Timing

Now that Annie's not usually napping but Jemma's still sleeping solidly from about 1:00 - 3:30 every day, we have a bit of an issue about bedtime.  Annie's an exhausted mess by 7:00 while Jemma's still ramming around the house, yelling, laughing, protesting even the idea of settling down to read a few books.  She's just not tired.  Last night, after tucking her in at 7:45, we heard her babbling away in her crib (happily, for the most part) until almost 9:00.  So tonight I took her for a run after we had tucked Annie in, and it was nice to be out in the humid summer night with her.  Not sure now we're going to solve this problem in the long run, though:  I don't enjoy starting the day with Annie's singing at 6:00 a.m. and not ending it with Jemma until 8:30 p.m.

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I've been writing more, which is good, but it also feels a little like I'm spinning plates, trying to keep every little project going.  I've basically increased my workload by two hours a day without getting any more time in which to do it (right at the time when Annie's finished school for the summer, too).  I pull out the laptop from 1:00 - 3:00 every day and I sneak moments here and there, and I stay up at night typing after Jason's gone to bed.  And I love it.  I love the thrill of telling a good story; I love the idea that I'm actually being paid to do something I'd probably be doing anyway.  But I don't love that I've lost a lot of the "me" time in my life - time I used to spend reading, talking on the phone with friends (something I do very little of when the girls are awake and around), watching the occasional DVR'd Food Network show . . . I'm searching for a balance, here, but mostly just wishing for a little more time in each day.

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I'm wishing lately that Annie had been born on August 11 instead of September 11, and not just because of the obvious negative connotations with that date.  For months now, I've been torturing myself over whether or not to send her to kindergarten next year or have her do young fives.  Since she is a September birthday, she's automatically qualified/recommended for Y5s, and I don't know why I've been questioning that all along.  I look around and compare her to all the other kids she interacts with every day (neighbors, schoolmates, dance classmates, Sunday School kids) and I think she looks and acts just like them.  I think about how both Jason and I went to school young and did well.  I think she's smart, capable, curious, determined, up for a challenge.  I think she's ready for kindergarten.  This is my gut feeling, and I always think you should go with your gut feeling.

But.  I also think you should always find the people, the experts, who know the most about the situation that you haven't yet experienced, and then you should take their advice.  And the experts - the district kindergarten teacher, the across-the-street-neighbor who teaches preschool and has had four kids go through the school system - all say, unanimously, young fives.  They say it's a gift of another year for her to just be a kid, that the more-confident, more-aggressive, whole-year-older girls will eat her alive, that she'll turn out to be a leader in her grade with extra confidence and poise, that I wouldn't want my 13-year-old freshman daughter at high school with the 18 and 19-year-old boys.  

I like to think that, whatever decision I make (and I say "I" and not "we" because Jason has given this about two minutes worth of thought and thinks we should just do young fives and stop analyzing), it will be fine.  And it probably will.  But don't want fine; I want great.  I want Just Right.  I want Perfect.  I want her to have been born a month earlier - two weeks, even! - so that this decision was a little easier to make.