do you ever?

Do you ever look around you and realize that you haven't stopped to take a breath in like two weeks?

This is my deck, which I finally finished painting on Labor Day--also the day I started my second pass of my KtMS manuscript so I can see if the edits I finished two weeks ago actually make sense. 

Today began the second week of school, and I realized around 3:00 that I hadn't stopped to use the restroom all day.  And, since at that time I was besieged by sixth graders (who all wanted to escape Language Arts class to use the restroom, by the way), the realization was once again pushed aside until 4:15, when my own son got off the bus and made his way to my classroom, freeing me to finally leave.

Except by then I was in the middle of previewing an online training module, which I have to present to the staff meeting tomorrow morning at 7:30.  And since I'll be in the meeting tomorrow morning before class starts, and since my sixth grade homeroom needs way more attention and assistance in the morning than my eighth grade homeroom did last year, I decided I'd better get my chalkboards set up for tomorrow as well.  I had two documents open on my computer, and I was pecking away at a lesson plan outline for my boss and a compilation of book blog addresses for my teen book blogging elective, at the same time as I was fixing a snack for Jabber and scheduling a complicated classroom swap with two colleagues. 

Still had not peed.

At last, I realized that I was way too busy to keep poor Jabber at school with me until I was done, so I called D. and asked him to come pick the boy up...annoying to D. as he was in the middle of making an experimental dinner recipe (which turned out to be delicious, when I consumed it out of the microwave an hour or so later!), but I was busy planning and photocopying and distributing files full of links into shared folders while I filed IEP notices, answered emails to parents, and double-checked two of my sixth graders' schedule changes.

I did finally make a trip to the bathroom--at home--and during this activity I was visited by a small child who needed help with putting on his socks.  Also several arguments/wrestling matches broke out at this time, which I broke up.  I heated up my coffee and my dinner while loading the dishwasher and then listened to Jabber read while eating and making out a check for his school photos.

Fixed bedtime snacks.  Signed reading minutes.  Cleaned up snacks.  Wrangled kids a bit.  Cleaned kitchen.  Went to gym and worked out (while reading the book I am going to start teaching on Thursday, which I've only taught once before, years ago), showered, made lunches, and sat down to revisit those edits.

Except, oh crud, I still haven't blogged.

*Breathes*

And now it's bedtime.

Lameness

GAH. Only reason I'm posting this? Because my kiddo erupted like Mt. Vesuvius last night (five times) and forced me to concoct a sub plan at 11:30 p.m. in between dashes up the stairs to try to catch some of the mess in a plastic mixing bowl lined with a dish towel and then the alternating dashes down to the basement to shuffle our bedding, towels, and several sets of clothing from washer to dryer and then back upstairs to the bed, ready to take the next round. Then back downstairs with the new load of ick. Rinse and repeat. Until 2 AM.

So when I started this blog, my goal was to get writing again. I had finished my first novel, spent a couple months querying it to agents (with no positive responses, frustrating because the rejections aren't even based on someone reading the novel!) and then got sucked into the bog of motherhood and teacherdom and, well, real life. So mired was I that I didn't write a single thing other than stuff for work. Maybe an email or two, I'll admit. Oh, and okay, fine, maybe a post or a thousand on a certain natural family living forum. But writing on a regular basis--something that has been a part of me since I was in elementary school--had virtually disappeared from my life since having children.

This blog was my resolve to keep a journal, something I had tried eight thousand times since Jabber was born, with very sporadic results. I decided to write once a week about my kids and their shenanigans, my thoughts on being a parent in this crazy world, my process of becoming a writer/remaining a writer/succeeding as a writer, random bits of creative writing that I hoped might trickle out of me, and maintain some kind of regularity to the whole thing. All last spring and summer I had the most terrific routine, too. I had a gym membership, and I would go work out after the boys went to bed (David included, since he works suuuuuuper early in the morning and goes to bed, ideally, right around the time that Jabber and Monkey do), and while I jogged around the track or slogged along on the elliptical machine, I would think of things to write about. Then I came home and made them happen.

At the end of summer, my gym membership ran out. There was no money for a renewal, sadly, since we are all tightening our belts (haha, yeah, try loosening the drawstring on my sweatpants now!) and stuff since apparently the economoy is awful and times are tough. (This, so far, is not any different from my life before the economic crisis, but whatever. I have lost exactly zero dollars on the stock market. :P Still, it is nice that David and I are still both employed...knock on wood.) Oh, dear, I digress.

Since school started, I've been terrible about this blog, even though I'm doing a nice job at writing itself. The kids...what could I write about them? I feel like I barely see them, to be honest.

The holidays themselves are always sort of an invitation for my soul to freak out. We start with "Deer Camp," the three weekends in November that we all go to the in-laws' so David can hunt. We have a great time, although I think my children have just about worn out their welcome after two weekends. They are certainly energetic, to say the least. That's three weekends in a row that I don't get laundry done, groceries shopped, toys picked up, whatever needs to be done. Then we have Thanksgiving, a family get-together the weekend after that, and wow! That brings us to the boys' birthdays. Wow, it's so nice to have their birthdays only one day away from each other. And just two weeks from Christmas!

*Elissa dies of overwhelmedness*

I've done my complaining about all of this...to anyone who will listen, honestly. But I haven't really come to terms with exactly how lame of a person I really feel at the moment. My mom, trying to reassure me over the telephone, said something like, "Well, you know, you need to let things slide. Who cares if the house doesn't get dusted today."

Uh, Mom? I don't think it's been dusted since 2005. That's the least of my worries.

There are so many things I should be getting done at any given time; I get lost in all the little details. I should be doing a craft project with my children to make little gifts so that they can give something nice to everyone in the family. Instead, I can't even manage to find time to give Jabber a haircut and search through the winter gear in the basement to find Monkey some boots before there's actually snow on the ground. I should be baking cookies with them, writing out greeting cards, shopping for Santa, and I dunno...buying a turkey for Thanksgiving, since I am pretty sure we somehow agreed to having the in-laws over here for Turkey Day? I can't even manage to get the checkbook balanced or buy toothpaste for the baby or change all my clocks over from daylight savings time.

So I'm lame. And my blog is lame. And my house is messy. And my bedroom smells like sick baby. And I haven't said even a little hello to any of my friends in over a month. (Hello, friends! I really do love you, honest!) And...I complain too much. I promise, the next entry will be either witty or endearing or, at the very least, mildly interesting. :)

iPod Envy and Teacher Talk

I have iPod envy, I admit it. Tonight I was at the gym, working out extra hard because I haven't been there in over a week and my diet has been a pretty steady stream of pizza and candy, and everyone around me was plugged into one. Me, I don't even have a portable CD player. What is my problem. Also, I can't read on the elliptical--too bouncy. So instead of doing anything entertaining to my brain during that half hour (or forty-five minutes, if I can convince myself to keep going) I settle for watching the display on the machine and coveting my neighbors' technology.

Ooh, look, I burned another calorie! Only 17 minutes and 45 seconds left on this joyride. No, wait, 35 seconds. Hey, maybe I should see how many steps per minute I'm doing. Oh, 158. No, 144. No, 152. Huh. Fascinating. All right. Two more calories for the win! Ooh, Ooh, I should check my heartrate!

Yeah, I need some music, or a nice classic being read to me off of librivox.org, a podcast of This American Life, c'mon, anything but this. OOH, look! It said my workout was 10% complete! Wheeee!

So anyway, in the absence of entertainment, my brain uses this time to mull over ideas (when it's not watching digital numbers slowly flipping). Sometimes I write my blog post while pretend jogging away. Sometimes I work through a plot hole in my novel. Lately, I have also been spending quite a bit of time working over ways to increase my patience with the two little ones. With very little success, but you know. Last night I actually spent a good portion of my workout making a mental list of things that need to be cleaned in my home because they have surpassed my own low standards of disgustability. (So today I staged a mini-nervous-breakdown and asked my daycare provider to watch both boys for the morning while I cleaned my bathroom and organized all of the boys' clothes...damn, it's amazing how fast they outgrow stuff, and I've got to stay on top of the organizational system or I'll miss a whole box of second-hand clothing until it's too late and it's already too small!)

Tonight, though, something unprecedented for the summer happened, and although it made me a little bit excited, it also made me very much sad. While I was bouncing along, my brain landed on an idea for my 7th graders to do as a writing assignment. Can you believe it? SCHOOL THOUGHTS. And this wasn't only like, "Hey, I think when we read A Day No Pigs Would Die, I think I'll have them do this rite of passage assignment, only a little different than I did last year. NO. This was like, planning out groups and arranging for the use of the video editing iMacs, and putting together a faux reality television show in my classroom. This was true inspiration.

TOO BAD IT'S AUGUST!!!

Ugh. Oh, well. This is one of the stranger mysteries of summer vacation, I guess. Every year, well except my second year, when honestly I was still burned out from the first one, I find myself actually getting interested in the idea of education once again, even though I hardly believed it was possible a month ago. Inspiration creeps up on me.

Don't get me wrong. I'm very loathe to go back to work right now. I am in the middle of a very exciting round of edits on my novel, feeling really happy about it, loving my routine of late nights and coffee in the morning, and mostly even enjoying being around my children and my husband. I am really, REALLY not looking forward to that part of teaching that leaves me constantly feeling like I'll never get caught up, always racing to get seven thousand things done in four minutes, standing half my life away in front of the copy machine, and grading those goddamn papers. My life is nice right now without homework.

BUT. It's nice to see that I do still like the thought of teaching. That I still have some of my old enthusiasm for the process of learning. That the creative teacher I like to think I am is starting to stir inside me. I'll let her out a little later next week, I think.

The Diet that Isn't a Diet

I've never been on a diet before, but it seems like I am right now. I've begun tracking my calories on an online journal (but I'm not telling you where, lest you go there and tell me to stop stuffing my face this instant and get your ass off the couch already, Elissa!) and have lost a number of pounds that I'm pretty happy with.

Still, I'm uncomfortable with this dieting thing. Growing up, I can't remember a single time when my mom wasn't trying to lose weight--getting ready for swimsuit season, slimming down for so and so's wedding, losing those holiday pounds--it seems she was always on a diet. I remember my mom and my aunt poring over calorie-counting books, drinking cans of TAB, eating nothing but grapefruit and iceberg lettuce. I specifically remember the 1,000 calorie diet they were on that had rigid meals laid out for each day of the week: Day 1: Breakfast: one half hardboiled egg and one half piece toast, without butter. Lunch: open-faced sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and one thin slice turkey and 4 oz. skim milk, celery or carrot sticks optional. Seriously, you want to talk about setting a woman up for failure? My metabolism kicked into starvation mode just reading the menu.

Of course I was never really happy with my body, either, although I think my mom did all right in not going overboard with the criticism. Like any mom, I suppose, she made small comments about how I should start sucking in my stomach and did I have to eat that last cookie, but the weight obsession was always about her own body, not mine. I remember Mom comforting me when my grandma told some friends who were picking me up at the airport to look for "the chunky redhead." Yeah, that did wonders for my self image. She reassured me that just because all the women on my step-father's side were like eight-and-a-half feet tall and couldn't pinch an inch did not, by any means, make me qualify as chunky. (Though looking back, I probably was, even for a shrimp.)

Still, I vowed that I would just be as healthy as I could be, that I would never obsess over the numbers on the scale, that I wouldn't worry about weight gain or pants size or whether my butt looked big. I promised myself I wouldn't avoid pictures because of a fear of my double chin or my flabby upper arms.

Yet here I am, counting calories. Two kids have redesigned my body, and I accept that. I love my shape-shifting self. Just...couldn't I be a little thinner? A little less...like a mom, maybe? I celebrate my mom body while wishing to whittle it down to a more manageable me. I break my promise to myself and step on the scale with bated breath, hoping to fall below a certain number. I contradict my philosophy of self-acceptance while pulling the tape measure taut around my hips with pursed lips of disappointment. And I worry about cascading into that endless cycle of weight loss and dieting that I witnessed growing up.

So, I'm not on a diet. I'm just "eating healthier." (while limiting my calories, heh.)

And, several positive things have occured because of this diet that is not a diet, things other than the weight loss:

1. I have actually consumed vegetables on a daily basis, sometimes more than once a day.
2. I have had a bag of jelly beans in the house for almost two weeks now, eating only one serving at a time, and not every day.
3. My whole family is eating less junk, especially if I do the grocery shopping. All in all, we've eaten much more healthy meals when I have to log them on the internet for anyone to see.
4. I have actually found more energy because of the exercising, which somehow has meant that I'm still getting stuff done around the house, even with the extra time I'm spending exercising.
5. I get to listen to back episodes of This American Life on my laptop while riding my exercise bike in the basement.

Just somebody stop me if you see me slurping a TAB and eating grapefruit, 'kay?