A Quiet Week

Yesterday G and I dropped the kids off at my mom's campground (RV park sort of thing). I'll pick them up Friday afternoon after office visits.
While having the house to ourselves is initially exciting, it's also just too darned quiet. Yesterday we ran little errands at our leisure, going in and out stores without any pleas to: Buy me something, please! We picked up chicken feed, looked at eye glass frames, went to a resale shop, went to the bagel store, and even test drove a car we had no intention of buying!
We ate out, and then took a long walk around the nearby empty campus. A lovely evening.

This morning I'm eating my bagel and drinking my coffee (hot coffee!) in peace. No one has dragged me away from my breakfast to assemble an action figure's accessories, or to put their hair into an ornate American Girl style ponytail, or to leave my own hot food to make food for someone else.

Lovely as it is, I feel like I should be doing something constructive. Like I should be painting a kid's bedroom, or organizing a closet. Right now though, I think I'll overcome that feeling by climbing back into bed and jumping back into my thick novel.
Later today I have my own prenatal to attend, and then a business meeting. Easy peasy.

Recommended Summer Reading

The Midwife, by Jennifer Worth

I just finished this book last week and loved every page of it. Jennifer Worth started as a young midwife in the early 1950s in the very poor, impoverished streets and hovels of East End London. These are the hard years following WWII. Folks are living with huge families in squalid two room flats. The government had billed most of the buildings as condemned, yet it was another 15-20 years before folks were actually evacuated and the buildings knocked down. Midwives and nurses were much respected during the time. Because most women were still having home births at the time and hospital birth generally had less favorable outcomes than home births, midwives were seen as life savers. And indeed they were. What I liked best about the book is how she describes how to sit on your hands and wait as a birth attendant. Over management can lead to disastrous results, so she practiced the way that out-of-hospital midwives are still taught today. Essentially, watch and wait and trust. Our bodies are wise.