We couldn't believe how much the college has changed -- the new apartment buildings and townhouses, like some kind of rich development. Even my former decrepit dorm got a face-lift, although it may be the same on the inside. Gone are the large expanses of empty land, and here are buildings for all different majors, art sculptures and fountains, perfectly manicured grass. Unrecognizable. I met many lovely alumni from the class of 1960, my aunt's class. We all ate lunch and they had their class picture. I bought shirts and window decals and a sweatshirt for K, like a tourist!

I'm sitting on the purple couch trying to edit this last article for the day. I have the Mets on the television, and the cat is curled up on my trench, pissed off that we ran out of wet food. The baby monitor is breaking; the on and off switch is getting rather wonky, and we have had it only 15 months. R is out getting us Starbucks so we can stay awake to finish all this work. Last night I fell asleep across the bed, watching the monitor as K cried himself to sleep. Not tonight again, I hope!

I just don't understand why things aren't easier, why I can't find what I need when I need it, why the last receipt in the envelope is the one I need, why things break after the warranty expires, why the two folders that were always in that cabinet are now missing (probably crammed in some box). Every little thing angers me, every dropped utensil or messy table, every uncomfortable shirt or sticky drawer or wet floor makes me tense up, and I'm not yet finding relief, and I might have to start that process again. That too makes me frustrated.

I have a plan that might work--not quite a plan, but an idea--to treat this cloud of negative thoughts just like I treat the obsessive impulses, which is to get rather angry at it and think, "You are an attempt to distract me from a happier life, a present moment awareness, and I won't pay attention to you. I won't let you control me." The irritation that something has power to make me waste my precious time has helped with the obsessions, so I think it's a good strategy. I wonder if I can successfully push it away.

K has decided that he is not interested in any food that is not a yogurt smoothie or juice or a pureed vegetable or pizza. He will go all day just on yogurt. I have heard that this is common, but I didn't think our big eater would all of a sudden turn to this. It's probably his new molars, but I can't tell, since he can't tell me. Tonight he actually wanted half a container of these puffy potato snacks and then some banana pudding, so I let him have as much as he wanted. At least he's eating!!!

What a beautiful day today -- windy and not too warm. This was K's first playdate with a "peer." At first he cried, didn't want to go inside their house. But after a few minutes he saw some toys and he started exploring. He didn't interact much with M until we went outside later, where he ran around the yard and then found he liked the small slide. He ran away with M's favorite bunny -- and didn't want to give it back. He passed out in the car on the way home. I carried him over my shoulder to the crib.

I am an editor. This is what I do: I edit. As someone told me the other day, I take a page that is seemingly perfect and I go over it and over it until I find the imperfection. The mar. Once I find it I must fix it. I analyze and review. I apply all that I know to correct it. That damn spot. Then certain spots, when found, eat away at me. I cannot turn the page. Can I accept that I have to work around some spots, that life is not always a page to be redlined?

K and I were on the deck this afternoon, and I was trying to blow bubbles to make him laugh, those thin, small bubbles from the blue jar with the pinky-orange, now-slippery wand. My lips weren't close enough to the ridged circle so the film was breaking instead of bubbling, but also a strong wind was swirling, a loud rushing sound like a fast truck on a highway. K looked around, not seeing anything but becoming very afraid of the noise, and it reminded me that what you cannot see and don’t understand can be so frightening.

Today we celebrated Mother's Day with both sides of the family, sitting around the in-laws' house, eating and watching K run from room to room, talking about the recent state cuts and a baby soon to come and plans for a wedding in late August. I didn't feel well and ate little. I watched K's aunt and uncle walk him up and down the sidewalk later in the day. We celebrated R's birthday early with a lot of candles on the angel food cake. He even blew them all out at once! Not bad for a middle-aged man!

I stepped on the scale and saw it flash what I knew it would flash. I've been eating junk for the last month or so, so what did I expect? Ever since having K, I can't just eat what I want and not gain weight. That's strange for me. So tomorrow I am done with sugary junk and high-calorie foods! I really need to exercise, too. We received our federal tax credit back today, so that should go to furniture and maybe a treadmill? We will see. Whatever it takes to be skinnier! Even K pokes my round belly!

Apparently the neighbors are moving out today, which for me is psychologically wonderful. That white van is doing wonders, stirring things up but also making me feel better. They are the last vestage of the original way this block was connected to the former house owners, and after today I'll be able to breathe and actually look out the front of our house without thinking of those people. It's like starting over here. I assume the new neighbors won't ignore us when we are outside. Even if they do, I can let that go. One more step to feeling better.

It's got to be that life tests me sometimes, tries to get me to practice present moment thinking. A couple weeks ago, unexpectedly, I ended up discussing at length a relationship that just stopped abruptly years ago, and now today I hear about that person again, after not having thought of this person in years. It is strange how these things go, like my having the discussion brought this person out. Hearing about her again makes me acutely aware of time passing, of what I have done since she and I last talked. My life has really changed since then.

This morning I knew I had to change routine, do something better for both of us. In midmorning I dressed him in his shoes and jacket and we went outside to walk to the park, but he was like a mule, not willing to go even two houses away. He turned around and ran to my car, where all he wanted to do was sit inside and play with the buttons on the dash. I should feel fine about it because we were engaged in something different, outside, but I feel again like I'm failing him each and every time.

He is still sleeping upstairs, rump up in the air and cheek to the mattress -- how he sleeps when he is really tired. I am down here listening for him, looking at the gray sky, reading online about how TV at this early age harms development and how good child care can improve his IQ and feeling just rotten about our weekday life, my need to work butting against doing better things for him. And yet he is so difficult to manage now when we are out that I almost avoid it. This life is tougher than I ever imagined.

Does everyone think about how they once considered a different profession than their current one? I do. I am watching NASA TV, listening to CAPCOM talk to Atlantis about their schedule, their high-res review for damage, the potential orbit adjustments in case of debris. I think of how I once wanted to work for NASA, how I weighed checking on how to become part of a shuttle mission team. Whatever romance I have for it, I’m sure it’s just a job, but today, with the program soon ending, it seems like I missed out on something great.

Sometimes when I am out at an event, a social gathering, I meet someone for the first time, someone around my age, and she looks a bit bohemian, has a gentle face, carries a casual confidence, and I start conversations a couple times, find out bits about her, where she works, what she like, what interests her, but then we do not speak much after this and she doesn’t reciprocate questions, but does glance over at me with something that I interpret as an interest, and I wonder about those glances and wish we could get to know each other.

This morning I weighed myself again, same time I weighed myself last Monday, and today the scale said three pounds less. Of course, I do not trust that scale. I hate it, actually. It never seems correct. We have tested it by weighing the cat and it does register him at the right weight. In any case, I have been trying to eat better, eat less. It is possible that my efforts did help, but I still don't trust that I've lost weight. I miss feeling thin, feeling my hip bones, seeing a flatter stomach, sliding on the tighter jeans.

Early this morning, around six, I awoke too hot, uncomfortable, thrashing about in bed, half asleep and dazed. Suddenly I heard this deep voice in my head, this masculine boom calling these four words to me: You can’t relax here. It immediately made sense, and he was absolutely right. I have been referring to it as being unable to “breathe,” but it is that there is nowhere in this house, on this property, that I can relax. The yard is small and not private. The house is small with nowhere for retreat. My tiny office? What's relaxing about that?

I'm going to warn everyone out there not ever to do what R and I have been doing for the past ten days, which is to play three old LOST episodes each night from 9:30 until 12 just to catch up for the finale on Sunday night. The process is incredibly intense, is affecting my moods and my sleep, my dreams. It's like seeing a serial movie every night. There is so much to process that I can't tell how I feel about the plot, and I walk around exhausted. I hope I'm happy later that we've done this.

I have been trying to "think" in poetry again. This is something that used to come much easier for me, to devise musical lines, to see the potential for a good poem in a simple daily act, in a long walk through nature. I want to write an ode to the kinky gray hair I find on my head, but surely that has been done before by some academic women's lib poet who came of age in the seventies and now has a wild mane of gray and reads Sharon Olds and listens to Joan Baez while drinking green tea.

The doctor seemed rather defensive, ready with her speech about not giving K the vaccine for chicken pox, but once she heard I was just deferring it and not dropping it altogether she seemed to back off, switched to another topic quickly. I'm really not against vaccines per se; I am just against K getting a whole bunch during one visit. So he got the MMR and cried a bit right after the shot, but honestly he was rather good about the whole thing. I wanted to take him for some ice cream to appease, but he's just too young.

At Target, K was eager to touch everything, play with all the toys in the toy aisles and grab bicycle wheels and try to grab other carts -- very touchy. For one moment, before I whipped around completely, I didn't see him and I couldn't breathe. I haven't been that frightened in a very long time. The cashier talked to me about boys as she rang us up, how she had three girls and boys are so different, so active, and I said I only knew boys but it seemed that way to me. Always throwing things around, on the move.

We spent 10 days watching every LOST episode from the mid-Season 5 through Season 6, and then tonight we watched the finale, another 150 minutes. I am so exhausted from going to bed very late for so long that I have that confused, crazed haze in my brain, the kind you get at college when you stay up overnight a few nights in a row studying, then hanging out, then studying, and you can't even form words or remember your phone number because you are so completely fried. I can't even tell if I am happy with the finale!

At the nursery the only relief from the heat was browsing the covered rows housing the herbs and vegetables and tender leafy plants. I considered the pumpkins, but our yard is not right for it. I picked out a lavender plant, its long stems stretching out like tentacles. I decided on yellow squash, rosemary, jalapeno. I bought basil, tarragon, parsley, chives in a large patio planter. The bee balm stood tall in my cart. The Asiatic lilies were in a row out near the sprinklers, where a cold shot smacked my back every thirty seconds, jolting me into selecting quickly.

Driving around today, feeling depressed and frustrated as I often do, and I thought, what if I change my perspective on everything? What if I decide that I am going to look at my time in this home as a step to the next thing, to the next place? This can be seen as an investment, something to care for, to improve, while we work to save money and pay it down. Maybe I am just here to be the caretaker for a while. Maybe there is something I should learn here. Or maybe I am overthinking everything once again.

Today K has his second playdate with M, on a very hot spring day. We were in the backyard for a while, K running around, tossing the ball, trying to make M eat a dried whirlygig. K laughed at their dog as it ran to the back, and I was glad that he was not frightened. Then we played inside, where K liked the toys, ate grapes and half a waffle. Tonight he said the full word "Elephant" for the first time, and I was very excited! I know he won't say it again, most likely, but wonderful to hear.

Some Sundays I am rather happy that we get the newspaper. I enjoy looking through the arts and life sections, the travel pieces. But then I unfold the funny pages from the glossy, annoying ad flyers, and I remember how much more I loved the Sunday paper when the comics were actually good. Get Fuzzy is only moderately amusing now. Adam@home sucks now that the original creator stopped drawing it. Newer ones that have little kids as the main characters are stupid. I really miss Wizard of Id and the daily Foxtrot and the wacky wit of Bloom County.

I was driving back from madrigals tonight, and I was really in the mood for singing, so I pulled out an old Yes tape (yes, a cassette) and popped it in and heard "Every Little Thing" and started belting it out. It has been such a long time since I've heard that. It brought me back to when I used to put Yes albums on my record player in my room and slip on my headphones and listen to every single nuance. I realize I need to listen to more of my favorites to feel more like true myself again.

So today it took quite a bit of time to finish up some work that I needed to finish; I had to wake K in order so that we could run to both FedEx and UPS, and then I came back and worked some more, but I got it done before dinner, and now I get two days work-free! Yee-hah! I hope I can get stuff done around here -- cleaning is the top priority. No computer, no wasting time, just digging in and getting it done. I am so tired of watching everything pile up under the dust.

I had NO work today (finally I finagled it, made it happen, like some kind of magic!) so I was actually able to clean my bedroom, go through tubs of folded clothes, put away shirts in the many different empty drawers, get rid of all the stained and ripped items, pass on all the tiny baby clothes to others at the church thrift store. I even got to organize K's closet so that I can store my dresses and blazers in there. I can now finally see the floor of our bedroom. It is amazing how cleaning lifts the spirits.

Today we went to the hospital to see Charlotte, the newest family member on R's side. Just 21 hours old. A small pointed nose. Very dark blue eyes. Tiny, dark pink feet. The large monitoring device strapped to her ankle. I held her close, her head covered in a multicolored knit cap, her body wrapped tight in a blue blanket, as warm as a loaf from the oven. I felt as though I had to talk R into holding her. He seemed more interested in talking to M about the LOST finale. Maybe he thought I was getting baby fever!