Portrait of a morning
May 18, 2007 The Story of My Life, Writing
I’m in my office. The little cubicle in the corner of the basement. It’s 9:30am, which means the sun is coming in the tiny window above my desk and blinding me. Brett is upstairs cleaning. Noah is down here singing. Madison is down here, too, and she’s wearing the dragon costume from Noah’s third Halloween. I’m drinking cold coffee because I couldn’t get myself up out of bed while the coffee was still hot. I’m wearing my pajamas.
There are seven jobs on my to-do list. No, wait, eight. Some are long-term and some I need to get done today. I keep a running list on the white board next to my desk. It’s a big full-size board and I have it tilted against the wall, tall instead of wide. The top left corner is my to-do list and the bottom right corner is what I’ve invoiced and what I need to invoice. I’m trying to get into the habit of invoicing every Friday. (I’m trying out billings and think I might buy it.)
When I log on to my computer in the morning the first thing I do is read email in my gmail account. Then I read email on my Get Them Blogging account. Then I scan my google feed reader. Then I check my to-do list and make my plans for the day.
I have to put everything on my to-do list. For example, yesterday I needed to send fact checking info to a magazine I wrote for this spring (article coming out in fall) and I put it on my to-do list. Otherwise I would forget to look it up and send it. No matter how small the job, it has to be on there or I’ll forget it because I have a lot of different projects. That looks like this:
- 100 Hats, which is my income anchor (dependable, predictable). I catch up for the week on Sundays and then do maintenance for about a half hour every day.
- Corporate writing, which right now has three clients and one pro-bono client and marketing for more clients so it’s several jobs/assignments/duties, which could have their own subcategories and all of these take up the bulk of my office time. Like I have jobs to do (a big one due next week — I need to commit some serious time to it), and a workshop to present in June, and some background work I need to finish for a consulting meeting I have on Wednesday.
- Other pro-bono jobs like Literary Mama and blogging for anti-racist parent.
- Any creative work I’ve got going on — nothing this week other than some minor research for a book proposal.
- Get Them Blogging, which is starting to pick up its own speed but I need to do some marketing for it.
With Brett home it all feels absolutely do-able even when I pencil in time to sit in the grass and let Madison be the mommy while I be the baby. (She says, “You’re too little to ride this bike. You’re too small.” She shows me all the things I’m too little to do — too little to play with candles, too little to mess with mommy’s hairwash, too little to cook dinner. I look sad and she pats me on the head and tells me I’ll be a bigger girl soon.)
If I can make this all work, this really will be the kind of life I dreamed about.
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Noah and choir
May 17, 2007 Parenting
I was watching an old episode of Six Feet Under and one of the brothers on there sings with the Gay Men’s Chorus. It was making me think of how much I liked choir in fifth grade and wishing Noah could have the chance to sing with a group. There aren’t any homeschooling choirs around here and the other non-school-connected groups are hyper-serious with try-outs and all that. Noah loves music but is much too shy to sing by himself and he hasn’t expressed interest in an instrument. He likes to sing with me and by himself (when he thinks no one is listening) so I figured he’d like choir. Then the next day at religious school I hear some of the parents talking about starting a choir and I said, hey, if you do that, lemme know because I’ll sign my kid up.
So he’s done choir the past few months and I was right — he loves it. In the entry below this you can see him in his “dark pants, white shirt” (too big, with cuffs falling over his hands) pretending to sing before his first public performance at the JCC’s Israeli Independence Day celebration. If I didn’t tell you all this, that picture might just look odd.
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Tags: homeschool, Homeschooling, Music, Noah
Protected: 2 Madison, 1 Noah (with Madison)
May 17, 2007 Pictures
She’s using markers to color her face these days.
Isn’t she lovely?
And with our peonies (wearing wings)
he’s not really singing, in case you wondered
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Open adoption in Ethiopia
May 17, 2007 Adoption
I’ve been reading her account and it’s very moving.
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Tags: open adoption
New PR folks on board
May 16, 2007 Blogging
We’re getting new PR reps over at Get Them Blogging, which means more opportunities for reviews! Please spread the word — there are going to be more review opportunities coming up!