When the next word is "unfortunately," you know where the letter is going.
I did not get in to the Phd program I applied for. Besides the obvious disappointment about being rejected from something, and the great annoyance of having put a lot of work into applying, I feel okay about it. Honestly, I am relieved not to have to put Amelia in some one else's care for what likely would have been many hours a week, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do all that school work (i.e. theory) anyway. I wanted more time to write, I wanted to teach, and it would have been cool to be Dr. O'Connor. Except for that last one, I can do those things without a PhD.
I am still looking forward to the coming year--we will still enroll Amelia in a preschool program, probably for 3 or so mornings a week, so I will have more time to figure out what to do next, writing-wise, as well as to actually write. I think Amelia will really enjoy a couple of mornings of preschool, and I will still have my baby in the afternoons and for one or two full days a week. It might have worked out that way anyway, but who knows. I am excited to explore freelance writing and to become more involved in a great local writing group (Lighthouse Writers).
I still think it would have been cool to be Dr. O'Connor. Oh well. College students just call you by your first name anyway.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Acknowledgements
These poems, some in different versions, have appeared or are forthcoming in the following journals:
Appalachian Journal: “The Fortune Telling Book of Dreams”
Cloudbank: “Three Months”
Colorado Review: “Thrush”
Copper Nickel: “The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics” and “Antler”
Hayden’s Ferry Review: “What the Blood Does”
South Carolina Review: “Joint”
storySouth: “My Grandmother Speaks of Beauty”
Two Review: “On Rereading Leaves of Grass”
-------------------------------
This is the third page of my manuscript, which I sent out to another contest just today. My acknowledgement list is looking pretty good, if I do say so myself! I got my latest acceptance, from Hayden's Ferry Review, yesterday. It's a nice feeling. I wanted to note, though, that I decided to count up the number of rejections on the "No Thanks" column on the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my submitted poems: 23. Twenty-three journals have rejected my poems, some of them multiple times. These journals range from really prestigous (like Poetry, which kindly sends its "no thanks" email in about 3 days) to journals I really thought would accept my work (I'm looking at you, Stylus). The whole process is such a waiting game, so the occasional news that a poem has been accepted somewhere is a boost, and a nice surprise.
Appalachian Journal: “The Fortune Telling Book of Dreams”
Cloudbank: “Three Months”
Colorado Review: “Thrush”
Copper Nickel: “The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics” and “Antler”
Hayden’s Ferry Review: “What the Blood Does”
South Carolina Review: “Joint”
storySouth: “My Grandmother Speaks of Beauty”
Two Review: “On Rereading Leaves of Grass”
-------------------------------
This is the third page of my manuscript, which I sent out to another contest just today. My acknowledgement list is looking pretty good, if I do say so myself! I got my latest acceptance, from Hayden's Ferry Review, yesterday. It's a nice feeling. I wanted to note, though, that I decided to count up the number of rejections on the "No Thanks" column on the spreadsheet I use to keep track of my submitted poems: 23. Twenty-three journals have rejected my poems, some of them multiple times. These journals range from really prestigous (like Poetry, which kindly sends its "no thanks" email in about 3 days) to journals I really thought would accept my work (I'm looking at you, Stylus). The whole process is such a waiting game, so the occasional news that a poem has been accepted somewhere is a boost, and a nice surprise.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Happy Valentine's Day!
little heart...
crafts
lots to say
We are doing much better this year than we were this time last year, and I am very thankful for a healthy little Valentine this year.
pigtails
Amelia, you are a precious Valentine, and I am a lucky Mama.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
The Potty Train
According to my post labels, I have only written about potty training once. That can't be right, but I know I've been kind of slack on recording the details of the process, so here goes.
To start at present and go backwards, I guess Amelia is pretty much potty trained. Yesterday, she was in her carseat without a diaper, and she said, with alarm, "I'm peeing!"
"Okay!" I said. "Can you try to stop and you can get out and pee in your travel potty?"
Dean pulled the car over and I rushed out to get Amelia. Her underwear were a little wet and she peed all over her pants trying to squat behind the car (she refused to sit on the travel potty: "Pee on the dirt!") but her car seat was dry. Score! In retrospect I realize I should have just removed her pants but we were in a hurry.
Amelia has been using the potty at home now for quite some time. As long as she is not wearing a diaper, she will generally ask to go when she needs to go. There have been several pee-on-the-floor incidents when, I guess, she has been too busy to stop and go. After one of these times I try to remember to ask her if she has to go, but overall she has pretty much been in charge of asking for herself. We were still doing diapers for outings until one day a week or two ago when I just forgot to put a diaper on her and she asked to go to the potty while we were out. Close call but no accident. After that I figured I should try to take the whole affair outside of the house more often. This takes more work on my part than Amelia's in that I have to remember to get her to try to use the bathroom before we leave, and remember to ask her use it while we are out and there is a bathroom available. This is one of the things that makes diapers much easier than being potty trained. It can be hard enough to get Amelia out the door and from place to place while we are out without adding a trip to the bathroom into the mix. But overall things have gone pretty smoothly. So far she has not peed on the floor of a public place and I hope this continues to be the case.
This travel potty has been key to the process. It works in two ways, as a child-size potty seat to use on adult-size toilets and as its own little potty seat complete with absorbent plastic bags you can set up and use anywhere. We mostly use it as a travel potty seat since Amelia is afraid to sit on a big toilet, even if I hold her on it. We have used it with the plastic bags once or twice and Amelia thought that was great fun. I keep it in a plastic bag in the diaper bag along with some Lysol wipes for public toilets and cleaning it after use in public places.
Overall, if someone were to ask me for advice about the process, I would say these three things. First, read a lot about potty training. I checked out about ten books from the library on potty training and there are a LOT of different methods and ideas out there. For example, I decided against any sort of reward system like star charts or M&Ms but I know people who have used them with success. Reading a lot about the process helped me pick the methods that I thought would work best with us.
Second, if you can, take your time. One of the first things I read about potty training was from a book that defined potty training as a very long process that begins when your child first becomes aware of potties and what they are for and ends when she can consistently use the bathroom completely independently. Obviously that is going to take a LONG time--I imagine it will be a year or two before Amelia is totally out of diapers and doesn't need me to help her on the potty and pull up and down her pants and wash her hands and sit there and play "bath toy animals pee" for half an hour every time she goes. We have had the luxury of not being in any rush at all--no deadline for any sort of program that required potty training, no feeling in my mind (and I had to fight against this for awhile) that Amelia needed to be potty trained by any certain date. This allowed me to follow the advice of several friends with older kids not to make potty training a power struggle or push it too early, which can backfire. It also allowed us to kind of ebb and flow (no pun intended)--some days we used diapers, some days not so much. If Amelia ever asked for a diaper, I just put one on her, and there were definitely some days or weeks that she just didn't want to use the potty.
The third thing I would advise, and this is connected to the second, is not to make having your child being potty trained some kind of marker on how good or not good a parent you are. This sounds obvious, but it is surprising how tempting it can be to feel good and happy when your child uses the potty, and to feel bad and upset when she doesn't. I have tried (and still do) to let this be about Amelia and not about me, and to not be in a rush.
To start at present and go backwards, I guess Amelia is pretty much potty trained. Yesterday, she was in her carseat without a diaper, and she said, with alarm, "I'm peeing!"
"Okay!" I said. "Can you try to stop and you can get out and pee in your travel potty?"
Dean pulled the car over and I rushed out to get Amelia. Her underwear were a little wet and she peed all over her pants trying to squat behind the car (she refused to sit on the travel potty: "Pee on the dirt!") but her car seat was dry. Score! In retrospect I realize I should have just removed her pants but we were in a hurry.
Amelia has been using the potty at home now for quite some time. As long as she is not wearing a diaper, she will generally ask to go when she needs to go. There have been several pee-on-the-floor incidents when, I guess, she has been too busy to stop and go. After one of these times I try to remember to ask her if she has to go, but overall she has pretty much been in charge of asking for herself. We were still doing diapers for outings until one day a week or two ago when I just forgot to put a diaper on her and she asked to go to the potty while we were out. Close call but no accident. After that I figured I should try to take the whole affair outside of the house more often. This takes more work on my part than Amelia's in that I have to remember to get her to try to use the bathroom before we leave, and remember to ask her use it while we are out and there is a bathroom available. This is one of the things that makes diapers much easier than being potty trained. It can be hard enough to get Amelia out the door and from place to place while we are out without adding a trip to the bathroom into the mix. But overall things have gone pretty smoothly. So far she has not peed on the floor of a public place and I hope this continues to be the case.
This travel potty has been key to the process. It works in two ways, as a child-size potty seat to use on adult-size toilets and as its own little potty seat complete with absorbent plastic bags you can set up and use anywhere. We mostly use it as a travel potty seat since Amelia is afraid to sit on a big toilet, even if I hold her on it. We have used it with the plastic bags once or twice and Amelia thought that was great fun. I keep it in a plastic bag in the diaper bag along with some Lysol wipes for public toilets and cleaning it after use in public places.
Overall, if someone were to ask me for advice about the process, I would say these three things. First, read a lot about potty training. I checked out about ten books from the library on potty training and there are a LOT of different methods and ideas out there. For example, I decided against any sort of reward system like star charts or M&Ms but I know people who have used them with success. Reading a lot about the process helped me pick the methods that I thought would work best with us.
Second, if you can, take your time. One of the first things I read about potty training was from a book that defined potty training as a very long process that begins when your child first becomes aware of potties and what they are for and ends when she can consistently use the bathroom completely independently. Obviously that is going to take a LONG time--I imagine it will be a year or two before Amelia is totally out of diapers and doesn't need me to help her on the potty and pull up and down her pants and wash her hands and sit there and play "bath toy animals pee" for half an hour every time she goes. We have had the luxury of not being in any rush at all--no deadline for any sort of program that required potty training, no feeling in my mind (and I had to fight against this for awhile) that Amelia needed to be potty trained by any certain date. This allowed me to follow the advice of several friends with older kids not to make potty training a power struggle or push it too early, which can backfire. It also allowed us to kind of ebb and flow (no pun intended)--some days we used diapers, some days not so much. If Amelia ever asked for a diaper, I just put one on her, and there were definitely some days or weeks that she just didn't want to use the potty.
The third thing I would advise, and this is connected to the second, is not to make having your child being potty trained some kind of marker on how good or not good a parent you are. This sounds obvious, but it is surprising how tempting it can be to feel good and happy when your child uses the potty, and to feel bad and upset when she doesn't. I have tried (and still do) to let this be about Amelia and not about me, and to not be in a rush.
Friday, January 13, 2012
HIJK MNOP
Amelia's dropping of the letter "L" results in some funny moments. We have long enjoyed her versions of "Luli" (who might have picked a different grandmother name if she had known she was going to be Ew and now Udi), but here are a couple more. I will let you add the appropriate l's for yourself.
---
Amelia: Where are we going next?
Me: We have to stop by the liquor store.
Amelia: I want a aheepop!
Me: A what?
Amelia: A aheepop! A aheepop from the ickor store!
---
Me: (reading a book about sheep) Woolly sheep, shorn!
Amelia: What's that sheep saying?
Me: What do you think he's saying?
Amelia: He's saying, what happened to my woo?
Me: (laughing)
Amelia: (looking at another page) And these itte sheeps have a itte bit of woo!
---
Amelia: I want some juice!
Me: (getting the juice) (and probably saying, "What's the polite way to ask?")
Amelia: Can I have some juice pease Mama? I want do do the id!
Me: The id?
Amelia: I want to put the id on by myself!
---
Oh, yes, we have a lot of id around here.
---
Amelia: Where are we going next?
Me: We have to stop by the liquor store.
Amelia: I want a aheepop!
Me: A what?
Amelia: A aheepop! A aheepop from the ickor store!
---
Me: (reading a book about sheep) Woolly sheep, shorn!
Amelia: What's that sheep saying?
Me: What do you think he's saying?
Amelia: He's saying, what happened to my woo?
Me: (laughing)
Amelia: (looking at another page) And these itte sheeps have a itte bit of woo!
---
Amelia: I want some juice!
Me: (getting the juice) (and probably saying, "What's the polite way to ask?")
Amelia: Can I have some juice pease Mama? I want do do the id!
Me: The id?
Amelia: I want to put the id on by myself!
---
Oh, yes, we have a lot of id around here.
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