End of Day Musings

My oldest child sits with a cat in her lap pondering the pile of homework she needs to complete in the next week on the final run up to end-of-term. She also has worried thoughts about art, money, and validation. My second oldest sits down stairs on a couch, snickering as he reads through the Schlock Mercenary books. He’s finally gotten old enough to realize that they are funny. Third child is reading Girl Genius in her bed. Youngest is reading Full Metal Alchemist. I could play “one of these things is not like the others” except that at any hour of any day the obviously different child would change. They are four unique individuals and I constantly have to alter my parenting strategies to accommodate their different needs.

I can feel the gears of my life shifting. We’re changing from book crunch into the lull before shipping. Hopefully we’ll fill that lull with bonus story creation for the next book. We’re also shifting from winter into spring. Gardening work must begin soon. Fortunately it looks like we’ve cleared away enough tasks that I’ll have space for it. I’m shifting into project mode and out of heavy parenting mode. This actually follows a pattern that I identified last year. I’d forgotten that I identified it, except that one of the things I was working on today was layout for my book of blog entries from last year. Seeing the patterns from year to year is interesting. I feel quite glad that this year we’ve finished the book crunch a full six weeks earlier than last year.

Now we just need to adapt to daylight savings time.