My mom bought me a MacBook, about which I’m very excited as it will make it easier for me to sneak away and write during NaNoWriMo. It’s supposed to arrive by Wednesday. Until then, I’m finding alternative ways to write away from the kiddos.
Today’s big plan: take the kids and the babysitter to the library where they’d all play in the children’s section while I wrote on the computers in the “Technology Center”. All was going according to plan. There was a computer available immediately, and I sat down and started to write. Every time I started asking whether what I was writing was any good or why I was trying to write a novel or if anyone would ever want to read this thing or what the people surfing the internet on either side of me would think if they knew I was writing a novel, I just took a deep breath and kept writing. When I hit a sentence I didn’t quite like, instead of deleting and re-writing it 17 times, I just wrote an alternate sentence or phrase to remind myself of the newer, greater wording I’d come up with, then I kept on going.
About an hour and a half later I had 2,300 words. Not a bad start for Day 1 (the goal is to average 1,667 words per day). I browsed the CDs for a bit, hit the restroom, then went in search of my children.
When I found them, it was clear that the baby had been crying. He resumed crying quite heartily when he saw me. Turns out, he’d fallen at least twice and bumped his head pretty hard on the steps in the Ice Cave play area. He calmed down long enough to nurse, then picked up the frantic crying where he’d left off. By the time we got home, he’d been crying for about 45 minutes, which is longer than he’d ever cried in his life. I put in a call to the doctor’s office and they instructed me to take him to the emergency room. He’d been crying for about an hour and a half when we got into a room, at which point he promptly stopped crying and started acting like his normal happy self. Three nurses, two doctors, and 90 minutes later, we were given the all-clear and left for home.
Not exactly what I’d planned for the first day of NaNo, but I suppose it’ll make both events more memorable (the first day of my first NaNo and my son’s first ER visit). Now to get everyone to bed and snuggle in to sleep myself in preparation for whatever adventures tomorrow may hold.
Imperfect Happiness 