Heatwave

We spent a goodly chunk of the weekend helping Braz and Adin move into their new place. Or more precisely, Matt helped them move stuff, and I kept an eye on all the kids so they wouldn't be underfoot. The house is fantastic; I totally have house envy, now. Penny and Alex agree; Penny spent the weekend raving about how awesome the house is, and every time Alex turned around, he was demanding to know when we were going to go visit "the new house".

It was a bad weekend for moving, though. The weather has been not just hot lately, but stupidhot, with highs in the upper 90s and heat indexes well over 105.

***

I didn't get a single lick of writing done, but I did manage to do some administrative/publicity stuff done. And one of my favorite authors mentioned on the mailing list that she'd read Safe Harbor and loved it and (teasingly) demanded to know when there would be sequels. Which made me squeal like a little girl with excitement. And also to start trying to think more seriously about the few sequel ideas I'd had!

***

There was a huge storm last night that passed right over top of us; the thunder crashed so hard that it kept setting off Penny's little bedroom doorbell from the vibrations in the walls. And then, hours after it had finally passed and we were asleep, the power went out. I know because at about 1:30, the smoke detectors started chirping at me about their low batteries. I stumbled downstairs and found my cell phone and used it as a flashlight to find the power bill and call the customer service number so I could report the outage. That done, I went back to bed and tried to sleep, but my brain wouldn't shut up. I finally dozed off and woke back up around 3, when the power came back on. I'm a little groggy this morning.

***

Lest there be any doubt whatsoever about Penny's feeling for our Cancun trip -- I offered last night to show her a few pictures from my previous trip, because I'd been trying to describe the resort and the beach to her, and words just weren't cutting it. Now, I know looking at someone else's vacation pictures can be pretty danged tedious, so I really planned to just show her a handful of pictures so she could have a mental image to work from -- but I'll be damned if she wasn't completely fascinated. She sat with me while I scrolled through each of something like 300 photos, asking questions and exclaiming with excitement.

Eighteen days and counting.

***

Her blood sugar leveled off over the weekend, too. After running high for most of the last month and us having to fight tooth and nail to get her back down into range any time we ate out -- we ate out three times this weekend, and she only had one high blood sugar, which was probably the result of my underestimating the carbs. It was fantastic, and her mood was noticeably improved, too.

Warm Break

In the category of things that are both heart-warming and heart-breaking, Penny and I had this conversation a couple of days ago:

"Mom? Remember when I got diabetes?"

"Yes, I remember. What about it?"

"When that happened, I thought I was the only one! I didn't know any other kids who had it!"

"That's true."

"And camp was so awesome because all the kids had it!"

She's talking about the weekend family camp we went to at the very end of April, more than two and a half months ago. And it was completely out of the blue. We hadn't been talking about camp before that, or even about diabetes, that I recall.

It's hard, sometimes, to really keep in mind that she's not quite eight years old. It's hard to remember what it was like, being eight, but if I really stop and think about it, think hard, I can remember pondering and processing and considering things for months and months like this. I can remember having blinding realizations weeks and months and even years after the events that prompted them. Penny still doesn't grok what diabetes means for her, down the road -- Matt and I are deliberately withholding some of the more gruesome possibilities, because she's not old enough to deal with that kind of fear. But we don't always comprehend that she's still working on processing what she does know. It took her a couple of weeks to get from the camp's "give yourself a shot" class to actually being ready to give herself shots. How much more processing would it take, then, to encompass something so much bigger as sharing this disease with other kids -- and not just a few kids, but a lot of them? It's huge, and it's beautiful, and I'm profoundly grateful once again that she had that experience and that she continues to remember it as something wondrous and wonderful.

On the flip side, I can remember, all too easily, feeling left out at school because there was something that set me apart from the other kids. I didn't even know what it was, because no one talked about "introversion" in the '70s. Penny has several good friends at school and seems generally well-accepted by most of her classmates. She has a few good friends at daycare. She's much less introverted than I was, much more socially stable, so it's hard for us to remember that being "different" is a terrible social burden for kids, and that even the ones who seem popular and well-adjusted may be feeling stressed about the inability to conform. These little conversations, random as they seem, reveal a little bit of that stress in her. I don't think it's a terrible pressure yet, but it is absolutely something I need to try to keep in mind, because it's going to inform a lot of the next decade or so. We may even need to try to make some extra allowances on the "fitting in" front, in order to make up for what diabetes takes away. And we'll keep going to camp, too, because it's going to be very important that once in a while, even if only for a few days a year, she be can be with people who really understand what she lives with, in a way that Matt and I never will. Somewhere she can check her blood sugar and give herself shots without feeling judged or self-conscious.

That she had a fantastic, positive experience at that camp -- that she had a fun time and made friends and still remembers it as a blur of giggling and silliness and excitement -- fills me with joy and makes it worth every little frustration and lost hour of sleep I suffered.

That she needed that experience, that something in her subconscious had apparently been desperately craving the company of true peers... can only make me ache.

Day Off

I took another "no work to do" day off yesterday. (I've been taking at least one of those every two weeks for the last several months, and sometimes more, and if I have to be honest, a lot of the time that I did work could probably have been compressed. I'm beginning to wonder if I should try to negotiate going part-time. I'd be okay taking a 10% pay cut if I could plan on having a day off every two weeks and still keep my benefits. It's keeping the benefits that makes this a bit of a sticky wicket, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I shouldn't at least ask. The worst they could do is tell me it's not allowed.)

Anyway, I'd been planning on taking the afternoon off anyway, to go see the last Harry Potter movie with Matt. So really, the only unexpected time off was in the morning. I'd been assuming I'd spend it loafing around the house until a friend at work suggested I go to a coffee house and write.

I started to laugh at the cliche, but it was a lightbulb moment, to be honest: if I got out of the house to write, then I was less likely to fall prey to all the distractions that make writing at home a problem for me. I didn't go to an actual coffeehouse, but I did wind up in one of the comfy chairs at Panera. I bought a scone and a cup of coffee (the kind where you can refill it for free) and loaded up Pages on my iPad. I'd made sure the story I'm working on was loaded before I left the house. (I swear, Pages would be so much awesomer if it didn't make saving a document back down to your hard drive when you sync a complete headache -- seriously, I've given up trying to really sync and just email myself the document and copy/paste the changes into the master document in my Dropbox folder.)

I sat in that chair from about 8:30 until probably 11:30 or so, and I wrote. I got up a few times to refill my coffee, and once for a bathroom break. I stopped writing for maybe twenty minutes to talk to a lady at a table near mine who had a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book amongst a pile of library books. It was the sort of amazing and spontaneous conversation that I see in movies and wish was real, and it made me wish I could do that every day.

I wrote about 2000 words -- four or five pages -- and at around 11:30, I suddenly thought to check my email (on my iPhone, because I hadn't turned on the iPad's WiFi, in order to minimize distractions) and Matt had sent me the list of times for the movie. We'd agreed to meet at the Barnes and Noble that's across from the movie theater, so I went over there and wrote maybe another hundred words or so while I was waiting for him.

And then we decided that we weren't all that hungry yet, so we went to the earlier showing of Harry Potter and loved it. (When did Neville turn into a badass?! I loved it! LOVED. And all the nods to characters we haven't seen for ages, and -- I could do a whole blog post on the movie, seriously, but it would sum up to: LOVE.) When it was done, it was after three and my stomach was growling, so we went over to the Corner Pocket for a heavy snack/late lunch (I may always and forever order their "grit cakes" which is basically baked grits with butter and cheese and was perfect). And then I went home (strolling slowly through the Barnes and Noble on my way and almost buying a bunch of stuff).

And then after the kids were in bed, I took the iPad upstairs and wrote another 1000 or 1200 words -- which is a good evening's work for me by any measure. Even though I have to two-finger type on the iPad, which is slower. But the distractions are gone. No kitchen to troll for snacks I shouldn't be eating anyway. No little blue twitterbird in the menu bar telling me that someone has said something. No email icon. Not even the temporary distraction of having the online thesaurus to consult when I can't think of the word I want. I just use a word that's close enough and promise to fix it in the edits. And I just. Keep. Writing.

It was a fantastic day. And even though I adored the movie -- I cried at least three separate times and there was only one bit that I thought was possibly just the littlest bit cheesy and over the top -- I think the day still would've been almost as wonderful (or maybe even just as wonderful) if I'd gone back to writing (either at the Panera or in one of the B&N's comfy chairs) once Matt and I had met for lunch.

This is why you hear about writers going to coffee shops, I guess. This is why Lynn does her best writing at the freaking laundromat. Because you do whatever you have to do, whatever works, to force yourself to put away the distractions and Just. Keep. Writing. Because there's nothing like writer's high.

Planning Ahead

In which I very carefully click on the correct blog-posting link, so that I don't post my morning babble to my authorial website that hasn't been announced because it's still kind of in development. You know, like I did yesterday, after which I sort of rolled my eyes at a friend who asked if I was going to post anything today, because I'd just posted. You know. To the wrong blog. That she didn't know about. *bonks self on head*

I ordered birthday presents for Penny yesterday, so we're pretty much good to go there. I'd been considering buying her an inexpensive digital camera to take along to Cancun, but the problem I kept running into while shopping was... well, in a nutshell: you get what you pay for. Every camera I looked at had some combination of problems in their reviews -- short battery life, no swappable memory cards, shoddy construction, crappy flash...

I finally decided that, since I'm going to be taking the old iPhone along so she can watch movies and play games anyway, she can use the camera on that. Granted, the iPhone has some of the same problems (no swappable memory and no flash, namely) -- but we already own that. And I'll be bringing the recharge cable for it anyway, and the resort has free wifi now, so if she fills it up, I can just mail pictures home and then delete them. And that's one less gadget to tote along, so that's a bonus, too.

(We might, however, splurge on a single-use underwater camera and take silly pictures of ourselves in the pool and/or ocean.)

I really should start planning our packing. What to take, how much gear to pack, what goes in the checked bag and what goes in carryon, diabetes supplies...

(Any of my D readers done a big vacation before? How many extra strips/syringes should I bring, given that we'll be partying it up and probably eating significantly less healthily than usual? I'm guessing at least 1-2 extra shots a day to keep up with the food, and 2-3 extra BG checks a day to stay ahead of lows caused by more activity than usual. Most of it will go in carryon, of course, but I want at least 3 days' supplies in carryon in case our luggage gets lost. We've flown domestically with her supplies before, but never left the country -- anyone ever have trouble with that?)

Penny and I worked it out in the car this morning: 23 days remaining until her birthday, and 24 until we head for Cancun. Let the countdown begin!

A Nutshell

Missed posting yesterday -- it was one of those mornings.

But the weekend wasn't so thrilling I was on edge to talk about it, really. Took Ripley for a few hours Friday night so Braz and Adin could take Henry to the Urgent Care for an injury. We had Jenn and Brian over Saturday for what was supposed to be grilled chicken, but the grill didn't cooperate, so we eventually gave up and ordered Chinese. Had a great time sitting around talking with them until probably way too late. And then Sunday we met my family at the Samurai (hibachi restaurant) for Sam's birthday dinner.

Add in Alex getting out of bed and Penny being alternately surly and wonderful (those teen years are looking more awesome by the day!) and that pretty much sums up the weekend.

So right now, dealing with weird work situations (stupidly busy, but not enough charge numbers) and home situations (Matt's car and mine have been recalled, so we're sort of taking turns not having a car this week) and life and stuff. Braz and Adin are moving into their new house this weekend, then we have two weekends with nothing much happening, and then it'll be Penny's birthday and the trip to Cancun! Whoo, less than four weeks!

And that's pretty much my life right now. That and trying to get my writing brain kickstarted.

***

Also, I realized 12 hours after posting this initially that I posted it to the wrong damn blog. No wonder my friend K. was sending me emails pouting about there being no blog entry. That's what I get, I guess, for clicking the "New Post" button before I've got my coffee in hand, and not checking which blog it is...

That Kind of Morning

Alex woke up at 4:45 and wandered into Penny's room. Matt heard him before I did, this time, so he was the one who got up and put Alex back to bed.

Which did not prevent Alex from trying to sneak out of his room at 6:05 -- I was just sitting up and caught him at it. "Hey, Alex. Whatcha doin'?"

Pause... "I was just sitting on my stool." Kid's trying to learn how to lie. Isn't that adorable?

While I was doing my exercises, Penny came down dressed in her beautiful Easter dress and carrying her little patent leather purse. I should explain: there's a girl her age at the daycare who apparently told Penny that she had nicer clothes than Penny did. This upset Penny, and now Penny wants to prove to this girl that she has nice clothes, too.

Now, Penny's had this particular dress for two years, and I actually am okay with her wearing it to daycare... but they're going on a field trip to a park today. So I told her she could wear her fancy dress on Monday, but today, she needed to wear run-and-play clothes. She asked if she could just wear her t-shirt and shorts under her fancy dress and change for the park. No, I said, go change.

There was some back and forth. I'm sure you can fill it in. I ended up yelling at her to go upstairs and change, already, and quit arguing with me about it.

Then as we were getting ready to leave, Alex handed me an attitude about not wanting to put his cup of milk away, and I had to whip out the numbers. (Nothing is more terrifying to a three-year-old than a parent slowly and sternly counting to three. I have no idea why, but it works about 90% of the time. It's important to have follow-through if you do actually get to three, though.)

And in the home stretch approaching daycare, Penny and Alex got into a fight over a toy. I ended up taking it away from both of them.

So it was that kind of morning, and I'm really, really hoping it doesn't turn into that kind of day. Or that kind of weekend. We've got fun things planned for this weekend... if I can get the kids to act like people instead of sleep-deprived monsters.

Early Morning Sunrise

So Alex has realized a fundamental truth about his new bed: he can get out of it.

Every night, I put him to bed. Every night, he pops up less than ten minutes later to "go to the bathroom". To be fair, he does go to the bathroom, and he does usually go right back to bed. I tried taking him to the bathroom before I put him down one night -- that night, he got up three times in half an hour. To "go to the bathroom."

But that part's minor, really. Hell, Penny still does that, two nights out of three. It's one of those things where we point him back to bed if he tries to stop and talk to us, but the whole time we're trying not to let him see us smiling about it.

The part that's killing me is that he's also realized that he can get out of bed in the morning. For whatever definition of "morning" you care to name.

For instance, he woke up this morning, apparently, around 4:30. The good news is that he did not come into our room, which is what Penny used to do. No, Alex either recognizes that we would just send him back to bed or else would rather play with his sister. So he went into her room and woke her up. And apparently they managed to play quietly enough that Matt and I slept through it until somewhere around 5:30, when they started playing some game involving Alex sliding down Penny's legs, and the giggling woke me up.

I made Alex go back to his room, but neither of them were happy about it. But I don't care much, because I wasn't happy about it, either -- because the act of my getting out of bed cued the cat that it was time for breakfast, and he immediately became a whiny pest.

He became so whiny, in fact, that at some point Alex decided that he was going to get out of bed and go feed him. The only reason the whole kitchen wasn't strewn with cat food was that Alex was not strong enough to open the tupperware container that we keep the cat's food in. So instead, he decided to have himself a little snack -- a piece of chocolate from of his candy bag.

I didn't discover all this until I gave up and got out of bed at six, and was met with Penny in the hall: "Where's Alex?" When I found Alex in the kitchen, he was sitting on the floor, huddled in the corner like a lost waif, little pieces of foil wrapper scattered at his feet.

Sigh. In fifteen years, when he's going off to college and the house wakes me up early in the morning with its emptiness and silence, I'm going to look back on this fondly, even longingly.

But right now? Right now, I want everyone in the house, even just occasionally, to sleep past six.