Here we are, Tuesday afternoon. Malko just fell asleep upstairs, proving once again that he's happy in his crib, which is such a huge relief! Yesterday he took a really long nap, so long I started to worry he'd wrapped the sheet around his head, but when I opened the door and looked in he was having some kind of intense communion with the big grey stuffed raccoon we recently saved, along with a rabbit (tan, lop-eared), from the thrift store. Today when I looked in the room he was sitting up playing with a long white thing, which turned out to be part of one of the slats of the blind hanging near his bed. That slat's broken now, but at least my child's resourceful at "quiet play"...right?
Joedy just left to pick Lula up from school and to do some grocery shopping, hopefully coming home with stuff to make the pumpkin-chicken enchiladas he was talking about at lunch. Since yesterday we've been straightening up around the house, trying to get our "administrative" things in order--calling Medicaid AGAIN (not to complain! We're VERY grateful!), opening mail, planning the week, making sculptures out of tacks, etc. Malko's birthday and my mother Benita's visit (she left yesterday; Uncle E came too for a few days, as did Joedy's parents, nieces, and nephew) led me to put off the "daily duties" I took on recently in hopes of becoming a Type A person, and by golly was I glad to get back in the ole' swing of things!
Now it's 10:30 p.m. I took the dogs for a walk after writing the above paragraphs and at the park Astrid flushed a deer out of the trees. It ran through the middle of the park and I felt kind of bad for it but there was no way Astrid could have caught it, so I stopped feeling bad for it and started worrying about myself getting hit by a running deer. When I came home Joedy was holding Malko and stirring chicken in a frying pan; I thought it smelled like fish, so he threw the chicken out and we didn't have pumpkin-chicken enchiladas after all (we had salad, but the salad wasn't cleaned right and it was gritty, which totally sucked).
Joedy and I are trying to make our lives smoother so there'll be less stress, and less screaming, and one of the things we're focusing on is the evening: namely, getting Lula and Malko fed, washed, and pyjama'd BEFORE extreme tiredness sets in. Before she starts whining, he starts crying, and WE start yelling! Before the tension becomes unbearable and we all lose it! The plan is to have Lula in bed by 8:30. Tonight we made it by 9:30, which was too late, but even though we're not succeeding every time with the smoothification/destressification it feels good to know we've "got each other's back," we're "on the same page," and we're a "team"! This stuff, this smoothification-of-the-shared-lives thing (which I can't talk about without, like, a bunch of cliches popping into my head), is coming from the couples therapy we've had the last month, and I'm glad to say that now there does seem to be less stress, less screaming, and more...ease. It will be a work in progress, obviously, but it's nice to make some headway.
It's 11 now and I've run out of news so I'm going to exit Internet Land and enter Bed Land, which is a soft warm continent within the greater Bedlam world, usually inhabited by a pair of hairy legs that very kindly do not shy away when I put my freezing cold toes against them.
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