Working, working, working

That says it all. The weekend wasn't long enough. C and I leave on Friday to go to a conference, and I haven't finished editing my paper. Yetta and Pita are arriving today to take care of Wild Man, and we'll take care Bear with us. I'm more than a little nervous about that for a whole lot of reasons. My kitchen counters were installed yesterday, and they are lovely. I'll post a picture when I get more than a minute. I'm completely unprepared to teach today, so, of course, I'm blogging. Mark Twain awaits.

2 weeks down

That says it all. Now I'm off to start my long weekend!

It is official . . .

Bear has two teeth (after months of preteething and teething) and is scooting everywhere. He's not quite doing a traditional crawl; rather, he is pulling himself on his bum by using his left leg and his arms. He can get into a crawling position and is rocking back and forth, so I think he'll be crawling by the end of the week. Here are some pictures of him scooting around in a hotel room during a recent weekend trip C and I took with the boys. As you can see, he is very, very proud of himself!

Random Updates

• I'm in day 2 of week 2 of summer school. We're making it. The nights are tough, frankly. Bear is still nursing, and since he is refusing all bottles during the day, he is nursing a lot a night. A lot. This month I was supposed to be working on night weaning him, but honestly, I don't have the energy. I know that this will make night weaning all that much harder when I start as he'll be a year old when summer school is done, but whatever.
  
• I had forgotten how much I love teaching American literature. I haven't taught a survey course since we left Southwest College Town, and I'm loving it. I'm slowly starting to feel inspired again. While I was teaching Thoreau last week, I even had an epiphany for revising one of my dissertation chapters into an article. That felt good. I'm hoping I can hang on to the inspiration until summer school is over and get to work on that article finally.
• Two of our best friends and their glorious children (including my goddaughter) are coming to visit this weekend, and I am so, so excited.
• I need to edit a 70 page dissertation chapter down to an 8 page paper to present at a conference at the end of the month. Sure, I can do that.
• My kitchen is under construction again. We finally decided on and ordered countertops. C is taking this week off from all academic work and is scraping ugly, ugly tiles off the walls, painting the walls a lovely butter yellow color, and making a mess in general. The countertops will be delivered on Friday, and they will be installed sometime next week. Yes, you're reading correctly. I won the battle to have them professionally installed!
  
• My Women's Studies class is going ok. It is an intro class, which I've never taught before, and teaching it in the summer is intense. I'm not used to lecturing so much, and I'm also a bit uncomfortable with the tendency of students to share really personal things. I'm not sure I'm cut out to teach Women's Studies, especially at the intro level, but we'll see.
• Yesterday when I got home at 7:00 pm, Bear started saying "Mama, mama, mama," even before I walked up the stairs. He pushed his ways out of C's arms and tried to crawl to me. Wild Man jumped up from the couch and said, "Mommy, you're home! We missed you!" That made my whole day.
  

One week down

I survived the first week of summer school, and so did my family. Wild Man was a bit of a handful yesterday though, and part of me wonders if he was responding to my absence in the evenings. He tested every single boundary he could and spent a lot of time sitting on the bottom of the stairs thinking about why he was being so sassy yesterday evening. So far today has been better. C is off with some friends for the day, and I took Bear and Wild Man to a playdate with some good friends. My friend and I drank coffee and talked while the kids played. I needed it as much as the boys did. Now they are napping and I'm getting ready to map out the week. I hope to have a few things accomplished before the craziness starts all over again on Monday.

Guilt

All total yesterday I spent about 3 hours with my kids. That sucks. It really, really sucks. So I woke up this morning (after a restless night with Bear) feeling guilty. Then on the way to drop Wild Man and Bear off at daycare, Wild Man asked for milk. I always bring milk for him to drink in the car on the way to school. Always. He doesn't always want it, but I always have it. This morning I forgot. And he told me I forgot on purpose. He made such a big deal about it that he even told his teachers that I forgot on purpose. By the time I dropped both boys off and got back to the car, I was in tears. And now I must prep a lecture on Benjamin Franklin.

An update

The first two days of the semester are over, and they've gone fairly well. Here's the run down.

• Bear is slowly getting back to himself. Last night was rough though. He was up a lot. He seems to be cutting every single tooth on top of having strep throat. I think C and I each managed about 5 hours of sleep each.
  
• Somehow I still managed to lecture on Puritans and Mary Wollstonecraft--in two separate classes.
• Wild Man pushed one of his classmates down today, and the little boy cut his head. Last week Wild Man got kicked in the face. I'm getting a little frustrated by the explanation, "The boys in Wild Man's class (Wild Man included) are very energetic and rowdy." Needless to say, C and I have an appointment with the director of the school to see if we can get a better understanding of what is going on. C doesn't think the teachers are firm enough, and I tend to agree. I'm more than a bit bothered by the fact that Wild Man intentionally hurt another child though. C made him tell me, and Wild Man was in tears before he told me. Oddly enough, he was more upset knowing I would be disappointed in his behavior.
  
• Tomorrow I get to teach Virginia Woolf and slave narratives. Here's hoping the rest of the week goes smoothly.
  

A great start

Summer school starts at CU today, so C is, once again, the primary caregiver again. Because of my schedule (I teach from 4:30 till 6:30) he will pick the boys up from school, give them dinner, and get them ready for bed on his own. I'll get home just in time to help put them to bed. This will be the norm for 6 weeks. I'm not feeling great about this schedule as I also teach a class from 11 to 1. I feel like I won't see my family during the week for 6 weeks. It makes me feel so blech that I had a good cry about it on Saturday night, which was supposed to be our date night. It was really romantic, let me tell you.

I am feeling very conflicted about my career and motherhood lately, and given my most recent post about my jealousy over C's recent career success, I'm feeling more than a bit like a hypocrite. I'm sure I'll be blogging about this in the next few weeks, when I have time that is.

For now, I'm trying to finish prepping for the first day of class and waiting to hear from C about Bear's doctor's appointment. Bear's been running a fever since Saturday night and is so crabby that I'm beginning to think someone kidnapped my laid back baby and replaced him with an evil clone.

*I just got a call from C. The doctor thinks Bear has strep throat, so C's off to the drugstore to get a script for antibiotics filled. I hope he starts feeling better soon.

I need to . . .

work on my attitude. I really, really do.

C just called me to tell me that he has been invited to give a lecture at an Ivy League school by a big wig in his profession. My reaction was less than supportive. Actually, that is an understatement. I had to try really hard not to cry. Because this is my blog and because I think the people who read my blog and know me generally know that I love my husband and that I think he is super-smart and that he works really, really hard, I'm not going to go write several paragraphs about how wonderful I think C is. Instead I'm going to write what I feel.

I'm jealous of C. I'm super, crazy, insanely jealous of my husband, and I feel incredibly guilty for that. But the reality of my life is this: I want a t-t job. I want my own office. I want professional stability. I want to buy books and to go to conferences without worrying about how I'm going to pay for it. I want to be involved in a professional conversation about my field. I don't want to have to explain when someone wrote something or to discuss historical context or to correct someone's misperceptions about my field. I want to talk about my work with someone who is in my field. I want to go to a department meeting (I went to 2 last week, incidentally) and feel like I belong. I don't want to have to constantly introduce myself and I don't want to have to remind people that I teach at CU because my husband is a t-t prof while I am not. I want to feel validated professionally. I want to be able to stop selling myself. I actually want to worry about how I'm going to make tenure rather than if I'm ever going to have a t-t position.

And most of all, I want to be able to feel happy for C without thinking about myself.