Whooo! Happy New Year! Ahem, yeah, whatever.
Right now, I’m ruing the return to school on Monday. I don’t wannnnna go back to school! I want to just keep rewinding this week, enjoying being with Dave with absolutely no schedule or plan. We slept in! We drank beer! We stayed up late! We watched all of Arrested Development, season 1! We justified everything with "Well, we will never be able to do this when we have kids." Our next week off together is in April, when we will be going to Florida and spending the week on the beach, luxuriating. Or whatever. My next week off is in February, only what, 6 weeks? But it seems like FOR.EV.ER. Especially in the context of being in the longest part of the month for me, the Wait.
Oh yes, it’s killing me. Waiting blows. I haven’t even been prattling on about it here, instead I’ve been emailing Amy with such gems as "Did the nausea wake ME up, or did I wake the NAUSEA up?" (I’ve now Carly Simon-ed this entry, a la "you’re so vain.")
So, my plans for ’05:
* Baby, et al
* Work on the full time grad school thing. Might be hard (if this is The Month, then we’re looking at a September due date, which doesn’t really sync with academia so much, but if I can get an assistantship deferred to mid-January of ’06, that would be cool. Or, start over the summer?)
* Get the hell out of teaching. It’s harder than it sounds, I think. There’s something to teaching that I do love, and there are perks (tuition payment, medical reimbursement, summers off) but at least one of those won’t be really available to me when I have a baby. Teaching AND taking a class AND having a baby just sounds like WAY TOO MUCH. Especially on days like today, where GETTING DRESSED sounds like too much, because that just means I’m getting closer to going back to school and having to TEACH. ARGH.
* I know that we just can’t afford for me to not do ANYTHING but be a mother. We can’t, and that’s really not a situation that’s likely to change for a few years. However, I think that it is possible to work something out where I work part-time at the library, or university, or even as an ed-tech at a neighborhood school. (I would make a KICK ASS ed tech, what with the teaching degree and experience, and my love for the challenging kids.) I would love for someone near me to get knocked up, too, and work out some sort of childcare co-op deal. That would rock. Anyway, while I would love to be able to stay home full time, I can’t, but I do think it’s possible to find a middle ground. If I was just shelving books at BPL, at least my mind is less occupied by all that comes with teaching, you know? And I just know that both my teaching and my parenting would suffer if I tried to do both. As it is, the thing that makes me a good teacher is my love for the kids, and I can only love my kids like that because I don’t have any yet myself.
* My resolutions are to drink more water (speaking of, I want to find a Life is Good water bottle online today . . .), walk more (5mi/week to start, in any combination) and take my goddamn vitamins. I also want to get back into salad mode; I’ve been eating more hot meals at lunch than salad, and I would say that that is directly related to comfort-food eating as a result of my stressful job and mental preoccupation with procreation. The emotional eating needs to be curbed, as in all of my research I have not found that warm cinnamon buns are necessary to maintain a healthy balance of hormones.
So, yes, let’s work on the first one, first, shall we? Once that one is taken care of, the rest will be easier to finagle. Being pregnant will make for such a gentle segue out of teaching: "Oh, I’m due the first week of school, so I’ve decided to stay home for a year and focus on my Master’s . . ." and also provide me with reasons to not feel guilty about taking sick days if needed. Whoa. I probably just jinxed myself with that one.