Ask Away Friday with Rabia from The lieber family

It’s time for Friday fun again!  Ask away Friday is a game hosted by four fabulous bloggers.  Each week bloggers pair up and ask each other ten questions so that we can get to know each other better.  This week I am pairing with the sunny Rabia from The Liebers.  She is raising two boys and a girl while working at a University.  I met her after stumbling on her blog and purchasing a small ad spot.  I had no idea what blog sponsoring was and used her blog to experiment.  She was awesome.  (If you want to sponsor a blogger that will promote you and give your blog lots of love click here.)  We have a lot in common, like our contempt of folding laundry, our age, and our ongoing battle against clutter.  She asked me some great questions this week so enjoy!

Raising boys and girls, I’m always interested in what other parents see as the main differences in their households. So, for you, what’s been the difference between raising a girl and raising a boy?  My kids are night and day.  Pork Chop is an active, absent minded little boy while Pea is a DRAMA queen.  I may have to repeat things a gajillion times before my son does it, but when Pea gets emotional, I want to bang my head against a brick wall.  I always thought I would have another ten years before she started yelling, “You don’t even love me” while running, bawling, to her room.  She’s been doing that since she was three…

What personality traits of your husband’s do you see in your kids and which traits are yours?   My husband’s attention span and need for order (OCD) I see in my son, while his easy going personality and sensitivity are all me.  My daughter got my husband’s persistence and natural sales ability.  Unfortunately, she tends to haphazardly collect random things in bags, totes, purses, boxes, and other containers and leave them everywhere.  I spawned a mini clutter monster that looks like her Dad but spreads chaos like her Mom.

I see that you crochet. What else do you enjoy doing in your spare time?  I have so many hobbies I lose count.  I love to craft in general.  I’ve recently been working on my photography skills and shooting in manual.  I am an avid reader and writer.  I also go through three-four month spurts of working out, prepping meals, and researching workouts.  The problem is that when I embrace a new passion, it consumes me for a while, and then something else will take over.  I am learning to balance my life and surprisingly, blogging is helping me manage my hobbies.

It looks like you’ve been blogging for almost a year now.  Is it what you expected?  In what ways have your grown? What (if anything) would you change, knowing what you know now?  My first blogger post came up April 10, 2013.  However, I have considered deleting everything I wrote prior to October 8, 2013.  I didn’t really consider my blog a real “website” until I moved to my own domain in the fall.  In October, I fully committed to blogging and transferred to wordpress.  It became the distraction that I used to get through the darker days following my miscarriage.  The women I met through twitter and blogging, though none of them knew I had just miscarried, helped me through it by simply being friendly and welcoming me into the community.  I didn’t have too many expectations when I originally started blogging.  I also did not take it very seriously.  Once I did decide to go “all in” with my blog, I entered into a completely different world.  Writing and posting are just the surface and the promoting and community completely surprised me.  If I had known then what I know now, I would have put more thought into the planning of my blog rather than just jumping in.  But, I jumped in when I needed to write so I don’t know if I would have become as invested if I planned before launching.  I am not even celebrating my blogiversary until October!

Where did you get your blog name and your kids’ nicknames (do you call them that in real life)?  Funny you should mention the blog name!  I have gone back and forth on changing the name of my blog since I moved to WordPress.  Right now I am feeling okay with the name but that may change next month.  Ten years ago, I had a little ebay business reselling baby clothes.  My last name is Scruggs and the name sounded like a baby shop to me.  I closed the shop when my work hours changed and I had to focus more on my career.  A few years later I opened my now neglected etsy shop selling crocheted photo props and hats.  I, again, used Scruggbug Corner because…you know, babies.  I purchased the domain name at that time.  When I started to blog, my kids were no longer babies and I was way too busy to think up a new name so I went with what I already had!

Pork Chop was a nickname I gave my son in vitro.  I gained over 75 pounds while pregnant with him and we all thought he would be huge.  Instead he was barely over five pounds and too scrawny to be a “pork chop.”  A few family members do still call him Pork Chop though.

Princess Pea or Pea’s name actually begins with a letter “P.”  I used to call her Princess Peepee (I still do sometimes) when she was a newborn because she would only cry when she had a “wet” diaper—and “wet” to her included the teeniest, tiniest little blue dot on the little yellow wet detector line of the Pampers Swaddlers.  We would feel her diaper and think it was dry.  When she didn’t stop crying we would see the smidge of blue along the yellow line and change her and all would be well again.  It always reminded me of “The Princess and the Pea” so I called her Princess Pee.

What’s the funniest thing one of your kids has done (or said) this week?  They crack me up every day but the funniest thing was something my daughter said yesterday.  We were leaving the house to pick Pork Chop up from school.  One of my uncles lives next door and another one of my uncles was visiting him.  As we were leaving our cul de sac, I said, “Aww look, there’s Uncle Manny!”  About thirty seconds later, after we had already turned onto the main road, Pea says, “How dare you call me Uncle Manny” in the lowest, most indignant voice I have ever heard.  I forgot that she could barely see over the window in my truck so she thought I was calling her Uncle Manny.  She was so mad.

What is your favorite room in your house?  Mine, because I sleep in here.

This one is for the kids! Ask them, “What do you like best about Mommy?” and then let us know what they said!  Pork Chop’s answer was, “Everything about you.”  Pea’s answer was “I like Mommy’s fashion clothes–and her glasses and everything about her too.” I am not a fashionable person so I am not sure which clothes she is talking about!

Would you prefer to go 100 years into the future or 100 years into the past? Why and what would you do?  I would prefer to go a hundred years in the past, even though that would put me at the beginning of WWI.  I consider myself an old soul with old fashioned tendencies.  I would have been a mom raising kids while her husband is deployed…which is pretty similar to my life now.  If I didn’t have kids, I would have been working in my blue overalls with a red bandana in my hair.

Do you have a favorite non-profit or charity that you support? Tell us about it!  My favorite charity is drumroll please…The Arthritis Foundation.  Pea has Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.  Though I used to think she had it “bad,” since meeting other parents, and hearing what their JA kids are going through with the flares and treatments, I have realized that so far Pea’s JA has been comparatively mild (knock on wood).  While she is on Celebrex, I’ve learned that the subsequent treatment options have far more side effects.  The NSAIDs are working on her joint inflammation so we haven’t had to start the heavy duty drugs.  Arthritis is not viewed by the general populace as a serious disease.  This has resulted in lack of funding.  The more people learn the realities of JA then the more people will help work towards a cure.  Learn more about Juvenile Arthritis here.   You can also see how JA affects our daily life here.

Thank you Rabia, for trading questions with me this week!  Check out the questions I asked her at TheLieberFamily.com. 

Don’t forget to visit our hosts!

Penny from the Real House Wife of Caroline County

Amber from The Bold Fab Mom

MrsTee from Love, Life, Laughter

Stacey from This Mommas Ramblings