Twenty Minutes a Day

I'm afraid I've been a remiss blogger of flat affect lately.  I having problems articulating.  Hee, hee.  That joke is funny because it's ten to ten at night and I still need to fulfill my lenten commitment!

Instead of giving things up for lent, I like to add something constructive to my life.  For a couple years, Martin and I introduced dancing into our nightly schedules, and that was a big, silly hit.

This year I realized that I was becoming a lazy writer.  It's so easy to substitute small bits of work on line for real writing, especially when my schedule only allows for shorter spurts of solitude.  I've had a book on ice since before Christmas, and my resolve was weakening daily.  When there are kids in the other room who may need me at any moment, I find tinkering with the website suits me well.  In any case, I kept telling myself I wasn't working on my book because I didn't want to begin, only to write for twenty minutes before an abrupt stop.  It takes a while to actually write yourself into a good place sometimes.  But then I realized the truth: it was all excuses.

So now I must write my book for twenty minutes a day.  Inevitably, it doesn't happen until ten o'clock, and then twenty minutes stretches into thirty or forty or an hour.  It's a good thing that happens.  Then I shut the computer and do something mindless for thirty minutes in order to lull my mind into a stupor conducive to sleep.

In other news, the girls are bright and beautiful.  Elspeth planted a fairy garden (above), and though it seemed a mess of mud and glitter and impossibly big beans, it's grown into a positively enchanting little world.  On the way back from school today, Bea scrambled up a hill and turned over rocks until she found an earthworm that she gingerly cupped in her hands all the way home.  "You're going to be my pet, little guy!"  she promised him.  I know he thrilled to hear that, as all little critters love being caught and held by four-year-olds.  He is currently living (I hope, and not dead) with the pink fairy in the little dished garden.

This earthworm is a shadowy but more affordable substitute for what Bea really wants:  "a baby dog."  She is simply longing after a dog, but we've told her we can't get one while we're still in a rental house.  She contents herself with earthworms and her stuffed dogs, which now must number half a dozen at least.  She cannot sleep without Woof Woof, her absolute favorite, whom she bedecks in frilly dresses and chats with on a daily basis.

The other night when I did the nightly before-bed tour, I came upon this:

Woof Woof.  Strung up high by the neck.  Of course she has no knowledge of hangings; she just wanted to have him on a leash near by.  In true mother fashion, when she was awake I quizzed her, "Would you ever tie something like that around YOUR neck?"

"No," she said.  "Because then I couldn't breathe."

"But it's okay for Woof Woof," I said, "Because he is stuffed with fluff."

She agreed.  When you're four, it doesn't matter that your dog with a personality and a soul is also stuffed with fluff, ala Winnie the Pooh.

Oh, dear.  Time to write away on the novel.  Anyone want to join me in my "twenty minutes of _____ a day?"  It's a doable time, not too long as to be defeating, not so short as to be just silly.  Twenty minutes of eating chocolate a day!  Twenty minutes of kissing a day!  The possibilities are endless.