Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Icky Bloody Weary Rainy Feast of St. Augustine Edition

1. Last night one of my boys brought me a small bug on his finger. He said, "My head has been itching and what do you suppose this is?"

Seven Quick Takes: Dead Grass Edition

1. I thought I might call this the coneflower edition, or the Queen Anne's lace edition. But wherever the neighbor tried (mostly unsuccessfully, I might add) to smite the (harmless) cicada killers with his mighty can of insecticide, he killed the grass. Argh.

2. Baby has figured out forward motion in the three days since I last posted. On Tuesday she was frustrated, saying to herself, "I know there's a way to get there but I can't figure it out." Today she is like a little Marine commando-crawling through the jungle -- Dig! Push! Dig! Push! Mission accomplished! -- only her mission is to eat the blow-in cards from Muse magazine and not to suppress terrorist activity or destabilize foreign governments.

3. When I started work on my dissertation transcripts at two weeks postpartum, one of the first things I did was to add a code to all of the abandoned and interrupted utterances so I could exclude them from most of my analyses. It should have been a pretty simple operation, but I made a mistake: I omitted a space from the code, so the program didn't recognize it. I have known for a while now that I would have to go back and fix it, but uuuugggghhhh I didn't want to.

This week I figured out my strategy and fixed the values for the first measure. It's not horrible, just tedious. And I have to get it done before I can move on, so I'll do it as cheerfully as I can. I am tempted to be irritated with my January self, but hey -- I made the choice to go back to work at two weeks postpartum knowing perfectly well what postpartumness does to my brain. Maybe I should just be glad I didn't blow anything up.

4. My other school-related goals for the summer, besides cleaning up the data, are to read a little book about cluster analysis, to make good headway in a big book about multilevel modeling, and to rewrite my method chapter to reflect what I did. (For the preliminary exam, you write your method chapter in future tense.) Summer is flying by here, but I'm making progress. Elwood is off on Friday afternoons and I have high hopes for a productive day.

5. In addition to those school goals, I had a bunch of personal goals for the summer. I think I need more summer. Or maybe fewer Aubrey-Maturin novels. I am enjoying them immensely and perhaps intemperately. (I am on #17 at the moment. The characters make me laugh and laugh, which is not what I expected when I started the series.)

6. Earlier this summer we were going out for a celebratory lunch. It was a special day for one of the boys (like a name day, only not exactly) and we always go to a favorite restaurant to observe it. The boy being honored, though, was having a terrible awful no good very bad day in which he just could not get along with his family. He is still angry about my response. Motherhood is like juggling eggs sometimes -- you can do your best to keep kind and patient going at the same time as firm and protective of siblings, but all you get is a big mess splatted all over.

I am tempted to post the story, but it would be my version of a contested story. The part that is bothering me is that he is also still angry with the friend who was going to lunch with us. I do not know how to encourage forgiveness in this child whose inclination is to hold a grudge.

7. Today is our 16th anniversary. Especially today, when I am thinking about the importance and the difficulty of forgiveness, I look back at the two of us and think about all the things we had to learn. I didn't know, sixteen years ago, how much closer we would be today than we were then. Building a marriage is like learning a secret language -- sometimes we can exchange a single look that speaks volumes. (Lest you think I am going all lofty on you, the most common look exchanged means "Can you believe the organist is playing this hymn so slowly AGAIN?" --"I know! It makes me crazy!") Here's to many more years.

More quick takes here.

Quick Takes: Glisten Edition

1. I am hot. Do you know the southern saying about how horses sweat and men perspire but ladies glisten? I am glistening up a storm. Usually our house stays pretty cool in the summer, courtesy of the big trees on the south side, but not this week.

2. Something is wrong with our AC drain and it has been emptying into the middle of the basement floor, pouring silently under a little carpeted area where my husband stored his ten or twelve linear feet of LPs. Something is also wrong with the expensive system we had installed last spring to deal with the water that leaks in from outside when the rain is heavy. Both repairmen are coming in the early afternoon. Here's to quick easy fixes. Cheap or free would be good too. (The perimeter system is supposed to have a lifetime warranty, so it had better be free.)

3. When I was in college, I lost my passport. I needed it to complete paperwork for a new job, but it was nowhere to be found. In the search for it, I wound up doing a thorough tidying of my disaster-area desk. I found the passport only after I had put away all the other odds and ends. I remember thinking that it seemed providential for the passport to disappear temporarily, because I needed the kick in the pants to clean my desk.

I am trying to be cheerful about the basement leaking water from two different sources. We have long talked about making better use of our basement, and now we will have to get down there and do some work on it -- throw out the carpet, probably, and find a better place to store the LPs, and set up a dehumidifier and hit the mildew-y places with bleach or something (any suggestions for green antifungals?). We might as well do some organizing while we're at it. A providential kick in the pants, just like in college.

I'd rather have a desk to tidy, I'm just saying.

4. On the happy side of the ledger, I am going to see a dear friend this weekend for the first time in a year. I am done with my seminar and it was fairly painless. I think I might take next week off from school and dive back in after the Fourth.

5. In further happy news, the bulging tooth I mentioned last week is through. The boys are all excited about it and have been reaching in to feel the little nub. It's just barely above the gumline, not far enough to do any damage. I'm guessing her first good chomp will cure them of sticking their fingers in there.

6. My boys have asked me to plan a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for them, and some temporarily insane version of me said yes. I played a bit when I was a kid, but D&D is more complicated than it used to be. The last game I played featured a dragon that said "Cowabunga!" when it burst onto the scene. My boys are not so interested in the whimsical -- they are asking me if the hostile zombie wombats will have titanium armor and if the dragon-born paladin can invoke the assistance of a [brain overload here].

To their questions I replied knowledgeably, "...ummm...?" This could be a time sink.

7. On our kids' bookshelf we have a 70s version of Robinson Crusoe in which the men have Leif Garrett hair. It is fairly true to the original, with lots of text and old-fashioned language. Pete, surprisingly, loves it. He told my MIL that she shouldn't just describe the pictures; he wanted to hear all the words. I am ending this post to go read it again. I suppose I should be grateful that I can deal with my glistening problem by calling a repairman, instead of making my lonesome self a goatskin parasol to keep the tropical sun away.

More quick takes here.

Seven Quick Takes: Tiger Lily Edition

1. I am halfway done with something I'd been dreading, and it's not so bad.

Quick Takes for a Quiet Stretch

I've been out of the blogging groove lately. It's been hard to find time to write, which is part of it, but some of it is that the urge to record our life has its own ebb and flow. Recently the tide has been at ebb.

Speaking of tides, I've been having a lot of fun with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. I didn't really expect to enjoy them, but they are a blast. I persuaded my husband, who rarely reads fiction, to tackle the first one, though I doubt he'll go the distance. Since I went back to grad school I've been reading a lot less for pleasure. I've been required to do so much reading that I've sought out other leisure activities, like knitting. It was strange to go from being a person who read three or four books each month to a person who only manages one book a month, and so it's been fun to be immersed in this series -- snatching odd moments to read the next few pages.

I decided that when I finished coding transcripts I would take a little time in which the most complicated thing I thought about was whether to cast on a new sock using size 1 needles or size 2 needles. I chose...both! The toe-up sock is the mate to this one, made from Knitty's Azure pattern in some luxurious locally produced yarn.

Kids are doing well here in the second week of summer vacation. No bloodshed, minimal howling. (My standards are pretty low, you'll notice.) Here is a funny thing -- I have often noticed similarities between Marty and Pete. Pete is the first person in the family to wake up in the mornings, and he often climbs in our bed and tells me his dreams -- long wandering dreams involving Star Wars clones. This morning he was so excited that he was talking on the inhale and the exhale both. Marty did just the same thing when he was that age, the only other boy in our family to do so. Isn't that a funny thing for them to have in common?

Baby is growing beautifully, mostly happy and curious about the world around her. She is inching toward mobility and she has figured out how her hands work, which means that the days in which she would sit quietly while an adult did something else (like grading) are gone. Thankfully I won't have any more grading to do until fall.

One of the posts in my drafts folder is about trying to teach my kids to be diligent without sending messages that will leave them trapped in perfectionist hell. Perfectionism has been breathing down my neck lately, the familiar feeling of not doing anything well enough. Why do I bother knitting when there are always flaws? Why am I working on this dissertation when I will never understand hierarchical linear modeling thoroughly? Let's not even talk about the feelings of mothering inadequacy. This struggle has plagued me for as long as I can remember, sometimes more intensely and sometimes less so. I am not sure quite why it's rearing its head with renewed viciousness right now.

I have high hopes for this summer -- habits to build and habits to break. One of the things I want to do is lots of reading aloud with the kids. At the moment I'm about a third of the way through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Pete and about two-thirds of the way through The Two Towers with Marty and Joe. I am going to wrap up this post and see who wants to curl up with a book. More quick takes here.

7 Quick Takes: Fading Peonies Edition

• This summer I am leading an online discussion of Kimberly Hahn's book Graced and Gifted. It has inspired me to implement some new habits to help our home run more smoothly this summer, but I am tired after this first week of it. I am also tired because Pete is out of preschool and missing his friends. He does not think -- just imagine! -- that coding transcripts is much fun to watch, and so I have been working after all the kids are asleep. Sarah the babysitter is here this morning to play with him and hold the baby and I am grateful for an extra pair of hands. I'm writing these quick takes in between coding tasks.
• Remember the horrible painful syntax analysis that prompted me to ask for help? After the guy said he'd be glad to help me (still can't quite believe he's going to do all that work for me), I figured out the problems that had prevented me from using the better software. It would have seemed like a much, much more manageable task if I'd been using this software from the get-go. I think my frustration was providential, because I would never have asked for help if I hadn't been so overwhelmed. A helpful reminder for me, to remember that God is at work in the midst of my exasperation.
• Barring disaster, I will be done with data collection in two weeks. Done! With data collection! In two weeks!! It has been a long slog, but the end is in sight.
• We've been praying the novena to the Holy Spirit, which I've enjoyed a lot. The boys, not so much. I am looking for some flame-themed fun ideas to celebrate Pentecost -- any thoughts?
• This is the last full day of school -- two of the boys are supposed to go back for an hour next week to collect their report cards. What's up with that, anyway? Does it allow them to fulfill a state requirement for days attended or something?
• Most of my perennials came back up and I have been enjoying them. The weeds, though! The weeds are relentless this year after I let them take over the joint last summer. I need to get out there this weekend and yank them out again. Wonder if the boys would help me if I encouraged them to be Indiana Jones hacking through the jungle?
• Speaking of which, remember how the boys sing the Indiana Jones theme song to comfort the baby if she wails in the car? This morning she was singing to herself in her carseat and I said, "Pete, what song do you think she's singing?" He answered instantly: "Probably the Indiana Jones theme song." I was going to post a picture of Pete in his Indiana Jones hat with his Indiana Jones whip (fabric, plays the theme song) at the ready. But I hit a snag copying the pictures from the card reader, so you will just have to use your imagination.

More quick takes here.

Speedy Bullets

Things accomplished this week:

• Grading midterms, which was loooooooooong and tedious
• Dealing with one of two students who cheated on the midterm :-(
• Guest-lecturing for the class, accomplished entirely with baby in the sling because my advisor is awesome and my baby is awesomer
• Completing analysis #7 of 9 for the dissertation (yes!!)
• Drafting a post on the Hanna Rosin/Judith Warner breastfeeding brouhaha, which I did not post because I had no time for a comments brouhaha here should one arise
• Taking the whole crew to 2/3 Triduum services, with no gnashing of teeth. Didn't even have to leave the pew to deal with unhappy children (see above re: baby awesomeness). This was made easier by the fact that our church does the short version of the vigil, with only 3/7 Old Testament readings. We talked about going to the cathedral, but stuck around here instead.

Things not accomplished this week:

• Folding of laundry
• Filing of taxes
• Filling of Easter baskets (this is where it comes in handy that I have not taught my children to believe in the Easter bunny)

A blessed Easter to you!

Swearing Off

My friends, I solemnly swear: no more searching YouTube for childbirth videos. I just watched one that has me crossing my legs and grimacing sympathetically at its up-close footage of a freshly cut mediolateral episiotomy pouring blood. Eek eek eek. Have you seen this one, though? Love it. Grab a tissue -- the first time I saw it I wasn't even pregnant and it left me weeping.

This afternoon we went to confession together, all six of us. The little guys took along some things to do while they were waiting for us to get through the line, and it went swimmingly. Our parish almost always has long lines for confession, and I was sure they would be huge today since it's the last Saturday before Christmas. When Elwood got home a bit later than planned from running errands (he made an extra stop on one of the craziest shopping days of the year, because he remembered that I was out of red raspberry leaf tea and picked some up for me even though he thinks herbs are a bunch of hooey -- love that man), I suggested that we go to the next-closest parish instead. It was a good call, in part because the pastor there, who wound up hearing my confession, is an especially kind man. I brought up my birth anxiety, which I know is partially normal but which is also partially a control-freak thing, like God needs me to worry about things for him and thus I can interpret "cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you" as "tie yourself into vibrating knots of stressballness and make the people around you miserable."

He had some good advice for me, and a helpful penance, and he said, "May the birth be better than your highest hopes, and as far as possible from your worst imaginings."

Afterward we went to our neighborhood bubble tea shop, which is a cozy place with shelves of games and books. The older boys each grabbed a book, while the younger boys worked a puzzle with Elwood and me and then played a game of chess. (Watching a chess match between a 6yo and a 3yo is not an undertaking for the impatient.) Too often cold and snowy weekend afternoons dissolve into fractiousness, but this was a nice one.

Contractions are ramping up but I don't see them going anywhere this weekend. (Jody asked about the state of the kitchen floor -- it needs mopping.) I am SO grateful that I didn't have any pre-labor action until just recently. With Pete I had weeks of thinking, "Is this it? No. Is this it now? No. Maybe this time? Fooled again." No fun at all. But I can deal with another week or ten days of it. (I think.) And by the end of that window, I should have myself a baby. An actual baby -- imagine that.

T minus 7 weeks (give or take)

Today I am 34 weeks pregnant, which means I will, God willing, be having an actual baby in about 7 weeks. (I know there are some women out there for whom 34 weeks of pregnancy means a baby in 3 or 4 weeks, but I am not one of those women. I appear to have a very comfortable womb, whose occupants are loath to leave it.) I am writing this post to say, Internet, I am giving up sugar. (Again.) I am a sugar junkie but it is bad for my energy level, bad for my disposition, and bad for my plans to wear pants that zip at some point before Easter. I was in the sugar-free groove until bronchitis and Halloween hit me one after the other. Today I am throwing out the rest of the Swedish fish and eating a big salad instead. No sweets until Christmas, when I will be exactly 41 weeks pregnant. (This year I am never uncertain about how many days there are before Christmas.)

One of the things I would like to do with my soon-to-be-burbling font of green leafy energy is to have a FOO -- a Festival of Organization, in which I go through my house room by room and smite clutter and disorganization with the fearsome double-ended blade of willpower and nesting hormones.

Do I need three knitting bags tucked in between the library basket and the end table? Of course not -- away with them.

Will the boys really cry if I implement my proposed plan for Bionicle storage while they are at school, or will they be secretly grateful for the chaos diminishment? Don't answer that. No Bionicles will be harmed in the quest for less chaos, I promise.

Will my husband join in the effort to tidy up the man-cave-ly office which is overrun, at present, with cables and batteries and... and... assorted manly things? I suspect he will encourage me to find more homeless Bionicles instead. We shall see.

I have pretty much decided -- in fact, I am making a firm decision right now as I type -- to delay my attempts to get my early research project published. If you caught the occasional disappearing posts about that project, you might remember that my project director was not as responsive as I might have hoped she would be. Nothing has changed on that front, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to push hard to meet a self-imposed deadline when she isn't answering my emails. Hm, I might need to go back and edit this paragraph later. Upshot: I'm cutting that from my list, thinking I'll shoot for summer when she has fewer administrative responsibilities.

All right! I am going to address some Christmas card envelopes, and buy a couple of Christmas presents, and switch the laundry, and squeeze in a little work before I pick up Pete. Which means I need to move swiftly. See you later.

Faster Than Some Speedy Bullets

• Tomorrow my second son turns nine. No school tomorrow, so I took his favorite spiderweb cupcakes to school today. (That picture is from two years ago but my spiderwebs are still about that wobbly.) Tomorrow my MIL is coming and so are four or five of his pals. Not quite ready for the party but I think we'll manage.
• I am making a note here for future reference that doubling the devil's food cake recipe in the Halloween chapter of Nigella Lawson's Feast gave me 24 cupcakes plus enough batter for an eight-inch layer. Everybody liked the end product too. I would share the recipe but (1) I am trying to be speedy and (2) I have the British version of the book, with measurements in grams, and trust me when I say you don't want me to attempt to convert to cups in a hurry.
• My children seem to have inherited my appreciation for quirky costumes. The almost-nine-year-old has been saying all month that he wanted to be a leviathan for Halloween, using a modified dinosaur costume from three years ago. He talked the six-year-old into agreeing to be an Umber Hulk. I just smiled and nodded because they change their minds, without fail, in the week before Halloween. Sure enough, all three of the trick-or-treaters presented me with new costume ideas (yes, plural) this week. The 3yo is deciding whether he wants to be a doctor or a cat. The 6yo is going to be a skeleton (thankfully, using a costume from the costume chest in lieu of the gorilla costume he asked me to make). The almost-9yo decided to be something really scary when it was discovered that he has grown an astonishing amount in the three years since he last wore the dinosaur costume: he's going to be Steve Ballmer. Why, yes, we are Linux users in this house -- how did you guess? And how does one make a 9yo boy look like Steve Ballmer, exactly? I only have three days to figure this out.
• One of these years, I tell you, I'm going to enforce a Halloween costume deadline. What you say you want to be on October 15 is what you get to be on October 31. Yeah. Maybe next year.
• On the subject of open source software, I have been trying to get The Gimp to lighten up some shadowy faces for our Christmas picture. It is not going well. I have succeeded in making various children look like mutant androids, but this is not really the look I hope to send out in our Christmas letter. Any tips? 
• I am suddenly feeling much more third-trimestery, with backache and symphysis pain and contractions all the livelong day. (I asked Elwood, "Am I looking a lot more pregnant all of a sudden?" because I wondered if baby had had a growth spurt that accounted for the increase in discomfort. Prudent man that he is, he said, "Oh, no, dear, not at all." I guess it's one of those "Do I look fat in this outfit?" kind of questions. But I'm still curious.)
• Ooooooohhhh, there were more things I was going to say but I cannot remember them at the moment. This time of year always gets to me, with the darkening days and the beginning of the end-of-year rush. The election is getting me down too this year. I have been quiet because who wants to read grumping? But I'll go ahead and stick this up for anyone who wondered if we were still alive over here, and be back soon with a cheery knitting post. (I am delighted with the way Joe's Sheldon has turned out. He just needs his last few ends woven in to make him presentable.)

The Good Thing About Pregnancy Insomnia

Petely and Joe slept on the pull-out couch last night (so much more fun than going to bed in the usual spot), but Petely woke up confused and calling me at 4:00 or so. I couldn't get back to sleep after I got him settled, so I stayed up and finished my draft of chapter two. It is emphatically a draft, because my advisor and I haven't spent a ton of time hammering out the details of the measures I will use and because I have a lot to learn about multilevel modeling between now and the time I try to persuade my committee to pass me, but hey! it's submitted!

The boys all woke up around 7 and we piled into a heap on the pulled out couch to read Pippi Longstocking. After a while they scattered and I turned on the stereo -- first "As Cool As I Am" on loud repeat (nothing sends cobwebs scuttling away in terror like a nice loud didgeridoo), and then "The Joy of the Lord" on equally loud repeat, which is a weird pairing but it works for me -- so I could clean. The boys did a pretty good job on the bathrooms while I played Attila Scourge of Dustbunnies. I cannot conquer the Caucasus but by God I can vanquish dirt.

Today I should also vanquish some piles of paper and pummel the checkbook into submission, and perhaps I will squeeze in a nap somewhere because 4am is really danged early. Don't know if that will work (no rest for the scourgely) but we'll see. I have three posts in my draft folder that I'm hoping to finish up now that both my chapters are drafted -- those last thoughts about the wacky caseworker, why I'm not willing to shrug off the locker room nastiness, and a reflection on our friend, the confidence interval (stop laughing! confidence intervals are too our friends!). I am sure I will have a truckload of revising to do in the weeks to come, but regardless -- both the chapters I need for my preliminary exam are drafted!

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

I persuaded the checkbook to balance and the washing machine came back from the dead again. I am caught up on laundry but for one load of clothes that needs folding. I turned 38 yesterday and have been enjoying Carrie Newcomer's new CD, a gift from my husband.

My early research project director accepted my revisions (I did not succumb to the temptation to include a couple of knock-knock jokes to see if she was actually reading the revised version), so as soon as I get comments back from the two people kind enough to proofread it for me, I'll get it printed up. Dissertation ho! (I hope it's clear that it's ho the interjection, as in Yukon __, not the noun.) On Friday my advisor, to my immense surprise, said I should consider myself done for now with reviewing the literature and move on to drafting. (Then she gave me ten more papers to read, but I'm not really complaining.)

Joe is visiting my in-laws this weekend and I am missing him something fierce. It's very quiet without him. Baby, on the other hand, is getting rowdier, thumping me harder and more often. I had persuaded myself that either I had an anterior placenta that was keeping me from feeling movement or else something was wrong.

In a few weeks I am taking the train to Chicago to meet up with all of my college roommates. We are going to see Melissa Etheridge, whose early albums were pretty much always on the turntable or in the tape player (aren't we old?) when we were living together. Funnily enough, three of the five of us are married to the men whose antics inspired us to belt out "Like the Way I Do" with such passion. (I bet I can still recite all the words to that one, though I haven't heard it more than a decade.) What were you listening to in college?

I will leave you with a recipe for the Best Sandwich in the History of the World, a sandwich I've made twice in the past week after thinking about it for a year: pan bagnat. Over and out from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Snippets

You guys know about my aikido black belt, yes? And I've posted before about our top-of-the-line home security system, that wails minatorily when someone even approaches the house with bad intentions? I mention this because my husband is out of the country for the week, and I would hate to have to beat the stuffing out of any stalker types who happened to read this post.

Alex is away at Scout camp this week also, which means I am the only person in the house whose age is measured in double digits. I'm not used to that. It was bad timing to attempt to discontinue the Unisom I've been taking for nausea. I'm almost better, I thought to myself, so I'll probably be fine. OH MY GOODNESS, I was not fine. I think I'll keep right on taking the drugs.

On Friday I am defending my early research project. If I pass, all I'll have left to do for the PhD is my dissertation. (My department abolished comprehensive exams shortly before I entered the program, intending to replace them with something as yet unspecified, but the students in my cohort don't have to take exams or do the mystery new thing either: coursework, early research project, dissertation, we're done.) In order to pass, I should probably prepare for the defense. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten past drawing cracks on a picture of a highway for my opening slide (see above re: only adult in the house and still throwing up).

While things are quiet I should probably work, not blog, so I will leave you with a quick random scramble.

Pete already has the lawyerly tendency that drives me so crazy in his oldest brother. Friday night I said, "Guys. You have to stop running around the house." He replied, "Me not running around house, Mama. Me running across house."

Oh, silly me. Running across the house is A-OK. (She said sarcastically.)

One of the kids on my caseload has the largest tonsils I have ever seen, and I have been trying for months to get a more informed opinion about them. I need to see his velum, which doesn't seem to be doing its job properly, but it's hidden behind his tonsils. His pediatrician has not seemed to be concerned in the slightest about these tonsils that meet in the middle, but the mom finally wangled an ENT referral. The ENT took one look and said, "Oh, those have to come out." He scheduled surgery for a few days later. I could not help but wonder if the pediatrician would have been so laissez-faire with a child who had good insurance. (Here's a tonsil picture if you have only a vague idea where your tonsils really are -- they live in between the two arch-y things you see in the back of your mouth (more properly known as your anterior and posterior faucial pillars). They should not, just in case you wondered, meet in the middle.) But I'm hoping the surgery makes a difference for him.

A pair of mourning doves built a nest on our front porch, and the mama sat on that egg for weeks and weeks. I felt some sympathy for her because she starting setting her eggs right when I found out I was pregnant. I would watch her up there in the cold April wind and think queasily, "It's hard work to help a baby grow, isn't it?" I kept watching and watching, waiting for little baby peeps from the nest. But there were never any peeps. This weekend they gave up. I peeked inside the nest, after weeks of trying to stay away from that corner of the porch, and saw one perfect-looking egg. I should probably toss the nest, because rotting egg is not something I want that close to my house. There's something so sad about an abandoned nest, though.

All right, time to get to work. Wish me luck!

Monday Monday

Hey, what are you doing today?

Elwood took the kids out for the whole day. The whole day! I have a house to clean, laundry to fold, a poster presentation draft to finish, an early research project write-up to get to my ERP director, and articles to read for my advisor. (I'm aiming to get to candidacy before the baby arrives. We sat down on Friday and drew up a schedule. I'm excited about it.)

I think I'm going to keep a record of my day here so that if I spend half an hour reading blogs at least I will have to admit it. Want to play?

I figure most people in the US and the UK are out enjoying the holiday today, but jump right in if you're so inclined.

Snapshot

Tonight Pete was fighting sleep but in the sweetest way. He was snuggled in next to me, signing "I love you" and patting my cheek gently.

Joe read me a book for the first time -- what a treat! It was a library book about the duck-billed platypus. He sailed effortlessly past "mammal" and "mouthful" and "worm." I haven't pushed him to read to me because he's made a big fuss about not being a good reader. I was astonished.

Marty told me after bedtime prayer that he wants to be a priest, and also that he lies in bed every night and worries before he falls asleep. I promised to see what I could find to help him with that. Any ideas?

Alex and I butted heads ALL DAY LONG, but we said a peaceful goodnight and I have some ideas about how to cut down on the head-butting. We get along best when it's just the two of us.

Elwood offered to take the kids on a road trip tomorrow, allowing me to stay home and work like a crazy woman!

I am much, much less sick. If normal is New Orleans, I spent the last month in Chicago. Now I'm in Memphis -- not all the way back home but at least I can see the magnolias blooming. I can't even tell you how nice it is.

Spitting Distance

Really, I could finish up my papers today if I just put my mind to it. Nausea's not too bad; house is empty except for me and the reptiles. But you know how work stretches to fill the time allotted? The work is stretching.

I called my friend around the corner to see if she was free for coffee, thinking that would motivate me to get finished. She's not home. I've been trying to think of something fun I could do when I get through and I'm not coming up with anything really thrilling. Walk to the used bookstore and buy something fun to read during Petely's nap? Pick up some cute sock yarn and cast on a new pair? Go get a new spring haircut? Got any ideas for me?

One of the things that worried me about being pregnant and in grad school is that pregnancy has a terrible effect on my brain. When I was pregnant with Pete, one of the boys said exasperatedly, "Mom, you get forgetfuller the pregnanter you get." He hit it on the head. Yesterday I was trying to do one of the puzzles in the NYT magazine and COULD NOT think of what word could be spelled c_ewy. I was utterly baffled. Crewy? Clewy? What kind of crazy words are those? Then I plugged it into OneAcross.com and felt like an idiot. In another example, I have a prenatal appointment scheduled for next Monday and I REMEMBER writing it on the calendar. Except it's not on the calendar. What did I write it on? The mortgage coupon that I put in the mail? (Wait, I didn't pay the mortgage yet this month.) The September page of the calendar? I think I'm going to have to call and see what time I'm supposed to be there. I wrote it down carefully, knowing how flaky I can be when I'm pregnant, and then I forgot where I wrote it. Yikes.

Thankfully, I think I'm hanging in there with the work I'm doing for school. It's possible that I'm writing sentences about Whorfian claims and metarepresentational competence that will cause my professor to laugh mirthlessly (or cry) when she reads them, but I think it makes sense. I think. And now I'm going to go write some more, so I can do something fun afterward. Something. I just need to figure out what.

Day of Rest

I used to think it was crazy and anachronistic to keep Sunday as a day of rest. I remember a friend of mine in college said he'd decided not to study on Sundays, and I thought he was heading for academic probation in a matter of weeks. I can't remember exactly when I decided that I'd give it a try, avoiding unnecessary work on Sundays, but it's been a real gift.

A couple of loads of laundry will be necessary work today, because yesterday was a bad enough nausea day that I couldn't countenance it then. I'm hard to please with this nausea thing: too much and I think "can't do it can't do it"; too little and I think "dead baby dead baby." Today I am in a good spot, nauseated enough to feel pregnant but still able to enjoy the sunshine and knit lazily on an applied I-cord border for that blanket I've been making. (Was going to post a new picture of it, but the camera is full of pictures taken by Pete: random toes, random carpet, random bedding.)

I'm getting there on those final papers, probably about halfway on the page count even though some of it's pretty rough. Eight weeks tomorrow.

Milestones

Today was the last session of the last class I will take. It's been a great class, one which has completely shaken up my ideas about what infants understand and how they learn. Today my project director said that my early research project is "in excellent shape," and I should be able to defend shortly. Today I also finished my follow-up data collection. As I thought might happen, I'm back in marginally significant territory. Maybe a few more responses will trickle in; maybe I'll do some one-tailed tests. Or maybe I'll just defend with marginally significant results.

In the next week I have 12-14 pages to write, and I'll be done with the semester. Then I will take a nap. Then I will fold some laundry, unless it has buried me alive by then. It's been a tough couple of weeks.

Any Roofers Out There?

I have shingles. I think I'm too young to have shingles, don't you? The nurse practitioner was rather grim about shingles, offering me narcotics along with the antiviral drug. I declined the narcotics for now. We'll see how it goes.

Why I drove almost 1100 miles in a 33-hour period

That's my newly-baptized nephew and his big sister, with their daddy and my two older boys, who were *fabulous* about all that time in the car. I was going to go alone but I'm glad I didn't. :-)