How I Spent My (Ridiculously) Long Weekend

On Friday night my lovely parents decided that they wanted to get away for the weekend. 

As it was my mother who made the suggestion I waited for further finalization as she is an optimistic thinker with a pessimistic heart (like mother, like daughter) who will more often than not burst her own bubble with one or more reasons why her fantastic idea will never come to fruition. 

However, this situation turned out to be different as they now had me in the picture, aka their in-home babysitter!

I could practically see a light bulb appear and come to life over my mother's head as she asked the question out loud: "But who will watch the kids?"

Ding, ding, ding! She's got it! 'My oldest child, of course.'

Now, let's back it up a moment or two, shall we?

My parents are very hardworking individuals so I was completely supportive of the idea that they should get away for the weekend and enjoy themselves.

I am technically currently employed by my step-dad as his office manager. So a long weekend for him meant a long weekend for me as well. 

Last but not least, I am the oldest of two children. My younger sister lives in an apartment with her best friend so in all actuality the "kids" my mother is speaking of is a reference to our five dogs. Yes, folks, you read that right. 

That's 5, as in 1-2-3-4-5. 

Well, if babysitting the little heathens would get an extra day tacked onto my weekend I was all for it. In fact, I even set up the reservation for my parents and come Saturday morning they were off on their merry way and I was stuck with four yappy Yorkies and a jumping Jack Russell. "Let's do this," I thought.

{My little angel baby, Tucker, who would never do any wrong...ever.}

I have to say that I was actually surprised with how the weekend turned out. Instead of slaving over 50 lb. bags of dog food and insane messes around the house (which is how my normal week with the dogs goes) it was actually really enjoyable. I don't know if my dogs were just like, "It's cool, guys, the grown-ups are gone. We can act normal" or what but there was hardly any messes to clean up and everyone was generally well-behaved. Which meant one thing, I could enjoy myself and do things that I actually wanted to do. Yay!

I have felt so inspired this week and really jumped back into blogging full time but I realized this weekend that I've been pumping out the posts but they've been generic and filled with things you see on every other blog or beauty guru channel and that's not what I really wanted to do. 

{My Tumblr-esque bath moment.}

So naturally I ran a warm bath complete with a Lush Dorothy rainbow-adorned bubble bar, sank into Season 12 of Project Runway on Hulu, and continued reading "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" by Mindy Kaling (all of which are incredibly inspiring things believe it or not).
It wasn't until I was scrolling through my Tumblr dash, as I do every day, that things really changed.

 I ran across a link from shewillmove-mountains aka Samantha, that was for her blog...
The Lazy Girl Guide.

Once I started reading I just couldn't stop. Not only were her posts interesting and relatable but her writing is laugh-out-loud funny and that is what makes it so special. 

Then it hit me, what I was reading was something special and in that is where I found my greatest inspiration.

I had an epiphany, if you will. I realized that the intention and ultimate goal of my blog should be to create something special for my readers that I also enjoy. Which is what I had intended all along but may have forgotten along the way. 

From what I've gathered so far, Samantha and I have quite a different style so don't expect too many similarities to stem from this sudden burst of inspiration, it was mainly of the figurative sense anyway. I love reading her blog though and also love to see other bloggers succeed (she's a correspondent for USA TODAY College, how cool is that?) so I will definitely keep reading because I can't wait to see what the future has in store for her. (I really hope that doesn't sound as creepy as I'm making it out to be) 

I finished out my weekend by over indulging in Mexican food and Cherry Coke (what else is new, right?) but I also got down to business with my blog and what it actually is that inspires me so I am totally starting this week on a high note that leaves me looking forward to the future. 

So here we go, a new chapter.
Keep a look out for some awesome stuff coming very soon.

until next time
xo
Merisa