Mid pleasures and palaces

I've been delighted to discover how very pleasant it is to stay at home. In the weeks since Ella's arrival I've felt happier and more content than ever, much to my relief, as I was afraid that cabin fever would strike. But it hasn't.

After Jane was born, I was so fearful of falling into postpartum depression that I made a point of getting out pretty much every day. She was small and portable, so it was no additional inconvenience to haul her along with me everywhere, and I strung my errands along most inefficiently to make sure I had an excuse to go somewhere. That was all well and good, but I knew that with the arrival of a second one my strategy wouldn't work so well. Taking into consideration a wiggly (and much heavier) toddler with a much more complicated car seat as well as the portable (but still requiring both hands) infant car seat, it seemed that it would almost be more trouble than it was worth to get out and about. That, combined with the fact that Michael takes the car for the carpool 1-2 times a week and I am certainly not about to strap the cars seats into the truck, means that we end up staying home several times a week. And I am thrilled to find that I just love these kinds of days.

It's very satisfying to settle the day's chores early on (and I've scaled back my expectations to a reasonable level, meaning that if I keep up on the dishes, laundry, and basic cleanliness we can let the rest go until the weekend) and spend a happy morning playing with Jane and Ella, the latter having just started smiling and the former already learning to read. I'm experimenting with meal plans to make kitchen time simpler and more Jane-interactive, so that's fun and exciting. And I am finally, finally catching up on sorting all our digital pics and ordering them online. Right now I am keeping current with the Ella pics and am caught up to Christmas '03 on the general folders. This a huge project that I should have tackled long before, but I am finding that breaking it down into manageable tasks makes all the difference. The great thing is that I'm placing these orders with various online promotions, offering anywhere from 10 to 50 free prints, which means that it's already broken down into bite-sized chores for me. Whenever I have five minutes I'll pick up where I left off, click through the pictures in the folder, and save the ones I want to print to a temporary folder in the desktop. Then whenever I get another freebie offer, I select the next 10-25-whatever prints from the folder and voila! Pictures arriving in the mail every few days, with very little effort on my part.

I was effusing to Michael the other day about how wonderful our lives are right now and how happy I feel ('Of course that's just the happy hormones from nursing but still!!'), and wondering whether that was a bad sign. Of course contentment is a good thing, but is it healthy for me to be feeling happier as my sphere shrinks? Culinary adventures are all very well, but I don't want the high point of my day to consist of a crock pot success. I should hope that feelings of accomplishment would stem from overcoming genuine challenges, not just from deflating my goals to an easily achievable level. Fortunately I am still able to converse with him rationally and sympathetically about issues at work, so I know I am not totally losing my connection with the outside world. Still one wonders.