Joke

I shouldn't post jokes I made up with my six-year-old. But I'm tired, so...

Knock, knock

(Who's there?)

Doctor

(Doctor who?)

Hee hee!

From here. I like this show, even though the episodes vary wildly in quality. Science is Magic, dinosaurs can rampage across space ships, and  Charles Dickens meets alien ghost-zombies (that's when I got hooked). Hee hee indeed.

Spring Break!

My husband's not working. I'm not working. The kids ARE in school.

It's the best holiday I've had for a while.

Sure, I still have to grade three essays a day (blah), and there's some lesson planning to do, and I need to clean my whole kid-riddled house before my younger sister's baby shower next Wednesday, but--and this is important--when my kids start chucking cars down the stairs or smearing peanut butter on the walls, it's not always me they yell for.

And if they do yell for me, sometimes it's my husband who goes and cleans up the toothpaste, or the marker, or the STOP PLAYING WITH THAT DEAD SPIDER! corpse.

I should be writing. I'm excited about my fourth book, and today I'm making a final choice between first person and third person point of view, but I just thought I would share what it feels like to not be the only one at home with a one-year-old, three-year-old, and six-year-old.

It feels something like this:

A Joke

My six-year-old came home from Tae Kwon Do and said "Mommy, I have something to tell you."

I looked at him.

"Knock knock," he said.

"Who's there?"

"Irish."

"Irish who?"

"Irish you a happy St. Patrick's Day!" he finished triumphantly.

Happy St. Patrick's Day indeed.

He's wearing a green belt here, so he can't be pinched. In case you wanted to know.

Writing Process

I finished my third book last week! Don't get me wrong: it's the most problematic of all my books, largely because I tried this new process for it (a sort of hey-I-like-Roald-Dahl-and-Maniac-Magee-maybe-I'll-try-to-write-like-them-even-though-they're-crazy-different-and-I-don't-have-a-plot kind of process), and...well, it didn't work very well. But at least my draft is done (and I have a killer concept for my fourth book!).

Anyway. This got me thinking about process, and all the ways writers can write. Some writers love making soundtracks for their books, others (me!) can't listen to music while writing at all. Some writers are meticulous planners, and others wing it all the way (I think I'm a mixture of both, although I'm still figuring that one out). Some writes can include a deft political agenda (like Barbara Kingsolver) while others (me again) need to focus solely on character and story or their book turns out problematic (see my third book, above). So here are some facts, because they're interesting, about various famous writers and their quirks:

E.B. White couldn't listen to music while writing, although he could listen to ordinary family noise.

Joan Didion would write, then go over her pages that evening with a drink. The next day she'd edit what she did the day before based on her evening notes.

Ernest Hemingway wrote in the morning.

Kurt Vonnegut also wrote in the morning, did teaching work in the afternoon, and slipped push ups, sit ups, and a swim into his daily routine.

Rick Riordan claims in this interview with Jonathan Stroud that he has a loose outline when he starts writing, that he spends a couple months researching the start of each book, and that he spends four to five hours daily with broken-up writing.

Jonathan Stroud also spends time planning out scenes before he starts a first draft. He aims for about 25 pages a week (even if he claims he often misses that mark).

Maya Angelou would write in the morning and early afternoon, then edit what she'd written in the later afternoon. Oh, and I love how she said "Easy reading is damn hard writing," because it is true.

Barbara Kingsolver became a mother and a writer on the same day. She says that it takes her hundreds of pages to find her first page.

I want to find more, but my sister is now on my phone. Let me know if you have any favorite writerly processes (yours or famous writers'), and have a lovely Tuesday!

Books! That are produced by writers with processes! I love writers...

Legos...

...are awesome. And not only The Lego Movie, although I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed this song...

...and this song...

...and Unikitty, which is just like the unicat I made up in third grade for a piano song I wrote, except Unikitty is Lego and she doesn't have wings.

Anyway.

Because Legos are cool, I want to do this to keep track of my writing/grading/critiquing time. Maybe even cleaning time!

Ha ha ha. That was a joke. I do not get cleaning time.

But Legos! Organization! It's hard to resist.

Maybe I'll get the pieces to build Unikitty.

The Children's Center

I've been living here every Tuesday. I go up at 11:30 in the morning and come back sometime after dark (usually around 6:30ish, which isn't technically living there, but...close). I take our three-year-old son, and he learns how to play.

It is awesome.

After our Play 2 Learn class (which is, as I just mentioned, awesome), we walk by fences for an hour or so, wandering towards someplace that sells food so that we can eat a snack (pizza, maybe, or a tuna melt sandwich). Then we walk back to the Children's Center for our Wiggly Worms group, which gives me a crash course in sensory integration/occupational therapy. We get to play with floam, and jump on mini trampolines, and make swings for giggling children out of pillows.

Isn't it a cool building? It's a hundred-year-old school with twisted metal-ball statues and toys everywhere.

Here's my confession: I spent months after our three-year-old's diagnosis reading lists, and calling mental health experts, and trying to figure out our (apparently nonexistent) mental health benefits for children through our insurance. I got frustrated. I was glad to know more about how our son thinks, and I'm sure that helped me, but I'm so, so glad I signed up for resources at the Children's Center. We've got the Floortime Method playgroup, the occupational therapy course, a family therapist (who can probably explain autism to our six-year-old, which is trickier than you might imagine!), and lots of people who understand if our middle son starts drawing fences, or running as fast as he can along the walls, or sucking on his fingers.

I was going to write more here about how when you get a diagnosis for autism you get lots of lists, and it's overwhelming, and once you find a reliable wonderful resource it's such a relief, but my sister called, so I shall sum up: yay Children's Center! Yay!

Where should you live?

I've lived in Utah for thirteen years now.

Thirteen years.

I was born in Utah, moved to Phoenix, Arizona as a baby, got dragged to Seattle as a six-year-old (I went to three elementary schools in first grade), and then came back to Utah for college when I turned eighteen.

That's six years in a super-hot city in Arizona, twelve years in the drizzly green northwest, and thirteen years in Utah.

I bring all this up because we can sell our house this year. We bought with a first time "here's some money from the federal government but if you sell in the first five years after buying you have to give it all back or we will KEEEEL YOU" thing, and since we put all the moneys into carpet and fixing warped water-damaged wooden floors, me and my husband decided that staying put was a good idea. But in August our parole time is up. And so I took this quiz to see where I should live.

The answer is London. Or Paris.

I like the four seasons we get here. But the air pollution in the Salt Lake winter is scary (I like my mountains to not be shrouded in brownish-deadly fog), and there's a part of me that longs for adventure. London or Paris would be an adventure...especially with three kids in tow.

And therein lies the getajob-sellthehouse-findahouse-pack!load!drive! scariness. Yikes!

This is more along the lines of what fog should look like. And trees. There must be trees.