Sunday morning

First off, two (re)finds of the day:

1000 Awesome Things - I haven't had a chance to go through the entire site, but just based on the first page, I can definitely say it's awesome. Came across the link at PostSecret.

FOUND Magazine - I remember spending an entire afternoon at one of my design jobs going through this site, reading other people's shopping lists and love notes and just random bits of paper. I often wonder what other people think of notes that I've dropped while shopping or walking, and if one of them will end up on this site one day.

It's an untypical Sunday around our house. Keith is off to the big city for the celebration of a family friend who is dying of cancer so Maddy and I will hang out with my mom for the afternoon. In reality, my mom will play with Maddy - or chase her, as she's started to walk lately - while I clean the house in anticipation of Keith's parents' visit this week.

Typically, Sundays are relaxing days. I try to keep the TV off for as long as I can when Maddy's up so she can play with her toys (or me) instead of getting distracted by the picture box. Today, with my mom here, the TV will likely be on more than I want, but it happens and I'm not going to get upset by it.

Another reason I've been trying the more music-less TV scheme is Maddy's attrocious sleep patterns. She sleeps fairly well during the day, 2 naps, usually 1.5-2 hours each. It's the overnight sleep that's the issue... well, still the issue, even after 10 months. There's so many back issues with her sleep that I just don't want to go into, but we've been working with her for a few months now to get her to sleep through the night. I have had success twice - only 2 times in 3 months has she slept straight from the time we put her down at 9pm and stayed asleep until 6am.

Her usual sleep pattern through the night is bed at 9pm, awake at 12 or 1 and up, fussing, crying or attempting to play until 2 or 3 and then co-sleeping with me until 6am. I'm done with co-sleeping; it's gotten to where she sleeps and I don't. I go back to work in 3 weeks. Co-sleeping has to end and it has to be now.

We tried the cry it out method to little success. I mean, it has worked in some ways - she went from sleeping in 45 minute stretches to 3 or so hours and being able to fall asleep in her crib rather than us holding her, but otherwise it was a pretty big failure. I don't take blame for it, nor do I blame Maddy, but I do place a fair share of blame on the public health nurses we had when she was born. (For more of a background on this, see this post.) With me going back to work so soon, I've become so frustrated with her and her inability to sleep at night that I've passed the job of 'fixing' her sleep off to Keith. I don't recommend this method to everyone, but in our case, and only our case, in my opinion, his method worked - he let her cry. For an hour. He was 10 feet away, in a different room, but he let her settle herself and she slept. I had a hard time waking her up this morning, in fact. But she slept. And that's the main thing.

Do I think we've messed her up by doing this? Hell no. I think she'd have much bigger problems if we let her sleep issues continue (and I'd have problems, too, with the sleep deprivation I've had for 10 months and going back to work and driving back and forth to work, but this is about Maddy), and we had discussed what we would do at length. I love her to pieces and would not hurt her on purpose. I think she feels the same way about her dad and I, too - she's still the same kid she was yesterday, with the exception of the walking. I don't think there will be any long-term ramifications from letting her cry herself to sleep. I refuse to be a helicopter parent and want her to be as independent as possible at this age. I will be there when she needs me, but she needs to start being her own little person, too.

Running behind bandwagons

I'm notorious for not following trends - fashion, literature, entertainment, technology - so it should come as no surprise that I've just discovered the wonder that is Google Books.

I knew it existed, but never visited. It was on one of my many to-do lists that I've misplaced over time. I came across a link to every issue of LIFE Magazine ever printed. I'm a sucker for black and white photography and old advertisements, especially ones from pre-1965.

Think I might have to peruse some issues this afternoon during someone's nap :)

Pushing aside

I have a feeling, that like my last blog, I will write about procrastinating more than anything else.

So... would that really be procrastinating? Perhaps it's more of an aversion than procrastination. An aversion to what, I don't know, but it's there.

But that's beside the point.

I just spent 15 minutes cleaning up the inbox for an email account I haven't used full-time for 6 years. The last time I cleaned it up was probably in 2007. I had 4058 unread messages, most of them spam. Made me happy - yet again - that I moved over to Gmail when I did.

I wish I spent my time procrastinating more efficiently. Instead, I start reading gossip blogs and I'm sucked in for half an hour. I used to spend that half hour at places like NOTCOT or The Canadian Design Resource. Or, if I was in the mood for a bit of randomness, I'd click the 'Stumble' button on my toolbar for a while, looking for something - perhaps educational - to spend some time with.

I feel like I'm burning through brain cells like there's no tomorrow. I need to rectify this. Only question is, how?

Hrm... I guess this is where I should proclaim that I will avoid the cesspool of gossip blogs I visit every day and start moving back to the good side of the internet to keep my brain from turning to mush and leaking out my ears. But I'm a procrastinator - guess which choice will win.

Chroma

I've been thinking about colour a lot lately. There's a couple of craft-like projects I've been tossing around in my head for the last few days. It's all part of my desire to not go back to work in December - I'm determined to find something, anything, to do from home that will bring in enough funds to keep me from having to go to work, at least from going back full-time.

Anyhoo, colour. A couple of jobs ago, I would ravenously scour the internet for colour ideas for ads. I tried to avoid the typical red-yellow-blue-blah-blah-blah... I loved searching through the Pantone pallet to find just the right colour for an ad. I became a devotee of kuler, Adobe's web app for colour development. I also knew, however, that no matter how wonderful colours looked in an ad looked on screen, by the time they hit the newsprint, the colour ended up muddied or washed out. (Needless to say, I've never worked at a high-end newspaper.)

Now, I'm trying to figure out ways to get my hands on as many paint sample chips as I can without raising suspicion. I have plans for these chips and I want to make sure I have all the colours on hand once I get going on my next (first?) project. Perhaps I'll rope my sister into helping me gather the chips next week when she's visiting :)

Private exposure

I tend to be a creature of habit. For example, every Sunday morning, after I put my daughter down for her nap, I grab my breakfast and flip through my usual websites. Once I'm done my cereal, I go to Post Secret to read the latest secrets. I can only do this while eating toast and drinking coffee on Sunday mornings - this has been a ritual for the last two and a half years, since I lived in northern BC. (just an aside - wow, is that an awesome looking website... my city's website is crap. Looks like a 12 year old designed it.)

I've always enjoyed reading the secrets that people send in - some I can connect with, others are just so personal and heart-wrenching that I feel kind of bad for having been let into their lives for a brief few seconds. But it's an interesting experiement in social behaviours, I think. Allow people, anonymously, to say what they really, really, really need to in a forum that allows the reader to possibly connect with their secret and maybe, just maybe, their lives will improve for having said what needed to be said.

Everyone has secrets. I do. It's human nature, I think, to try to keep a small part of yourself from being exposed for everyone to see. Humans are far to judgemental for everyone to be completely honest and open all the time. It'd be incredibly tiring and frustrating to live like that - having everyone know everything about everyone else. Although, with social networking like Facebook and Twitter, how many secrets are people really keeping these days?