SuperIma Sunday Check-In: "Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend" Edition

Last night I asked Nathan if he possibly wanted to go to the pool or splash pad tomorrow, and he said, "I can't, I'm too busy with my work."  I asked him what kind of work he had to do, and he said, "Math, writing my name, and making potions."

Now, first off, let me note for the sake of anybody new here that we are not homeschoolers, so it's not like my kid has assignments or lessons or whatever to complete at home.  I think maybe he just watched a Berenstain Bears DVD where Brother Bear had to do homework, and so now he's pretending that he has homework, too.  And the whole "making potions" thing most certainly came from a TV show, or else what Nathan overhears when I play my Billy Joel/Elton John playlist.  ("If I were a sculptor/But then again, no/Or a man who makes potions in a traveling show ... ")

Anyway, this morning Nathan asked me if I could fish him out some underwear from the dryer, and he said, "Hurry up, I'm going to be late for work!"  I asked him where he worked and he said, "Downstairs," with a slight tone of disappointment. 

That's great, it's nice to be able to work from home.  And speaking of, I have my own angst about professional endeavors coming up.  But then I read original SuperIma Leigh Ann's check-in today, and she is so excited about her new job (which is sort of like her old job, but then she moved away and came back and things are different with the job now, in a good way), and anyway she inspired me to be more optimistic about my own work.  Although any work I would get would be very part-time, I started to worry about the unpredictability and the juggling of it all.  And, to paraphrase something my friend Farrah once said about one of her own career changes, there's a whole shift in how I define myself here.  I'm going from "stay-at-home-mom" to "part-time freelancer," and change is always hard.  The strange thing is that I never saw myself being a stay-at-home-mom, and the plan was always to do some sort of paid work, and then I got stuck and scared and ... there's a lot to be said here about self-actualization and stupid societal labels (SAHM!  WOHM!  PT WAHM!) but if I tried to transcribe all the drivel that's tangled up in a giant disorganized pile in my mind, this post would be incredibly long, and possibly not the slightest bit coherent. 

(Also let me note that my brother and I used to have a sort of running gag/inside joke/tradition of calling each other every Friday and singing a very bad, high-pitched version of Lover Boy's "Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend."  Now my brother is a clergyperson, which means he does his most important work on the weekend, and I am certainly not living the Monday-through-Friday-nine-to-five lifestyle either.) 

So, with the stress of ch-ch-cha-changes in work-related matters, I admit that this was a pointlessly emotional week.  At many points I just wanted to throw up my hands and say, "No, life, don't throw me anything more!  No, no more!  I can't handle it!"  Which is ridiculously dramatic since the stimulus that produced this hand-throwing frustration was something like a stain on the carpet. 

Yeah.

So, last week I said my goal was to establish some kind of plan for babysitting.  I kind of sort of did something about that, in that there's a teenage girl who is in the show with me who seems like a responsible, take-charge type, and I told her she could babysit for Nathan sometime.  And that was all I did about that goal.

But my goal to pet Leia went really well!  It's really good to set goals involving pets, because pets generally don't let you forget about them.  Leia would get to meowing and rolling around on the floor in her general "notice me" behavior, and I would be like, "Well, I did have this goal ..."

I thought it would be cute if I had some photos of Leia to accompany this post.  Here's the thing about Leia, though: she is the least photogenic cat I have ever had.  You see her doing something cute, so you grab the camera.  Except she sees you and starts rolling around and meowing, and you get weird photos where her mouth is open and she looks like she's going to bite you.  Or else she has the glowing cat eyes of death.  Or she's in some weird, unnatural-looking position.  Here are a few recent Leia photos to illustrate the difficulty of taking cute cat pictures:

 This was an attempt to take a photo of Leia lying peacefully in the sun.  Somehow I caught her mid-blink, so she just looks like an angry teenager.

Then I managed to photograph her while she was sneezing.  I like how you can see her little pink tongue, though. 

I call this pose "The Bambi."  She looks very somber because the hunter just shot her mom.

In the end you just take something funky and abstract, because you figure you're safe if you don't include her eyes, her mouth, or most of her body. 

As you can see, Leia gets plenty of attention.  Goal achieved.

Moving on to this week's goals ... As I said yesterday, we're going on a small local-ish trip to a waterpark, so that pretty much takes care of the "letting things slide" part of my SuperIma goals.  (Waterpark, slides, get it?  No but really I meant "let things slide" in the figurative sense, because we're going to be on vacation.) 

Also this week I'm going to try my best to be out of the house as much as humanly possible, because being in my house stresses me out.  Messes get made faster than I can clean them up, and that is maddening. 

The end -- and now it's not even Sunday anymore.