Parenting Comes First

Dear You,

Glad to see you're still around. I'm sorry that I've been neglecting you. What I had originally anticipated with the birth of my third son was that he'd sleep a lot. He doesn't. In fact, he's quite active in the mornings which is when I had been contributing to the blog and when I had been doing the bulk of my writing. Instead I've been driving kids to daycare, changing diapers, making breakfasts, all the little things that fill up my time. These are all good things, of course, but what gets cut out is blogging time and writing time. Despite the fact that I'm on sabbatical (the tail-end of it, I might add), I find that I have so very little time to dedicate to reading and writing. So this wee post is to alert you about my hiatus and to scold myself into getting back into the swing-of-things.

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Speaking of parenting, Meredith and I have had a troubling few months with one of our kids. I won't go into detail, but it involves trips down to Seattle and various other places in order to help him. I've been speaking with other parents who have dealt with this and who are currently dealing with this, and that's helped. One conversation I had with a poet struck me quite profoundly. He said that he envisioned the son that he would have when he was going through what we're going through now, and the process the son he had hoped for would never be in the exact frame of his imaginings. I'm feeling the same way these days. Worried. Fretting a little.

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Thanks for your ear. I promise to be better about jumping online and updating the blog a bit.