Head

Mine is full and sore.

We went to a birthday party for a friends' one-year-old yesterday. There were a lot of older kids there who were nice enough but made me feel like the Grinch anyway, at least when they started with the maracas and the tambourine and the triangle and the noise noise NOISE NOISE NOISE!!! The last twenty minutes or so that we were there were incredibly stressful for me, as I stood there, shoes on, holding Clara's bunting bag and waiting for the kids to stop climbing all over Mr. K so we could leave. Extra-strength Tylenol hasn't touched the headache.

For now I am content to be the parent of a single child. I am writing this to remind myself later, in case someday I get the crazy idea that I want another one.

I finally went back to the gym. Oddly enough, I have lost a tremendous amount of ground from where I was just before getting pregnant. I can't do 410 pounds on the leg press anymore, and I can't finish a second set of ten reps of 50-pound bench presses. If I tried the 200-pound deadlift again I'd probably rip my arms out of their sockets. I think the best attitude to take here is that I suck, n'est-ce pas?

(Not really. It felt wonderful to be back. I'm going to shoot for lifting twice weekly and FitMomming once a week until I run out of FitMom classes, and then go back to three times a week at the gym. Should be able to get back to where I was pretty quickly. God, I've missed it.)

I owe a lot of people e-mail. I usually remember who they are at about midnight when Clara is finally drifting off to sleep. If you're one of them, I'm sorry. My inbox is a mess right now; I still read everything in Pine on a Unix shell, in plain text, and once something has scrolled off the top of the screen I tend to forget it was ever there. Bleah.

Speaking of sleep, we haven't figured out the best way to approach it yet. Clara's been sleeping in my arms every night, but when she writhes and twitches she wakes me up and I'm grumpy all day afterwards. So Thursday night we tried putting her in a sleep sack back in the co-sleeper. She didn't sleep well, and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed all day Friday. (Perhaps that is what poured the foundation for this headache; the noisy party framed it, and the hideous nightmare this morning finished off the roof.)

However: I am very close to finishing a sweater. I sewed the last seam today, and am going to try to get all the ends darned in and the buttons sewn on tonight. Clara will probably have outgrown it by next Wednesday.