Stuff I'm Glad About Today

1. I've been exercising with arm weights and various fitness videos every morning, which is something I persist in even though it makes me feel hatefully perky. While I cannot tell, from looking at my fainting-Victorian-lady upper arms, whether I have been building any muscle, I do feel more...square? More aligned? Like, when I go up the stairs, I notice that my knees are pushing out right over my toes, etc. Like my day-to-day form is better. Or I'm more conscious of it. Either way, I like it.

2. After I wrote yesterday's post, I reflected on some of the other differences between now and five years ago. The two biggest ones are these: I finally have a more-or-less real job (if nothing else, proving that this is a human activity I am capable of), and life with the kids has hit the sweet spot. Right after Silas was born, one of my professors said something like "The next few years will be terrible, then they will be great for about eight years or so, then they'll be terrible again, and then they'll be great." So far we seem to be sticking to this trajectory, slightly extended due to adding another small person to the mix. While upon rare occasion I miss those babies I used to have, most of the time I am luxuriating in my ability to do basic normal things, like take a bath alone, or read at breakfast, or drink a cup of coffee without leaping up five times to attend to someone (although this still requires frequent semipatient reminders that I will do X when I'm done with my damn coffee, please). We can go on hikes and watch movies together. We can do trips. I can read chapter books to both of my kids. Life is pleasant, except when tainted by future longing (i.e., when I think that five years from now I will have a 10-year-old and an almost-14-year-old, and that the 14-er will probably look at me with loathing, and will be so busy with activities that we'll never be able to leave town, and when we do leave town he will spend the whole time pining after his friends and/or texting them inappropriately and on the sly).

3. We looked at cabinets and countertops yesterday, and I started to be excited that someday relatively soon we are going to have a kitchen that not only works properly but which was specifically chosen and designed by us. As I've never lived with a kitchen that wasn't a morass of compromise and small disappointments, this is a big deal. It also raises uncomfortable questions of resource use and agency and allocation of personal funds--I can no longer be, or pretend to be, the virtuous planetary resident I was when I had a bike and 500 square feet and a monthly budget of $500. Also, that means the disastrous tupperware drawer will be completely our fault.