Category Archives: Words Words Words

Reset

I need to get back into journaling regularly, but I don’t really remember how to do it.

You see, I had a weird incident last year that kind of broke me for a while. I’m a writer by nature and career, and writing things out is how I work through things. Not having this outlet has really undercut my ongoing healing process from living life in general, and you know what? Enough of that. Feeling like this outlet is blocked or broken hasn’t been conducive to being able to sit down and use journalling in all the ways I do – recording the good stuff, the family stuff, the confusing stuff, the ‘I feel really down and broken and I need to work through it’ stuff. I use this journal as a place to work things out when things are not going well; I need to work them out by writing, and I do that by writing in a place where people can sometimes give me feedback or support. It also keeps me honest: writing here means that there is an audience of some kind, and that’s important to me as a writer, because it gives me a sense of responsibility. I write differently for myself than for others. If it’s just for me, I’ll be lazy. If I know others will read it, I take more care in how I express myself, and it ends up being a lot clearer to me when revisiting it.

After that incident last fall, I stopped trusting myself, I stopped trusting my audience, and it really broke me in a specific way that a writer can be broken. As you’ve seen, pretty much the only thing I’ve kept to is Owlet’s monthly updates (and I even skipped one of those). Anything else has been very irregular. I need to ease back into doing this, and I think a way to do that is to come up with some sort of loose schedule. Maybe Tuesdays I can jot down a few words on the spinning, knitting, and dyeing stuff I’m doing. Maybe Thursdays I can talk about cello, what’s happening in orchestra and in lessons, and maybe I can broaden the subject to include mention of the type of music I’m listening to, and new discoveries. Maybe Fridays I can talk about what I’m reading, online and in book form. I stopped doing my end-of-month book roundup right around the time Owlet was born, and not knowing what I read when has been driving me up the wall. Sparky deserves his own posts periodically, too. I stopped doing his monthly posts when he turned five (and I’ll do the same for Owlet), but as a result I’m not noting down the stuff that he’s doing very often, and I feel like I’m missing pages in his scrapbook, so to speak.

Right now I am having an odd relationship with writing in general, and I think maybe my journalling issue is also symptomatic of that. I work very well while fixing other people’s writing — that’s what my career is right now, after all. I’m very happy with it, too; I’m good at what I do, and my clients seem to be absolutely thrilled with me and my work. I enjoy it, but I miss pure writing. I remember the feeling of writing; I remember working through an idea by putting words on paper to see where it went, and I miss that. In a recent editing lull, I went through some old novels that were in rough draft form or just missing the conclusion, and while I read and enjoyed them, I recognized that there were things that needed to be fixed. But I have this broken writing thing. I know that sometimes you just have to plunge into it, but that can be hazardous when one’s writing muscle has atrophied through lack of regular exercise, which is partly what journalling is.

That incident last fall really cut my feet out from underneath me, and I’ve had to think about my identity as a writer, as someone who communicates and works with words, as someone who interprets the world through words. I used to do that as my job, and I really need to find my feet doing it again, so baby steps; I’ll start with this schedule, and we’ll see where that goes, where it takes me. I’m sure it will help in several ways, and among the areas of my life in which I’ll see a benefit are my mental and emotional states (both of which took a big hit in the past while, which has contributed a hell of a lot to my struggle with depression).

I think one of the associated problems I’ve been having is that journalling seems so overwhelming now. I haven’t been writing things down for so long that when I do sit down to journal, I’m drowning in the amount of information I have to break down. There’s so much to say that I don’t know where to start, and I don’t know how to get it all down. And I’m constantly asking myself if it’s worth writing down, censoring the writing before it even happens. It’s frustrating, and it usually scares me so much that I don’t sit down to do it at all. As a writer, this paralysis has been devastating to me. I comment on life in my head throughout the day; I have a running narration going on, about what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, and so forth, and not being able to actually write that down somewhere in some sort of form has had a really negative impact on how I’ve been processing things, in dealing with information and events in my life. Not blogging probably doesn’t sound like much to some of you, but it is a fundamental shift in my outlook, in how I process and interpret the world and information around me, and there’s been a breakdown in my thought processing, in how I understand what or how I’m feeling. When that gets stoppered up, everything else starts getting slowed down, and there are traffic jams in how I emotionally assess things.

I think that if I just start writing things down again, little things here and there, it will help me back to a better place in my relationship with words. At this point, what I write isn’t as important as just making a date to put a few words down a few times each week. I’ll use the rough schedule as a trellis, so that my expression has somewhere to climb; the guideline will offer me something to cycle through, but I’m not going to beat myself up if I miss a day, and I’m certainly not going to let that structure stop me from doing something at any other time. I think that if I journal more regularly, I’ll feel less intimidated because there won’t be so much to choose from when I do sit down. It will be easier for me if I can keep it to short entries, and it’ll be easier for you as readers because you won’t have to wade through a novella every time I sit down.

Let’s see where this goes.

Owlet: Thirty-Three Months Old!

Same old. Child grows, gets cuter. Converses more articulately. Does adorable stuff. Gets pathetically ill. Bounces back. You know.

You want pictures.

We spent Easter with my parents in Ontario. Owlet’s choice of reading material on the trip will, no doubt, be approved by many of you.

The weather was glorious, and the kids played outside with chalk on the sidewalk. Then we moved into the backyard so Sparky could climb the cherry tree, as he does at least once every visit, and Owlet decided that the backyard stone bunny needed some Eastery chalk decoration, too.

Travelling was great on the way there, but on the way home we ran into a toddler difficulty. Every time we stopped and went into a public bathroom, Owlet said she didn’t need to pee. She would try but couldn’t; the big public bathrooms were, I think, too busy and noisy, with all the flushing and lots of doors slamming and those wretched hand dryer machines that sound like a jet engine taking off and still make even Sparky cringe. We even carried our own toddler potty, because she’s been working through big potty/small potty comfort issues, and we didn’t want to stress her out with that any more than the trip was already going to stress her. So she wouldn’t go, we’d leave, then she would randomly say “Peepee! Hafa go pee!” with great urgency while we were on the highway. So we’d pull over, set her up on the little potty in the back of the car, and we’d wait; she still wouldn’t pee, and we’d pack up and go again. I’d forgotten how stressful travelling with a relatively newly potty-trained child is. (She eventually peed about two hours from home, in one of those lovely big private family bathrooms that are also the wheelchair-accessible rooms. So now we know: wait for the family bathroom, even if it means a longer stop, because the big public bathrooms are just too much for her. It wasn’t as much of an issue on the way down because we’d managed to use the private family bathroom every time except once, and the public bathroom was surprisingly quiet for that one.)

This month, Owlet decided that she wanted to learn how to knit. She grabbed my ballwinder one morning and said, “I love knitting!” She cranked it for a while, then said, “Where is my knitting? Oh, there it is!” I wasn’t about to give her my blanket square in progress, so I popped upstairs and got her two fat DPNs and the tiny ball of deep purple I had left over from a different blanket square.

“My knitting!” she said importantly.

Apparently, knitting consists of carefully wrapping the yarn around and around a needle (which isn’t entirely wrong, just missing a couple of details). And despite me trying to keep the ball of yarn on her lap, she insisted on dropping it over the side of the chair, probably because I put my project bags on the ground to the right of my feet so the yarn travels straight up to my right hand without getting caught on anything. (Frankly, if she was imitating me, I was surprised she didn’t say ”I’m COUNTING!” whenever I spoke to her.)

She has been sick twice in the past month, the first one a cold that had her home for three days, the most recent one a high fever coupled with a brutally sore throat that had me worried about strep until I heard that it had gone through the other daycare and lasted about four days. Every kid in our daycare caught it, too, except for one little girl who missed the two infectious days.

I forgot to post these two a couple of months ago. Who knew we had a little girl old enough to have hair this long? Here’s proof that curls take up more length of hair than you might think:

Braids are fun when you shake your had back and forth and feel them bump on your back and neck. Action shot!

She is off potatoes for some reason (why? who knows?), still hopes for “graby” if there’s meat involved in supper, loves to eat handfuls of frozen peas if I’m about to cook them for supper, loves raw sweet peppers, adores granola bars, and is going to be one sad little owlie when she finishes the last of her Easter chocolate. Every night after supper she says “Little bunny!” or “Chocclit egg!” with great excitement. Handing her a small foil-wrapped egg is good for a few minutes of peace, because she peels it all off in tiny flakes.

Adorable conversational quirks these days include saying, “Oh, man” when she’s unimpressed or sulky about something (thanks so much for modelling that one, Sparky), and the much more enjoyable “I love this one!”, or some other version of “I love {insert thing she’s doing/watching/hearing here}.”

You know what she loves doing? Playing on the iPad with Sparky. Actually, doing anything with Sparky, because he is awesome. (And he is. She’s right about that.)

And the willow tree that we planted outside her window when she was about six months old. She loves her tree.

Socks!

A couple of years ago, my friend Elina sent me a skein of sock yarn along with a pattern for socks, and said that she knew I could do it. I had to use it for socks, too, she said; no cheating and using it to weave something or knit a scarf.

I did a couple of trial runs. I knitted a pair of bulky socks that I felted down to make slippers (which, despite having leather soles sewn onto the ball and heel, have worn through anyway), and I knit Sparky a pair of Gryffindor socks. I cast on this yarn for a pair of socks for myself last September, and finished the first one around Thanksgiving. I started the one right away — I have heard a lot about Second Sock Syndrome — and got a few rows done here and there. I turned the heel early this year, and then it sat in a project bag while I did a bunch for other stuff. I brought it with me and worked on it in the car on the way home for visiting my parents this Easter, and grafted the toe this morning.

I have Made Socks!

First pair of socks for me, April 2014

I am very proud of myself. They’re not hard, really; you just need to pay closer attention in a couple of places. Otherwise, it’s just plain knitting. Obviously I haven’t done anything complicated pattern-wise; I may eventually, but for now it’s nice to have something that’s a go-to project for knitting in waiting rooms or in the car.

The pooling is different on each sock. The ways patterns and dye repeats pool differently is something that I find interesting.

First pair of handknit socks for me, April 2014

The grafted toe feels a bit odd on the inside. I expect that will vanish (or at least be reduced) with a wash.

I used a lot less than the full skein, too. I’ll have to weigh what’s left, but I think I may have used about 2/3 of the yardage. Maybe I’ll knit Owlet a matching pair of socks with what’s left over! But the good news about the yardage is that now I can look at my handspun in a different way. I always thought socks would use up about 400 yards, but if I can knit a basic pair with about 300 yards, then lots of my handspun is now potential sock yarn!

Alpaca!

Dizzy spells yesterday. Charming. This medication can settle down any time.

I recently spun some raw alpaca I bought from my friend Jenn, who runs an alpaca farm and sells alpaca fibre at Frayed Knot FIbres. I got an ounce of cream, caramel, and chocolate alpaca, washed them, blended them together on my hackle:

And dizzed the roving off:

And then spun it into a lovely, fuzzy, deliciously soft single:

Mmm. I could cuddle it for ages.

Reboot

Yesterday I got a surprise book in the mail with no clue as to the sender, and this morning I got some Peaches & Cream tea from DavidsTea! The book is from our friend Helen in Australia (actually, I have two friends named Helen in Australia, thanks to the magic of the Internet), and the tea may be as well. Random acts of kindness are so special, and it came at a good time and cheered me up.

In mostly unrelated news (because being happy is what being treated for depression is all about, right?) I met with my doctor this morning. He says the numb/tingling tongue issue is odd, because I’d been taking the medication for a while at a lower dose for fibro with no side effects, but to be sure he wants me to take it at the half dose again for a few days. If there’s no reaction, I’m to up it to the full dose again and watch for the same tongue thing. By that point we’ll be at our next appointment in a week’s time, and we’ll go from there. If it turns out I’ve developed a sensitivity to it, we can switch to the medication I was on twelve years ago, but he wants to make sure I have a sensitivity to this one first, to resolve the open issue, so to speak. He doesn’t want to leave a question mark in my file; if I have a reaction to it, he wants to be able to confirm it and enter it in my permanent file. I can understand that. And he doesn’t think it’s dangerous, or he wouldn’t ask me to do it. Although I did the right thing by coming in, he assured me.

So we’ll reboot the medication, and see where it goes. La.

Blurry

Owlet and I are both sick with colds. She seems to be chugging along with the usual bounces and energy regardless and is back at daycare today with just a bit of lingering chest congestion, but I feel like I have cement in my head. Beyond this, something odd and worrisome happened over the weekend. On Saturday, I finally got irritated with the odd tingling in my tongue. It had been happening for a few days, and I had ascribed it to spring finally deciding to drag itself out of bed. Sometimes the roof of my mouth tingles when I’m having trouble with my allergies, so it wasn’t that much of a leap to put the tongue tingling down to the same thing, especially when I noticed it more when I ate chocolate or peanut butter, two things that sometimes make my mouth feel a bit odd in the spring when my system is already handling allergy overload. Except it wasn’t going away, or getting any better when I took antihistamines. In fact, it was kind of getting worse. So maybe it was something else? What else could it be?

The only thing I could think of was the medication my new doctor put me on. But I’d been taking it in a lower dose already for fibro; surely the higher dose couldn’t be triggering it, could it? I looked up side effects to be sure, and, um, there it was, in big “seek emergency medical help if you feel any of these following symptoms” letters.

So I stopped taking it. I wasn’t going to go to the emergency room of the hospital saying that my tongue felt a bit odd, not when I’d been taking the higher dose for three weeks already. But it was worrisome enough that I wanted my doctor to know, and to discuss alternate medications with him. I left a message this morning and the receptionist got back to me at lunch (on her lunch hour, I think) and gave me an appointment tomorrow morning. (Bless her; it really does pay to always be super understanding about cancellations and rescheduling on their end.)

Stopping my medication isn’t a huge thing. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. I haven’t been taking it for long enough for a full stop to have significant negative effect. On the other hand, the blessed sleep it was ensuring has taken a hit, and that’s ungood for the physical rest I need for the fibro (proper muscle relaxation and all that) as well as the mental and emotional wellbeing (bad sleep makes me short-tempered and significantly reduces my available spoons with which to cope with basic day-to-day stuff). And I still can’t think of why I started having the reaction three weeks into the treatment. Did it hit a particular saturation in my body or something? Or were my allergies stacking, as they sometimes do, and I started having a reaction to it now because there are so many other things taxing my system? I have no idea. Perhaps the doctor will. But stopping it and the reaction vanishing within twenty-four hours was pretty significant, I think. Even if it’s a stacking issue, it needs to be dealt with.

Owlet: Thirty-Two Months Old!

We’re on track for reading! Owlet loves books, and lately she has started touching words or making us run our fingers under the sentences when we read aloud to her. Then she tries to do the same thing. This means she knows that what you say changes as you move from word to word, which is so exciting. It’s also exciting that if you ask her to find two of the same word on a page, she can do it, which means she’s recognizing patterns and word shapes.

The child gates are now all gone (yaaaay! our shins are so grateful!) except the one to the stairs leading to the office. Even that one we leave closed but unlatched a lot of the time, so it’s mostly a visual reminder that she’s not supposed to go up there. Occasionally if she’s alone for whatever reason, she takes it into her head to pull it open, climb the stairs, and play the piano, which is always amusing. (And yes, it is still a “pinnannose.”)

She loves playing with her new build-a-bug app on the iPad, and she’s getting better at the matching games, too. She was very into The Princess and the Frog for a while, including the music, even though she kept saying she was scared of the shadows in it. We think she was working through fear/discomfort by desensitizing herself to it and play-acting through all the stages of “I scared!” and “shadows can’t hurt me.” Now, of course, everything is all Frozen, all the time. Nana bought a copy for them and brought it with her when she visited a couple of weeks ago, and the children were over the moon.

Her favourite books are a little less clear; she cycles through her bookshelf pretty regularly these days. We read Are You My Mother? frequently, she’s been enjoying Chester and the Scaredy Squirrel series by Melanie Watt an awful lot. She likes magazines because they have lots of different pictures in them, preferably her brother’s copies of Chickadee. She loves choosing a book to bring in the car in the mornings. And one day she insisted on bringing her chosen book into the daycare, even though I told her she’d have to share it with the other children. She actually got excited about that, and was pleased to pass it around and talk about the baby animal pictures in it.

She’s suddenly into puzzles. She’s past the wooden ones with the lift-out basic shapes, so we cleared most of them out and sent them to the daycare along with some other toys she’d grown out of, which pleased everyone; they had fun with their new puzzles and she was happy that she’d shared them. She’s now into the 24-piece cardboard ones, and is pretty good at them, so long as one of us turns the pieces the right way up and makes sure they’re sort of in the right general order. She’s learning to look for pieces that have the colours of a certain character on it and put them together first. She really doesn’t understand the concept of lining up the straight edges of the border yet, though.

The best new game of pretend is “ocean.” She spreads the blue afghan out on her floor, pulls the old baby bath out from under her bed (where it holds random stuffed animals and toys), climbs in, and pretends she’s in a boat. It is best played with Sparky, who can rock it, and they “dive” into the “water” and swim around, or catch fish, or pile any water-related toys they have into the boat with them (like stuffed turtles, fish, puffins, and so forth). It’s a great game. The two of them are working out their relationship; he thinks and imagines so much more quickly than she does, and in general she’s willing to enthusiastically follow him. But she’s starting to suggest her own variations of what they’re doing, and Sparky is having trouble being flexible; if what she imagines doesn’t fit in with his vision, or alters something he’s already proposed, then he gets cross with her. We’ve been doing a lot of refereeing, reminding them to share the imagining and take turns suggesting the next development.

She is so ready for winter to be done with. She has been pulling her rainboots out of the cupboard and tromping around the house in them. It’s warm enough that she can wear a spring jacket to daycare in the mornings for the quick jump between the car and the building, but not warm enough to wear only that (plus splash pants) to play in. So we’ve been toting two complete outfits to school each day, her spring one and her winter one.

She loves, loves, loves painting and coloring. She enjoys tracing things like cups and hands (including Hop-Hop’s paw). She still directs people to draw things for her instead of scribbling herself, though. Stickers are still the best things ever, but she gets whiny about which ones she has to be using. We are forever peeling stickers off the floor, chairs, windowsills, doors, and our arms (we even find them in the dryer exhaust screen). Fortunately they’re easily removed, and don’t leave adhesive behind.

Among her current favourite foods are ‘rolly cheese’ (her term for a slice of processed American cheese, the kind we use for special grilled cheese sandwiches, because it’s flat and she likes to have it rolled up), carrots (because she can share them with Solstice), peanut butter toast, ‘graby’ (her term for gravy, which is also what she calls maple syrup), peas (preferably frozen, and preferably while she is pouring them into the dish before microwaving them). She is totally off potatoes, for some reason. All meat is awesome if it comes with ‘graby’ to dip it in.

She’s mostly in size 4; we’ve given up on size 2 and 3, because they’re generally too small. I have no idea what size her feet are; her rainboots are size 7, but her snowboots are size 9, and it’s been forever since she wore a shoe. She has recently asked for an umbrella, and as they’re going to be doing umbrella-related activities later this month at daycare, then I’ll have to pick one up for her. She has decided she would like fairies or Hello Kitty on it.

She loves helping with the dishes. Her job is drying them, although she needs to be reminded each time to put them on the counter instead of dropping them back into the dirty water. She’s gotten much better at sitting still while we put her hair in ponytails, although leaving them in is still not guaranteed. She’s always moving, always imagining, and always loving. She’s fun to have around.