Everybody's Working for the Weekend

The past month and a half have been exhausting - work has been taxing and when I come home, five-ish, I have about five or six hours with Luke and Clementine before I drop off into a dreamless sleep and wake to do it all over again.  I'm tired despite having a baby who sleeps all night almost without fail.  Once in a while she'll wake up at 4, take a bottle, and fall asleep for hours.  (In general, she sleeps from 11 pm to 8 am, wakes to eat, and is back asleep til 10.  We hit the jackpot.  She is a champion sleeper like her mama.)

I find myself working for the weekend.  What to do with these precious weeknight hours?  I miss my hobbies - cooking, reading- and the hobbies I aspire to - learning to sew, playing the piano, gardening.  I am gripped with a desire to split myself into several parts, each fully 'me', but each pursuing an interest/calling:

• Being a homemaker, making organic purees with the food mill, planning meals so that the chicken from one night is used in a new and equally delicious dish the next night (planning to attempt with this new book), and so on.  Composting.  Actually running and managing a household with planning and care.  (This is an interesting editorial on neo-traditionalist households in which mothering is a "demanding, full-time endeavor, requiring [all of their] creativity, energy, and ingenuity.")

• Reading reading reading! journals and books to become a scholar and a worker bee.

• Craft maven extraordinaire making all sorts of wonderful things.  Planting plants.  Sewing little jumpers.  Painting terra cotta planters half neon.  And such.

• Professional Class Taker: ceramics, photo editing, letterpress, conversational Spanish, knife skills and in the sports/fitness categories, tennis lessons and tap dancing and barre and the weightlifting-to-music one (Powerflex at the gym formerly known as Bally's.)

From the Overdue Realizations desk: I will probably never learn to play the piano, or get a master's degree in science writing.  And that is all right.

From the No Pain/No Gain Bureau: inspired by 1) a $25 registration fee Groupon and 2) upcoming Air Force fitness test and 3) daily unpleasant game of 'weight, weight, don't tell me!' with my scale, I am going to start training for the SA Rock and Roll half marathon with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  Looking forward to meeting some new people, raising money for research, having a workout plan with a concrete goal in mind.  AND HITTING YOU UP, DEAR READERS, FOR $$$$$$$$$$

But that's later.  Now is to snuggle with C ... while reading about the recent Pappenings in women's health.

Hope you are having a great week, all!  What are your goals?  How do your alternate selves spend their day?

via