School, etc.

Jeez, now that Blogger has stopped telling me about all it's fab new features, I can finally type something! Not that I will be typing a long something, though, because I'm about to fall over. But first things first.

Gaz is finally in school. (Check out her back-to-school get-up! She picked it out herself, as you can probably guess.) I got her registered with little trouble on the 2nd (the third attempt being the charm), and classes started this week. It's somewhat shorter days this week, which is a drag on many levels (one of them is Gaz's lunch period is so short that she's not eating most of the food I send with her; that's one drag that I am especially frustrated over), but it's a massive adjustment for everyone. I'm still not sure how *I* feel about this school, but I don't think it's monstrous. Gaz's teacher *does* have some strange, trollish teeth. . . . But anyway, I'll be happier when Gaz is less keyed up all day and night.

Gaz loves school. She sins excited songs every morning as we walk to school, and the stretch of sidewalk that takes us to school has one section where someone once drew a Batman symbol on the wet concrete, so we even get to geek out in a DC Superfriends manner twice a day. She enjoyed gym today, and is looking so very much forward to art class that she has plans to bring in a special piece of painted wood to give to the art teacher, whoever she is. She's in class with one of the neighbor girls, which is more fantastic than I can begin to describe. They get along already, and now not only do they get to spend more time together, we have an easy connection for getting Gaz to and from school in the event of some kind of emergency or schedule insanity. We love the neighbors anyway, and now they're even super useful. What could be better than that?

We have had some difficult sleep this week (Gaz woke me up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to ask me to tell her a story, and to ask for a drink of water, and to ask for company on a bathroom trip . . . ), and my girl has been much more short-tempered with everyone and clingy with me. I know this is just a transition thing, and I am trying to give her all the extra support she needs to keep on being her big, crazy self. We'll get through this. We did okay overall with preschool and weaning; we can survive the kindergarten adjustment.

But how am I holding up, people ask. You would not believe how well I am doing right now. I've got so much editing work that I have been desperate all summer for school to start up again. Working from home and being the stay-at-home parent at the same time has been nothing short of hellish for me* and has resulted in many weeks where the dishes overtook the kitchen and started singing medleys about overthrowing the slovenly human oppressors. (You who have mechanical dishwashers: you are lucky, lucky creatures who darned well better appreciate your modern luxuries.) We're managing to maintain appropriate levels of apartment hygiene, but clutter is another story.

So no, I'm not at all upset by the start of the school year. It's making life tolerable again.

But once more, I am frustrated by the needs of work interfering with my spending time with Gaz, especially now that she needs extra cuddles and reassurance to get her past the stress of full-day school. I try to spend the time from after-school to Mark's arrival home and dinner time with her, scheduling my work day for before she's up and while she's at school, but she's been waking up quite early. We're having to do the other hard transition of less me at bedtime and more Mark, and she's really used to me being the one who gets her settled in more often than not for most of her life.

I am very far behind on blogging, uploading pictures, replying to email, visiting relatives, and who knows what else (apart from the dishes; I know how miserable the dish position is on any given day). I have no idea when I will be digging out from under the backlog, but between Gaz and work both needing me and everything that had to be done for school registration, I have been completely tapped out. I do hope to get more regular with the blogging again, but anything longer than your average Facebook status update or Twitter entry is difficult for me right now. Please be patient (and send patience. And coffee. And scones. And sleep!).

* And specifically: exhausting and cranky-making

The Week That Was

It has been a trying week.

First, I've been trying to break Gaz of a bad habit that I've allowed to run rampant for far too long. She always likes to hold onto the spare breast when she's nursing, and since this has never really bothered me, I let her. But it does make public nursing that much harder when she's used to doing things a certain way that involves me exposing more of myself than I really want to. So on Tuesday when she lifted up my entire shirt for her first-of-the-morning nursing session, I just decided that I had had enough. I clamped one hand over the spare breast and so began the battle of wills. I won, of course, but it took an hour and a half of her crying and me explaining and attempting to soothe for her to settle down enough to nurse. She's still testing me, but she's getting better. Sometimes I don't even have to cover the spare breast.

The side effect of this is that Gaz has been a bit more irritable than usual. Twice this week she's woken up from naps and cried hysterically for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and after Wiggleworms this week she had a nice, long fit induced by the frustration of one little girl stealing her shaker and not getting to strum the guitar as much as she wanted.

But in amongst the unhappy moments have been some real gems. Tuesday I had a dentist appointment, and Mark met us up at the dentist's office to take over Gaz duties while I got cleaned and x-rayed (no cavities! hooray!). She really missed me and when we stopped for dinner afterward, she sat next to me and showered me with hugs and kisses when she wasn't trying to destroy my water glass.

On the way home from Michigan last weekend Gaz unleashed a new sentence on us: "I excited!" I hear it all the time now when I'm bringing food to the table or getting out a snack or settling in with her to nurse. She's also insistent about which side she nurses on, always asking for the "good one." The good one is never the same one twice, so that makes things hard to predict. But I'm loving the new depths to her vocabulary and expression.