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.
Hello Serena!! I loved reading your blog 💗we miss seeing you guys!! -Tamela
ReplyDeleteMiss you too, Tamela! I made French toast the other day and I was thinking about you and that epic French toast you made! Thanks so much for reading and I’m glad you enjoyed it.
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