Seven Quick Takes: Things That Are Making Me Crazy Edition

1. Evening activities. I have three boys in soccer this year, which means four dinnertime practices and a coach who is lobbying for a fifth. Ai yi yi. Also: Scouts, confirmation prep, and games club, all starting between 6 and 6:30. Dislike!
2. My hair. It is falling out left and right, with the result that it looks like goats have been chewing on it. It is EVERYWHERE. I was cutting my hair out of the vacuum cleaner's beater brush on Monday and thinking, "If anyone else in this house left this much hair in his (or her) wake, I would REQUIRE him (or her) to go get a buzz cut." Also: the Nexxus people have reformulated Humectress. I have been a loyal Humectress customer since I was in high school, because it was like Haldol for my crazy hair. Harrumph.
3. My heart. The littlest things have been triggering my arrhythmia. I feel tense so I have more arrhythmia episodes and the feeling of my flying heart makes me tense.
4. A general dearth of fun. I am not exercising because the last time I went for a run it made my chest hurt, which raised some red flags for me in light of this recent change in my arrhythmia. I am not blogging and I do love to blog. I am hardly seeing my friends at all. I have a super-fun knitting project in progress (Kernel in peacock blue Malabrigo with extra beads -- love it), but the baby who usually knows not to mess with Mama's knitting thinks that Mama's knitting + beads is a completely different ballgame, one which she should be allowed to play. This is not, in case you wondered, conducive to lace-knitting.
5. Bedtime. I am spending a lot of time getting the toddler to sleep. By the time the big boys are in bed I just want to wrap the quiet around me like a superhero cape and jump off the back of the couch in elation because the house is finally still. This would not be a completely crazy idea (only a moderately crazy one) except I want to keep doing this (figuratively, you understand) until 11:00. Which is too late for me to go to bed if I hope to be pleasant and smiley the next morning.
6. School transition stuff. My son who gets some special ed support has a new teacher who thinks his problem is just that he just needs to slow down and try harder. This makes me ever so slightly ballistic. I am talking to the special ed teacher about how to approach it so I don't burn any bridges with the classroom teacher, but GRRRRR. My kindergartner needs a little extra help learning to get himself off to school with a reasonable lunch and off to soccer practice with all of his gear. He doesn't make me crazy in the slightest (I could eat that boy UP with a spoon and then a straw for the melty bits after (which might sound even crazier than jumping off my couch while pretending to be Quiet Queen, faster than a speeding sound wave, but it's late at night and you are getting the unexpurgated me to think of what you will (and how's that for a run-on parenthetical construction?))), but I keep forgetting that I need to allow some extra time for it.
7. My secret fear that I am hopelessly lazy and that's why I'm having a hard time getting a paper drafted for publication. There's this balance in academic writing that's kind of tricky for me. You have to leave yourself enough time to think, because you're writing stuff that requires thought. But you have to keep moving forward, even if you write "must find out more about this part" and "aagghhh why am I such a terrible writer?" as placeholders. If you don't, you find yourself (or at least I find myself) sliding over to Google Reader instead of doing the hard work of thinking and getting the words down in a row. Blech.

Things I am going to do in order to feel less crazy (am I going to get booted out of 7 Quick Takes if I have 14 things?):

1. Email the other parents on all three soccer teams to see if anyone might like to carpool. Email the other Boy Scout mom in the neighborhood, ditto. People don't seem to carpool for those activities but BOY I wish they did. Also: serve "tea" at 4:15 (in lieu of dinner at a reasonable person's dinnertime), featuring new-to-me low-stress recipes from this blog. Elwood doesn't get home until after 6, and it will be good to have something that can wait in the crockpot and stay warm for him.
2. Go get three inches of hair cut off, somewhere besides the cheap neighborhood place I usually go. If not this weekend, Tuesday night.
3. Bite the bullet and make a doctor's appt. Add "take beta blocker" to my list of morning tasks so I stop forgetting.
4. Do a time log. I have been meaning to blog about Laura Vanderkam's book, and this week is especially timely. Remind myself that I don't have to run hard for 30 minutes to get some benefit from exercise: I can bike over to church instead of driving. I can do a few dozen push-ups. Cast on something simple and pretty so I can knit in spare moments when the toddler's on the loose, instead of thinking wistfully about the beaded project.
5. Start teaching the baby to fall asleep while I rock her (instead of walking her or driving her). Tuck Joe in earlier and give him permission to read by flashlight for half an hour, so I don't miss the baby's sleepy window. Send the big boys to bed half an hour earlier with permission to read for a bit. Tie myself up with baling twine and drop-kick the resulting bundle of procrastination into bed by 10:30.
6. Get the email out of the draft folder and into the special ed teacher's mailbox. She has surely dealt with this many times before.
7. Finish an article draft by Wednesday -- just crank it out in git-'er-done mode, giving myself permission to write atrocious-sounding sentences in the pursuit of a finished first draft.

I'll udpate Sunday. More quick takes here.