Sticks and Stars

It’s bedtime and I really should be going to bed but I feel a little like blogging so I’m going to do that instead. Although I’m going to try to be quick, too.

Tonight is night one of my boys’ new bedtime routine. I’m reading this parenting book that I don’t really like, partly because in a book of many hundreds of pages, I think I’ve found maybe ten of them actually useful, and partly because the authors either don’t have children or are those kind of people who have a trillion friends who love nothing more than coming over to hang out with their kids or whisk them away for playdates so that the authors can have lots and lots of sanity-saving free time and lots and lots of unrealistic expectations about the patience levels of mere human beings. But anyway, one of the things I did get out of this book (and probably tons of other books, but this time it’s sticking) is the idea to establish a bedtime routine. In general we kind of have a half-assed bedtime routine but that often means we skip out on important things and the half-assedness of it means that more often than not there is yelling, maybe from me, maybe not. So I thought that a real, official bedtime routine might make things progress more smoothly (and not result in my kids staying up until I go to bed after endless rounds of whack-a-mole where I whack them down and they just pop right back up again).

I planned to institute the routine a couple weeks ago when I first read about it, but key to the routine is having a visual aid for them to follow, apparently. No, not a chart with stars or stickers because that just teaches them that the only reason to do something is to get a reward (or so says the book), just a visual aid so that they can follow along with the steps and know where they are in the process. But the chart I envisioned included photos of them doing each task (or so demanded the book), which meant a) getting them to do each task, most likely many times until I finally remembered to take a photo, b) uploading the photos to my computer (not so hard, but more work than not doing it), and c) either hooking my printer up to my computer and dealing with the myriad problems that will arise before I am allowed to print anything or finding some other means for printing. I can tell just from typing this list that it’s too much work, so indeed, the visual aid problem stalled the whole process. Eventually I thought that I could just find images online of some other children performing the same activities and as long as they were boys and had dark, shaggy hair, my boys probably wouldn’t notice the difference, but still, that wouldn’t resolve the printing issue.

After many annoying bedtimes came and went, I realized that I needed to be a little more resourceful about this whole process. I recalled that we are a modern, 21st century family and so we needed a modern, 21st century solution. That’s right, a visual aid in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. I slapped that puppy together yesterday afternoon, each bedtime task lovingly illustrated with a cartoon animal performing said task (thank you Google image search), and just as I suspected, the boys were thrilled to see their bedtime routine on our tv, and the most exciting treat I could bestow upon either of them was choosing who got to flip to the next slide.

I definitely think there’s something to be said for bedtime routines. Usually our bedtime routine starts at about 8 with me telling the boys to start getting ready for bed and sighing inwardly because I know they will not, not, not. Then we spend the next one to two hours engaged in various levels of battle until finally I collapse in defeat onto my bed, at which point they dance around me just to prove their point and eventually heap themselves on top of me and fall asleep. But tonight I announced that it was time to start the routine at 7:30 (thinking that it would take so much longer since there are so many more items than what we usually get done) and they were in bed by 8. No, they didn’t stay in bed, but I kept my cool and didn’t yell and calmly and kindly addressed all issues that arose and they were asleep by 9. Granted, we went swimming this afternoon, which always exhausts them, but still, in their room by 8 feels pretty damned amazing to me.

Last night, for the first time in forever, I actually laid down and fell asleep. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night and actually went back to sleep. This morning my alarm woke me and although I was very tired, more tired than I usually feel when my alarm goes off, I figured that I have a lot of sleep to get caught up on after weeks of insomnia, so that seems reasonable. It wasn’t until I was up and checking my email (a gentle way to ease myself into my day, particularly when I feel extra tired) that I realized that I had managed to thwart myself again and had accidentally set my alarm for an hour earlier than usual.

Sigh.

But at least I had time to get a few extra things done this morning, like my school paper that I had intended to finish last night but hadn’t on account of small children and the many, many, many ways they can be distracting, and the dishes that I’m trying to keep up with every day. The other day as I was washing the dishes I thought absently to myself that someone really should invent a machine that washes dishes, I would so love to have one of those, until I remembered that, oh yeah, someone has invented one, I’m just not lucky enough to have one.

Sigh.

Sometimes I feel that dishes are the bane of my existence, that if I just didn’t have to do dishes, my quality of life would be so greatly improved. Except I know that’s not really true. If I had a dishwasher the bane of my existence would merely shift to something else, most likely my dirty, dirty floors. I’m pretty sure that if I picked up all the cereal underneath my kitchen table that I’d have an entire box. And I could probably scrape up and reconstitute enough dried, spilled milk to sufficiently serve with the cereal.

Sigh.

I mentioned that things have been somewhat dramatic at work and unfortunately the drama recently turned from not-necessarily-bad to what-the-fuck!? with people quitting and threatening to quit and emotions running fairly high and me holding out my hands and imploring, “Can’t we all just get along?!?” Luckily it all has nothing to do with me, I just find myself in the mediating middle in some cases and on the uninvolved-but-still-affected periphery in others. Today I am alone in my little cube pod, my other three cube-mates having either already quit, being on the verge of quitting, or just out sick. It’s not making me feel much like working, I’ll tell you that much.

Sigh.

Insomnia is kicking my butt. I don’t know why I’m having it so bad these past few weeks but lately I can’t fall asleep and I can’t stay asleep no matter how tired I am, and let me tell you, I’m getting pretty tired. I just cannot stop my brain from race, race, racing every time I have a quiet moment. Work, school, work, my boys, work, my boys’ dad, work. I guess mostly it’s work. And really, there’s nothing wrong with work, there’s just a lot going on, a lot of drama (not necessarily the bad kind), a lot of change, a lot of impending drama and a lot of impending change. I like change and I don’t even mind drama (or at least the not necessarily bad kind), but it’s letting the mice use my brain for a running wheel and I can’t get them to stop. Apparently mice do not need sleep either, or at least they need less than me.

I started my school program this week (should have been last week but they lost my shit in the mail) and I must say, it’s so fascinating! I love doing the work: I love my reading assignments and my exercises and the papers I have to write. In fact, I’ll be writing a paper tonight if I can manage to pry off the leeches for a few minutes.

The program takes a year to complete (although it’s online and work-at-your-own-pace, so I hope to be done sooner) and my first quarter covers the history of information technology (like, from the beginning of documented history) and the history of the Internet, and then HTML/XHTML and CSS. Even in just this short few days I’ve already learned so much, much more than I was expecting. I forget how much I love being in school until I’m back in it, but I really love school so much, in particular having the excuse to learn something new and the structure to make sure it happens.

Well, I was kind of hoping to wait until I finished my 100 (more or less) things before writing my first post but I’m not even half done and it’s been over a week and it seems like there’s always something like this that comes up and prevents me from doing any number of things I want or need to do, so fuck it, I’ll just post anyway.

So here we are, a new blog, a new month (okay, not a new month), and a new me (okay, really just the same old me). I kind of want to just pick up where my old blog left off, with random posts about my general level of tiredness and my job and what fruit I recently purchased, but at the same time, given that this is a whole new blog, I sort of feel the need to write something introductory. Perhaps just a summary of the state of affairs at this very moment? Okay, let’s go with that.

At this very moment I am tired. It feels like I’ve been tired for weeks and weeks, and probably that’s true. I’ve been sleeping terribly, unable to fall asleep and unable to stay asleep. Luckily being completely exhausted smooths down my temper and gently lays me down in a bed of calm serenity. It would really suck if being exhausted made me bitchier and more impatient and more likely to yell and less likely to keep my house clean or keep up with rest of my life.

I think it’s just a downward cycle that will maybe start spiraling back upwards soon. Or at least I hope that’s the case. Really, there are a number of things contributing to it, and really, I should probably spend some time thinking about ways to resolve these problems. But really, in all likeliness it will take every bit of my motivation just to get my dishes and laundry done this weekend, so that may not leave much time for any sort of problem resolution. I kind of think if I could just get my house clean, really clean, then I’d feel much, much better, but it’s so dirty and grimy and messy that even merely thinking about the work it would take to get it clean is entirely too exhausting.

You know, as I sit here lost in thought between each paragraph I type, I’m thinking that I really should spend some time this weekend figuring shit out, figuring out what I can do to get rid of the cracker crumbs and dirt that I’m finding in this bed I’ve made and am now lying in. Often my solution for feeling stressed out and overwhelmed is to make a(n almost entirely useless and mostly ignored) to do list, but maybe this time I’ll try something different. I’m not sure what though. Well…maybe it will come to me during my insomnia witching hours, my brain certainly races along at those times.

I feel compelled to be productive today but pretty thoroughly incapable of carrying it out. I did make blueberry pancakes for breakfast this morning, so that’s something. That’s one thing I love about summer. I made two batches of raspberry muffins this past week, blueberry pancakes this morning, and strawberry freezer jam after this afternoon’s trip to the farmer’s market. My mom used to make freezer jam every year and I liked the idea, the pioneer (plus freezers) feel of it, so once I was on my own, I started making it too. However, one or two people can only eat so much jam. It wasn’t until I had two peanut butter and jam loving children that I really appreciated why one might want stacks of freezer jam cluttering up the freezer. And indeed, once I buy another lemon, I’ll make another batch of raspberry jam too. Thank goodness freezer jam requires almost no effort.

I set myself up a wordpress blog last night and stayed up late playing with it. I had no idea that you don’t have to host your own wordpress blog anymore so that was a pleasant surprise. No bother with registering a domain and finding a webhost. Once I manage to get some content up I’ll let you know. Although I don’t plan to keep the blog so carefully anonymous (that’s what the password protected posts will be for), I think I might still have people specifically request the url rather than just posting it so that I know who’s reading, at least in the beginning.

Five years and five blogs.

My two year old talks so much. I have no idea at what level he should be speaking (and frankly, I don’t care, he’s speaking a hell of a lot more than his brother was at this age, and that’s enough for me) but he uses tons and tons of sentences and is really good at communicating what he wants and needs and how he feels. One thing I adore in particular (which does not at all relate to what he wants, needs, or feels) is how he doesn’t call me “Mama” but instead calls me “Mom Mom.” Last night, after a long and tiring day on a number of fronts, when I was tiredly nursing him down and trying not to express my impatience with his constant desire to jump up and play instead of peacefully falling asleep, he stopped nursing, flung himself onto his back and said, “Mom Mom, I yuv you,” for the very first time.

Everybody say it with me: Awwwwwww!

I adore my little two year old. He is pure sweetness and joy with only a hint of mischievousness. Okay…maybe more than a hint, but even in the midst of feeling frustrated when he gleefully kicks and kicks while I try to put pants on him or when he runs away in the midst of a diaper change, I still see the sweetness and joy. He’s just happy, that’s all.

I’m finding that, at least when it comes to my boys, two year olds are infinitely easier than five year olds, but my five year old brings his own sweet adorableness. One thing I want to be sure to write down lest I forget as the years pass is his love of the word “lobby.” A while back we read Beverly Cleary’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle, which takes place in a hotel. I think this might have been the first time my son heard the word lobby and when I read it he interrupted me and said, incredulously, “The lobby?!?” And then burst out laughing. He thinks it is the funniest word he has ever heard and any utterance of it immediately reduces him to fits of giggles. Even now, months later, when the word casually comes up in some random context, he stops everything and shouts, “the lobby!!!” and dies laughing. It is so adorably funny to watch him be so greatly amused by something that is amusing just to his own little individual self. I loving seeing that evidence of his personality every time it happens.

Today is the kind of day when I wish I could password protect posts. I think I will have to pursue the ability to do that because I’ve been thinking of all the things I could write about if I felt freer to write, and there are a lot. And I think it would be very useful for me to get my shit out there because if nothing else, writing helps me process and think things through, and my blog is the only place I write.

Today I am merely tired, so that’s making everything seem much more terrible and dramatic than it really is, but it still feels that way right now and bedtime is a ways away yet.

I need to get more sleep.

I’ve finally decided what I want to be when I grow up (aside from a grown up, of course) and I feel pretty excited to finally have a path. Ever since I started on this new techie journey I’ve been so certain that it’s right for me but less clear about where I should go, what I should aim for. I knew pretty clearly what I could expect in my old path (nonprofit management/administration) but this new path walks me through a foreign land and the local customs are unfamiliar and somewhat unwelcoming. I keep asking people what I should do, what jobs I should look for, what knowledge I should obtain, whether I need to go back to school, but their answers are always, “Well, it really depends on what you want to ultimately do,” and that’s not the answer I’m looking for.

Last night I took the plunge and registered myself for a certificate program offered by my local big university. It’s “Web Development Technologies” or something like that and while I usually shy away from the whole idea of a flimsy, flakey little certificate (as opposed to a big, heavy, solid, something-to-stub-your-toe-on degree) I feel like the fact that it’s offered by my well-reputed university, in an area for which my university is particularly well-reputed, is a good sign. Plus, I need some help. Yesterday at work my boss sent an email suggesting a solution to a programming problem we’re facing. He asked for my feedback and I not only had absolutely nothing to offer, I didn’t even understand the functions of the code well enough to fully understand the problem. This certificate program will give me a good foundation in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL and PHP and, even more importantly, how they all fit together. Some of it will definitely be review (although the SQL will be mySQL instead of PostgreSQL (what I use now) so at least that’s something) but I figure that even if I already know a good number of HTML tags and a tiny drop of CSS and a big bunch of SQL and a cup and a half of PHP, this program will fill in the gaps and make the connections that keep me pulling up short at work these days. I’m excited and hopeful (although I can’t deny that part of my excitement is having an excuse to buy books).

When I was walking back to work after my lunch break I was thinking about a coworker’s response when I shared my new educational pursuit. I could tell she wanted to be supportive but that she thought it was unnecessary to do something like this when I should learn all of this in the course of my job (apparently she missed the fact that I’m not actually learning in the course of my job…or at least not much faster than at a glacial pace). I was mulling over the certificate program and whether I thought it would be a good addition to my resume and was picturing it on my resume except I couldn’t remember the title and could only remember something like “web developer” and then it sort of hit me that, DUH, this is what I want to do when I grow up! I want to be a web developer. I want to design databases and write PHP (and more) to build websites. I want to do the job I have now, except more so (and better). For some reason I’ve been thinking that I could either go the route of becoming a database administrator or I could go the route of becoming a programmer, and it made me sad that I couldn’t have both because I really love both. But duh, this *is* both.

Always before when I considered web-related work (yes, I’ve considered it, along with pretty much every other career out there), it was web design and making things pretty. I shied away from back-end development because it seemed so dry, so absolutely lacking in artistic merit. Of course, I see it differently now. Yes, still not much artistic merit I suppose, but oh so creative! And oh so well paid rewarding! I look forward to walking this path.

When I joined my gym I got a free session with a personal trainer. The session was kind of annoying because he was kind of condescending (”Wow, you’re doing so great we might just have to hire you on a staff and give you a t-shirt like mine! Har har har!!”) but I did learn a couple of things about how to work out more effectively and about nutrition. This came at the same time I happened to be reading a book about nutrition, or rather a book about “intuitive eating,” the notion that society has beaten out of us our natural instincts around food and if we start actually listening to our bodies instead of following the latest supposed health craze, we will eat exactly what our bodies need and be healthier as a result. I’m not necessarily so concerned about heating “healthier” per se, but I am interested in training myself to pay attention to the cues of my body instead of whatever random food rules/neuroses I’ve internalized from our culture at large and so the book provided interesting fodder.

Both the nutrition-related personal training and the intuitive eating information suggested that the best way to eat during the day is to essentially eat all the time. Condescending Personal Trainer said six times a day (”But no carbs at night and nothing after dinner and a huge breakfast in the morning and [many other rules I almost immediately tuned out]“) and the intuitive eating book said whenever I get hungry (the key, of course, being to pay careful attention so that I recognize that onset of hunger, rather than waiting until I am a starved wild animal when my eating becomes less…discriminating).

So for the past few weeks I’ve been giving it a try (heavier on the intuitive eating than on the personal training) and it’s been interesting. I eat breakfast in the morning whether I’m hungry or not but after that I wait until my body cues me. I find that I’m constantly thinking about whether or not I’m hungry, but I suppose that’s to be expected because I’m trying to figure it out after so long of trying to ignore it and argue with it. In general, my body seems to cue me to eat about every two hours (sometimes more or less depending on what I eat), and in response I eat some kind of snack (for example, a few of today’s snacks included yogurt and a raspberry muffin, cherries and string cheese and pretzels, a Hot Pocket and sugar snap peas). After I eat I check to see if I’m still hungry and eat a little more if I am…although usually I’m not. Sometimes I want to snack when I’m not hungry and it’s very interesting to check in with myself, recognize that I’m not actually hungry, and try to figure out why I want to eat. Usually, I’m just bored but sometimes there’s something tasty in my kitchen (like a pound of Rainier cherries) and I want a bite (or two…or three). If I want to, I’ll eat anyway, but when I want to eat out of boredom I usually try to find something else to do instead (because eating is not going to make me less bored), and when I want to eat because there’s something enticingly tasty to be eaten, it’s nice to be able to appreciate that, to know that I am eating for the sheer pleasure of the sweet firm ripeness of Rainier cherries instead of just to fill my mouth.

Just to clarify, this is not any sort of diet. I eat when I want and I eat what I want. The only difference is that I pay attention to what my body is telling me, how I feel before and after I eat and why I feel like eating. The results, though, have been pretty amazing. Until I started this experiment, I never realized the pattern of my day. I’d skip breakfast, be starving by 11am, force myself to wait until 1pm, wolf down a huge lunch, be sleepy and sluggish all afternoon, get hungry just before leaving work, be starving by the time I got home with the boys, wolf down anything in reaching distance while fixing the boys dinner and then continue snacking through the evening. Now that I’m eating all the time, my days are so even and I feel so much more productive. I never realized how distracting it was to feel so hungry during the day and so tired in the afternoon. It’s also a lot easier to make better choices about food. Since I have to plan in advance to make sure I have enough food to last the day, I have the opportunity to choose a tasty and wholesome range of food instead of grasping at whatever’s closest. And since I eat as soon as I notice that I’m hungry instead of when I’m starving, I’m happy to eat a reasonable portion instead of feeling like I need to desperately scarf down everything in sight.

I have no idea if it’s related, but I’ve also been in a better mood and felt like I had more energy since I started eating this way. And my usual PMS symptoms of a sweet tooth gone wild were completely gone this month, gone to the point that I was shocked to find myself bleeding this weekend because I entirely missed my week long binge.

Now that I’ve been doing this for a few weeks I’ve gotten into the mindset of trusting my body and it’s so bizarre to me that I used to not trust it, that I used to think that my feelings of hunger were trying to work against me, trying to make me ever fatter, and that some random rule from sources unknown about when I should eat was taking precedence over what my body was telling me. It seems so silly that I would choose some random food commandments from a clearly eating disordered society over millions of years of evolution. And really, I thought I had pretty good politics around food and eating. But at first I still thought that if I allowed myself to eat whatever and whenever I wanted, I would never stop eating. And let me tell you, while I work to accept my (fat) body every day, I sure as hell don’t want to be any fatter. But lo and behold, I actually feel like my relationship to my body is improving now that I’m listening to it and that my relationship with food is becoming healthy for maybe the first time in my life. I don’t have to eat everything because I can truly have whatever I want, whenever I want it. I always thought I gave myself that permission, but really I didn’t. Really, I still felt guilty about eating certain foods or certain amounts or at certain times of day or whatever. This change is pretty cool, I must say.

The thing that I hate about blogging these days is that I feel like I’m being watched. Ever since my boys’ dad starting threatening to use the contents of various posts as justification for taking my boys away from me, I’ve felt pretty stifled. I don’t know that he reads this blog and I’d like to naively think that he respects my wishes that he not, but given the veritable treasure trove of incriminating evidence he might imagine finding on my “anonymous” blog, I can’t imagine he’d stay away. And this blog wouldn’t be hard to find, especially if he was specifically looking.

He’s not currently making threats. That ended months ago and although I am intensely wary of our current interactions, we are managing civil conversation (as long as we avoid everything but the most banal of topics). I still don’t trust it though, and I certainly don’t trust that anything I post on my blog, anything that could possibly reflect me in less than a saintly light of perfection, won’t be twisted against me at some yet unnamed future date.

I really hate blogging like this. I start blogging about something, anything, and I start feeling more and more tense. I delete and rewrite and delete and rewrite and eventually I just stop writing because it feels too dangerous. What angle am I missing? What small detail am I overlooking that could lead to my downfall? I feel pressured to write only posts about my good examples of mothering or my good examples of [insert endless array of topic demonstrating that I am a mature, highly competent adult]. And of course, I really am a highly competent adult, but I always think of my blog as the place where I can let my hair down, snarls and gummy tangles and split ends and all.

I desperately want to blog about the difficulties of parenting. Right now my five year old is having a rough time and as a result we are all having a rough time. I am handling it as best I can and when I can step back and look at it objectively, I don’t think I’m doing a bad job, maybe even a good job despite the fact that nothing I’m doing is working. But I really want to blog about it all and I can’t. Because of course, if my five year old is having a hard time, it must be my fault, right? It must be evidence of my terrible, terrible parenting that my children aren’t specimens of perfect emotional health, that their every moment isn’t peaceful, serene, precocious wisdom. Of course, I am saying that facetiously, but I know for sure that’s what their dad thinks. He’s made it clear on many occasions that everything bad is my fault and everything good is good in spite of my poisonous contamination.

The hardest thing about parenting alone (or one of the hardest anyway) is not having anyone to help you have context, to help you see that other parents aren’t perfect either, to back you up in the choices you make. I find myself constantly, constantly reading between the lines of all parenting tales I encounter to see whether I am the only one who [insert potentially questionable behavior here]. It’s much harder, though, when you feel like someone else is watching too, waiting for you to slip up and reveal your ordinary, well-intentioned, imperfect horrendously abusive ways.

I don’t know what to do about this. Do I create a super duper secret blog somewhere else and never reveal even the most vaguely identifying information? Do I just stop blogging and give up this form of expression that I’ve been doing almost every day for the past five years (almost exactly five)? I don’t know. But that’s why I blog less than I ever used to and why I never post about anything interesting. Just so you know.