May 32

Hi, I'm still here! Did you miss me? I have been a busy bee, trying to get all that May stuff done.

Successes: morning routine taken care of every single day without fail. That's progress. I only have nine months' worth of pictures left to put in albums -- also progress. I finished reading The Lord of the Rings to my two middle boys, after months of nibbling away at it.

Fails: evening routine = BUST. I am tired by evening and it is hard, so hard, to be consistent. Yesterday the Office of Readings for the Visitation was talking about how great it is to reflect on the Magnificat in the evening when we're tired. It's less great if you're the one who has to spur the reluctant smaller people in your household to reflect.

Actually, that's the only thing that I'm really bummed about: I wish we had a consistent family prayer time in the evenings. Well, that and my ongoing difficulty with computer drift, which is going to require perpetual tweaking. I am almost done with most of the unfinished things that I care about, and the veggie project went really well between May 5 and about May 26. (Then I catapulted off the wagon in fetching half-gainer fashion, but there's always tomorrow.) Finishing the dissertation has mostly killed my knitting mojo, but I'm all right with that. I think I needed something that was within my control while I was working on the dissertation, you know? I didn't know if I could learn multilevel modeling, but by golly I could knit socks.

Putting in a garden was more work and more fun than expected. It makes me feel positively maternal, watching my little beans sprout and admiring the marble-sized green tomatoes. "Look at you grow!" I tell the tiny beet sprouts. "Aren't you clever?" (I tell them this very softly, because my garden is right under the neighbors' living room window.) I tell you, if my family could eat creeping charlie, we'd be feasting every night.

Tomorrow I am going to move pictures from the camera to the computer so I can do a few short picture posts. I am also going to post a Plan for June, because it is so motivating for me to have my plans posted. I think, though, it's going to be a less ambitious plan. May made me tired. All work and no play (or not very much play) makes Jamie a dull blogger.