Edits and Dreams

I’ve been swamped with editing stories lately. Seems like as soon as I finish one and send it back to an editor, another editor emails me, “Here are the first edits to so-and-so. The story releases in two weeks.”

Say what?!

So I’d just received my third ‘here’s your edits to do’ email in one week and was starting to panic when the kid runs up to me, holding a ball and says, “Ball,” in her sweet little girl voice. The hubby and I thought she’d never start to talk. We’ve been trying to force words out of her, holding her ball up out of her reach and instructing, “if you want the ball, you have to say ball,” which only made her scream, and stomp her feet and throw herself on the floor. And here, she walks up to me, pretty as you please, and volunteers the word. Crazy kid.

Speaking of the crazy kid, I’ve been trying to train her to put herself to sleep, setting her in her crib, then kissing her and tucking the blankets around her, and smiling before walking out of the room. But I’ve decided, screw that. I don’t care if this makes me a weak mom, I just can’t handle listening to her cry herself to sleep. What if she thinks I’ve left her forever? What if it gives her nightmares? What if she grows up with these awful abandonment issues?

Thus, I’ve decided, I don’t care if I have to spend forty-five minutes every night until she’s sixteen, walking and rocking her to sleep, and she turns out to be a major mama’s girl with no independent skills, I’m not listening to her cry herself to sleep one more night.

I don’t know if it was the guilt of listening to her last night, or if it’s because I finally read about Casey Anthony on Wikipedia, or because the hubby had to work a night shift (which always makes me have disturbing dreams), but I dreamt about my baby being in some car that had been wrecked and people informing me she hadn’t made it. Don’t ask what she was doing in a car without me, or why it had been wrecked, I have no clue. My dreams never make much sense. But it totally freaked me out.

When she woke up at five ‘til five this morning, I wasn’t upset about getting up that early. I popped right up and went to her so we could snuggle. After changing her diaper and grabbing her tippy cup of milk from the fridge, I brought her back to bed with me (another big parent no-no I don’t care that I broke). It didn’t even bother me that she crawled up on my neck, like she likes to do, and went back to sleep there. I was just glad she was okay. When my alarm went off and I had to get up and ready for work, life was good. Both my hubby, who’d made it home from work only a few hours earlier, and baby were safe and sound, snuggled up on the bed snoozing next to each other.

Okay, fine, by the time I got out of the shower, I heard Hubby growling, “Quit kicking me in the back,” but that only made me happier, letting me know everything was back to normal.

And that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I’m down to one and a half edits to finish, and my family is wonderfully okay. Oh, and my next story KISS IT BETTER will be out in TWO WEEKS from today (August 19th)!!! I think I’ll have a video for you to watch about it next week.

Happy Friday.