I went to three yoga classes today. That’s six hours of yoga, which is more time than I have spent sleeping at least a few of the last dozen nights, in preparation for leaving for this trip and since we’ve been on it.

Once again, I’m writing from a hotel parking lot with a snoring baby in the back seat. And a more serious column will have to wait, because if I stay up too much longer, I won’t trust myself to drive back to the condo in the fog. The weather through Tuesday was gorgeous, but since then, it has rained nonstop. Not great for wandering around the Euro-style ski village or for all the attractions that were supposed to be outside. But fine for staying inside and doing yoga all day! Well, except for having the baby brought to you and dashing out to the car to nurse every 2 1/4 hours.

This is an amazing experience for which I am so grateful. It’s taken a lot from a lot of people to make happen. Thank you to everyone who has supported me along the way and especially this week! I just wish I had more time to synthesize all I’m learning and feeling.

I am going to have sore abdominal muscles tomorrow but have really been enjoying myself. The condo is a mess, and I still haven’t wished my brother and a good friend a happy birthday from five days ago or my dad  happy fathers day from four days ago. We forgot to stop our mail and our newspaper at home and haven’t figured out even when — day or time — we are leaving to return home.

But somehow after all this breath work and all this time in my body, I do believe everything will be okay.

Related posts:

Yoga festival co-founder shares her vision: Interview with Schuyler Grant

Yoga gathering celebrates “magic” on the solstice: Report from day one of Anusara Grand Circle

and, here on the blog,

First report from my mat

Yogi goes to Vermont

From lots of yoga to none and back again! This week I’m taking part in the Anusara Grand Circle and Wanderlust Vermont. I’ll be reporting on the events for my Washington Times Communities column but at least wanted to post some personal reflections here before my head gets any more exploded!

These are groovy people. They really want you to be happy with yourself. I knew that Anusara yoga was about opening the heart, but I am learning that it does that by helping you believe that everything is good in its essential core and that you are whole and beautiful just as you are. “No one can make the kind of artistry you can,” said Anusara founder John Friend in his Monday morning class.

Just hearing this kind of feel-good message – especially from such a lovely voice, and later repeated by other teachers – can be transformative on its own if you’re in a place where you’re ready to hear it. But here, in the beautiful mountains of Vermont, on a crisp clear day just before the summer solstice, the words came at me while I was breathing deeply and moving intentionally in a yoga practice. It’s a powerful thing, this combination of worthiness talk while my body’s nervous system is getting calmed down and every cell is getting a jacked up dose of oxygen.

Today, I was a little intimidated to do a full backbend or wheel pose since it’s not something I practice regularly. I do know that bridge pose often leaves me feeling like my body has just been washed in warm sunlight, the kind that calms but doesn’t burn. In fact, it was the hope of changing my sour mood and getting myself back to sleep that caused me to do a bridge pose the day before my daughter was due. Instead, my water broke and she was born 4.5 hours later.

But wheel requires more upper body strength, something I’ve never had much of. So it was a huge surprise and such a delight to find myself today actually giddy after we’d done it a third time. The first two times, I just rested on the top of my head, but the third, I found I could rise up, and it felt delicious. I started laughing when I came down. Clearly, I was not alone in my reaction; John friend said knowingly, “Backbends can make anything better.”

My backbend two days later, more tired and a little less able to reach for the sky. Don't you just want to take a strap and pull up my hips and nudge my shoulder blades so that I can lift my heart up and forward?

The class with John wasn’t especially hard; it was longer than a regular class but shared a lot in common with the great classes I took at Centered Yoga during my 10-day/10-class yoga challenge earlier this month. I felt very well prepared. But with extra assistants in the room in the large morning class and later in the alignment and fundamentals class with Deb Neubauer, I got some helpful assists and adjustments. Maybe it was the extra dose of talk from John on the message of “No, really. You seriously are fine the way you are. Nothing needs to be fixed. You just need to come into alignment to realize the full expression of yourself.”

Or maybe I was just ready to believe that I am not broken because I left my house a complete mess, spent hours packing for this trip and still forgot things and slept less than I needed to the night before we left (two hours later than I’d hoped).  Maybe I inherently do believe that it’s okay that I pursue all the things I do. Maybe I’ve invented the belief that I should feel guilty just because my husband doesn’t greet each new project I undertake with pom poms on the sidelines or because other women seem to be perfectly content to full-on homeschool and to do handwork all the time.

I love the idea of being an artist, something that was said today many times. I love the idea of dropping self-criticisms or questions. I mean, isn’t it more enjoyable to be around someone who relishes her life and makes no apologies than someone who constantly is saying she’s sorry about not replying to emails or lamenting the fact that she didn’t get around to something she wanted to do with her kids?

Methinks this is exactly what my friend Patricia recently talked about in her workshop. If you are intentional (a big word in Anusara) and live according to your priorities rather than just stumbling along or going through the motions – whether that’s in sun salutation or parenting – just how fulfilled can you be?

So I’m inspired! And yet, I’m writing this at 10:40 p.m. with a baby on my back because she would not go to sleep and stay asleep any other way. There are realities in our lives beyond our control, but if I remember that parenting is part of a chosen path that brings me so much joy and wisdom, perhaps I can drop the grumbling about lost free time.

For now, I’m thinking that I will be so sore in the morning that I will stay home from the morning yoga and hope to get the internet working in our rental house so that I can post this and maybe write some more.

Related posts:

Yoga festival co-founder shares her vision: Interview with Schuyler Grant

Yoga gathering celebrates “magic” on the solstice: Report from day one of Anusara Grand Circle

and

Yogi goes to Vermont, the second post I wrote about the event for this blog but the first post I actually got up. This post, the first I wrote back on Monday, was held captive on the laptop that couldn’t connect to ethernet, and we had no flash drive and no opportunity to get to wireless for two days, so I’m actually posting this Wednesday night and back-dating the time stamp to when I wrote it. Did I mention I’m sitting the parking lot of a hotel siphoning off their public wifi while my daughter sleeps in her carseat. Here’s hoping my son stopped crying when I left instead of having a fit that his grandmother was going to put him to bed. I do feel guilty enough that  probably won’t stay as long as my battery would let me, just in case he’s refusing to sleep.

It’s been only eight days since I completed my 10-Day Yoga Challenge, but I broke the daily yoga and writing habit in a big way. My last class was on Monday, and on Tuesday night I was up until nearly 1 a.m. preparing food for a surprise road trip to my sister’s on her 50th birthday. Since I have such a specific diet with no starchy vegetables or grain (in addition to no gluten, dairy, corn or soy), everything I would eat all day the next day had to be made from scratch: “pancakes” of egg, nuts and vegetables, turkey burger, apples with no skin, soaked and low-heat-dried nuts, and homemade broth with veggies. This is what I usually eat: I just don’t usually have to prepare it all for a complete day the night before.

My other sister and I began our drive Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.  The trip up I-95 and back later that night took a total of 9.5 hours of driving when it should have taken about 7. It would have helped if the baby had gone to sleep and hadn’t made us stop an extra two times, but the delays were mostly about construction or something invisible but clogging.

Even with my sister riding shotgun and valiantly staying in conversation, I could barely stay awake the last hour. We pulled up to my house at 12:30 a.m. early Thursday morning, and just as I was about to get the baby back to sleep from the carseat into her crib, her brother fell out of bed and split his lip open on the nightstand. He was a wreck, unwilling even to take homeopathy. When it happened, I’d been almost asleep in the rocking chair, exhausted and still feeling the vibration of the road through my weary body. But then all four of us were up with lights on, trying to figure out what the heck had happened.

So after completing my yoga challenge on Monday, I went way far afield. It was amazing that I didn’t collapse or snap on Thursday, but I actually felt okay. It was as though I’d done a detox diet to cleanse in advance of competing in a hot dog eating contest. The unhealthiness of two late nights and a lot of time on the road probably didn’t hit me as hard because of the yoga foundation and all that extra oxygen I’d stored up.

I kept my son home on Thursday, his penultimate day of preschool and got a taste of summer life without school or childcare. Then Friday and the weekend were packed, not to mention incredibly hot. So, when I learned that Virginia Yoga Week was launching Sunday, I was both excited and overwhelmed by all the opportunities I would probably not be able to take advantage of. So many free and cheap classes! New studios to visit! Different traditions to try! In order to keep track of my options amid other scheduled events for the week, I took one of my son’s sheets of painting paper and made myself a giant chart for the week.

This way I was able to see that it would probably be wise to try out sunrise yoga at Pies Fitness Monday morning at 6:00 a.m. I got everything all ready to go and paid my special yoga week rate of $5 online the night before. But then I got to bed too late. Again. So when my alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., I first decided sleep was more important than another challenge. But then I rallied, convinced I probably wouldn’t get back to sleep or successfully undertake a practice of my own for more than 15 minutes. I was too tired to write and too worried about making noise in a sleepy house to clean.

So I rushed outside in the yoga tank I’d set out the night before and was amazed how profoundly it felt like a new world. It was cool. Chilly, even! It was as though my skin could breathe instead of just push away the humidity.

I zipped to the studio and arrived just a few minutes late. There was only one other student, and the teacher was kind and understanding. After a brief centering, I knew it had been wise to come to remind myself to cultivate a sense of awe and reverence for life. We were called to set an intention, and what came to me was to be grateful and enjoy the life I have with my children and husband.

This sounds simple and obvious, but at a time when I am facing a summer with a non-napping and loud preschooler, and a baby who no longer predictably naps, and a husband who is not at the top of his happy game on the heels of his 40th birthday, I’ve been stuck focusing on how to just make things work and get my needs met. In that space, I sometimes forget to enjoy the moment I’m in.

As Momma Zen author Karen Maezen Miller said when I heard her speak back in April at Lil Omm yoga studio, the present moment is the only moment there is at that moment. It’s impossible not to live in it. The choice is in how you experience that living — as a joy and privilege or as a chore, something to get through.

So the call to set an intention was a gift for me to greet my day from a place of wonder and gratitude.

We did a lot of sun salutations, and I realized I was already out of shape again from the gains I’d made during my challenge, something that gives me some pause if I’m going to attend the Anusara Grand Circle or Wanderlust next week.

It was also clear that I was still way underslept and way overtired. As I am now.

Perhaps tomorrow I will get up early and set an intention and undertake a practice while the house is still quiet.

Perhaps tomorrow I will write about the yoga class took with my son today and last Tuesday. I usually like to return later to my writing before I hit Publish, but that feels silly now, even if this post wouldn’t pass the test in an essay workshop.

Because right now, I am exhausted and need to sleep. I did need to write, and I would like to add links, not to mention go spend a bunch of time in the kitchen to save me time in the morning. But in this moment, my body needs rest. So that is what I will give it.

It didn’t take me long to get off my game. I finished class #8 of my 10-day Yoga Challenge at 8:00 p.m. on Friday night and spent Saturday virtually yoga-free, except for one sun salutation in the morning. When I finally returned today at 4:00 p.m., it felt at the start like that 44-hour break might as well have been a year.

I tried to live like a yogi in my being during my off day, but it was difficult between planning for a kitchen remodel, scurrying to find the belly-decorating henna I was supposed to have bought ahead of time for two friends’ motherblessing, waking up my baby to go to her babysitter’s wedding, and then leaving after 45 minutes because the ceremony hadn’t started yet and I had to get to the motherblessing where I would for the first time in over a year see a friend who “broke up” with me when I was 7 months pregnant.

I do credit my yoga this past week with helping me rally and actually stay for the blessing though I was in tears upon arriving. I knew the “story” I was telling myself about myself not belonging there was not going to help my friends feel honored or loved. It would serve only my own self-sabotage. So I tried to let it go and hold onto the higher purpose of the evening.

I’m so glad I stayed. It was important to my pregnant friends, and I actually felt a little bit healed. I did have to take my exhausted baby and my hungry self home before the festivities concluded, but I made it to the end of the ceremony. As I drove home on a gorgeous June evening in a quiet car with a sleeping baby, I envisioned the little darling would play sleep catch-up and be out for the night.

Ha.

The baby appreciated the lovely evening so much, she wanted to give me a chance to enjoy it, apparently, because she woke upon returning home, which led me to the conclusion that I’d just take her for a walk when it got a dark. I was glad for the opportunity to be out but could not believe she lasted a full half-hour in the stroller before she shut her eyes at 9:00 p.m. On top of that, my five-year-old son had, for the first time in over a year, actually taken a nap, of course while I was out. Having been, in my husband’s words, “unwakeable” for two hours, the little devil was still wide awake at 10:00, outlasting his dad while hockey played on the TV despite my husband’s shut eyes.

It was like the world tipped its head to the side and laughed at us.

We made the best of it, though. Both LJ and I went to sleep in the boy’s room so we wouldn’t wake the baby, still in her stroller insert in the big bedroom. It felt a little like old times, just the three of us, and I enjoyed snuggling with my boy, a rare treat.

My kids know how to PLAY!

So, when I finally got back to class this afternoon and the teacher asked us to set an intention, the word “Play” came to me in half a beat. If I take everything completely seriously, I’m missing out on letting it be fun. Why can’t I approach all this stuff I am so passionate about from the perspective of how luck I am that I get to “play” with so many “toys?”

It can feel like a burden to have so many interests, pursuits, friends, and communities, but I really am privileged to be able to stay home and pursue them. They are luxuries I would likely pine for if I were working outside the home at a job that wasn’t miraculously addressing everything I love. It can be both a blessing and a curse to never be able to turn of my mind or to rarely say no to anything. But what if I decided to just count my blessings as blessings?

It was helpful that the teacher reminded us several times to stay true to our intention. And then, late in the class, she had us approaching crow, a pose I have never done because I have never had the upper body strength. I had to smile when, noticing that folks were not exactly moving into it easily, offered, “Just play with it.”

Yoga can be about many things, and one is joy. I’ve known for a long time that doing bridge pose does something to my adrenal glands that makes me feel awash in a warm, calm happiness. (That’s why I did it the morning my daughter was born, ostensibly to help me get back to sleep at 5:30 a.m. Instead it broke my water, and 4.5 hours later, I had a baby in my arms!)

I have to give props to the teacher for her amazing “savasana assist” in which she raised and swung my legs like a lymphatic chi machine and then pressed a few points on my feet that gave me the impression she’d found my “play” button. It was as though she’d released a rush of serotonin or oxytocin or some other great body chemistry cocktail. I would come back just for that!

So by the time I left, I felt much more integrated and back in the game. One more day to go before I have to start paying for this stuff more than $1 a day.

—–

Have you ever had a clear and profound physical or emotional change that seemed directly connected to a yoga pose?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

The theme of yesterday’s post was “reveal,” but I waited until this one to close that loop. I am not going to yoga on Day Eight. Instead I went back to a second class on the evening of Day Seven.

This does feel like cheating, I admit. But looking at the day, with a wedding at 2:00 and a mother blessing 4-7 p.m., and commitments to my family and my home in the morning, it is just not feasible for me to go to either of the Saturday classes offered. If there were a 6:30 Sunrise Yoga, I’d be there. But 8:30-9:45 is just too late for all we have to pack into the day, including my preparing all the food I will need to eat all day to accommodate my special grain-free, starch-free GAPS diet. My friends and family need a nourished, rested mama, and that is already a little sketchy.

So instead, I went out for a second time on Day Seven to my first evening class at Centered Yoga. It was Yin yoga, a class described by the studio as using passive poses and the breath to create a “sense of balance, harmony and inner peace.” Sign me up!

Even though I was dragging a little all day, and it was so lovely outside I might  have rather taken a walk than spend as much time in the car as in the yoga studio, I knew that I would feel better for having had the meditation and relaxing stretches. And I knew that I would feel almost I wasn’t a cheater if I doubled up on one day but certainly like a failure if I didn’t go on Saturday or Friday night. My husband was going to be home early, so it was the one time I could get to an evening class.

Aside from the yoga, which I’ll get to in a second, one eye-opening part of the experience was seeing what life is like for the hundreds of people who work in Georgetown and live in Virginia. The post-work and Friday night scenes are foreign to me these days. It felt like cultural tourism just to sit on Key Bridge at 6:15 p.m. And then, on the way home, to sit on Canal Road at 8:15 p.m. That was the most exposure I’ve had to over-20/under-30 humanity and to external combustion I’ve had in a long time. Witnessing it — while listening to classical music — was an exercise in anti-narcissism. It’s important to be reminded that your own individual issues are not being obsessed over by everyone else in the world.

But I’m avoiding talk of the class, I see.

Early on, the teacher invited us to dial back our intellect and to “turn up the volume” on our intuition. She said a lot of provocative things, and sometimes the music helped me get out of my head and let her words take me to their essence.

The first time she said, “Our hips tell our stories” — that they reveal a lifetime — I could only think of boys and things you do with them in the dark. But on the second side in pigeon pose, I thought of giving birth to my daughter, 10 months ago yesterday.

In the birth pool, I had my left knee down and my right knee bent, up and perpendicular to the ground. My labor was short — just 4.5 hours from the pop of my water when I went up into bridge pose at 5:30 a.m. to her birth at 10:08 a.m. — but I was pushing for too long. I’d been unpracticed in the art of breathing through intensity; as soon as it came, I wanted to match it. But three hours later, I was tired and the midwife’s tone got just a touch stern after my daughter’s head was out that the rest needed to come along, too. No longer feeling the inevitability of the next contraction, I had to finish on my own, and quickly.

And when I did, I was cautioned not to pull the baby too high out of the water because of her short cord. My son’s cord was so short, he’d been breech and delivered via c-section. I’m not exactly a fan of short cords. I got a little freaked out.

Then I remarked that, while my surgically-delivered baby’s head looked quite intact and non-smooshed, and this baby’s did not. It looked funny, her eyes and ears seemingly set wide apart. She also didn’t cry right away. I didn’t know what to make of this near-flaccid baby who looked rather like Gollum. My first thought was a worry that she might have Down Syndrome and that I would not know how to be a good mother to her. I worried I wouldn’t love her enough, that my heart was not big enough to envelop this being I’d spent nine months worrying about and loving and feeling move inside me. What would this reveal to me about me if I stopped short of adoration?

We can never know who are children are, but it is striking to me how much with both I just looked at them in wonder. And with my daughter, I had a nervous first two minutes wondering if anything had gone wrong, chromosomally or otherwise. Here I’d had my successful homebirth in barely enough time for my midwife to make it to my house and relieve her backup. But what would happen now? Who were we all going to be?

In yoga class, I felt my hips expand in pigeon pose and thought about my story. The teacher told us, before folding, to expose our hearts, and I found that sob at was hiding on Day Four. And I cried. Mostly it was in my body, but some tears fell on my block, the floor, my cheeks.

I hope the teacher wasn’t concerned if she noticed. It was an important release.

I came home wanting to embrace my baby and her father. They are precious.

And yet, life is not just a Lifetime movie. The baby would not go to sleep. When I pulled her off my breast, she writhed like I was sticking her with a hot poker. I gave her homeopathy, Rescue Remedy, an herbal calming tincture. My husband tried again to get her to sleep. Finally I put her on my back, did some watercolor painting for the motherblessing books, and there she lies, her neck cocked over in a way that probably feels as uncomfortable as the extra 20 pounds feels to my back while I sit with horrible posture.

But it’s what is working right now. I don’t want to challenge it. Sometimes you just have to go with that and have faith that things will all work out as they are meant to be.

Right?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

My poor daughter. She gets schlepped everywhere. Plucked out of bed some mornings for preschool drop-off, with nary a nursing or a diaper change. Then either some appointment I have or preschool pick-up interferes with a nap in the afternoon. I haven’t even tried a mommy and me yoga class or anything for fear of messing with her even more. I’ve started a log to figure out what her natural rhythm might be so that I can try to honor it, but it’s still a moving target, especially when I have some event I just have to go to…

Her brother was more challenging, but because of that, he felt more portable, at least at night. He didn’t want to be set down, so if I had an evening La Leche League meeting, he just came along. I thought it was weird when mothers with babies were out without them for more than an hour or so.

But this girl — three and a half months now — would certainly like to just be set down in a dark room rather than out in bright lights while her mom leads a meeting. But then again, when I went to an event two nights earlier, I was sure she’d be zonked for hours, but she woke and would only stop if my husband had her in the sling. So off to Holistic Moms she went to avoid a repeat performance.

Today her dad is going to take her brother out in the morning, and I’m not sure how she’ll handle just staying home with no car ride to start her morning nap. When her brother was this age, Elizabeth Pantley hadn’t yet published her No-Cry Nap Solution book. We used the No-Cry Sleep Solution quite a bit, and my husband even got on an email list for people following its recommendations for nighttime sleep.

For naps, I just usually took them with him, and that worked until I caught up and he got used to sleeping alone. The second time around, that’s a luxury we don’t have. I could use some help figuring out how to establish good, healthy nap habits. Big brother was d.o.n.e. napping by two and a half, which was rough. It looks from the tips in Pantley’s newsletter that he was probably ready to be done, but I wasn’t!

I think it’s time for us to check out the rest of the expanded Pantley library of no-cry books, especially now that she’s got a discipline book, and we finally have on our hands a boy whose antics stump us! And for the baby girl, I just might want to use some of the logs that are available for download to get my act in gear. The official website is http://www.nocrysolution.com. She’s currently running a contest to win her whole library if you mention one of her books on your blog, website or e-newsletter. 

I woke last night around 3 a.m. with that sad feeling of having finished something and, though it was successful, feeling like I could have played it better. Said more thank yous, not left Slow Food DC off the resource list, not been so snappy about having to rearrange the room or not having any help until 5 minutes before doors were scheduled to open.

It was a great panel on Local Food, a huge success for my chapter of Holistic Moms Network. And a lot of work. I hope it is the last big thing we try to pull off before I check out a little to have a baby in August.

My son weathered my stress and busy-ness well, so well that I bought him a virgin plastic toy today and a creme brulee dessert after lunch (when a cafe and pastry shop takes pains to list what is gluten-free, I feel like I should support their efforts even if I don’t really want him eating much dairy or sugar either. At least this had eggs so some decent fat and protein, I hope).

The toy succeeded at keeping the peace this afternoon and also giving him something to occupy himself so I could actually take a nap. What a concept. He gave me a solid half-hour and then another 15 minutes, and then we cuddled on the couch for a while playing pretend with his new toy.

I shouldn’t fail to mention that the toy in question is a little character and car, a pink daisy Wow! toys thing, the cheapest they had. My son got this same “character” for free at the grand reopening of a toy store and he was happy to get a second one and to go for the flowers when I said the tow trucks and emergency vehicles were too expensive.

So score one for not falling into strict gender roles, and strike one for needless consumerism. We were buying something for a friend’s birthday party, and, since, as I wrote a few weeks ago, he was bummed that I didn’t let people bring gifts to his birthday party, I felt like today’s toy purchase softened the blow a little. I also let him pick the gift — a turtle gardening bag with plastic shovels instead of the recycled cardboard bug dominoes I suggested. But it’s for gardening…

Although I wish I’d slept through the night, my awake hours set me up to just take today as it came, to be glad I didn’t have to be anywhere other than 9:30-11:30, to not get on the computer the second we got home after lunch. That two hours I spent not sleeping gave me religion to get off even the decaf and up the water, to find a place to get into my body, which is sorely overdue for this pregnancy and for healthy living.

A friend of mine who is 37 weeks along had a fall today in a parking lot, and, having yesterday been told she had low fluid and high blood pressure, spent a few hours being monitored in the hospital as a precaution. I hope that all is well (as it appears to be) and that she will rebound and have a few more weeks of pregnancy. But I also heard some real calm in her voice, being somewhere with no deadlines or anything to do. She didn’t turn on the TV. She decided to just be. I hope it’s exactly what she needs.

Sometimes we need a real kick — or fall, or slap in the face — to remember just what that is.

Four-year-olds do not sleep when it’s sunny. That’s an exaggeration, but I cannot say that I am in love with this early switch to later sunsets. The hour shift has been tough enough when we’ve had three more weeks of gradual, natural lightening to get used to the idea. But now that it’s mid-March… Ouch.

A friend sent this piece by Ann Patchett as inspiration for taking oneself seriously as a writer. I love it and did find inspiration in it, but I also found it rather divorced from the world of being an at-home mother.

Additionally, I am someone who seriously needs to spend a good bit of time on meal preparation — and on exercise and/or yoga, and at least one bodywork appointment per month, if not more — or everything else falls apart. I know that I need a lot of components to be running on all cylinders. If I ignore one thing — sleep, or healthy food, or exercise, or acupuncture/chiropractic/craniosacral work — for a month, I spend the next 6 weeks or more playing some kind of catch up.

My feeling is often that there just isn’t enough time — not to do all the things I “have” to do, but to do all the things I want and feel like I need to do to feel alive and with both feet on the ground and my hands pressed together reaching for a star. It’s like there’s a Top 40 of needs in my world, not just one or three things that can demand my laser focus.

I know there are ways I can cut down on some things. Blogging for instance. But the work (to upgrade/combine/streamline) seems so much more daunting than just plodding along (which has some personal rewards, or I wouldn’t do it). Shifting toward a new momentum is where I need some motivation, a coach, the decision to make something a priority. But I don’t think working on writing presence/business development is going to help me fit more writing hours in the day anytime soon (as the article discusses). So the goals seem to be at odds. Would that I’d quit teaching and started freelancing before I became a mother!

The multiple strands in multiple directions are not doing wonders for my sleep or centeredness, especially as long as I keep acting like I rue them.

I am resolving nothing for the new year other than to try to be kind to myself and to be in the moment in whatever I’m doing — even if I’ve got multiple things going, I’d like to stop making that wrong and just play with the complexity, which is, I recently realized, something I do truly value for its own sake.

I am being pulled in opposing directions. Now, my wanting to do several things at once is not a new thing, I freely admit. However, I was starting to feel good about the idea of going to bed early in order to get up early and do yoga or work out and write before my son got up for the day. If I get up at 5:00, I figured, (something I did regularly while teaching high school), I can do 20 minutes of yoga practice at home and then write until he comes downstairs with his dad at 7:00. We’ll get him used to sleeping or at least resting until 6:30, and then he can play quietly in his room or in the hallway while LJ showers and gets dressed. Or, on alternate days, I will write for just a short bit and then go to the gym to return at 7:15, when LJ has started breakfast but is about to be needing to leave for work.

Either way, I thought, I will feel refreshed from an early bedtime, exercise, centering and creative expression. Surely this will make me more than ready to face a day of focusing on my son when we’re together — being fully present with him. And on the days I do have some childcare, I’ll be more on-task for having gotten some ideas down on paper already. I’ll either be able to move ahead on that or work on work or leadership for the moms group I’m starting.

That sounds lovely, but I’m feeling like it just ain’t gonna happen, not without a few rough days of habit change. Why? Because my son is no longer sleeping soundly through the night on his own or in his own room. He paddles into our bed sometimes as early as midnight. Sometimes he just snuggles in, but other times he tries asking to nurse first. I tell him it’s sleepy time, not morning yet, and he usually complies, especially if I have some almond/coconut milk ready for him to drink. But when he wakes at 4:00 and I say no to nursing, he sometimes gets pissed. He whines, telling me “No!” and wriggling his hand back up or down my shirt. This also happens on occasion when I cut him off from the allowed post-5:00 feeding(s). I essentially feel like I’m done with my night’s sleep at 4:00, and that is just too early even if I were getting to bed by 9:00. In fact, on New Year’s Eve, I stayed reading on the couch when my husband took him up to bed, and for some reason that image would not let the boy rest without his mama. So we all went to bed together early that night. And 4:00 still felt just plain wrong.

Yet I never fell back under solidly, and he wanted access to the bar at 5:00 and 6:00, and then he was just up and wanting us all to be up for the day. That is now becoming the norm: he whines, “I’m hungry! I want to go downstairs!” He used to be willing to go play in his room for a bit, maybe bring in a doll or some books to us, but now the suggestion that he amuse himself just upsets him more.

I don’t know what we’re going to do. Since my husband will probably not start his new job this week, I think I’m going to say we bite the bullet and I just leave the upstairs at 5:00 and let them deal with it. I’ve planted seeds of suggestion about this to the boy, which he ignores to ask some unrelated question that seems to be a cue he doesn’t want to hear about whatever I’m saying. I am not in a hurry to wean for good before age three, but we may have to morning-wean or bed-wean. I don’t know if he’s just coming on like gangbusters now in a last-ditch effort to claim the goods before he drops them or what. We had been down to just morning and night until just after Thanksgiving (also just after I ovulated for only the fourth time since he was born); then he was asking around the clock for a few weeks. Since that period ended, he’s tapered back to morning and night, sometimes before nap and only asking otherwise if he gets hurt or is just feeling needy. I ought to read more of How Weaning Happens and Mothering Your Nursing Toddler. My friend’s 13-month-old just stopped on his own — was crying when she’d try to feed him. I just can’t imagine my boy ever wanting to stop. I wonder if there’s something I’m contributing to that dynamic — some need to be needed?

I would like to wean and cleanse before the summer, before considering trying for another child if that’s what we decide to do. If we do go for #2, I would want my body to have some recovery time and to get to the healthiest possible state, which it clearly is not right now. Seeing as it took 29 months to get my first postpartum period, I want to be gentle with myself.

One other thought about the boy is to get serious about restarting remedies. Tonight I gave him Bach Flower Essences Impatiens and Vervain in addition to our first time trying Rescue Sleep — and I could get him back to the craniosacral therapist and get us both into one of our healers who helped before. I also read in Peggy O’Mara’s “A Quiet Place: Your Child’s First Healer” in the new (Jan/Feb 2009) issue of Mothering magazine that the homeopathic remedy Nux Vomica is a go-to helper if you’re waking at 3 or 4 a.m. If I don’t find that I have any in my medicine chest, I think I will pick some up tomorrow and give it a try. And I will also call my pediatrician (a homeopath) to finally get in for an appointment!