GUEST BLOGGER: FADKOG: Dorothy had it right, and this is where I hang my hat

Our next guest blogger is known as FADKOG, which stands for For a Different Kind of Girl. I discovered FADKOG on Twitter and her tweets, as well as her blog are hilariously funny. Please welcome her!

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When my family moved to the Iowa town I grew up in, my world was a three-block radius. It was the circle around which I'd ride my bike for hours, where neighborhood kids would meet to play kick ball until dark, and where, every Wednesday, I'd endure every feasible weather condition or barking dog to deliver the weekly advertising circular. Those three blocks represented the place I felt safest (despite the vicious dogs) and most welcomed. It was a short journey from my block - the filling in the neighborhood sandwich between the other two blocks - to school or the convenience store we'd visit on late summer afternoons to purchase orange snow cones, but it felt vast.

Aside from time spent in college and several years working as the editor of a community newspaper, I've never truly ventured very far from those three blocks. Today, I'm raising my own family a mere two minutes - though sometimes it can take three depending on the occasional confused motorist who pauses uncomfortably long at the five-way stop sign up the road - from the front door of my present home to that of my childhood home.

Unlike the other places I've lived, I've always felt at home where I now reside. Always. Although my hometown - which often dominates the top of any "Fastest Growing Communities in the Nation" lists - is vastly different from the place I remember growing up, when I say I'm from here, it feels familiar, and to me, familiar means comfortable. Three big-name grocery stores dot the landscape where, years ago, residents had a difficult time supporting even one small, family-owned market. The library, which once operated from a tiny room in the back of an equally tiny city hall building, now host programming in a large facility with a parking lot that is always full.

Today, more houses are cropping up on what was once sustainable farm land than actual crops, and just when I think developers can't possibly come up with any new names for a multi-dwelling subdivision, up pops a Painted Woods or Something That Always Ends With The Word 'Pointe With An E.' Trying to give directions to someone unfamiliar with my hometown is virtually impossible for me because there are so many new streets and so many new names for them that I'm almost as lost as they are. If it's not part of the "old part of town," (which is what the area I grew up in is referred to now), I'm sorry. Good luck on your journey!

Yet it still feels like home.

My youngest son is finishing his first grade year in the same building where I attended elementary school, and though countless revisions have been made to it, walking through it is like zapping through a time warp and there's the kindergarten classroom where we incubated chicken eggs in the spring. Except now it's the computer lab! My oldest son, a middle school student, plays basketball in the same gymnasium where I ran laps as a student, only when I was a student in that particular building, I was attending high school and preparing to graduate with a class of 62 students I'd been going to school with since kindergarten. When my sixth grader graduates in 2015, he'll be crossing the stage with more than 600 classmates who filter into our district from the surrounding suburbs. Very few of them will have known each other from the days when they were learning how to write their names and navigate the vast hallways of a new building.

This is home.

From time to time, I'll drive around my hometown, and in my mind, I can distinctly see the games we played on the streets I'm driving on. There's the house where my best friend and I sat on the front steps and talked about the boys who traveled in packs on mopeds and played basketball in the driveway over there each night after dinner. On this street is the house we'd all meet at when the sun went down and we'd sit outside on the patio, watching movies on a tiny television that had been dragged outside.

When I take my boys to the park, it's the same park where I barreled my orange Huffy 10-speed down the hills. When we get there, the boys will swing on the same set of squeaky swings my best friend and I used to cut through the air on. I'll sometimes mention these memories to my sons, both as a means of connecting my life with their respective childhoods, and perhaps planting the idea that it's important to remember where we came from. I don't know that their goals will keep them near me here, but I hope no matter where they go, no matter what fancy named subdivision they may one day live in, they feel the sense of home I'm struck by when they think of what is now our shared hometown.

Guest Post: Midwest Transplant

Our second guest blogger here at MP is the fabulous Cathy who blogs at Mayberry Mom and The Full Mommy, and also runs a site devoted to family fitness. She has two kids including a son she really does call Opie. I've always loved her blog name since I stumbled upon her site and seem to hear whistling in my head when I read the title for some reason...

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My husband and I went to college, separately, in Philadelphia. We met in New York City, where we both lived and worked for more than 10 years after college. Our first home was a two-bedroom condo in an urban neighborhood just across the Hudson River from Manhattan Island. Our first child was born at NYU Medical Center. We even adopted our dog from a shelter in a fairly seedy neighborhood in New Jersey.

So five years ago, when we announced to friends, neighbors, and colleagues that we were moving to a small town in Wisconsin of which they’d never heard, they all thought we were 100% crazy. What about restaurants? Culture? Shopping? Temperatures above 10 degrees?

There are actually restaurants in the Midwest, we assured them. Theaters, too. And a season we like to call “summer.” Most importantly, there was a roomy, charming, old house that cost the same as the selling price on our apartment. There were jobs that required a zero- to 10-minute commute, instead of a 60- to 90-minute one. There was a community, with neighbors that would know us and our kids. There was a park across the street, and a community pool around the corner, and a lovely library a few blocks away. There were decent public schools and child care centers.

It was a trade we were happy to make, and we’re still glad we did (although at this point in the year, the winter? Kind of a drag). Yes, we miss living in the city sometimes. We especially miss the friends and family we left behind. But as parents of young children, we weren’t exactly painting the Big Apple red every night. Dining out often and seeing the latest shows and exhibits didn’t fit into our schedule, let alone our budget.

And guess what? The performing arts center located 10 miles from our Midwestern home gets all the traveling Broadway shows (not to mention the cheesy kids’ ones too). We’ve discovered some good restaurants and a lot more time to enjoy them.

Above all that, we have the community we hadn’t quite found in New York, where our friends and family were scattered across the five boroughs and the surrounding states. Here we have neighbors who drop what they’re doing to chat with our kids or care for them if we’re in a pinch. We have friends who drop off meals during times of crisis. We have teachers and doctors and shopkeepers who really know us. We have sturgeon, for goodness sake!

I think we’re going to stay a while longer.

Guest Post: O Chambana, Will You Cry For Me?

We are asking some of our favorite Midwestern bloggers to write a guest post here at Midwest Parents! To start things off we asked the very busy and very popular Mrs. Chicken who writes at Chicken and Cheese (among other places). She agreed to write a post even though she has a very active daughter and a 6-month-old son and writes for about a gagillion different places. If you haven't read her work before (really? who hasn't?) you're really missing out.

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I have an uneasy relationship with the Midwest.

A Northerner by birth, I spent most of my life on the shoreline: first in the Great Lakes industrial city in which I grew up, later along the Thames, when my family lived as expatriates in London, and finally, as a young adult attending college in Boston.

Water is a huge part of my life. The ocean beckons me every summer, to Cape Cod where I've spent every July since I was just 8 years old.

When my husband called me from the flat lands of Illinois one February afternoon and told me we would soon be living in a college town two hours south of Chicago, my first reaction was panic.

I'd long since returned to the city of my youth. It was where I wed, buried my father and birthed my first child.

It was home.

My father's death just a little less than two years earlier caused my roots to grow even more firmly into that hilly ground. I couldn't bear the idea of being so far from his grave, from the water that gave him so much joy.

I did not want to leave.

But marriage carries obligations, and my husband put forth a compelling argument: if we go, he said, our future will be brighter in the long term.

So we sold our 100-year-old Dutch Colonial—bought just a scant nine months earlier—and set out for the prairie, and our new life.

It was shocking how flat the topography is here. For days I drove the same small, circuitous route from hotel to mall to new suburban development, aching for trees and rolling hills and the shimmering blue of Lake Ontario.

Longing for the familiar, I unpacked all our worldly goods and watched as strangers painted our daughter's room the precise shade of pink that adorned her walls back East. I arranged her crib bumpers and decided where to put the coffeemaker, waiting for my mother and sister to wing her back to me, after watching the girl for the seven days it took to move to Chambana.

O, Chambana.

Our first months here were hard, harder even than the first days in a foreign country. I was adrift, tethered only to the baby and the strangers inside my computer, whose blogs and emails helped me make it through that first horrible year.

Winter was the worst. The baby gave up her nap and together we fussed and fretted our way through the short days, eyes seared from the glaring brown of the decimated cornfield behind our house. Every day I waited for the locks to click, announcing the arrival of my husband.

We flew at him, us girls, clamoring for his reassurances, his strength, his kisses.

Oh, we were lonely.

Slowly, surely, the winter waned and summer arrived, our first in the bare patch of grass outside our backyard. I counted days like sheep, until at last, the time came to depart for the water once again.

We spent three weeks at the oceanside that year, days filled with sunshine and the scent of lemons on a salty wind. But as our time there waned, the baby who'd become a girl in the 12 months of our Midwestern life begged to go home.

"Are we going to go back to Mybana?" she asked me. "I want to go to Mybana."

And so it came to be that her home was mine, as well.

Two years have passed since that fateful afternoon by the sea, when my daughter looked at me with hazel eyes and asked to go home.

My house is now as familiar as my own skin, cheerful yellow kitchen and shoddy carpentry, crooked door frames and a new nursery, bright green this time. Hopeful holly bushes line our front stoop, poking out of freshly dug beds. A Big Wheel stands at the ready, eager for a spring rider.

And this August, when the cornfield is as green and undulating as a deep ocean, we will leave Chambana for parts unknown. As it stands now, we will stay in the middle of this great country of ours, headed north this time.

North, to a land of lakes and greenery, a land notorious for punishing winters and liberal summers.

We will leave behind the physical shell of our life here in the Midwest, but will take with us memories that cannot be undone by geography: our daughter's first school days, my new career as a freelance writer, my husband's shiny new degree, and the happy smile of our second-born, a native Chambanan.

Chambana and I have not always agreed, but trust me when I say my tears for this place—this strange, frustrating, wonderful place—will be very real indeed.