Putting feet in front of other feet

Aaaaaaaaaand appointment scheduled. A few days ago I also encountered a fascinating article and TED Talk about the connection between sleep deprivation and mental illness, which now has me putting in a concerted effort to go to bed a full two and a half hours earlier than has been my normal behavior. So far, I've been obedient to the plan, but it's hard to actually fall asleep that early. I think it might be starting to help, though. I'm going to keep it up and see how that improves.

In addition, I started reading the Book of Mormon out loud to my family each night, mostly at dinner time, when Daniel is already mostly sitting still and has his mouth full. :P I'm not explaining much yet, but I've always wanted to have family scripture study be a thing for us, with varying degrees of success even pre-kids. So this is more about creating that habit and making for future opportunities. And also getting Daniel's ear familiar with the cadences of that sort of language. I'm sure he's not understanding much, but already he occasionally asks for the definition of a word or something, so that's fun. This is all stemming from a big BoM kick I've been on in general lately, due in large part to a fun conversation I had with a friend on facebook. More on that in a minute.

So yeah. Some decent days (Thursday, Friday) and some really bad days (Wednesday, Saturday). Today is a good one so far. (Here I interrupt myself to play with a giggling baby, then spend over an hour trying to encourage him to sleep as he becomes increasingly cranky and erratic. Eventually I give up. At least now Daniel has him happily distracted, playing on couch cushions on the floor.)

Anyway. Trying to pile on as many good things as I can and see what sticks. None of the things I'd been trying previously have worked. If the bad days could just be not so very very very bad, and the good days involve more energy for doing anything, that would be enough. It's funny--Noah is 14 months old, which is exactly the age Daniel was when I first couldn't take it anymore and had to get counseling. I guess this age just really short-circuits my brain. (It's a time of strong opinions and poor communication, to put it lightly.)

IN OTHER NEWS:

I actually did end up doing a lot of writing in February! I made progress on my RPG prep, though not on my webcomic scripts. I wrote that talk I posted. Astonishingly, I actually did write a poem, which I thought was pretty good. I got frustrated by a stupid birthday card I was about to spend and ended up composing the world's most ridiculous short story to try and "fix" it. And I put together a narrative timeline of the Book of Mormon for the aforementioned friend. All three of these things I will probably end up posting here over the next week or so.

Now it's March! I don't know what to do hobby-wise for March. I had a vague idea that it would be fun to try to learn to cook, but that idea isn't holding up well in the face of the face of all this domestic despair. Or maybe it would help? I dunno. I think I don't want the pressure right now. The other big thing I keep wanting to do is work on learning a language--either Esperanto or Spanish. But maybe it would be smarter to devote the whole month to my Fate campaign?

It'll probably be one of those things, anyway.

Constantly under assault

All of my logic and faith and optimism and coping skills are totally failing this week. I am a terrible person and miserable. It doesn't matter that they do amazing things every day. I don't know what to do with them or myself. I am out of control and scared. I might need counseling again.

Some things are possible

I've been having a really hard couple weeks on the mommying front. It's not the old problem where I struggle over wanting to do my own thing--I actually feel pretty okay about that stuff, and I enjoy the time I spend directly interacting with my little people too. But I'm super depressed by the constant disastrously messy state of my house. If I try to get up and do anything about it, Noah either a) gets into what I'm doing causes trouble or b) tries to follow me around, gets freaked out by my constantly walking away from him, and follows me around crying.

I have thus discovered that a small person following me around crying is my #1 mind-destroying rage trigger. Daniel's grown out of it, so I hardly clash with him at all anymore except when my temper has already been snapped by his brother. But when he was right around this age was when I couldn't take it anymore and had to go into counseling.

So to avoid the rage, I end up just staying in the same place, and when I'm boring, Noah entertains himself or is entertained by his brother. Sometimes he checks in and we play a little. Or I can play with Daniel, who I have more fun with the older he gets, and Noah hangs out with us. And in between, I actually get a lot of time to myself--in fact, all the time I want to sit around and read or whistle or do heraldry or whatever.

But I hate having a messy house. I feel like a pig. The fridge and the dishes stink. Noah's run out of pajamas. The shower is a science experiment. I'm really worried about Daniel's degree of constant exposure to TV and convenience food, and about not teaching him to clean and cook too. We have way too freaking many toys, even after Daniel helped me fill two boxes with donations. I don't know where to put any of my SCA-related crafty stuff.

For the last week or so I've been twiddling with this text file on my computer where I try to imagine my totally ideal, Mary Sue-ified self, as if she were a fictional character. Someone who has all the skills I want and makes time for all the things I want. Smart and kind, funny and humble, loud and quiet, playful and spiritual, artistic and domestic, a beautiful clean house full of good smells and happy people and music and books and video games and completed projects. But this character doesn't make any sense to me. Nothing I do seems to make her seem realistic or possible. And none of these traits are things I feel are dispensable, or are merely being imposed on me from the outside. I really want them. I really want them.

Hmph.

Anyway. I need to find a way to talk someone into hanging out at my house all day every day for like a week and play with my kids so I can at least whip my domicile into shape and stop feeling so imprisoned by it. I'm not sure that's possible, though. I don't know what to do.

...I was aiming toward ending this on a despairing sort of note, but oh my goodness Noah is being adorable right now. O_______O ♥ Aaaaah.

At some point, invisibly, I progressed to the point of finally really feeling that the benefits of parenthood outweigh the pain. Because the number one thing I want most in the world--really, the very most, this is not a hyperbole--is to have a bunch of kids who like each other and play together. And right now, whatever else may be going on, I totally have the beginnings of that. And it is wonderful. I just wish I wasn't so terrible at everything else.

Newness!

Hmmmmmh~! This is one of those posts I've been planning in my head for way too long, so that now the inertia for actually writing it has set in. What was I going to say again? Didn't I already say that a few times in my head a few weeks ago?

2013 was the year that I finally learned enough to start understanding how little I know. This is a concept, that, intellectually, I was pretty familiar with. It's just a humility thing, right? You're probably not an expert at anything, especially when you're as young and scatterbrained as I am. But I guess I always just kind of felt like everything was more-or-less within my grasp, as soon as I felt like trying. I'm pretty smart. I got through most of my life's school years just doing what came naturally. But I only really dabbled in things and tried to stay with what I knew I was good at, or else investigate just one thing super deeply, driven by my passion for it.

In 2013, I experimented with learning a lot of totally new and foreign things, especially arts. The SCA has a lot to do with getting me enthused about many of them. I tried four or five musical instruments, song-writing, painting, calligraphy, sewing, cooking, singing very old songs, reading very old stories, deep medieval heraldry studies, a bit of dancing, some new clay-working techniques, some new (old) board games, a new RPG system, Esperanto, a regular running program, probably other stuff I'm forgetting. I don't think I've ever tried so many things all in a row in such a short space in my life. And that's not to mention that, for the better part of any individual day, I was mainly developing my parenting skills.

Some of these things, I probably won't pick up again. Some of them I hope to, but I don't know when. Some I actually managed to start getting good at! I'm beginning to play some real songs on the recorder and tin whistle and sound like I know what I'm doing. I was able to run a 5k when the weather started being prohibitive. And I've recently started feeling like I might be able to have this mom thing figured out by the time I'm done with it.

All of this has given me, for the first time, a really intuitive and deeply-felt sense of how very very very very very very very little I know about anything. I've discovered a lifelong habit of bravado that I didn't even know I was putting on, pretending (and convincing myself) that I always knew a little more than I really did. I'm starting to not bother pretending and just say "I have no idea!", or even "I'm pretty sure what I just said was actually totally made up, I'm sorry." I've started keeping my mouth shut and listening more. It's like a completely new life. It's like breaking down a wall and finding that it was an egg shell all along.

Two days after finishing NaNoWriMo, I made a post to facebook that went like this:

I made a list of all the long-term projects I want to pursue and talents I want to develop -- not "someday" stuff, but things I would like to be working on RIGHT NOW -- and there are 25 things on it. ._.

In the weeks to follow, I developed a plan. The plan is this:

Every month in 2014, I will focus my creative energies on one particular hobby. Not with the intention of making fast progress on it or anything, but just so I don't have to feel like I'm always obliged to do everything, and always failing at it. I'll keep making lists of all the things I want to do, and as new months begin I'll either switch my current focus or not, as my mood swings. (And if I get sick of something halfway through the month, that's okay, too.) The idea is just to be able to try lots of things without feeling guilty about the other things.

When I was a brand-new mom and newly out of college, I lost track of my need to make art and became overwhelmed by a loss of fun and a loss of identity that seemed to come from being imprisoned by my baby. But when I went to counseling I found out that writing poetry made me feel better, and drawing, and singing, and any number of pointless artistic endeavors. I need to be creating to be happy. And I need a bit of time to be--not necessarily alone, but uninterrupted. In the flow. Once I reopened the door to that part of myself, things immediately started to feel better.

For a long time I tried to have my art simultaneously with my guilt over taking time for it, but 2013 was also the year I seem to have given up on feeling like I'm being irresponsible by spending my energy this way. There's definitely a lot I need to work on about myself, but this? I think this is who I am. I need to be gentler and more reliable and less irritable, yes. There's a moral right to those things. And the stuff I've written before about putting my kids first in my day-to-day life still stands, too. But my being easily distracted, being whimsical, even being cluttered? Those are kind of outside the realm of ethics, aren't they?

Daniel and I can both sit at the table and draw. I can play the whistle on the floor while Noah bangs blocks together. Sure, my house is messy, but once I get to the hygienic-and-sort-of-organized point, should I really feel as bad about the rest as I historically do? Most of the mess has always been, since before we had kids, all the books I have out, the drawings, the pages of notes, the special pens or whistles or dice or Rubix cubes. The other stuff--socks and dishes and things--are easy to tidy, but the projects have always stymied me. So, okay! For now, I give up. The projects will be there, cluttering up the corners, until I'm a gajillionaire with an eight bedroom house to keep them all organized and tuck them away.

I guess it's not surprising that always wanting to make things and read things is part of who I am. My mom is kind of the same way, and my dad, too. My new paradigm is to see it as a primary feature of my personhood and therefore of mothering, not as competition with it. The fact that my kids will have heaps of dorkiness around them growing up might not need to be something I fear. I hope as they get older some of the projects are theirs. (And, don't get me wrong, I do hope I can yell less and clean more this year than I did last year.)

My patriarchal blessing says that, as my life goes on, my "educational pursuits will be in evidence." I always thought that was kind of an odd phrase. I wondered what it was supposed to mean, why it would be worded that way. At one point not long ago I doubted whether it meant anything at all. But I think maybe I'm finally starting to figure it out.

ANYWAY!

After making this plan, I ran into this extremely exciting blog post that talks about an extremely exciting TED Talk: F*** 10,000 Hours: Thoughts on Process, Perfection and Good Enough.

...Which...yeah. I don't even know what to add to that. It's one of the most liberating things I've ever read/watched and sets me off into a state of wanting to scream and run around in circles with enthusiasm. I can do it! I have time! I don't need to be a world-class expert--I can be as good as I want to be and I only need 20 hours!

And that brings me back to the beginning of this post. Because 20 hours is more than enough to find out how little I know. But that's okay, because you know another thing that feels really, really good? Being educated enough to comprehend how mindblowingly awesome another person's talents are. I think the world and I are both about to get cooler.

So. The year has begun. January's project is (continuing) to learn my way around my little collection of wind instruments--the recorder, the Irish whistle, and the three-hole tabor pipe. I'm having a lovely time with it so far.

Belated, followed by belabored

And then, one day, you get out of the shower and just... are completely fine. All of a sudden.

(I wanted to post this on May 4th, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure it would stick.

(It has. Everything is totally different. I guess I just finally finished processing, or something.)

~


In May I had an awesome week or two of feeling amazing about life, being all like, man, I have no problems! This is crazy! What do other people worry about, anyway? I wonder what my first new problem will be! Then there was a sudden tragic death in my local religious community, and I felt very strange about my idea of what it means to have problems.)

Aaaaaanyway. We potty-trained Daniel in about a week after his third birthday, and that was part of why I felt so amazing. It was like I had finally passed the final rite and become a Real Mom. I did it! Birth, that just kind of happens. Potty-training, though, you could theoretically just not do, if you were a horrible person. But I did it, and Daniel did it, and it was actually really fun, because I spend that week being incredibly involved with him, setting aside all distractions and paying close attention. I loved it. He behaved better for the attention, and I was less frustrated by always trying to do other things. We enjoyed each other.

Sadly, it didn't take me very long to forget that lesson. I'm just now (like, today) coming out of several weeks of being an unexploded bomb of rage and misery and hating-my-life-as-a-mother. Although much of that has come from problems with nursing; I guess I won't go into the gory details, except to mention that the details actually involve gore. x_x And that drove me to wanting more distractions, which led to me ignoring Daniel a lot, which led to him misbehaving. But things to have resolved, or nearly so! Partly from technique-adjustments, and partly because Noah is six months old now (what?!?) and so we've been experimenting with solid food. In doing so I have discovered that he really really likes and wants and is good at eating solid food. Yay!! It helps that he has five teeth already, plus two almost-teeth (see above re: nursing problems). I've been giving him mini-meals the last couple days, and there's been a huge reduction in the whining and crying and a big increase in smiles. I'm hopeful that we can move more rapidly into nursing just once or twice a day than I did with Daniel (who didn't have a single tooth until he was 8 months, and who nursed to sleep, and with whom I also had painful problems around this age).

I also sat down with Heath last night and set a bunch of new, small goals about how I spend my time all day, aiming to maximize my usefulness and happiness and minimize my angst and frustration. I do way better at life when I have goals, even if I don't exactly meet them. Today went really well inside of me, even when it was chaotic and messy and loud and obnoxious outside of me. So that's awesome. (It also helped to be back in my own apartment, my own place that I'm in charge of, after a week with family. My family is awesome and it was so much fun, but being in one's own home is more the kind of awesome I seem to be in need of right this second, sanity-wise. Have I even mentioned that my sister is home from Nicaragua? I like her.)

(I also like: my kids. Noah was so adorable it was insane today--all happy and grinning all over the place with his little teeth, sitting up on his own all fat and cute, bouncing in his doorway bouncer so hard I thought he might land on his fluffy-diapered little butt. And Heath had a break in the middle of the day, so while the two of them took naps, Daniel and I went off by ourselves for a walk around town. This is absolutely my favorite thing to do as a mother, and I don't do it very often anymore. It was so much fun, and so nice. I miss him when we've been clashing. (When we were nursing, we always had to emotionally reconnect no matter what else was going on, and while I know that won't be the case for most of my time as a mom, it's still new to me (we nursed till he was two, still more than half his life) and I'm still learning to cope with the lost resource. I think that's the main reason I haven't made any gestures toward actually weaning Noah, even when I've had every reason to do so. I don't want to miss out on having that foundation with him as he gets older and more independent.)

So there is my boring and self-indulgent update! In other news, I might start a separate SCA blog because, oh yes, I am that big of a nerd. I do think it's more fun to talk about all my stuff in one place, but I also don't want random society people being like, cool post about late medieval Portuguese armory! What else you got here? Nipple problems, eh? Unfortunate, sister.

I also want to write a less rambling entry about how my identity has evolved lately in the face of my constant ambivalence about my ongoing choice to be a full-time caretaker, but I'm not sure it makes any sense. The short version is, I get way happier and more relaxed when I think of homemaking and kid-entertaining as my job. Like the kind you get hired for. Get up in the morning, get dressed, go to work! Don't slack off during your shift! Don't try to do other things and pretend you're not at work! Even if I'm doing it all the time and don't get as many breaks as I might want, if it's just my job, it's not who I am. This is why I used the word "caretaker" there. Being a mother is in fact a big part of who I am now, and I love that fiercely. But that's about my relationships with these two people, not about whether or not they live in my house and need me to make it a certain kind of environment for them. That part, the part I do, is just a job. And therefore I don't have to thrive on it. I can just do my best at it, and enjoy the kids I'm doing it for as much as possible, without having to transform into an archetype of it. I don't have to become it in order to do it, no matter how much of my time it takes. I can love my kids (which comes easily), get the home-making done (which doesn't), and still be me inside throughout the process. It's not like this is some magic formula that will prevent me from ever getting tired or burned-out, but it helps me feel less oppressed by my own perfectionism. I can get up in the morning and say "okay, I guess I better do some motherish stuff" instead of "ugh, I don't feel like a mother-ish person today...again." It's just stuff. And if I save the selfish things I /want/ to do (especially ones that park me at the computer) for when Heath is home or everyone else is asleep, I may not get as much time in on them, but I'm happier because I'm not spending my day getting interrupted. That ratchets up the resentment-points way too fast.

Whoa, I just went back to edit that paragraph and dozed off in my chair.

More things to preserve

 I have this list of amazing Daniel things to blog, but I'm not really in a writing mood, so this is likely to be even more disjointed than usual. (If I ever make a new journal, I should just call it "Disjointed," because I seem to use that word in nearly every entry. Come to think, that might have been the name of my LJ layout.)

* Noah is getting stronger. He can't roll over, but when I set him up in my lap a few days ago he was briefly able to hold his torso erect. I excitedly showed this to Daniel, who said, "He's growing up!"

* Where a normal person might say "That's interesting," Daniel says in highly intrigued tones, "That's serious." I think he might have developed that because serious is the opposite of silly? And therefore when things are remarkable but not silly, this must be what you say? Anyway, it's darn cute and another of the injokes Heath and I have adopted into our own vocabularies.

* There was an armadillo on TV, and I talked to Daniel about it. "Isn't that cool, how they can turn into balls?" "Yeah!" he said, "like cars do!" "Cars can turn into balls?" I asked. "Yeah!" he said. "Huh. I've never seen that," I said. "It's kind of busted," he explained. Which is exactly right, now that he's pointed out to me. A sufficiently busted car would totally look like an armadillo.

* Daniel has always had an amazing brain for making unlikely visual/auditory comparisons between things. Like last summer when he bit a sandwich into the shape of a helicopter, or a couple weeks ago when he pointed to the cover of this book at the library and said, "Mario!", or last week when Noah suddenly howled and Daniel remarked that he sounded like an elephant.

* No matter how whimsical a parent you are, you can't be prepared for everything. When he asked me "What sound does a brain make?" I was overcome by amazement at the question itself and unable to come up with a good answer.

* Noah has been sleeping in his crib at night for the last week or two, and it's been so lovely. It's not really a huge change--we still bring him to bed when he wakes up so that he can nurse, and then fall back asleep for the second half of the night with him still there. Same thing we did with Daniel. But he was spending the first part of the night in the swing in our room before, and there's something just so exciting and wonderful about tucking both my sweet little sons into their shared room and tiptoeing out. Daniel really likes having him in there, and the first few nights I just hung out in there for over an hour after they were both still asleep, playing Backgammon on my phone and just soaking in the magic of listening to my plural children breathing peacefully together.

* In less lovely but still interesting sleep news, Daniel has nightmares sometimes, and they are fascinating. We try not to show him scary things on TV or whatnot, and he hasn't had very many frightening experiences in real life (aside from the occasional Mommy Is Extremely Loud incident), so they're not usually about obvious things like monsters or drowning (although the most recent one is about a burning truck, which makes sense). But if your hormones tell you to be scared, you'll come up with something for it, apparently. The big one last week was, as far as I can understand, about a coconut tree that sprouted in the middle of the church. "It's very tall. It's very big. The coconut tree spins around. It spins around very fast. It's kind of smoky. And the man, he's talking." I think it's amazing how these peculiarly benign elements add up to something absolutely that is absolutely legit creepy.

 * Interesting parenting moment: Daniel has discovered the word "beautiful," and as he was examining the DVD case for The Little Mermaid on Saturday, he remarked that Ariel was beautiful. Heath told him that was a nice thing to say. Then he pointed at Ursula and said, "What's that?" "That's Ursula, the Sea Witch," said Heath. "She's very beautiful," said Daniel, and there was this brief pause while everything about the fat, aging, garish, super problematic and stereotyped character design flashed through my mind--along with everything I want Daniel to know about the women in the real world, and all the different body types, personal styles, ages, degrees of physical ability--and how I want him to respect them and treat them kindly, in the fact of extreme peer pressure to the contrary--and how little time I have as his sole and utterly trusted source of socialization... It felt like an extremely long and significant pause for thought, but it was only like half a second. "Yes, she is beautiful," I agreed.

* What else? Oh, yes. Yesterday I asked him if he remembers the names of his fingers--I was thinking pointer, pinky, etc.--and he said yes. So I held up my thumb and said, "What's this one?" and he said with a big smile, "Jenny!

* I am working on returning to being a person who does not swear even when severely provoked, and I'm finally making progress. Last-second cuss word replacements from last week: "What the funny money!!" and "Oh, shirt."

* Today we talked about "full names," and I told him his own, and those of other people he knew. He was fascinated and asked for more. It was awesome. Other than that, it was a really difficult and lonely day. But it was really sweet when he painstaking assembled the sentence, "Is something wrong, Mommy?" (Noah screamed a lot today, is the main thing. He took a big nap in the morning, during which I did a ton of laundry out of sheer boredom, but after that it was Just No Good for anyone. I felt totally abandoned by the rest of the world, and the weather was super nice but I couldn't get everything together sufficiently to get us outside, so I was trapped. Then, after about a century, Heath got home, and with the extra pair of hands I was able to fix everything up. We went for a really excessively long walk in the beautiful sunshine and all came back exhausted, but I felt so much better afterward.)

Some things to preserve

* Like many toddlers, Daniel is full of energy and loves to express it by running around wildly. In the process, he often shouts out this magnificent word: "PAPOMINGA!" When we first introduced him to video games earlier this winter (mainly N64 games), he couldn't understand what Mario was saying when he fell out of paintings or spun out in his go-kart. Nowadays I've heard him actually say "mama mia!" a couple times when it happens in the game, but his enthusiastic word for taking corners or pretending to triumphantly crash into things in real life remains papominga. I hope he never grows out of it. I'm adding it to my own vocabulary.

* Noah opens his mouth super wide when he smiles. It is the greatest thing. He's three months old now, already. Cooing and adorable. Time for the first batch of really exciting stuff: rolling, sitting, grasping, crawling. Daniel is looking forward to sharing stuff with him, and he's getting good at pushing the umbrella stroller in a gentle, straight line down the sidewalk--at least inasmuch as the sidewalks themselves are gentle and straight. Oh, Monmouth. Anyway, such a sweet big brother. (Having two kids is infinitely better than just one. I can't wait to see my entire family all together. I want them all here right now so I can start knowing them. I was baby-hungry the minute Noah was born, but I guess this time is for getting to know and appreciate him, deeply and individually, while he's the baby.)

* I'm super tired but I'm enthusiastic about the lovely weather lately.

* I bought a white gel pen yesterday and my life is 987398684756 times better. I'm drawing this amazing amazing kind of medieval sampler thingy, and it's almost done.

* Heraldry: still acting on me like a tasty drug.

* My oldest brother is coming up from California next weekend. YESSS I am so stoked to be with all of my brothers! But not all my siblings, sigh. One more year till Jenny-time. We better send her a picture.

* I've had a series of connected epiphanies over the past several months. I guess I should preserve that in my private paper journal in more detail, but that one barely even knows Noah exists, poor thing. The epiphanies, in rough outline, were that I am super attached to divine justice (toward myself), even moreso than divine mercy; that I used to think I was good at forgiving, but actually I'm obviously horrible at it, all things considered, and that's been making my life stupid for ages; and finally that Daniel, luckily, is really really good at forgiving, and therefore things between him and me are probably going to be okay even if I suck sometimes. He loves me. I am trying to learn from him.

* Also about Daniel, I failed to write a poem last week about a moment where I went from reading a lot of articles about violence and horror to going to wake him up from his nap, and ended up just kneeling by his bedside, becoming late for our appointment, kissing his sleeping fist that smelled like sticky oranges and still had dimples in the knuckles and hadn't yet learned to hurt. I am so grateful to be his mom. Send me more sons. They won't be perfect, but there are a few important things they'll know.

* I am learning to be more appreciative of the people in my life. They don't just not-exist, even if they're not the precise à la carte friend selection I would have made in my "Lucy seeks Ethel" desperation. And they're awesome. It occurred to me that maybe I'm Ethel; maybe instead of waiting for someone to come over to my house and make it less boring, I have to pay attention to what's actually happening. Also, maybe this TV show doesn't completely revolve around me. Still kind of following this rabbit hole. Making connections is not really my strength right now. It might not have to be.

* I should go to bed. I need to be getting more sleep. But I should put together that Easter basket first.

* (Apparently it's possible to become reconciled to something while simultaneously being in constant mourning for it. Apparently you don't grieve less, you just do other things more. It's not what I expected or wanted, but I guess it works.)

* Seriously, it will be the first Easter Daniel actually knows about and participates in! That's exciting. Be excited, Rachel. Zzzzzzz I will after I sleep.

I feel very weird because it's spring. Which is a statement that kind of demands explanation but my brain is too tired to elucidate and obfuscate it simultaneously, which is what I'd have to do.

Noah's birth

Writing a birth story is such a daunting task! I don't see how people can do it without being completely overwhelmed and buried in perfectionism. That's why I never got around to finishing Daniel's. Because the kinds of feelings you get in birth don't show up anywhere else. Like, even just physically, and even without the pain part. Many are impossible to describe, and others are more personal than a lot of people might want to get into. And some things have this weird layer of vague euphemism built up that makes them okay to talk about socially as long as you don't actually talk about them, so that someone can say, "yeah, I needed two or three stitches" and people just nod and carry on as if this was normal. Sure, it is absolutely normal in birth, but it's really not normal in the speaker's every day life. (Your what got ripped open?!) So it's weird to talk about any of it, because at any given moment I might be all like, "Yup, people have been having babies for ages, nothing new under the sun," but later I'll be going, "Holy crap! A freaking placenta came out of me! AND IT FELT REALLY WEIRD"

But, anyway. I guess I have to let go of that, to a certain extent. I'll never be able to actually convey the intensity of the experience in all its pain / joy / terror / relief / amazement / excitement / utter alien weirdness. People who have had their own babies will have an allegory, but even they haven't done exactly what I did. No one has. But I can still tell the outside facts, and remember the inner things better for it later.

In which I mention a baby!

Oooooof. Since August? Really? And the one before that was last January? (The funny thing about my last entry is that when I went to the store to buy a new planner, it turned out the only one I really liked aesthetically was a Jan-Jan one after all. So after all that, I completely tossed it all aside and just got the pretty one. X) It was still a worthwhile thought process, though. I am large, I contain multitudes!)

So, stuff~. I'm going to make a list of things I want to write entries about, but first and foremost I will state for the record that I totes had that second baby. He is Noah, and he is super cuddly, and his birth was awesome. Things are going really well so far. ♥ This will definitely change as time goes on, but for the moment, he has yet to present us with any challenges we didn't already learn to deal with from Daniel. So that's been pretty cool and a huge blessing, especially because Daniel is actively blazing new trails in the "how the heck do I parent this?" forest. (He is brilliant and adorable and I love his guts, and also, he is two and a half.)

Anyway, things I want to talk about:

• Birth story! (Hint: 2 hours!)
• Comparison between hospital/n00b experience and birth-center/v3t3r4n experience
• Daniel! He is a toddler. What else?
• Some general musings about how my parenting philosophy and techniques have evolved
• All kinds of interesting food stuff I learned from gestational diabetes
• What have I been doing besides parenting? (Not a ton, but some stuff!)
• Um, heraldry. A lot of that. Yesssss. And some SCA gatherings!
• NaNoWriMo (I did it again last year, probably won't this year)
• How awesome Heath is / what we might be doing next in life
• Quite possibly one of those "30 days of entries" things again, because I need an outlet.

Those are the things. Stay tyuned?

Haaaaaaaaappy new year!

Aaaaaaaaaah! Hi!

I don't usually make formal new-year resolutions, mainly because I simply don't usually feel like it, but I have some awesome ones this year. I'm really excited about how it's going to improve my life to even try to do this stuff.

First, the littler ones:

• No more eating anywhere other than at the table. I want Daniel to follow this rule, so I have to model it for him. I also want to have more of a social thing around eating our meals together as a family, the way I was raised, and there's no way to do that except by...you know. Actually doing it

• As a corollary to the above, no reading while I eat unless I'm alone. This one will be really, really, really painful at first, but I think it's important, so I'll do it.

• No checking my email, facebook, or anything else until I've said a prayer in the morning. My routine right now is basically to roll out of bed and across the house into my computer chair, and to very rarely get around to praying at all. This is lame, because my life, mood, and behavior are way better when I pray more. So I'm using my natural, built-in motivation to check email to remind me to do something that is generally more useful.

• No going to bed if the dishes are insane. "Sane" here can mean something as major as "all put away" (yeah right) or as minor as "rinsed and stacked." In any case, no more unstable heaps of days-old filth! IT ENDS NOW!

At least the first three of those are going to be pretty easy to keep. They're just tweaks to the items within my existing system of doing things, not a big change to the system itself. Well, okay, the last one is going to be hard. But it's also going to be amazing. And for the most part, I won't have to think about this stuff very much except to notice whether or not I'm trying to cheat.

Then there's the bigger resolution clump, and this is the one I'm really really jazzed about. When I got engaged, my #waitility friends (mainly _Quinn) wrote me a funny list of life advice parodying another, more famous list, that was already floating around on the internet. The original one suggests, "Do one thing every day that scares you." The one my friends gave me replaces this with, "Do one thing, every day. This should not scare you."

Even though this was mostly a joke, it lodged itself in my mind as being actually really good advice. Do a thing every day. It sounds like a low bar, and yet there are certainly a lot of days, even now, when I totally fail to do even one thing of my own accord, and where instead I just spend the entire day reacting to my circumstances. Not because I'm actually overwhelmed at the moment (some people are, and are doing awesome just to keep reacting), but just because I'm not really trying to do anything more. I mean, I am doing more art stuff these days, so that's something, and that's very good and vital to my sanity. But I don't do much for my home.

So I've listed out seven of the things I really would like to be finding more time for, and designating an official time for each of them. My big resolution this year is to do one thing, every day. This should not scare me.

• SUNDAY'S THING: Writing in a journal, whether it's this one or my even more sadly neglected paper one. Whatever miscellaneous writing I do during the week in my fuzzy notebook is good, too.

• MONDAY'S THING: Menu planning and grocery shopping. I'm tired of not being able to cook, so I'm going to start doing it now. It's become necessary anyway, because last month I found out I have celiac disease (more on which in another entry). As it turns out, most of the stuff I love is still available to me in gluten-free forms, so that mitigates the angst considerably, but eating pre-processed food has become really expensive. I'm not a terrible cook, though, just a negligent one, and when I do get the inspiration to do it I often don't have what I need. So, I'm setting aside this day in the week to pick things I want to eat, see whether we have the ingredients, and go get them if not. (We don't go to the store nearly often enough anyway and are always running out of weird things, so this will be great in many ways.)

• TUESDAY'S THING: All the little local errands. This is magic number day at Bi-Mart, and also story time at the library, so this "resolution" is actually just marking what I usually do without being told. :P I'll throw in other walking-distance errands as needed, too (like post office trips, bill-paying, bank deposits, etc).

• WEDNESDAY'S THING: Working on Runewood Abbey stuff, both by myself and in "office hours" with Michael. By the way, because it's the new year, our hiatus is now over, and a new page is going up this coming Saturday! SO EXCITED!

• THURSDAY'S THING: Laundry day! I don't mind laundry, but I procrastinate it, so here's a day for it. As a bonus, I will also make this my day for treating myself to an awesome movie while I fold my way through the mountain.

• FRIDAY'S THING: This is my wildcard day, mainly dedicated to making sure I have a date with Heath. Spending time together is not currently a challenge our marriage faces (talk to us after a few more kids, maybe), but it will be fun to have some dedicated time, whether we actually rope in a babysitter and go out, watch a million episodes of something on Netflix, play board games, or on super busy Fridays just sit on the couch together for five minutes before going to sleep. (Hopefully not falling asleep on the couch, but our track record so far is less than perfect on that. (We've been falling asleep on our dates together since the beginning, including while sitting up decorously straight in non-private locations. Yeah, we're awesome.))

• SATURDAY'S THING: Cleaning, also known as rescuing the remains of the house from the tearing jaws of the week. This is not something we currently do unless we're having visitors. It never has been. But my self-esteem suffers when my house is ugly, so I'm really stoked about having a time for this, because it doesn't happen by itself. I'm really looking forward to occasionally having a clean-ish home sometimes, maybe, possibly, even for five minutes. :D Also, I have cannily placed this Thing on Saturday, when Heath is usually home and can make the whole process more social and therefore less boring. This also increases our chances of going into the Sabbath with a more pleasant abode. It will probably take us several weeks of Saturdays to get around to some of the more entrenched heaps of random paper and baby socks and whatnot, but at least I have a plan.

So yup! There you have it. Do one thing a day, eat at the table, pray before email, and rinse dishes before bed. I think it's both significant and doable, which makes it a pretty good set up. It can only help to try, anyway! Wish me luck!

Aaaaaaaaaaaand day one: Thing Done. Aw yeah. (As a bonus, I also made dinner, which here means "threw five things in a crock pot and went to church." Looking good while acting lazy! Go me.)

My son and pizza are awesome

Oof, I'd gotten into the habit of not writing.

Hi again! I've been doing pretty well lately. Gearing up for NaNoWriMo at the moment, which is a lot of why I'm writing this--I want to be able to blog about that. I'm excited! And I'm scared! And I'm excited. Hopefully it will be all fun and glory and creepy fairies, tapping into the majesty of my first three years (especially the very first) rather than the letdown of last year. I have reasons to hope that it will go well.

In other news, I just ordered pizza! It's kind of a waste of money, but whatever! I'm super hungry and we haven't gone to the grocery story in 2358547 years. Anyway, apparently Domino's delivers to Monmouth now, so this is going to be pretty freaking awesome.

Well, I'm boring tonight. Oh well. I'll plagiarize from facebook my most recent Daniel update, which I posted yesterday:

Tonight, we have finally embarked on the goal of having a bedtime routine for Daniel. We've been surprisingly fine without one, but it was time and past time. He wasn't even sleepy tonight because of a late nap, but I was determined anyway, and shut us in his room. It only took an hour of quiet play, reading, and snuggling,* and he fell asleep in my arms in the rocker. Yay! Pretty good start!

* Also, I might mention, nursing. The fact that we're still doing this is a big part of why we haven't really needed a routine, because I can just bust out the sleep-inducing hormones wherever he happens to crawl into my lap. But I'm hoping to wean around his second birthday in six months, so having other sleep-inducing factors well-established in his life by then will help a lot.

 Oh, and while I'm talking about Daniel, this one describes some awesomeness from last Thursday:

The other day I took Daniel for a walk through campus without a stroller, and it was slow and long and exhausting and totally amazing.

He learned how to blow dandelion seeds, listened to a clock tower chime, ran through a tunnel made of bike racks, tried to read the spray-painted roadwork letters on the sidewalk, eagerly pointed at items in a shop window but didn't want to go in, played around on some stairs, sat a table doing nothing for a while, pressed the alarm button in an elevator, stole some brochures, touched rocks in a fountain, laughed at his reflection in a sculpture, crawled under an advertisement sign, pointed at a lot of interesting cars, crunched a lot of leaves, got tired, pitched a fit, and was carried home. After 20 minutes of rest, while I was still dead, he started pointing at the stroller and saying "Go?" again. Luckily Heath arrived home around then to take him back out.

 So good. So good. I was so tired, but it was so good.

Actually, I've been feeling strangely competent as a mother today. Strange because I never feel competent, even though I no longer feel like a total screwup (at least not most of the time). But I've been playing with Daniel more, and enjoying it more. I've been doing other stupid boring distracting things less. Also, I actually cooked lunch (read: made boxed pasta) and we ate it together, and when he was full he pushed his bowl away instead of throwing it at the ground. (He saved that for later, when Daddy was giving him dinner. Haw haw.) He got my wallet out, and instead of storming over to snatch it away before he pulled all the cards out, I nicely asked him not to open it and to put it back, and after a while of procrastinating, he actually put it back! And then applauded himself! Also, we went for a walk, and we saw a kid meow at a cat, and Daniel meowed at the kid, and the kid was obviously delighted.

We've been doing "Parent and Me" swimming lessons, and Daniel is amazing. His only thing is that he doesn't like being confined to the warm little therapy pool, even though it's awesome, and would much prefer to be free to climb out and go jump in the lap pool. But that's just him being him, and the water itself bothers him not at all. I can hand him a pair of floaties and propel him around the pool on his stomach, only holding him up by the feet, and he doesn't even care. He splashes and climbs in and out and plays with toys. Today he didn't want to do much of what the teacher was suggesting, but she's extremely cool about my disinclination to force him. Instead, he floated by himself for a couple seconds, using only the little water weights and without my touching him at all! Then he figured he was done and really wanted to climb up the stairs and go do something else. Instead, after some other wandering around and playing, I set him standing on the bench and gave him a watering can. He spent most of the rest of the lesson scooping up water and pouring it out, often on the concrete by the side of the pool, with a look of deep concentration on his face. I could practically see his brain working, and it was the most magical thing ever. I told the teacher, "I bet you didn't know you were running a Parent and Me Physics Lab."

(Another awesome thing Daniel does is recognize letters. He doesn't know any individual symbols, but he knows writing when he sees it, and he likes to poke the letters and make authoritative little staccato noises. He does this with the depth markings on the pool, the warnings on his carseat, building signs, food packages, sides of cars, books... I'm pretty sure the place he learned it was from sitting in my lap when I was on a big crossword puzzle kick a few months ago. Just the other day he found one of my puzzles sitting out, picked up the pen, and poked at it four times, stating, "Dee, oh, nih, nih.")

So yup. <3 Some pretty nifty stuff going on. Also some other kinds of stuff. But right now, I feel like I'm doing okay at life, and that is nice. It's weird to feel competent on an evening when the kitchen has more dirty dishes than clean and the fridge contains more moldy food than edible, but whatever. I'll take it.

In another post I should talk about all the books I've been reading, and the one I'm about to write! But right now it's time for me to sit here and imagine eating pizza until it's time to sit here actually eating pizza. Mmmmmmmm.

On Writing, Returning, Depression, Returning, and Writing

Well, humm.

I want to write a new post! But so much time has gone by. It's always hard to catch up.

Ordinarily, the first thing I do when catching up is apologize for not getting around to writing, but in this case I don't have to do that. The lapse started out unintentional, but turned into a deliberate thing before very long, because I was actively shedding as many of my reasons to feel guilty as I could.

I stopped writing because I was miserable, and I didn't know how to talk about that. That's always been the hardest thing for me when it comes to writing in public--I always feel like the internet has enough people's banal, repetitive angst in it, and that adding to that would just annoy and bore everybody. Or worse, make everyone get super worried and crowd in on me at a moment when I'm feeling easily embarrassed.

Eventually, I figured out that what I was dealing with was untreated postpartum depression. It took me a long time to come to that conclusion, but then I figured out that if you have to keep asking yourself whether or not what you're feeling "counts" as depression or not, the answer is "sure, why not?" as far as pursuing treatment goes. Similarly, if reading the list of symptoms of PPD makes you cry, that should be taken as a sign.

So during the hole in talking about my life, I've been working on trying to fix the hole in enjoying my life. On the advice of my awesome bishop, I've been talking to a counselor. I've been asking people to babysit for me so I can leave the house by myself on occasion. I've been writing privately about my negative feelings. Possibly most importantly, I've been making art of various sorts, which I've discovered is a really big deal for my sanity and self esteem.

Progress is being made, especially as I sort out my thoughts and emotions and my ambivalence about being a mother, which basically comes down to this: Daniel is amazing and beautiful and funny and delightful. But full-time caretaking is not a job I'm naturally inclined to like or find fulfilling. So I've been feeling a lot better just in owning that fact, because everyone likes some things and dislikes others, right? This is just another thing. I'm about 75% of the way to convincing myself that I'm not a bad person just because I don't enjoy, and in fact sometimes resent, my day-to-day activities. The mothers of generations past who did this had a totally different culture and much tighter communities. They would have gone stir crazy all alone in my living room, too.

So the next step is to try to change things somehow. The obvious method, or at least the first thing people say, is "well, start enjoying it, then," but my brainstorms along those lines are still tainted by guilt and fear of judgement. Anyway, how do you just "start enjoying" something? Everyone says "be grateful" and "find joy where you can" and "savor it while it lasts," but nobody says how to do that. So this method: not super effective.

The other obvious approach is lifestyle changes. I'm still thinking about this. Getting some time to myself outside the home has made a really big difference when I've managed it. I've figured out that I really, powerfully, desperately miss being a student, and although we don't have the resources for me to do grad school at the same time as Heath, it's been a useful fact to notice about myself. I've figured out that I love writing, and do it a lot better when I'm not at home. I've figured out that I feel fine about expressing my negative emotions when I can find a pleasing way to phrase them.

It would be cool if I could find a part-time job. Coming home to Daniel after just two hours away lets me start over fresh and be excited to see him, which feels like a much more fitting approach to his awesomeness. And it helps me avoid ever getting to the stage where, after being chased by him all day, I end up literally hiding in the closet because I can't handle playing clown anymore.

Side-note: It turns out I'm very introverted, and Daniel is very extroverted, and most days I'm his only source of socialization for like eight hours in a row. It is not a good fit. Days when there are other people around for him to talk to are 30973657 times better.

But yeah, anyway. Having a job just for fun is so not going to happen in this economy. I'm happy just to go out somewhere and write and breathe fresh air and not have anyone scrabble into my lap whining and crying for a little while. So when this school term starts, I'm asking my mom and my sister to each take one two-hour shift a week as part of the general depression-recovery project, and see how big of a difference it makes in my joie de vivre / ability to function. If it works, I can then deal with the fact that asking for help like that seems really selfish and weird. (But shouldn't it be okay? Communities are important, right? But most other people seem to have more graceful ways of dealing with the exact same problems I have. Or do they??? No, no, Rachel: worry about this later, remember?)

It's all a work in progress. But I'd like to be able to write in this blog, and I don't want to carefully tiptoe around the issue, so let's drag the elephant out of the closet and out into the open: I do not like parenting. I have been capital-d Depressed for most of my time as a mother. But I am going to keep doing it anyway, not because I believe it'll all be worth it in the end, but because I love Heath and I love Daniel and I already love my future kids, and I'm the only one in a position to do this for them.

Knowing it's all worth it in the end is a privilege reserved for people who are not depressed. I'm looking forward to that. Meanwhile, I do have a lot of moments of joy. They don't cancel out the badness, but they inspire me to keep fighting the badness off. Eventually I will find my balance, and I hope that time is soon. Juggling a household is one thing (and I'm prepared and happy to accept that that will always be difficult), but juggling while standing on a ball balanced on a pole just kind of sucks. (The ball, uh... represents my brain. Also, I can't do any of these stunts in real life. Also, I am so blessed and lucky and cared about and such a ridiculous whiner to dare to be depressed when I have as much goodness in my life as I do have. Also, shut up, guilt-lobe. I told you to go take a nap.)

Anyway, hi. I'm back. <3

They think they are wise

Look, I'm posting on time!

"Day 29 - In this past month, what have you learned?"

Uh.... I dunno.

*looks at planner*

• Groundhog Day is a good movie.
• Everyone's utilities bills got psychotic lately, not just mine. How nice.
• How to solve the Rubik's Cube's first-layer corners and second-layer edges at the same time. (Still working on getting it as fast as the rest of my solving. My new record on the old method is one minute, by the way!)
• Heath is really good at constructing Magic decks. (He was in a tournament and got the highest score but lost to the winner.)
• Babies get you psychotically huge tax refunds!
• Relatedly, being totally out of school debt feels goooooooooooood. :D
• I still really, really, really like to dance.
• I am still afraid of insinuating myself into groups of dancing people.
• With prayer, I can give a super good talk even if I'm banging my head on the table through the whole preparation time.
• I'm kind of a jerk sometimes.
• Andy and Joanne and kids are awesome.
• OMSI is awesome. It has a room for little little kids that I wish was next door to me. Daniel really likes those tables with the beads on big wires. Apparently they're cheap at IKEA.
• Also, there was a mummy, and I solved a horse puzzle.
• Raw fish is not terrible, and eel is pretty good, and egg sushi is deliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicious.
• My friend Brendan is super helpful, and a given Baskin Robbins probably doesn't have a changing table.
• Hadestown is the best thing. The best thing.
• A bunch of other stuff.
• Heath does super well at interviews!
• I love Summer and Courtney like mad and miss them.
• I'm good at shopping. Actually, I already knew this.
• Secretariat was the coolest horse.
• Apparently you can milk Minecraft squid.
• Heath: still fun to smooch.
• My new Boba baby carrier is awesome.
• Avoiding drama doesn't help, because it finds you.
• I can and must write scripts faster.
• Church choir is way easier when my mom-in-law comes and takes care of Daniel. Thanks! <3
• Nicole's concerts are awesome, and going to them makes me miss being pregnant, because last time I went Daniel galloped around me the whole time.
• People are really cruel and horrible and obnoxious sometimes.

 I guess that's enough? I'm probably missing something major or deep, but I don't know.

Events from the past few days: Heath got into his grad school program! :DDD Now he officially gets to become a teacher! And I got my Boba and my own copy of Hadestown and they are awesome.

On the negative side, I had a headache for four days. And today was miserable for everyone, because Daniel's next four teeth have decided to come in all at the same time, and nothing is helping. He's been frantic with pain and unwilling to nurse. There was some respite when we went for a walk, but mostly there has been lots and lots of inconsolable crying. And I broke a glass.

Tomorrow is something I want to be excited about, but mostly I'm sad for my baby, and scared he'll cry all day again, and scared that I'll completely lose my mind from the stress of it.

What, why, whoa

Blah! As you can see by the fact that I've gone several days without getting around to it, that one is too hard. What is this, school? I'm pressing on. :P Maybe I'll get back to it later.

Luckily, the next several are super easy:

• "Day 26 - What do you think about your friends?"

What does this even mean? Does anyone really say anything other than "OMGooberzzz my friends are the BEST!!"?

Because, sorry guys. MY friends are the best.

(Though I wish some of the ones who are into hanging out actually lived in the same town/state/country as me. I should probably meet more people. Bahhhh, I hate actively trying to meet people. It is a wilderness.)

• "Day 27 - Why you are doing this 30 day challenge"

 Because I like babbling, and I like prompts, and because Allanna was doing it and it looked fun, and because it contained several things that I already wanted to talk about.

• "Day 28 - A picture of you from last year and now - How have you changed?"

About a year ago.

About five minutes ago.

The difference is subtle! Can you figure it out?

More catchup

• "Day 21 - A picture of something that makes you happy"

My bookcases make me happy. Being an English major was awesome. Also, comic books and sci-fi books and church books are awesome. And now I need a whole new set of shelves for all the kid books we're getting! ♥

• "Day 22 - What makes you different from everyone else?"

Wow, what a question. I often wonder if anything does.

For a lot of my life, it really mattered to me to categorize myself very exactly, and to be clearly special and distinct from everyone else around me in as many ways as possible. I think I've made a big deal about every single one of my features and predilections at some point--I'm oh so pale, my nose is oh so big, my hair is oh so precise a shade of golden red, I'm short but not that short, I'm an alto but I'm versatile like so, I'm a geek but not like those other geeks, I'm a Mormon but you don't know what that means to me, I like guys who are exactly like this except for these exceptions, I'm the most empathetic person who ever didn't cry at movies, my favorite books are ABCDEF in precisely that order, I have the worst menstrual cramps you've ever heard of, I know more than you do about (fill in the blank).

I went through a big meltdown when I was a teenager because I started to figure out that there were other people named Rachel in the world; that people named Rachael weren't spelling it wrong; that some people have my same hair, or like the same books but like other ones better, or are a lot better than me at my best subjects. I still struggle with this, sometimes. But, there's nothing I can actually do about that, because everything about me is shared by a gazillion other people who don't care they're on my turf.

And really, that's a good thing, because it was kind of exhausting trying to be Mary Sue all the time. (Yes--I was living as an author-insertion into the fanfic of my OWN LIFE. Try that one on for size!) Meanwhile, I've learned (and am still learning) that the more people I meet, the more they're super awesome and fascinating and unique themselves, so I feel much happier if I worry about that, and let them worry about whether or not to be interested in me.

So, I was going to call shenanigans on this one, but wait. I think I just figured it out.

Whatever else is going on, I'm the only person in the world who gets to be Daniel's mommy.

• "Day 23 - Something you crave often"

Hmm... Well, pasta. And I've gotten in the habit of having a little bit of chocolate after most meals, to get rid of the my-mouth-tastes-like-chewed-food feeling. Other than that, I don't really know! I crave everything I like sometimes.

• "Day 24 - A letter to your parents"

This makes me really uncomfortable! Writeups about my friends and loved ones is one thing, but an actual letter seems inappropriately intimate for posting to a blog. I guess I could write up my parents. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow.

Okay, so instead, I guess I'll do tomorrow's in this space:

• "Day 25 - What I would find in your bag"

 My purse is now my diaper bag, and when I leave the house I try to have:

• Awesome, cute cloth diapers, usually one or two more than I think I'll need
• Changing pad, cloth wipes, and an awesome wetbag for the dirties
• My spare sling, which is flat and tiny and stowable
• A spare outfit for Daniel
• Several toys for Daniel
• My planner and pencil
• Keys, wallet, sunglasses, camera
• Hand sanitizer, chapstick, Orajel
• Map of Corvallis's bus system, which I guess I don't need anymore, weird
• A bunch of other random, useless papers in the side pocket that I haven't thrown out
• Snacks for both myself and Daniel, if I was smart that day
• A Rubik's cube

Famble

"Day 11 - Another picture of you and your friends"
"Day 14 - A picture of you and your family"

I'm swapping these two because I have other plans for that one. Meanwhile, have this!:

 Not a new picture; a picture of new

I'd probably have preferred to use a more recent picture, but I'm at my parents' house, so I'm limited to what I've uploaded to facebook. :P But I've been thinking a lot about Daniel's birth lately, and I spent a bunch of time this morning looking at pictures from the end of my pregnancy and from when he was new. There's a lot of sweetness and beauty there. It makes me a little baby hungry despite the fact that having #2 would be kind of unreasonable right now (or possibly because of that, since I'm all safe?).

Incidentally, I've just learned that I live a lot closer to this lovely birth center than I thought I did. Very very very interesting.

Anyway. ♥ ♥ Heath. ♥ ♥ Daniel. ♥ ♥ the ones who are waiting. I'm frazzled a lot of the time as it is, but I miss them and I want to meet them soon.

Day of awesome

"Day 9 - Something you're proud of in the past few days"

Oh man, today was the right day for this prompt. Usually, I don't get very much done because I'm tired and Danieled and anemic and lazy. But today! Today, presented with the clean kitchen my wonderful husband gave me last night, I had a psychological high that carried me through getting a thing done, which carried my through getting some more things done, and before you know it I was getting things done all day long.

Things I got done!:

• Folded and put away a junkton of laundry
• Played under a sheet with Daniel
• Tidied up a bunch of random stuff
• Looked up a recipe online
• Made dinner?!?!?!
• Unloaded dishwasher
• Loaded dishwasher
• Installed cupboard latches in the kitchen
• Wrote a haiku about Star Trek
• Gave Daniel three solid-food mini-meals (aside from his normal nums)
• Hung my necklace rack and finally unpacked all my necklaces
• Tidied nightstand
• Changed sheets
• Had awesome food and watched funny videos with Heath and Jennifer
• Went to the grocery store with Jennifer, was hilarious apparently? 
• Left Daniel with Heath! Was a leaf on the wind in the produce section!!
• Came home and helped Daniel get to sleep
• Oh, I even played Minecraft a little this morning!
• Now I'm blogging!

In conclusion, aw yeah. So now, I guess tomorrow will either be awesome or terrible! Or maybe somewhere in between! J...just like always?

PS. Remember how I was talking before about wanting to cook? Yeahhhh, baby. The dinner I made was this dinner! It was insanely easy and it tasted prooty goot. I like this crock pot thing, by golly.

PPS. Using a bedsheet and your arms to make a big tent around yourself and your baby: five stars. He giggled and flopped around like mad. It was adorable. He's getting so fun and snuggly. It's hard when I need to do something else, though. He kept trying to crawl into my lap and grab the screwdriver while I was working on the cupboards, and he got all sad and clingy just as I was needing to hang up clothes. But mostly, he's just jolly and interested and busy.

PPPS. Sometimes when Daniel can't sleep, I have to tickle him, and then he can. :)

Uppydatey

And life moves on!

November 19th was Heath's and my fifth anniversary. Our first half-round number! It's hard to believe we're already here. Most of the other seasons of my life have been, at max, four years long. And this relationship is just going to keep going on and on and on. It's crazy! And it is awesome. <3

We celebrated by dressing up nice and going out to a fancy steak dinner (using a gift certificate--thanks, Carole S!). I've never done that before! It was deliriously tasty and made me feel happily princessy. Daniel came along, and he was absolutely perfect. We took turns holding him, talking to him, feeding him bits of bread, so he didn't feel left out and never did any fussing. It was delightful. We've discovered that including him actually makes us less likely to resent him, because it takes away the idea that we need to "escape." I know this won't work all the time once he becomes more noisy and hyper, but for now looking across a candelit table at my family is extremely romantic. Daniel is part of the reason for my love for Heath, after all, not something that just interrupts it.

The week after that, Thanksgiving! That was awesome. Who else is stoked that a woman won Punkin' Chunkin' this year?! Bahaha~

Then the month ended, and now it's December. Daniel was sick last week, so I haven't gotten much of anything done. He had a crazy fever and a lot of pain--his voice is still a little bit hoarse from the constant crying. It cleared up on its own and the doctor couldn't find anything wrong, but based on the diluvian drooling, I figured it must be teething. And I seem to have been right, because lo and behold, there are now some sharp bumps at the front of his gums!

Not only that, but now that he's mastered crawling, he's launched right into pulling up, and can now stand upright while hanging on with one hand. Geez, that was fast. No cruising yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

Next up: my brother Michael is getting married this weekend. Yaaaaaaaay! I am super happy to gain Jessica as a sister and just stoked about the whole thing. <3 Also about seeing Aaron and family when they come up from California, and the good times that will ensue! Ahhh, my family is awesome.

I've been having some thoughts lately that I want to write about, including babies and gender, how Daniel got his name, how this journal got its name, and maybe eventually a birth story. I think there was something else, too. Hopefully I'll remember later.

Stressalicious

I totally can't get the motivation going on this year's NaNoWriMo event. ;_; I'm like 8,000 words behind. It's my worst record ever. The words themselves are awesome so far, too, so it would make me very sad to just give up. I keep blaming my distractedness on the baby (even when he has nothing to do with it) and it totally flies. Agh. No! Bad Rachel! Also I pretty much need to ban myself from a) Minecraft and b) talking about feminism all day on facebook.

I have had kind of a depressing/depressed week. It's always so hard for me to write about that. I want to have good news to report every time I come up for air.

A lot of it was mothering related stuff. I'm starting to realize just how impossible this job is to prepare for, and how some of the best advice I picked up and embraced early on has actually damaged me. It's still good advice! It's just that I created an ideal for myself that I can never, ever measure up to, not because no one's perfect, but because the world doesn't work the way I thought.

Specifically, all babies don't actually need your undivided attention at every moment. Daniel doesn't. And I know that, so I'll often plop him down and let him crawl around while I do other things. The problem is, I accept this mentally, but not emotionally, so when Daniel starts crying from the floor, if he's not easily consoled I feel devastated and guilty, like maybe if I'd been actively playing with him he wouldn't have gotten lonely or bored or whatever it is.

There's another version of this, which is that sometimes Daniel (and other babies, I hear) will cry temporarily-inconsolably for no apparent reason. After exhausting all my efforts to try and comfort him, I can end up feeling pretty fried and unhappy and, frankly, bored, so I often end up sitting at the computer holding a crying baby and reading stuff while I nuzzle him. But I feel awful when I do that--even though I'm still trying to help him get happy, and talking to him, and trying different things in a sort of distracted way. I feel like I'm breaking the rules, like I'm supposed to be suffering with him and that would fix it, but I also think I would completely lose my mind. So in the end I give my brain a vent and feel guilty about it, both.

I think the hardest part of being a mom for me so far is the way everything comes in little tiny increments of time. Nurse for five minutes, play on the floor for ten minutes, ride on my hip for ten minutes, play on the floor, poop, get a new diaper, cry about that for a while, nurse again, play in my lap, play on the floor, play in my lap, cry for no obvious reason, get over it for no obvious reason... (The only exception is that he loves being worn around in the sling and would probably be thrilled to go on walks all day. This would be awesome except that I run out of places to go and things to do really, really fast.)

I've been a married adult for nearly five years now, and I'm kind of a homebody, so I'm really, really used to my time being my own, and accustomed to having it come in multi-hour chunks. Sleep for eight hours. Read for two. School. Read. Heath time. Video games. Big expanses of time I can stretch out and be languid in.

Nowadays, those stretches primarily happen late at night (even later than usual, with Daniel going to bed at 10 all this week). I can't stand to waste my only long, empty hours--the only hours that feels familiar and normal!--on something as boring as sleep! Unfortunately, Daniel is still waking up at the same time as usual, 8ish. So I've been staying up into the wee hours and operating while exhausted a lot, which leads us back to the part where I said I've been super depressed.

Problems:
* Lack of sleep
* Frustration with Daniel fussing, staying up late
* Guilt about my mothering
* Guilt about NaNoWriMo
* Plural instances of random people being insane/rude/scary
* My house is horrifyingly messy
* We're so behind on the comic
* Wayyyy too much candy
* Not nearly enough healthy food
* Still working on keeping the thrush away
* Still haven't figured out how to not be bored lonely all day on weekdays
* There are a lot of really, really important things I keep not doing.

Sometimes it is really hard to have feelings that aren't just "Blah. I am terrible."

Good times!

I'm always proud and excited to tell people how much tidier and less icky cloth diapers are than disposables.

That still may be true, but it turns out that when your baby plants both feet in poo mid-change, kick-smears your arms, and then pees into your sock, it doesn't actually matter what kind of dipe you had him in!