Family

Regulation of Input and Retaining Reserves

By / May 5, 2010 / 2 Comments

Each evening as I returned to my room after a day of conventioning, I looked at my laptop and dreaded opening it. This is unusual. The internet is usually my friend. I like my regular blogs and email. But my brain was so full of new things, that the last thing I wanted to do was add more new things. My caution was wise because I ended the convention over loaded.

I’ve been back for three days now and I am still carefully regulating my input. I’m back to answering email and blog comments. But I still haven’t caught up on my usual internet sites. I’m not reading much that I don’t have to in order to keep our business running. Also I am sleeping more than I would like. It is a necessary reset, which is being hampered by my extensive list of things to do.

I’ve seen this sort of overload in my kids as well. Patch is the most prone to it. He really requires quiet spaces in order to stay his usual happy self. One of my jobs as a parent is to watch my kids and force them to slow down when they’re getting over stimulated. Apparently I need to do a better job of doing this for myself. A couple of friends at the convention told me how they always schedule time mid-con to hide from everyone and everything. This sounds wise.

I am already thinking about how I can put this into practice next August when Howard and I take the two oldest to GenCon. We are all going to be over loaded and I need to think carefully about how I can counter act that and give us quiet spaces. The kids and I may have to ditch the convention for an afternoon and go find a park to sit in. Or perhaps we’ll watch movies in the room. I am going to have to be much more careful to conserve my own energy. I can’t afford to run myself to the edge of my limits when I have two kids to watch out for. I’ll also have Howard who will run himself to the edge of his limits, as is his job. I need to spend energy making sure that the presence of the kids does not interfere with his ability to work the show. It will be an interesting challenge.

Conventions are not the only time when I need to spend energy regulating input. I still remember clearly the day I worked myself to my physical limits assembling two pallets of books, and then had to face a plethora of kid crises with zero emotional or physical reserves. That was the kind of day I vow never to repeat, and I haven’t, but I keep coming close. I think one of the hardest things about being a mother is that I can’t allow myself to run to the edge of my abilities. I have to hold part of my energies in reserve so that I can always answer the needs of the children. It was one of the joys of Penguicon that I could use up my reserves. Mostly. Except for the phone calls. (How exactly did they expect me to help find the eye drops in my brother’s house while I was over 1000 miles away? I don’t know, but they called to ask me anyway.)

Hmm. This post began talking about regulating input and ended with retaining reserves. My thoughts are still rambling and I lack the focus to bring things back around so that they all connect at the end of the post. Also I am still tired. So for today I will apply the lazy solution and add the words “and retaining reserves” to the title of the post. That makes it all relevant. Right?

Retrieve the kids day

By / May 3, 2010

Four hours of plane travel and three hours of solo driving was almost enough time for me to index all the thoughts and experiences I had at Penguicon. Throughout the convention my brain kept grabbing things and storing them for examination later. In my regular life this system works very well. But one of the few things the convention lacked was contemplative time. As a result my thought storage buffer was packed too tightly for me to see anything. I had to sit staring at nothing, listening to nothing, waiting for things to drift across the middle, then I’d scribble them down in my notebook. I call it stalking my brain. It is interesting for me to flip through the book and see how the early pages are all fragments, but the last pages are coherent thoughts with the beginnings of analysis. It is all indexed and noted. Over the next week I’ll be either putting things into use or long term storage.

The kids pile-hugged me as soon as they realized I had arrived. I can’t think of a happier place than the middle of that hug, no matter where that hug may takes place. The only thing it lacked was a Howard. He stayed home to sleep off the convention so he can get back to work tomorrow. I’ll be sleeping off convention slowly over the course of the week, while also trying to wrap my head around May’s list of things.

After the first hug, the kids went back to their movie while I visited with my sister-in-law. Occasionally they would come for more hugs. I watched them. They were glad to see me, glad to be going home, but there were no signs of stress. My trip away was actually beneficial rather than the reverse. The bonds between them are stronger and they have a little more confidence in their eyes. This was really good to see, because I received a couple of mid-convention phone calls from tired kids which had me concerned. They definitely had some child sized crises while I was gone, but they banded together and managed them without Howard or me there.

The trip home was uneventful. Howard had dinner waiting for us, which was another reason we left him home. Now I have a front room full of luggage to sort and put away. In a short while I will need to gather the children and attempt to restore a normal bedtime so that we can get back into the swing of school tomorrow.

Road Trip Day

By / April 29, 2010

The last two Augusts I have gone with Howard to Worldcon, leaving the kids with relatives. Both times I felt very conflicted and stressed about leaving them. This internal turmoil found physical expression in a small pile of packages that I gave to them. They were to open the packages whenever they felt sad or lonely. The packages had dollar store items. What really happened was that the kids opened all the packages on the first day and then managed their emotions just fine on all the other days. They’re not much for delayed gratification. The truth was that the packages were as much for me as for them. I was harboring lots of guilt about the amount of emotional energy that I was spending on things other than them.

I just got back from dropping the kids off with relatives. This trip has been remarkably angst free. I did give them each one package to open. They each got a new book, but mostly because I think having a new book when mom and dad do conventions is a nice tradition. This time I’m not vainly attempting to compensate for anything because I’ve been giving lots of energy to the kids these past 8 months.

I left the kids in a house full of cousins. As a bonus, they managed to supply a litter of six week old kittens. The kittens are a little wild and so my kids will get to participate in gentling them. When I left Kiki had made a sort of a cave with her long sweater. All five kittens were curled up inside and peeking out at the other kids. They only gave me the most cursory of hugs. I only felt a vague awareness that I am going to miss them.

I love that I have relatives where I can just hand the kids over with no special instructions other than “Oh this one currently has pink-eye, here’s the bottle of eye drops.” My sister-in-law did not bat an eye. She just answered that one of hers had pink-eye too, so remembering the drops would be easy. I really wanted to stay and visit. It has been far too long, but I had a three hour drive ahead of me. I did not dare linger too long.

I was worried about driving three hours solo. But it turns out that caffeine perks me right up. Really up. Singing at the top of my voice kind of up. Of course I’ve been home for over an hour and I think the up may just barely be wearing off enough that I can sleep. This is good, because tomorrow I get on a plane to Penguicon where I’ll get to visit with old friends, meet online friends, and meet new people who will become friends. It will be good.

At Fault

By / April 26, 2010 / 1 Comment

Sometimes things go wrong even when I’ve done everything right. There are days I follow the usual morning routine with cheerfulness, but am rewarded with grouchiness and squabbling. Or perhaps I stay home from an event that I’d like to attend because I feel it is best for the kids, but this does not prevent them from being whiny and volatile the next day. The meal is a favorite and I fixed it on schedule, but they all decide they don’t like it today. I’ve long believed that if I want life to improve, the person I need to change is me. But sometimes I am not the problem, and I have to accept that. Sometimes there will be conflict despite my best efforts. Then I find myself washed up in my room, feeling shipwrecked, and trying to figure out how to make it go differently next time. It probably should not be such a revelation to me that not everything in our family is my fault to fix, and yet I keep being surprised by the idea.

There are days when I am not at fault in a hard day, but I can see how I could improve our lives by doing things differently. Usually these are small, concrete things which would only take a little of my time. I could make the kids lay out their clothes at bedtime, so the mornings would be less hurried. If I just instituted a 10 minute pick up time every evening, the whole house would be neater. Link would benefit from me making him read aloud. I could make all the kid check the clocks in the morning to track their own progress toward school preparedness. These are all good ideas. Unfortunately they enter my brain and are tossed into my huge pile of good ideas. I would need 37 hour days to be able to implement every good idea that occurs to me. Many of my good ideas must lay idle. In my shipwrecked hours, I feel guilty about that. I feel guilty about the fact that I did not make Link read aloud every day in first grade. I knew it was a good idea. I knew it would help him, but it never got done. My unimplemented good ideas nag at me.

The days I like least are the ones where things go wrong because I am the one handling the situation poorly. I am human. I have cranky days and tired days. Sometimes my focus is not in the place it should be and I sacrifice the emotional needs of the kids for something which feels urgent, but really isn’t. I make mistakes. Then I have to give myself a time out, pull myself together, apologize, and try to make the rest of the day different. Oddly, I am more willing to forgive myself for having a cranky afternoon, than I am to accept that I can’t follow through on all my good ideas. Cranky days happen and I feel bad, but then they’re gone. The unrealized good ideas haunt me.

In one month school will be out. I will no longer have the school schedule as a prop to support my effort to structure our days. My unrealized ideas become particularly pesky at this time of year. Surely with the kids home all day every day I can find time to implement some of these things. I can make Link read aloud, practice typing, write stories, and mow the lawn. I can tutor Gleek in beginning piano, knitting, writing stories, dance, and gardening. Patch can read aloud, learn to ride a bike, practice writing, learn to organize his toys, and learn to fold laundry. I can teach Kiki to cook and assist her in furthering her art studies. All of that. Every day. While simultaneously writing a book, launching a book, preparing for several large conventions, sending kids to 3 different week long camps, maintaining a house, tending a garden, keeping in touch with communities of friends, and having a family vacation.

Obviously I need to be scaling back rather than adding things. It is a good idea. I’ll throw it right here in this pile.

My saving grace, and the reason I am not incapacitated by guilt, is that I have an instinct for which good ideas are really critical and which are optional. The critical ones don’t go into the pile. They get shoehorned into our days and made to work. I can also beat back the guilt by looking at what I did instead. It is hard to feel bad about idle good ideas when I can see that the day was filled with critical things.

But the most important realization which frees me from omnipresent guilt, is linked to what I said in the first paragraph. No matter how good I am, my children will still have off days. The opposite is also true. Even if I fail to implement a good idea, my children can choose it if they wish. Just because I fail does not mean that they will. My children are separate from me. In the end what they choose will have a far greater effect on their lives than anything that I do or fail to do. This is another idea which I constantly rediscover with surprise, but the older my children get, the more true it becomes.

My best is all I have to give. The rest is up to them.

Link’s Adventures in Creative Cooking

By / April 25, 2010

Today Link learned that adding chocolate chips to oriental flavored ramen does not result in chocolate ramen. He further learned that adding crackers, sugar, and garlic will not remedy the situation. He did figure out that eating a handful of sugar does wonders to remove bad tastes from his mouth.

Staying home from an event

By / April 24, 2010 / 2 Comments

Soft footsteps padded across my bedroom carpet. Then the bed bounced as a small body rebounded off the side and under the covers. Patch wriggled his way into his favorite snuggle spot and we all drifted back to sleep for awhile.

Howard’s morning playlist sounded off at the usual time, waking all of us. Usually we turn the alarm off on Saturdays, but Howard had to give a presentation at the LDS Storymakers Writing Conference. He would be gone all day and we planned for me to join him at the awards gala in the evening. I looked forward to it. I do not get many chances to dress formally and go out. Not to mention I love the people who are there. It was so much fun staying out late the night before to visit with them all. The kids had a movie fest in my absence and I put them to bed when I got home.

Patch and I snuggled under the covers while Howard got up to shower.

“Did you have fun last night?” I asked Patch.

He smiled “Yes. We watched three Scooby Doo shows.” He then proceeded to give me a detailed description of each plot. I did not interrupt his flow of chatter. Sometimes Patch just needs to talk until his head is empty. I know the feeling. I do the same thing. I did not really listen to the plots. I was too busy watching Patch. Next Wednesday we’ll be separating for four days. Howard and I have a convention and the kids are staying with relatives. They’ll have a good time and so will we, but being away is still hard on the youngest of my kids. Patch’s eyes were alive with excitement and the gap in his front teeth gave a slight lisp to his speech. He’s not the baby he once was.

The stories wound down and we snuggled under the covers in silence for a few minutes. The house is chilly since we’ve turned off the heat and opened windows for cool spring air.

“So next week you get to stay with your cousins.” I said.

Patch’s face lit up and then his forehead crinkled. “I’m going to miss you mom.”

“I know. That part is hard. But you’re going to have fun.”

He nods, but then wraps my arms around him and snuggles closer.

“Hey buddy. Dad and I were planning on me going with him to a dinner tonight. You would get to have another fun movie night. How would you feel about that?”

Patch was silent for a moment, then answered “I’d rather have you home mom.”

“You want your normal bedtime with me here?”

“Yeah.”

I think of the beautiful dress I planned to wear. I think of the friends with whom I could visit. I think of how over-tired the kids were last night and the likely crankiness that I’ll have to deal with today. The morning following had church. Kids up late for two nights in a row guarantees Sunday morning meltdowns. I look into my boy’s blue eyes and know that being home for him and his siblings is more important. I need to give them two days of uninterrupted mom-at-home time this weekend so that we’re all ready for next week.

“Okay, I’ll stay home.”

The further I got into the day, the more sure I was that the decision was right. Sometimes the business things need to bend to the family things.

Peace and Sunshine

By / April 22, 2010

The stressy, angsty time of this-book-is-almost-done has given way to the happy period of peace which frequently comes afterward. Or at least I’m having peace. Howard is still scrambling to build the buffer back up before we head out to a convention next week. I sometimes feel guilty that I’m having cheerful peace while Howard is still living in stress land. Then I remember that for me “happy peace” still includes a day that is scheduled by the hour. I’m just scheduling house and family stuff more often than business stuff.

Today the family stuff manifested in the shape of shoes. Link has been wearing sneakers with gaping holes for almost a month. Patch and Gleek were down to one pair each. This meant considerable time spent each morning seeking for lost shoes. So I took Link shoe shopping. He is in that middle ground between child sizes and adult sizes where the pickings are pretty slim. It also gives me the opportunity to muse on the fact that men’s shoes cost twice as much as children’s shoes eve when the pairs in question are nearly identical. But Link was happy. He took great joy in throwing away his old shoes before we even left the store. He just put on the new ones as soon as I paid for them. We brought home shoes for Gleek and Patch as well. I’ve done my part to keep the economy healthy for this week.

The business stress will return. I see it off on the horizon in the shape of an XDM project deadline and pre-orders for Resident Mad Scientist. May will have crazy in it. But I’m not there yet. I’ll deal with it when I am. Also there will actually be fewer things to manage in May than there were last month. It is less crazy-inducing to manage two big things than 5 smaller things. For now I’m going to turn my back on the far off clouds and enjoy the sunshine.

That kind of day

By / April 19, 2010

Today is the kind of day where I start blogging and then discard everything I wrote because I realize that I’m telling the wrong story, or framing it in the wrong way. In fact today is the kind of day when I do that twice.

It is the kind of day which begins with Howard and I talking business as we bustle the kids off to school. Howard has to re-invent all of his work processes because his computer crashed to the blue screen of doom and the only solution was to reformat his drive and restore from back ups. Thankfully Howard is compulsive about backing up thoroughly. Then I buried myself in my office to plow through accounting work, which I was not looking forward to because it included a letter from the Utah State Tax Commission claiming that we owed them more money. (We didn’t, I explained it all over the phone to a nice man who agreed with me and shifted a mis-credited payment. $790 which stays in our pockets is a good thing.) The morning also included helping a business partner find a solution to an urgent problem and calculating funds against expenses and proposed purchases. Also, I shipped packages.

Today is the kind of day which takes a sharp left turn in the middle of it and spins off into something entirely different. Gleek was crying when I pulled up at school. I don’t think her whole day had been hard, but it ended in frustrated tears. Which almost brought me to tears because I don’t know how to fix it for her. Also I worry about next year and who her teacher will be. Gleek requires deft management or things go bad in a hurry. So today became the kind of day where I talk with school officials and neighbors, trying to piece together exactly what the budget cuts are going to do to the staffing of fourth grade. Teachers are being shifted all over the place. I’ve put in my requests and tried to make clear why my requests are not frivolous. Time will tell if I’m believed.

Today is also the kind of day where I sit down with Gleek and we weed three flowerbeds together. She seemed to enjoy the quiet together time and even expressed that pulling weeds was a good solution to angry feelings. I agreed. Gardening is calming for me as well. At the end of the work, Gleek was hot. Then today became the kind of day where we break out the swimsuits, turn on the sprinklers, and invite neighbor kids from four different houses to come and splash. I stood outside for more than an hour catching a toddler at the bottom of the slide and regulating trampoline turns. The crowd of children grouped and regrouped as games were created and abandoned. I listened to the words of the four-and-under crowd, amazed once again that persons so small could express such complicated thoughts with limited vocabulary. I watched them all and loved them all. It was the kind of day where I am grateful once again for the neighbors that I have.

I left the yard to create dinner, which started with a bag of Spanish Rice mix, but expanded into a Mexican food sampler with black beans, refried beans, and grilled chicken. Then it became the kind of day when I spoon small amounts of new foods onto the kids plates and insist that they try everything. I also said they had to pick three things to eat completely. Gleek and Patch both eschewed the refried beans. Link left a pile of grilled chicken. Kiki abandoned the black beans. Good thing I provided variety. Fortunately I also made the last of the Easter eggs into deviled eggs. (Did I mention that we only got around to coloring eggs yesterday? Easter tradition was delayed by book.) The kids filled up on the eggs mostly.

At the end, today became the kind of day where we pile everyone in the car to go buy gelato (Italian ice cream) from Mia Terra. We sat at the high counter and told a round robin story which petered out into absurdity. But no quarrels were had and at home the kids read until lights out.

Next it will be the kind of day where I fall asleep hoping for tomorrow to be just as good, but perhaps a little emptier.

Patch Contemplates his Future Part II

By / April 12, 2010

This morning Patch got ready for school with time to spare. He sat down with paper, pencil, and the boxes from his Halo toys. I watched as he began to draw. Then erase. Then draw. Then erase.

He looked up at me. “Mom, this isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”

“Yeah. May be you should work on practicing drawing Halo dudes and worry about making comics later.”

Patch nodded. “Or I could just practice drawing Lego guys. Maybe I’ll make a Lego comic instead.”

I gave him a hug. “Just remember that practice isn’t about getting things perfect. It is about trying your best.”

Patch jumped down and fetched his Halo sets from his room. He began to carefully arrange them around his piece of paper. “I’m going to need more Halo sets, cause I’m a Halo collector.”

Patch carefully arranged the little guys on their vehicles and created a tableau. Then he looked at me.

“Dad had a harder time than me. He didn’t have anything to practice from. He just had to think it all up in his head. I’m lucky. Dad said if I start drawing comics as a kid, then I’ll be better than him. Really.”

After that the Halo guys were too busy talking to each other for Patch to have any attention left over for either me or drawing.

Patch Contemplates His Future

By / April 11, 2010

Patch climbed out of bed and approached me with a serious look on his face. “Mom, I’ve changed. Now I am thinking ahead. I’ve been thinking about how my life is going to be. Making Halo comics.”

“Oh?” I answered.

“Yeah. I need to start practicing now while I’m a kid to get good at my things. I need to practice until I’m good enough to make comics.”

“And what things do you need to practice?” I asked.

“Drawing Halo guys from toy boxes. I need to get more Halo sets so I can look at the boxes. Or I could look at the boxes at my friend’s house” Then Patch begins to tell me the plot of his planned comic page by page. After every page is described, complete with explosions and sound effects, Patch continues.

“So I’ll start selling them now for $3. Then when I make my teenager connection I’ll sell them for more. When I’m in my 20’s or 30’s then I’ll start hiring people. And when I have five comics I’ll put them in a box together and sell them for $15. The boxes will be really expensive.”

“So I’m really thinking ahead. I think the changes will start tomorrow.” He paused a moment.

“It’s going to change my life completely.”

After another contemplative pause he added. “And I’m going to have a telephone.”