When I Have Time

As a new mom, the question I am now often asked besides "How old is your baby? Is it your first?", is not whether CJ is a boy or a girl, or when I'm going back to work, or how my husband is handling new parenthood. The question I get a lot is, "How do you find time to blog?"

Here is the answer: it's 5:31am. At 4:30am, Caleb screamed at the top of his lungs. By the time I got to his room - which is the room right next to ours - he had both arms out of his swaddle and over his head and had put himself back to sleep. I figured he would be up soon and made a hot bottle so it would cool to the right temperature by the time he woke up. It has been an hour, and while he is making lots of little noises in there, he has not fully woken up, and I fully subscribe to my dear friend's philosophy of "Let a sleeping baby sleep. He's not going to starve himself."

So I made a cup of coffee and booted up the old laptop and played a few rounds of Bejeweled! on FB because honestly, I thought he would be up by now. We have a show and tell at my mom's office today around 10am (yes, he is the object of today's show and tell). I'm waiting on some soft boiled eggs to go with my coffee and I started a grocery list and thought I would check updates on the few blogs I follow, and maybe start the draft of another entry.... and then an hour went by and I thought.... damn. I could have laid back down.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is when I find time to blog. Much like college, when I had a paper due. I would think about it for days, maybe sketch an outline, but mostly just think about the topic and outline it in my head. Then the night before it was due, around 2am, after 2 hours of thinking about it some more over several rounds of Solitaire, I would sit down and shoot out a 10 page essay in 2 hours. Spell check it and turn it in, never look back. I was a B+ student, did I tell you that?

When the sun has yet to come up, you can find me at my corner of the dining table, coffee in hand, with the various accoutrements of my homemaking trade: that's Caleb's food log notebook, the grocery list (because as a new mom, its easy to forget the 4 things you needed from the store once you are there), scissors for the coupons that still need to be clipped from yesterday's paper, and the calculator to pay the bills I've been procrastinating paying. I'm thinking maybe tomorrow, since Wil is going to be home for the day, I can complete my most recent project which is going to be white peach jam - Mom gave me a case of peaches, what else to do with them?

The clock on the Mac just flipped to 5:47am. Damn, I could have laid back down....