Sunday, October 15, 2006
It’s been an exhausting weekend. Alesia was very good all day yesterday, and a pill pretty much all day today. Mom think she is PMS-ing. I don’t know.
I met with the publisher yesterday who is going to publish my children’s book. She showed me on the computer how the pages will look, and we inserted the illustrations. We have to wait to get the original illustrations so we can scan them in at 300dpi, for the best clarity. The e-mail versions look great to my untrained eye, though.
Vally [the publisher with the unusual name] even made up a prototype of what the book will look like when it’s done. I was so excited to see that.
I started a new blog, a public blog, just about the book.
http://deescribbler.typepad.com/jacks_new_family/
I hope I can generate some interest in the book that way, and so when copies are available to sell, hopefully in a few weeks, I will have customers waiting. Several folks have already told me they will buy copies. I suspect marketing will hinge on word-of-mouth, and how many adoption websites I can get a blurb on. There are a lot of websites, fortunately.
I took Mother and Alesia and we went yesterday morning to the Mistletoe Market, a Junior League Christmas crafts show. It’s got a lot of different vendors and the items are all high quality. I found 3 books for Matthew, all Cat in the Hat books, including my all-time favorite, Green Eggs and Ham. Hopefully they will spark an interest in reading, as he hears the funny rhymes. Mother found several items at a great booth that caters to seniors, with assistance things like rubber door handles, lighted magnifying glasses, etc.
We had lunch with my cousin Charlie Rusin and his partner, Michael. I had not met Michael, but he’s a very nice person. He seems good for Charlie. They’ve been together over 6 months, which is encouraging. Michael works for a recruiting company that works for Home Depot, and the company helps us find store managers. So we had something in common.
I wanted to go to the Georgia Writer’s Association meeting after lunch, but I couldn’t get there. I started out on 285 headed toward Dunwoody, already 15 minutes late, and traffic was at a crawl for some unknown reason. So I just got off at the next exit and headed home. I was disappointed because I wanted to hear the author who spoke.
We watched a great movie, Finding Forrester, last night. It’s about a brilliant black kid in the Bronx who finds a mentor in a reclusive writer. Sean Connery plays the writer. Excellent film.
Alesia ran around outside without shoes on yesterday afternoon, I discovered this morning. I had spotted her one time yesterday afternoon without shoes and told her to put them on, and she didn’t. This morning, she showed me a splinter in her foot. After breakfast I spent a long time digging it out of her foot, trying not to hurt her.
I told her after breakfast she needed to get dressed, and let me put some Neosporin and a bandaid on the foot, and then wear clean socks and tennis shoes all day. She was really ticked about that. It’s been a cool day here though, in the 60’s. I had bought her brand-new tennis shoes last spring and they were unworn.
Well sir, the battles began. She didn’t want to let me doctor her foot. She didn’t want to wear the tennis shoes. She was so smart-mouthed I made her do 20 pushups, then she smarted off again and said “Pushups aren’t that hard!” So I made her stand for about ten minutes with her arms over her head, straight up. I know her arms were hurting. She refused to back down. I made her go to her room.
We had a relatively uneventful grocery shopping trip. Her behavior was better.
Then when we got home, after she unloaded the groceries, she went straight upstairs and stripped off her shoes and socks. I told her she had to wear the socks. We explained, Mother and I both, about wounds getting infected.
At lunch, I told her not to start eating until I sat down, and she licked the mayonnaise off her plate when she thought I wasn’t watching. I called her on it and she argued. I made her go put her shoes back on, and I told her she’d have to wear shoes and socks the rest of the day. [What an ogre I am…]
The other time she was sassy to me was late this afternoon, after we came in from planting some things outside. I told her to go drink some water, rehydrate. She said No, and I had to yell at her. I finally said to her “Alesia, if you say one more word to me, you won’t go to youth group tonight with Elena, you will spend the whole evening alone in your room!”
I don’t know what was wrong with her. I cannot allow her to be disrespectful once, because then she will have a field day with it. Yesterday she was in a good humor and was sweet all day. Today, the pill emerged.
Tomorrow will be really busy, so I hope she will not be so difficult. She’s less cranky when she’s busy.
I am faxing a copy of my 171H application to a lawyer I know in New Orleans who recently went with Homeland Security, in hopes she can call the office here and find out what’s happening with my application. I am praying Charlotte can get them moving on it for me. I need to get out of limbo, for my emotional well-being. I’m getting depressed about it.