Okay, so I have…

Okay, so I have babysitting for the day today, and Melissa's been here before, so I don't need to show her where everything is. The weather is cruddy, so I don't particularly want to go out to a cafe to work; I'm curious to see how productive I can be here if I try.

The goal -- get some actual writing done, and ideally drafting new material, not only revising. It's interesting -- I'm finding that I can finally do some work in the mornings now (and sometimes midway into the afternoon), while Kavi is rested and in a good mood and happy to play by herself as long as she can see me. It makes my life so much better -- and to be honest, is more what I expected parenthood would be like. I don't know whether Kavi has been unusually high needs this way compared to other infants, but until she hit about eight months, she seemed to need a tremendous amount of hands-on care. Now, she's actually able to entertain herself for hours at a time, letting me get some work done! But I can't seem to generate new material that way -- there are too many little interruptions when Kavi bumps her head, or wants some milk, or is heading at top speed towards the power cord or plant or fish tank. I can use that time for e-mail, for working on SLF and DesiLit stuff, for reading student work or just reading. But I can't use it for critiquing student work or for lesson planning or for drafting new writing -- all of those require a little more concentrated brain power than I can get while keeping half an eye on Kavi. (I also run errands much more efficiently if I'm not hauling Kavi along with me.)

So that's when I need one of three things to be happening: a) she's napping (1-2 hrs reliably), b) Kevin is watching her (which he can do some evenings, Thursdays, and 1-2 weekend days), or c) a babysitter is watching her. Right now, we're tentatively planning on three days of babysitting a week, because I have an intensive new course to prep for and teach this spring, and to do it right is going to take a day of work a week on its own. After the school year's over, we'll probably drop down to two days a week (conveniently, our Saturday babysitter will be going back to Bolivia then). It's a bit tight in the budget, but affordable, I think, especially since child-care is tax-deductible. So we will try it and see.

Which brings us back to the question of just how productive I'm going to be today. I think I'll try logging the day, see how it goes. See next entry, to be updated over the course of the day.

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