Journal Entry: September 23, 2009

On Monday I told a lot of people, "Oh, it's so much easier with the second baby. With Annabelle we were up all night, every night, startling awake at every tiny sound. With Alexander, we're a lot more relaxed. I'm actually getting a lot of sleep."

On Monday night, he proved me a liar. Bigtime.

So, as a result, I woke up late yesterday and I was dragging. I went in to work anyway, and stumbled through the morning's responsibilities, and then spent my lunch break grading papers, and then darted out to OC for my fourth week of class. I will, of course, tell that tale elsewhere.

I had several students hang around after class to talk with me, as I'll mention in my recap. That was awesome, in the sense of making a connection with my students, but it was draining in the sense described in detail in last week's link, Caring for Your Introvert. On top of that, everyone I interacted with at work all day wanted to talk about the baby (and, frankly, I did too...but it's still tiring). Then I got home to a full house -- T--, two babies, and two in-laws.

It's nothing but whining about blessings, but all that interaction got to me yesterday. After three weeks of getting crippled before my classes by anxiety -- for days on end -- I managed to get away with fewer than three hours of anxiety problems this week, and they could be gone altogether by the next time we meet for class. But my night was still shot just from interaction exhaustion.

T-- let me hold Alexander as soon as I got home, and I took him to the couch and AB came running up to see him, and I asked her all about her day. At the same time, T--'s mom and dad got home from some shopping they asked me all about my day, and it was all perfectly nice but for some reason I just wanted to cry.

So I handed the baby off to his Papa, and then when no one was looking I slipped off to the bedroom to hide in the dark.

Karla and John naturally picked up that something was wrong, and they know me well enough that they were able to guess what, and they said they'd be willing to head home early if I needed a little alone time before my family showed up this weekend. I replied to that with an emphatic no, because they're doing so much to make our lives easier. I really, really appreciate all their help. I've just got my own crazies, and the demands of the situation don't really allow for any good outlets. It's a pretty short-term problem, though, and one I've weathered countless times before. I'm not going to go turning away good help just because I'm feeling a little uncomfortable.

Anyway, there was bacon on the griddle and brisket in the crockpot, so I didn't stay in hiding for too terribly long. I came out for dinner and then took sanctuary behind my laptop for the rest of the evening hours, while we watched Word World and Lie to Me. Then, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, I stayed up a little longer in the still silence and finished off Newsradio. Such a great show.

Ah. I did have one actual problem yesterday. T--'s laptop is dying. It takes forever to boot into Windows (if it does at all, before locking up), and then when it loads it gives a complaint about accessing the user profile and loads a temporary profile instead. It seems pretty clear that it's a hard drive problem -- probably from AB knocking the laptop off an end-table last week while she was watching videos -- but there's a lot of photos and T--'s work stuff on that hard drive that we're going to be incredibly frustrated to lose. And, y'know, no laptop. I don't cherish the idea of sharing mine with T-- and AB. We all have very different ideas about what a computer should be doing, and how it should be handled.

So, y'know, that's going to be a mess. Probably an expensive one, but sometimes we're saved by hand-me-downs and free IT services from friends we're all-too-happy to take advantage of. So I'll let you know how that turns out.

Other than that, it's just things and stuff.