This one's for you, lady of the major histrionics.

Parenting pro tip: if, when your kid is having surgery, you feel the need to make the experience all about you, you're doing it wrong.

Off

Last night on call was strangely pleasant. No one tried to kick me or rip anything out of themselves. No one tried to die. The one person who was supposed to be sick was greatly improved by a change of scenery. The pain service pager went off blessedly infrequently. And yet I could not manage more than three hours of (third-rate) sleep. Partly the problem is that I just don't sleep well when I'm on call: those pagers stare at me, daring me to nod off. Also: I never get to stay up late, and I am a serious night-owl. Also also: I had a really terrible dream in which Mr. Hour fell off the side of a building.

Bad dream fog is still drifting around my brain.

Tomorrow, Scarlett, is another day.

Earworm

(Most brilliant cover ever.)

via

Effusive, I tell you

Huh. It turns out that picking the one best thing about every day is a lot harder than it sounds. Or at least picking a different thing each day, because every single day I could get downright effusive about the miniwatt's sweet face next to mine.

And then I get all confused when I'm on call overnight-- what distinguishes one day from the next? Is a call day one day or two? I don't know. This happens. (The days, they have become a blur.)

So, seeing as I've failed NaBloPoMo with flying colors, I will give myself license to write whatever I want whenever I want.

Scattered posting with a chance of intermittent updates

Yesterday's best:

I was on call overnight, and it did not suck.

Frankentater

Today's best: Miniwatt creations.

Bail early, bail often

Right. It didn't take me long to fail NaBloPoMo, for reasons*. Let's just overlook that and move on, shall we?


Yesterday's best:
The miniwatt's happy face next to mine in the morning, completely unaware of his parents' sleepless night listening to his croupy breathing.

Today's best:
My ankle isn't broken after all.

*See today's best.

Now with more pith

I am toying with the idea of this NaBloPoMo, as a way of reinserting myself into the Intertubes. Life continues apace, but without material easily converted to blog fodder. Residency? More or less off limits. Parenting? Mostly off limits. My own crippling procrastination and sloth? Likely to be an issue.

So. Attainable goals. I propose to, each day, determine what has been best about that day and tell you, gentle reader, all about it. Briefly. Pithily. With pith.

Here goes... something.

At the playground yellow ginkgo leaves paved the ground. My son stood in the sandbox, wary of the somewhat younger boy in the green frog hat. Slowly, we all let go. We talked up the boy's nice parents. We laughed. We made piles of sand and stomped them. Weightless we jumped, the three of us, into the castles we had made.

Grace in Small Things: Part One of Some

1. Trying something new.
2. Spying on "circle time" at the daycare.
3. Napping on the couch post-call.
4. Wyshuck!! Ebsessess!! Peecar!!*
5. Remembering 1983 Michael Jackson.




*Firetruck!! Ambulance!! Police car!!

Time for living

I am so scattered and hurried, time is so scarce, that I feel my life is constant loss. Each moment going by is irretrievable. I am trying to remember to slow down, to stop multitasking the days away.

There was a moment at the playground earlier today, when the camera's memory card had filled up, and my coffee had run dry, and I was left with no option but living in that moment. My son stood between two little girls while they all three chimed the chimes, a perfect trio of toddlerhood. My husband shared a tiny bench with me. And it was good.

We all three have this weekend off, and while we made no plans in advance we do plan to get out of our routine. No more sitting at separate computers while the boy pushes cars around. This is time for living.

Miniwatt stats

At 18 months:

35 inches tall (off the charts)
24 lbs 14.5 oz (35th percentile)
(He's a string bean!)

Eats like a horse.
Speaks more words than I can count.
Knows all the letters of the alphabet.
Finally calls me mommy.
Makes my life so sweet.

I am really sorry to do this to you.

And I can't bring myself to defile my blog the way my retinas have been defiled, so... here. Go watch that, if you think you can.

Yeah. There was no way I was keeping that to myself.