Spring broke

Oh yes, I used to have a blog. Here it is!

I've dropped the ball on lots of things lately. Blogging. Writing that story that all both of my fan-friends are clamoring for me to finish. Cooking real meals. Working. Dressing in grown-up clothes. Those kinds of things. Lucky for the family, I haven't given up showering or brushing my teeth.

As for excuses, I've got a laundry list that I won't bore you with. Feeling run-down is among them, and that kind of encapsulates all of the NOTs I've been busying myself with nicely. I could blame Katherine, who has us staring down the barrel of Two with trepidation and sometimes outright soul-sucking panic. She's going to be a sight more difficult in this phase than her brother was, I daresay. I think it's payback for what an easy baby she was. How she slept from the minute she popped out straight through her newborn days and up to around 6 months of age, when she woke up only to grace us with smiles and sunshine until we were coddled into believing we'd never know what it's like to deal with a temperamental small person with a personality the size of Texas.

But I won't blame her, because that would be supremely unfair. She's doing what she's supposed to be doing, and is entitled to a mother who meets tantrums with calm, whining with a deaf ear, inexplicable sleep disturbances with grace and boundless energy. Oh, those mothers don't exist? Well that does make me feel better.

If I'm being honest, I haven't stopped working. On the contrary, I've been doing more than I comfortably can, and so arises the key issue of working from home, when you never leave the office and therefore forget that you should really set hours for yourself and allow for the occasional cuddle with the toddler when she's allowing people to touch her and the occasional game of Chinese checkers with the big kid when he's in the mood to refresh you on the rules without rolling his eyes too much. Or even to catch the occasional episode of The Office, The Walking Dead, or Judge Judy (don't judge me).

But not being able to do it all leads one to believe that one is not doing enough. And feeling like one is not doing enough compounds the problem by making it more and more difficult to be satisfied with what does get done, and more often than one would admit, pretty darn competently.

I'm trying to cut myself some slack. It's easier said than done.

In the meantime, Alex's spring break is almost over and I couldn't be more relieved. (Cue mommy guilt.) It's just that I feel bad when I don't keep him occupied and supply the "fun" that is supposed to be had, in theory, during spring break. I've taken them for game playing at Chuck E. Cheese and an impromptu (and ill-conceived) side-jaunt to the state park's fake beach. We walked to the park and played even though Katherine fell and scraped both knees on the way there and her diaper fell the heck off when she came down the slide. I invited their cousins over for pizza and rowdy X-Box play. We tried bowling today but were turned away because the leagues were dominating all the lanes (shame on the leagues; it's a rainy day during spring break!). So instead we ate cookies and watched a movie. All written out like that, it doesn't sound like I exactly neglected the kid, but then again I suffer from often-baseless guilt and was born with no gauge of enough.

It was a taste of the summer, and made me want to redouble my efforts to keep Alex occupied for most if not all of it. My boss insists that I stop playing and get back to the grind, and that can best be done when I'm not dreaming up ways to prevent two kids from getting (gasp!) bored. Perhaps the funniest part is that Alex is so easygoing, he wouldn't mind if his summer was a 24/7 three-ring circus or an endless loop of Nintendo DS and an occasional trip to the pool. It's all me and my misconceptions and misperceptions and mis ... givings?

I think I need to try harder to go easier.