Katherine is walking. Ish. She took her first few steps when we went to the beach with the Bosches and the Jacobses (Steven's parents, brother, sister, brother-in-law, and their three adorable children), and since then has been getting more confident little by little. She still prefers her crippled-crab crawl, but that's OK with me because I'm going to miss it when it's gone. I've never seen a baby move as fast as she does by propelling herself with one leg stuck out in front of her. Steven says she reminds him of that weird spider-doll thing in the Toy Story movies. I think that's creepy.
I'm so ready for school to start. I love Alex ... ADORE him, in fact ... as anyone who knows me can attest. But having the two of them home since May has been a challenge, and that's putting it mildly. A home-based job simply does not lend itself to entertaining an energetic 6-year-old at the same time as meeting the diametrically opposed needs of a 1-year-old and getting the amount of work done that I should and want to. I'm not complaining about the work; this is my dream scenario, and I'll do whatever it takes to ensure that it stays this way for the foreseeable future. But I never really considered the logistics, back in the days when Katherine slept 22 out of 24 hours and was content to lie next to me on the couch in her Boppy while I fed her with one hand and typed with the other.
I miss those days a little bit. Seems like I was extraordinarily productive. But if I'm honest with myself, I'm pretty darn productive these days, especially under the circumstances. I've taken on more projects and am not feeling bogged down at all. In fact, it gives me quite a charge to multitask, something I never really felt when I had an office job. I can throw in a load of laundry and give the kids lunch (thank God Katherine is now self-feeding) and get back to my laptop in a matter of minutes, and every now and then I can have an awesomely terrible movie like Paranormal Entity on in the background while I do some of the less-cerebral work (i.e. formatting, which consists largely of cut and paste). Not that I watched Paranormal Entity last week. Not that if I had, I would have really, really enjoyed it. Nope.
But it's been mostly a challenge to see to it that Alex didn't get cabin fever all summer. Don't get me wrong; he is excellent at entertaining himself. He plays spy games outside, he tries to train two senior-and-set-in-their-ways golden retrievers, he watches Scooby Doo and plays with his sister and finds new and weird crafts to make. Just last week I was presented with a bracelet made out of yarn, Scotch tape, and a quarter, and today he used his new skill, which is blowing up balloons and tying them, to make a whole family of balloon people.
He got a new fish. It's a beta that he named Finny. It lives in a small tank with a barely working filter and a gigantic alien skull that is really not at all attractive. Steven is responsible for both the fish and the skull. I told him he's also responsible for picking up the pieces of Alex when that fish inevitably dies, which, from my experience with fish, I know could be at any second, for any reason. I have a really poor track record with fish, going back to Frank, my first one, when I was about 9. I'm sorry, Frank.
Fridays have been our "fun" days, and the "fun" is in quotation marks for me, not for Alex, who loved every minute. We've done Chuck E. Cheese, bowling, swimming pool, and Pump It Up, the inflatable wonderland where I spend most of my time chasing after Katherine, who does not understand why she can't participate in the bouncy fun. I told her last time that she would get squished. She didn't care, and expressed that sentiment to me at the top of her lungs.
So yeah. One more week. And this week Alex is going to a fine arts camp at a local church from 9 to 12:30 every day, so I'm guiltily glad for that, too. Surely it'll be more fun than making balloon people and coming up with new and innovative ways to scam money out of his parents. (He opened a "LIBRARIE" in his room the other day and charged me 25 cents to check out a Clifford book and an Encyclopedia Brown that we got out of the free bin at 2nd & Charles.)
I'm grateful for every new project I get, for every day that I have the steady work that keeps Katherine in diapers and me as busy as I want to be without making me so overwhelmed I want to tear my hair out. I am grateful that I have healthy, happy children who do their damnedest on a daily basis to circumvent me from DOING that work, and for a husband who takes over when he gets home so I can make up for the time I spent being Julie the Mommy instead of Julie the Freelancer.
I'm grateful for a wonderful beach vacation where I got to see my boy trample his fear of water like it had never been, and ride gentle waves with my girl on a float while she pointed excitedly to every boat, parasailer, person, and seagull and asked, "DAT??" And for the people with whom we shared the experience.
And today, especially, I'm grateful for people out there, two in particular who are on my mind and heart, who are willing to turn their lives upside down for the good of others. Ian and Laura, I don't know if either of you will see this, but God bless you both, and all three of those little ones.
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