So Say The Stars

I found a site that gives parent and child astrology compatibility forecasts. http://www.ivenus.com/family/stars/

Scorpio parent – Pisces child
This is a great combination – a child who nourishes your soul. Both of you are water signs and will automatically understand each other. Your little Pisces child is full of imagination and
dreams and will just go with the flow. You might try to get him to stick to some sort of plan, to adhere to some rules, but you are wasting your time. He will just withdraw into himself and flow out in another direction. The Scorpio parent will love the kindness and gentleness of this little child, as they will feel
appreciated. You can pick up each other’s feelings without speaking and this bond ensures that you grow closer and closer to each other. This child will really affect you to the depths of your soul. You will do anything for him, and he in turn will do the same for you. Fuel his imagination with fantasy stories
and games.

Scorpio parent – Cancer child
How similar, the Scorpion and the Crab – both have hard shells hiding their real selves from the world. Both can strike out their pincers if you get too close. This parent/child combination is intense and emotional. The Scorpio parent will understand well when this Cancerian child is slow to move out into the world, and needs to test the water first before any move is made. The well-controlled and proven environment, which Scorpio will have laid out for little Cancer, will be adhered to well by the Cancerian – he is not one to take risks anyway and always likes to stick to the safe and trusted path. As he grows older, a bond of teamwork can be achieved if both are driving towards the same goals.

G is the Cancer and Ivy is the Pisces. I actually love these little reports. They warm my heart. I mean, who really knows what our relationship will be like, but if they follow what’s written here, I will be very happy, because those sound like great relationships, and they would very well with what I want.

See more progress on: Raise strong, happy children

Still Learning How to Manage These Healthy Mom Meals

Always an adventure. Lately I feel as if the boy is getting more balanced meals than I am, as I so often just feed him, feed the baby and then graze the kitchen for dinner myself. In the last few days, I think I have had the following for meals: a handful of dry cereal, cookies and milk, a lot of fried zucchini, a hard boiled egg,some grapes, a protein bar. Sigh. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches seem to be my most well balanced meal lately.

I found an article though about a woman who manages making dinner while being a busy wohm. I’m not a wohm, yet, and my kids are a good deal younger, still nursing and on baby food, or in toddler hood, but she has a couple of good ideas for making meals that everyone will eat… part of it comes from making parts of meals that can be assembled in the form and with the ingredients that individual family members will eat.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/dining/11batt.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ei=5087%0A&em&en=3c6a98a275b8d5f9&ex=1184299200

See more progress on: create healthy, well-balanced meals for my family like a good mom should

I need to learn how to roll with the punches

Instead of getting stuck when there are roadblocks, I need to learn how to keep up my positivity and continue my forward momentum.

I can’t find my portfolio… discouragement.

I have technical difficulties that get in the way of signing on to paypal… I feel like I can’t get anywhere.

Time and children get in the way of actually working… I start to not bother trying to squeeze one more project in.

Questions about where we are going to be living in a few months? Well, why even try, if I’m going to have to start all over again somewhere else where I’ll probably be too busy getting life set up and adjusting to even get back to doing what I want to do.

No matter what bumps come in the road, I have to remember to look forward. I have a tendency to only see the littlest baby steps, and then get flumoxed when those baby steps fall short. There are benefits to going baby step by baby step—but I think it’s also important to keep the big picture in mind.

This is about following my dreams, not about letting my insecurities and neuroses take over. Do I really want neurosis to be the defining characteristic of my life? I do not. I want to be the woman who follows her dreams and is not stopped by blocks or detours.

Full steam ahead.

Eyes on the prize.

Green light go.

See more progress on: Set up a shop on Etsy

A Boy

When did my baby become a boy? He was always a boy, I mean. I remember that sonogram picture and the unmistakeable evidence: little weiner, proudly flying between half made baby limbs. I've changed the diaper and watched him flirt pretty much from awareness with girls and women all over town. That love of football? It started at 3 months. Why am I surprised that he is SUCH a boy? Snippets and snails and kitty cat tails (we don't have puppy dogs.)

His latest thing is running around dressed in Shark Pajamas, the pants legs fastened over his shoulders and flapping down his back like a cape. He is a superhero. And then there's also the sword fighting. He has sponge tubes and he likes to barrage anyone within range with wackity wacks. We've made the rule that he's only allowed to hit if the other person has a similar "sword." He also adores monsters of all types, both makebelieve and wild animal. Sharks, Alligators, Wildthings, Wockets in the Pockets, Nightmares in the Closets, Shrek the Ogre, what have you. He is not picky. All I have to do is say, "Are you a monster?" and up come his claws. Out comes his growl. And the laughter! Oh, it's so funny.

He's started to tell stories. Often featuring monsters and swords and much running about. He doesn't speak very well yet, so it's kind of hard to understand what is exactly happening in these stories, but something is happening. These are not things that I led him to do. He has picked up all of these things on his own. Painting, I can say I encouraged him in, and enjoy his interest in, but being a Superhero or a monster? These are things that mommy did not create for him. Something in the boy brain made the jump from small boy-person to Shark Boy who flies about the room with his cape.

He is growing up into a little person. A boy person. Not a baby.

When I first found out I was going to have a boy, I think I went into a little shock. I had a hard time conceptualizing how I, a woman, a very non masculine (though not girly) woman could have this male person growing inside of her. I've spent so much of my personal and professional life considering what it means to be a woman and girl, that the idea of raising a boy threw me for a huge loop.

Of course, once you have a baby, it doesn't matter what sex they are. They are just your little baby. Your little person. And you are the mommy, and that's all there is to it.

But now, the baby is fading away, along with the chubby legs, and the Boy, capital 'B,' is standing in the baby's place. Now, I feel like we're really starting to get into the business of what it means to be a boy, and someday not as far off as I think, what it means to be a man.

What role do I have, as mother, in who he is as a boy? As a man? How does it relate to all of my studies of what it means to grow up female? As a woman and a feminist and a human and a mother, I think having my Boy Boy is going to be one of my greatest life lessons. I can't even imagine what is going to come next.

The Road Begins

I started my second draft today during nap time. Four pages so far. Added a new kind of intermission or heading that I want for all the chapters… a view from the outside, in a way. News reels. Documents. Correspondence. They live in a formal, constructed world, although from the inside, being used to it, they wouldn’t really see it. So I can deal with a lot of the exposition that way, rather than always having the characters talking about “the way things are.”

Also started with changing the POV, and that seems to be helping with the exposition overload, also.

Of course, the babies are up from their naps now, and I have to take them to the playground. So that’s all for right now.

But I started. Yes I did.

And that’s the way things move in my life right now. In inches. 4 pages a day means it will be done in a few months. I guess from here on in, I am stilling time to write. A few minutes here. An hour there.

Well. I’ll work on it. I’d like to have at least an hour a day scheduled. That means I’ll have to give something else up.

See more progress on: Finish the second draft of my novel.

Moving and Shaking

Yesterday, I revised 30 pages. And it wasn’t some special day where I had hours off from the kids. This was simply because I took my novel and a pen to bed with me, and that was how I wound down. I thought I was going to get tired and pass out like usual, but I got into it.

Today, I just got through another twenty pages or so and I only have 30some pages left in my first read through!!!!!

Holy Frickin’ Shafizzle!

And it’s not even 11 pm. I could conceivably finish my first revision tonight! And then I can cross of my goal of editing my novel and start a new goal of writing the second draft. That is really exciting. I could even, maybe possibly, have a readable second draft done or partly done by the end of September. Or even October, if I am willing to give up part of October, which I had planned for plotting and development of book two. But the writing of book one can definitely contribute the the movement of book two.

That’s exciting.

What’s also exciting is that the end of my book is WAAAAAAYYYY better than the middle, which sucks, and much better than the beginning, which is skimpy with undeveloped characters. While reading through the ending, I actually got the feeling that I was reading a real science fiction novel, like a published one. Cool.

And I’ve come to some decisions. I need to make this all from the pov of the youngest sister. She needs to be with the other two sisters often. Then we will get the older sister’s POVs through dialogue, not navel gazing and exposition… always two things that I rely too much on. And the ironic thing is, I’m actually pretty good at dialogue, but I’m such a Hamlet overthinker myself that my characters always talk talk talk—to themselves. Soliloquy central.

I just hope that I remember there is nothing to be scared of. And I hope I remember how much I like the end of this book, and that the story is not the tripe that I often fear it is.

It’s all okay, we can whip it into shape. Woo hoo! Charge!

See more progress on: edit my novel

The Blog-o-Sea

I spent a lot of yesterday looking at blogs. I even commented upon a few of them, like I said I was going to. That’s good, big step up in my not being a frickin hermit and hiding my head (and my writing) in a hole. I found this one blog that I thought was hysterical and brilliant. The best I’d read in… well, possibly the best ever, in part because she isn’t trying to be something that she’s not, and part because she’s just that good a writer, and part because she is, did I say it? HYS. TER. I. CAL.

Check out this post if that is in dispute… but don’t if you have a sensitivity about cuss words, condoms, or the torture of teenagers. http://boobsinjuriesanddrpepper.blogspot.com/2007/03/filed-under-parents-1-smart-ass-teenage.html

I think she is so funny that it makes me all shy inside. I have my sense of humor, but it’s a much lighter, dryer, flakier kind of humor… like a biscuit.

A biscuit? What kind of metaphor is that? I guess I also just went to this blog http://www.thepioneerwomancooks.com/ so I’m feeling kind like blueberry cobbler.

Looking at all these blogs, though, got me thinking. I am no novice to this genre. Not to blogs and not to personal essays and not to journaling. Computers, I’m not so good with, but writing, that’s my thing. And journal writing? Well I’ve got about 70 hardbound journals sitting in a bookcase to attest to my experience with that. I’ve got just as much of a right to be seen and read and enjoyed as any other blogger. Everyone does, hurrah for the democracy of the internet, but why do I have this feeling in me that no one would want to bother with what I have to say? I mean, any more so than anyone else.

It’s time to take myself seriously as a writer—as someone who can and should be read be persons other than my immediate circle.

Get on out there, Rosy, the water’s fine (sharks? what sharks?)

See more progress on: Be a better blogger

When nothing is sure, everything is possible

So says Marge Drabble

Good quote. So true.

I probably won’t be living where I live by this time next year, because of a psychotic landlord who has just up and decided he won’t renew our lease. Don’t know where we’re going, but I doubt it will be here, (unless said landlord gets therapy.)

Instead of freaking out about all the change, instead of worrying over unknown possibilities, instead of grieving the loss of my home, I’ve decided to embrace the change. I’ve also decided to take advantage of all that my neighborhood has to give.

I’m looking forward to change. Change gives a fresh start in live, and I’m kind of feeling as if I am in a transition period… or perhaps nearing the end of the transition and wanting to really move forward. A new home, a new neighborhood… it could be good. I have faith that we will find a place that we will be happy with. So believing that, I want to have fun with the last of my life here.

I want to go to galleries. I want to take the boy to that little garden by the park. I want to walk across the Williamsburg bridge. I want to go to the Metropolitan Museum of art. I want to take a ferry across the East River… I think there’s a ferry landing a few blocks to the south of us. I want to have more picnics in the park as long as it’s warm. I want to try that pizza place I heard was yummy. Maybe I want to write some articles for the neighborhood newspaper again, (maybe, maybe not.) I want to have better relationships with the other moms here, too. Stop being so antisocial, even if we might move far away, that doesn’t mean I can’t make connections that last.

It also means stop complaining about the sucky things in the neighborhood and the apartment, and just enjoy what’s there. Let go of it with joy.

See more progress on: enjoy where I live to the fullest

I Think Warriors Should Know

When to ease back.

A warrior needs to take charge of herself, be aware of what’s needed and necessary and take a break. Be kind to herself.

Breathing deeply is important. Caring for the self. Figure out what recharges and what depletes.

It will be clear when it’s time to charge forward again.

See more progress on: Be a Warrior

Having a project makes me feel closer to being an adult, again

A project or two not related to children, housework or being a mom, that is.

I feel a little selfish, sometimes, when my time and energy go into my art or writing, instead of the kids or the house, but I need to do this, for me. I don’t know if I would be happy with ‘homemaking’ as my focus for life. Sometimes, I wish I could. I would not be as pulled in as many directions. I wouldn’t feel like I was somehow subpar as a mother.

I’ve got to get all those expectations out of my head. There is no “should be” for life, mothering, or being a woman. There are lots of ways to be. And I am who I am. Ignoring the rest of myself won’t make the non-mom-me go away, it’ll just make me miserable. The all of me, mom-me and non-mom-me both.

I am an artist. I am a writer. I am a mother. I am not a very good housekeeper. I guess something has to give.

See more progress on: Develop my life outside of being a mother and (shudder) homemaker