Getting My Nancy Drew On

Here's a funny story:

We have a drug dealer in our neighborhood. He lives across the street and a few houses down. He's a younger kid (maybe 19) who lives with his parents. And his parents know about this. And they are trying to deal with him as best as they can.

And so are we. Since I've been home for a while I've started a log of the different people and cars that go into and out of the house. There's even a pattern to it. And every time I take a picture or jot something down in my log, I call 911. The police have been super-helpful, and very encouraging.

They've even tolerated my very fuzzy cell-phone pictures I've been taking through the screens on the windows. A few times I've made up excuses to be outside and take the pictures (running selfie anyone??), and that's good. I have little nicknames for the different people: "Noon-Walker" "Skate border" "Creepy-van-man". The police assure me they are getting close to a solution for our neighborhood.

Until then, I'll be organizing a neighborhood watch this summer..... or maybe getting a job. Both would be very productive.

Had it.... Lost it... Found it

The baby (who is 7 months old already!!) doesn't sleep for more than 2 hours at a time. This has been true for his entire (short) life. He once slept for 4 hours. I remember that one night in January. It hasn't happened since.

As if that wasn't tough enough, he's been sick for three days and waking up every 40-60 minutes stuffy and coughing and generally, infantly, pathetic. I'm so beyond tapped out that I may have hallucinated slapping a bee off of my leg yesterday, and even in my dreams (when I have them) I'm trying to fall asleep.

A few nights ago (or hours, who really knows at this point?) I read a blog article about "the one thing that changed parenting for me forever." When I read it I wanted immediately to share it here, if only to have it saved forever. And now I can't find it. And googling, "parenting blog life changed forever" only yields several millions of results.

Anyway, the point of the article was: a woman was struggling with a baby that was very fussy and kept her from doing housework and generally, getting life done. A friend of hers looked at her situation and suggested that she reframe it. Maybe the baby was her primary job, and the work she was doing could come second. (It seems elementary now that I type this out.)

And it's true. When Adam was tiny and had the screaming colic for 5 hours every night I knew and prepared for it. It wasn't a struggle for me because I could prepare for it. I set up snacks for myself, entertainment for myself, put on comfortable clothes and "did colic" every night for 5 hours.

Cut to today.... I looked at my daily schedule and noticed that everything that I do after 3:30pm has been a struggle lately. Clearing the kitchen table from toys... getting dinner ready.... occupying the 5 year old..... carrying around the baby...... And I spent the morning setting up the afternoon. I put dinner on the stove to simmer before 3pm. I had the house ready for playing and snuggling (i.e. vacuumed and straightened) and accepted that anything that wasn't done by 3pm wouldn't get done.

And it didn't. And I felt totally fine with that. By the time I got to 8pm and the bedtime routine, I was the calmest I've been in weeks. And as icing on this idealogue cake.... Adam fell asleep on the floor next to me as I was typing this. So even he is on-board with this plan.

#tbt

(That means "throw back thursday". It's a thing people do on Thursdays when they want to remember something that happened in the past. It's usually a photo..... Call me if you have questions, Mom.)

Sawyer rode his bike to the park today while I pushed the baby. Instructing the 5-year-old to "not go too fast" was useless. So I had to start a slow jog to keep up with him. And that reminded me of this one time...........


Almost exactly 5 years ago I was pushing baby Sawyer in a stroller out to the "far away park" that's about a mile from our house. The weather was dark and foreboding, but I'm adventurous. I hadn't ever run a 5k. The furthest I'd ever run was about 2 miles on a treadmill, but I had high hopes. And decent shoes. So when we were about half a mile away from the house and it started drizzling, I broke into a slow jog. And I had to walk after about 15 feet. I was out of breath. I tried a few times to break into a run, but never made it very far.

I started wondering what would happen if I ever needed to run, like, if the rain that was falling got much worse, or if there was an emergency, or zombies. That wonder/fear drove me to start seriously running that summer. And the serious running led to the marathon the following spring (2011), which has led to meeting amazing DetermiNation friends, running friends, medals, journals, blog posts......

[Insert coherent ending about April Showers bringing lifetime flowers]