I hadn't realized just how long it had been since I'd last posted. School had pretty much eaten my brain and all my internal resources. I've been making changes so that's less true, including making sure that I'm making a point of finding sources of joy and pleasure every day, and taking responsibility for nurturing myself. I'm hoping that'll mean I'll have more going on that makes me motivated to start journaling again.

I love reading all the photo-heavy journals of the friends I'm reading through this account (it's very different from the journals of friends I read elsewhere -- I love those journals, too, but the images make everything so much more immediate for me) -- it's been inspiring me to get around to taking out my camera a little more often than my usual "uh oh, christmas is coming up, better take pictures for the scrapbook gifts!"

No photos today, though. This morning I'm listening to the Spring rain and wind rattle the windows and batter at the walls. The thought of going out to the car to find the camera I suspect I stashed there is not even a little tempting...

We're in the midst of Spring cleaning and reorganizing. I recently asked the family to change our TV viewing habits, so that we each get to choose just one show per day (we'd gotten very TV-heavy since starting at the free school -- in part because I was focused on work and email so much after getting home, in part because starting to work for the first time since Sarah was born made it easy to fall into pre-Sarah work habits (which tended to involve Joe and me spending hours on the futon, reading with the TV on in the background), and in part because I relaxed my concerns about TV viewing any time anyone in the house was sick, but having such consistency to our routines made it very hard to adjust ourselves back to healthy TV habits once everyone was well... Before starting at the school, I used to get us out of TV habits by shaking up our routines for a few days, being away from the house until quite late.). Sarah has been willing to work with this new plan -- she's been better about policing it than we have, some days -- but both of us have noticed that the recent chaos in the house makes it much harder to quickly come up with something else to do in the evenings.

I've also recently been dealing with some uncomfortable physical symptoms which my doctor agrees with me are likely stress-related, and the state of the house is *not* helping. Too much clutter, not enough cozy, nurturing spots.

This weekend we have nowhere else we need to be, for once. So we're digging in and transforming the house together.

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I've been doing self-hypnosis from time to time for a few years, to help myself with different things (it works remarkably well at dealing with dental phobia, for example). I've found with this recent distress, though, it hasn't been working. So last night I finally wrote up a script (pulling bits and pieces from various online sources, and writing the middle bit specifically for my needs) and had Joe read it to me. It worked really well, in one sense -- I went much deeper, without the possibility of drifting off to sleep, than I've ever gone on my own. In another sense, though... One of the benefits of self-hypnosis is that I can pace it to what's going on during the trance. If it takes me a while to settle into a particular part of the script, I can just keep focusing on that bit until I'm ready to go on. Joe read the script exactly as I wrote it out, and paced it very well, but I didn't spend enough time on certain parts of the script, and could feel myself torn while I was under -- not wanting to move along yet, but wanting to keep up with the words I was hearing... I'm going to rewrite it today, and we'll probably try again tonight.