30 Day Redux

I want to write more, and I do well with prompts, so I'm going to redo this silly thing from two years ago. Some of the answers are going to be the same as they were the first time, but I'll try to find new things to say as much as possible.

The first day's prompt is "Recent picture of you and 15 interesting facts about yourself." I recently had a baby, and I'm in a really awkward phase of growing out my haircut from last year, and I just got a new phone, so most of my recent pictures are amusingly unattractive selfies. Here is one that is merely silly.

Although on further thought, I'd probably really dig living in a tree and making cookies.

There was a time when I was doing a lot of these things for some reason, so to keep it interesting I started making the facts I gave about myself kind of obscure. But it's been a while now, and I've changed a lot. So I'm going to reintroduce myself as a way of rediscovering myself, or something. See how that turns out.

1. I'm Rachel. I'm 26. That was two facts.
2. I have two children so far, Daniel and Noah. They are so cool I kind of can't believe it. I have many many many flaws, but I am better overall at parenting than I used to be, and in my clear-headed moments I call that victory. I dearly miss having long stretches of time to sit in quiet doing whatever I wanted, but I also passionately want to have two or three more and complete my set. I wish that by the time they're all here I could plan to stop sucking altogether, but I guess that's more a journey than a destination.
3. Yesterday I was looking at my kind, handsome, brilliant, ridiculous husband, and I finally identified a background feeling I've had about him for the whole 7+ years we've been together. That feeling is a strange sense that I'm actually not in the normal, baseline universe at all. I'm in an alternate universe, a crazy and awesome one where I get to be married to Heath. How did that even happen? Usually the heroes would just make a brief stopover here and hijinks would ensue, but I've somehow wound up living here full-time, and hijinks are ensuing every day. And I find myself the the more-deeply-realized spin-off show version of who I thought I was going to be.
4. I have celiac disease. As I was writing this, I bit into a piece of Easter candy and immediately had to spit it out, because I discovered that it was peanut butter and rice crispy. That is the most magical and delicious combination in the world, but it's almost always gluten-contaminated. I'm enjoying the tiny amount of it that I can still taste in my mouth, but I'm also already getting slightly sick from it. Should have broken it open to check first.
5. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I love its doctrines profoundly and joyfully. I frequently take issue with the subculture propagated unofficially among the members (who are, after all, dumb humans like me). I was super devout growing up, but I got lazy and depressed in the last few years and stopped doing very much more than just going on Sundays. I'm working now on making it a deep and growing and active part of my everyday life again, because it's awesome and it makes everything else more awesome. And I'm not content with the flat, shaky sort of awesomeness I'm limited to without it.
6. I am a feminist, in the real definition of the word, not the stereotypey one. My main sub-issue is trying to help shift our culture away from its extreme levels of violence, especially of the sorts a significant number of my loved ones have endured. I think and study and talk about that a lot. I'm super enthusiastic and friendly about it when I'm not being immediately freaked out by something despicable. I'm not judgey of individuals who enjoy problematic media, because most people are privileged in some area and it is possible to like one part of something while conscientiously objecting to others. I want to see creators thinking outside the box more, though.
7. I'm feminine in identity, presentation, and chosen daily vocation, but I usually feel a lot more comfortable hanging out with geeky men than with people outwardly similar to myself. Men have a different set of social rules that makes way, way, way more sense to me on an instinctual level, and I usually relate more to their interests. I still crave the company of other women, but it's harder to make a connection and feel liked. I often come off as shy. I figure that's better than coming off as a snot.
8. I am excessively passionate about a lot of enormously dorky things, and a lot of mainstream-dorky things as well, but somehow a particularly awkward combination of those two. I participate in the SCA, host a weekly roleplaying group at my house, read lots of webcomics, write a (terrible) novel every year since 2007, draw a lot, read constantly, and play video games. I'm working on writing a text adventure right now. But my number one hobby at the moment (which relates to the first item in that list) is medieval history, particularly heraldry and heraldic design. That can pretty comfortably be called an obsession at this point.
9. Things I used to do: Design websites. Serve as Wikipedia administrator. Peform regularly in choirs, including two years in an a capella group. Write a weekly opinion column for the school paper. Write for a webcomic (hopefully will do so again soonish). Teach about the Old Testament at church. Study Japanese. Act in musicals.
10. My favorite book series is the Miles Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I love more fiercely than tongue can tell. My favorite single book is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. I can no longer even begin to narrow down my favorite music, but I generally lump it together as "pretty and/or strange." The best video games are Portal (1&2) and Chrono Trigger, and the best movie is I have no idea.
11. I have a degree in English (magna cum laude!), the acquisition of which was one of the funnest (yes, darn it, funnest) things I'll ever do. Once my kid-having situation is nice and settled, I'm going back for a minor in writing, and then (depending on how much I like that) a Master's in either Creative Writing or English Literature. I'm looking forward to that a lot.
12. And then I had to do other stuff for 10 hours! Coming back in a totally different state of mind. Uhh. Stuff. This has been pretty wordy so far, hasn't it? I value brevity, but this is what brevity looks like to me. At least when I'm writing for myself. There, that's a factoid.
13. I have three older brothers (all married, two with kids), and one little sister who is currently on a mission in Nicaragua. She will be back in a year, and I miss her like crazy, but I'm also getting a lot of vicarious satisfaction out of what a cool thing she's doing. My brothers are entirely rad, and so are my parents. So are my other relatives. I love spending time with all of them. I had a fun and diverse and affectionate home life growing up, which is why I want to have a plurality of kids myself.
14. I am not a very accomplished homemaker. Today I folded laundry and unloaded the dishwasher, which is about 10% of what it seems like other stay-at-home moms are doing before lunch, but it was super productive for me. I've been plagued by fatigue a lot of my life (see #4), and it's become kind of a habit. So I often forget to notice I have energy. But meanwhile, I really really care about the state of my house, so I've tended to sit around feeling edgy and guilty all the time. I'm a genius! I also can't cook, but I'm trying to learn, because feeding my kids random junk at random hours is more embarrassing than doing that to myself, and I don't want them to be like I've been.
15. Well, I sort of implied this in #8, but I get really, really intensely enthusiastic about the things that catch hold of my imagination. If I like something, I immediately want to become an expert in it. I challenge myself to a lot of fairly hefty projects for no extrinsic reason (showing here) and pursue them tenaciously. I devote tons of time and energy to making art or researching subject areas no one else will care about, and boil over with delight all throughout the process. I also use up a lot of myself, day after day, on the things that upset and worry me. All of this is why I need to talk so much, and write so much, and fret so much over needing people to talk and write to, and thank heaven every day for my marriage-and-conversation partner.

Okay, let's call that a day. I'm sleepy. (Sooo wordy. Let me stress that I'm writing this mainly because I like and want to write, not because I expect hordes of people will be clamoring to read it.)

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?

Calendars

I've been thinking a lot about life-seasons and cycles lately, not surprisingly, as my birthday is in a little over two weeks.

When I was in high school, I noticed that I had a deeply-ingrained tendency to conceive of new years as beginning in September, not in January. A new school year brought changes to my schedule, my physical environment, my social pressures and opportunities, the academic subjects I was surrounded by, and the similar concerns on the minds of nearly everyone I knew. The chronological new year was fun and all, but it was never more than a ceremonial gesture. I didn't chart my experiences under terms like "1999" and "2000," but rather as "1999-2000" (i.e. 8th grade). Going by what grade I was in, I was able to organize the seasons of my life in surprisingly coherent mental volumes, and trace themes from one to the next.

(Somehow, nothing incredibly important ever seemed to happen during the summertime--or if it did, I ended up seeing it as either at the beginning, merging smoothly into the previous year, or the end, merging smoothly into the next. Kind of like a Harry Potter book.)

Obviously, this has everything to do with being in public school, an external force that defined most of what happened to me all day. So I always kind of figured that things would change when I had completed my formal education. Specifically, I imagined that in my early-to-mid-twenties I would stop buying day planners that began in September, and start buying ones that began in January. It was sort of a rite-of-passage to adulthood. Grown-ups, I figured, are more comfortable in strictly Gregorian calendars. They do taxes that way. They buy wall calendars that way. They write history books that way.

Yet somehow, a couple years (?!) after graduating from university, and well into my erratic and timeless routine as a full-time mommy, I still find myself in the exact same mental pattern. I realized a while ago that at least one reason for this is pretty simple--my birthday is at the very end of August, just days before my childhood school years generally started. Halfway through college, when exactly what "grade" I was in was getting increasingly hazy, I started identifying my years by my own age, and therefore rolling everything over at...exactly the same time as ever.

What's more, every time Heath and I have changed apartments it's been in the August-October range, and now he's about to start his full-time student teaching, after which he'll start teaching for real. For our foreseeable future, his work will come in waves starting every September. And in a few short years, our kids will start going to school, too... Then at some point, I'll be going back...

So yeah. I think I'll switch back to buying student planners after all.

I might even start right now, even though my current one has the rest of the year's months left in it. It's falling apart, because it was a two-year planner. And frankly, I'm more than ready to symbolically shove the last two years in a box and move on to shiny new ones. I can only strive to hope that 26 be a better year than 25 has been.

Overall, in the little in-between spaces, it's been a really pretty awful one, revolving around one awful theme (which has nothing to do with my family or my body). That's why I haven't been writing here, or talking much to anyone but Heath. Lots of good stuff, too, but that stuff will hopefully and presumably be continuing indefinitely. The rest... I'm ready to be done. Somehow. A symbolically convenient time to declare myself so is approaching; I have no idea what that means or whether anything really will or can change, but at least the timing is something. I don't know. I have no idea. I can hope, but I can't plan. Or maybe vice-versa.

Definite transitions that are coming: Shortly before my birthday, I'm getting my 20-week ultrasound with baby #2. Shortly after, my "little" sister is leaving on her mission, which is exciting but I will miss her like mad. And next month Heath is starting his last term of school, which will end in getting his teaching license. Immediately after that, at the start of 2013, the aforementioned awesome new baby will come along and distract us all for a while. Heath will briefly go back to carpet-cleaning to keep us eating and start paying off loans. By next summer, we will hopefully have found a teaching job for the fall, somewhere relatively close by, and will be getting ready to move. Then, bizarrely, our post-student life will begin as I turn 27.

So that's all pretty awesome. I hope I'm up for it; I think I will be. More uncertainly, I hope I'm up for whatever other unexpected weirdness life throws at us in addition. That's not impossible, either, really, just as long as it's gentler or at least wildly different from and completely unrelated to this year's. That sounds very restful. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about any of it from here.

So we'll see what we see, I guess. I need to have something change, and a haircut didn't do the trick. (Not that that was the point, but one always hopes.) So for now, I'll happily take the new age, and the new year, maybe some new weather and tree-colors soon. The upcoming hints about who my new baby might be will be fun, too. And when the big roll-over to 26 comes, who knows. Maybe I'll stay up till midnight and sing a song and throw some confetti around.

And hope for the best.

Awesome. Crazy. Book of Mormon.

On January 1st, I spontaneously decided I wasn't insane enough, and that I wanted to try reading the entire Book of Mormon in a week. (I already knew I was doing it at the time I wrote my post here, but I didn't mention it because I figured it would probably overpower the other stuff I was saying.)

RACHEL WHAT WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT

I don't really know? I guess I just wanted to reread the Book of Mormon, but I was making so many other long-term paradigm-changing goals that I just didn't want to have to add yet another thing to my "pay attention to this forever" list. It was actually more exhausting to ponder having to spend a year spurring myself into reading 15 minutes per day (or whatever) than it was to just blast through the entire thing and get that goal behind me so I didn't have to worry about it anymore. (Not that that's the only scripture reading I'm going to do this year, obviously, but now I don't feel compelled to be structured about it.)

The result? It totally worked--I started late Sunday afternoon on the 1st and finished early Sunday afternoon on the 8th. It was super hard, by which I mean I got a whole lot of other stuff done that week while I spent the first half of my day procrastinating. (This means that, yes, my first week of keeping new year resolutions went swimmingly. I'm starting to notice that having one big important project is a sure-fire way to get tons of unrelated minor things accomplished. :P)

I know this sounds like a totally ridiculous and lofty thing to do, but I've got to say, you should try it. A week is such a small commitment, when you think about it. Seven days of extra-craziness, then you get to go back to normal. And what do you take with you?

If you're me, 33 pages of notes. Keeping a journal beside me was Heath's recommendation, and oh man I am so glad he made it. I would never have kept track of everything I was noticing and learning and getting confused about and figuring out--so much more of it would have just disappeared down the short-term memory drain. But as it was, oh my gosh.

I thought I knew the BoM fairly well before this, but there are some things you just will not notice unless you still have it in your mind that What's-his-ihah did XYZ, some fifty pages ago. Can you keep that kind of detail in your head for the two months it takes to get through Alma one chapter at a time? And is your reading record that good? Yeah, me neither. But when you just read about the XYZ yesterday, connections jump out at you that are surprising and exciting, and make everything make way more sense than it ever did. This is true even if it made sense to you already. It's even more true if you were confused (and who isn't? Hugh Nibley doesn't count).

The easiest example of this for me to explain is Abinadi's sermon. How many times have I heard the story of Abinadi in a class? Several dozen? And yet all I remember talking about are the actual facts of his story--the things that happen to him. I don't remember ever studying the actual words he said, in depth, as a cohesive sermon with an overall theme that begins at the beginning and ends at the end and is always revolving around the same point. I've never read it all in one sitting before. If you don't do anything else I'm talking about here, I highly recommend at least that. It is really, really cool. (Learning about the BoM is awesome and fun, but that's not what it's for. It's for learning about life and God and how to line them up, and Abinadi is not only brave, he's also wise.)

So, some things that helped me in my efforts:

• Heath. The man is amazing. He was 100% supportive from the word go, and it just so happened that the first week of January was a slow one in the carpet cleaning business, so he had a lot more time at home than usual, and spent quite a bit of it on solo Daniel-duty while I holed up in our room and read. It also just so happened that he was asked to substitute in seminary class three mornings that week, so after Daniel was asleep, we'd have our own several-hour study hall at the kitchen table and talk all about what we--well, mostly what I was reading. It's because of him I had so much time to read, especially when I was cramming at the end, but he is also directly responsible for getting me extremely behind in the middle because we could not stop talking. It was awesome.
• Taking notes. I just kept my journal next to me and noted down cool insights, newly-noticed connections between events or doctrines, thoughts for what to do in my own life, and questions for later. This was a big deal while I was doing it, and it's going to continue to be a big deal for me to be able to go back and read those notes so I can re-learn the stuff that slipped out of my head, whether about the book or my own life.
• Not everything I wrote down was positive. Sometimes, a description or turn of phrase or event would confuse or bother me, and I decided to write those down, too. It was interesting how taboo this felt. But what good is any religion if you have to suppress your concerns? What good is any religion that can't answer those concerns? It turned out to be extremely awesome and helpful to have those negative items, because it helped me focus on some specific things I wanted to learn more about. I was much more likely to notice when the answers to some of my questions came along, or when a different writer later gave another perspective on the issue that had troubled me. And just like with the other notes, I'm able reread my questions later and do specific research, which is awesome.
• I cannot, cannot, cannot recommend this edition of the Book of Mormon highly enough. Instead of being laid out in the verse-focused, unbroken two-column format, it's organized into paragraphs. There are boldface headers that help sort out the direction of the narrative, and footnotes that keep track of all the references to other parts of the story and what they're talking about. Subtle shifts from topic to topic are suddenly a million times clearer. Connections between ideas, and the flow of arguments, are way more obvious and easy to follow. The words are all the same, but it's like a whole new book, it makes so much more sense. It's incredibly exciting. One of the best parts is that quotations from other texts are indented, and poetic quotations are broken up into lines and stanzas. What this does to the Isaiah chapters must be seen to be believed. I would never have imagined that a change like that would make them so much easier to understand, but at least for me, it was just huge.

Maybe at some point I'll dive into my actual notes and talk about some of the specific things I learned. Or maybe I'll just tantalize you with dreams of what you might learn if you try this!

Does this sound fun to you, even a little bit? Are you momentarily free from any life-changing deadlines? THEN DO IT. DO IT NOW. START WHILE YOU'RE EXCITED. I think a lot of the reason I was successful was that I was being recklessly spontaneous. Reading the Book of Mormon in a week is such an insane thing to do that stepping back and considering my situation, and trying to fit it into my week in a tidy and rational way, just never would have happened. It's obviously too much. You'll never find time for such a ridiculous goal, and even if you do, you'll want to use the time for something else. SO DO IT RIGHT NOW WITHOUT THINKING. If it doesn't work out, oh well! You'll at least get an hour or two of good studying in before tomorrow hits!

In my case, starting on the first day of the year was sort of a coincidence. That is, it wasn't a resolution, but in Sunday School we were beginning our year of studying the Book of Mormon, so that's why rereading the thing was on my mind. But it was a pretty cool coincidence, I think. I might even make it a tradition in the future.

(Oh, I was also partly inspired by the experience of plowing through a novel in one day the week previous, just to get it out of my way. I thought, if I can do that with this kind of book, and if all those people in the 1800s gobbled up the Book of Mormon in a single night when they first got it... Isn't a week worth a shot?)

So yup! There's that. This past week, I was so relieved not to be doing that anymore that I did very little else, either. X) I nailed most of my resolution days, but not all. (My paper journal got the entry last Sunday, as you might imagine.) Tomorrow is another Monday, though! This week I'm gonna rock it! Woo! ...Not least because I already have another awesome (but less crazy) project thought up, so I'll need to do some housework while I ponder/prepare/procrastinate that, right? Right.

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

O hai

Don't worry, I still remember that I have a blog.

Current status: I need a shower.