For the record

I don't know if anyone has noticed lately, but I've been a little sad. That's actually not entirely true. I'm Fine(tm).  In fact, I'm so Fine(tm) that the word Fine(tm) has completely lost all meaning to me.

Just to recap: I'm fine.

And I really am.

I'm in this limbo period between just having made the decision to apply for grad school and then actually applying for grad school, so that's hard because my mind immediately jumps to oh I should look at the schools in that area for Lena and how walkable is this campus when I haven't even been accepted yet, and this sort of ends up with me curling up in a neat little web of my own thoughts and day dreams just...dreaming.

I've been fairly anti-social these past few weeks, mostly because I think so much of my energy (besides the normal every day to day exertions) is going into thinking about the future, and I've been putting Lena to bed and just opening a book, which has been really nice, and I love being in a relationship with my local library, but it's time to get out more.

Last night I went to see Bela Fleck with Aspen at Memorial Hall. It happened to coincide with the last day of classes, and campus is positively buzzing with excitement. (See here.) It was amazing to be a part of it, and it was also really fun to just break the mold for a day. My days are so scripted with Lena, evenings are spoken for. I pick Lena up from day care, we make dinner, we eat dinner, play, bath, books, bed. It was nice to break free from that for one night.

But not too nice.

So for the record, I'm giving myself one more month. One more month of sports bras and young adult novels. One more month of declining social invitations and hiding out under the covers. One more month of wallowing in my own thoughts, and then I'm doing it. Big things. Watch out world, Rachael is coming for you.

In a month. And she'll have shaved legs and a real bra on.

Can't wait

Time seems to be moving to slow and I need to keep reminding myself to live in the moment blah blah blah, but here are the things I absolutely cannot wait for:

• My hair to grow out
• Grad school applications to be due
• hearing back from grad schools!!!
• Pool/beach season--more day trips!
• I really want my hair to grow out. 
• I also really really want to go to grad school.

Up a storm

These past few months I have been reading up a storm.

I think I've read more books this year already then I read last year combined. And they're not even all YAF!

Books I've read this year, assorted by brow-ness

Literary Fiction:
The Marriage Plot--Jeffery Eugenides (I liked it because it was angsty English majors but was nowhere on par with Middlesex which I now want to reread)
Once Upon a River--Bonnie Jo Campbell (Highly recommend, amazing characters. I want Lena to read this.)
Never Let Me Go--Kazuo Ishiguro (Surprising in it's simplicity.)

Fiction that may or may not contain zombies and the adult version of twilight and Beijing crime novels:
Patient Zero--Jonathan Maberry (Non-post apocalyptic zombies!)
Discovery of Witches--Deborah Harkness (Twilight-esque, but with Genetics!!)
Rock Paper Tiger--Lisa Brackmann (Beijing!)

Young Adult Fiction (AKA the best genre in the world):
Divergent--Veronica Roth (Dystopian Chicago.)
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks--E. Lockhart (Boarding school and awesome girl)
(Not included, every novel by Sarah Dessen that I pretty much reread weekly.)

On my to-be-read list, and the books I'm hopefully going to get from the library today:
I, Claudius--Robert Graves
The Submission--Amy Waldman
Train Dreams--Denis Johnston
Paper Towns--John Green (who I have never read! and there are a bajillion holds on The Fault in Our Stars)
Gone--Michael Grant


Oh and I should probably pick up some books for Lena too.


And then I got a paper cut at work yesterday. And I powered through it and was like, Katniss Everdeen!!!


And scene.

Parenting swagger

There lots of tiny victories that come with parenting. Like say, when you make a dinner that contains a vegetable. Or when your kid goes to someone's house and doesn't act like a deranged monkey.

But there is nothing, nothing, like the feeling of completing a project that your kid has started.

I wish I could tell you the amount of puzzles Lena starts, how many lego models, and then subsequently how many times I've found my dad, late at night or early in the morning, finishing up some 1000 piece puzzle or ages 12+ lego model of a motorcycle.

This weekend it was my turn.

I built that! EFF YEAH.

I literally walked around the house with a bounce in my step for like 10 minutes afterwards because WHAAAT!

So Lena got this set for Christmas, and it's like, recycled cardboard pieces so it's like green and edgy and it's for ages six and up but LET ME TELL YOU, no six year old could finish that. I'm serious. It was hard and the directions were not at all explicit. There was a lot of extrapolating from the picture. And I'm not saying that you need a college degree to complete this but this was not a walk in the park.

(I may or may not have told Lena to try to go find something else to do because Mommy Has to Focus. So, there's that.)