Now what?

Some of you have noticed the sharp decline in posts over the past year.  I've scarcely managed to put out anything.  Why is that, you wonder?

Let's take a stop in at the Cheerios Garden and find out.

Rewind back to December 2007.  I did that whole birthing thing on the last day of the year.  A week later, my darling husband went back to school to work on finishing his Bachelors degree.  He worked full time and took 1 or 2 classes every semester until May of 2010.  It was difficult, but we managed it.  We thought we had it hard then.

Over the summer of 2010, Andrew (that's DH) attempted to job hunt and interviewed all over the country.  We had no idea what we were going to be doing in a few months.  We had an upstairs neighboring family that repeatedly came home late at night and allowed their young children to use the Wii Fit at insane hours.  We traveled to Georgia with our child for several days.  And after enjoying all that stress in his first semester off in 2 and a half years, Andrew came down with shingles, hardcore, and spent the worse part of a month in painful agony.

What does that have to do with my blogging?  Well, I kept up okayish during that time.  I made some posts as I could, despite spending a good deal of my time picking up the parenting/household maintenance slack and being in chronic pain (n.b. I had been suffering from a spinal injury to my neck from December 2006 still).

And then in the fall of 2010, Andrew started graduate school.  He disappeared even more from our lives.  Shortly thereafter, my pain level had finally subsided, miraculously, after nearly 4 years of chronic pain.  I actually had some days each week in which I felt human again. (That's also gone again; I was rear-ended again this May, with new injuries, and I'm still in physical therapy twice a week.)

And a couple of weeks later, Jackson stopped napping.

Guess which had the most effect on my blogging?

He was about 2 months shy of his 3rd birthday, and Jackson went from napping 3 hours a day while I rested and blogged, to zilch.  To make matters worse, he sometimes would really need a nap, and I would let him take one....  If I woke him after a short nap, he turned into a gremlin.  If I let him sleep a full 2 and a half or 3 hours, he woke refreshed and didn't feel the least bit tired until some time after midnight--at which point, I started turning into a gremlin.

This cycle continued for a few months.  MONTHS.  Do you understand how long that is?  We went from a predictable, easy, daily schedule that was naturally maintained and preserved as sacred to this horrid cycle of unpredictability.  There was no winning.  No matter what we did, someone was going to lose, and it was usually all of us.

But mostly, and this may be me being egocentric, I feel like I was the one who lost.  I lost my time to myself.  I lost peace and healing rest.  I lost my blogging hours.  Right now, I'm trying to write this with Andrew sitting next to me, and I had to ask him to STFU and not interrupt.  But I feel like a jerk because this is nearly 10pm on a Friday.  It should be OUR time.

But it's never my time anymore.  Ever.

I didn't realize just how little "me" time I'd been getting until about a month ago.  I was scheduled to go for a moms' night out (MNO) with some other mom friends.  And much as I love their company and our little infrequent gatherings (usually about 3x per year at most), there was this selfish little homonculus talking in my head, saying, "Don't go.  Just find a quiet place to sit and do nothing.  You'll love it!"

Well, I did go, and I really did have a great time.  But what about me?  Well, I took the advice of that homonculus, finally.

Last week, we went to a pumpkin patch as a family.  It's a fairly lame one, so I'm told, but it has a bounce house and a hay wagon pulled by a tractor, which is plenty enough for Jackson to be content.  The pumpkin patch, such as it is, gets held by the church on whose grounds it occupies each year.  This was our 3rd year attending and the first time I'd noticed a "Meditation Walk" sign at the edge of a woody area.

I informed Andrew that my phone was left at home and that he was going to be on duty while our spawn enjoyed shaking his brains in the bounce house.  And I went to explore this Meditation Walk place.

I was expecting more of a walk in terms of distance, but what I got was much better.  There was a stream that was partially underground, partially exposed.  There were dead tree branches suspended in midair by their living compatriots.  There were enormous Tarzan-swing-able vines hanging ubiquitously.  And I was all by myself.  It was delicious.

I had no clock, watch, cell phone, computer, or anything of the sort.  I sat and thought about my life.  I thought about things that were making me happy.  I thought about things that were stressing my brain.  I thought about things I wanted to change or to be able to change.  I allowed myself not to worry about my son.  I allowed myself not to worry about my husband.  For a brief span, it was just about me and how I felt.

Then I heard my name being shouted irritably, "Jessica!"  I got up and brushed off the dirt and dragged myself back out of such a glorious place.

I'd had my 45 minutes.  It was time to go back to the Real World.

I hadn't really resolved anything other than that I need more time to just breathe and be me.  We have 14 more months until Andrew finishes his masters degree.  I have forbidden him to even consider a doctoral program.  Jackson will be nearly 5 when Andrew gets this degree, having known his father as a perpetual student and part-time figure in his life, his entire life.

What will I do when I no longer have to be a parent and three quarters?  Will I write more?  Will I meditate?  Will I learn French (which I've been putting off)?  Will I learn guitar?  Will anything change?

I'll have to see where I am in another 14 months.  Until then, I'm sorry for the limited posts.  I know some of you have depended on me to demonstrate the grossness and absurdness of parenting.  Some of you have even told me how helpful I've been by writing this blog.  You guys are awesome.  Seriously.

So please, baby, understand, it's not you, it's me.  It's just that I've got this thing in my life right now, and all, and it's not that I don't love you, baby.  It's not that at all.  And if it really bothers you...come babysit my kid so I can get some writing time! <3

Things I Never Expected Before I Was a Parent

Among the many things one does expect to encounter when becoming a parent there are sprinkled a great many other things that are completely unexpected. Every mother or father has moments of exasperation or shock that "this is really happening to me" or "I really did just do that!" Here are some of the things the pre-pregnancy me would not have guessed I'd find myself doing a short while later:

1. Enjoy changing a diaper
2. Become violently ill from changing a diaper
3. Stay at home beyond 6 months postpartum without working
4. Sit on the toilet with diarrhea while nursing a baby
5. Completely change lifelong sleep habits
6. Not be able to sleep at times just because I was expecting my child to wake during the night
7. Enjoy snuggle time with a sick baby
8. Buy my kid a loud and annoying toy
9. Eat food that had been half-chewed by someone else first and then spit into my hand or on the floor
10. Nurse a baby for 13 months without pumping bottles
11. Go for more than a year before hiring a babysitter--and even then only for a doctor's appointment
12. Co-sleep with a child
13. Give birth to a nearly 10lb baby with no drugs
14. Allow an almost-12-month-old baby to transition from crib to queen sized bed
15. Surrender the living room furniture (futon) to the baby's room
16. Put the baby in the master suite and take the "other" bedroom for my spouse and me
17. Go an entire year only trimming the baby's fingernails 3 times total
18. Have complete sympathy with parents who rage out on their kids--just takes sufficient additional stress in one's life to push someone in an already trying situation over the edge
19. Write a mom blog
20. Allow my child to regularly eat food from the floor
21. Allow my child to use a pacifier that had been on the floor without first cleaning it in some manner (other than to dust off the big chunks)
22. Spend an entire 3 hour napping period for the baby just looking at pictures of him in his photo albums
23. Teach my child basic sign language
24. Let my kid scream at restaurants without acknowledging it
25. Begin potty training my baby before he could speak two-word sentences

There are so many other things to add to this list, to be sure, but in all honesty this is really just a filler post to help me while I build back up a buffer of posts. Comments made on this post expressing opinion (positive, negative, or neutral) or similar thoughts about unexpected parenting behaviors would be much appreciated.