Lopsided

Brand new

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Home Ec meme.  All I can say is damn!  You people get up EARLY.  It’s interesting to me how many different combinations are possible, and I appreciate the opportunity to think outside of our own particular dynamics.

Today the Snapper is ten months old.  I haven’t blogged about him much since he was just a few months old and was driving me crazy.  Truth is that months 4-10 have been amazing, wonderful.  He is becoming a little boy right before my very eyes.  I remember the day he started looking like a baby instead of an infant, how his round face suddenly elongated and took on a goofy and curious expression.  Now all of the sudden he is a toddler just on the cusp of walking.  He takes two steps and decides it will be faster to crawl, but he has all the balance and coordination necessary.  He’s like his mother: he holds on for emotional support, but he doesn’t really need it.  The best thing, though, according to Attic Man, better than his first steps or his first hug (which was my favorite) is that he tells jokes.  No really, he does!  When he’s in his feeding seat he likes to drop things off the edge like all babies.  But now he’ll stretch out the hand holding the cracker, look Attic Man straight in the eye, and when AM puts his hand under the cracker to catch it, snatch it back into his seat and laugh.  And yesterday after AM yelped from a bite on the elbow, the Snapper spent several minutes coming almost up to his elbow again, mouth open for a mock bite, and withdrawing to giggle.  He’s also taking charge of his own games of peek-a-boo with any object–dishtowel, blanket, book–he can find.  His first reaction to anything new is usually laughter. I can’t tell you how happy and relieved we are to find that he has both a sense of curiosity and a sense of humor.  The world is rough on a curious person who can’t laugh the tough things off.  As AM said the other day, the Snapper sees the difference between how the world is and how it should be and finds humor in that space.

Right now he is perfecting his new turbo-scream in protest of the morning nap.  He was also rehearsing at 4:20 this morning, and wouldn’t you know that half-asleep mama gave in and slept nursing with him on the couch until Heidi came and licked us both?

Here’s mama’s story: I have to figure out a way to reign in my emotions so I can write my dissertation.  I have no self-confidence and I can’t seem to shake it.  I hate everything that I’ve written.  It’s hard to keep going when I don’t feel it will come out alright.  But I finally have the time to do it so I just need to soldier on.  Except that I’m not sure how to do that–I know how to handle my emotions at a death, or when someone rejects me, or when I receive disappointing news, but I have no idea how to manage this.  The dissertation experience has magnified every battle I’ve had to fight about my own efficacy.  I lost my violin playing to it and I’m in danger of losing this too.  Only I don’t want to.  I want to teach college (at a good college) more than I want to do anything else in my life.  And I want to be a scholar, a good scholar.  I have to write better than I do now, better than I do on this blog (blech) and certainly better than I am writing academically.  I need to do it faster.  I need to stop staring at a blank screen.

So that is why I haven’t been writing.  I have nothing to say that I can say well.