On Doing Nothing

Sometimes I like being sick.

For example, yesterday I woke up with a cold and bad allergies. Usually I get up at 6:30, because that's when Alexandra likes to wake up and eat, but yesterday I got up briefly to feed her and then went back to bed and slept while she slept. I also took an early afternoon nap while she napped, then a late afternoon nap when Ian got home. I watched some movies and read more of Hebrews and Harry Potter, but other than that and caring for Alexandra, I didn't do much.

Normally this kind of day would drive me crazy, but feeling sick and needing to rest gave me an excuse to feel okay about doing nothing.

The most difficult adjustment I've had to being a mom is how little I get done on some days and how unpredictable my schedule can be. I started to realize within the first couple of weeks after she was born that I might not always be able to shower before noon or finish all the thank-you notes in one day or mop the floor as soon as I would like. I know the routine will come eventually, but in the meantime I have to put my agenda on hold.

I never realize how much I base my self-worth in completing tasks until I'm not getting anything done. Besides the tiredness of caring for a newborn, part of my "baby blues" included the feeling that I wasn't being productive. I experienced a similar sensation when my husband and I first moved to Iowa and I didn't have a job. It's fine to tell myself that my worth is based on being made in the image of God, in who I am and not what I do, but that's hard to believe when I think I'm not doing all the right things.

So again I'm learning the lesson that my worth is not found in society's measures of productiveness, which tend to value tasks and accomplishments over people and rest. And in reality I'm not doing nothing; I'm taking care of my baby!

But sometimes it's still nice to have a reason (such as being sick) to enjoy just holding my sleeping baby while I watch TV for an hour instead of thinking about what I should be doing.

Blogging, Attempt #2

Introduction/Recap

So, the last time I had a blog, I didn't keep it up. Partly it was because of busy-ness, since I had four part-time jobs (I taught Spanish at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, taught a homeschool Spanish class in Winterset, taught piano lessons, and was freelance writing). I tend to be a procrastinator, and when it comes to writing I'm a perfectionist, and the two traits combined mean that I don't want to start things unless I am convinced I have enough time at one stretch to finish them completely and perfectly. Writing is scary enough as it is, because it's never exactly what you want it to be. Unless you have a deadline, you could work on a paragraph forever to make it say exactly what you want it to say, and of course with a blog there's not really a deadline. A procrastinating perfectionist's nightmare.

So what made me decide to start blogging again?

1) Several people asked me to/said I should.

2) I want to be able to keep my friends and family up-to-date about what I'm doing even if we don't see each other that often or they live far away.

3) I will attempt once again to get in the habit of writing regularly.

4) I enjoy reading my friends' blogs, because it's fun and enlightening to view life from someone else's perspective.

Topics

And what will be the topic of this blog? That is more difficult. They say that blogs should have a topic and a theme, that you should write what you know. So I'm going to make my everyday life my topic. Too broad? Perhaps. But I will likely focus on five categories:

1) Teaching Spanish.

2) Writing.

3) Being a new mom to a baby girl.

4) Funny things that happen to me.

5) Things I am reading and learning. These may be serious, like my current study of Hebrews, or they may be fairly light (almost enough so to spell it "lite"), depending on what fiction I am reading. (Right now it's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I would put in the category of light but not lite. It does have its dark and deep moments, but it's certainly no Brothers Karamazov, which I will finish someday.)