On Monday, both kids woke up and immediately set about whining about how they didn’t want it to be Monday. I did my best to reassure them and say, “hey, the weekend will be here before you know it!” But that’s admittedly a tough ruse to pull off at 6:30 on a Monday morning, before I’ve even put my glasses on.
But up and at ‘em we went, and pretty soon the kids were moving into their days with minimal complaint. I had my morning run and got to work, and things flew by pretty quickly. When it came time for Henry to go to preschool, he did resist and have a small meltdown, but Erin and I were able to help him through it, and before long he was OK. By the time we got to school, he had the usual spring in his step as he ran into the classroom.
Henry has found himself with an increasingly packed schedule lately, and we are doing our best to mitigate it as much as we can, and be sensitive to those moments where he struggles. He is five, after all, and I can respect that he needs some down time and free time to do his own thing.
But, he had a good day at school and he was quite chipper when I picked him up. We had a nice walk home together. Once back, I had some more work to finish up and then it was dinnertime. After dinner, while I was cleaning up, I heard the kids playing around with some balloons and making a video on Henry’s tablet.
Ah, kids and balloons. Some things change, and some things don’t.
Once the kids were in bed, I settled in for a marathon writing session. Backing up a little, a few months ago I was made aware of a short fiction writing contest through Grist, a climate action website. The contest was for submitting works of short fiction related to climate change in the future. I’m in early stages for a book I’d like to write in that arena, so I decided I would use this as a practice exercise to do some character sketching and back story.
Of course, I had plenty of time to actually write the story, but finally got started a little over a week ago. It was due Monday night at 11:59pm. I plodded along, little by little, each night until Friday night I realized that what I had was totally wrong. Not working at all. I had about half the required word count, but I was way off track. In my head, I heard the voice of Seinfeld’s J. Peterman saying, “This is incoherent drivel! A total redo!”
So Saturday morning I faced a decision. Do I try to restart the whole thing with the tall order of writing 3,000 words by Monday night? Or do I just limp through what I have? Or do I skip it altogether?
I weighed each equally, and finally settled on TOTAL REDO! I figured, if I don’t finish, it’s not the end of the world since I wasn’t writing to win anyway, and if I do, well cool. So there I was, on Monday night, with about 1000 words left to go.
I actually got into a good flow and in fact wrote 2,000 words, and got the story submitted with 15 minutes to spare.
It’s rough around the edges and definitely a draft, but I felt pretty good about it and most of all felt like I made the right decision about which way to go with the story.
After that, I celebrated by very quickly falling asleep.
