It's that time of year

Note to self, for Christmas supply order: 9 cups Dutched cocoa.

Shoelace, tied

105,685, and Shoelace is done. Done. And I am dead inside about it. I'd meant to finish it before Chloë came, and then finish it on maternity leave, and I guess I have--I go back to work in exactly eight days--but I have no sense of triumph, not even any sense that it's finished. It's been dragging on so long, and I've known there are so many things wrong with it, and I've been writing so poorly, and ugh.

But it's done. Now I will let it sit for a while, and think about my next project, Finity's Edge, which has been in queue for a damned long time now. And in a couple of weeks or months or years or whatever I'll come back to Shoelace and make the changes I know need to be made, because I do think it can be, will be, a good story. But for now it's just done, and for now that's enough.

Nothing but baby

The child sleeps in the swing in a 3 months onesie (she's 10 weeks) and dinner is cooking in the oven. It's a real dinner, casserole with salad and cantaloupe on the side--obviously the salad and cantaloupe aren't in the oven--and bread is cooling on the baking rack. We went to the farmer's market and the grocery store today, and took a family nap. Life is getting somewhat back to normal, or at least settling into a new normal. I'm relieved to find the new normal includes going out and doing things (though always on a two-hour time limit, or at least punctuation) and staying in and getting things done. Like baking and cooking. The quilting and spinning are coming very slowly, but they're also coming. They should come in even better when Chloë is older and more independent and can do things like sit in a Johnny Jump-Up, which isn't too far off now.

I'm working on a plan for putting the garden to bed, the better to start over in the spring (though that will be a showcase garden intended to help sell the house), and I've discovered that I can vacuum with the baby in a sling, which is helpful. I'm also taking Zoloft and seeing the counselor for the postpartum depression (which the counselor did diagnose). I'm not totally impressed with the counseling so far--I don't feel like I'm talking about my issues, just answering questions, but maybe that's my own fault. I'm also slightly ashamed about the diagnosis since I still don't think this is so bad, at least in comparison to what I hear other people get, and it doesn't feel like I'm ill so much as that I'm simply a horrible person. But apparently that's what regular depression feels like, too.

So today we shopped; tomorrow I'll bake and cook some more (including rye bread and a smoky pepper-eggplant spread I want to try), and maybe do some garden work, and maybe even do some writing, depending on the child. It turns out she'll sit in my lap and watch me on the computer, but she likes it best when I'm doing something with movement and pretty colors, like World of Warcraft, not simple black-and-white typing. (Babies are supposed to like red. Maybe I should change the font to red and see what she thinks.) Eric's got lesson plans to do, but he can take the kid, too; he doesn't do it enough to make me happy (have I mentioned I'm looking forward to going back to work? Though I'm also unhappy about leaving my child to someone else's care, even though doing the care myself is driving me crazy?) but he does do it. And we're sending her to Mema's (Grandma's) so that we can have a few kidless hours, which I'm going to cherish madly. We've done this twice before; once we went out for dinner and bookstore shopping, and once we did household stuff and I went off to Urgent Care to get antibiotics for mastitis.

M said she hoped I wouldn't be one of those women who talk about nothing but their children. Right now I am, because I'm not doing much of anything else, and I hate it. I'm trying to change it. Keeping up on news would be a good thing--I've fallen way off on that--but getting back to a semblance of a real life will be, too.