On Call: A Troubling Start to the Weekend

So this weekend Absurdist Lover is on call at his job. This means that he gets disturbed all the time for problems as lame as printer jams. Ugh. His being on call every six weeks or so is absolutely the worst part of the job for him -- and for the whole family because it means that I have to be prepared for him to have to leave at any point. Double ugh.

So last night, Tot decided he wanted to go to sleep at 7pm. This from the late-night toddler. (Speaking of: he's two months away from three years old! I can't believe it. Surely he deserves a better moniker than Tot, now that most sources seem to call him a "preschooler." Am working on it and thinking about whether he and AL should have monikers that really fit them more than just their relationship to me, but I digress and still don't know what I think about it all.) But I am not one to argue against his sleeping. So he slept. I thought it would be a good time to start freezing the bushel of green beans I ordered from my CSA. A bushel. I had no idea how much a bushel really is. It's a lot. So I took a nap, then got up and made a start around 11pm. AL was gone on his first visit to work at that point. Of course, Tot woke up at 2am and stayed up until 5am, so that nap I took that robbed me of some green bean time ended up being totally inspired. I went to bed at 6:30am. Tot woke up at 9:30am, bright-eyed and shiny-faced. At that point, AL was already gone, having been called in for the second time since he started being on call at 7pm. (The first notice of the first call-in was at 8:30. The darn place can't survive without him for even two hours!)

All this to say: his being on call sucks for the whole family (no going to any of the fairs going on right now because it would suck to waste the entry price); Tot was on some weirdo schedule yesterday, though he's fine today, though I'm quite tired because of it; the upshot of all this is that I managed to freeze about or at least almost half a bushel of green beans in the wee hours last night.

I did take a picture of the now half-full bushel box, which I'll post later. (I haven't downloaded photos to my computer for ever. Though not a big deal, of course, it seems like a big job for some reason. Perhaps everything seems big now.

Oh, gotta go. Tot wants to take a nap. More later.

***A half hour later***

False alarm. He decided he wanted to look at a particular page of The Cat in the Hat, which then meant that we went through all the subsequent pages (not reading, but he likes to flip the page and ask, "What happened?" and then I try to help him figure out what happened based on the pictures). When he got to the last page of the book, the one with just white on it, he did what he did last night: asked about coloring the pages. And I said no, that we don't color our books, only our papers. And then he promptly got up and ran to his desk so he could color pictures of trains. He loves trains and asks daily about going to the train tracks. He also loves cars, buses, and motorcycles. And most recently, probably because his Montessori teacher is an artist herself, painting. Actually his paintings have really nice composition. We hung them up. I like them, even apart from being his mom.

I'm sure I should get started on those green beans, but my energy level has dipped. (I never do well when he teases me that he's going to take a nap and then doesn't.) He's busy with AL talking about "orange" and "red." So cute. I'm going to go and grab what family goodness is available to me this weekend. Talk to you later, most likely about green beans, transplanting container garden vegetables and herbs, and the bounty of local organic food in this region. (Not about work, though I'm up to my navel in summer quarter. I really don't like being so far off the normal academic schedule. It's very alienating. So instead of gearing up for the fall semester, like so many of you with that familiar mix of excitement for it all to start again and dread that summer is over, I'm deep in midterms. Next academic year will be better, I've been promised. I swear I put it on the first draft of my annual report that keeping myself from complaining about my schedule was a part of my departmental service.)

Happy fall semester, everyone! May all your syllabi write themselves and your copying get done!

Unexpected Day Off

So we're having a terrible storm that has robbed Tot's Montessori of power, which means though I have a complete day of teaching along with a department meeting nestled between my two classes today, I'm home with Tot. So many things are power struggles with him lately that I'm not as overjoyed for the unexpected day with him as I wish I were and, of course, feel a bit bad about that. (Lest y'all think that we're terribly traditional in the Absurdist Household, Absurdist Lover did offer to stay home, but he's got this huge deadline at work tomorrow, and I'd rather that he just go and deal with the mountain of work he's got rather than let the stress mount even more. For me, getting behind in my classes by cancelling today is just an annoying and unwelcome wrinkle.)

(Another power struggle over whether putting one's feet on playing cards one has just dropped is a good idea. We do a lot of threatening time in his playpen these days. It's easy to feel like a terrible parent. I lose my temper often.)

But the upshot is that I can blog. Unfortunately, I feel like I have little to say. I'm teaching, doing service work (wow: it would be great if I could make some headway on this report I meant to start but didn't yesterday), and trying to work on the major revision for Article Slightly Outside My Field. For that article, I've been putting some very odd things together, but I knew before that there were some Australian researchers putting them together too. Now I see they have a book due out next year. I can't figure out whether I feel bad about being scooped or relieved to know that I'll be able to simply gesture to them as evidence that putting these things together does make sense. I wish the book were out now. But as much as I went nuts researching and ILL-ing articles that I could find from these researchers, this aspect of things is a small part of the overall argument. (That is, this is theory while the main thrust is application.) Why is it so easy to get all obsessed about one difficult part of one's argument rather than focusing on that which is going to get the most pages? Of course, there's lack of self-esteem and imposter syndrome in the mix, but is it also, in this case, that I'm more interested in delineating that theoretical argument than the main thrust of the chapter, which includes both application (which is okay) but also a specific kind of analysis that I'm not really thrilled about doing?

It's foolish to think I'm really going to get a lot done today, when keeping Tot out of trouble is already a major never-ending project. If anyone has great ideas about specific indoor activities to do with an extremely active tot of 2-3/4 years, please let me know.

Playing Catch Up

My dear friends, I'm sorry I haven't blogged recently. There's been a ton going on. In the words of Inigo Montoya, "let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

• I had terrible tooth pain for weeks, finally went to the dentist, waited for three more weeks for my appointment to roll around, and then had a root canal. Icky. I feel diseased. (And I have not yet had the usual cleaning and diagnostics to tell me what other nightmares await me in the teeth realm.) I'm still on pain meds. It absolutely ruined our weekend last weekend along with. . .
• AL has been on call at work. It's over now, as of today. But he's gotten up in the middle of the night so many times I swear he works more at night than during the day. This made root canal weekend even worse because he was too tired to take care of Tot. Even still, he tried. We managed.
• My sister fell off a horse and actually fractured her spine. She had to have spinal fusion surgery. She's at home now, trying to manage the pain. She's going to have to wear a brace for six months. It's awful. Which has also led to. . .
• My mother came back up from the deep to send me text messages about my sister. The latest ones are all about whether I know whether my sister knows the recipe for my late grandmother's "Miracle Soup." As if I would know. As if my sister, at home alone because her husband and kids are at work and school, respectively, should be making herself soup rather than having someone else make her soup. As if my grandmother's soup was anything more than Whole Foods vegetable soup powder with an awful lot of vegetables in it. Finally, I stopped texting back about that one because it's just so stupid. I really liked it much better when my mother wasn't talking to me for reasons I'm not sure about but can guess. I'm sick of the hot and cold with my mother. It finally occurred to me, because I'm incredibly slow, that not only have I been putting up with the same kind of BS from my mother for my nearly 40 years, but that I'm tired of it and have no more energy to invest in relationships that merely drive me crazy and don't pay off in any way; in fact, I'd be stupid to invest what little time I have that way. As AL said so well, our lives are so busy with full-time jobs and an active toddler. My mother could be a support, something that adds to our lives. Instead she takes away. I'm no longer going to invest time in the minus column of my life.
  
• I've decided to start Tot in Montessori in July. We've observed the class, we've talked with the director, and I, at least, am looking forward to it. Tot, on the other hand, seems to love his current daycare, though all I have to do to firm up my resolve is to come in at snack time when some deranged parents think it's a good idea to pump their kids full of donuts and cupcakes. (Sorry if this is insulting to you, dear readers. AL says I shouldn't judge. But really: sugar, fat, and likely trans fats and GMO. Oh, and I realize this is a trivial consideration: no actual nutrition for kids' growing bodies. I'm not against the occasional fabulous dessert, but donuts from a coffee place as a kid's everyday snack? Bringing in a giant cupcake snack for a whole room full of early preschoolers? I feel especially responsible for bringing tasty and healthy snacks when it's my turn to feed the entire room. Am I the only one?)
  
• Tot has started asking to be with "other kids." Which means that I'm concerned that this long weekend isn't going to be as fun as it should be. AL and I are determined to do nice things for ourselves beyond the usual laundry, dishes, trash. Unfortunately, it looks like it's going to rain all weekend, when the things we want to do involve being outdoors and eating outdoors. We might try to take Tot to a restaurant, something we've really stopped doing because he is so active.
  
• The Farmer's Market started up last weekend. Thank God and Hir's wee angels. It was rained out the day it was supposed to start.
• I hate the quarter system and especially my Uni's academic calendar that makes me way off of every other academic's calendar. The good news is that I have today off, though it's only week 8. Which means. . .
• That today is the day I.simply.must.make.amazing.progress.on.the.article I now owe to Grad School Colleague and will soon owe to a professional workshop thing I'm scheduled to go to (but can't quite imagine since I have to leave AL and Tot here) AND to my regularly scheduled writing group.
  

I've decided that there is no earthly reason why I can't write two articles per year if I just put in the time. I've been doing other really useful reflection, like that I really do feel like teaching, which I value amazingly, does get in the way of my regular work on my scholarship and I find that annoying. Which is how I've come to realize that while I really love teaching and would love to be in a place where I'd be able to teach courses across the range of an English generalist, I'd not like the heavy load, unless class size were really limited. So while there are lots of things I don't like about my job -- the calendar, the lack of majors, the focus of my bread-and-butter teaching -- the teaching load is certainly one of the amazing perks. Another thing I really dislike is the lack of an academic community where people discuss things. Now I realize there are plenty of big and small departments that for whatever reason don't foster a sense of intellectual community. Mine certainly does not have intellectual community because most of the people in my department live elsewhere and commute in (which amazes me in the winter, but I grew up in a place where people start driving wonky in the rain -- snow would be impossible). I need to go seek it out -- at conferences and other schools around the state.

But you'll notice that none of this is helping me get my article done. So here's what I'm going to do:

• I'm not going to panic.
• I'm going to take my outline and dump in the various discussions I've been working on into it. Had to do a course correction, but done!
  
• Then I'm going to print it out and do some handwritten revision. Thwarted! Our printer is so close to out of ink that it's giving me very choppy unreadable pages. GAH! Okay, I could go to work or I could go to my friendly nearby Staples. Since I have laundry in the communal laundry room, I suppose Staples is the smart choice. Done.
  
• My goal is that I'm going to get one of the five sections of the piece written through today. Done.
  
• But before I do any of that, I'm going to read that blogpost from the day I calmly wrote that article. I have done it before, and I can do it again. But I just need to remind myself how. Done.
  

I hope y'all have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! And if you're already done with your academic year, well, remember that there are those of us who are not so fortunate. It is your responsibility to have more fun, read for pleasure, be nice to yourself, and take more soothing naps and, above all, as my professor grandfather said and AL last night quoted: don't should yourself to death.

ETA: I just figured out that my organization is not going to work because, as always, my points are intertwined with one another. Instead I'm going to group the discussions together differently, which of course means I've spent some of my productive time on important discoveries that don't yield actual pages. Sigh. Back to it.

Research Monday

Thank goodness it's Monday. The weekend sucked. AL has been super-stressed about some work things going on early this week and has been really ill as well. I've been stressed because AL is stressed and because the work things may affect some immediate plans we have -- so we've been in limbo and still are for the next couple days and that's just never a good feeling. Even though I told myself a zillion times that there was nothing I could do and so should let go of the stress and try to be there for AL, I failed utterly. Tot is making an on again off again transition to his toddler bed, which means that going to sleep is a new kind of ordeal. (It always was, of course, but now it's a new ordeal.) I think Tot also felt the stress or is just exploring and experimenting because he crayoned over some toys and then the walls. They're washable crayons and everything, but you can't just act as if it's nothing, can you? Because then they won't know what's right in the future. Parenting is hard. Sometimes it sucks. Like when Tot steals the bed so that I'm smooshed in the middle of the bed between two restless sleepers. Needless to say, I woke up and got up early for a change.

And it's no wonder to me that some part of me that would usually rather sleep wanted to get an early jump on today because I am simply Deeeeeelighted that both of my boys, whom I love dearly, are taken care of for hours upon hours and I can be alone and focus on me. (No making dinner or taking Tot out on walks or going to the children's museum or whatever because I should. No shoulds!) Mondays I'm scheduled to do yoga and go to therapy. I doubt I'll do either today because I need to take care of me. I don't want to go to therapy because I don't want to rehash the weekend of suckage. And yoga is in less than an hour and my back hurts and I just don't think I'm going to get there. I actually have tons of things to do today, but what I really want to do is research. The entire weekend, actually starting with Friday, I wanted to work on my research, perhaps because it belongs only to me and I have control over it unlike the various reasons that made the weekend of suckage what it was. Partly also because Thursday, which is supposed to be a lesser but still significant research day, was almost completely taken up by this service document I had to crank out. And I really missed not getting to work on my work! (This feels like a really significant difference from the version of me who had to basically cajole myself into writing my dissertation and thought I might be perfect for a job that required little research. Now I know that's not.true.at.all. I love research.)

So work-wise, I want to

• Write up an abstract for a conference paper and send it to the panel organizer.
• Work on article. Accomplished.
  
• Possibly finish the email I'm carefully crafting to a contact asking for help on a project.
• Stage a creative work submission so all I have to do is print and mail when I'm at work before the window closes at the end of the month.
  

Other things I have to do:

• Do laundry. Done.
  
• Do the bills. Done.
  
• Pick up Tot's favorite seed butter across town at the only place that carries it which happens to be on a street that is now under construction and is just a major pain to get to. Done.
  
• Call and reschedule therapy appointment. Done.
  
• Figure out dental insurance, find a dentist, and make an appointment so I can stop living with tooth pain.

I also have daydreams of things like watching a movie and napping, though I doubt that will happen. I also wish I could go and help out at my friend's farm, though that's not even on the radar for today.

Can I just say that I love being invited to do things by other scholars in my field? It just makes me feel like I have something to say and have some expertise for someone somewhere even though I work daily in an institution that merely pays lipservice to the necessity of the skills I teach and I teach things that not only are not my specialty, but are things I don't value to students who on the whole wish they didn't have to take such classes at all. And when I do get to have wonderful scholarly conversations with my colleagues, it's usually not on anything I really know anything about -- though I tend to love having them anyway. It occurs to me now that going to conferences can be a lifeline for some of us, probably most of us, because most institutions hire people to cover certain areas, which often means that when you get right into the fine detail of your field, there's no one right across the hall to talk to (unlike grad school). I didn't go to the Big Conference this year because I don't like to be gone from home a lot and I already went to a specialist conference and am going to a workshop, then two conferences in the fall (one is local). That's a lot. But I think from now on I'm going to make it more of a priority, even though in the past I really haven't liked Big Conference all that much. It's too big, for one thing. And I find going to conferences and sitting in session after session really difficult, so I tend to go to too few sessions. But maybe I have to look at it more as a chance to slurp up new ideas that I can then digest for the rest of the year.

Knowing that a senior scholar that I respect is asking me to do something (or if I'd like to do something) also makes me more careful in my work, wanting something to be good rather than merely done. I'm going to enjoy writing my annual report this year since I've had some rather good luck. In fact, I admit I often go to sleep thinking about the good luck I've had research-wise.

(By the way, the reason why I'm not inundated with grading and counting down the weeks until summer like most of you is because I'm on the quarter system and so am getting my first boatload of papers tomorrow. Worse than that, I'm teaching right though the summer -- with maybe three weeks off at most. So while I'm not in grading jail right now, I am off the normal academic calendar, which means that while you're all writing about your summer plans and then lightblogging because you're out having fun, well, I'll be doing the regular thing, same bat time, same bat channel. Being so far off the academic calendar is another thing that makes me feel really. . .well, alienated from my academic colleagues. The final cure for all this is obvious, but wouldn't do anything immediately for my headspace. So instead the real cure for all this is research. Who knew?)

Conversation I Would Like to Have

If Mommy doesn't get more than three hours of sleep per night, she will never ever get well from this cold!

To review the action for those lucky enough to have slept through the play by play:

9-11:30: Tot too restless and overtired to sleep. Mom would've had no trouble, but alas.
11:30: Woke up from what Mommy thought was a sound sleep
12:00: Finally got him to bed. Mommy went to bed.
2:00: Tot woke up with a leaking diaper.
2-3: Fitful sleeping by Tot and Mom with Mom fighting for space from Tot and Cat.
3:00: Must've slept.
5:00: Mom had to get up.

GAH! Thank God and all the little angels that this is the last day I teach at 8am.

As is usual when I wake up on time, I'm still late getting into the shower. No doubt my being in the shower will wake Tot, still in our bed.

Musings from Grading Jail

We had another terrific snow this week, after highs in the 50s and all the snow melting away last week. I swear we had a couple days of spring, though I didn't like it at the time because 1) I worry about how the warm-up and refreeze will affect the apple trees (the apple harvests in our areas tanked last year because of a late freeze); 2) I haven't ordered the seeds I'm going to start indoors yet. So the snow means I've gotten a reprieve on that front.

But the grading front? There IS no reprieve. Let me recount for you. I have had one class's projects for an embarrassing length of time. I'd really like to get them back to students on Friday (when I'll be picking up projects from my other class). Then I also have two stacks of other stuff to grade and get back: one from each class. Eeegads. Every quarter I say I'm going to keep on top of grading, and each quarter I get sick, the world seems to collapse, and I get behind.

So. Tot is asleep at an uncharacteristically appropriate nap time. He keeps waking up in the middle of the night and wanting to come in with us, which I let happen because it's much easier than staying up and trying to get him back into his crib. But then I don't get much good sleep. There was a ridiculous moment where the cat was taking up all of Tot's space, who was basically squishing me off the bed. AL manages to sleep through all of this most nights, though there are the nights where he's hanging off the edge of the bed for dear life. A Queen size bed. When Tot got out of bed at 7:30 this morning, I was not a happy camper, especially because my leg hurt from all the weird positions I was sleeping in.

(Can she procrastinate for another paragraph? Yes, she can!) Part of the problem with these projects is that each one takes a long time -- and even though I've done my best to make sure it's on a topic that I'll enjoy reading about, it's still in a format that I never thought I'd be teaching quarter after quarter. It occurs to me that this is not what I went to grad school for. I mean, I remember wanting to teach a class like this so I'd be more competitive on the market. But I didn't realize I'd be teaching this damn thing every quarter.

It looks like we may have to wait a year to buy a house in order to have the two years of solid paychecks from both of us -- and maybe that's a good thing. Despite that I love some of my colleagues (some), maybe I really should look around next job season. Maybe we don't want to stay and put down roots here. (Easy to say that in the winter with the scary slippy-slidey winter driving.) Maybe I don't want to spend my entire career here teaching things I don't value. (I don't always teach things I don't value. Just some of the things I have to teach. In every class, I teach things I value highly -- granted, to students who just couldn't. care. less, but they're the ones who need it the most, right?) I don't know. I do know that I'm inordinately excited about putting my annual report together this year (which is still several months off) because my long-awaited article finally came out and I have another, much smaller, much less prestigious publication (but still!), due out before annual report time. Of course, if I go on the market, this isn't really enough. Well, I'm not going to drive myself crazy. Looking around is not the same as really doing the job market. But in any case, I'm really excited about doing more scholarship and sending things out -- to paraphrase The American President: I don't want to just make tenure; I want to make it with a couple of touchdowns.

But alas. Those papers aren't going to grade themselves. It's even more difficult to get myself to do these because this class has been full of stupid student tricks -- like people just blowing things off and then a bunch of international students who really don't have the literacy to be in the class, yet are. Ah freshmen.

Okay, so I'll try for two projects in the next hour, which is all I can count on Tot to sleep anyway.

***Update***

Alas, I barely got one done, and Tot is awake! But at least it was interesting.

Too Frigging Much

Oh my friends, my brain is scrambled. There is too much going on, hence no blogging. It's been ironic and silly to see that last post up so long, as if I were going to get scholarship done. As it happens, it's been impossible. For multiple reasons.

The first and most important tonight is that my father had life-altering surgery a few hours ago. My sources say that it went well and that it was a good decision considering what they found. Though there will be a long recovery period, this surgery is hopefully the show-stopper for my father's continuing problems. The man has been in and out of the hospital for a month. I talked to him a few days ago, and he was quite slurry, very down. Getting ill is so bad because it's not just a physical one, it's an emotional and psychological one as well. It colors the eyes with which one sees and encounters the world.

And I know this because I've developed back problems -- an actual ligament sprain or something comparable and have been in intermittent pain. Sometimes really bad, but mostly pretty manageable. But it's still pain. And I get grumpier faster. At first, I thought I was somehow imagining it, but after three weeks I went to the doctor -- and it's completely real. I'm on prescription doses of ibuprofen and now two people have suggested that I wean Tot off breast feeding so that I can take the muscle relaxers the doctor would have given me if I weren't breastfeeding. It really would never occur to me to wean Tot so I could take some pill, but partly this has got to be because I've had really bad experiences with muscle relaxers.

Tot is sick. AL is staying home with him tomorrow, thank God and thank AL.

I have my impossibly-early and long day tomorrow. Teaching all my classes. Oh woefully behind grading. A weird possibly stormy possibly thorny issue arising in my department that I'm very concerned about is helping me crystalize my thinking about pedagogy. An upcoming conference for which I believe my paper was misplaced in its panel. An abstract due tomorrow. Appointments with students. Myriad service obligations. Must call my father. Must get the abstract done. Must grade. Must prep for class. tiltTiltFULLTILT.

Daycare Problems: What Do You Think?

Oh, I feel so beaten down, trampled really. I know part of it is that I'm sick. My dad is still in the hospital and we're wondering if his being in so long for extra tests signals the Big C; I talked to my brother yesterday and among other things, we discussed Dad's values -- his fancy cars and charging high rent to his kids on an apartment he probably couldn't get rented anyway. So it was already an emotional day. I also didn't manage to eat after breakfast until I got home. But the trampling has to do with Tot's daycare. I desperately need an outside perspective.

Last night, when I picked up Tot, I noticed he was trying to sit down without sitting on his butt -- and his thermals were all bunched up inside his pants. When we changed him, we found had the worst case of diaper rash I've ever seen on the little guy. Painful to look at. A couple layers of skin off. Really bad. And he was clearly in pain, though before he had been basically his happy self, though he's sick (and we clearly shouldn't have taken him into daycare yesterday in the first place).

Both AL and I were freaked out about the diaper rash: he didn't have it in the morning. I changed him, and though I don't remember particularly looking at his butt, I know I would've noticed that. Of course, this puts the question mark on what's going on at daycare. But really, he just has a terrible bout of diarrhea (which we've figured out since) and it's irritating his skin -- and I'll bet dollars to donuts the poor guy is scratching. (Poor thing has my super-sensitive skin.) I had initially thought that he had a skin reaction to the eucalyptus oil I was experimenting with because it's supposed to be good for colds. But now I don't think that was it. Anyway. This isn't the problem.

The problem is that when we took off his pants and thermals, we saw there was poop on them. That's not cool. He has extra clothes, so it wasn't that they didn't have extras and he had to wear them. The daycare people must've not noticed. On the one hand, I can see how it happened -- how they would just not notice, especially in the case of a big bad terrible poop, which is likely what was going on. On the other hand, do I really want my treasure in a place where they didn't notice that there was poop on his clothes? Even on the outside of his clothes? (I guess it's possible that they saw and made the judgment that it wasn't worth changing his clothes because we'd pick him up soon, but that's not a great judgment either.) This comes on top of some issues that have made me a little worried about this daycare in the past, especially about their respect for following parents' instructions. I could go on and on about their totally insane food choices -- okay, so they don't care about GMO or organic or whatever, but everyone knows about what sugar does to children and how children need nutritious food and someone please tell me what possible effing nutritional value Nilla Wafers have? Anyway.

AL put it very simply: we pay them to provide the care that we would. He took me into the bathroom to look at Tot's clothes soaking in the sink: is this what we want for Tot? Is this what we pay for? He's decided that Tot is not going back there. He's taking days off work to make sure Tot is okay. (And there's no way that Tot is starting new daycare all sick and rashy.)

In order to present this correctly, I have to say that Tot has learned all his letters and now sings the alphabet song (though with letters omitted) primarily because this place has done such a good job with him. Not that I care whether Tot is a verbal genius, necessarily. I want him to eat well and be well cared for. I want him to be able to run around. When he's there, he seems to be quiet and into himself. That's not strange for his age or temperment -- AL and I were and are both very animated and goofy at home (when I have the energy, which I frequently do not), but are sometimes withdrawn and reserved out there in the world, especially when we're uncomfortable. Is Tot uncomfortable there? I don't know. He's not as excited about going there (and I can say that the tenor of the place has changed a bit lately), but doesn't cry when I leave either. (He does sort of follow me around and doesn't want me to leave, but I don't know if that signifies anything but that I am his mom and he prefers me.)

Here's the thing: on the one hand, I think AL is leaping to a decision here. He's not being fair to the place. Tot was not endangered in any way -- and a little poop on his clothes is not the worst thing in the world. On the other hand, is that what I want for Tot? What duty do I have to be fair to the place, when the most important thing is Tot? When it comes to my kid, I don't have to be fair. In fact, my duties are to do the best for him. Can I really say now that this place -- poop on his clothes, food issues, respect for parents issues -- is the best we can do? Furthermore, do I want to argue to keep him there? Do I feel so great about it that it's worth arguing about? No, not really.

I'm really freaked out. And I'm not sure whether it's the daycare, my concern for Tot and his diaper rash (which is really terrible to look at), that I'm sick, AL's strong reaction, or just the accumulation of all this on top of my father in the hospital and my poor unhappy brother.

Oh, I hate searching for new daycare. Despite that there are tons of daycares in the area, it never feels empowering. Our stance on vaccinations and food makes us fringe -- and I always feel at a disadvantage. I know I'm paying them -- and in a consumer economy (yeah right) that's supposed to give me the advantage -- but they've got something up on me -- we're talking about my son. My precious, my only, my baby son. (Yes, I'm being melodramatic, but I feel melodramatic. And he's no longer a baby. He's two.)

I'd really like to hide under a rock.

By the Skin of Our Teeth

We made it through the second week of what will likely forever be known in our house as the Winter-from-Hell. This waking up super-early is really hard on the entire family. Tot has a cold, natch. I was having some mystery pains and then got my period and was super-bitch yesterday. Absurdist Lover is slogging through his job, which he hates. My father is in the hospital with a bad flare-up of his chronic illness. Fun the whole way around.

I have some stuff I want to blog about my scholarship. I've been doing important things while nursing and praying for my son to sleep, like deciding to name my work Turnip Studies. (He's been going to sleep at midnight and, you have to understand, there's not a lot that can make you smile while you're sitting there in the dark hoping your tot will go to sleep and hoping you will not.)

But this is not the time. I can only describe the mood I'm in as the kind of mood when you decide that it makes sense to go trolling the internet for celebrity gossip. I think I'm going to order some old movies. I'm just tired and grumpy, glad it's the weekend because I could not be kind and supportive to worried students just now (especially those having trouble following my directions!!!). We're a sick house, watching lots of Elmo videos. I haven't left the house in over 24 hours, and I'm sure the Coffee Corporation is suffering without my patronage. We ate all the chocolate in our house last night. It's freaking cold. Grumble, grumble. I'm still here, but not so pleasant. Sorry. I shall return when I have something new to say.

Happy New Year!!!

Right now, Absurdist Tot is watching his Cookie Monster DVD, totally charmed. Since he woke up with a fever, which made him very toasty when he snuggled in bed next to me but of course is not a good thing, it's a pleasure to see his face break open into a beaming smile even with his watery eyes. This is after he's already gotten one dose of Elmo. My son loves Sesame Street, just like his mother. One of the first songs I sang to him was C is for Cookie, probably not the most brilliant thing to sing a child who you're hoping will eat healthily. Oh well. Consistency and hobgoblins.

Absurdist Lover is sick too and actually taking some really productive steps toward health. And amid the sickness, I feel very optimistic about the new year on many fronts. First, I am committing to doing those things that will make me feel better: namely, exercise. Instead of talking about going to the yoga studio near my house, I'm actually going to go. Exercise makes such a huge difference to my brain and body health that I practically owe it to my family to do it. Yoga especially just makes me feel. . .high. How much of an idiot does one have to be to avoid doing something that feels so good? Just because of a little sweat. The whole pressure to be a good mom also does its number on me. Like many toddlers, Tot is a particular eater, which for him means that he still eats a lot of baby food jars. (At least he eats a bunch of vegetables that way.) He also still falls asleep nursing and goes to bed really late. I feel so behind and bad motherish because I've allowed these things to go on. Most of the time, even AL is itching for me to try to move Tot forward on these fronts, especially the sleeping. But lately AL said not to worry about it, that Tot is fine and will grow out of it. And that's opened up a tiny little ray of grace that maybe these issues do not signal my bad mothering, but just are what they are.

(It's taken at least an hour to compose this post so far. Now Tot is asleep on the couch, which is a marker of just how sick he is.)

So I'm going to exercise. I'm going to try to not beat myself up. I'm going to do other things -- like take my vitamins -- that contribute to a happy, healthy head. I'm going to go to therapy. I also need to find Tot a better pediatrician, because I feel like we're getting drive-through doctoring. He looks at Tot for three seconds, then writes him a prescription. When he's got a cold, okay. I know, the doctor has probably seen the exact same symptoms a dozen times the same week. But when I'm talking about a bump on his penis? No. I need a doctor who will say more than "Don't worry, Mrs. Earnest." I'm also thinking about enrolling Tot and myself in a toddler art class. We need to do fun things when we're together.

I'll be teaching in a week, and I haven't put together my syllabi yet. But I've got some great ideas and revisions to these classes that should jazz up the classes for me and present more involved learning experiences for the students. There are also some little things I'm going to do that to me signal that I've gotten more comfortable at Specialized U. And I'm working on an elective that I'll likely be able to teach in the fall. I'm also one of several people who've been approached about developing a new class that's really right up my alley. So that's exciting.

On the scholarship front, there are good hopeful things too. I'm going to an awesome specialized conference in the spring that will help me further develop my elective and is on a subject I'm completely devoted to. And then there's an awesome workshop in the summer that is in an adjacent field to mine -- I should hear back from them one of these days.

In the past three or so months, I have sent out all my creative work, wrote and sent out a short article, started two groups designed to support my continued writing, and held a successful and very meaningful event. I also worked on our department website, making some changes that I hope improve its overall look and usefulness. That's not bad. I've also managed to get myself excited and hopeful again about teaching.

On personal fronts, I've managed to get on top of our finances, send out Christmas cards to most of my friends, and, with yesterday's strange warm weather after weeks of snow, planted those bulbs in the little patch of grass around our patio. (Yes, even totally missing bulb planting last year, I totally missed prime planting time again this year. But with the wacky warm weather, I figured it might be another chance. I'm not terribly hopeful for the bulbs actually, because the earth doesn't seem particularly fertile and they'll have to make it up through a net of grass, but at least they are in the earth now instead of in a bag or the refrigerator. Maybe next year I'll get them in on time. Maybe next year, we'll be in a house. I've seen some very hopeful looking rent-to-own possibilities here.)

I don't know. I guess taking those vitamins that are especially good for my brain chemistry has really helped. I feel hopeful, even in a house of sickos. Here's to good starts to the year!

I Wanted to Write about Cooking, but This is What Came Out

So while many of my academic friends are starting their semesters or gearing up to start them, I'm waist-deep in my summer quarter and taking the day off because I'm sick.

I've been thinking a lot about how I grew up -- or specific shaping experiences from my childhood -- and how they affect me now, how they color my view of the world. And I'm thinking that they do. I see possible menace around most corners. Sometimes it seems amazing to me that people don't kick in locked doors and smash through glass much more often than they do. I guess some part of me doesn't really believe in safety or security. Many of my dreams are about being chased or found -- or acquiescing to some terrible more powerful person in order to live through it. (I guess that sums up some aspects of my childhood pretty well.) I also have a terrible temper, a really low threshold for frustration.

I've explored all this -- written about it, talked about it, addressed it. I was in therapy once, though I think we focused on other things, and it seems like therapy is probably the next step now, but I also had a bad therapy experience. (Don't get me started about therapists I've known from the way past and the problems I can see with therapy.) My former therapist said I had a lot of stuff that was right on the surface. If the point is to talk this stuff out in order to get it out of my subconscious, well, I've done that. I know at least some of the ways in which this childhood stuff colors my life. But what do I do about that, dammit? I want practical strategies, not to just talk about it all the time. I told this to my former therapist, but I think developing practical cognitive strategies wasn't really his strong point. Of course, he also wanted me to go get diagnosed and medicated as manic depressive. I will admit that I feel like I've spent a fair amount of my life trying to cope with fluctuating moods, but not in a manic depressive way. More of a turbulent way. (Super rapid cycling?) A friend of mine said it really well. What did she say? She said I was. . .unpredictable? Something like that. Well, if you think it's hard to predict how I'm going to respond when you're a different person, imagine how much harder it is to live inside that? I try for self-awareness, growth, self-acceptance, but there's a lot going on in here. I often don't know what's going on! It's not that I'm deliberately emotionally dishonest, but I've got a lot of conflicting emotions, some that are elusive even to me! I'm trying to be more mindful. And Tot definitely deserves someone more in control. I certainly don't want to recycle that particular childhood with different players. AL says that a good therapist would help me to see it differently, would ask me different kinds of questions that would help me see it in a different way. It's hard for me to imagine that there's territory I haven't explored, read about, written about, talked to other people about, etc., but I guess that's when you go to therapy. So that is likely coming up in the coming months.

I also really have an aversion to some of the discourse around childhood experiences like mine. The victim discourse. The overuse of the word "abuse." I do understand when people say "I'm this way because this happened to me when I was a kid and I'm still dealing with it" but I don't like to do that. I guess I really want to pass as normal in some ways. I know I'm not. But I don't want people to look at me as some maladjusted misfit either playing the victim card. Yes, I have the credibility to play that card. But I like being able to pass. I really don't want to blame my present lot on my childhood -- that was a long time ago and I'm an adult. But I can see the ways all this fear and crap self-esteem sort of lowers the horizon of my expectations. Sometimes life seems so bleak. (On the other hand, there are great gifts of all this too. I think I understand better when people living under political oppression say that they wonder if every car they hear is for them, if soldiers or whoever are going to break in and drag them out from their beds. How do people live with that, most Americans wonder? You just do, I want to say. You can't help yourself. You live with it, around it, under it. You get used to it, even as it weighs on you, even as you wonder if your kids will make it home from school. You half-expect something to blow up between here and every there you go to.)

But why does all of this lead to crap self-esteem even eons hence? I know I didn't deserve those experiences. I really do know. I know the circumstances and life histories that led to those experiences. I've done work on forgiving the people involved. I can conjure up anger at them if I want. But it does me no good except that anger is a firey emotion and is not as debilitating as grief. But it's all so stupid. Of course, having a child has brought all this up. I wanted to be better by the time I had a kid. I get so mad -- and at what? The fact that being a toddler, he has different priorities. He doesn't understand the importance of getting out the door right now before the cat scrambles out. Or that he can't have his way all the time. Ridiculous. He's a child. He needs love and discipline, not a mom who flashes red because of stupid things. I really do think a part of this is that I feel so worn down that those flashes of anger are also flashes of energy. I need to work out, which is the only thing that I've decided I really must do today, even in the face of a bunch of work that should get done but which is not compatible with the relaxing and recuperating taking a sick day ought to involve.

Why is all this on the surface and why do I feel compelled to share it? Well, I saw a website that advertises parent coaching. It might good. It might be totally inspired. I don't know. But it basically said that when I lose my cool, this reflects on my maturity level. Parenting is about the parents. And while I totally agree with this, reflecting on it in the moment only contributes to my feeling terrible about myself, something I'm trying to work on. I'm actively trying to have a better outlook and not indulge in the ridiculous self-fulfilling self-talk that I'm undeserving and undisciplined and nothing good is ever going to happen for me (a line of logic that my lived life already proves false, but these things aren't logical). Somehow saying to myself that I've got problems or that I'm not good at controlling my temper means that I'm a totally terrible person, rather than a person with an important flaw that I'm working on. So I'm not that mature. Okay, I can live with that. But is parenting really all about the parents? Is this discourse really about blaming parents for all that happens with kids, when that's really just not fair at all? (I'm not linking to these websites because I don't feel I'm representing them fairly or accurately. I haven't participated in their programs, so I can't really say. But I wonder if I would want to participate in their programs or if this is just another way to make parents feel bad or what?)

Why post this on my blog? To own it? To come out? I don't know exactly. I'm writing it because though I really want to write about other things, this is what's come out. But that doesn't explain publishing it. Hmmm. I guess I'm pressing publish because I need to connect with others, share, be heard and listen to what others have to say. Your turn.

***Postworkout***

I feel flipping fantastic! Worth 50 mg of Zoloft my friends. Surely if I worked out regularly, my frustration would just melt away. So much of my life is good. Blessed, really. Thank you, Legs of Steel 2000!

A Quick Grumble

I've got HFMD now. I should've realized it was inevitable; Tot would likely have not shown symptoms if I'd be immune. It's not so bad. Mostly the blisters are just painful to the touch, as if I've got splinters or something inside my skin. I was having some other trouble anyway, so now I just feel pretty diseased all over. It took Tot forever to finally go to sleep. Absurdist Lover went to bed hours ago. I should go to bed and get some sleep before Tot wakes up and wants to be brought to bed. I always do better if I get to sleep and get some sleep before he comes to bed. What a great start to the weekend.

I've been trying to be more mindful of what goes in and out of my head, so I won't vomit grumbles though it's really tempting (but will it make me feel better?). I wish to spend at least part of my day on things that make me feel better. The interesting thing about having to stop like this mid-quarter is that I've been thinking a lot about creative work. It's nice.

Grandpa

I found out last night that my grandfather is dying. The doctors say it's a matter of days. He has two different cancers, and he is in his eighties. I should've seen him when I was in Urban City a couple weeks ago for my sister's wedding, but I was barely functional the one day I could've seen him so I didn't.

Though I haven't seen him in a while, my grandfather is a very important person to my writing and my scholarly life. He really started me on the trajectory I'm now on -- in trying to understand the mystery of him, I developed a whole collection of scholarly interests that I am still fascinated by. He was always a very difficult man, sort of cold and distant emotionally. He worked all the time, talked about war and politics during the holidays. He couldn't really relate to people on other people's terms. He was only really interested in talking about a few subjects interesting to him. Luckily, he and I shared interests -- mostly stories about his rather remarkable life -- and I wrote about him over and over again.

Part of me wants to hop on a plane, but I really can't. We don't have the money, for one thing. I would have to take the Tot because we are not at all prepared for me to be gone -- no breastmilk saved up, days that the daycare is closed when Absurdist Lover has to work. I have responsibilities here. I could ask my father for the money to fly Tot and me to Urban City, but there is a whole drama there. I owe my father tons of money already which he is angry about and mentions that "we need to talk" but then doesn't call me when he says he will and doesn't pursue clearing the air with me. Yet, I know he's still mad at me because he didn't call to tell me that Grandpa was in the hospital or anything and because my brother made reference to it. I know Dad avoids confrontation, and I should just deal with it because of course he has every right to be angry, but we're doing our best with one car and can't pay him back yet. It's hard for me to believe that he needs that money to eat the way we do. And maybe I've just been avoiding the whole thing too, because it pisses me off to have to be the one to pursue it when I'm already ashamed of the whole mess and I also have a full and exhausting life without worrying whether my father is angry at me and won't deal with it a dozen states away.

I don't want to borrow pretty much near a thousand dollars right now. I want to honor my grandfather and what he means to me -- my brother says he's only sometimes lucid -- but I also don't want to further weigh down my little family's half-deflated liferaft of hope that we're going to eventually be able to climb up and out of the financial mess we're in. I just can't do that to AL when he's working so hard and not really loving this job -- really finding some of the corporate crap impossible and ridiculous. If my father gives us the tickets, that's something else. Though it would be nothing but headache, I suppose I would take Tot on a couple planes and tough out dealing with all the stupid issues (Tot in some sort of living space not meant for an active toddler, Tot with Dad's dog, etc.) if Dad would buy us the tickets. I'm not holding my breath, though maybe he would. Obviously, I don't really want to go to Urban City, don't really think it will do much for me and my needs when losing my grandfather to deal with all that. I'm really torn. I swear to God I was already really exhausted from trying to be a good little trooper finishing up a sort of depressing quarter, driving everyone around, and dealing with Tot's being sick, which means he wants to nurse through the night, i.e., bad sleep for Mom.

I can't really expect the family to understand and respect that I'm torn between my duties to them and my duties and responsibilities to my little Absurdist Family. (My needs in the face of this loss: how do those factor in to them?) I'm not sure that there is much I can do there in Urban City -- for my grandfather, my father, my siblings. I can see my grandfather, if he makes it that long. I can go to a funeral. I should probably call my father and ask him how he's doing, despite his idiocy. (How angry and disappointed at him I am to realize that his anger toward me outweighs his letting me know that his father is dying! Did he say anything about his anger toward me at my sister's wedding? No.) I know what's important is that I make the right decision for me and feel good about it -- but that's so much easier than it sounds. What is the right decision? (Is not going the right decision for me? Or am I just trying to justify it? I don't know.)

I feel terrible. I've been in my office for hours now. I should be reading some student papers already woefully overdue to be graded. Instead, I've been writing about my grandfather (which I'm sure will turn into a eulogy that I can ask someone to read), remembering things, and reading things I wrote about him. And crying.

So what do you think? Am I the terrible daughter and granddaughter I think I am for thinking that I really can't just up and go to Urban City? Do I wait for the funeral? Do I go to the funeral at all, if I have to pay for it? I figure I shouldn't go anywhere until next Tuesday anyway, when my classes are over. Not really because my job is important, but for my own peace of mind. Maybe I'm terrible, but I'm exhausted and I need to finish up my courses. I have a couple weeks between the end of this quarter and the start of summer. Maybe I can go to Urban City then and help with whatever Dad needs help with.

Oh. My. Freaking.Goodness

It has been the most exhausting. . .I don't know anymore how long it's been. . .long time.

So to start where I left off last week I woke up late to get to my flight to Urban City, but made it nonetheless. I slept, somewhat, and worked on research on the plane. Then despite the fact that I told my credit card company that I was going to Urban City and what I was planning to use the card for, the idiot company still put out the fraud alert when I tried to rent a car at the airport, making it impossible to use said credit card. Gah! The rental car company was really nice and let me call AL from their phone while we tried to figure out what to do. Ultimately, we had to let the rental card company hold money in our checking account so I could rent the damn car. So that was an exercise in purgatory.

That day, finally, I visited my grandmother. That was fun. Then it was off to the wedding locale and though I thought that everything was going to be mellow, I ended up being whisked away by my sister and her friends and it was a whirlwind from then on, right up until the part where one of the bridemaid's (not me!) didn't have her dress with her until 15 minutes before the wedding. Oy vey! I've never had so much hairspray on my head in my whole life -- and I was an inventive teenager. It took several days to wash it all out.

I got home Monday evening, then Absurdist Lover started his new job the next day. Because we share a car, I had to drive him, then take Absurdist Tot to his eye doctor appointment. The next day I worked my first day at the CSA (yay! in the rain! squashing beetles! yay!), then I went off to my final workshop that makes me despair of any other such workshops. I'm not signing up for anything outside my field that proposes to teach me how to teach from now on. I could critique the facilitators up and down, but I won't. Suffice to say: madness and badness.

Then Thursday, driving everyone everywhere, then going to teach, locking myself out of my office, driving everyone everywhere again. Friday, same thing without locking myself out of my office. All this, while making sure that Absurdist Lover is there at his new job by 8am. Which is a time I don't really believe exists. I now understand how people get their children to sleep by 9pm and themselves crash by 10: it's called waking up at 6. I crashed on the couch at 10pm last night watching Pollyanna. How embarrassing.

Today, I woke up at 7, took a shower (unheard of on the weekends), got Tot, etc. By 2pm, I had baked bread, gone grocery shopping, started the laundry, taken care of the Tot. I wanted to do anything but the grading I needed to do. When I finally got to it at 5pm, I figured I could do one in 20 minutes. And by the end of 2 hours, I had 5 graded. Then I nobly did 3 more once Tot went down to sleep. Now I'm considering my options: I could work on research, which I've strangely been doing in between other things; or I could eat chocolate chocolate chip ice cream. The last few nights I've been too exhausted to get to dessert! What is happening in this world?!

All I can say to all this craziness is that I can't wait until two things: 1) This quarter ends in less than two weeks and then I have about two or three weeks off. 2) We get another car.

I basically go through my day telling myself what a trooper I am, what a good job I'm doing, mostly just because I'm still alive at the end of the day.

This is the first time in a week I've been able to actually consider putting together this blogpost, meanwhile so many of you are off now. Next week will be better, even though I have to have AL to work even earlier (egads!); at least I won't have to go from quietly planting seeds in flats and hunting beetles to pretending I find a bunch of hot air intellectually and pedagogically inventive in a matter of hours.

Tomorrow's the farmer's market. Fitting all the lovely things -- like homemade bread, working at a farm, and going to farmer's markets -- alongside all the other things that must be done means pushing myself to do things when part of me just wants to park my butt on the couch, watch some 8 hour saga, and drool. I feel like this week I've been living my life in a higher gear (or a lower gear -- one that has more oomph). I'm not sure I'm up to it. Two weeks from now I'll be taking Tot to daycare and probably coming back home to sleep. Oy vey.

Trying to Honor My Emotions while Focusing on What I Can Control

So, there's a lot going on right now -- and as is usual probably for all of us, that which has been most tumultuous is pretty much unbloggable. But beyond that, I've been feeling pretty hemmed in by my life lately. AL drives me to work, then I'm inside my building teaching and running around until pretty much the second that AL comes to pick me up. Then we pick up Tot, and I'm mom again. What I'm saying is that I get very little time to myself. I guess this is what my chair meant when s/he said that being on the tenure track and having kids at the same time takes discipline. What's made it worse the last few days is that I've been grading, grading, grading -- and so even when I'm home, I'm holing myself up in the bedroom trying to get stuff done. I really don't feel well in my body and know that the answer is going to have to be to get some exercise, but I'm really struggling to figure out when I'm going to be able to do that. I know I'm not completely insane, because a colleague who is also junior faculty says that she doesn't know how I manage at all, because she's running around like a beheaded chicken without a child. Still, I'd really like to live to see my child grow up. And I really feel like I'm run down in a serious way. I'd rather not wait until the heart attack happens. But when? When am I going to fit in some exercise? And how without putting the entire household out? I'm sure that this one is going to take someone else to figure it out, someone who is not staying up late blogging after grading after a particularly hellish day.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm an idiot for the choices I've made. I guess that's not a very productive thought just now though.

So I'm going to meet with my mentor about the big picture of what I'm doing from now until I go up for tenure. I have to say that lately I've been dealing with the minutiae, really just running from thing to thing and hoping it's enough to keep everyone happy. (Can I just indulge in my bleak mood for one second and say that my running around lately has not been focused on whether I'm happy? But then, that may not really be fair. I'm happy when I'm looking at the six goslings following their parents. I'm happy when I look into Tot's face. Sometimes I feel a wave of love for my life; I'm just tired now. And achy. And dispirited.) So the question of what I want to accomplish and how my goals for P&T fit into that has been interesting and productive. While I thought last year when I was writing out my plan that I really would write the weird fat book where I discuss three different related heads of the hydra, I've thought lately that even though the weird Three-Headed Hydra book would be super-cool, and there would definitely be productive and cool stuff to see when I put the heads together, it really would short-shrift each Hydra Head. And because of stuff going on in my midst lately, it's clear I have even more to say than I thought about one particular Hydra Head. Even in the diss, this Hydra Head was pushing at 50+ pages; one of my readers commented that he thought that the overstuffed chapter probably suggested that there was a book in there waiting to come out. So now I'm thinking of writing the obvious and more conventional book: One-Headed Hydra. It's hard to figure out whether it would actually sell, but I'm not angling for the book by tenure, only a realistic plan for articles by tenure.

There's another set of concerns I'm interested in -- and these I'm sort of collecting into a second book. So I can write aspects of either and still feel like I have a trajectory. I like this. I like feeling like there is a plan. Like I actually have something to say to my mentor. This is exciting.

Rainy Sunday. . .Now with Chocolate!

So things have continued along the crazy path, hence my lack of blogging. On the days I'm on campus, I run frantically from one thing to another. On the good days, I'm pretty clear-headed about what I need to do next. On the bad days, my brain is like six people trying to get through a door at once. On the days I'm at home, things are considerably more mellow, but of course I still have to get work things done around taking care of the Tot, so it can be stressful to try to steal moments to respond to papers and email and read for class.

I really shouldn't blog about this, I suppose, but (oh! how I want to) it's amazing to me how much people can just not know about effective teaching and teacher development. Active learning just hasn't occurred to these people. Apparently they think the way to get people to make things their own is to just yammer at them. Dear lord! I mean, I realize that most people with PhDs haven't gotten them by studying pedagogy, but I don't think it should require specialized study to figure out that you don't inspire people to make changes in their work and take up the baton by just talking at them for a number of hours. Makes me wonder about their own teaching. Okay, enough said.

So I woke up this morning just completely not wanting to do anything. Taking care of Tot is fine, but I didn't want to work. I was just grumpy and grumbly, especially about tomorrow being a work day. (Tot keeps up waking up in the middle of the night and wanting to nurse, which does nothing good to my ability to sleep.) Absurdist Lover had to go out on a shopping expedition, so when he came back he showed me a lovely chocolate bar that I can eat while working, then a DVD of Tombstone he bought to inspire me to get done quickly. I know. I have the most wonderful man in the world. But here I am in the other room and what happened to that chocolate bar? (Ooh, he just stopped in to tell me he was taking the Tot to go change the laundry -- and he's getting me the chocolate bar!) It's official. I am the luckiest woman in the world. But now that I've shared with him that I've been blogging, I really better get to those response papers. Absurdist Lover, Tot, and Val Kilmer are waiting. It's a hard life, but it's also very very good.

Good Friday

I'm working in slow motion, trying to ready myself for next week. Next week! Sigh. Absurdist Tot went from totally okay and running around during the day on Wednesday to snotty and watery-eyed Wednesday night. So no daycare yesterday. And today they're closed, but it doesn't matter because AT has green gunk coming out his nose and yellow out his eyes. Poor thing. He's napping now -- one of God's small miracles. Yesterday, we had to resort to sit up nursing because the pressure in his head when he was lying down made nursing impossible. Poor little guy.

So I did manage to get some work done yesterday -- solid progress toward the new quarter -- all thanks to Absurdist Lover. So with the wee bairn asleep in the middle of the floor and the beautiful day shut out (we'll take a walk later -- Absurdist Tot loves going out for walks), I'm asking myself what small step I could accomplish at this point that would make me feel a bit closer to the goal. Yesterday I managed to roughly outline the quarter -- wow, a quarter is a short period of time! I always worry that there are better readings out there somewhere, but clearly I won't be able to even use all the ones I'm excited about. Well, it's a new prep, an experiment. Some of my favorite classes (gosh, maybe all of them, now that I think about it) have been experiments. I guess I could start to order the stuff -- or I could start some of the other aspects of the syllabus. It's easier to just open a new tab and start looking for even more texts and films. I know! I wrote some stuff down longhand that needs to be typed. That kind of super-easy stuff is definitely what I should do. (They're actually learning objectives -- and our campus, like so many others, is very hip on including learning objectives on the syllabus.) So that's a big step in the right direction!

I made bread today, though this one looks funky. Mostly, we're just mopping up Absurdist Tot, though AL has his usual long list of projects keeping him busy.

By the way, if you need to laugh -- and who doesn't? -- read Paul Reiser's Babyhood. This guy knows what he's talking about -- but he's so frigging funny that I'm reading and trying to hold my laughter in so I don't wake the baby. It's the kind of funny because it's so true. Oh.my.god. So frigging funny.

***Update 5pm***

When I finally settled down into typing out those handwritten learning objectives I was talking about above, AT woke up from his nap crying. I was in the bedroom with the door open -- a pretty normal occurrence and he usually just toddles in to me, but this time he was looking for me in the kitchen and wailing. He had all this gunk coming out of his eyes. When I tried to open the blinds, he shut his eyes tight for ten minutes, even when we closed the blinds and put him down on his boppy, even when he was nursing. The gunk kept coming out of his eyes. AL suctioned his nose and two seconds later it was running green again. Really, he's about as sick as I've ever seen him, with big red eyes. When I went to call the doctor and handed him to AL, AT started wailing again. This is not my usual active child. He didn't want to be put down until, finally, he saw that he had unimpeded access to a couple of DVDs he likes to play with. Then I figured he would be okay. We started up Follow that Bird, and -- get this -- he looked to me when the Grouch's Anthem started up. (I like to sing it. See what kinds of madness I start?) I even got a glimpse of his usual sparkley-eyed self when I sang it. Now, he's watching Big Bird's adventures and hanging on to one of his socks. We now have a doctor's appointment for noon tomorrow. Poor guy.

Note to self: You can no longer wait until the last possible moment to write a syllabus, because that's when AT's going to get sick. Or you're going to get sick. Or whatever. Moms are more organized because of their extremely limited time. You're a mom now. It's time to realize that the last possible moment is about two weeks before you think it is.

The Count is counting the telephone poles. All is right in the world. ("Once you set your heart to moving on. . .there ain't no road too long." Words of wisdom.)

Beginnings: New Daycare, New Quarter

Absurdist Tot starts a new daycare tomorrow -- with a more regimented daily plan. He's such a wild kid, I can't tell whether it's going to be a complete no-go, making him feel confined and ruining his sunny disposition, or whether he'll thrive in more structure than Absurdist Lover and I are good at providing. This place has a lot of art and music, gymnastics and outside time. So he may well thrive. I hope so. Why am I the one who is nervous?

I really hope he doesn't cry when I leave; I just hate that.

Tomorrow officially starts spring break, which means I've got to use the time to high-tail it and wrest the spring quarter under control. Learning objectives. Syllabi. Plans. All that. Not that I haven't been taking notes and planning and researching and thinking and rethinking. But I haven't written my syllabi, finalized exactly which readings to include, things like that. I certainly haven't mapped it all onto the quarter calendar. It all begins again tomorrow.

I long for the sleepy winter, everything blanketed under snow, with good excuses to stay in and hunker down. I must wake from my winter hibernation. Some hibernation -- I've been tired the whole time! Back to walking back and forth between my classroom, the women's bathroom, and my office for hours on end. Back to teaching. Back to trying to find time to get scholarship done. This winter, instead of pumping out some articles, I crocheted up a storm, worked on a huge cross-stitch project for AT, taught myself how to bake bread, cooked a lot. Started working out a little bit. Spent a lot of time with the tot. Spent some quality time with AL. Went away to a conference which reminded me how lucky I am, for all my grumblings about how hard it is to be a working mom, an academic mom, a mom mom, a mom on the tenure track. I'm very lucky. Even very barely squeaking by financially and incurring the irk of my Urban City family, I'm very lucky. Even though it is certainly difficult to balance everything, I'm still very very blessed.

How Different I've Become -- and Coping with ADD

Sssshhhhhh. I'm up here. In my hotel room, far away from the rooms where the sessions are taking place. I can see y'all in your smart suits, geek tags swinging. I'll be back down there with you soon enough.

Yes, I'm at a conference. I flew in today, leaving home at scary early in the morning after practically no sleep. After weeks of looking forward to this conference for the hotel room and not having someone bang on the door when I'm in the bathroom and having the luxury of taking a bath, I just miss AT so much. I just never knew I could love someone so much that it feels wrong to be away from him. I miss AL too. And my life of baking bread and crochet and finding organic stores and farms with AL and walking with AT to see the geese. I thought it would be good to get away, and I realize that the good of leaving is to realize how much I miss them. Yesterday, I was sad just thinking about leaving. I've run into a couple colleagues from grad school days already -- and I realize how different my priorities are now -- not in terms of the conference (I'm not good at all the glad-handing and networking of conferences -- I just prefer to sit down and have longer conversations with people rather than the quickie who-are-you-and-what-do-you-do stuff and have always been that way), but in terms of my life. It's weird but nice to think how I've changed. I wish I could feel more comfortable in those changes, but I think more sleep is probably key to feeling better in a bunch of ways. One of the colleagues I ran into and I commiserated about how being a parenting academic means feeling you're doing everything half-assed. It's so nice hearing that come out of someone who always looked, at least, like s/he knew what hir was doing. Maybe this is just what a parenting academic looks like. I mean. . . this is what it looks like! Anyway, this is what I look like -- and there's nothing wrong with it. No more of this mental toxic sludge! Just stop!

I had this classic moment at the airport. I was reading this fabulous-looking book on ADD that was talking about all this mental toxic sludge that goes on in our heads when we're just ADD when I booted up my phone and it said 7:30am, the time my connecting flight was supposed to leave. Which means that I had been blissfully reading the book as if I had all the time in the world -- for over an hour! I freaked out. Dropped the book and started down the hallway back to my gate. Luckily, it was just that my phone hadn't yet registered the time change and I was fine. But that freak-out like I could've been flipping through this book for more than an hour felt totally real -- and totally ADD. Just zoning so totally out that I have no idea how much time has elapsed. If I needed proof of my own ADD, there it was. In the book, they were talking about a state I know very well: Overwhelm. I get overwhelmed pretty easily -- or it's that my brain races and worries and obsesses so I'm overwhelmed early, way ahead of schedule. Obsessing is the one thing I don't procrastinate.

Right now, I'm too tired for true Overwhelm, but as always I'm having trouble figuring out what to do (and so I blog -- sorry everyone). I did a great job (if I say so myself) revising my presentation on paper on the flights, so now I need to incorporate those changes into the file and figure out where to print it. (Note to self: Don't forget again that you are a paper person! Revising on paper is doable, if wasteful. Just do as Anne Lamott says and plant trees and give it up already! Work with not against your natural proclivities, girlfriend, as I'd say to any of my friends.) Do I do it right now, when I'm tired, but not really sleepy enough to take the nap I surely desperately need? Or do I turn on the TV and trust that after a couple stressful days I will surely zone out and conk out asap? Why can't I ever make a decision? (ADD.) The book said when overwhelmed to back up and get back to a decent mental state. Which requires sleep. So TV and sleep, here I come. See? I can follow directions. Which maybe means I'm not ADD. Ha ha ha.

Daycare Update and Things Are Springing (Slowly) Forward

It's ironic that I began last Thursday's blogpost with my concerns about our daycare over the long term, because by the end of the day we decided we really can't take Absurdist Tot back there. When we went to pick him up, the person in charge told us that AT had a big mark on his eye that they found after his nap, but even though he asked the morning person and researched whether there was anything in the nap area that could've caused it, they found nothing. He said this before we saw AT, as the little ones are not in the front room. When we saw AT, it looked awful. Not only was his eye puffy, but he had big sort of square splotches above his eyebrow. How could they not know what caused it?

Now, I've certainly had my back turned with AT when he smashed into things. He's a very active little boy. But I can put two and two together afterward and surmise what must've happened. I'm not that upset that he got hurt at daycare, or even terribly surprised that it happened when someone's back was turned, but how could they not figure it out? It was bad enough that it looked like AT must've cried when it happened. And as AL quite rightly pointed out, they didn't call us about it, even though they must've known about it for hours before we picked him up. What if he had needed a doctor? Since this is on top of some other icky vibes we've gotten, we're not taking him back there. So we have no daycare now and are searching, again, for a place that will deal with us with the food. We had seen some other decent places when we were searching before, but it's hard for me to feel good about putting him in a place where he's going to get non-organic food, not because I think somehow I'm going to keep his little system pure, but because I just want him to have the best I can get for him -- and if he's going to get pesticide-ridden things in daycare, then it's going to be on a regular basis rather than the occasional bad thing. The more good food he gets, the stronger his system will be. The more his little liver is trying to rid him of bad things, the less energy his body puts into things like growing and developing.

The strange thing is that I feel sad about leaving our old daycare. But I know it's for the best, because the caregiver we really felt confident about was only there for a halfday anyway. And I don't feel as confident about the other caregivers, especially because it really seems like they have just too many kids and not enough caregivers. The prospect of looking for a new daycare leaves me feeling deflated. I'm trying, again, to find out where the granolaheads send their kids, but I'm afraid the answer at his age is either expensive (private nannies) or impossible (staying home). But in the time it took to write that AL called up a new (to us) place and asked about opting out of the snacks -- and they volunteered that it was fine because they have a number of kids on organic-only diets. Cross your fingers. It's a Christian daycare, and in the past that would've been a complete no-go for me, but now I'm so confused about religion that. . .I just don't know. The new organic co-op we found has a box of prayer requests, so maybe. . .I just have no idea.

Both Absurdist Lover and Tot are sick. AT has not been sleeping well, which means I'm not sleeping well -- and I spent a number of hours lying in bed thinking about my elective, thinking while ostensibly doing something else being the operative way I work nowadays. I don't feel like a good academic just now. I don't feel like my classes are prepped as much as they should be by now. Sigh. Next week, when Absurdist Lover is well, I'll ask him to watch AT more so I can get stuff done. AL reminded me recently that I should ask him to watch AT so I can do supportive and restorative things for me too. We put a hopeful sum away for me to buy a car. AL is likely starting his own business. We're determined to be more positive. So good things are happening over here. Spring has sprung, and I long to be outside more. We're trying to find more community. It's all just sort of slow going right this second. The daycare thing is a drag, but we'll figure it out -- and maybe this new place will be much more in line with us.

Big changes may be afoot in my department -- and I have some things to say about them to the bigwigs proposing the changes. (I'm not against them, but I want more explanation for some particular curricular revisions they're proposing, since I've been trying to get some curricular revision done around some particular courses -- and it's clear they're not thinking what I'm thinking.) It feels a big David-and-Goliathy but probably only in my own head. Imposter syndrome. The young mother in jeans against the men in suits. It's just me. I'm smart, dammit! I'm going to start daily affirmations or something. This imposter syndrome has got to stop. I need to be a good academic, professional, and colleague -- and I can't do that if I feel like I shouldn't say anything until after tenure. No. That's not who I am. It's just hard to have so much on the line. (And all this hand-wringing in my first year. Ee gads!)