It’s as close to the sea as we can easily get, and this weekend we began our summer treks there.  I’m hoping we might even get to make a bigger trek to the real sea this summer!

The water was cold, but that didn’t seem to matter to Gabe one bit!

It was Isla’s first time there. She was neither distressed nor thrilled.

She’ll learn! 😉

It was uncharacteristically hot here this weekend, and this was Isla’s makeshift (aka redneck) sun shelter – a chair turned on its side covered by a blanket.  We really need to come up with something more official if we’re going to do this more often!

Tahd’s sister was with us on Sunday and joined in.

Pretty sure I could have reached out and touched the Coast Guard helicopter when it went by!

Loving sandy baby toes!

Tahd was such a good sport.  After dousing Gabe several times he pretended not to notice Gabe sneaking up on him with buckets and buckets of water.  He’s a good dad!

I already can’t wait to go back – this time with some sort of pop-up tent, I think!

Remembering on Memorial Day!

Happy Summer!

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

~ e.e. cummings

I love

…hot cocoa, the cheap stuff from Nestle.  It’s what they stocked in the hospital kitchenette and it makes me remember when Isla was born.

…the warm sun.  It’s supposed to be 88 here on Sunday. I think I want to visit the beach!

…my sneakers.  They’re still covered in an explosion of color from The Color Run.

…house tweaks.  I painted the dining room white, picked up some sale fabric for new curtains, and moved the dining room curtains to the living room. It feels fresh!

…Burt’s Bees Calming Baby Lotion. It’s scent is a bit of an acquired joy, but I think it’s really yummy.  I use it on me and on Isla and I like that we smell the same.

…the pink stripe across the bottom of my computer screen.  I only love it because it’s pink. I’m not so fond of the fact that it’s only present because apparently we have a cracked LCD.  But I’m trying to look at the bright side.  It’s a very pretty shade of pink.

…three day weekends.  Self-explanatory.

What little anxiety I’ve been experiencing lately (yay!) has been entirely wrapped up in time – as in I have none and therefore feel anxiety. I remember Isla being a few weeks old and thinking how non-tired and non-busy I was and marveling over how this wasn’t as tricky as I thought it was going to be.

I think that might be where The Universe laughs at me. ;). But oh, yes! I sure did exhale a small sigh of relief two weeks into this parenting-two-kids thing and think the most difficult time was behind us.

We’ll blame the hormones, okay? They’re big. They can take it.

First off, I had forgotten that sleep depravation is cumulative. So although Isla slept well and I hardly lost any sleep (praise the good Lord!) losing hardly any sleep every night in a row for 4 months adds up to the equivalent of losing sixty hundred hours all in one night, and at some point you crash. Which I did. This weekend. With mastitis.

Glorious mastitis.

I speak of her fondly, yes, because without her I never would have permitted myself to sleep 15 hours in a row, interrupted only by feedings and several drenching fever sweats. But it was a lot of sleep, and it was delicious even though it was also completely necessary since I was literally incapable of anything else. I wrongly thought that mastitis was a breast infection. No, it’s more like the torturing of every joint, lymph node, edge, and crease by invisible but HIGHLY VINDICTIVE angry fabled witches who use you as their little voodoo doll with at least a thousand needles.

But I survived. Huzzah. And I think it’s mostly over, which is a beautiful thing.

Back to the whole “time” thing.

Next to Lack of Sleep is the issue of Baby Schedules, which are also closely relate back to that issue of sleep since MY BABY DOESN’T LIKE TO MISS ANYTHING. I’d complain about this except I have very distinct memories of being 4 and army-crawling up the polyester ish red carpet to spy on my parents and their company because they’d had the SHEER AUDACITY to put me to bed during their party and I couldn’t believe they didn’t find my presence completely indispensable to the success of their evening.

Everybody, check the comments because I’m pretty sure there’s a good chance my mother’s going to be doing one of those fancy motherly “payback’s-a-b!#€#” giggles except she’d never swear and she never says, “I told you so.” She probably should in this case, though.

So Isla doesn’t want to sleep, but being The Mother I know better that she does, in fact, NEED sleep. So I force it on her by – get this – sleeping with her. Apparently and under the new and expanded terms of the Mommy Wars, I am “Mother Enough” to cosleep eighty hundred hours a day.

Do the math on that. I lose sixty hundred hours of sleep every night and cosleep eighty hundred hours all day long. So why am I still do tired? No clue, but I just know that somewhere in the midst of the exhausting twenty hundred hours of sleep credit I earn every day I lose a lot of time and can’t get anything done.

Hold that. It’s 1:34 and isla’s waking up again. Third time tonight. Everybody hold your breath. Maybe she won’t hear the silent tap of me hiding under my covers and tapping under my IPhone (which I just totally tried to spell “eye phone”).

Twenty minutes later…

I haven’t mastered this whole “juggling my time” thing. I can squeeze in the little tasks of unloading the dishwasher and grabbing some groceries and clearing off the counters, but to do things that generally require a more devoted amount of attention? Well, I can’t seem to find enough time to do that – to apply myself to one particular project or thought for any consolidated amount of time.

What bugs me is the things that require this type of attention from me – the things that require me to think and plan and be creative and stay engaged – are the things that are most important to me. But I haven’t done them in a while now because I haven’t been able to figure out how to be a really good juggler of my time yet.

We have to talk about this – learning me some better time management skills.

Okay – I’ve juggled my way out of energy tonight and it’s 2:04 and Isla just squeaked again reminding me that I have approximately 90 minutes before I hear from her again and 90 minutes is a lot of obstructive minutes so I’m just going to stop writing and sleep.

Good night.

(and just one more thing – I typed this whole thing on my eye phone in the middle of the night so it probably has a whole bunch of awesomely embarrassing auto-correct fails and I’m not proofing them til morning. Or never. Depends on how well I juggle my time tomorrow… 😉