Victory!

November comes to an end today, with something of a bang rather than a whimper, as I submitted my novel project online exactly twelve minutes ago to achieve this:

I made it!! 50,010 words down, and I don't think they're all rubbish either, which is an effort I'm pretty proud of.

November was a challenging but really good month for me. The end-of-year busyness began to ramp up, especially from mid-month onwards. My big girls and I got to see Florence and the Machine in concert on the 11th. My partner and I managed a weekend away without the kids mid-month, which was lovely. I wrote so much, completing both NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo. I attended my final Novel in a Year class. I have been so enjoying my lovely new kitchen, which was fully completed a week ago today with the stove being installed, and doing much baking and experimenting with meals.

It was a huge month in terms of paid work, too. I finished with my first big client on 12 November, and had a whopping 5 days off before kicking into my new project for Big Client the Second on the 18th. I've been very busy since with it, and will be until 17 December, when I go onto 2 weeks vacation.

December will, I hope, be a month of blessings also. This week holds work, high school orientation, Christmas craft club, primary school end of year concert, and at the weekend, the final netball games of the year, a guitar concert and a Christmas lunch. Christmas preparations are in full swing, and the race to the end of the school year is well and truly afoot, with concerts, graduations, performances, sporting finals and parties aplenty; so it is going to be a very crowded month.

After the extreme wordiness of November, I'm going to take a break from writing for a couple of weeks. I may post some picture-posts, but I may not do that either - I am very busy with work and I am also really feeling the need for a breather from the intensity of the past month of writing all the things. I imagine I'll be back with the traditional Christmas-wishes post in due course, but I think I'll be pretty silent between now and then.

So as we all plunge headlong into the race to the end of 2015, I hope your December is bright. I'm off now to fold laundry, fill in endless school forms, and listen to music :-) I'll leave you with the last passage of Theory of Mind, my NaNoWriMo novel.

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This air is as pure as crystal, as abundant as the stars above.

This air is air; not a facsimile, not a replication.

It makes itself through living systems, not machines;

it has reached the self-sustaining tipping point that Sani and Jod always believed it could.

If we fly away, it will stay alive for a million years. More, Jod had said, his face alight.

Absent a large-scale collision catastrophe, it’s seeded for good, now.

It’s what Briony saw, when she looked at the red dust.

What it could be.

Marginally higher in nitrogen than earth, a mere soupcon lower in argon;

but supplied with just the Goldilocks amount of oxygen to inflate human lungs,

to let us fill ourselves and breathe. In. Out. In.

Nasima presses close into my side. Eight years old, and a never-ceasing source of wonder to me;

her adaptation to almost five months aboard ship, and landfall on a strange world, one of uncomplicated delight.

I remember holding her, a newborn, her wide, wise eyes locked on the star outside the window.

Star baby, star child, I’d crooned, as Phoebe slept an exhausted sleep.

You’ll go to the stars someday, my child, my lovely child.

Newborns don’t smile; everyone knows that. Their mouths might distort a little in a smile-like rictus

but it’s nothing but the passing of gas (a thing they do a lot of).

All the same, I could swear she smiled at me, my star daughter, on that still midnight.

Mam, she says, her voice serious. Mammy, why don’t you open your eyes?

It’s beautiful out here. Please, look? I can see so far …

Phoebe murmurs something to her, hand pressing into mine.

For a moment I think, this is more than I can bear, more than I can compass.

I’m almost 55 million kilometres from where I was born, and I am lost and confused,

dazzled and sotted beyond imagining.

To be here, in the open air, the open Martian air –

But this is what we came so far to see, after all.

I take my daughter’s hand, and I open my eyes.

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This is the 30th and final post in NaBloPoMo. All done for another year!!

Christmas is upon us

Today was our traditional tree - raising, decorating and carol-singing afternoon. Now I am feeling highly seasonal!

This is post 29 in NaBloPoMo. 29 down, 1 ... ONE ... to go!

First dinner party

We had my Dad's birthday dinner here tonight, which was also my first opportunity to produce a proper dinner party type effort out of the new kitchen. It was SUCH a good experience. I did roast beef and roast veg at Dad's request, and made a chocolate mudcake for birthday cake. Everything worked so well, the kitchen was so spacious to work in, the clean-up was easier than ever before, and my parents, brother and brother's partner all liked the new kitchen, which was also pretty gratifying.

It was so nice to see everyone. I love my family, and we don't catch up often. My parents, and my brother and his partner, all live on the other side of town (close to each other, but a solid hour in good traffic from us), and we're all busy people, especially in school termtime. I wish we could see them oftener, but in reality-land, we need to just try to make the most of the times we do get together.

So this is where our lovely new kitchen really hits its stride, and where I am seeing the value in the money and disruption it cost. Being able to host meals for family and friends more easily and pleasurably is a great plus, just as much as the inprovement in our day-to-day family meal-making.

This is post 28 in NaBloPoMo. 28 down, 2 to go!

On knowing you're done

I woke up at 5:30pm from an almost 2-hour nap, one induced by a crashing fatigue, and here's the really important part - one that my three children allowed to happen by peacefully going about their separate business for that whole length of time.

The crashing fatigue itself was an indicator that at least one of my chronic conditions is playing me up (probably the hormonal one, given recent changes to medication). The best way to manage these crashes - where I go, over the space of five minutes, from normality to utter exhaustion so profound I can barely raise an arm and walking is actively painful - is to lie down. Sleep is best, but if it's not possible, *sometimes* quiet immobilized rest will do the job, although it usually takes longer to work.

The crash happened when I was sitting in the car waiting for the kids to come out of school. When they piled in, all full of stories about their day, I listened, made appropriate comments, and then said: "Girls, I'm really tired. I want to lie down for a rest when we get home. Will that be OK?"

They all agreed it would be, and so, we got home, I gave them snacks, they set themselves up doing three individual activities on computers, TV and with a book, and I lay on the couch, snuggled up to a heat pack, prepared for a sleepy rest ... and fell fast asleep, only to waken much later when one of the kids called out to another.

Aside from being slobberingly grateful for the sleep, it made me realise just how done I really am with the baby and toddler stage of parenting. Such a thing would be literally inconceivable - negligent and dangerous - with tiny ones, no matter how shattered the parent is. Unless the kids / babes are napping too, daytime sleep is next to impossible when you have preschool-aged children at home and you are the only adult on duty.

I actually feel a bit sick thinking about how I would (or, more likely, would not) manage the demands of my various health problems, including my anxiety, and my professional life, if I was caring for an infant or a toddler right now. I think I wouldn't cope very well at all. I think it would be harder even than I imagine.

I love my three children fiercely, and I really loved their baby stage, and even their toddler years (well, mostly). If I had not had to have three caesareans, making a fourth pregnancy medically inadvisable, I would've liked to have had four kids, and would've probably had another close in age to my thirdborn.

But being 42, being prone to extreme fatigue snaps from at least two of my underlying chronic conditions, being at the stage where I am getting more serious about my poetry and also trying to build a viable freelance business, being ready and needing to start reinvesting more time and energy into my relationship with my partner, being called upon to do more and more in the community, being available to my kids as they grow and their problems become more complex ...

Well, for me, all of that is incompatible with the total immersion that is life with a newborn. It was a beautiful stage, but one I don't want to, can't, go back to. I know I'm done.

This is post 27 in NaBloPoMo. 27 down, 3 to go!

Tired

I'm getting tired. The Month of All The Words is combining with work, the hectic social and school whirl of this time of year, and a dip in my thyroid levels to wear me down, and I'm feeling the beginnings of a fatigue slump coming.

Proper rests will be difficult until after Christmas, so I'm just going to have to make do with improper ones - stealing time when I need to so I can gear down, even if only for a few hours. Case in point: yesterday, I hit an unexpected pause in my work project, so instead of doing what I maybe should have (trying to get a grip on Mount Papermore on my desk, doing Christmas or birthday prep, doing housework), I just wrote my novel then went to the movies with my husband.

There's not much I can do about the big committments in my life, but getting through these hectic times when I'm tiring out is largely a matter of not sweating the small stuff, and trying to be kind to myself. That's going to have to be my motto for December, I think.

This is post 26 in NaBloPoMo. 26 down, 4 to go!