Oh. Hello.
Oh. Hello there. I'm blushing with semi-embarrassment that nearly 3 months have passed since my last post.
I have myriad reasons (note: the lack of the word "of" there is not a typo), most of which come down to . . . busy!
Summer was busier than I would've liked, but hey, here we are. Locked into routine again with the new school year. But my main reason for blogging silence was simply that I was working extremely hard to finish a first draft of an 80,000-word manuscript.
I did it, and by my self-imposed deadline, too. My good friend Lauren was instrumental in this, cheerleading, nagging, bribing my children (all the way from California!) to Let Mommy Write, pressuring, reminding, snail mailing, listening, commiserating, and not letting any excuse fly. Like, none. I'm pretty much I could've delivered a sob story of a having a sick dog, the stomach flu, 80 books going to press at work this week, Chris out of town, a ballet show, a house full of company, a dozen potty-training toddlers, and a power outage and Lauren would've been all "Interesting--but did you hit your word count goal?"
She's my WF: writing fairy. No, seriously. Charlotte actually asked me if writing fairies were real (3 out of 4 Hofmanns in our household receive actual mail from the writing fairy, so it was a fair question) and I had to say . . . . no. But yes.
Anyhoo, that manuscript is shoved away until I have enough distance to begin revisions, so OF COURSE I've decided to torture myself with a new writing project, positioning myself for the late autumnal masochistic ritual known as NaNoWriMo. Oh, how I loooooathe Nano (national novel writing month--it's a November thing, probably only for alliteration. Why not February, when there is no holiday company or holiday travel or ballet shows or elections and the weather is too shitty to go outside?).
I won't bore you of a detailed recap of How We Spent Our Summer Vacation. We did what we always do: work, go to Reno (I managed to squeeze in a couple days in South Dakota with Lorelei first), go to the beach in NC. Charlotte did lots of camps. I went to work. Chris went to work. VBS happened.
And here we are, back in our overscheduled lives.
I had to give up my ballet class this year after all. Charlotte's violin lesson conflicts. Chris is taking on more kid-chauffeuring activities, which is the only thing keeping us ahead of our calendar app. I'm trying really, really hard to create at home the illusion of a calm family life, but boy, it's tricky. I swing between deluded optimism ("we can totally do this!") and self-pity ("I'm being drawn and quartered and how can I ever, EVER fit in my writing time if OBLIGATIONS don't stop rushing toward me?). But the kids seem happy, we're eating dinner as a family, and everyone is reasonably clean, so I guess we're doing okay.
I suppose all we can do is slog forward and re-evaluate in January.
Funny, I still break my life into semesters.
Anyway, I won't list the dozens of books we've read in the past 3 months. I'll just update what we're doing now.
Lorelei is toiling, working, struggling through Hop on Pop. Learning to read has been much more challenging for her than her sister (I know, I know, don't compare). It's so interesting, discovering how differently they think. Lorelei is so analytical, so calculating (in both good and bad ways), so persistently logical. The way words are made is just not clicking for her yet, and I kind of think her, um, opinion of what a word should be is getting in her way a bit.
But watching her READ her first sentence (not from memory, but read it) and the grin that broke across her face when she realized she finally did it? Oh, my darling Lorelei. She was SO gloriously proud. It was just the best thing.
Charlotte is into the American Girl character of Julie, whom she loves because she plays basketball (Charlotte loooooves basketball), so she flew through the first Julie book and is pining for the second book (hello? library? but no, she wants to OWN it, and I'm being mean . . . and also plotting Christmas gifts). Together, the girls and I are reading Little House on the Prairie, the second of the Little House books, and as they trek oh so slowly across the wilderness from Wisconsin to Oklahoma, the main thing I think about is Ma and Baby Carrie and no diaper genie.
Actually, let's stop on this for a second. I must say, it's a strange experience reading the Little House books again as an adult. My mom read all the books to my brother and me when we were very young, then I read them all to myself as I got a little older, and now I'm reading them to my girls. So, it's at least my third time through each book, if not more (I read The Long Winter many, many times!), and obviously I identified, like all little girls, with Laura--the less lovely, more naughty girl with the brown hair and a precious rag doll named (I shit you not) Charlotte.
But now? Reading them as an adult? As a mother? Oh, my story-loving heart has its eye on Ma. Caroline Ingalls, how on earth were you so patient? So GOOD? Try reading between the lines of her relationship with Pa. "If you say so, Charles." (When I read it aloud, I do her voice dryly and skeptical--trust me, no sane mother wants to haul three young daughters across frozen rivers and roiling creeks and untamed prairies just because the deer are skittish in Wisconsin now.)
And while Ma is just that awesome mom that everyone admires and no one can really emulate, there's Pa. The dude WHISTLES while setting up camp after traveling ALL DAY in the covered wagon with four females dependent on his (hopefully) good sense. The whistling says a lot. He wasn't a storm cloud of gloom, or a dick who tyrannized his family, or a flighty idiot chasing schemes. He was optimistic and decent and prudent and hardworking. He let his little girls name the new horses and assured his middle child that God would let the family dog into heaven. And he played the fiddle!
But Ma is the one I keep coming back to. Caroline, Caroline: What are you thinking? How did you not lose your shit? And then their partnership. Ma and Pa--they seem so co-dependent (in the best way), tender, companionable. Friends.
I'm thoroughly enjoying my return to the Little House books, even if I edit out references that are smidge racist (ahem, it's "Indian Country," so you can imagine).
Anyway. I'm in the midst of several books, naturally. For Sunday school, I'm reading The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, just five per week, which are so fantastic. Oh, demons and British wit. It's great fun. Chris is also reading it.
I'm also reading An Inquiry into Love and Death by Simone St. James, which is a ghost story set in the 1920s in an English coastal town. What's not to love? It's very good and deliciously atmospheric. I was in the dark, reading a tense, ghostly scene merely by a tiny book light in bed when Chris suddenly lunged at me with a loud roar with the sole purpose of scaring the shit out of me. It worked. I screamed, punched him, and then cried a little I was so frightened. Clearly, he had a lot of apologizing to do before I'd return to my book or let him on my side of the bed.
I'm reading The Atlas of Love, mainly as competition research for my current manuscript, but it's turning out to be very enjoyable. The premise: three grad students in Seattle join forces to raise a baby.
Finally, I'm reading Anne Lamott's Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, a book of essays that has some hits and misses. But what I love about Lamott's writing is that she has these lines that just creep out of nowhere and knock you over with their brilliance.
P.S. Chris wants me add that HE reads books. At the beach he read J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (which was quite a win, because nothing goes BOOM in that book AND HE LIKED IT), and now is reading Thinking Fast and Slow and The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh.
So, there we are, blog readers. There we are.
I have myriad reasons (note: the lack of the word "of" there is not a typo), most of which come down to . . . busy!
Summer was busier than I would've liked, but hey, here we are. Locked into routine again with the new school year. But my main reason for blogging silence was simply that I was working extremely hard to finish a first draft of an 80,000-word manuscript.
I did it, and by my self-imposed deadline, too. My good friend Lauren was instrumental in this, cheerleading, nagging, bribing my children (all the way from California!) to Let Mommy Write, pressuring, reminding, snail mailing, listening, commiserating, and not letting any excuse fly. Like, none. I'm pretty much I could've delivered a sob story of a having a sick dog, the stomach flu, 80 books going to press at work this week, Chris out of town, a ballet show, a house full of company, a dozen potty-training toddlers, and a power outage and Lauren would've been all "Interesting--but did you hit your word count goal?"
She's my WF: writing fairy. No, seriously. Charlotte actually asked me if writing fairies were real (3 out of 4 Hofmanns in our household receive actual mail from the writing fairy, so it was a fair question) and I had to say . . . . no. But yes.
Anyhoo, that manuscript is shoved away until I have enough distance to begin revisions, so OF COURSE I've decided to torture myself with a new writing project, positioning myself for the late autumnal masochistic ritual known as NaNoWriMo. Oh, how I loooooathe Nano (national novel writing month--it's a November thing, probably only for alliteration. Why not February, when there is no holiday company or holiday travel or ballet shows or elections and the weather is too shitty to go outside?).
I won't bore you of a detailed recap of How We Spent Our Summer Vacation. We did what we always do: work, go to Reno (I managed to squeeze in a couple days in South Dakota with Lorelei first), go to the beach in NC. Charlotte did lots of camps. I went to work. Chris went to work. VBS happened.
And here we are, back in our overscheduled lives.
I had to give up my ballet class this year after all. Charlotte's violin lesson conflicts. Chris is taking on more kid-chauffeuring activities, which is the only thing keeping us ahead of our calendar app. I'm trying really, really hard to create at home the illusion of a calm family life, but boy, it's tricky. I swing between deluded optimism ("we can totally do this!") and self-pity ("I'm being drawn and quartered and how can I ever, EVER fit in my writing time if OBLIGATIONS don't stop rushing toward me?). But the kids seem happy, we're eating dinner as a family, and everyone is reasonably clean, so I guess we're doing okay.
I suppose all we can do is slog forward and re-evaluate in January.
Funny, I still break my life into semesters.
Anyway, I won't list the dozens of books we've read in the past 3 months. I'll just update what we're doing now.
Lorelei is toiling, working, struggling through Hop on Pop. Learning to read has been much more challenging for her than her sister (I know, I know, don't compare). It's so interesting, discovering how differently they think. Lorelei is so analytical, so calculating (in both good and bad ways), so persistently logical. The way words are made is just not clicking for her yet, and I kind of think her, um, opinion of what a word should be is getting in her way a bit.
But watching her READ her first sentence (not from memory, but read it) and the grin that broke across her face when she realized she finally did it? Oh, my darling Lorelei. She was SO gloriously proud. It was just the best thing.
Charlotte is into the American Girl character of Julie, whom she loves because she plays basketball (Charlotte loooooves basketball), so she flew through the first Julie book and is pining for the second book (hello? library? but no, she wants to OWN it, and I'm being mean . . . and also plotting Christmas gifts). Together, the girls and I are reading Little House on the Prairie, the second of the Little House books, and as they trek oh so slowly across the wilderness from Wisconsin to Oklahoma, the main thing I think about is Ma and Baby Carrie and no diaper genie.
Actually, let's stop on this for a second. I must say, it's a strange experience reading the Little House books again as an adult. My mom read all the books to my brother and me when we were very young, then I read them all to myself as I got a little older, and now I'm reading them to my girls. So, it's at least my third time through each book, if not more (I read The Long Winter many, many times!), and obviously I identified, like all little girls, with Laura--the less lovely, more naughty girl with the brown hair and a precious rag doll named (I shit you not) Charlotte.
But now? Reading them as an adult? As a mother? Oh, my story-loving heart has its eye on Ma. Caroline Ingalls, how on earth were you so patient? So GOOD? Try reading between the lines of her relationship with Pa. "If you say so, Charles." (When I read it aloud, I do her voice dryly and skeptical--trust me, no sane mother wants to haul three young daughters across frozen rivers and roiling creeks and untamed prairies just because the deer are skittish in Wisconsin now.)
And while Ma is just that awesome mom that everyone admires and no one can really emulate, there's Pa. The dude WHISTLES while setting up camp after traveling ALL DAY in the covered wagon with four females dependent on his (hopefully) good sense. The whistling says a lot. He wasn't a storm cloud of gloom, or a dick who tyrannized his family, or a flighty idiot chasing schemes. He was optimistic and decent and prudent and hardworking. He let his little girls name the new horses and assured his middle child that God would let the family dog into heaven. And he played the fiddle!
But Ma is the one I keep coming back to. Caroline, Caroline: What are you thinking? How did you not lose your shit? And then their partnership. Ma and Pa--they seem so co-dependent (in the best way), tender, companionable. Friends.
I'm thoroughly enjoying my return to the Little House books, even if I edit out references that are smidge racist (ahem, it's "Indian Country," so you can imagine).
Anyway. I'm in the midst of several books, naturally. For Sunday school, I'm reading The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, just five per week, which are so fantastic. Oh, demons and British wit. It's great fun. Chris is also reading it.
I'm also reading An Inquiry into Love and Death by Simone St. James, which is a ghost story set in the 1920s in an English coastal town. What's not to love? It's very good and deliciously atmospheric. I was in the dark, reading a tense, ghostly scene merely by a tiny book light in bed when Chris suddenly lunged at me with a loud roar with the sole purpose of scaring the shit out of me. It worked. I screamed, punched him, and then cried a little I was so frightened. Clearly, he had a lot of apologizing to do before I'd return to my book or let him on my side of the bed.
I'm reading The Atlas of Love, mainly as competition research for my current manuscript, but it's turning out to be very enjoyable. The premise: three grad students in Seattle join forces to raise a baby.
Finally, I'm reading Anne Lamott's Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith, a book of essays that has some hits and misses. But what I love about Lamott's writing is that she has these lines that just creep out of nowhere and knock you over with their brilliance.
P.S. Chris wants me add that HE reads books. At the beach he read J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (which was quite a win, because nothing goes BOOM in that book AND HE LIKED IT), and now is reading Thinking Fast and Slow and The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh.
So, there we are, blog readers. There we are.
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