Proof I'm a mother (as if the baby weren't proof enough): yesterday as I was settling down to eat, I got myself a cloth napkin out of the drawer, and without thinking, I popped it open and draped it over my left shoulder.
Proof I'm a bad mother: I have, twice now, in a restaurant, fed the baby in his car seat with one hand while eating with the other. It's the first step on the slippery slope to bottle-propping.
More proof I'm a bad mother: Although Eric's swing says plainly, "Keep child in view while in swing," I often do not. If he goes to sleep in his swing, I leave him there and go about my business in my office or the kitchen as needed, keeping one ear open for an alarming crash and peeking in on him every few minutes.
Speaking of cloth napkins in the drawer: a couple of weeks ago, I cleaned out the dresser in our dining room. The dishtowels and dishcloth drawer was overstuffed, and I realized that we hadn't opened three of the dresser's four drawers in years, so I thought I'd see what was in there and whether it could be relocated to make space for things we use more regularly. Some could; I reclaimed a drawer to un-crowd the regularly-used linens. One drawer is stuffed full of sterling flatware. A few years ago when we used it for Thanksgiving dinner I discovered that David had inherited one complete set, big chunks of another couple of patterns, and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. I left it in there.
The other thing the drawers were stuffed with: tablecloths. At least the minimum 10 we need for me to put a clean one on the dinner table every night. Again, mostly thanks to inheritance, we own tablecloths that range from cheerful gingham checks to elegant embroidered linen. The elegant embroidered linen, some at least, were still in dry-cleaner bags, labeled to be delivered to Dan Dierauer at the Griffin Street house in Bismarck where David grew up. It made me sad, even though I never met David's father, to be holding these tablecloths that he had taken in to be cleaned years and years ago.
I used to be so cranky with David for keeping so much of the stuff he inherited. Linen tablecloths? Sterling flatware? Elegant glass serving pieces? His grandmother's good china (settings for 16!)? The kind of stuff we never use (as evidenced by the 10-year-old drycleaning tags) and would never feel the need for. It's hard to imagine us, for instance, deciding to invest in sterling flatware of our own. But, cleaning out the dresser drawers, I find I have gotten fond of these things. I even, as I pulled tarnished knives out of their protective sleeves, thought about polishing it all again. And then I found myself thinking, "Why shouldn't I have sterling flatware of my own? That reflects my taste? Why shouldn't we buy a decent set of dishes one of these years?"
Strange urges like these usually pass. But not always: witness the baby.
Speaking of strange urges, I decided to look into the possibility of teaching one class at LCC this fall. The housepainting cost a bucketload more than we anticipated (they did a great job on the painting itself, but a poor job estimating the costs!), and I thought, for a modest investment of time, I could bring in a couple thousand extra dollars this fall. Teaching at LCC doesn't pay as well as teaching at MSU, but is not bad for part-time work.
Well, I figured that, since I haven't taught there in four years, nobody would remember me, I'd have to re-apply, and it would be a big hassle. Yesterday I dropped the chair of the department an e-mail (a man I don't think I've ever actually met, since his predecessor hired me), and he remembered me, was glad to hear from me, and forwarded my message to the lead writing faculty member, who does the scheduling. I followed that up with an e-mail of my own detailing my availability and preferences, and then I figured I'd have to wait until closer to the semester's start to hear. Well, I got an e-mail from her first thing this morning expressing her delight to have another faculty member; a new part-timer just bailed out on her, she's got lots of available classes, I can take my pick, would I like to teach two (No to that last part), and can we talk ASAP. The whole note had a slight ring of desperation to it.
It means I'm going to get my first choice, most likely, an 8-10 a.m. class two days a week. I figure I can walk to school in the morning, about a mile, and thus get some exercise. Then David can pick me up at 10 and I can drop him at work by 10:20 or 10:30, only an hour or so later than usual. That should work fine. My second choice would have been a once-a-week evening class, but I hate to be away from home too many evenings, and I'm already committed to one evening a week for my sign language class (which, if I'm teaching, I don't have to pay for, so that's effectively another couple hundred bucks income right there!).
I love teaching first thing in the morning, because I love to finish up so early, and have the whole day stretching ahead of me. I can usually get classes to teach as a part-timer partly because I don't mind the early mornings, the evenings, or, pre-baby, driving to extension centers (at the extension centers, you get paid mileage, and the classes go with a smaller enrollment--you might get a class with only 12-15 students instead of 29 which, since the biggest time commitment is grading, is just terrific and raises one's effective hourly rate significantly).
The desperation factor on their part bodes well for actually getting to teach, too. Being scheduled to teach a class before the semester begins is no guarantee; many classes don't make minimum enrollment, and they can't always (though they can usually) slot you in somewhere else. It's a good sign that there are lots of unassigned classes.
The bad news: they've gone to a portfolio system with external assessment. Blech. If this means what I think it means, at the end of the semester faculty have to read portfolios from students in other classes--basically the semester ends with grading at least twice as many papers as you normally would have to, though I'm sure you don't have to read the other papers closely. I've talked with people who have taught composition under similar systems, and it just sounds nightmarish to me. But I'll have a better idea when I see the departmental syllabus. All part of a misguided attempt to make grading "objective" and "standard," as if it ever could be.
I don't actually know what the pay is like now; I remember seeing in the paper a couple of years ago that the part-time faculty got an improved contract. We'll see.
I guess I'm moving on to step 3 in my "sequencing" already.
Our Eric 3.0 upgrade arrived at the end of last week. Eric 3.0 eats large meals less often, including occasionally a 7-ounce tanker right before bed; is capable of sleeping up to eight hours at night (but usually doesn't); is awake and active many more hours of the day than Eric 2.0; and has a well-established social smile. His sleeping and waking pattern, except at night, is divorced from eating: he often wakes without needing to eat right away, and stays awake after meals for at least awhile. His kicking is more vigorous and organized; he can bicycle his legs, which is a developmental milestone, and now splashes water out of his tub when bathing. The smile is great; he can really let us know what he likes. He likes his bath, he likes to see his dad first thing in the morning, and he likes my singing, though I figure I better enjoy that while it lasts.
His sleep smile is still beatific and beautiful, but his social smile is completely goony--he sticks out his tongue.
David and I have decided that Eric was still a beta version when he was born: Eric .9B. He was pretty buggy back then. But many of the bugs seem to have been worked out in this new release.
You know, ten days ago I would have said I wasn't ready to do anything like teach. I was even thinking of not taking my sign language class. But Eric has been on such a good sleep schedule for so long that, except for the occasional day when I'm extra-tired for some reason, I feel normal and have felt normal for awhile. My hormones seem to have settled down; I neither weep nor get snarly on a regular basis anymore.
I am happy to say, too, that I seem to be over the bulk of the grief about breastfeeding at last. Even yesterday morning, when Eric woke me by rooting at my nipple, I was interested to notice that he still has that reflex, but it didn't make me sad. It's a big relief; I was tired of feeling bad.
When we had dinner with Julie and Kathy back in June, we talked some about how ministers, having no set hours, manage their time. Kathy said that during the years she worked in ministry, she tried to divide her day into three chunks, morning, afternoon, and evening, and make sure she wasn't working during one of them. So, if she knew she had a meeting in the evening, say, she'd try to take the afternoon off. That's a skill I never mastered in school. When I have evening seminars, which I often do, I have the bad habit of working all day and then finding myself heading out to a three-hour class just when I'm feeling ready to have some quiet time--and then, of course, the day ends having been a 12-hour work day.
I need to learn to pace myself as a homemaker, too. I feel guilty when I take time off during the day to read or watch a video, what with David and Scott both at real jobs. But if I don't take breaks during the day, I might not ever get any. Consider Tuesday: David and Scott arrived home about 6:30 while I was cooking dinner. I finished cooking dinner, cleared the table, served dinner (not on a tablecloth), did the dishes, dried and folded Eric's laundry, folded and put away my laundry, made up bottles. It was after 8:30 before I had a chance to settle down a little, even with David acting as Point Man for baby care, on top of having worked all day at this and that.
I had to laugh because yesterday on one of my bulletin boards a woman posted asking for help getting her baby onto a better sleep schedule because she's so sleep deprived. She then went on to describe exactly the sleep schedule Eric has been on the last few weeks that I think is so terrific. She gets up one feeding earlier than I do in the morning, though, which I suspect is her problem. I didn't post in reply, but I suspect the poor woman was not pleased when everyone who did pointed out that her baby is on an amazingly good sleep schedule for his age and she should count her blessings.
A favorite parenting moment: when I check on Eric, and he's just half-awake but hears my voice, opens his eyes and looks at me, and smiles. David and I have been joking that he started smiling just in time; we were getting tired of feeding him and were about to leave him on the hillside for the wolves. He'll never know how close he came!
Posted by Su Penn at August 2, 2003 08:37 AM | TrackBack