An Affair

Weekend: awesome.

We went to the Chocolate Affair Saturday evening, and gorged ourselves on chocolate until we could barely breathe and looked at beautiful displays like these:

Then, since Braz and Adin all but insisted we go out afterwards, we went with Vicki to the Corner Pocket to sip coffee and water and try to convince our stomachs that they weren't as full as they thought they were. (We were also hoping to meet Vicki's boyfriend, but he didn't arrive until a few minutes after Matt and I decided to leave.)

Sunday, we went down to my parents' house to visit my mom for a while (Dad was, as usual, at some camping/boy scout thing). Mom and I talked about Cancun for a while, and things we might do while we're there. Just in case you were looking for confirmation of a suspicion: yes, my parents are ridiculously excited about me bringing Penny to Cancun.

First things first: Alex had no accidents all day yesterday! That's two days in a row, whoo-hoo!

Of course, we're going into the weekend tomorrow, so I'm not sure how that'll roll. Obviously, we'll be keeping him in his "big boy" underwear, but I don't know if the accident-free streak will continue, as there are advantages the daycare has that we don't. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

***

Tomorrow is going to be busy: Penny's swim lesson in the morning, and then the cat has a checkup at the vet. And then the Chocolate Affair is tomorrow night! I can't wait! I'm still trying to figure out if I have a purse that I can discreetly line with tupperware containers... ;-)

We don't have any particular plans for Sunday, though we'd talked about dropping in on my parents, if they're available, since we haven't seen them for a while.

Hope you have a great weekend! See you on the other side!

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Alex went all day yesterday wearing "big boy" underpants, and didn't have a single accident! Whahoo! Better yet, while he was watching Sesame Street before dinner, he actually stopped the show in the middle of a segment to go potty!

It's not over by any stretch, but the light at the end of the Diaper Tunnel is getting brighter!

***

Book club was fun last night. We'd read The Help by Katheryn Stockett, which was just a wonderful book. Touching and uplifting and funny and poignant. Of course, when we all agree on a book, we tend to discuss it less, and move on faster to talking about our kids.

And apparently, last night, we were all sporting the sense of humor of an 8-year-old boy, because the anecdotes we found funniest were all about body functions.

- One woman, attempting to educate her 9- and 10-year-old daughters about sex and reproduction in advance of the school's class, got them some books from the library, and sat them down for The Talk. She expected that they would be utterly mortified by the discussion, listen in embarrassed silence to what she said, and not really say anything themselves. So she was not prepared for: "Mom! Do people connect their butts?" "Can anyone connect butts?" "Do you and Dad connect butts?" "How often do you and Dad connect butts?" "When was the last time?"

- Another, who'd gotten a backyard trampoline for her kids, looked out the window one day to find her 8-year-old son peeing off the edge. She called him inside and demanded to know why; he said, "Because I had to go and couldn't make it to the house!" She told him that if he couldn't hold it long enough to get from the trampoline to the house, then he wasn't allowed outdoors anymore, and thought that was the end of it. A few days later, she saw her 10-year-old peeing off the edge... only the 7-year-old and the 4-year-old were still bouncing behind him, so his arc was shaped line a sine wave. She had real trouble stopping laughing long enough to read him the riot act.

- One 4-year-old asked her mother, "Mommy, did you pray to have babies?" She answered, "Yes, I prayed for babies." Then the 4-year-old continued, "Did you pray in the bedroom to get babies?" The mom thought, Well, there was an element of "Oh God, oh God, oh God!" at the time... This did not enable her to keep a straight face when the child said, "Where else did you pray?"

Weight For It

My weight popped back up this week, dangit. I knew I was overdoing it this weekend, but I didn't expect the numbers to keep climbing into this week, since I was back to being good on Monday. I even managed to resist the doughnuts in the office kitchen Monday! Stupid scale.

Tonight is book club, though Kris promised she'd pick up veggies and fruits, so I should be mostly okay there. But then this weekend is the Chocolate Affair. At which I refuse to count points. I'll just have to be good the rest of the weekend and hope for the best.

But dang, it sure would be nice to be back to baseline by the time my doctor's appointment rolls around in April; or even below that in preparation for the trip to Cancun in August.

Guess that means actually sticking to plan for a while, huh? Stupid cause-and-effect. I wish I could make myself not like food for a while. Then I could just eat-to-fuel and not care about anything else. Seriously, isn't there a switch in my brain I could flip? Come on, science, let's get on that!

Trudgery

I feel like I'm slogging through muck today.

I did some proofreading for Torquere yesterday, including a short story by one of my absolute favorite authors, and once again, she did not disappoint. I found a few typos, but as always, the story was solid. Funny and hot and perfectly paced and except for a slightly awkward opening, completely adorable.

So when I sat down with the computer last night to write, I was feeling hopeful. And I managed to write 700 words and finish the scene I've been trying to finish for most of the past week. But I'm not happy with it. It's stuttery and jagged, but not in a good way, just in a my-pacing-sucks kind of way. It's neither hot nor sweet, it doesn't advance the plot... All I can say good about it is that the scene is finally finished.

Two months ago, I'd have killed for a 700-word night. But the last few weeks, I've been averaging 1000 or more words per writing session, so last night, 700 felt like a cop-out. Especially since it was 700 words that I'm wondering if I'm going to have to completely delete and re-write.

Editing and proofreading don't mix very well with writing, for me. Once I've flipped the switch in my head that makes me look for "how to make it better" then that becomes a drag on "how to get it out". I'm getting better with flipping back and forth -- if I edit in the morning, I can usually write in the afternoon. Yesterday just... didn't work for me, I guess.

Yesterday should have been a good day. I crossed off a lot of things on my long-standing "to do" list, and made my airline reservations for the trip to Cancun this summer, and Alex made it through the day with only one accident.

But I'm tired and trudging today.

Neil Gaiman had this to say back in '02 about writing and writers' moods:

When writing a novel that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: "House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day." "Got call this morning to say I'd got Nobel Prize for literature. Wrote less than 300 words (285) probably unusable, so lousy day." And so forth.

Yes. Very much yes.

On the other hand, I saw this from Kevin Smith yesterday about writing and the motivation to write:

Writing is the closest any man or woman will ever come to playing God (or a god).
...
Only writing – amongst not only all the arts, but amongst all of humanity’s waking endeavors – allows we mere mortals a true taste of all-encompassing creation along the lines of that which God (or a god; or a god-like energy from which the universe sprang) knew or knows.

You sit down with a blank page (let’s be honest: a blank screen) and you create a universe. You fashion a world. You populate it with whimsies and desires. You make the world the way you feel it oughta be. And you don’t have to show a single image to convey your creation to others: just words. The more you share it, the more your fiction becomes a reality.
...
When you write, you are as a god – or even the God. Who needs motivation for that? You wanna enjoy the perks of godhood without some jackass nailing you to a cross? Go write something. Right now. Stop reading me.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Presidential

Stupid President's Day. Matt and Penny have the day off, but I'm at work.

Fairly good weekend, though. We met up with Braz & Adin and company for dinner Friday, and rather spontaneously, in the middle of dinner, Penny got invited to spend the night at Adin's with Ripley and Sarah. I thought about it and couldn't come up with any reason why she shouldn't go, so we went home and threw together her suitcase.

Saturday afternoon, we'd planned for Jen and Brian to come down to hang out and have dinner with us. Jen is sort of chronically late, so I didn't worry when they didn't arrive on time, but after about forty-five minutes, they called to say they had been on time, but then had wound up stuck in completely unmoving traffic for over an hour. Another half-hour later, they called to say they still hadn't gone anywhere. Matt did a search online and discovered that all eight lanes of the interstate had been closed due to some brush fires. Eventually, the cops got everyone turned around (literally, had cars turning around and driving the wrong way up the interstate to get off and take alternate routes), so after four and a half hours of sitting in the car and essentially driving through fire, they showed up.

We had a lovely dinner, though, and greatly enjoyed sitting around talking and watching goofy shows on Netflix.

Sunday's plan was to join Braz & Adin and kids at Braz's apartment to play some Rock Band while Braz and Adin did their laundry, and that went pretty well. Though we took a risk on skipping Alex's nap, and while he was fine right up until about 5, he fell asleep on me watching TV and then was sort of cranky and easily-upset for the rest of the evening, so I guess he's not quite ready to give up the nap yet. But the Rock Band was fun, and after a while, all the girls went outside to play together, so the four of us grownups got to totally rock out.

The big experiment for the weekend was trying to keep Alex in his "big boy" underpants. The daycare wants to go pretty much cold turkey on the pullups, so we're trying to support that. He only had two accidents on Saturday (and managed to hold his bladder for a whole hour while I took him out running errands!), but Sunday was a bit of a disaster, even though I had a timer set to remind him to go to the potty every half-hour. Oh, well, we'll see what happens, I guess. I dropped him off at daycare this morning with four changes of clothes. I expect we'll be doing a lot of laundry over the next week or so.

Turning Back the Clock

Dropping Penny off at school is usually the same. We stand in the lobby with a dozen or so other kids and parents until the school clock reads 8:15, and then the monitor will release the kids to class by grade. Usually she calls them in order, starting with kindergarten. Sometimes she'll send the 4th grade after 1st, just because those are the two grades whose classrooms are furthest from the lobby. Either way, when she calls for the kindergarteners, I give Penny her hugs and kisses so that when the 2nd grade is called, she can bolt down the hall without any delay. (Parting hugs and kisses, for Penny, is an involved process: five squeezes to the hug, five kisses each for her face and both hands.)

This morning, for whatever reason, the lobby was more crowded than usual. Thirty or more students crowded the line, and the monitor was having trouble keeping the kids from blocking the path to the office. The worst offenders were a clump of second graders.

So when it turned 8:15, she started calling the grades, but saved 2nd grade for last. And, in fact, refused to call them until the clumping kids finally got a clue and moved out of the way of the office path.

At 8:17, they still hadn't gotten a clue.

"I've got to go," I told Penny. She'd already had her hugs and kisses, as usual, so I said, "Have a great day! I love you!" and turned for the door. Like usual.

"Mom!" She held up her hands. "I want more!" More hugs and kisses, that means.

She hasn't done that to me in a while, but she used to do it a lot, as a stalling tactic. She always does it when I'm feeling time-crunched. She always does it as I'm leaving, not when we're standing there doing nothing. It always turns me into an angry ball of resentment.

"You need to do this when we're just standing, and not when I'm trying to get to work on time!" I hissed. I gave her the most perfunctory and un-loving hugs and kisses ever, and stormed out the door.

Stamping across the parking lot to my car (parked half a block further away than usual, thanks to a lingering bus that had caused at least ten cars to park somewhere other than their usual spots), I seethed. I hate that the school's before/after program won't take her. I miss being able to be at work at 7:30 so I can leave at 4. I resent every single little imposition on my time, even the ones that only take ten seconds.

But by the time I got to the car, I was starting to feel bad.

It's not her fault. She doesn't even know that I used to work from 7:30 to 4. And it's not like I was, actually, late to work. Or even that I've got a lot of work waiting for me today. I was just impatient with the school monitor playing headgames with the kids and feeling crowded by there being too many of them and wanting out.

By the time I'd got the car started, I felt like dirt. I wanted to get out and run back into the school and go to her classroom and pull her into my arms and tell her I was sorry. That I love her so much and that it wasn't her I was mad at.

When did extra hugs and kisses become a bad thing?

I feel like a bad parent today. I want to turn back the clock and start it over again. I don't need a lot of extra time. I just want to go back to 8:17.