in which i post for the first time in more than two months
I don't mean to be away for that long at a time. I think the issue is actually that I seldom use my laptop at home anymore - I'm on my work laptop at work or when I'm working from home, and when I'm at home not working, I get my internets on my phone, where it's harder to post to DW and much easier to post to Facebook or Twitter. (I'm on the work computer now, of course, because I'm at work. It's not like I can't use it to read and post. But I generally don't, because I'm generally working. Only right now I have done all the work available to me except one project that I really am going to have to dig in my heels before I can face it. So here I am.)
obU.S. politics: Our country is a dumpster fire, actual grown adults in many states (probably all states, but fortunately they don't seem to be in the majority in all states' legislatures) genuinely believe that girls and women* do not deserve the same control over their bodies that we afford actual literal cadavers, and I've railed and gnashed my teeth and am experiencing a Dan Rydell-style crisis of not knowing which of the deserving organizations combating this shit should be where I send my donations. I've been tithing out of my Catholic-choir-section-leader earnings to Planned Parenthood these past seven-ish years, but I think it's probably time to diversify and put some cash in the hands of the folks actually running the clinics in actual Alabama and Georgia and Ohio and . . . you see my difficulty. (*Nor trans men nor other folks with uteruses, whom the grown adults in question seem not to understand or believe are actually real. The rage is a many-headed Hydra.)
Family: Himself did a lot of soul-searching and auditioned a lot of pharmaceuticals and whatnot for more than a year and ultimately concluded that he can't agree to have another kid. I am devastated by this but there's nothing left with which to try to persuade him. I'm trying to get on with coming to terms with it, but it's really hard. (My mother sometimes makes it harder, and I'm going to have to recruit my brother into helping make her understand she has to stop, because when I tell her something she's done has upset me, she invariably gets upset and then I have to comfort her for having hurt me. I don't know if it's ingenious or inadvertent, but either way, it's fucked up.) In fact this past couple of weeks, after several months of struggling to come to terms etc., I thought I might be pregnant despite being on the pill - general lower abdominal symptoms that I couldn't explain any other way - but I still can't, because I wasn't even a day late. I hadn't said anything to Himself, because what would have been the point of bringing it up before there was anything to know, but when I told him yesterday that I'd thought there might be this chance but it turns out I'm not, he said the question of what to do about it would have been a huge fight. (At this point in my life I don't think I would choose to terminate a healthy pregnancy. The fact that such a choice - I mean, could it be any more relevant, see above re: politics, jfc - might apparently cost me my marriage means it's good that I'm not actually faced with it. . . . But I will never not want another child. You see my difficulty.)
BUT! The prince is fantastic. He's two and a half next week and entirely charming about 98% of the time. He's currently obsessed with doughnuts, of which he has had precisely one in his entire life; last weekend he came with me to the Catholics (which we identify as "Mommy going out singing") because his grandparents are out of town and his dad wasn't feeling well, and I got him snacks at Starbucks on the way in but he didn't like any of them - unaccustomed string cheese and weird applesauce and a sort of fruit-leather bar with no granola or anything did not suit him - so by the time he was waiting in the choir room with the choir director and music director after mass, playing on the piano while I went to get the car in the rain, he hadn't eaten all day and the doughnuts were right there. The bosses did tell him he had to wait and ask me if he could have one, rather than giving him one themselves, which I appreciate, but I reasoned that he would be simply impossible in the car and at home (for nap time) if he didn't have some food in his belly, so I let him have a doughnut as a special treat. The words "special treat" have been heavily reinforced w/r/t doughnuts ever since, but he seems to think "Mommy going out singing" equals "doughnuts." And this has been my concert week, with rehearsals on the usual Monday plus Thursday and Friday as well as the concert on Sunday, so there's been quite a lot of Mommy going out singing, plus Daddy going out singing for his own rehearsal on Tuesday. And the kid keeps saying he wants to go singing with us, which, when we query it - because the couple times he's been to the Catholics with me he's been bored, of course, and our evening rehearsals take place after his bedtime so he's not actually invited - he always follows up with "I want a doughnut." Obviously what's going to have to happen is, he's going to have to come with one of us to something musical at some point and not get a doughnut, because our telling him that there aren't always doughnuts when we go singing is not getting through to him.
He's also willful and committed to his selective listening, of course. And in the stage where he hits at us when he's frustrated, but old enough to have it reinforced that he's simply not allowed to do that. This morning, for example, he used up all his opportunities to come voluntarily to put on his shoes and leave the house, so I picked him up to carry him to the front room; he hit me; his dad and I both said hey now, no hitting; he hit me again; I held his hands for a few seconds; as soon as I let go he hit me again; I immobilized his hands in a timeout hug, which is how we do the discipline at our house - constructive cuddling for 30 seconds - and as soon as I started counting he leaned forward and tried to bite me, so now I had to cover his mouth as well, and he cried. Of course as soon as his 30 seconds were up I gave him non-restraining hugs and kisses, but you know he was upset to have got in trouble. Then once his shoes were on his feet it was all fine. Sigh.
The latest cuteness, was walking home from day care yesterday. He asked me to pick him up at one point, and I didn't argue, so I was carrying him when a neighborhood dog started barking at us from its fenced yard. The prince was alarmed, but he patted my face and said "It's okay, Mommy." ♥
I don't remember who recommended An Ever-Fixed Mark eight million yonks ago, but I had it open in a tab on my phone for many, many months and finally read it. For the benefit of anyone who's further behind than I am, it's a soulmark/wristname treatment of Pride and Prejudice, and that's all I'll say about that except to note that it got me to dig out the 1995 BBC miniseries again (I do love the Netherfield ball scene, before it all goes sideways; in fact I generally like the ballroom scenes in the TV and film adaptations, because the directors pretty uniformly use the scenes properly and achieve what they're going for, as far as I'm concerned, and everyone looks great doing it; I think late Regency fashion might have suited me) and I may one day actually - gasp! - get one or more volumes of Austen down off the shelf and actually read them again.
I sort of miss being fannish about things. I don't consume much new media anymore, because we're not ready for the kid to be watching TV so we don't turn it on until he's in bed, and then there's only a couple of hours at most before we go to bed ourselves, so it's generally hockey or curling or old familiar comfort viewing rather than anything a person would have to pay attention to. Plus Himself and I have different tastes in TV shows; we both like sci-fi, there's some overlap on fantasy, but he's not much of a one for most procedurals (legal, medical, police, political, whatever) and would generally prefer to eat glass than watch a half-hour sitcom from any era or costume drama of any length. (That might be a bit harsh. But he doesn't care for them, and in fact he doesn't watch nearly the amount of TV on his own that I do or did on my own, so if I'm going to "make" him have the TV on in the limited time we're together without the prince in the evenings, I feel it's fair not to "make" him sit through something so far down his list of preferences.) So when I do DVR those, I save them to watch when he's out, which isn't super often. One falls behind. And of course getting out to the movies requires a week's worth of planning these days. We can just about keep up with Star Wars; we might have been able to get a babysitter so we could get to Avengers: Endgame, but we're so far behind on Marvel movies that we're having to do a lot of DVD catch-up before we're prepared, so we're going to have to get that one eventually as well.
No idea if anyone is even reading me anymore. I'd hoped to get back into the posting habit when you all came back from Tumblr, but I haven't managed it well. I'll keep trying, though.
obU.S. politics: Our country is a dumpster fire, actual grown adults in many states (probably all states, but fortunately they don't seem to be in the majority in all states' legislatures) genuinely believe that girls and women* do not deserve the same control over their bodies that we afford actual literal cadavers, and I've railed and gnashed my teeth and am experiencing a Dan Rydell-style crisis of not knowing which of the deserving organizations combating this shit should be where I send my donations. I've been tithing out of my Catholic-choir-section-leader earnings to Planned Parenthood these past seven-ish years, but I think it's probably time to diversify and put some cash in the hands of the folks actually running the clinics in actual Alabama and Georgia and Ohio and . . . you see my difficulty. (*Nor trans men nor other folks with uteruses, whom the grown adults in question seem not to understand or believe are actually real. The rage is a many-headed Hydra.)
Family: Himself did a lot of soul-searching and auditioned a lot of pharmaceuticals and whatnot for more than a year and ultimately concluded that he can't agree to have another kid. I am devastated by this but there's nothing left with which to try to persuade him. I'm trying to get on with coming to terms with it, but it's really hard. (My mother sometimes makes it harder, and I'm going to have to recruit my brother into helping make her understand she has to stop, because when I tell her something she's done has upset me, she invariably gets upset and then I have to comfort her for having hurt me. I don't know if it's ingenious or inadvertent, but either way, it's fucked up.) In fact this past couple of weeks, after several months of struggling to come to terms etc., I thought I might be pregnant despite being on the pill - general lower abdominal symptoms that I couldn't explain any other way - but I still can't, because I wasn't even a day late. I hadn't said anything to Himself, because what would have been the point of bringing it up before there was anything to know, but when I told him yesterday that I'd thought there might be this chance but it turns out I'm not, he said the question of what to do about it would have been a huge fight. (At this point in my life I don't think I would choose to terminate a healthy pregnancy. The fact that such a choice - I mean, could it be any more relevant, see above re: politics, jfc - might apparently cost me my marriage means it's good that I'm not actually faced with it. . . . But I will never not want another child. You see my difficulty.)
BUT! The prince is fantastic. He's two and a half next week and entirely charming about 98% of the time. He's currently obsessed with doughnuts, of which he has had precisely one in his entire life; last weekend he came with me to the Catholics (which we identify as "Mommy going out singing") because his grandparents are out of town and his dad wasn't feeling well, and I got him snacks at Starbucks on the way in but he didn't like any of them - unaccustomed string cheese and weird applesauce and a sort of fruit-leather bar with no granola or anything did not suit him - so by the time he was waiting in the choir room with the choir director and music director after mass, playing on the piano while I went to get the car in the rain, he hadn't eaten all day and the doughnuts were right there. The bosses did tell him he had to wait and ask me if he could have one, rather than giving him one themselves, which I appreciate, but I reasoned that he would be simply impossible in the car and at home (for nap time) if he didn't have some food in his belly, so I let him have a doughnut as a special treat. The words "special treat" have been heavily reinforced w/r/t doughnuts ever since, but he seems to think "Mommy going out singing" equals "doughnuts." And this has been my concert week, with rehearsals on the usual Monday plus Thursday and Friday as well as the concert on Sunday, so there's been quite a lot of Mommy going out singing, plus Daddy going out singing for his own rehearsal on Tuesday. And the kid keeps saying he wants to go singing with us, which, when we query it - because the couple times he's been to the Catholics with me he's been bored, of course, and our evening rehearsals take place after his bedtime so he's not actually invited - he always follows up with "I want a doughnut." Obviously what's going to have to happen is, he's going to have to come with one of us to something musical at some point and not get a doughnut, because our telling him that there aren't always doughnuts when we go singing is not getting through to him.
He's also willful and committed to his selective listening, of course. And in the stage where he hits at us when he's frustrated, but old enough to have it reinforced that he's simply not allowed to do that. This morning, for example, he used up all his opportunities to come voluntarily to put on his shoes and leave the house, so I picked him up to carry him to the front room; he hit me; his dad and I both said hey now, no hitting; he hit me again; I held his hands for a few seconds; as soon as I let go he hit me again; I immobilized his hands in a timeout hug, which is how we do the discipline at our house - constructive cuddling for 30 seconds - and as soon as I started counting he leaned forward and tried to bite me, so now I had to cover his mouth as well, and he cried. Of course as soon as his 30 seconds were up I gave him non-restraining hugs and kisses, but you know he was upset to have got in trouble. Then once his shoes were on his feet it was all fine. Sigh.
The latest cuteness, was walking home from day care yesterday. He asked me to pick him up at one point, and I didn't argue, so I was carrying him when a neighborhood dog started barking at us from its fenced yard. The prince was alarmed, but he patted my face and said "It's okay, Mommy." ♥
I don't remember who recommended An Ever-Fixed Mark eight million yonks ago, but I had it open in a tab on my phone for many, many months and finally read it. For the benefit of anyone who's further behind than I am, it's a soulmark/wristname treatment of Pride and Prejudice, and that's all I'll say about that except to note that it got me to dig out the 1995 BBC miniseries again (I do love the Netherfield ball scene, before it all goes sideways; in fact I generally like the ballroom scenes in the TV and film adaptations, because the directors pretty uniformly use the scenes properly and achieve what they're going for, as far as I'm concerned, and everyone looks great doing it; I think late Regency fashion might have suited me) and I may one day actually - gasp! - get one or more volumes of Austen down off the shelf and actually read them again.
I sort of miss being fannish about things. I don't consume much new media anymore, because we're not ready for the kid to be watching TV so we don't turn it on until he's in bed, and then there's only a couple of hours at most before we go to bed ourselves, so it's generally hockey or curling or old familiar comfort viewing rather than anything a person would have to pay attention to. Plus Himself and I have different tastes in TV shows; we both like sci-fi, there's some overlap on fantasy, but he's not much of a one for most procedurals (legal, medical, police, political, whatever) and would generally prefer to eat glass than watch a half-hour sitcom from any era or costume drama of any length. (That might be a bit harsh. But he doesn't care for them, and in fact he doesn't watch nearly the amount of TV on his own that I do or did on my own, so if I'm going to "make" him have the TV on in the limited time we're together without the prince in the evenings, I feel it's fair not to "make" him sit through something so far down his list of preferences.) So when I do DVR those, I save them to watch when he's out, which isn't super often. One falls behind. And of course getting out to the movies requires a week's worth of planning these days. We can just about keep up with Star Wars; we might have been able to get a babysitter so we could get to Avengers: Endgame, but we're so far behind on Marvel movies that we're having to do a lot of DVD catch-up before we're prepared, so we're going to have to get that one eventually as well.
No idea if anyone is even reading me anymore. I'd hoped to get back into the posting habit when you all came back from Tumblr, but I haven't managed it well. I'll keep trying, though.