When I grow up I wanna be...

This question has haunted me my whole life.  What do I want to be when I grow up?  I am 30 years old and I still haven't figured it out yet. 

Since I was old enough to talk I said I wanted to be a singer.  I still do, but I am to afraid to really go anywhere with it because I desperatly want to be good and I am horribly afraid that someone is going to tell me that I am not very good at it (yes I have been told my whole life that I am good at it and I still get told, but some of those people on American Idol were told they were good their whole lives too.  And no I am not fishing for compliments, just being honest).  I think if anyone were to tell me that I sucked at singing, I would curl up into a ball and die...seriously, I am overly sensitive to this issue, ask anyone that really really knows me, I really am.

When I was about 7 or so I learned how to crochet, nothing fancy, just chains and a blanket (nothing big enough to use because, come on, I was 7 and had no attention span), but within the last few years I picked it back up again.  Nothing to big or fancy, my attention span hasn't gotten much better over the years, but enough that I can make hats (with a very detailed pattern), blankets, scarfs, and that is about it so far, there are a lot of things I would love to make, but haven't had the time, or the right colors to make them, and if I make them in the wrong color it ruins the entire thing.  I love crocheting things, I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to that though, I will start something and undo it about a million times, no matter how far into it I am if I look and realize that I have done 75 rows and in the 3rd row, I added a stitch and it doesn't look right anymore, I will undo all 72 rows to redo that 3rd row just to make it perfect.  So that being said,  full length blanket can take me quite a while to make, so I tend to stick to small things.  I would love to be able to sell them and make a little play money, and I sold a few, but all it really covered was the cost of the yarn and the shipping, but I am not discouraged.

I love to write, I have always written things, when I was about 12 I started writing poetry.  I love reading, so for me writing was a natural thing, I love trying different writing styles, but none of them are me.  I have "written" many books that were a whole 7 pages of the same thing and way more detail than any book could ever need (I mean seriously, come on, now many ways can you say she was wearing a blue dress?), and no matter what kind of "book" I was writing, they all started, "It was a dark and stormy night..." yes I know worst opening ever.  The characters were always the same and the same thing always happened.  By the time I got a few pages into it, I was drawing a blank, and the whole creative writing process started.  As for my poetry, I wrote about 12 or 15 and that was about it, it helped me through a lot of heartbreak during middle and high school, and I had one published in a book that you could only read if you bought it through this one website, but it was published and I felt I had accomplished something when I was 14.

Drawing would be so cool!  I would love to draw some beautiful pictures, but I totally lack that skill.  I took ceramics in high school...we will just say that ceramics and art are not my strong points.  My stick figures laugh at me and even another blog I read would laugh so hard at my pics and she prides herself on her crappy pictures.

Being a massage therapist would be really cool too.  You get to make your own hours, make good money and you are helping people de-stress.  It would also be cool to be a CSI!  That would rock! 

I know that some of my ideas are out there, and some are pretty realistic, luckily I still have a lot of time to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Whatever happened to...

What ever happened to being a kid?  I ask this because when I think back to when I was between the ages of 12 and 18, I had fun.  Yeah I had my share of boyfriends, homework, grounding (don't even get me started on that one I have more than enough experience with that to last me 6 lifetimes), chores, babysitting, and not doing good in school...but I had so much fun, school dances, trick or treating, running around the neighborhood, sleeping over at friends houses, friends sleeping over at mine, more mom's than I knew what to do with (every one of my friends mom, was my mom too and didn't have a problem telling me that I needed to help with stuff around the house since I was there long enough to create the mess, and told me when It was time for me to go home, and my mom was their mom too, she had no problem telling them what they should and shouldn't do).

The reason I am blogging about this is because recently my 12 year old Taylor (and my 16 year old Haley did this last year and the year before) was telling me about the Halloween dance at school (when I was in middle school I so would have been the first person to buy my ticket), and how no one was going to go to the dance because it was "lame" COME ON PEOPLE!?  You are 12 and 13 years old!  What is wrong with dressing up in your costume and hanging out with your friends at a school dance?!  My friends and I went to every single dance (that I wasn't grounded for), we went to the awesome ones (ROTC Ball, Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins-my fav because it gave me another excuse to ask a guy out) and the not so awesome ones (can't even remember which ones weren't awesome, even if the theme wasn't that great, they all rocked).  Haley was telling me that she wasn't going to her prom because school dances are "lame"  Prom???  Really?????  Why can't kids just be kids and enjoy the time they have?  It took Haley 2 years to get to a point where she is involved in anything at school and only because we pushed her to join Key Club last year, and pushed her to join band halfway through school last year.  Now I hate that she missed out on so much fun in high school.  Now she is never home (not complaining because she is doing great things with her school and her education), finally after telling her for almost 2 years that high school was going to be the best 4 years of her life, she gets it.  Why can't kids just be kids?  Why can't they just have fun and enjoy going to school dances, just be silly and run around the block with their friends making crazy faces and jumping all over the place?  Why does everything have to be so serious?  What happened to kids?  Did we do this to them?  Did we make them want to grow up so fast?  Did we make them have to grow up so fast?  Why can't they just be 12?  Why can't they just be 8?  Why can't they just be 15 or 16?  Why can't they just play outside and ride a bike and dress up for halloween?  What happened to our kids??