Erika Mitchell's Blog, page 30

Teensy Little Post

I know I’m more than a decade late in coming to this conclusion, but Friends is a terrific show. I laugh out loud at every episode and it makes me happy to watch. I’m a huge fan, and it’s really too bad I can’t go back in time and announce this fact proudly to all the people who would’ve cared about it in the 90′s.

Oh well. I’m announcing it now, and I’m sure no one cares but I only had five minutes to write a blog post today and I only got five hours of sleep last night so here we are. With a teensy little post about an outdated topic.

But that’s just how I roll. Raising the bar in blog quality one post at a time.

Show, Don’t Tell, Gosh Darn It!

One of my newest pet peeves as a reader/viewer is lazy storytelling, primarily when writers tell and don’t show. I was reading a book the other day and the writer did this left and right, and you know what? It was really freaking boring.

For those of you who haven’t been to tons of classes about showing not telling, I’ll elucidate. Here’s an example of telling:

Steve was a jerk. Impatient and demanding, he had no time for anyone he didn’t have use for. Even then, he was unpleasant to work with. His colleagues had all long since given up on him demonstrating even a shred of humanity.

I mean, yes, you get a sense for who Steve is, but this doesn’t exactly make for compelling reading.

How here’s an example of showing:

“What the hell is this?” Steve asked. The white paper cup on the counter was filled to the brim with thick white foam, the top of which was dotted with flecks of nutmeg.

The chipper young barista forced a smile while she consulted the scrawl on the side of his cup. “It’s a cappuccino, sir.”

“No,” he said, knuckles whitening as he squeezed the edge of the counter, “It’s not. It’s a cappuccino with crap on top. If I’d wanted crap on top, I would’ve asked for it.” He reached for the cup. When the barista handed it to him, he emptied it onto the floor. As coffee splashed onto her shoes, he scowled and said, “Make it again. The way I ordered it.”

While the barista fought back tears and remade the drink, the next person in line stared straight ahead and pretended he was elsewhere. He reminded himself that even though he shared a cubicle with Steve, he wasn’t responsible for fixing the guy.

This isn’t a perfect example, but I hope it gets the point across. You know exactly as much about Steve in the showing example as you learned in the telling example, but it’s, in my opinion, a lot more fun to read.

I’ve seen a few example of this lazy storytelling in TV shows and in books recently, and it’s annoying me. If Show Don’t Tell is an axiom I know, then surely other writers must have access to it, too? Is it too much to ask for some fun dialogue?

Just Try It On

Have you ever seen the movie Spanglish? There’s this scene where Fleur (the protagonist) encourages a young girl to try on clothes she thought would be too small for her by saying, “Just try it on” because she secretly altered the clothes to fit the girl. When the girl tries the clothes on and discovers they’re no longer too small, a smile of pure delight crawls across her face and her surprise is heartwarming and lovely.

I was reminded of this scene on Sunday when Wes and I deliberated whether or not to take the kids out for breakfast. We’d never tried to take both kids out for a meal before, because we dislike paying tons of money for food we can’t eat because our tiny humans are crying and need soothing or discipline.

Now, Aidan’s actually really well behaved in restaurants. We’ve worked really hard to teach him how to sit patiently at the table, waiting for his food and then eating in nicely when it comes. He’s still two, so some ventures are more successful than others, but for the most part we have no concerns about taking him out for a meal.

Lily, however, is an unknown quantity. Would she sleep quietly in her carseat the whole time? Would she realize she was in her carseat halfway through the meal, remember how much she dislikes her carseat, and then start hollering? Would we even make it to our table before she started crying and needed to be shushed and soothed?

We didn’t know. We just didn’t know. Would we end up paying $40 for a relaxed family breakfast or would it end up being a $40 investment toward stress and cold food?

Finally, we just decided to go for it. We’d never know how Lily did until we tried it, so we threw shoes on most of our feet and headed to our favorite breakfast spot.

And you know what? It was great. Lily fell asleep a few minutes after we arrived, she slept the whole time, Aidan was sweet and well-behaved, and Wes and I both got to eat our meals while they were still hot. We just tried it on out, and it was great.

It got me to thinking about how we never know what we or our children are capable of until we try new things. Sometimes it goes really well, sometimes it’s a colossal failure, but it’s always illuminating. We have to make room for surprise, and in my experience the only way to do that is by trying new things.

And if this means I end up with red velvet pancakes in my belly, then so be it. I guess I’ll just have to live with that.

Restricted Movement

My biggest apprehension in being on restricted movement (no exercise other than light walking and no lifting anything heavier than ten pounds) for the six weeks following my C-section was taking both kids out shopping. After all, if I couldn’t lift Aidan into a shopping cart, what in the world was I supposed to do to keep him and his busy little fingers occupied with something other than bringing about the ruination of order in any store we ventured into?!

Not being one to let fear dictate my behavior, I decided to wing it and saddled up my trusty minivan last week to take the kids out to Target. My shopping list was long and my patience was high thanks to a good night’s sleep, so I figured it was better now than never.

It went surprisingly well. Aidan hung onto the front of the cart like a leggy little sea urchin and Lily slept through most of the trip, so I count it a success. Of course, everything went kablooey the minute we walked through the door, because it always does, but at least everybody kept their tempers in check until we got home so I still count it a win.

I find that with each week of mother-to-two-kids I survive, I grow more confident. I’m beginning to suspect that the days when I’ll feel capable of adding exercise and writing back to my daily routine are coming soon, and they will be most welcome.

Of course, it’s been so long since I exercised I doubt I’ll be able to lift any weights heavier than ten pounds anyway, but hey. It’s a good start point. And this time I’ll get to work out secure in the knowledge that I’ll never have to lose baby weight again.

That fact in and of itself is reason enough to celebrate.

Halle-freakin-lujah.

Delusions of Capability

For this baby, Wesley’s “push present” (a gift your husband gives you after you have his baby) was two months of housecleaning. Nice, right?!

Well, last week we went on vacation with Wesley’s whole family. All seventeen members of it crammed into a gorgeous luxury vacation home on the eastern side of the state. We spent seven glorious days enjoying new parks, the pool, and eight pairs of helping arms to hold and play with our children.

I returned from vacation encouraged and empowered. After all, if Wes’s siblings could all handle two children (and his mom survived having four children!) then surely I could, too. After all, I’m an experienced stay-at-home mother. I have two and a half years of motherhood under my (wider than normal) belt, two kids is totally do-able!

I started thinking crazy things, like maybe I would have the housecleaners come over on Friday, but then maybe cancel the last two cleanings. Cleaning is kind of my thing, surely I could start incorporating those tasks back into our routine. After all, I’m experienced! I can handle it!

Monday came and went in a frenzy of keeping up with the demands needs of my children. I figured Tuesday would be a little more mellow and I’d see how many opportunities I had to clean. But then Tuesday blew past me too. Try as I might, I just barely had time to use the restroom before someone else needed something.

Wednesday, I thought. Wednesday would be better.

But it wasn’t. Five loads of laundry, emptying the dishwasher, making meals, and feeding/changing the baby kept me hopping until bedtime.

So now here we are at Thursday and I’m SO THRILLED to steal fifteen minutes for myself to write this blog post. But now Aidan’s asking to go to the park, and I resolved to get out of the house with both kids by myself at least once this week, so now I have to stop writing.

In summary, here’s what I learned this week: I WAS OUT OF MY FREAKING MIND TO CONSIDER CANCELLING THE HOUSECLEANERS.

The Long View

I can say with absolute, perfect confidence that I like being a second-time mother MUCH better than I liked being a first-time mom. When Aidan was born, I felt like I was broken down and rebuilt from the ground up as an entirely new person.

My life looked completely different. My routine was turned on its head, my body looked unfamiliar, and I had to adjust to life as a stay at home mom.

This time around, this is all old hat. My life already revolved around attending to the needs of a tiny human when Lily was born, so there hasn’t been much of an adjustment. I must say, it’s a lot more fun to have a baby when everything isn’t new!

That said, I’m so freaking tired. So. Freaking. Tired. Like, I can barely even string words together because my poor groggy brain refuses to come up with them fast enough to keep up with my typing fingers.

Lily is pretty easy-going, but she’s still a newborn so that means I’m up most of the night. Even when she’s sleeping, she’s making all kinds of dinosaur noises that keep me up. After months of pregnancy insomnia, I think it’s entirely likely I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since Christmas.

CHRISTMAS.

The nice thing is, I know this passes. The long view of the situation is that this is our last baby and in a few months Lily will be sleeping through the night and I’ll start feeling human again. Maybe even human enough to get my flabby body back to the gym!

Until then, I’ll just keep stumbling through each day with a cup of decaf in one hand and the tremulous hope of an afternoon nap in the other. So long as everyone ends up fed and dressed at the end of each day, I figure I’m doing pretty well.

Another Guest Post!

My guest post on The Writers Vineyard last week got kind of forgotten in the excitement of bringing a whole ‘nother person into the world, but I figured it was better late than never. I wrote another guest post for The Writers Vineyard, this time talking about the process of meeting my characters.

If you’ve got some spare time and feel like reading my musings on meeting my protagonists, click over and check out my post. It’s a short, though hopefully entertaining, read. Enjoy!

Surrender Is Maybe Not So Futile

So recovery from major abdominal surgery is fun. I kid, of course. It’s a tortuous (not torturous, mind you. Tortuous.) process, full of cringey faces and tiny little baby steps toward back-on-your-feetness, but I can confidently say that at 11 days post-op I’m feeling pretty darn good.

I’m thinking I might even be able to tie my own shoes in a few weeks! I kid, of course. Tying shoes is for quitters, sandals all the way! Even when it’s raining!

From my recovery haze of nursing the baby, resting, and napping, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the events of the last few weeks. Everything, from the surprise discovery of Lily’s breech presentation at the 38 week ultrasound all the way up to the moment I walked into the operating room, has been rattling around inside my head.

I’m not gonna lie, the whole 180 degree change from an unmedicated birth center birth to a planned c-section was a head trip. I mean, you just can’t get more opposite than that. I definitely went through a period of mourning the birth I wouldn’t be able to give Lily, and then I stopped looking back and just relaxed into it.

I surrendered all control over the process, in so doing enabling me to see the beauty in Lily’s birth. Even though the majority of the work I did to bring her into the world was to lay there and breathe, it was a truly beautiful birth.

There was so much love in that operating room, and I’ll never, ever forget the feeling of holding her on my chest and feeling her sweet little breath on my cheek while she cried for the first time. It was a completely different birth experience than my son’s, but it was in some ways better.

There was no screaming or swearing, there were only smiles and tears and a full head of luscious baby hair. It wasn’t the birth we’d planned, but it was Lily’s story all along, we just didn’t know it at the time.

And now, 11 days later, I’m feeling upbeat and positive and I have two amazingly beautiful children and a husband who’s been through the wars with me and we’re this blissed-out family and I don’t really care that Lily’s birth happened in a hospital courtesy of a scalpel. Because she’s here and she’s exactly what was missing from our little family.

I’ll just take my battle wounds and move on, because in the immortal words of Tyler Durden, “I don’t want to die without any scars.”

See? Fight Club dialogue is the gift that just keeps on giving.

Our daughter is here!

On Thursday afternoon, Wes and I welcomed our daughter Lillian into the world! It was a smooth delivery and Lily and I are now home and resting. She’s pretty comfortable in our arms most of the time, I am considerably less comfy recovering from surgery.

Still, we’re ecstatic and healthy and looking forward to spending many sleepless nights watching her sweet face. Posting may be light for awhile as my whole world revolves around recovering and keeping up with my kids, but all is well.

So well!!!

Way Too Much Excitement

Oh my gosh, last week. LAST WEEK. When I took my belly photo on Wednesday morning, I had absolutely no idea what kind of day I was going to have. I figured I’d go to my midwife appointment and then lunch with Wes’s parents and that would be that.

Well, I did go to my prenatal appointment, where my midwife revealed that she still STILL wasn’t confident that Little Girl was head down. Between her and my other midwife’s uncertainty, Wes and I decided to heed their recommendation and schedule an ultrasound for later that afternoon.

After lunch, I headed to my ultrasound certain it was a waste of time and money. Ha ha, the joke was on me!

Baby Girl most certainly WAS breech. Breech breech breech. I saw her perfect fingers covering her chubby cheeks, and her fat little toes kicking up near her face, and felt my entire world shift on its axis.

This changed everything. EVERYTHING! I knew it was probably too late for an external cephalic version (where a doctor attempts to flip the baby head-down by moving her through your belly) to be effective, but I scheduled one for the next morning anyway. I wanted to make sure I did everything I could to prevent a c-section if it was in any way preventable.

And then I cried. I made a dozen phone calls on the way home and cried my way through most of them.

The next morning, Wes and I headed to my ECV bright and early. It was our very first visit to the Labor & Delivery ward and we were in jolly spirits. We had no idea what we were in for.

The ECV was painful. Excruciating, really. Horrible, horrible pain that was ultimately pointless because Little Girl would not be budged. After two attempts to flip her around, we all agreed there was no point putting me through a third attempt.

We went home. I scheduled a c-section for the next week. I cried some more.

I’ve been in complete, perfect shock for almost a week now. In the last few days I’ve started grieving the loss of the opportunity to bring my daughter into the world the way I’d planned, but I’m also trying to stay positive and see the upside to the whole situation.

My emotions are a huge, bubbling wreck and I alternate between excited and terrified on an hourly basis. I take comfort in my friends and family’s assurances that I’ll bounce back from my c-section faster than I would have thought possible. I take comfort in knowing that my Little Girl is going to be coming into the world safely courtesy of skilled hands.

But most of all I take comfort in knowing my daughter will be born July 5, after which I’ll never ever be pregnant again. This pregnancy has been way too exciting for my taste and I can’t wait to get my body back for good.

T-minus three days until I get to meet my daughter. I can’t wait.