Mama Bean has clearly been absent

Good. Grief.

(As a too-early-in-a-post-to-have-an-aside aside, this is my newest speech idiom. I say it more often than is humanly possible. And I don't even feel like breaking the habit, because it's so much better than saying for EFF's sake (without the 'eff' y'know?) all the time. I guess I have to start watching the potty mouth around the Bean, so eventually I'll be saying things like Crikey! and Drat! or something...joy.)

For the first few weeks, I was keeping this mental list of all the things keeping me from posting, but now I don't really have a great handle on it. I know there were a series of visitors - my parents, Papa Bean's youngest brother and his girlfriend, then Papa Bean's parents. During the visits I started to lag on my RSS feeds entries - I used to clear it by bedtime every day which, in hindsight, is so totally ridiculous I don't know what was wrong with me. I had upwards of 500 new items to peruse before I finally started clearing some feeds that I just know I'll never be bothered to actually read. It's not so much that I don't still really enjoy or care about all the sites I've subscribed to. I think it was more a lesson in how much excess time I was spending trying to stick to an arbitrary standard (clearing my feed) that really doesn't change anything meaningful in my life's function or purpose.

Then I had a wicked low back spasm that just completely laid me up for three or four days. I couldn't sit, I couldn't stand up, I could barely lay down comfortably. I was cuddling up to ice so hard I got freezer burn patches that are still tender and bruised (oddly enough.) I took a Monday off from work. I didn't even turn on my computer for at least two days, and then only to clean up my email. And that was another good lesson. As internettingly connected as Papa Bean and I may be, I think I'd lost some perspective on the difference between my on- and off-line lives. I will always contend that online life is every bit as real as my offline one but offline has that important distinction of being physically and temporally Immediate and Present to my physical and temporal circumstances. Online everything is removed in both space and time, that's just the facts.

I needed to remember this now, because with every day, Bean gets bigger, smarter, and more Immediate and Present in his own ways. I want to spend all his waking hours making him smile and giggle in that impossibly adorable way that I didn't even know existed before him. His waking hours are longer now, and that's just going to keep me away from the computer for now. After experiencing how much a physical problem kept me away from fulfilling his most basic needs (I could barely nurse him, let alone bend to change his diapers, or lift him from the crib) I know I can't let online issues keep me from him anymore. It's not good for either of us. I go through giggle withdrawal.

Finally, our life tippled through another wave of change, as Papa Bean started a new job. He has been on parental leave for the past six months, and would have stayed stay-at-home-daddying if a supreme job opportunity to work at the college where he's taking his pastor schooling hadn't come up - with an ASAP sort of start date. He's still an IT guy, and as an employee, his tuition will be paid. How awesome is that?! We have arranged for child care to start in August, when his parental leave would have been exhausted, and that is when he will start full-time. For now, he works part-time around my clinic schedule. Part-time, he makes essentially the same amount as he was making from parental EI, and with an excellent new benefits package (plus the tuition thing, did I mention the tuition thing?) which is good.

Since I went back to work, I haven't really been with Bean alone on a regular kind of basis. At work, I was away from them both, and when I was home, Papa Bean was generally always around. He was the one on parental leave at Home With The Baby, see. So this part-time working thing is a new world for me - it's just me and Bean when PB's at work, and just PB & Bean when I'm at work. It's like we're both part-time stay-at-home parents lol. This is now the primary factor in my decreased 'puter time. I don't know what that means for blogging right now. I definitely have missed it, and regularly have post ideas float around during my long commute or night-time nursing. With each new day sans posting, the unreasonable pressure I put on myself to Get On With It Already weighed down my motivation somehow, and I'd just go randomly wander through my RSS instead. But I'm back now. I'll try not to disappear again... (Thanks to everyone who encouraged me that I've been missed. I truly appreciate you!)