Photo gap

This is one of those times I'll look back on in life and wonder where my photos are. Maybe I'll think a computer crashed and I lost some data, or that my camera was broken. In some instances that might be true. But in this case, you just have to chalk it up to plain old busy. Isn't it unfair that when you have the most to record you have, by definition, the least time to record it? Since Jack was born, we've taken between 200 and 900 photos a month. So far in September, we've taken 32. And 16 of those are from his 9 month birthday, the day he fell down the stairs, which jolted me out of my photo-inertia enough to at least get out the camera. I've taken exactly none since that day, over a week ago, which might explain why the rate of blogging has slowed as well. Not as fun to tell a story without a picture. Especially when there's no time to tell it.

I've lost a whole month of my life before. It doesn't exist in my journal. I just got so far behind by the time I tried to go back and fill in details I discovered I didn't even have any notes to fill in between. That was March, 2008. Coincidentally, that was the month Jack was conceived. I have no idea how, because as far as I can tell that month never even happened.

So in the interest of preserving September 2009, here are some things that happened since I last wrote:

• I submitted the fellowship for which I had crammed a good month's worth of work into just under a week.


• I tried to support my husband through a long day of Saturday work-related events, but wound up eating my way through a farmer's market and sleeping through the evening fruit and wine pairing event (in my defense, I needed to put Jack to sleep, and accidentally fell asleep with him)


• We played split-squad on our long run on account of a flaky babysitter, and discovered that fitting two long runs into a day takes up pretty much the whole day


• I taught my friends how to use a pressure canner, and narrowly avoided losing an eyeball by forgetting or failing to heed the instructions on when it's safe to remove the pressure cap


• I took Jack and Ki down to visit my Grandma, and had my first really good day with Ki, where he actually let me put him down for a bit and crawled around and was cute. I had been waiting for this day since I started this gig, and was so glad when it finally happened. It's so fun to watch the two of them together, Jack tries to do everything Ki does, and sometimes can and sometimes can't and is adorable either way. I was really kicking myself for not bringing the camera that day.


• I had another rocky beginning to my second day of teaching, when my nanny called to tell me she'd been in a car accident (three days prior) and had to go to the hospital (despite having three days to do that, and/or to notify us)


• I started, completed, and ran through a rehearsal of my first lesson plan, which will debut next week


• I got infinitesimally closer to finishing the draft of what will hopefully be my first publication of my phd


• I dredged up a very ugly GIS dataset that has needed fixing for the past three years that I might have managed to put off until April if not spurred by the limited availability of a willing undergrad


• I ate chocolate at a fancy wine bar with my girlfriends and found it all over my clothes and even embedded in my watch band the next day!


• My professor told me, "Well, I don't know how you're doing it, but you seem to be on top of everything!"

I put on a good show, don't I?