Realizations Coming Slow, Fast

I gave up yelling at my kids for Lent. I'm less than a week in and I've been pretty successful. But it's made me realize how much I've been yelling at my kids the past year or so.

Just one of many little things that have been creeping forward to the front of my brain lately. Others?

I hate fiction. No. I hate modern literature. I love most juvenile fiction dearly, and I can get cozy with things I've read before or even things that are somehow related to things I've read before (like a different Marquez or Austen, that sort of thing). But I hate the modern fiction written with the book club in mind. Books that are published with thought-provoking questions in the back. I've come to the realization that I have either failed to read or have disliked 90% of what my book club has read in the past two or three years, which is really dismaying because I like the people in book club. But it turns out, I like nonfiction. I like reading about the history of zero or an alphabetical listing of all the important people and theories surrounding prime numbers. The history of how linguists have debated the origins of language. Books about odds, about breastfeeding politics, about Benedictine thought. I like religion and humor and odd bits of history and science. Hell, I will sit and read a well-written field guide cover to cover (I'm partial to Peterson's Guides). But I just don't like pretentious fiction that thinks I'm going to discuss it later. I just read about 1/8 of Lark and Termite and flipped to the last chapter. Nauseated, I put the whole damned thing down. I'll probably go to bookclub, though, where I will drink decaf and eat snacks from Trader Joe's and listen to other people talk about the book.

I mopped the wood floors on the first floor and the front staircase today, and it made me realize it's been a long long shamefully long time since I've done that. The floors look strange now that they're really clean. Sad.

I can't keep up the pace with Girl Scouts. Next year I'm going to be Maeve's daisy troop leader or co-leader. I'm going to be City Garden's troop organizer. I love Sophia's troop and I don't want to divide it by school but my neighborhood liaison or whatever her three letter abbreviation is at girl scouts HQ really wants me to. I want other ideas and plans and buy-in from the parents but I don't want Cookie Mom to elbow her way further into my life. It's been a good study in Bridgett's Boundaries, and so far, it's going ok but I've realized it's getting pretty close to the DMZ. So a letter is going home to all parents tomorrow. I'm going to have a parent meeting about next year in two weeks' time. The saddest part of this is that it would be no big deal to continue with a large multi-school troop if it weren't for that one person.

My thyroid medication is working. My house hasn't been this clean (clean, not necessarily tidy) in years. I'm sorting and donating and cleaning and organizing. The trunk room/walk in closet off the bathroom is half empty of its boxes. The bathroom off the kitchen is almost ready for renovation. Yes, the room I'm sitting in now looks like an absent-minded professor organized the shelves, but even the guest room is getting an overhaul. In other thyroid news, the winter didn't hurt this year. Cold used to hurt. A lot. And I thought it did that to everyone. Turns out probably not, since cold is just simply cold now and not painful. And I'm having those moments of "hey, wait a minute, I'm happy" that I did when I first went on medication in 2005.

I am going to poignantly miss many things about Leo's babyhood but one of the things I will not miss is nursing this kid. I nursed all three and I'm damned proud of that. But there was something so earnest and loving about my nursing relationships with Sophia and Maeve. With Leo it's more like a wrestling match, hostage crisis, and cat fight rolled into one. He's taken to chewing again at night when I don't expect it. His latch (mouth position) is shallower than it should be, which is also a new old habit. And he's interested in picking up the pace after sunset. Also not much of a fan of that. I do a gently parent-guided weaning and I'm slow about it, but I don't think we'll make it as far as Maeve and I did (and definitely not as far as Sophia).

Connected to the first realization, my last one is about Maeve. We went to the library today and came home happy with many books about superheros. Sophia got out of the car and ran up to the house in the rain. Maeve got out of the car and I told her to watch out for the mud. She watched the mud. Dawdled. I was about to bark orders at her and stopped. She moved out of the way for me to shut the door to the car, and then slowly made her way up towards the house. And I realized that she is 5. She is not a short 8 year old. I got wet in the cold wet winter rain while she in her hooded sweatshirt slowly made her way up to the house without complaint. We got inside and she joined her sister upstairs to read their new books. Nobody was flustered or in a bad temper because I couldn't simply let her move at her pace. And how smoothly things went for several hours after.

Now realized, I wonder how long I will remember.