Milestones

A long-overdue update...

* I made it to the second trimester! I am now in my 17th week, which seems kind of amazing. A few weeks ago, the nausea improved about 10%, and now I think I've made another 10% jump. It's definitely not where I hoped I'd be by this time, but it is nice to feel some improvement.

* With a corresponding slight improvement in my energy, I suddenly notice how disorganized and chaotic my life and house are. However, I'm still pretty worn-out, recovering from various colds and sinus infection and pink eye, on top of the pregnancy symptoms. So I find myself no longer able to completely ignore the disorganization, yet still lacking the will to really tackle it. The same thing happened after my miscarriage, when I found myself longing for someone to come rescue me. I try to remind myself that 20% improvement means I am allowed 20% higher expectations of myself, no more. Baby steps...

* I managed to swim laps one day this week for the first time in too long to count. I'm trying to use that increased energy to get a little more exercise, since it's such an important mood-booster for me.

* Elan is (occasionally) wearing underwear! This is a big step, as he was very undergarment-averse for the first few months of the potty-training adventure. Finally we graduated to him saying "later" he would wear them. Then one day my clever husband put the underwear inside his pants. Viola! We didn't draw his attention to the fact he was wearing underpants until the end of the day. Of course he still prefers to be bare-bottomed inside his pants, and he has very skinny hips, so he winds up showing off the world's cutest plumber's crack on a regular basis. What 3-year-olds can get away with.

* In the chaos of the last few months, Elan has been steadily napping less and less, and Mikhail and I find ourselves struggling to come up with new routines for "quiet time" to give us all a break. I'll let you know if I find something that actually seems to reliably work. So far, it's all very random and disorganized-feeling. I have realized that since having a child, a firm structure and schedule have become very important to me, which is interesting since in my life B.C., I didn't think of myself as a very scheduled person. I'm not sure how much of this phenomena is due to the fact that Elan is a child who responds well to a firm schedule, and how much of it just how I am as a mother.

* Somewhere in the chaos of the last few months, my writing partner and I finished our screenplay. How did that happen? A lot of very focused work, including several 4-day-long writing marathons, while our husbands wrangled the children. We have now submitted it to a few places and are hoping for positive signs. There's a fair amount of fear involved with putting something out into the world and facing rejection, but it feels great to actually have finished a major piece of writing.

So there they are - recent milestones. I will try to get myself to post more often...