Wednesday, November 10, 2004

About Me

Ah yes, I'm joining the world of blogging.

Funny, when I decided to do this this morning, I felt like I had a lot to say, and now I can't think of anything. Also, I've tried to keep journals on and off my whole life and I never stick with it. so we'l see how this one works out.

I guess I can just start with some basic stuff about me. I'm 34 years old, a stay-at-home mom to two kids: Rachel, who will be 10 at the end of December, and William, who just turned 6. They are both awesome, and I try to remind myself of that when they start getting on my nerves. Rachel is a very high functioning autistic. She has been mainstreamed in a regular classroom since kindergarten, and she's now in fourth grade. Will is in a K-1 class for first grade, just like he was last year for kindergarten. I like having him there since it puts him in the middle, age-wise. He's going to spend pretty much his whole school career as one of the youngest kids in the class and he's kind of quick to completely fall apart when he gets upset as it is.

Look, I started write a paragraph about myself and ended up talking about my kids. That will be something to work on as I continue writing these entries.

Yes, I'm a mom. I'm also an aspiring novelist, a wife, a crappy housekeeper, and a runner (when I'm not feeling lazy) , and a liberal feminist who was ready to slit her wrists after the election last week. I've lived in California my whole life and don't have any plans to move. I was born in the L.A. area but my family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was 8. I went to college at UC Davis, about 15 west of Sacramento, and after some moving around, my husband Ryan and I decided to come back here a few years ago. Davis is my spiritual home, in spite of the weather (my hay fever goes haywire in the spring, and the summer is HOT) and I plan to live here for the rest of my life. I'm pretty sure my husband is planning to hang around wherever I am, so he'll probably be here for the rest of his life too :-)

Ryan is an attorney with a small firm in Sacramento, and he specializes in water law. If you don't know what that is, let me just explain by saying that California is actually a huge desert, and when there isn't enough water to go around, people start fighting. He really enjoys his work, so that's a good thing. We met in the dorms our freshman year of college, and we've been married for twelve years now.

I have a pretty sweet deal. I know that. Both my kids are in school from 8:30-3, Monday through Friday. I'm at a point where a lot of my friends are planning to go back to work, but because a) I like staying home and have no particular career goals other than publishing a novel one of these days, b) my husband recognizes the contributions I make to our family and likes having me home, and c) we don't need the money, I don't plan to go back out to do paid work any time soon. This means that most mornings I am free to go to the gym and/or out running, have coffee with friends, go shopping, or even laze about messing around on the computer in my pajamas if I want. I justify my unproductive days by interspersing super-productive days from time to time. I think Ryan doesn't mind coming home to find that I'm unshowered, the kids have been watching TV all day, the house is a disaster and we're ordering pizza for dinner because he knows occasionally he'll come home to find that I've cleaned the whole house, gone grocery shopping, worked in both kids' classrooms, fixed an elaborate meal and painted all the bathrooms. Most days are closer to a happy medium though, happily!

So that's my life. This month some wrenches have been thrown into it. For one thing, it's National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo is an online challenge to write a 50,000 word starting November 1 and ending on or before November 30, and I am participating in it for the third year. My friend Becky, who lives in Maryland, got me started, and it's something we do together each year. I've actually managed to write 60,000+ words with time to spare the last two years, so even though I've hit a few bumps this year (to be discussed in another post), I am confident I'm going to cross the finish line this year as well.

Another wrench is that Rachel's situation at school is kind of up in the air. She's always had classroom aide to help keep her on task, and in the past year there have been problems with the amount of aide time she's receiving. Most recently, they cut an aide position at her school, which meant that the aide she had been working with since the third week of this school year was just gone one day. So we're having to make a lot of phone calls and complain a lot to get things taken care of, and it's a real pain in the ass. There will probably be more on that too!

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