Not so good at sitting...

I grew up on a dairy farm. Yes, for most of my life, my Dad milked cows twice a day, every day, 365 days a year. And when he wasn't milking cows, he was feeding cows, or bedding cows, or breeding cows, or plowing fields to grow food for cows. You get the picture. We lived on a small family farm, and there was always SOMETHING that needed to be done.

From an early age, I acquired this skill (or need) that Dad exhibits...the ability to always find something that needs to be done. My Mom has it too. She helped keep up a garden, keep up a house, and keep five kids clean and fed. So it's not that there was ever a shortage of things to do.

Even when I was young, I always felt the need to be accomplishing something. Even when watching TV, I usually had some sort of craft or needlepoint close at hand to keep my fingers busy.

So, as an adult, I have retained this trait. I dust when watching TV. I rearrange closets on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I can find any number of outdoor chores to do on a sunny day.

This was, of course, before Olivia. Now I do a lot of sitting. Sitting and holding tiny hands and waving colorful toys and doing all manner of baby distraction techniques until she's worn out and ready for a nap. And then I attempt to fit a whole day of "doing" into naptime.

This is an exercise in frustration. As soon as I get deep into a project, that familiar cry rings through the house to tell me that naptime is definitely OVER.

I'm learning to cope with moving at a slower pace, but I will certainly be happy when (if) Olivia ever learns to sit and play happily on her own. She probably has to learn to sit first, but I'm more concerned about the playing happily on her own. Because right now she refuses to let me leave the room, even if she's occupied in one of her many play/stand contraptions. The moment I leave, whatever she was playing with suddenly becomes uninteresting and even repulsive to her and all she wants is to be rescued from the evil toy/playing contraption and be picked up.

*Sigh* THIS is why working from home was never an option for me. At least not until she gets much older.

New topic. I've noticed that when I get up in the middle of the night for Olivia's bottle (yes, she is still getting up, but only once), I usually spend this quiet time thinking about the journey that brought her to us. After all, I have nothing to do but sit quietly in the dark as she gulps down her formula, and this is good thinking time. Good praying time too, but not so good for meditative prayer, which runs the risk of putting me back to sleep in my already half-asleep state. So I usually just let my mind wander and speak to God about the things in my life in a conversational, half-asleep sort of way.

Anyway, as I've been running through these things in my mind and thinking about how I really should get started on her lifebook, which I haven't even come close to starting (see slowing down comments above). And I've been thinking...maybe I should do a series of posts on this blog about how we came to consider adoption and how we ended up adopting this particular little baby. That might jump-start my lifebook efforts, and it will be a way to get all of these thoughts down in writing.

I think all of this is flooding back to me because of the timing. It was a little more than a year ago that we started seriously talking about adoption. For those of you who remember, it was several more months before we got serious about it, and then mere weeks before we met our birthmom (yeah, unusual...stay tuned). It's amazing to think of how our lives have changed since then.

So, I'm going to begin working on our adoption story. My progress will, of course, depend on the nap schedule, but I'll do my best to get it going in a timely fashion.

But for now, I must rescue my baby from her crib, as she is insisting that, once again, naptime is over.