15 Month Visit

Unremarkable visit, other than the fact that he suckered himself to me like an octopus and cried / screamed the entire time as soon as he realized where he was. He is one strong boy. It was agony for both of us when I had to hold his arms down while he got his shots, but he settled down afterwards, had a nice nap, and he’s his old self again now. Much less trauma than weeks in a hospital with a preventable disease.

He’s 32.25 inches (80th percentile), 20 pounds 14 oz (7th percentile), with a head circumference of 45.25 cm (7th percentile). Though it’s hard to know how accurate those measurements are since he was wriggling and crying through all of them.

I have 8 more days to go until my 12 week check-up, after which I may exhale a little bit and start believing in this thing. It’s hard now. At least I still feel pretty bad (if not as bad as before), so that gives me a little more hope. I know symptoms come and go, but their complete disappearance would not help my optimism.

I weighed myself at the pediatrician’s and saw that I weight 130, down 5 pounds from when I weaned Ali. Not worried about it, just a note. I don’t have much of an appetite these days, but I don’t need much in the first trimester. I’m sure it’ll come back in the second, if I’m lucky enough there is a second.

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Pattern Recognition

Ali still doesn’t talk much yet, but someone gave us a talking dog toy with buttons on its appendages, and what the buttons do changes depending on how many times you press and hold a certain button on the left hind paw.

Ali knows how to press and hold that button three times, then press on the heart three times to get to the exact little song he wants:

“I love you, I love you,
You make the world so bright
Morning, noon, and night!”

He also taught himself how to press and hold the heart down so that he hears every song on the dog’s repertoire all in a row.

Talk about a conceptual maze. Color me impressed.

Sweet Child of Mine

So Baba (daddy) has been taking over bed time since our little man weaned, I think mainly out of pity because he knows I have zero energy pretty much ever, but especially at night. And finally my boobs didn’t have to be there, so he was able to take over bed time for the first time.

Ali has been taking a bottle with about 8 ounces of cow milk, after bath and story time, then Baba rocks him to sleep standing up.

Except lately — because of the 15 month regression and/or the 2-1 nap transition and/or whatever — Ali has (apparently) been refusing to be rocked to sleep. He only wants to fall asleep next to Baba on the mattress in his room. Which means at some point I have to go in there and pick up the baby, rock him to sleep again if he rouses, nudge my husband to get out (and hopefully take the bottle with him), put the baby in his crib, and sneak out. And then often as not, Ali will wake up some time in the night and start crying, I assume because he’s wondering why he fell asleep one way and woke up another.

Between night wakings and refusing afternoon naps, it’s been real around here.

Finally I laid down the law and told Ahmed if he wasn’t going to put the baby in the crib, he’d have to let me do it again. So tonight when he couldn’t get Ali down in the crib, I tagged him out and tried rocking him myself. Immediately he wanted his Baba back, stretching away from me toward his retreating father. Once the door was closed, he put his head against my shoulder and cried. I rocked him and sang, and after a while he changed tactics and stretched out toward the mattress on the floor. Maybe Mama would give in and sleep with him in the bed, too!

Well, clearly the rocking and singing wasn’t going to work right now. So I laid him down on the bed with his legs kind of draped over my left forearm. I petted him and talked to him and smiled and said sweet things, and he looked into my eyes and smiled sometimes, too, and he touched my nose and I touched his, and he touched my ear and said, “Ear,” and I showed him my other ear, and he touched it, too, and smiled. He took the foot of the stuffed elephant his Aunt Val brought him and touched my nose with it. He touched my mouth and touched his mouth and tried to touch his eye but it kind of hurt and he scrunched his eye up against his finger and I laughed softly and he smiled. He held his hand up and I marveled at its strong, tiny perfection.

After a few minutes, I picked him up again, and he settled into my shoulder as I sang, and then he went into the crib without a peep and quickly fell asleep.

I’m abashed to say that far too often, I’m focused so much on Doing the Next Thing and Getting Through the Day that I can gloss right over these beautiful moments of pure connection. I’m just thinking, “I need to get him down so I can…”

But these moments are really It, you know? Why else do we have kids? It can start to feel like an endless chore (and God knows it never ends, and it’s often a chore), but in parenting as in life, sometimes you’ve got to stop and savor it. We both had full cups after that.

Which is nice, because I still feel like exhausted hell nearly all the time, and the 2-1 nap transition is completely kicking my ass. Poor Ali cannot regulate, exhausted in the morning for his nap and then wired by the time his afternoon nap comes around, nearly always refusing it (we can literally battle for an hour and get nowhere), then painfully over-tired by bed time.

I finally bowed to the inevitable and started pushing his morning nap later and later, but one day we apparently pushed it too late, too fast and he was already over-tired, and it took us FOREVER to get him to sleep. That was yesterday, actually — the Fourth of July. When we were planning to go to my half-brother’s step-brother’s place for his annual (everyone’s-welcome, very-extended) family BBQ. I go mainly because it’s a chance to see my brother and nephews and only have to drive 30 minutes instead of 2 hours. They have a huge yard and always have yard games going as well as an above ground pool.

Anyway, Ali woke up just in time for us to get there in time for the grilling (we brought the hot dogs), and after the big dogs who live there were given tranquilizers and exited the scene, he did quite well. Wandered around, played with everyone, hardly ever cried. Then he went under the pool stairs and found a big mud pit and went hog wild digging in it, squishing it, rubbing it on himself, tasting it, splashing in it, sitting in it. His sandals were completely saturated.

The middle pic was after his first pass. He went back in and got quite a lot muddier after that. His khaki shorts will never be the same, haha. We had to pre-rinse Ali in a little bowl and then scrub him down in a kiddie pool.

My sister and her husband are in town, so they were there, too, and so were our mom and step-dad. It was nice to have everyone together. But of course we had to leave before the fireworks started. Ali’s bed time dictates our lives again. (He was a total zombie on the car ride home and not easy to get to bed due to over-tiredness.) Looking forward to the days when we can relax about that stuff a little more!

Today Ahmed put Ali down for his morning nap as usual, figuring he needed it, but then he just lay down and rested for his afternoon nap, never fell asleep. But I was able to get him down at a reasonable hour tonight and then go out and watch the sun set over the river.

19 days ’til my next ultrasound — if I even get an ultrasound. Might just be the heartbeat via doppler. I’m debating whether to get the Harmony test. I cannot for the life of me figure out any kind of ballpark of what it might cost me. Guess I should just call my insurance company, though they’re often quite useless and frustrating to deal with. Then again, another part of me thinks it’s worth whatever it costs for peace of mind. I am 39, after all. This ain’t no donor egg. I’m ‘geriatric’ for real this time 😛

Just gotta get through July. Get out of this boggy first trimester. (Among all the other things, my low-hanging ute is now compressing my bowels and bladder. Can’t wait ’til it’s perched up on my pelvic rim again and I can poo and pee so much better. At least ’til late in the third tri.) Get the scan that really starts to look like a baby. By then, maybe Ali will be happily settled down with one long daily nap.

I’ve also agreed to work on a friend’s book in July. She needs help on the overall architecture of it, which is something that’s usually fun for me, and it’s on a subject I really enjoy. She’s a wonderfully perceptive person, and her first book was a great success. I know firsthand how daunting that “sophomore” effort is!

The only downside is that I’ve been meaning so much to work on my own book, but I’ve been failing so hard because I’m so damn tired all the time, and when Ali has crap naps, I just bottom out. But it’s much easier for me to work on other people’s stuff than to work on my stuff. Still, I’ll have to muster a lot of energy and probably be that much more tired.

So yeah. Here’s looking at you, August!

Little Raspberry

Thought today would never come. Drove to Hillcrest South in scorching hot weather with the baby. Ahmed met me there. I got right in for the ultrasound, and she tried it abdominally first. Ali was clearly visible abdominally even at 7 weeks, so I hoped to see something good with this one at 8 weeks.

She searched and searched for what must have been a few seconds but felt like forever. Finally she saw… something. Some black space, a blob. “Your uterus tilts back, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Yes.”

She tried to get a heart reading, then quickly said, “You know what, I’m going to do it trans-vaginally, we’ll be able to see a lot better.”

My heart sank. My first (abdominal) ultrasound with Ali and his twin, Ali’s heart was clearly pumping away and it was the doomed twin that couldn’t be visualized well. I opted out of a trans-vag ultrasound that time, but not this time. If it was over, I wanted to know now.

She said reassuringly, “It’s looking good in that there’s something there.” It gave me a little hope that she was being reassuring instead of trying to temper expectations.

So she left the room and I assumed the position, and she came back in and found it quickly. I could see a heart beating, but it seemed slow to my untrained eye. But then when she turned the sound on, it sounded very fast. “160 bpm?” I asked.

“Nope, it’s higher than that. 185. And measuring right along with your due date based on LMP. Everything looks good on my end!”

I exhaled. I still felt somewhat disconnected from it. Like it was a thing on a screen, not in my belly. I’m so self-protective when it comes to pregnancies. I hope eventually I can lighten up and loosen up with this one. I’m enormously relieved but still uneasy. The further things go along, the more it will hurt if they go badly.

I’ll do my best to stop thinking that way.

(I’d read that the embryo would be the size of a raspberry at 8 weeks, so I kept thinking, “I hope, I hope, I hope I see that raspberry!”)

So, that was quick, and I kissed Ahmed and sent him on his way back to work and waited in the waiting room to be called in. It was about 2:30, dangerously close to Ali’s nap time (around 3:30 today, since he slept late with his first nap — until 12:30 — but he probably could have slept just fine at 3:00). Maybe 20 minutes later a nurse called me in, but then she started talking to a friend in the waiting room and just kind of left me hanging for a while. Finally she took me into a room and we chatted for 10 minutes or so about health history, etc. She said Kim Kmita (Certified Nurse Midwife) would be in in “a few minutes.”

Well, it was more like half an hour. Ali was on the edge already when she came in. She hit the highlights about how her care is different from both doctors and CPMs like Sarah (my previous midwife). She has OBs who back her up if need be, and she won’t be there through my whole labor, just basically to catch the baby, like a doctor. (She said she was half an hour late this time because of a birth. I said I was surprised she was only behind by half an hour, and she said, “It was her fifth baby.”) She said she catches about 95% of the babies in her care, so a miss is rare. That’s comforting, although I blurted out, “How do you have a life?”

She kind of chuckled knowingly and said, “And I have a husband and three kids, too.”

She said because of my age and recurrent losses she would refer me to a maternal fetal specialist for higher-level ultrasounds and evaluations. I asked, and she said it would be billed separately, and I could opt out depending on how things go.

I can’t remember what I asked her that prompted her to pause for several seconds and say, “I’m trying to figure out how to be politically correct.”

I said, “Bluntness is fine.”

She said, “Good. So… it can be hard to be a midwife in Oklahoma. I go through waves of being supported and less supported by the OBs in this hospital. It’s about money and ego, basically. So there are things going on that I hope are resolved soon.”

I didn’t ask further, in part because Ali started completely melting down by then, but it sounded a bit ominous. And sad.

I had to get bloodwork and leave urine at the lab upstairs, all the while Ali barely on the edge of screaming (or just screaming), and FINALLY we were allowed to leave. It was so frustrating after the quick, personalized, one-stop-shopping care of my last midwife.

Ahmed is pretty dead set on a hospital birth, and I guess it’d be fair (and probably prudent) to let him decide this time. But this reminded me exactly why I hate dealing with hospitals.

Anyway. The main thing is, there’s anything to have a dilemma about at all. So far so good. Grow on, little raspberry.

The image of walking down the river trail holding hands with two children is back in my mind. They’re no longer the same height, and they don’t both look like Ali, and that is a little sad. But I’m glad he’ll have a little brother or sister to play and grow with. Inshallah.

Ali hasn’t napped since we got home an hour ago, at 4:30. Poor over-tired shell-shocked miserable guy. I’m gonna have to plan it better next time. Didn’t realize it would take so long. I was so spoiled by my last midwife!

I. Feel. Like. Death.

As always, not complaining. Just an accurate description of how things are going right now.

The first ultrasound will be tomorrow, at 8 weeks. Moment of truth. Whether this thing is a thing at all or just a nauseating illusion. Ali is definitely not getting the best of me during the day. I’m in survival mode. Desperately trying to find something I can eat and drink just to keep going. I do play with him, of course, but not as actively or as much as usual. I just feel awful all the time, like the moment before you throw up. I want so badly to throw up and get the sweet relief of it, but it never comes.

It wasn’t this bad when I was pregnant with Ali. At all. I didn’t crave things (other than Boba tea, which sounds disgusting now), barely had any aversions. Now I crave sweet things constantly — Coke, which I otherwise never drink, ice cream, which I’m allergic to (dairy), coconut cream pie, you name it. But then I never want more than a bite or two. Sometimes literally nothing in the world sounds good to eat except one random thing, like Arby’s or chicken noodle soup.

At least household chores are weirdly distracting, so I’m not slacking there too much. Last early pregnancy I had no energy for anything for some time. Now I mostly just feel gross and miserable.

Maybe it means it’s a girl? Time will tell. If there’s a heartbeat, I’ll talk to Ahmed about whether we want to find out the sex before birth or not. I’m tempted to keep it a surprise. If it is a boy, I’ll be so glad he’s here and healthy (inshallah) I probably won’t be thinking about gender preferences. If it’s a girl, we’ll be over the moon.

If it is a baby, it’s the size of a raspberry right now. Doesn’t seem real at all yet. Just feels like a protracted summer flu.

Wish us luck tomorrow.

Gok

So Ali’s favorite word lately is “Gok.” We can’t figure out what it means. He says it a lot. He also says something that sound like, “What’s this?” and “Who’s that?” His versions are, “Whaysis?” and “Hoossaah?” So cute.

Sadly and happily, we’ve completely weaned now. I stopped offering the boob a few days ago and he’s mostly stopped asking. When he does ask, I think he means milk in a bottle now, because if I offer the boob, he just kind of smacks his lips on it, pulls back, and looks at me expectantly.

He wouldn’t drink cow’s milk for the longest time. I started adding a bit of chocolate syrup, then switched to a tiny bit of maple syrup, which we gradually reduced, and now he’ll drink milk plain. He seems to relish his bottle and wants quite a lot of milk at night, sometimes 8 oz or more. He also gets a half cup of plain yogurt in the morning. I hope that’s a good amount of dairy, not too much or too little.

Meanwhile I’m still feeling like dog poo (so nauseated, so tired), no spotting or anything, but it’s still 12 days until the first ultrasound to figure out if this is really anything or not. And we have agreed not to tell anyone until then. Last time people close to us knew right away because it’s tough to hide a 10-day trip to California. So this secrecy thing — from everyone — is new. And it feels right, I just don’t want any more pressure on the ultrasound than there already is, and I don’t want to get anyone else’s hopes up just to be Sad Sally again. I’ll tell some people the bad news, but at the same time as the good news, that I can get spontaneously pregnant at all, so it’s not quite as much of a gut punch. I don’t want to be thinking about anyone else’s guts right now.

But it’s annoying. If I’m tired or scatterbrained or not playing soccer, my exhausted brain also has to come up with a plausible excuse, and that’s draining. And having a secret is like cash money burning a hole in my pocket, haha. Like a hot potato. That’s draining, too. It would be even more draining, though, dealing with anyone else’s thoughts or feelings about it until I know what the heck is going on.

Anyway. In my more hopeful times, when I believe this may work, here’s what I think to myself. One, I feel like it’s a girl. Last time I thought it was, but this time I feel like it is. It’s probably still wishful thinking. We’ll most likely add an 8th penis to this generation. For the last four babies we’ve hoped it was a girl every time. It seems by now that a granddaughter just isn’t meant to be. But I feel like it is. I won’t be crushed if it’s a boy, of course. Boys are pretty great. I’ll sigh and move on.

Two, I’m sorry, little one, that we’ve condemned you to a January/February birthday. Mine is in January and Ahmed’s is in February, and it’s kind of the worst. Everyone’s hungover from the holidays, the weather is crap, and no one wants to do anything, including us. Sorry. Didn’t plan it this way. Didn’t expect it! But it will be close to Cousin Mason’s birthday, and close to Great Grandpa Red’s birthday. So there’s some meaning there.

Three, please don’t come early! If you come at the start of 2020, all my health care for the rest of that year will be free because your birth will max out my out of pocket max right at the start (probably about $7,000 again). If you come at the end of 2019, I get no benefit at all in that way. Everything will just start over again in 2020. So please stick tight like your brother. Thanks.

Four, you’ll probably be born at a hospital, unlike your brother. For one thing, our genetic heads tend to be much bigger than Ali’s, and giving birth drug-free was just too exhausting. I hardly got to enjoy anything. The pain I could handle, but not sleeping in 48 hours on top of it? Too much. I couldn’t even hold Ali in my arms properly after he was born, and I still feel sad about that. And the stress of being transferred to the hospital and being mostly separated from Ali, it was sad. If I’d been at the hospital in the first place, things would have been much more chill. (Or not. Who knows. If I’d been at the hospital I might have had an emergency c-section or fourth-degree tear. Sigh. You really just can’t know.)

Anyway, I did it one way last time, I think I’ll try the other way this time. I am definitely scared. I’m going to see a Certified Nurse Midwife at a hospital, the only one in town as far as I know, and I hope she’s cool. I hope if she’s not there when I give birth the other doctor will be cool. I hope I don’t tear hugely or need surgery. I’m scared of getting an epidural (sometimes they don’t work, sometimes they wear off, sometimes they cause complications) and scared of not getting an epidural (what if it hurts worse in that different environment or I need to be induced and contractions are crazy?)

I’m also not looking forward to telling my midwife from Ali’s birth that I’m heading to a hospital. I haven’t 100% made up my mind, we’ll see how the appointment with the CNM goes. I also hate the bureaucracy and long waits at hospital clinics for check-ups. It can literally take hours, whereas with Sarah it was like popping into a friend’s house for a quick check and a chat. It’s a big part of why I abandoned Turbo OB last time. Hopefully a CNM will be the best of both worlds? We’ll see.

And will Ali be jealous of the new baby because s/he shares our genetics and ethnicity? Or will the new baby be jealous of Ali because of his awesome extended genetic family and fascinating, multi-faceted identity?

Finally, what the hell am I going to do with two small kids?? I can barely get out the door some days with one. With a baby and a toddler who’s barely two? I feel like I’m going to be almost totally homebound for at least a year. (Especially since we live on the third floor.) Which also means no toddler classes for Ali during that time, and that is making me sad. He’s not going to know what hit him. I hope it will be worth it in the long run for him to have a sibling, but I’m dreading him hitting such a tender age (he’ll be 22 months on the baby’s due date) only to have an invader in the house taking up a LOT of parental energy. And it’s quite daunting thinking of all the sleeplessness to come. Again. We’re just getting to such a good stage with Ali and it’s all gonna start all over again.

Ahmed sometimes feels burned out as it is, coming home from work and his sick-feeling and exhausted wife handing over the baby, whom he’s often primarily responsible for until 9pm. He basically has 12 hour work days. When Ali won’t sleep forever at night, it’s that much worse. When he’s being picky with his food, it’s that much worse. I’m just completely spent by 5:30pm, but so is Ahmed! So we’re kind of running on empty right now. Thank God the first trimester won’t last forever…

Obviously I’m glad and grateful. If it happens at all. I hope it happens. It’s just a lot to take in and think about. Twice as many kids. One of them a newborn. We didn’t really know if it would happen, but now that it’s a real possibility, our eyes are widening a bit…

But I’m very glad and relieved I won’t have to “do my research” again to figure out the ten thousand things that parenthood involves, from sleep to food to breastfeeding and so on. If I’m honest, this is one reason I wanted to have another kid. The thought of getting my PhD in Mom-ology and never using it again? Hard to swallow. I mean, I may get a terrorist kid who screams 24/7 and has a thousand health issues. But if I get a pretty standard-issue baby, it should be a whole lot easier than the first time around.

And I’m definitely getting a rocking chair this time. That’s one time when I should have listened to my mother! I have no idea where we’ll put it, but I’ll figure it the heck out.

Speaking of space, we’re fine as 3 people in a two-bedroom apartment, and we’ll have the new babe in our room the first six months, so that should be OK. But after that? I don’t know how well a toddler and an infant are gonna share a room. We just renewed our lease and have no plans to move at least until the little one will be 15 months.

I hope that doesn’t end up being a regrettable decision. We like it here and don’t want the stress of a move any time soon or to pay any more than we’re paying or to be responsible for any more maintenance than we’re currently responsible for. (Yeah, the lawn guys at 6:30am on Mondays are annoying, but it doesn’t cost us anything extra or any sweat. And someone’s here right away, for free, if an appliance breaks, etc.) But four people here may feel like a lot.

I’ll be so sad if all this trepidation is unwarranted and in 12 days we’ll find out it was all a mirage anyway. Thrown back into the pit of waiting and wondering when or if it will ever happen. But I think trepidation about a second kid is very natural, and I think we’re allowed to have normal, natural emotions, even if it’s a miracle baby. Even if we don’t know yet if it really is a miracle baby or not.

There have been so many times in my life that I wasn’t “allowed” to feel my feelings because it might be “inappropriate” or might upset someone else. I really don’t want to let fertility issues do that to me again.

I completely respect and understand that other people feel differently. If my words do upset anyone, I sincerely apologize, and I’ll understand if you’d rather choose a different blog to read ❤

Acting

If there’s one thing I’ve always wanted to try and never quite had the courage to, it’s acting. I did improv in college, and while I was excellent at the theory of it, in practice I don’t do well with too many choices, and in improv there are infinite choices in every moment. It kind of shut my brain down.

I think the main problem is that I was too self-conscious. In improv as in life, focusing on those around you is generally the better strategy. But I have an unfortunate tendency in social situations to worry too much that I’m going to do the wrong thing. Growing up I was a weird kid, and I was bullied a lot. Social things didn’t make intuitive sense to me. Popular culture, fashion, slang, being cool… all of it was like a foreign language to me that I had to painstakingly try to learn so that I could act reasonably normal, so that I wouldn’t set off confusion and/or cruelty.

To this day, I’ll be at a party thinking about a cool cloud I recently saw and sweating trying to figure out what everyone else is expecting me to talk about. Sometimes I’m just content being the quiet one. Either way, “improv” in a setting where I’m not exactly sure what’s expected is, shall we say, generally not a relaxing experience for me.

But with acting, your job is to focus on yourself. But it’s not actually yourself — it’s your character. At every moment you have to think, “How would my character react to that?” Also, “What are the writers trying to get across here?” They go hand in hand. There’s a macro picture (the point of the whole thing) and the micro picture (what would my character’s eyebrows be doing right now?)

It seems right up my alley. And I’m always getting annoyed watching TV show and movies, thinking, “No, you emphasized the wrong word and totally changed the meaning of what the writer clearly intended!” Or, “Wait a beat before you react. I know you know what’s coming next, but your character doesn’t.”

Ha, maybe what I really want to be is a director 😉

Anyway, I auditioned for a play a couple months ago. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. I liked the book but wasn’t sure how they’d make a play out of it. Didn’t matter. I didn’t expect to get a call-back anyway. I just auditioned to be around actor energy for a little while. Nothing to lose.

I prepared a monologue, and after learning it my own way, I watched some people on Youtube do the same monologue. I was super annoyed by most of them. Not right at all (in my mind). I stopped watching them so they wouldn’t get in my head.

When it was time to do the monologue in front of the director, I introduced myself and said I’d never acted before but I did improv, etc. I gave the monologue. Afterwards the director thanked me and said with what seemed like genuine surprise, “And you say you’ve never acted before?” It was flattering.

Later when I was reading lines with someone trying out for the lead (I was just playing a bit character, a priest), the main character went off on a long diatribe about where heaven is and how he’s never seen anyone shooting dead people into space, and so on. My timing and reaction to the diatribe made everyone laugh. Twice. (We read through it twice.) This in a competitive space where people supposedly didn’t want to let on that anyone else was doing well.

To my surprise, I did get a call-back, and then I had to actually think if I wanted to do the play or not. If not, it wouldn’t be nice to waste their time. The rehearsal schedule was intense for two months. Almost every weeknight evening. Ali and Ahmed would be left along all that time. I’m sure they could handle it, but the thought made me sad. And what if the play wasn’t that good? What if I didn’t like the people that much? What if I got two rehearsals in and realized I’d made a terrible mistake?

So in the end I didn’t go to the call-back, but I did watch the play when it came out. And I felt vindicated in my choice not to (try to) do it. Everyone got the part I expected them to get, and everyone was just about as good as they had been two months earlier. I was frequently annoyed by poor timing. (The priest didn’t get a laugh at all in his scene.) The play as a whole wasn’t my cup of tea. And the thought of not just rehearsing but performing it over and over and over made my skin crawl.

So, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I do want to act, I’m probably better suited for movies. Get it perfect once, get it on film, done. Once I’ve figured out a character’s meaning and reactions and do it properly, I won’t feel like doing it again. Even a TV series seems like it’d get boring after a while. (I am easily bored, though.)

Since I doubt any movie executives will be calling my number any time soon, it’s likely this is one avenue I probably won’t explore much further 😛

It’s nice to learn about yourself and things you think you might want to do, and do them far enough to know it’s not actually where your passion is. Not enough to do the hard things, to put in the work and start from the bottom. Anything worth doing involves incredible work and no small amount of drudgery, and you have to find the places where you’re willing to put in the drudgery because you actually love it and you’re willing to do it for its own sake.

For me so far, parenting and writing are my big ones. So, I guess I should really get working on finishing that novel…