Growing Mama
Sunday, November 30, 2003
BABY MOZART
Today I put on the Baby Mozart video tape, after the only trial almost a year ago. It seems I am more fascinated with it myself. I just sit down and watch all these changing pictures. His attention span is quite short, he is distracted by his other toys. Is it really for parents? Probably: they have to like it because they pay for it.
BABYSITTING
He openly prefers my company. Instead of watching the TV he climbs up on my lap, and demands some hard-to-reach objects from my desk. There is no way to concentrate on any other subject when he's around. The only way to keep sane, is to remind myself that my main occupation today is babysitting, and it's not he who's stealing my time, but it's me who's depriving him of my precious attention.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
LITTLE GAMES
When Lev goes to bed for the night, the house looks like a deserted battlefield. Overturned cars, scattered magnetic letters, letter cubes, tortured stuffed animals, shredded paper, overturned cup, and much more... And me, crawling around getting this stuff out of the way.
What kind of game is it, when the little man opens his drawer and starts pulling his clothes out and throwing them on the floor? At some point he starts stucking them back. Sweet boy. But before I have time to rejoice, he decides he'd rather play the first game, and starts pulling his clothes out agian... Then brings them proudly to me, one by one, and I have to explain to him that he should not put panties on his head or try socks on his ears. I don't always have energy to clean up. Needless to say that we don't spend much time in his room.
Monday, November 10, 2003
JEALOUS
When my husband and I start kissing or hugging in front of our little guy, he becomes mad and upset. He makes a grimace and starts whining: "Ba, ba, ba!" He feels excluded. When we take him in our arms he immediately stops whining. I guess he is not demanding attention of the specific parent, just wants to join the fun.
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
TO EXIST, TO PRODUCE, TO PUBLISH
Lev is in daycare now, for 4.5 hours a day. That really untied my hands, and my brain! I started reading books, I started thinking, I started writing!
It's amazing how much I can produce during an hour of so-called uninterrupted writing. It makes me feel really good. I am not any more envious of my husband who comes home from work full of that energy you get after being somewhere else, after doing something, after making something happen. I am not envious because I have done something, too - look at all those files on my laptop! With writing, my life is getting its meaning again. I wonder what stopped me from realizing it earlier, from commiting to these laptop hours earlier. I guess it's just laziness, the lack of some clear goal in mind, and fear of doing something that would make me really exist. Fear of coming to existence.
My writing is not really about the baby, even if I somehow mention him. It's about me, changed after having a baby, becoming more relaxed, more aware, more acute.
I started reading books, too. I read a wonderful article on Chick Lit in the recent issue of "Writer". I borrowed these books from our library. I just devoured "The Nanny Diaries". And I got "The Devil Wears Prada" I am working on now. Reading gives me so many ideas of my own, makes me think, makes me produce!
I never thought much about reading-writing connection. Or did I? I realize now that there was a period in my life I read a lot, and it did great to my writing. It was in Russian, I was 14 then, and I was writing poems, and I read tons of Russian poets at that time. It made me unlock that music inside. It made me breathe these lines out easily. Now it's different. It's English, and it's prose. But the effect is the same: it's stimulating my brain. And I am so grateful to these writers: that they exist, that they produce, that they publish their work - no matter how hard it could be for them. They become my inspiration, and my hope that some day I will be able to do it too - to exist, to produce and to publish my work!
