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.

"I'm going to eat Bear's toes!"

Wild Man declared at breakfast the other morning. He climbed down from his chair, walked over to Bear's high chair, climbed under the table, and proceeded to do just that. For his part, Bear was thrilled at the attention his brother was giving him!

Am I Good Enough?

I think a lot about whether I am a good parent, and Kate's recent post at Academic Ecology made me ask myself the "Am I Good Enough?" question yet again. It is very safe to say that C and I ask one another this question a lot. While I do feel like I'm a successful parent most of the time, there are lots of reasons why I think I'm not doing a good job, and I make bad parenting decisions almost every day. C and I do try to discuss the bad decisions, and if I make a bad decision, I expect him to say, "Um, M, that wasn't such a good move," as I also help him recognize his mistakes. Suffice to say, we spend a lot of time talking about our children, how we parent, how we want to parent, and how to be better parents.

After reading Kate's post, I began to wonder if there is a direct correlation between being a good parent and doubting whether one is a good parent. It seems to me that the best parents I know, including my blogging mama buddies Kate, Anastasia, Lilian, Profgrrrl, and AcadeMama, as well as my real life mama friends Meg, ML, Supadiscomama, P-Duck, Jennie, Sarah, and L, are constantly questioning their parenting decisions. And each of these ladies are wonderful, thoughtful, concerned, and involved parents, although each and everyone of them has a parenting style that fits their individual children and lives. I also know these ladies agonize about various parenting decisions similarly to the way C and I do. I think that thinking about parenting doesn't make one neurotic (as I have been told in the past and as I have occasionally felt); rather, it makes one a better parent.

Breast-Feeding or Fertility

I came across this article on breast-feeding and fertility while taking a break from grading. I find all things about breast-feeding interesting, and I find the idea that a woman's decision to breast feed a child for an extended period could prevent or limit her ability to have another child based on her age really intriguing and complicated. As a mother of two children, I feel like I'm constantly negotiating between what is right for one child versus what is right for another, and in any given minute, I am privileging the needs of one child over the needs of another. It is a constant struggle for me, and I'm sure for all parents.

After reading this article I found myself wondering if I were in this mother's position would I have stopped nursing Wild Man to get pregnant again. I don't know if I would have. As much as I love Bear and am so thrilled we have him, I can't imagine not nursing Wild Man for as long as we did (19 months for the record). I really believe that nursing for that extended period played a significant role in his development, both positive and negative. I also believe the same for Bear, although we're only 10 months in. The writer, Erica Kain, poses a very salient question, one so many parents are confronted with: how do you balance the needs of one child with the very different needs of another, even if the second child is only hypothetical? I know I struggle with this one every single day.

Wild Man the Monkey

This image captures his true spirit!

Spring time in CU Land

Last fall Wild Man and I planted about 100 tulip, hyacinth, and crocus bulbs in our front walk way and back yard. In the last few days they've really started to bloom. These flowers make me smile every time I see them, so I thought I'd share them with everyone!

Summer Courses, Summer Pay

I am teaching during what CU calls Summer Intersession. From May 10th till June 18th I will be teaching 2 full year courses. That means I have about 6 weeks (or approximately 25 classes as we will meet 4 days a week) to present material that I would normally have 28 weeks (or approximately 56 classes as these classes meet twice a week) to present. One of the classes in an American lit class which I have taught before elsewhere, so I'm not too stressed out about it. The other is an Intro to Women's Studies course which I've never taught and I am a somewhat nervous about (I've been reminded repeatedly that this is the course that convinces a lot of students to become Women's Studies majors; thus, I feel like I'm being tested a bit.). The Winter term ended last week, and although I have a lot of grading to do in the next week or so, I now have about 5 weeks to focus on getting the courses together.

I've been thinking for sometime, however, that I'm going to be doing a lot of work in the next 12 weeks or so for not a whole lot of money. I say that knowing full well what I'm paid as a "part-time" instructor is much more than most, if not all, of my friends working as "part-time" instructors in the states. So I was more than a bit surprised to open my contract today to learn that I get paid for the course, not for the term. The pay for a full-year (two semesters) course is twice the pay for a half-year (one semester) course, but being an American and being accustomed to the way things are done at American universities, I assumed my pay was and is based on the semester rather than the course. Thus, I assumed I was paid for the number of courses I teach in a given term, regardless whether I'm teaching what are deemed full-year or half-year courses. With the summer courses, I assumed I would only be paid for one term since I'm technically only teaching for one term,even though the courses are actually full-year courses. Well, in fact, it turns out that CU pays based on the course, not the term. This means that for the months of May and June I will receive the same amount I was paid for teaching my full-year English course from September 1 to April 30. When I realized this, I literally almost fell on the floor. I immediately called C, and he actually spit out the coffee he was drinking. The summer just got a little brighter for us, at least economically.

Spring shoes

Last week, I went on a bit of a shopping spree and bought myself some clothes that actually fit. Yesterday I stopped in a shoe store just to see if I could find any shoes to go with my new clothes, and I found these in yellow. Since they are cork, they are actually fairly comfortable for being so high. C was totally shocked that I actually bought yellow shoes (I own nothing in yellow, but I think they will go with several of the dresses I bought last week). I can't wait for the weather to warm up a few more degrees so that I can wear them!

Wild Man's Quote of the Day

"Kissing is good, Mommy. But don't kiss Daddy so much."

I want my own office

The title of this post says it all. I have access to 3 office on campus, but I share every one of them with multiple people. As a part-time faculty member, I am discouraged from using said offices to do any of my own work. They are simply locations where I can meet with students. In fact, I am expected to coordinate my office hours with all of my office mates so that none of us are in the office at the same time (this is ostensibly to give us privacy while meeting with students, but the implication is also that we're only supposed to use the offices during our office hours). As I spend a fair amount of time on campus (for various reasons, but primarily because we only have one car, and C and I teach on the same days) I spend a lot of time in C's office. I do this because I really don't have anywhere else to do. And I hate it. I hate that I don't have a space of my own on campus. I hate that I'm constantly in his building and that I see the people he works with all the time. I hate that being in his office reminds me that I don't have a tenure-track position. I hate that I can't apply to use a study carrel in the library because I'm only "part-time" (yes, I'm only part-time, but I teach more courses than most t-t faculty).

I literally use a corner of C's desk, and I have one bookshelf in his office. I am acutely aware that this is not my space, and I'm constantly leaving when he meets with students. He repeatedly tells me I don't have to leave, but I don't want to be in his office during those times. Truth be told, I don't want to be in his office at all. I do have an office at home, but again, for various reasons I end up being on campus more often than not. Most days I can handle this situation. But today it is really getting to me. Simply put, not having an office (even a shared office that I can access on a daily basis) reminds me of the impermanence of my position and makes me feel like I'm not valued by CU at all.

Body Image

I've started this post about 5 times, and every time I begin it with a lengthy caveat about being thin and how I know that most women would like to have the problem I'm currently having with my body. I'm not sure why I feel it necessary to apologize for being thin, but I do. Ok, so that's not true. I feel it necessary to apologize for being thin and for complaining about being thin because I've been made to feel like it isn't ok for me to have body issues based on my thinness or that my thinness is an affront on people who aren't as thin as I am or that I need to be reprimanded for being thin because, after all, I'm thin to make other people feel bad about themselves. Case in point, at my wedding, my sister-in-law told me I made her sick because of how small my waist is. Nice thing to be told at my wedding, right? But then I thought this is my blog, and I will write whatever I want to write, comments be damned.

Anyway, since giving birth to Bear, my body has changed dramatically. I have lost all of the weight I gained while pregnant and then some. In fact, I now weigh about 10 pounds less than I did when I got pregnant with Bear. None of my clothes fit, and shopping trips are incredibly frustrating. Anything I try on I try on knowing I will have to have altered. C is getting concerned as I eat like a horse (literally, I eat as much as he does), and I'm still losing weight even though I'm not trying to and I'm not really exercising (chasing after a pre-schooler and breastfeeding Bear do count as exercise in my mind). But this post isn't about any potential health issues (of which I'm fairly certain there aren't any; my metabolism just seems to be in overdrive lately, although I do have a doctor's appointment to get everything checked out just in case). It is about body issues.

I'm so tired of pulling out my favorite shirt/skirt/dress/pants/jeans only to discover that everything is too big. I know this is an issue lots of people would love to have (there I go apologizing), but I don't. I feel like I'm too thin. Seriously, everything I own needs to be taken in. It's incredibly frustrating. I don't want to be this thin. I don't want to have the body of a 12-year-old girl with big boobs (boobs that will disappear as soon as I stop breastfeeding Bear). Before I got pregnant with Bear, I had some curves, not a lot mind you, but some. Now, I just look skinny. I want to be able to wear something without having to cinch my belt as tight as possible. I don't want people to say, "My god, you've gotten so skinny." Or "I wish I was as thin as you." Really I don't. I just want to wear my favorite dress and my favorite jeans and know that they look nice on me, not like they are falling off of me.

Just thought I'd tell everyone. . .

• I really want to go shoe shopping.
• I'd rather be doing just about anything than getting ready to go teach.
• I wish Bear's teeth would come in. He seems to be cutting a mouthful at once. This makes for a cranky baby and a cranky mama.
• I'm in love with my children. Bear lights up whenever he sees Wild Man, and when Wild Man kisses Bear, Bear laughs out loud. Wild Man then announces, "Look, he loves me! I'm a good big brother, Mommy."
• C and I are trying to figure out how to get to San Francisco in a few months for a long weekend. I am presenting at a conference, and we thought we'd make an early anniversary trip out of it. We'll take Bear, but if everything goes as planned, someone will come stay with Wild Man.
• I can't believe people are already asking me what we're doing for Bear's first birthday. It is still 3 months away!
• Oh, and I can't believe my baby is 9 months old. Sigh.
• This week Wild Man is insisting on being called Robin Hood. C is Little John, and I'm Maid Marian. Bear is Friar Tuck. Wild Man is using his toy golf clubs as his bow and arrow, and as I was leaving the house today, he was putting the Sheriff of Nottingham in jail for being "unkind to everyone."
• I am so ready for spring.