Another Late Update

Sorry for the delay. I simply got distracted yesterday and forgot that it was Monday and therefore a posting day. Whoops!

Bean is finally better after over a week with a cold that quite simply kicked his ass. The doctor found no infection and his lungs were clear, so the fever was just his body fighting off the latest cold virus.

Comfort and Self-Care

Poor Bean is sick. He has been since last Wednesday, with a low-grade fever that just won't quit. The paediatrician was completely booked today, so his mother will be taking him tomorrow. We figure it's probably yet another ear infection, as those are the one thing he can't seem to shake for the life of him. It always takes antibiotics, even though ear infections are often said to clear up on their own. He hasn't complained of ear pain, but that's not necessarily significant with him--he's not much of a complainer when he's actually sick. We can always tell when he's truly under the weather, because he goes quiet. He spent most of last Wednesday cuddled up with his mother or me (whenever she wasn't available to cuddle), and has by all reports been extra clingy all week. I've been back at my job since Thursday evening, so I only have second-hand reports about all of this.

With any luck he'll have antibiotics tomorrow, and things will go back to normal. Selfishly I'm hoping he'll be ready to go back to daycare by the time I get back from work. I adore him, but having him at home 24/7 is mentally exhausting for me. When he's sick but not feeling too bad, his behavioural problems come out in force. There's even more shrieking and tantrums than usual, more outright refusal to do anything, and he gets extremely crabby and whiny and demanding, which, quite frankly, dances on my very last nerve. Also, a week of no school for him means he's not getting any social contact with other children, and it means his mother will also be fresh out of any remnant of patience. It's not good for anyone.

An Early Monday Update

I feel a little bad, actually, because once again I've arrived on a Monday with no subject in mind about which to blog.

Life has been a lot of the same for me lately: going to work, coming back, scrambling madly to get all the chores done (and failing), trying to spend some time with Bean, and then going back to work.

I did get to go to my first ever birthday party for one of Bean's friends whose parents weren't also friends of mine. This was a preschool friend, so it was kind of exciting for me to go. The parents had rented a room in the Children's Museum in Laval, which has an exhibit of all the different kinds of jobs you can have when you grow up. It didn't cover them all, but it covered a wide range, from farmer to policeman to astronaut to grocery store clerk to teacher to cook. There was also construction work and a very cool room devoted entirely to engineering and science with lots of bouncing balls that you could subject to gravity in varying ways. Bean had a blast in that room in particular.

I got to experience my very first "Mommy Wars" moment, too, which was unpleasant at the time.

Keep All Those Plates Spinning

I realise this blog has exactly one reader, but I feel I must nonetheless apologise for missing Monday's posting deadline. It's been a heck of a week, and by the time I had a minute to myself on Monday, it was already bedtime. On Tuesday I called in sick to work with a migraine and was mostly too out of it to update, and today I was back at work for a training session.

So, here you have it, a Wednesday update rather than a Monday one.

A very quick update

I've been trying to think of a topic to write about all week, and failing. I did promise I would update on Mondays, so that's what I'm doing, but I'm ashamed to admit I don't have anything to say. So instead of a thoughtful and well-composed entry, instead you'll be getting my stream-of-consciousness ramblings today.

Life has been incredibly busy lately. Work has been keeping me later than usual, and last week I had to get the car repaired the morning after. Then there was grocery shopping the same day, then next day my girlfriend and I spent the entire day doing our freezer cooking for the month. On Thursday I got up early and tried (unsuccessfully) to finish the freezer cooking, then packed up and left for my job.

I've been working steadily since then. So, in short, I haven't had time to do anything except run around like a crazed, headless chicken. I've been trying to fill what little free time I have productively, but it's been a struggle. Mostly I'm so tired I can't see straight.

In the past I wouldn't have felt guilty about taking a few hours for myself today, but that's no longer the case. I can't shake the feeling that my girlfriend is slowly coming to resent me more and more as time goes on. I'm pretty sure she's convinced that I do absolutely nothing with my time, that I'm forcing her to carry the load of caring for Bean and the house on top of having to go to school part-time. 

So I've been trying extremely hard to make myself useful when I'm home. I make a point of getting most of the groceries (though I don't think she sees it that way), of cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom and vacuuming when I'm home, and doing as much of the laundry I can. She does her own clothes and Bean's, but I try to get the linens and everything else along with my clothes. I try to make sure meals are prepared and ready, and I load, run and unload the dishwasher as much as I can.

Whatever I do, it never feels like enough. I'm away from home for five or six days at a stretch, and it must seem like I get to have a mini-vacation while I'm not there, because I have all this time to myself. Actually, because I work 12 hour shifts, it actually comes down to 12 hours of work, 1 hour of commuting time (on a good day, with no traffic; on a bad day it's more like twice that), 1.5 hours of cooking/dishes time, 1 hour of shower/other personal grooming, and half an hour of "free" time if I want to get 8 hours of sleep). But I can understand how it must seem like a sweet gig to someone who's not in my shoes. After all, I have no responsibilities outside of work and feeding myself, right? So, vacation.

Also, as usual, I'm worried about money. My girlfriend told me that she won't be getting money for Bean's daycare for several more weeks and that I would probably have to pay for February on my own, and then got angry with me when the announcement stressed me out. Bean's daycare costs more than my mortgage, for the record. It's almost as much as my paycheque.

I realise that she has no control over the money from the government (though her statement of "It's not like I spent the money on frivolous stuff!" is specious, as just before Christmas she told me she used some of it to buy presents because she felt "stupid" not having presents to give people "just because I'm poor."), but the anger she then directed at me felt unjustified. I wasn't accusing her, I didn't even say anything to her. I merely made the mistake of trying to work out how I was going to pull the money together on my own out loud. I suppose she felt I was attacking her, but I think I can be forgiven for being a little stressed when I'm told that I'm suddenly going to have to pull an extra thousand dollars (and more!) out of my ass on less than three weeks' notice.

I am going back to work in a couple of hours. Today I have extra "free" time because I'm flipping from a day shift to a night shift.

Tomorrow I have taken an appointment with a therapist. I am hoping that a couple of sessions a month and some "homework" for a while will help me learn better skills of emotional regulation and self-regulation. If there's one thing I've learned, it's not other people that are the problem, it's me. I can't change the people around me, nor should I, so the only thing I can change to help me be less frustrated and stressed is myself.

I need to simply learn to deal with the fact that my girlfriend thinks I'm a useless lump who trapped her in a life she never wanted (she hates having to take the language class that makes her eligible for the government money that lets us pay for Bean's preschool), and not let it get to me. In a couple of years, when she's finished her studies and it's time for us to consider the next big step in our lives, if she decides that living with me is still untenable, I'll be in a better position to help her make the best decision for her, and if she wants to leave me, I'll (albeit reluctantly) help her do that without suffering too many financial repercussions. I'm hoping that by then she'll have changed her mind, since with any luck she'll be studying something she loves by then and maybe not feeling as if I tricked/coerced her into ruining her life.

In the meantime, therapy seems like the thing to do. If I can learn how to manage my emotions, it'll be easier on all of us.

In conclusion, here is proof that, even after a 16 hour cooking day, we still know how to clean like pros. ;)

The New Year Has Arrived!

It was my birthday today. Happy birthday to me! I'm officially 35 years old, and to be honest I never thought in a million years that I would be where I am today at 35.

This is a good thing, in case you were wondering.

Overall, I am very blessed in my life. I have a family that I love, pets that adore me (and the feeling is mutual!), a steady job that I am unlikely to lose except under truly dire circumstances, and a house that is all my own if you don't count the mortgage. Both my parents are alive, in relatively good health (considering they're both in their seventies), still happily married and more than willing to poke their noses repeatedly into my life. I myself am in good health overall, am surrounded by good and supportive friends, and have a number of hobbies and activities that I find fulfilling in my life.

So, lots to be grateful for.

I've decided that 2014 is going to be a big year for self-improvement. This is technically not a New Year's Resolution, because I was already thinking about it in December, and I decided that rather than give myself an artificial start date and put off the self-improvement until January 1st, I was going to start right away. So that's what I did.

There is a lot about myself that I need to work on, but almost all of it boils down to chronic procrastination. Yes, I am part of the roughly 20% of the population who define themselves as chronic procastinators. Everyone procrastinates, of course. Anyone who says they never put off a single task they find aversive is either lying or deluding themselves. That being said, procrastinating once in a while is not the same as chronic procrastination. Procrastination, for me, has been a problem since my early teens, and at its worst it seriously affects not only my quality of life, but also the people around me who sometimes end up having to pay the cost of my having put things off.

What I noticed recently was that when I procrastinate, it's usually in the context of a self-defeating spiral of anxiety. I get anxious, so I procrastinate, which then makes me anxious, and then I procrastinate more. It's a form of short-term mood repair, but is ultimately very self-destructive. Furthermore, because I have an avoidant personality, I found that I was withdrawing more and more into myself as a result of the anxiety, and therefore not spending the kind of quality time with my family that I wanted. This was a big wake-up call for me. For the first time I have the family I always wanted, and I'm pulling away? No. This will not stand.

In light of this, I've been listening to the iProcrastinate podcast by Professor Tim Pychyl, whose website can be found at http://www.procrastination.ca. I happen to find the website itself kind of klunky in its design, but thus far I love the podcast itself. It's just the right mix of theory (academic and otherwise) and practical applications thereof for me, and has already offered some very good insights into the phenomenon of procrastination.

The one thing that has stuck with me since I started listening a few days ago is the idea that the feelings of guilt that stem from procrastination are actually the result of living in a way that's inauthentic to one's true self. This hit really close to home, and hard enough that it made me sit up a bit in the car (where I was listening to the podcast) and think that, yeah, that sounds exactly right. Putting things off, especially important things (and isn't it always the important stuff on which one ends up procrastinating?) always ends up with me either in a mad rush, or crippled by anxiety (which in turn results in more procrastination), and that's not who I want to be. I also have a huge problem with perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking (they go hand in glove) which in turn leads me to procrastinate ("If I can't do it perfectly/all at once, then I won't do it at all!")

That's why I decided not to wait until the New Year to work on my procrastination. I figured I would take Pychyl's advice and "just get started." I did have some projects that I put off starting, if only because I knew I didn't have the time and attention for them right then. January was just around the corner, and a sagacious delay is not the same as procrastination. As Pychylputs it: "All procrastination is delay, but not all delay is procrastination."

One of the major components of ending procrastination, according to Pychyl, is to make what he calls an "implementation intention." It's essentially a concrete plan for oneself, framed either as an approach or avoidance goal (the former being preferable to the latter), the more specific the better. So if, say, I want to become more reliable about flossing my teeth, the process might look like this.

1- I want to floss my teeth regularly in order to have a sparkling white smile and because my mouth feels nice when I do it (Approach goal. An avoidance goal would be "I don't want to get gingivitis or have tooth decay." Avoidance goals are, apparently, psychologically harder to stick with).

2- Every night after I take my toothbrush out of the glass but before I brush my teeth, I will put down the toothbrush and floss my teeth first. (This gives me a concrete set of steps that will allow this to eventually become an unthinking habit, something to work into my nightly routine, and by not making it the last thing I do, it makes it easier for me to follow through on implementing my intention.)

So because there are lots of things about myself that I would like to change (most of them small, some of them big, all of them important in some way),I've been spending time coming up with not only a comprehensive list, but also coming up with a series of implementation intentions and strategies for the coming months. Changes need to be small and gradual, but also consistent.

The short list of stuff I have right now is as follows, in no particular order of importance:

1- Health habits (walking, eventually running, getting a grip on my mental health, etc.)
2- Writing (writing regularly, honouring writing commitments--fanfic and original--, finishing my work, submitting work for publication)
3- Knitting (working on more projects and rediscovering my enjoyment therof)
4- Family (spending less/no time on the computer when we're all home together)
5- Mindfulness (this may well fall under health habits, but I also want to focus on not letting negative thinking influence me as much)
6- Cooking (cooking more, mastering the art better, cooking more from scratch)
7- Housekeeping (keeping the house tidier than I currently am)
8- Work (actively pursuing career options, being more assertive about my job)
9- Friends (making a point of keeping in touch, which I am notoriously bad at)
10- Blogging (posting once a week, getting my thoughts organised, etc.)

Part of my resolution to post regularly in the New Year will be my commitment to all these changes. I want to be accountable for the changes I'm trying to make, and the only way to do that is to put myself out there and therefore honour my commitment. In fact, one of the first implementation intentions I'm going to make is one regarding blogging, and when/how I'll be able to post more regularly.

It's difficult for me to form habits because of my irregular schedule. I can't say "Every day at X time I shall do Y thing," because on some days I work from 5:30am to 5:30pm, on other days I work from 5:30pm to 5:30am, on other days I don't work at all, and some days are spent recovering from a night shift. So a daily routine is next to impossible. That being said, I think I can still find a way to form good habits and to get into a kind of routine, just one that isn't as conventional as it might be. I just have to figure out what works and what doesn't. I've been using a tool suggested by Pychyl known as the "unschedule," in which I plan my day backward, in a sense. I write down all the things that I know get done no matter what--morning routines, evening routines, meals, work times, etc., and then from there I figure out how much time is left over to do the rest. It's been working pretty well so far, though it needs some fine tuning.

So there you have it. This year is the year I plan to put an end to my procrastination once and for all. That way I will open up all that "extra" time to spend with my family, with Bean and my girlfriend and the pets, and hopefully free up some time to write about it here, and share all the exciting stuff happening in my life.

What "Work" Really Means

So after a record five weeks of the new job, I finally got the "I'm here all the time and you're only here half the time," reproach that I'd been expecting. She held out longer than I thought she would before telling me that, to be honest. It still wasn't pleasant. Then she got upset because I was clenching my fist (it was either that or get really upset myself and say things I'd regret).

It appears that only she is allowed to find the present circumstances difficult. After all, I'm going on a 4-5 day vacation every time I commute 2.5 hours one-way to a different city in order to pay for the privilege of staying in an 8x11 foot room in a house that's not my own and work 12-hour shifts in order to keep a roof over all of our heads before commuting back.

She's doing the real work of going to class 2 hours a day and bringing Bean to daycare and bringing him home. She told me she feels like she's trying to fit 24 hours of work into a 12-hour day, which, okay. I get that a house is a lot of work, and Bean is a full-time job by himself. I would never dispute that.

The thing is, on my off days I work a second job doing translation contracts so that there won't be too much month left at the end of the money, since she has no income. So while I realise she thinks that I'm not doing anything, I'm working 90 hour weeks trying to keep things afloat financially. Just because she doesn't see me working, I guess she assumes that it must be all fun and games for me. Work is a lovely, relaxing thing that I do away from home, and when I am home of course I "slack off" by not immediately setting to and mopping floors or doing laundry (because I'm usually working on my translation stuff).

Short of burning out, I'm not sure what I can do about this situation. So far any attempt at discussion has failed, probably because emotions are running high on both sides. I'm exhausted and so is she, but she seems convinced that I can't possibly be tired because I sometimes get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep (on average once every 7-10 days, which is admittedly more than she gets because she has trouble sleeping even on a good day).

So, I don't know. Anyway, this has been a rant. Carry on.

Oh, the irony...

I'm becoming one of those parents. You know the ones, the ones who are obsessed with books on parenting and trying to work out just how badly they are screwing up their kids.

So far I've only read the one book, but suddenly I find myself with a "to-read" list as long as my arm. Whoops. On the plus side, my newest obsession is unlikely to affect anyone but myself, as my input on parenting strategies is still, as far as I can tell, unwelcome. I can't imagine my girlfriend will be any more receptive to "I read this in a book," than she has been to anything else I've said.

I've been back at home since yesterday evening, and we've had a pretty good time with Bean overall since I came in. We were fine right up until just before bedtime, at which point the very notion of being asked to go pee was treated as ANATHEMA. So I held him by one hand in the bathroom as he jumped and thrashed and flailed and flopped—right up until he accidentally knocked his leg against the bathroom counter and promptly wailed in anguish. So I sat him on the toilet, gave him a kiss (to make it better, you understand), and we had the following exchange:

Me: "Was that a good idea or a bad idea?"

Bean: *hiccupping* "A b-bad idea!"

Me: "Mm-hmm. And do you think you would have hit your leg if you'd listened and gone pee like we told you instead of flailing around?"

Bean: "Da!"

(As an amusing side note, Bean has not said "yes" or "yeah" or "yup" in about two years. For reasons unknown to anyone, he started saying "Da!" like a little Russian boy, and nothing we do or say has made him change his mind)

After that there were hysterics at bedtime because he remembered a half-eaten apple that he decided he had to have right now instead of going to sleep. He ended up not falling asleep until about ten to nine... an hour and twenty minutes after bedtime.

This morning went much better. My girlfriend was going on a field trip with her class (she's taking conversational French in order to hone her skills for the job market here in Quebec), so she told me last night she and Bean needed to be out the door by 8:00 at the very latest.

Morning and evening routines are what Bean finds the hardest to adhere to. Inevitably there seems to be screaming and tantrums and tears, or else he simply ignores all requests to go to the bathroom/eat his cereal/put on the clothes he's picked for the day. In the past 2-4 weeks this has gotten so bad that he and my girlfriend have not made it out of the house before 8:15 at the earliest, and sometimes as late as 8:45. My girlfriend's class starts at 9:00, which gives her not enough time to drop Bean at daycare and get to class on time.

Generally in the mornings I try to stay out of the way as much as possible. It's been made clear to me that I don't know what I'm doing and that my interference is unwelcome. This morning, though, I offered to help out, and much to my surprise she accepted. So while she was sorting out her lunch I got Bean going for the day.

Perhaps it was the novelty of my going through the morning routine with him, but he did really well right up until the last minute. He went to the bathroom and took off his nighttime diaper with very little prompting. He picked out clothes for the day (a button-down shirt and his "cosy" pants, since all his skirts are in the wash) and got dressed all by himself—I helped with exactly one button. While he ate his cereal I pulled out my phone to show him the new foal in my "pony game" (an iPhone game called Derby Days with which he's developed a slight fascination). By then it was five minutes to 8:00 and the car was packed and it was looking really good for getting out the door on time. Alas, at the last minute he decided he wanted to play in his room rather than go pee and put on his shoes, and so there was more flailing and whining and it took both of us to get his shoes on him. In the end, they made it out the door at 8:05, which is still the earliest they've been in at least a month.

In short, I'm counting today a win so far. If we can carry this momentum through to the evening right through bedtime, that would be awesome.

In the meantime, I have a stack of reading to do...

The Real Challenges

Ostensibly, this is a blog about the challenges of our newly formed, nontraditional little family.

I'm going to guess that most people who first come to read this are going to expect posts about my anxiety about the fact that Bean is gender nonconforming, about all the uphill battles we're facing. Snide remark from other adults, teasing and bullying from other children, the works. It's possible, even likely, that there will be posts about that, eventually.

The thing is, that's not the main problem we're having these days. I'm really not worried about Bean's clothing choices, nor have I ever been, and nor has his mother. Are we concerned that there might be repercussions later? Of course. For the moment, though, we are blessed by incredibly supportive friends and family (except my own parents, but that's a post for a different day) who so far have no so much as batted an eyelash at Bean's love of pink and sparkly frilly things. His preschool have also been wonderful and supportive, and the two "incidents" with other kids were short-lived and barely registered as a blip on the radar.

The real problem we're having with Bean is a behavioural one. I've mentioned before that he's a high-energy kid, that he never stops going except when he's asleep. He's also been acting out. A lot. This is no doubt due in great part to the fact that he and his mother moved in with me the week he turned three. After three years of being one-on-one with his mother who was a SAHM and was able to devote her attention to him 100% of the time, now he lives in a house with another adult who takes his mother's attention away AND goes to preschool full time, five days a week. He has to cope with a new parental/authority figure, a new home, new pets (my dog and two cats, who are much more present in the household than the two cats who live(d) with him and his mother and resided primarily in the kitchen).

It's a huge adjustment, and just as that happened I got a job in a new city which means I have to commute back and forth every 4-5 days. So my schedule is a mystery to him (heck, it's a bit of a mystery to me), and that adds to the overall stress.

In short, there is a lot of acting out. He doesn't listen, no matter what we do. Lord knows, we have tried everything from time outs to taking away toys to turning off the TV to resorting to "redirecting" at the suggestion of his teachers (i.e. physically moving him away from whatever it is he's doing that we don't like and setting him up doing something better), to no avail. He's lost whatever ability he had to tolerate frustration. The moment he hears "no,"  he melts down. Screaming tantrums, kicking and shrieking and turning red in the face, and just ignoring it until it stops doesn't work, because he just works himself up more until he's rigid and practically convulsing with rage.

When he's not having eardrum-bursting tantrums, he's running in circles and screaming (happy screams instead of tantrum screams are still screams), or getting into everything he shouldn't be getting into. Whatever idea pops into his mind, he acts on it instantly. I realise that this is part of being a three-year-old, but because he's so high-energy, what would be a minor thing with most kids turns very quickly into disaster with him. If we tell him not to mess with the drawers, he does. A regular kid might open one drawer and poke at it. Bean, on the other hand, opens all the available drawers and pulls out everything in them, dumping it all on the floor in the time it takes for us to turn around and say "No, don't do that!"

Any attempt to discipline him, when not met with the aforementioned tantrums, are met with giggling and outright defiance, as though it's all one giant game. I remember that, as a child, I was incredibly sensitive to my parents' moods, and would be crushed at the thought that they weren't happy with me. I was, even then, a people-pleaser. Bean has no such compunctions. If we're angry and frustrated, so what? That just makes it funnier. It becomes an increasingly funny game until we find the right "punishment" for that moment, at which point he starts screaming and wailing again.

It's exhausting and frustrating for all of us.

It doesn't help that my own role as parent/disciplinarian is fuzzy at best. My girlfriend and I are still working out the kinks of this whole relationship thing, and in many ways she still has the get-the-fuck-away-from-my-kid reflex whenever I try to intervene. This in turn makes me tend to either back off or not come on as strongly as I would if it were, say, a child I'd raised from birth/infancy. Bean gets away with a lot more than I ever would have liked to see in one of my kids, especially when it comes to how he behave with/around other people. He also senses that my authority is in doubt, and that makes it much easier for him to ignore me whenever I try to get him to do anything that doesn't fall within his "This is what I want to do right now" parameters.

These days, even a suggestion of "Go to the bathroom, please," when we notice he's grabbing at himself is met with "NO!" If we insist, he has a tantrum. No matter what unfolds afterward, it inevitably winds up with wet underwear. Bean actually started potty training early by most standards, well over a year ago. So it's not like going to the bathroom is a huge ordeal for him, except how apparently it is. The mere suggestion that he interrupt whatever he's doing is insupportable, it seems.

What doesn't help is that Bean is slightly delayed with his speech. Nothing too worrisome, and he's been improving by leaps and bounds since going to his new school, but he's definitely behind most of his peers. Only his mother understands the majority of what he says. I can grasp about 60% of what he says, and other adult are flummoxed. He hasn't figured out pronouns or articles except in the most basic way, and while he's now managing complex sentences (something he wasn't doing even at three years old, when he was still only putting together two words at a time), they're pretty fragmented. I suspect that the frustration of not making himself understood is a part of what's been going on.

In short, I'm at a loss, and I'm not in a position to do anything about it. Every time I even mildly make a suggestion about modifying something, I get shut down. Either it's something that's already been tried (and heaven forfend that I point out that trying something once and never again doesn't, in fact, constitute a proper try), or else I get "that would never work, because X, Y & Z." My girlfriend has years of childcare to her name (her mother took care of kids, and she ran her own daycare business for years), whereas I have none, so my input has no weight to it. Whatever idea I have, it's automatically theoretical because I have no real world experience to lend it weight. The only experience I have is my own childhood (and I was that rare unicorn of children, a quiet, self-directed people-pleaser, the kind of child who was so low-maintenance that people think my parents are lying about how easy I was to raise), and the stories I hear from other parents.

So, fair enough. I am pretty sure that my girlfriend is never truly going to accept me as Bean's other parent. Bean is hers, and I just live here. We are planning to have other kids, and I suspect it'll be hard to have the kind of double standard that will always have him getting exemptions from every attempt at discipline, but it's still workable. It's not ideal, but it's not a deal-breaker as far as I'm concerned. Raising Bean is a big challenge, and there will be different challenges in the years to come with other kids.

In conclusion? The gender nonconforming thing? It's not a real problem. It's just who Bean is, and that's one of the best things about him. I just wish it were the worst of our problems, because if it were? It would mean life was 100% awesome all the time.

Here be brightly coloured dragons...

Post #1.

I'm not sure what kind of blog this will turn out to be. I've blogged before, mostly on LiveJournal, but mostly as a kind of personal journal with a small audience. This will, I think, be rather different. I'm starting late, but I see it a little as a way to chronicle the biggest change(s) in my life and how that goes.

To sum up what's happened since last April: my girlfriend of a year (we've known each other for ten years but only been dating for one) moved in with her three-year-old son, hereafter known as Bean. (I have yet to figure out a nickname for my girlfriend. Stay tuned. :P) I work for the RCMP as a telecoms operator, which means shift work, and recently I got transferred to a different city nearby. So for now I'm commuting back and forth for 4-5 days at a time between shifts.

So I've dived headfirst into being the "co-parent" (as my girlfriend puts it), of an extremely high-energy three-and-a-half-year-old boy, who also happens to be gender nonconforming. Or maybe more gender creative—that term seems to fit him better. Bean has two speed settings: fast and asleep; he also has two volume settings: loud and asleep. He loves trains and Iron Man and playing with rocks. He also loves princesses and fairies and pink and purple clothes and all things sparkly. He wears skirts and tights and hair clips as well as his regular "boy" clothes and plays with Barbies and throws rocks in the water and digs in the dirt. Basically, he's a kid.

I don't know if anyone will read this. I don't know if I'll be able to keep up with posting. I don't know what I'm going to put in here, except for the fact that it's going to be about my own experience with all of this. I'm not an expert, and goodness knows I am riddled with my own fair share of neuroses. Up until now, I've been terrible at relationships and not all that good with small children. I've had plenty of other things happen in my life that I will likely end up discussing here as well, because they are important to who I am.

In short, this is uncharted territory for me. Here be brightly coloured, gender nonconforming dragons. ;)

Also, eventually I hope to clean up the look of this blog. I am terrible with all things html and other coding, so bear with me while I muddle my way through the beginnings of this.