Meaningless drivel and life as a temporary single mom

Ava is taking a super-long nap that started at 4PM with a required 5 minute cry-to-sleep-time since she was in nap resistance and now it's just creeping past 8PM and I wonder if she's calling it a night.

This week I'm impersonating a single Mom. T is down south taking care of work and I am coordinating and conducting the babysitters throughout each day I have yoga or work. Sunday I decided, after stressing about this week in advance with angst and tears, that everything would work out OKAY. Somehow, someway, even though four different babysitters are involved including one who hadn't even met Ava yet, it would all work out.

I'm halfway through the Single Mom week and it is working out! I don't know how, but it is! Saturday during yoga it was our teenage babysitter from across the street; Sunday it was my Mother in law who picked Ava up two hours early and I got to go to a yoga class! Monday was real fun - the morning was a friend from the Yoga Teacher Training (who teaches toddlers here) whom Ava just loved immediately (yes, can you hear my sigh of relief all the way across the Internet?) and the afternoon was my Mother in law again. Today I was off, although it was hard to tell with the five or twelve calls I got from clients and coworkers. Tomorrow and Thursday the featured babysitter is a close family friend who loves Ava as if she was related by blood. Friday, blessedly, T returns and I will run far, far away but be back in time for yoga class at 8PM.

It's kind of fun, the way vacations are a break from reality fun. I miss T, but as I told him, this week I only have my own stress to deal with, so as long as I'm not stressed, the house is stress free. I'm such a sponge that I pick up his stress and magnify it, even if he's downstairs watching TV and I'm reading upstairs.

I don't know what I came here to write, but it's kind of like morning pages when I haven't done them for weeks and suddenly there's a flood of words when I pick up a pen.

Speaking of Morning Pages (MP's), I just picked them back up this week. My little exercise to get up early enough to meditate before my family woke tripped over its shoelace. Get up early? Ha! HA HA! So for the last four weeks or so I haven't meditated or done MP's in the morning and I've been a skattered mess. Well, not so much with all the yoga, but more skattered than I like to be.

Sunday marked the first day of Return To MP's (RTMP), while Ava slept, and also Monday before I went to work. Today the RTMP wasn't quite so tidy, one page in bed, second page while Ava fed herself Cherioos and strawberries and asked five times for "mo pees juice" which then spilled down her legs and all over the floor because I gave her a real cup instead of a sippy. The third page got finished right before the spilled juice that left a clean spot on the otherwise dirty floor.

But it's so nice to dump all of my meaningless drivel and droplets onto those blank white pages! It's so wonderful even if reading them will be pointless. Okay, so I had dreams about vampires, I mean really, so what? The so what is - that stuff is out of my head. I could kiss the picture of Julia on the back of the AW I'm so delighted!

Maybe someday I will be good at meditating. Maybe someday when a toddler doesn't sit in my lap or put soft plush music playing toys in my lap. Maybe, but for now, writing those three pages is my meditation. It may not be what ancient yogis had in mind, but it works for me.