I was on a fairly steady daily blog there for awhile, but fell off the wagon the last couple days. We've been busy...some of which is parenting related, but I'm not ready to write about yet...and some of it has been just odds and ends piling up.
Yesterday was a little home improvement. Borrowed a drill from a neighbor and finally got around to hanging the curtains around Leda's crib. They've been sitting in the corner waiting, but necessity has motivated us. Leda has horrible sleep habits. Partially our fault, partially hers. She still requires us holding her to fall asleep and has somehow gained a love of absolute dark and quiet before she'll give in. And we love Cole's 7:30pm bedtime, but are lucky to get Leda down by 10pm frequently.
Lately, Leda has taken to going down for a morning nap just fine--usually after I get Cole down for his--then refuses to nap in the late afternoon waiting until early evening. So it's a couple hours of horrible whining and tired and nothing makes her happy followed by being out cold at 6-7pm. Of course, then the problem is that we're not ready for bed so chances are something...the dog going outside, the tv, the radiators, walking by to get a glass of water...will wake her up again so start the usual 9-10pm process all over again. If we could just black out light from the rest of the condo, she'd be fine...or at least that was our theory.
So far, so good. Last night with the new curtains up, she slept through the night for me from 8pm until morning. How much of that was due to being over-tired we'll find out soon enough. We took a grocery store trip this morning so she's having her first nap of the day very late--chances are there will be no second nap, just early bed.
Our other big adventure yesterday was a playdate at the library with our friends we had the "zoo fail" with a few weeks back. This time went much, much better. Other than a minor incident where I had to take Cole to the parking garage to get milk from the car, both our kids did very well. Hopefully our friends had a good time, too. Leda loved the library's gerbil. Cole loved running around the stacks of books...I'd occasionally stop and try to show him cars or a book about trains or whatnot but mostly he just wanted to use the toy room as his home base for exploring. We did manage to bring a few books home...the real goal was to have something new because we go through so many bedtime stories these days.
Then there was swimming on Friday night. I wanted to get a workout in before I'm on a schedule and I have no idea why I decided to do a bit of a time trial but I'm glad I did. Kelly has been laughing at me as I look up the 2012 results for the race I'm doing. Comparing swim and overall time to my age, gender, everybody--trying to figure out whether I will, indeed, be the last one out of the water or the last one across the finish line. Kelly maintains that I will not be either one.
I swam a quarter mile in 15 minutes. Which is insanely slow. (Ok, maybe not for you non-swimmers.) But considering I've spent less than a month in the pool, I consider this one of those amazing epiphany moments where I realize "I can do this." Because I have an entire 16 week training schedule ahead of me before my first race. Then over a year before I'd like to attempt Ironman...and, yet, 15 minutes for a quarter mile more or less puts me at the swim cutoff if I kept that up for 2.4 miles. And I will only improve with more time.
Writing it down makes it sound crazy because it looks even more like the non-event it was. But exiting the water and looking at the laps-per-mile chart on the wall to confirm was a pretty good feeling. Frankly, I was just happy I swam 1/4 mile! I remember the early days of training for my first marathon when I'd finish a 30 minute run wondering how the hell I was going to do that for several hours. The beautiful thing is knowing that if I put the work in, the performance payout at the end will happen.