I'm not going to waste my time feeling guilty about the fact that I also want to pursue other dreams. I think that's okay, and there are lots of ways to do this well - in fact, as many as there are women. I guess there is likely to be a statistically significant number of women who have a natural desire and inclination for early childhood life and living. It's okay that I'm not always that kind of mom, and that I really deeply crave getting out of my house and talking to real people about ideas and theories about the world.
[Side note: I spent a lot of time the past decade feeling guilty about this, but I am pretty much over that. It's okay to have multiple dreams if you have your priorities straight. Danny assures me that I do, and he is extremely supportive of my dream to go back to school and pursue a career in the weird field of linguistics. Somewhere near the area around computer-assisted language learning, corpus linguistics, second language acquisition and testing...something like that. Not quite sure yet, but that's perfectly okay!]
I got myself a mother's day gift. It was about $12. A series of bullet journals that I thought were really pretty. Basically, bullet journaling is another recent female trend like Kon-Mari-ing your house. It is a different way to write and keep a planner.
My friend Megan showed me her bullet journal in January. She wanted to design something for me, but I couldn't really figure out what I needed. My friend Karin showed me hers and I thought it was interesting. Somehow randomly I had already found an app called "a year in pixels" which is basically borrowing from the bullet journal concept, except as an app. It's been extremely useful for me to visualize my moods.
I spent a little bit of time while nursing Joey in the middle of the night last night looking at ideas for bullet journals. I quickly got extremely bored with it for these reasons:
a. A lot of vloggers care a lot more about how the thing looks than how to make it useful
b. Usefulness > copycat picture-perfect designs. I got a few ideas, but mine is going to look a lot different; I don't like daily pages at all and I can come up with and free-hand my own designs with total confidence. Also, I will have a lot more mistakes. And I don't care about the pens. At all. Whatsoever.
c. I have good penmanship. I can write very beautifully. It's not important to me. Most vloggers were more interested in showing off same-y calligraphy than talking about the thing in action.
But hey, I didn't look that extensively and it was like 4 am, so maybe I missed something.
I've really enjoyed the act of writing in a bullet journal. I have decided to use it as a way to record my achievements. I've had a system of post-it notes for a to-do list for some time now, and that has worked surprisingly well. I don't need to make huge to-do lists; I'm like, the queen of that already. What I need is to recognize the little achievements and accomplishments I have already managed to do. So this bullet journal is basically a way to track my projects as well as to list my achievements each week. It feels good. It's nice to see a fat, full page of stuff that I managed to do. My to-do lists never make me feel satisfied because my strategy is to make a list of 100 things and then accomplish 10. Danny says most people have a different approach: make a list of 4 things and accomplish all 4. I usually end up doing more things but feeling less satisfied. But this way I can focus more on just the 10. It's really great.
For example, this week I did really well on a mock GRE test. It feels nice to see that on a list of things I got done this week.
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In other news, I decided to stop taking antihistamines to help me sleep. I have been taking them daily since about February or March.
I have problems with:
- falling asleep
- staying asleep (I am a very light sleeper)
- falling back asleep <-- once I'm awake, that's it. I am awake.
- occasional insomnia where it's not just 15-45 minutes to fall asleep but like, 3-4 hours. It is awful because usually I feel tired. I just can't seem to sleep.
On a side note, I always dream. Every night. I don't always remember the dreams for very long after waking unless I write them down. Sometimes they are pretty abstract and hard to put into words; somehow the words spoils it. I have vivid memories of my dreams, especially places. I also have nightmares fairly often. Definitely multiple times per week, I would say. Usually it's easy to trace the source, but not always.
So yeah. I'd been taking Benadryl (diphenhydramine) for a while but then when we ran out, I took Unisom (Doxylamine), a similar antihistamine. The effects of Unisom on my body are much more pronounced. I had to cut the pills in half so I would be able to function the next day, and for this past month I've still been struggling with kind of a brain-fog during the day. Also I am fairly certain it's increased my water retention (ugh bloating) as well as constipation (ugh more bloating). It also gives me kind of a dry mouth, which isn't that pleasant. But still, it's better than not being able to sleep.
I read some Harvard study that showed that there is a correlation between prolonged antihistamine use and dementia. I really, really don't want dementia! On the other hand, maybe it increased the likelihood from 1% to 1.5% - I didn't read it too closely (generally I try to stay away from self-diagnosis and health information on the internet because I am prone to obsessiveness and anxiety, the bedfellows of hypochondriac-ism. If I knew more Latin, I'd know the correct ending to that word. I bet it exists. Sigh).
Anyway, the "ideal" is to not be on drugs anyway - and I've been really frustrated at my plateauing weight loss. So I decided to try not taking any pills to help sleep.
I am certain Joey gets a mild dose of it through the breast milk but it's one of those Class C drugs, and my OB/GYN and lactation consultant both told me it was okay to take while breastfeeding. But the thing is, that mild dose of it seems to affect him, too, because last night was the first time since October that I've needed to crawl out of bed to go feed him. Danny was irritated. He wanted to get a bottle to feed him. But the thing is...Danny is a heavy sleeper. It seems really stupid to me to tap sleeping Danny on the shoulder to wake him up so that he can be irritable and grouchy, while meanwhile I am laying there unable to fall back asleep, and the milk let-down is making a mess, and I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for causing Danny to be annoyed at me. "I'm not annoyed! It's always just this feelings of, "what's going on?" when I wake up," he assures me. But it certainly sounds really angry to me. It feels awful. Anyway, there's an endless supply of weird and interesting things to read and watch on my phone. It's better than lying in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to slurping sounds from the nursery down the hall.
We will see how long this experiment lasts. Maybe I will end up going back to Benadryl. The crappy thing was that not only did I wake up at 4:30 for Joey last night, but I also woke up at 11:45 and 1:30, both times with pretty lousy headaches. There is an enormously strong correlation between me getting a good night's sleep and my mood/anxiety being tolerable enough to function.
On the other hand, maybe it's enough to try extra hard to make sure a "sleep routine" is in place. Laying in bed reading is - well, it can be - a super helpful way for me to calm my mind. Drinking some warm herbal tea before might be another option.
****
In other other news, I've spent the past few weeks juggling course schedules and I think I figured out the way to optimize both time and cost for my family. If I were to be a full time student and take 9 credits per semester, I could graduate by Fall 2022. That's six semesters over the space of three years. Maybe my parents won't have moved to Utah by then and they can be a real help to us with childcare.
Turns out, childcare for 5 kids is very expensive. I hadn't even looked at the cost before today.
Danny, always the negative Nancy realist, is skeptical that it could work with me having such a full schedule. But I've been looking at the times when the classes are taught and I've figured out that most semesters I can just take all the classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which would significantly decrease the load. And most of our kids will be in school - except Joey, who will need to be cared for. If my mom is still here and can help out, that would be great. There's one semester where the classes I have to take are taught from 2:20-3:30. That is a really crappy time of day when you have elementary school kids. But on the other hand, by that time Jane will be 12 years old and possibly old enough to babysit under very controlled conditions. But on the other other hand, that's the most important time of the day. Ugh. A nanny is like 3x cheaper than the after school care program, which is definitely not designed for families with 5 kids. And on top of that, Joey will still need to be cared for during that time. Ames is like 30 minutes away, and there will be some buffer time from when I leave class to get to my car. It's unlikely I'll be able to be home before 4:20-4:30. So that's 2 hours 4 days a week. I don't know. I keep feeling like there has to be a way to make that work but Danny is so negative and skeptical, raining on my dreams. It's good that he's there to reign me in from doing rash, impulsive things. It's also good that he can see costs that I can't. I have to keep reminding myself about that.
This is putting the horse way, wayyyy before the cart. I haven't even been accepted to ISU yet. So I have to like...apply.
This weekend we went on a date walking around campus. It was really fun and nice for both of us. It's a beautiful campus and there were all the graduating students walking around in their funny robes and hats. It was fun to read the comics and stuff posted on the doors of the English professors. Some of them would even fit in with my super liberal left-wing high school teachers :-) I mean, I know universities skew liberal, but I went to BYU where "liberal" looks like something else to most normal people.
Time to go make dinner for my mom. I was at the store yesterday and the woman asked if I was doing anything for mother's day. "Probably cooking for my mom." "Oh that's nice. I wish my mom were still around for me to cook for." That made me want to cry. I love my mom. I love cooking for her. I love that she lives close. I am really anxious about them moving away before I get the chance to do this degree. I don't at the moment see how it will be possible without her help and support with childcare. But...people do it...so...it must be possible. It's just maybe the sacrifice will end up looking too big for either Danny or me. Oh man. I just really hope that isn't the case.
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