And the baby’s down for another nap. I like this long-nap thing. It’s cumulative.
I find it very amusing that my site stats indicate that this journal’s popularity has plummeted since syndicated feeds (LJ and otherwise) have begun publishing the whole entry instead of just a link and a slug. Not many people come here any more. Which doesn’t mean no one’s reading, of course; it’s just that the owlies are lonely. Ah well; more whiskey sours for them, I suppose…
Happy Beltane!
Not turning on my computer for four days running is a very good method of dealing with stress. I like it. It does, however, mean that I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on when I get back to it. The good thing is that it was over the weekend, when there’s generally less stuff to handle anyway.
Let’s see. My parents were in town for a conference, so they came over Friday night and I cooked a belated birthday dinner for my Dad. Roast breast of duck glazed in ginger marmalade and soy sauce, wild rice with oyster mushrooms and toasted almonds, organic spring greens salad with homemade vinaigrette, followed by a dessert of chocolate sponge sandwiched together with strawberry coulis folded into whipped cream, then topped with fresh strawberries and chocolate ganache. And my parents brought an excellent Australian shiraz called [yellowtail] and it was the perfect accompaniment. It was so incredibly perfect. I’m not sure what happened, but it all worked. I’m always surprised when special dinners work.
Band practice was very okay. We miss our drummer something fierce when she’s not there. We talked about what to drop for the upcoming private gig (we’re playing a wedding! okay, it’s the guitarist’s wedding, but still!) and ran through stuff. I think most of us feel better about the gig in general after a week of distance.
Liam’s naps and sleeping-through-the-night went out the window again. Saturday was very, very bad. Last night he only woke up once around midnight, and today when he woke up after a scant twenty minutes of nap he was soothed back to sleep, so I am cautiously optimistic. We thought a tooth had made its appearance Saturday morning, but it’s still covered by a thin bit of skin, damn it. Like the other three, now.
We had coven yesterday and wove a beautiful Maypole. We slipped the weave off and tied it into sections and everyone took a bit home. Our feast was really good, too.
I’ve been going to bed very early to cope with the sleep fragmentation I’ve been suffering courtesy of the waking baby. It seems to be helping a bit.
Reading an excess of Connie Willis (not that there really is such a thing) makes me want to write desperately again.
Okay, baby’s awake! That makes for a total of over an hour of nap this morning. Hurrah!
Twenty-one pounds, ten ounces. Yikes.
Today was the follow-up appointment to the research project Liam was involved in at Ste-Justine hospital for premature babies and the prevention of respiratory illnesses. We got there, I fed him his oatmeal, they weighed him, asked if everything was okay, and we all shook hands and wished one another well. The results of the study won’t be available for a year or so, but in the meantime he didn’t get sick and we helped advance the development of a valuable vaccination.
He slept through Tuesday night. Then he had four (four!) naps yesterday, two of decent length and two catnaps, and he slept through last night as well. (He woke up at five, but them’s the breaks.) I’ve been whisking him off to his room to nurse him to sleep when I catch him rubbing his eyes, which has the added bonus of increasing his nursing as well, something that he hadn’t really been interested in doing during the day recently.
He’s cruising around pieces of furniture really well. And now he’s trying to share his toys with his other toys. The other day HRH found him holding one of his little rolling balls out to the stuffed turtle Luanna gave him.
Nap’s over! Back into the fray.
I finally got that review done on the writing that was passed to me three weeks ago.
Three weeks. That’s awful turnaround time. (Sure, there was Easter and an out of town trip in there, plus a week of insanity, and a little boy who’s thrown naps to the wind, but still.)
And it looks like I and four other people have finally successfully scheduled a meeting that we’ve been trying to nail down since the beginning of February. February.
I saw dozens of people at the gig on Saturday night who I hadn’t seen in months, friends whom I’ve known for years in some cases but haven’t been in close contact with for a while. And with the way life is for each of us, I probably won’t see them again till the next gig. But it was wonderful to see them, even briefly, and to exchange a hug and a couple of words. That will tide us over until the next meeting. In the meantime, I take a second to think of them when they pop into my head, send good energy their way, and wish them well.
I go to bed at night and as I’m falling asleep I remember at least a half-dozen things I wanted to do and didn’t accomplish. Sometimes it’s eating a meal. Sometimes it’s calling the bank. Sometimes it’s making a doctor’s appointment for myself. And these things drag on and on because there’s always something else to be doing or thinking about, like chasing Liam or doing groceries or running to band or orchestra or trying to prepare for coven or class. Time seems to telescope, and I don’t realise how long some things have been carried over from one day’s list to the next, and the next, and the next. The days all blur together.
I feel like I’m about three months behind myself, all the time. And the only way to deal with it is to let it go and focus on the immediate things in life in my main sphere of responsibility. Liam, me, HRH. Then parents and closest, dearest friends. Then other friends and acquaintances in order of how well we know one another, what kind of situation they’re in, who else they have to look out for them, and so forth.
I only have so much energy. I can’t do everything. I can’t take care of everybody. These are valuable lessons I’ve learned over the years. It has to be me and mine first. It’s the only way to stay sane doing this juggling act.
And in the interests of allowing the door to hit the inner critic firmly on its way out, I wrote a short story this afternoon.
It was meant to be a joke, but when Megan came home and told me that she’d bought a harpsichord I realized that she’d missed the punch line.
“Megan,†I said, “we don’t have anywhere to put a harpsichord.â€
“I know,†she said, her cheeks flushed from her walk up the hill. “That’s why I also stopped by the realtor’s office and asked her to go through her listings and come up with a half dozen houses for us to view next week.â€
It’s 793 words long; I was aiming for 750. Not bad. And I can probably tighten it to lose the forty-three extra words. But not now, because we have to go pick Liam up and give Devon her birthday present. And only now do I remember that I’d set aside this afternoon to read and critique someone else’s work, which I completely forgot about in the throes of “I know I’ll write a story serves you right stupid inner critic”. Gah. Maybe tonight, then.
It occurred to me on the way home from dropping Liam off to play with his Auntie Pasley that my inner critic has been taking over my brain for the past three weeks. It’s been scraping away at my spirituality (why do I bother?), my writing (I have a book coming out in a month, so of course now I’m waking up at night desperately wishing I’d left something out, or included something else, or said something differently), and my music (I’ve been tame in how I’ve expressed myself here over the past few days to protect audience and fellow bandmates from my self-loathing). I’m surprised it hasn’t told me that I’m a bad mother yet, because Liam’s not napping as long as he should and waking up at night.
But you know what? My inner critic can go take a long walk off a short pier.
We now return me to my regular scheduled programming. I’m passably good at some of what I do, really good at most of it, and I enjoy myself. So my inner critic can just go hang out with the bottom feeders in the cold murky muddy depths of the seaway.
We tried Liam on yoghurt again today. This time it was a success, which is a relief because this container won’t get thrown out like the last one did. Of course, I used a half cup of it making scones this afternoon. And I could make lots and lots of my special pancake batter, because there’s no way I’d eat it; I hate the stuff. But still. And he may have liked it this time because I swirled some fruit into it. Whatever.
Jan was in exactly the same sort of mood I was today, which is a good thing. There were books, and tea, and cats indeed. Liam was by turns charming and cranky. He said “Hi cat” a lot. And I got him to sleep at naptime with only a cry or two, in about twenty minutes, and he slept for forty. Not as long as he used to, but better than the twenty or thirty he’s been taking lately. Damn teeth.
Once he’s in bed and I’ve eaten, I too am bound for bed. Maybe this way if he wakes up in the middle of the night, I’ll have had enough sleep to be functional.
I’ve stopped being less happy with the gig because Jan pointed out to me today that it was only the third time the band had played live, which means it was only the second time for me. I keep forgetting that. I’m really tired of not enjoying myself because I’m not being as good as I know I can be. Part of me just wants to give it up because I’ll never be satisfied, and I don’t mean in a striving-for-excellence way. I’m just too damn hard on myself, and I know I resolved to be less hard on myself, but it’s hard. You know? So now I’m not unhappy, I’m just neutral about it.