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Maybe it's my relatively new allegiances to Twitter and Plurk, but I find myself just forgetting to post here. Sorry for that. I'll try to be better about keeping my voice from going out on this site.

I had a long-in-the-works review of Grand Theft Auto IV that ran in the paper last Friday. And I've got two big stories running Saturday and Sunday in Life & Arts this weekend.

Lilly has quickly gone from rolling over to sitting up to dragging herself across the floor to crawling on all fours to nearly standing up on her own without help. I think this is when things start to happen too quickly, like the baby's life is on fast-forward. It felt like we had months and months to baby-proof the house, but all of a sudden, we're keeping electrical plugs out of her mouth and we're trying to teach her to avoid all the open flames we keep around for our amusement.

I went through a major funk last week, just sort of summer blahs, party because of the video I wrote about last time, partly restlessness. Some of it was that I'm not really taking any vacation until August and I think I've burned myself out a little with our non-stop schedule.

This weekend, though, we spent a whole day at the mall, something we haven't done since before Lilly was born. She behaved incredibly well, just staring at all the sights (she'd never been), people-watching, not being fussy at all. It was a cool trip.

I sometimes struggle so hard to retain some of the normalcy from the time before Lilly was here. I get all frustrated that I can't do some of the things I did before, that I have to pass up opportunities to do artsy projects or go out and do party things. I try to work and live at the same pace I did before and I just exhaust myself.

I think the hardest part for me of parenthood hasn't been the parenting itself, because Lilly has been relatively trouble-free. I think it's just been accepting that I'm a parent, that my life has changed permanently, that there's no going back to those freewheeling days (which never seemed so freewheeling at the time; was I ever worry-free?).

I have to remind myself that lots of parents have been through this, have thrived, have found time to do the things that make them more than The Host Organism. And I guess I do still recap and work and play video games and do a comic strip and work on several blogs. I've only had to give up a very small number of things, and maybe those things had run their course anyway. Maybe Lilly has saved me from a rut and from some dead ends I didn't even see coming.

posted by Omar G. at 10:49 PM

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