For the first time in almost twelve years of marriage I hope my mother in law sends another fucking box of presents. She sent a box of presents for Eldest Child’s tenth birthday that happens next week. (Woo! Big kid! So Exciting!!!)

Guess what she sent? She sent clothes for the baby. She sent two identical boxes (one for EC and one for MC) that are intended to be memory boxes for the infant period. It would be an appropriate gift for Youngest Child because I’d stand a chance of still having most of the things for this box… but uhhh…. ten years later I don’t have a lot of these things. I didn’t save the first bib or first binky. So uhm…

And another dang blanket. Clearly baby sized.

This is the first time I have ever hoped she’ll send another box. Not one thing in there was an appropriate/nice birthday present and she’s not usually a complete failure in the gift department.

The third time is the charm is this delightful baby. We went for a walk yesterday and she hung out cheerfully in a stroller for an hour. Not a peep out of her. She smiled at the big kids while we were walking. She seemed to like that each big kid took a turn pushing her and she was excited.

My Youngest Child is such a glorious person. Getting to spend time with her feels like a present from the universe. I’m so happy about hanging out with her. Even though it is also exhausting.

That’s life, buddy.

We are going to try the stroller a few more times before I make any sort of commitment there. We currently have one that a neighbor left out on the sidewalk free (my favorite reason to try something new) but it’s a terrible design. By the time we got back all three of us had very sore wrists. I know that better/more ergonomic handle set ups exist… but it’s not worth investing in until I know the baby likes a stroller so much that we might actually use it.

I hate strollers in general… but my back hurts so badly right now I feel like someone slammed me backwards into a wall. I hurt from neck to hips. It burns. I saw my chiropractor yesterday and my massage therapist tomorrow. I should go back to acupuncture. I could probably also benefit from trying to see the personal trainer again.

Where is that money tree when I need it.

How in the world am I going to manage when I leave all my medical support? This is going to be terrifying as fuck.

I had an interesting chat with the kids last night before bed. Middle Child asked me about why I yelled earlier in the day. Because it hadn’t been necessary. I said, “Well. Let me tell you a story.” I told them (as if it weren’t me) about a little girl who was moved around a lot and learned to be very nasty to people because people always say, “If you are good enough you can stay” but they never mean it and there is no way for her to be good enough. She always has to leave every home. After a while she was just mean to people to start off with because that way she doesn’t hope and get hurt extra anymore. I talked about why she would learn to hate herself and be very very mean to herself every time she makes any kind of mistake. Those are the only kind of words she has really heard.

Then what do you think would happen if she grew up and had children and had to learn how to talk to herself and other people as if they all loved each other.

Would there be bumps in that road as she learns how to love herself and other people?

I learn how to love myself by interacting with my children. I replace my inside voice with their voices over time very carefully and deliberately.

I fucking love that my children tell me not to call myself or my mistakes stupid. They are silly.

So I said, “Notice how the mistake you made was the exact same pattern of mistake I do?” Middle Child being the plucky soul they are said, “YES! That’s why it seemed so mean!!! You mess up just like that all the time!”

“I do. And what you don’t know is that inside my head I am always screaming at myself the way I screamed at you. Sometimes in my head I get confused and I forget that you aren’t me because you are my me-not-me and inside my body when you mess up the same way I do… I get agitated. Because my body freaks out when you mess up like it messes up when I mess up. I shouldn’t. It’s not fair. It means I over react. I yell because I’m treating you like me. And that sucks.”

“Oh. Wow. That really sucks. You shouldn’t ever talk to yourself like you yelled at me.”

“I know. I’m working on it. It has gotten a lot better… but it’s hard to unlearn everything you learn as a very young child. It’s why I drill you so much on habits you want to have as a grown up. Changing as a grown up sucks so much.”

Separately, Middle Child asked me to take a week off the forums and spend more time with them. That sounds like a lovely “End of school” present.

I love that my children love me. They show me how to love people. They show me how to forgive and work harder. Because they deserve every speck of energy I can muster for them. Someday I hope I will really be the mother they deserve.

Noah, I wouldn’t have absolutely any of this without you. I wouldn’t have these people without you. I wouldn’t have had this privileged walled garden experience without you.

And, randomly… it’s nice that every single person in our network locally is talking about how much they will miss us from the neighbors to the grocery store clerks to our car mechanic. They all say they understand and they hope they won’t fall off the Christmas card list.

Oh I won’t forget you wonderful people. I hope you will write back and tell me about your own adventures. I love you and I want to know how your story continues. I know it will.

Got rid of two dressers today. Packed several more boxes. Shifted around books and clothes again. Other than books we are very close to having all the kid stuff in the play room. That helps the kids visualize how much they have. With it spread through the whole house they can’t keep doing the “Oh I’ll just bring this with me” dance. They are looking around and feeling a bit overwhelmed.

We have serious art supplies. We should have an art party this summer. We have soooo many kinds of materials.

I think I have either packed or gotten rid of half of our books so far. I’m leaving out the ones I want to encourage the kids to read before it goes into storage.

Tomorrow I’m going to shift the pantry. Open up the garage a bit. Be ready to get rid of one of those shelving units.

I have a vision in my head of how I want the house to look for staged pictures. I hope to take them in September. Rather, I hope to hire someone who is talented at taking pictures and have them come take a bunch of pictures of my house and yard.

The yard is absolutely beautiful. It has finally started arriving where I wanted it to be. I have made magic. I’m a god damn good gardener. *pat self on back*

Right now for science the kids are drawing detailed pictures of the plants in our yard. We are going to make a series of drawings to show how they change this summer. We are carefully labeling the pictures. I am going to have the kids write information about the plants. By the time we move the children will be able to instantly name all these plants forever.

In our heads these plants will mean Wonderland.

I should take more pictures of the plants. The hanging baskets are blooming and they make my heart sing. I will miss this yard.

In my head there is a picture waiting to happen. It will be taken from behind the bench swing in the back yard. It’ll be the back of mine and Noah’s heads. We will be looking through the window at our children playing in the house.

The view I love the most is my front porch looking in.

I have so much tidying and organizing left to do in the yard. I’m looking forward to it.

I feel like I should shave off the blue potato vine. It’s eating the patio area. It’s hard to have enough sunlight for the pots of vegetables.

So much in the ground. We have permanent: apple (3 kinds), plum, cherry, orange, blueberry, strawberry, sage, grape, spearmint, chocolate mint, asparagus, oregano, and tons of non-food plants. This season we have bell peppers, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, a few kinds of beans, sunflowers, and artichokes.

I will miss our little harvest.

Time to brush teeth and go to bed with my baby. Gosh I like her.

Pam was here on Thursday and I stayed up very late because I wanted to hear all the words she was willing to say to me. I haven’t slept well since. I just… I feel like I’m doing that vibrating with energy thing. I want to separate from my family and be an individual person. Not be a milking machine. Only 2-4 years to go…

I feel like I’m very overly focused on negativity. I want to complain about every one and every thing. Even though I feel pretty happy. It’s like being happy makes me more irritated by the things that aren’t perfect yet.

How very very codependent I am with my friends is bothering me. Many of the people I spend time with are abused or traumatized people. Many of them are not that great at adulting. I let these friends take up a lot of space in my head and then I waste hours and hours and hours being frustrated by the steps these folks won’t take to change their lives.

As if I have room to talk.

BUT THAT DOESN’T STOP ME FROM JUDGING IN MY HEAD. BECAUSE I’M A FUCKING ASSHOLE.

One lady I like a lot. She’s so nice and kind and gentle. So nice and kind and gentle she is letting her kid walk all over her. I’m deeply worried about both of them.

Another lady I like a lot. She’s deep in grief. I worry a lot about how she is balancing what she owes the dead with what she owes the living.

Another lady I like a lot. She’s struggling to cope with her grief over losing a connection she never ever thought she could even want. I worry that she is going to fall into that hole and not ever be willing to try again.

Life is nothing but trying again.

I think I frequently make wrong choices. I think I waste so much time and effort and energy on stupid things I shouldn’t do. I am sitting in a glass house with a big pile of rocks. Does it make it any better that I’m not saying almost anything to these people about what I think they should do?

Dude I know that my opinion ain’t worth nothing. Nobody ought to listen to me.

Except my kids. And that sucks for them. Ha.

I wouldn’t want control over these peoples lives if I could have it. I am not actually wise enough or omnipotent enough to know what they really should do. I don’t have Noah’s hubris that I can think through all the possible repercussions and make the Right Choice. I think I’m going to make the wrong choices over and over and stumble towards a path that is right enough for me.

I see my friends hurting and I want them to hurt less. Sometimes the ways in which they are hurting are ways in which I instantly feel and believe that I know something that might help. I’m mostly wrong. I’m mostly lying to myself. I’m mostly keeping these thoughts in my head and not sharing them because fuck me and my stupid ass advice.

Seriously dude. Fuck me.

But I can’t get my brain to shut off. I don’t want to have these elaborate thoughts about other peoples lives. I don’t want to strategize someone else’s divorce. I don’t want to be constantly weighing and measuring in my head what kinds of services my friends should be getting for their kids.

It’s exhausting.

I hide at home partially because the weight of “keeping an eye on people” wears me the fuck out. What do I do with this keeping an eye on? Mostly nothing. But it feels like what my inner child requires of me so that I won’t turn out to be one more piece of shit who just didn’t notice some egregious problems.

I’m not calling CPS left and right so clearly I think people are doing well enough. But I’m always scared. Who is going to go off the rails? I don’t trust that anyone is so awesome they could never fuck up.

I don’t trust anyone. There’s a piece of me that feels so grateful that CPS came to check on my family. I get my kids evaluated by Teh Authoritays pretty frequently because I want to be checked up on because I’m totally capable of going off the rails and abusing the shit out of my kids. I don’t want to though. So I put tons of checks and balances in place so my babies don’t have to be at the mercy of my kindness. I’m not that kind. What I have instead is an incredibly well developed Super-Ego and the desire to keep my forever family.

I dislike this negativity in my head.

I want to think about the good parts. The parts I admire. The parts I am striving to emulate. There’s not one person I want to give advice to that I don’t try to copy in some way at some times. Generally speaking I think they are all much better people than me. But good people don’t always think strategically about their own benefit. Sometimes they care too much about the feelings of assholes.

I want to teach my friends how to be bigger assholes like me so they won’t get kicked so hard. But it doesn’t work like that. My schtick works for me for complicated reasons that won’t work for other people and I know it. But it still hurts to see my friends be hurt and I’m a selfish piece of shit and I want to hurt less. So I want my friends to get hurt less. But I don’t have much control over this since I’m not the one hurting them to start with.

So I inappropriately think controlling thoughts in their direction. WITH THE POWER OF MY MIND I WILL HELP YOU TO BE A BIGGER ASSHOLE SO THAT YOU GET SHIT ON LESS BECAUSE YOU ARE AN AWESOME PERSON AND PEOPLE WHO PICK ON YOU DESERVE TO HAVE A RASH THAT MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE TO EVER SIT DOWN AGAIN.

I am at my absolute limit for how much control I can exert over Noah and the kids. The kids are getting old enough that I need to start backing off more seriously. In some ways I already have. So to replace the codependent relationships I want to be having with my mother and my cousin and my aunt… I think too much about my friends.

I’m trying to both curb my codependency and forgive myself for the impulses. I limit how much time I spend with the friends I want to “take care of” on purpose because I get inappropriate. I don’t need to go clean anyone’s damn house. I don’t need to get into another situation where I’m providing respite/therapeutic care to special needs kids to help their parents out. I love and miss the Bonus Kids but my stress levels have gone down so much it isn’t funny. Trying to learn what I needed to learn to help them… that was hard. And I was fighting their mother’s impulses the whole way because helping them would require her changing and she didn’t want to.

I can’t do that any more. I need to stop fighting other people to change. It isn’t my place. It’s wrong of me. And it’s ineffective and I don’t have time for ineffective behavior. It’s hilarious to me how much “being effective” has become a more important metric than “being nice”. Fuck nice.

If someone else wants to sit still with their mental illness and not fix big glaring problems in their life… I have enough shit of my own to fix. fuck.

ugh

At dinner I commented that I couldn’t actually remember… but I think this has been my best Mother’s Day ever. EC said that she remembers that last year was… not good. I said I don’t remember and I don’t want to. Moving on! Today was great!

Noah and EC both gave me cards. EC and MC both gave me little presents of stuff… I bought and they gave back to me. Sure. Why not. It’s the thought that counts. I’m happy. Noah did his normal breakfast/lunch cooking, We had Thai takeout for dinner. Lovely day. I bought myself flowers because I wanted them at the farmers market.

Noah and I had an interesting conversation today. I am… probably closer to what I understand as a political progressive than Noah is. Noah notices things like most revolutions don’t work and not thinking through the long-term consequences means that when you do things sometimes they blow up spectacularly.

I can’t get past the example of my own life. If I had done the things other people called “smart” if I had “gone along” I would be dead. I am breaking all these rules and refusing to think through the consequences in a country where a successful revolution was fought because a bunch of folks who were mostly 17-22 decided to blow some shit up.

If I had “thought through” the consequences of my brother and father killing themselves would I have prosecuted? Would my current life be possible if I hadn’t?

It isn’t that he’s wrong.

Depending on how you define “success” there is no human culture or belief or way of being that has ever been successful because everything has changed. What we are doing today is no more permanent than slavery under the Roman Empire.

I’m still trying to figure out how/where I am going to grow with regards to sex. Coercive sex that hurts me is not something I can keep doing forever. I tried. I really did. I tried to do what I was told. I tried to do what was wanted of me.

There turn out to be consequences that neither I nor Noah could predict super well when we got married. We were both trying to make considerate choices. But I was negotiating from a very broken point of view. I was actively negotiating and pushing for things that were abusive to me. I’m not in any way saying it was all Noah’s fault. It wasn’t. *I* hurt me.

Why didn’t I just negotiate for something different, something healthier…

I negotiated for what I was told I was supposed to get from when I was a toddler. I’m sorry that I’m not as healthy as someone who had a different life. I’m trying. I’m improving. But the progress is slow and uneven and fucked up.

Did Noah and I really think through all the consequences of our sexual choices?

Maybe it’s really hard to think through all the possible consequences of anything.

I don’t have very many answers today. But I’m glad I get to keep talking to Noah about it.

My only complaint is the day would have been smoother if the kids had unloaded the dishwasher last night.

That means it is a great day. My family has been lovely and kind.

I went to the funeral to support my friend. I need to visit her again this week. She’s really struggling. Her boy was 23. It was an open casket event and I can’t get the smell of death out of my nose. I’ve showered a few times to see if that would help. I even went outside and smoked some pot even though I don’t do that very often these days because I want to stop smelling that. Even over the pungency of pot… I can smell it.

Death waits for us all. It is stronger than any other force.

Yesterday I think the baby started hitting a growth spurt. She barely made noise all day except for when she had a direct need. Mostly she just slept. When she sleeps that much and is so quiet I check her constantly because I’m afraid she could slip away. I want to know her so badly. You never know how much time you are going to get: a few hours, a few months, a few years, a few decades, a whole life. I don’t want to get to the end and feel regret about not spending enough time. So when my baby sleeps all day it is hard to leave her alone and just let her rest.

But I do it because that sleep time is when she grows and internalizes what she is learning. Don’t fuck with sleep, yo.

She’s so fat and jiggly and alive. I am so enchanted.

It’s lovely how my tenderness with the baby is still being extended to my big kids. We are snuggling a lot. They adore their sister. They are both learning how to interact with her and it fills me with joy. They both firmly address her as “My baby”. This baby belongs to all of us. I can imagine other circumstances where such an assumption of ownership would bug the crap out of me. But when it is my children feeling possessive of one another within the context of our family?

Heart exploding with joy.

My siblings hated me and desperately wished I had never been born. My children are deeply attached to one another and spend time every day saying they love each other and they are glad to be together so much. I’m allowed to be part of this.

I’ve run into more of the home schoolers recently. There is a core group from the community we used to join a lot that miss us. It looks like our summer will involve some touching base with people. Folks are sad we are leaving. My former neighbor is really upset. She is talking more seriously about going back to India because without me here… she truly has nothing. I’m her one friend here and her ex-husband is a nightmare.

It’s interesting finding out where people have depended on me and I didn’t know it. I am sorry to let you down. But I really need to travel. It’s like if someone were doing a Mentos/Diet Coke commercial with my insides. I feel absolutely bursting with the need to go. To find out who I am in different spaces. To find out how much I am capable of growing and expanding to meet new needs.

I have loved the bay area. I have found friends, lovers, and family here. I have met 100% of the most important people in my life here. I will always have ties to the bay. I wouldn’t be surprised if we came back every year or two for a visit. It will be different and a tiny fraction of people will still see us when we visit… and that’s ok too.

I can’t be all that important to all that many people. Monkey spheres and all that.

There are a lot of people here that I would prefer to never see again. It’s time to go. I feel eaten alive with the desire to avoid my fucking sister. I haven’t made an appointment with my pain doctor for a follow up partially because running into my aunt there is so distressing.

So much pain and there’s not a god damn thing I can do about it. Not for anyone.

EC still feels like my idealized self. What I wish I could have been if things had been better. MC still feels like a closer match to the reality of what I would have been like if things had been better–I still would have been a rocky person and MC is an emotionally tempestuous person. I wonder so much about YC.

Yesterday she was waking up from a nap and I knelt down next to her. She gave this gorgeous giant smile. I felt like I would melt into a puddle of goo. Yes oh my daughter, wrap me around your finger. I’ll do so much for that smile.

I love all of my children’s smiles. I feel like the older two inherited this quality from Noah of softening when they smile. They relax and lean in at the same time. It looks like they relax into visibly feeling safe.

Do you know how good it feels that someone can feel like that around me? I often make people feel alarmed, tense, threatened. I see people get rigid in my presence. I feel bad every time.

But not my family. My family relaxes and treats me like I am here to keep them safe instead of hurt them.

Even if I am a monster… I am their monster and that’s ok then.

My arms are on fire. My hand is spasming so much that holding a fork to feed myself is sometimes painful.

Baby skulls are fucking heavy.

I love my massage therapist and chiropractor. Losing them will be some of the hardest part of leaving the bay. Not only are they very effective, but we have excellent rapport. We are friendly enough to exchange spontaneous gifts. The conversations are fun bright spots in my week. I have a great community.

The baby is waking up from the larval state. It’s a lot of fun. She’s more purposeful by the day. She still mostly only complains when something is wrong. She’s a very chill person. I am not sure where she came from, surely not from me. I’ve never been so relaxed in my life.

I’m obsessively thinking about sex and bdsm and how to negotiate differently and what is it I actually want as opposed to feeling like I must do it? How do I learn to take out the compulsive self harming behavior? How do I learn how to actually know what I want instead of what I can take?

How do I learn how to advocate for myself in a useful way? I’m still trying to find out.

I can advocate for myself. Poorly. In useless ways much of the time.

It’s funny how watching my children teaches me so much about myself. I get what my therapists mean about I bring too much of myself to every situation. But I also see a big chunk of ableism in the commentary. Part of the reason I am so paranoid and controlling of my environments is because I do have a bunch of issues that need accommodation. I have disabilities. If I don’t advocate early or forcefully enough my disability issues are totally ignored and I suffer.

But there’s a balancing act.

I see this so very clearly when my children walk into every room and feel free to demand that everything in the world must conform to them. *cough*

Oh. Yeah. Ok. I see what y’all have been complaining about. *cough* Ok. I think I understand a bit more about how and why to reign that in. Ok. That makes sense now.

I learn so much from getting to sit near my children all the time. I like them so much and I am so enthralled with their development.

YC is glorious and grunting more forcefully and waving with more intention and she very nearly has head control. This is exactly where she ought to be.

MC is fierce and intense and so loving even as they struggle to master their inner impulses towards treating everyone like a mean attacking figure. They feel victimized a lot of the time… even when good things are happening. We are trying to figure out how to work on this, but it’s complicated. Perception is… hard to change.

EC is trying so hard to be a dependable peace maker and her ADHD means that she’s always going to struggle to be the person she wants to be in her head. Her follow through sucks. She has a tremendous amount of desire to follow through… ooh shiny squirrel! It’s a process. When I watch her behavior I understand with great intensity that she would need to be medicated in order to handle school. She can barely handle home schooling. Mostly… she doesn’t and I handle it for her and walk her through the process and that shit’s gotta stop soon. I tried to transition this responsibility with the points system and that failed abjectly. I need to find something else to try and I am not sure what.

I honestly want the moving to fill some of these roles for me. My kids rise to the challenge of change really well. Like me… they aren’t people who sit around and do the same thing well. My follow through isn’t exactly stellar. If I really wanted to live in one house for fifty years and work the same job for thirty years… I would need a lot more medication than I am currently on. I am not wired to do that.

I’m wired to learn something new. So is my daughter. How are we going to learn how to stay the course more together?

I feel like Noah could do more keep-on-keeping-on than I can. He doesn’t have the restlessness.

I feel so restless it is like I itch. But I have to stay here and deal with all the crap in a responsible, kind way. I can’t dump the responsibility on Noah or the kids. I don’t want to just trash it all and walk away. I want thoughtful culling. Which takes a rather lot of focus and work because Jimminy Christmas we amassed a lot of shit here. Even though I purge all the damn time!

Sarah is coming today. Maybe part of our date will be hanging out at Half Price Books together as I take a big batch in. Maybe. Sigh.

I got to see a friend yesterday I haven’t seen in a while. I originally met her when I was 17 and going to junior college. We worked in the theatre together. I feel so grateful that these threads of my life continue. She’s grown up a lot in a variety of ways. Yes, she still has troubles because she is still alive. But she’s changed and deepened and not softened… but relaxed into herself? Her presence felt much more certain now than it used to. She used to feel-to-me like she was almost afraid of herself. Now she fully lives in herself. I love watching people grow up. This is such a glorious gift.

Hey K–before I move… can we get together? I don’t think I’ve seen you since middle school. My last concrete memory of you is when you signed my 6th grade year book. Santa Cruz isn’t that far away. Maybe I could be silly and take a room in a hotel down in Santa Cruz for a weekend in the next few months so I could have a proper visit with all the Santa Cruz folk before we leave. I will miss you all so much. K is there. R is there. I wouldn’t mind going to Kiva and walking the main drag for a while and going to the Boardwalk with my kids….

That should happen.

ack bye

Eldest Child and I had a nice chat and cuddle this morning. She doesn’t consider the weeding experience a punishment. She talked about all the steps that happened, all the ways I tried to avoid having this crash down on their heads… “But we just refused to help until the job got so big that it was a mess. Then we got to clean up the mess. That happens.”

She is so… level headed and tolerant.

She also said that the fact that they came in from weeding and got to use the screen then have their dessert like normal really helped it not feel like a punishment and instead feel like just hard work that needed to be done.

*pat self on back*

I also woke up and did their chore for them (emptied the dishwasher) because I was antsy and awake and I wanted to clear the counter of dirty dishes. She appreciated that too.

I swear I wasn’t trying to punish you. Err, not this time. I did use weeding as a punishment a few months ago. They didn’t mind that time either because our friend M was here and that time it ended up feeling more like a party for them.

It’s hard to punish children who experience most things as fun adventures.

And my back yard is clear of weeds and ready for the next stage. I mean, there’s a bit more clean up for me to do… but they dealt with the grass such that what is left can be mowed and it’s fine. They cleaned it up enough that we can actually clear up the toys and the garbage and that was the point.

I’m not sure weeding/gardening is ever done.

But we are ready to put the veggies in for the season. I should probably go to the nursery today. I think the yard will photograph better for sale if the boxes are full of pretty vegetables. I’m going for an aesthetic this year. I’m showing my kids manicured yards and gardens and explaining the difference between what I have been aiming for over the past 10 years and what other people want. They find it fascinating that anyone would anything other than the meadow effect.

We agreed that we will enjoy a break from gardening but we will want another garden some day. This girl is so lovely to live with.

The baby has her first best friend. I can’t tell if it is the towel bar or the butterfly decal on the wall but she smiles and laughs and has a gay ol’ time on the changing table looking that way.

Noah was a glorious, kind, lovely husband last night. He walked the baby when she wouldn’t settle at bedtime. So when the baby needed a diaper change this morning at our normal wake up time I told him to just stay asleep.

These moments of help feel so tender and loving.

EC has spent the last few days creating an enormous bird army out of construction paper. These birds have clans and histories much like the Warrior Cats book series she is currently obsessed with. I love her imagination. She’s better than tv.

MC is enjoying the lovely lie-in. They are the longest sleeper in the house. I should probably get up and start making breakfast soon. I’m hungry.

I had one of those experiences yesterday where someone uses a describing word in a way that feels neutral to them but it’s loaded with trauma for me because of my family. She really didn’t mean anything. If only my family didn’t live in my head ruining perfectly good words.

Tonight sleep is hard. I feel like it isn’t helping that Her Cuteness is nursing every hour because she had multiple epic naps of not eating yesterday and she needs to make up for lost time. I feel like as long as these nights are occasional they are kind of special and wonderful. I love listening to her breathe.

I forgot about the field trip happening today. Oh that’ll be rad after testing this week. Lots of car time and being out all day. And not sleeping much. I got what–5 hours?

Follow through is hard. I’m great at making plans. Following them is tough.

We are now down four bookcases. A fifth was almost picked up then not so much. I’m ready for my second trip to Half-Price Books. I’m going when I have six cubes worth of books to unload. I think I have one, maybe two more to fill.

I’m so grateful that a huge chunk of my library was free. I take cast-off books from everywhere.

Tired. Want to talk. Oh hey! I get to chat with Jenny today! Oh that’ll be lovely. She has such lovely stories about the kids.

I keep finding myself randomly crying about my friend who died. His death feels like such a big loss to the world. And it’s tied up in my feelings about parenting. He would have been such a good father. But since he was going to die young from cancer… uhhh maybe it is better that there aren’t kids in the world missing their great dad. But these things can’t be known in advance. So it’s just a waste that no one got to benefit from his kindness.

And I’m so grateful that Jenny found her lovely husband and she got to have the kids she wanted to so much. And L got to have her baby. And R and L get to bring home their baby today!

There is a lot of joyous parenting in my extended community and I’m so grateful to witness it and get to learn from it.

And there is heartache and pain too. People with years of painful losses. People who have tried and failed to become joyful parents. It is so sad. There is no justice or fair or deserve. Life hurts so much. Some folks never find the right partner and they don’t even get to try and fail.

There is no. fucking. fair.

My Sweetness is sleeping on my arm as I type. It hurts. I don’t care. I don’t want to put her down and risk waking her up. She needs her sleep so she can grow up big and strong. So she can be feisty and challenging like her Sissy and Sibby. So she can backtalk and sass.

Just like all of us.

I feel like the internet was my first relationship and now I’m deep in NRE with my new side chick and I’m just flaking all over the place.

This is why I do not get jobs that depend upon my math acumen. I FREAKING KNOW THAT 400/20 SHOULD NOT BE 100. WHAT IN THE HELL AM I THINKING.

But the hilarious part is I bet a dozen or more women walked past my two math mistakes. (Meaning I bet chicks noticed.)  My guy buddies can’t do the same thing. That amuses me to no end. I love you both. Thanks for the corrections.

EC is doing state testing this week. (Maybe her math will be better than mine. Maybe not. We’ll see!) Her feeling about this experience is that she is very glad she doesn’t go to school because this is horrible. Seems legit.

I just sucked ass at scheduling this week. I thought ECs test was a one day thing on Monday. Nope. It’s a two day test going from Tuesday to Wednesday. Well that fucks up all my planning. Damnit. I am just… not on the ball right now. Fudge.

My Sunday plans have changed and I am so very happy for the reason. Some dear ladies have been trying to adopt a baby for a few years now (it’s a complicated process) and their baby is with them now! YAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY I am so happy for them both. What a lucky baby to get such fantastic mothers. I hope I get to know this kid at least a little bit. It will be complicated with moving away, but technology is wonderful. And I already know I love the baby’s mothers. So that makes the effort easier.

I will get to go visit them during their fourth trimester. That’s glorious, joyous news.

I’m trying to figure out how to dig a few more spoons out of the back of my drawer. Sigh. A buddy had her oldest child die this week. She is in the process of collapsing from grief. She has five children still in the home and she needs help. I’m not sure what all I will be able to do between time and energy constraints but I need to do something,

Sobonfu taught me a lot about grief. The best way I can honor her memory is to step up and use that knowledge when it is relevant. I can’t fix everyone. But I can be part of a community and help carry grief. This lovely mama has been really good to me for years. She’s one of the people who kept me when we left the home school group. She’s worked hard to stay my friend when I was actively pulling away. Those bonds mean something.

I can help her make lists and organize how to delegate work. She does not have to carry this tragedy alone.

Joy and tragedy. Minor irritations. That’s life in a nut shell.

But any minute here my beautiful baby will wake up and need me. It’s worth getting up every day to see these glorious faces.