Manic Monday

What do you call it when you arrive to find out your charges have already consumed more sugar than the gross national product of the Hawaiian islands.

Mania.

Oh my gosh.

Today the boys had so much sugar I don’t know how I didn’t relapse in my food program just from being in contact with them.

It was a special day and boy oh boy did they take advantage of that.

Plus the visiting grandparents.

Couple that with its dad’s birthday and the boys started off the day with surprising dad in bed with glazed donuts and coffee.

Nice way to wake up on your birthday for sure.

I came in on the tail end of the sugar binge.

I am not 100% certain how many donuts the monkeys ate, but the mom had bought a baker’s dozen and when I got to work there were two left in the box.

The boys also consumed cookies and birthday cake today.

It was like juggling cats.

Really, really stoned out cats.

I had the juice sucked out of me right quick.

I had myself a few coffees to make it through the day.

And the day was made through and the grandparents will be there tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Sometimes I have felt hindered by this, but as I have grown used to the number of adults around the boys, disproportionate to what I have been used to in the past, I am cognizant of how they rely on me and my schedule and my serene ways.

They crashed of course and it was a wild ride, but over all when I thought of it, I am pretty darn lucky to be working with this family and have the nice perks that I do.

Mondays the cleaner comes in and does the house so I always get extra money in the diaper bag and we have a big park adventure and then we go out to lunch.

Today it was Crepe House on Valencia at 22nd.

The boys love it, they often see firefighters or local policemen, and always some working guys, and its decent food and I get to have a big salad, the salmon cobb today, and not have to pay for it.

It’s a really nice perk.

I probably get half my meals taken care of while I am working and that is something to be said when the largest part of my spending plan is groceries, right after my rent.

The next largest is my student loan.

Which I am happy to report I will be downloading and printing off the paperwork tomorrow at work so that I can take it down to CIIS and have the financial aid office sign the forms which state I will indeed be attending the graduate school program and my student loans need to go into deferment.

I don’t know when my undergraduate degree student loans are going to get paid off, not for the next three years, but I do know they will.

Occasionally I will have magical thinking around them and just have a fleeting feeling of “Poof!” they’re gone, some good Samaritan has paid them anonymously and I am relieved of the debt.

It’s the only debt I have.

Which is great on one hand.

The interest rate is low.

And sucks on the other.

I still owe $31,000.

Still.

But I know that I had a lot of wreckage there financially for a while that I had to clean up and all things considered I worked and paid and worked and hustled and did the deal and got out from under all my other debt.

Which was considerable.

I tried to log in again to my student financial aid server and there’s just something wonky with my account.

Tomorrow I’ll call the office, find out when I can bring down the paper work or if I can actually just mail it in and have them mail it back to me.

I do have time for the deferment to go into effect.

I will make one more payment this month then in August I should be stopping.

It’s all happening.

In a rapid fire kind of way.

It’s been such a long time since I have been in school, I feel rusty thinking about it.

But I feel comfortable with the idea of doing the reading and doing the writing, hell, I’ve had a pretty good run of things for a while with my writing practice.

I told my friend this morning that there are some women I work with who are in absolute awe that I get up two and a half hours before I have to be at work so that I can do my morning writing, so that I can have some time to myself to attend to the things that make my life a pleasure to live.

The insight I get from doing my morning pages is astounding.

So too this blog.

The act of showing up to the page and letting go of the words and seeing what comes out is always revelatory.

It’s a kind of living breathing inventory of my day and my process and who I am and who I am becoming.

I am proud that I have been showing up to this pages for over five years.

So to the morning pages, but those I have been doing for even longer, 8 1/2 years.

That’s a lot of writing.

Which makes me feel fairly comfortable with the idea of being in graduate school and the amount of writing that I will have to do for the program.

It’s a lot.

There are a lot of papers that I will be writing.

But I can do it.

A month from today will be my first full day with my cohort.

One month.

This is happening.

Then the burning of the dude in the desert.

And who knows what adventures await in the next four weeks.

I suspect they shall be grand.

As long as I can make it through the week with the grandparent visit and the sugar bombs that implode with little warning.

Hell if I can do that.

I can do anything.

Tags: blogging, burning man, graduate school, grandparents, manic Monday, morning pages, Nanny, nanny adventures, nanny life, showing up to the page, sugar, work, writing