Books, Playtime, and More Books

I’m feeling quite proud of myself to be blogging again already only ten days after my last post. Although by the time I finish writing this, several more days may have passed. The baby’s asleep and my son is watching Netflix. Yeah, it’s one of those kind of days. That makes it sound like this is an unusual turn of events, but who am I kidding? Every day is one of those kind of days. My son won’t go to sleep until around 10:00 p.m. (he’s in his room by around 7:30 p.m., but he doesn’t fall asleep until much, much later) and the baby is awake every few hours all night long. Mama needs a minute and Netflix is there.

Before we devolved into the Netflix Zone, we spent some quality time together reading. His favorite book this week is A Couch for Llama by Leah Gilbert. We read it a lot today, which I was really excited about because he has only been wanting to read Harry Potter lately and I’ve been missing picture books. I also managed to get a craft project underway with him—a snake made from toilet paper tubes. He only painted one of the tubes before saying that he was too tired to do the rest. By tired I think he meant bored. So I carved him a stamp out of a sweet potato and he used that to make diamond prints on the rest of the tubes. Maybe we’ll even finish the snake tomorrow.

Last week (at least I think it was last week, but the days and weeks and months have been blurring together lately, so who knows for sure), we did a cool art project with shaving cream and food coloring. It came out really nice, but I’m not sure I want to do the project again because the shaving cream smells soooo strong. I tried to find unscented shaving cream, but apparently that’s not really a thing. The pictures reeked so much afterwards that I sprinkled them with baking soda for a few days in a row to try to get the scent off of them (it helped but you can still smell it).

My son loves to build and I was wondering if I should look for some sort of a new building set for him when I suddenly remembered a rainy day activity that I used to have available in my classroom. So I bought a 100 pack of plastic cups (which in my head I still call “keg cups” despite having not had a beer from a keg in a plastic cup in well over a decade). The idea is to build something out of the cups and then knock them down. We’ve had a blast building castles and other structures, and then devising unique ways to destroy them. We’ve tried blowing, throwing paper airplanes, launching foam rockets, and rolling a ball, among other things. My favorite was one-on-one garage soccer with cup castles for goals.

On the writing front, I finally finished the back matter for two picture books that I’ve been working on and now my agent is getting ready to submit to editors. I’m really excited but also feeling more nervous than usual because everything in the publishing world has been grinding to a halt. Both stories are uplifting so hopefully that will inspire someone to want to acquire them in these challenging times.

I was idly Googling the name of one of my books a couple of weeks ago and discovered to my surprise that it was showing up on Goodreads, Amazon and other places that books are available for sale. I went from giddy to horrified in the time it took me to click onto one of the sites because I realized that my name was wrong (Serena Allen rather than Serena Gingold Allen) as well as the publication date. But my editor got it sorted out quickly, so I’m back to feeling giddy whenever I think about it. It’s like real, solid proof that my books are coming out next year. Since my books are now listed I was able to set up my Goodreads author account which helped me to feel even more legitimate.

Oh, and if you were wondering, I did finish writing this post in one day! I feel so accomplished.

What I’m reading: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie. I recently bought a bunch of Christie’s books because they were on sale for Kindle. I read through most of her works when I was a kid/teenager and it seemed like it would be fun to reread them now. I’m only a few chapters in and hoping to not be disappointed, because I’ve found that there are many things I liked as a kid that I do not like as much as an adult.