on my bed while I was working on the same project with Amber on the phone. I noticed my phone was about to die but ignored it. Eventually it completely died and I lost the call with Am. I went downstairs to my charger, plugged it in, and called her back. We talked for a few minutes before I had the feeling to go check on Brycen. The last time I was on the phone while it was charging he found my hair straightening serum and squirted almost all of it onto the carpet in my bedroom.
I got a little nervous as I kept Amber on the line and ran up the stairs to check on him. I walked in my room and didn't find him. I poked my head around the corner into the bathroom and didn't find him. Then my heart dropped as I realized where he most likely was: the office. Normally Brycen stays on the bed during wind down time and we don't have any issues. But today was different. And sure enough, I walked into the office to find Brycen standing by the desk chair looking right at my computer.
My entrance into the room made him jump and he immediately started to cry. He doesn't cry in moments like these unless he knows he's done something wrong. I looked at my computer to find a big grey square with jagged white edges covering the entire screen, and a black Sharpie with the lid off on the desk. The first words out of my mouth were, "Brycen Timothy, what did you do!" I didn't yell, but I was stern in my tone. He nervously looked at me with his hands clasped together. I approached the computer and went to move the mouse to see what he did. The mouse didn't move. The little arrow stayed in place and nothing was happening. Just that big grey square and a still mouse arrow were in view.
I started to feel myself panicking a little and decided to try shutting the computer off. When I turned it back on, that creepy grey square was still there. This brought me into a full-out panic. I had never seen this before and I was freaking out. I thought for sure my computer had crashed. I couldn't remember if I had closed out of the program used to work on this project, and if I hadn't, I was worried he deleted the project. Then thoughts of all my pictures and projects came to mind. This was the part where I started to sweat and pace. I tried calling Tyson but he didn't answer. I just wanted to cry, but I was panicking so bad I couldn't come up with any tears. As I kept trying all kinds of things to get the screen back to normal, I kept saying, "Brycen what did you do!" in that same stern voice. I didn't yell, which is common for me in situations where something crazy or horrible has happened. I do a lot of talking and a lot of, "Ok. Alright. Ok. Ok. Alright," while pacing.
Brycen looked at me with a concerned face. I didn't know what to do. Thoughts of taking my dear computer to a computer doctor came flashing in my brain, and then in that same vision the doctors told me there was nothing they could do to fix it. It was at this point I could feel the tears coming and my heart slowly stopping.
Then I looked up and saw something pop on the screen. It had to do with my wireless mouse and how it wasn't able to connect to my computer. The computer was "searching" for the mouse. Then it dawned on me that whenever my computer has done this in the past, it is because my mouse was turned off and the computer couldn't detect it. Sure enough, I turned the mouse over and the switch had been moved to turn it off. Then that scary grey image came up again. I moved the mouse to see if I could do anything about it when a small box appeared at the bottom that had two options: "Save image in iPhoto" or "Close". I hit "close" and watched that big scary square turn into the teeny tiny image of a grey card I had saved on my desktop. It looks like this:
On my desktop it is teeny tiny, and whenever I have opened it the size is still only about two inches wide on my computer screen. I had never seen it that big before and still have no idea what Brycen did to make it that big. But as it was stretched so large as such a small file, the edges of it got super pixelated, or "jagged":
Can you see those corners and how they're starting to look pixely? Imagine this image the size of a 21.5 inch iMac screen. Yeah. Dang scary. I thought for sure my computer had crashed and this is what it was now doing.
After I closed out of the picture, my desktop went right back to normal. The mouse was working fine and all was well. I turned to look at Brycen and he was looking up at me with that same concerned face, hands still clasped together. I bent down and gave him a hug, apologizing for getting upset. When I told him not to touch Mommy's computer, he hit me right in the face. Big shocker there, he always hits lately. I held his hands, looked him in the eyes, and softly talked to him about playing with my computer. He responded with his sweet little jibberish and gave me a hug.
Then he looked at me and started to cry. When I asked him what was wrong, he showed me his hands. He had drawn on them with the black Sharpie and didn't know what to do, thus the reason he was crying. I couldn't help but laugh at this point. I gave him a hug and told him he could take a bath and we'd scrub the black off his hands.
This experience taught me a couple of things. 1) I can't leave the office door open if Brycen is close by to come in while I'm not in there, and 2) I NEVER want to have to go through a computer crashing. What a disastrous moment that I never want to relive, and praying that I won't have to! I'm doing all kinds of back up now just in case something happens to my computer for real. But for now, this experience ended well and I'm incredibly grateful for it!
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