Just now, as I sat down to type this blog post, Amber destroyed a tree Rose built out of "brain flakes" building discs. Rose screamed and cried and shoved Amber away. Amber cried. As natural consequences, I had Rose apologize to Amber for the shove, and Amber had to clean up the busted pieces. Amber thought this was the most unfair edict ever, and in anger she tornado'd the blocks around the room, scattering them far and wide and making her clean-up job that much harder. For the next fifteen minutes or so, I endured Amber's endless protestations and outright refusal to clean up. Her main argument was she wanted lunch before she cleaned up the mess. I refused. She whined and moaned and kicked more pieces around. I told her whiny kids get naps instead of afternoon screen time. She got more mad.
At last she went and brought in her last true ally: Jeff. He came into the room all sympathetic and ready to help until I harshly set the record straight. I refuse to let the dad swoop in and save the kid from a mom-imposed punishment! Thankfully Jeff agreed with my judgement (smart man) and refused to help. Amber sat in the middle of her mess and sobbed. Swallowing my complete exasperation, I offered Amber a hug. She came over, sat in my lap, and cried into my shoulder for a few minutes. I held her and rocked her. When she stopped crying, she told me "I'm hungry. I want lunch." As a compromise, I gave her a big drink out of my water bottle (a rare occasion as I have an aversion to backwash). After she had chugged several gulps of my water, she went back to her mess and quietly cleaned up all of the scattered pieces. Jeff and I praised her efforts and she scampered off to eat lunch.
My shoulder is still wet from her tears. Motherhood is so confusing. Hugging a kid who is upset over a punishment I have imposed seems so unlikely a solution! But it worked. I know enough to know that it probably won't work every time, but I'm glad it worked this time!
Ok, now that it's nearly an hour after I started to write this post, back to the weird week. I was in a funk, remember? My funk has faded by degrees so I feel more normal and capable today than I've felt all week, but it sure was sluggish going for a few days there in the middle.
I wanted the house to be cleaner, but it felt pointless to keep juggling all of those balls in the air with kids home full time. The kids do one chore every day, plus dishes, so the part of our house that looks good/clean/bearable rotates depending on the day. I had to re-accept that reality.
My legs were tired and sore from last week's amazing trail run up Hex Mountain, so my running was somewhat feeble and not satisfying. I did more yoga, and managed to get my shoulders nearly as worn out as my legs. I can run on tired legs, but running with tired shoulders is agony. For some reason, holding up tired shoulders is harder for me than running on tired legs. Yoga is doing wonderful things for my gimpy shoulder, posture, and overall upper body tone and strength, but progress comes with a price: tired muscles. So running, my one escape from home-life, was a chore all week.
Then there was my writing. My all-consuming project of writing the first draft of my first novel was done a month ago. I finished the first round of pencil-and-paper revisions at the end of May. On Monday (June 1st) I was planning on jumping in for round two of those revisions, but when I sat down at the computer to digitize them, I felt utterly drained of all creativity, all motivation, and all interest in the project. It honestly seemed like I would make the book worse if I tried revising it in that state of mind, so I closed my computer and read a book instead of writing one.
It was a very good book, and I loved every page. Over the next few days, I read several beautifully written, clever, witty, excellent, well-plotted books. My confidence waned. How could I ever even think of writing a book? My sad little attempt seemed flat and lame in comparison to the elegant paragons of Good Writing that I had just read. I did my best not to think about my poor little homespun novel all week. It wasn't worth the anguish of failure.
Instead, I lost myself in good literature. I listened to two audiobooks while working endlessly on a mindless photo organization project. I went on walks with Jeff. I ran. I yoga'd. I made phone calls and watched Marco Polo messages. I herded the kids through their routines. I still felt at loose ends much of the time. I missed my book writing project, but I didn't feel capable of taking it up again! It was a weird week. Finally, on Saturday, I began to feel stirrings of possibility inside again. Tentatively, I opened my book file in Microsoft Word. It was so huge and long! Again I was swamped with overwhelmed-ness. But there was a spark of creativity deep in that swamp, so I fanned it and began round two of revisions.
As I worked, I realized that one reason this task had been feeling so gargantuan was because it IS a huge undertaking to revise an entire 77,000+ word manuscript! Especially as a beginner who knows nothing! I reminded myself that I wrote this book to learn how to write books, and I needed to look at it from a learning viewpoint rather than a perfectionist viewpoint. I had set myself a deadline of June 19th (the last day of school) to be done with this writing project, but I realized that my self-imposed deadline was one reason for my freeze-up. It was not enough time. Writing, revising, and editing a full length novel was more than a mere two month project. Duh, Shaina. Why do my most obvious realizations take so long to come?
My first round of revisions was done with pencil in hand on a printed copy of my book. Margin notes, arrows, and pencil-scribbles are low-commitment revisions. Round two was digital: typing, changing, and fixing the actual document. High commitment factor! At times I can be so self-motivated that I stress myself out. That's what happened. I decided to give myself a different goal: at most, edit one chapter per day. That is still a solid amount of work, but I was amazed at how freeing it felt to break it down into smaller pieces. (another obvious realization--duh!) I am used to fixing up small-scale writing (hello, blog and journal). This feels more doable.
And now it is Sunday again. Rose and Amber dressed up for home church. The asked if they could wear my scarves, and I let them each pick one out. They felt beautiful and fancy. Jay was the only one who didn't dress up for our home church. We don't force anyone to dress up, even though Jeff and I always dress up. We teased Jay a little bit for not dressing up. Then we sang Scatter Sunshine and had the sacrament.
We watched this week's 10 minute Book of Mormon video and talked about how to be more like Jesus. I gave each kid a specific, recent, common situation (Jay shouting at Amber to get out of his room, Rose getting annoyed and screeching at Amber, Amber hitting everyone) and we talked about specific ways to follow Jesus' example in those situations. I shared my own opportunity to improve (patience with messes), and then the kids turned to Jeff: "what's yours, Daddy?" They were so interested in and curious about their parents' faults. I realized that they don't really see our faults, blessed children. It was humbling.
After our lesson, Jeff said "aren't you kids glad to know that your parents aren't perfect?" We laughed. Then the girls started building with the brain flakes and the whole tree-destroying debacle mentioned above occurred. Baby steps.
Sunday selfie with 4/5 of us dressed nicely.
These girls felt so fancy in my scarves. (pre-squabble)
Rose and her beautiful tree creation that Amber destroyed a few minutes later. I don't know why these thingies are called brain flakes, but I guess they had to name them something. They are flat discs that interlock together. It is a very brainy toy.
Morning art. Rose is really in to TREES right now, and she's teaching Amber how to draw trees too.
I think someone wants chicken for dinner--this note was on the fridge yesterday. But it actually says "pat chimken in crack-pot" and it made me laugh so hard.
A not-so-artistic picture of running with Jay this week. He usually prefers to run alone, but he invited me one morning and I jumped at the chance.
Quarantine hair is getting wild! Jay is determined to wait until school is out before he lets me cut his hair, and we have nowhere to be so I'm fine with it. His hair is constantly getting in his eyes and he's taken to tossing his head regularly to sweep it out of his eyes. He wore this ponytail to his school class zoom meeting this week to get some laughs, although he told me that there's a boy in his class who has always had a "man-bun" long hair so Jay didn't get quite the effect he hoped for.
Jeff and I went on a walk one day and Amber came along, dragging her suitcase for the sheer joy of the loud rolling noise it made. Not the most peaceful walk we've ever gone on, haha.
Amber ended up off-roading with her suitcase. We told her not to drag it through the dirt, so she lugged it nearly half a mile all by herself all the way around (the long way) to the neighbor's yard where the kids were gathering to play in a tree house.
Rose has been working hard for the past few weeks on her "passion project" for school. She chose a topic she is passionate about (architecture, apparently due to Minecraft), and created this elaborate house to present to her class online. We had a few disagreements about this house. Rose wanted to cut a door in a regular box and call it good, and she got so mad at me for telling her she needed to add more details like a roof and paint. But once she got going, she enjoyed it and was proud of the result.
Jeff has been trying to get the cross country team involved in a Google Classroom. He has a different theme for every day of the week. Thursday was hat and sunglasses day. His goal was to get everyone to go running and then share a picture of themselves wearing a hat and suglasses afterwards. We took our picture, even though we didn't run together. Jeff has been battling knee and ankle issues and discovered that if he runs faster, his form is better and his joints feel better. So we run separately.
We had a semi-social-distanced gathering with a few friends this week. The moms sat 6 feet apart in the shade and talked while the kids ran around, biked, played on the rope swing, and dug in the dirt. They created quite a battle zone for the army men.
The next day, they moved to a different swath of dirt for their army man battle.
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