Massive understatement time: Things change when you have babies. I’m very lucky in that I have two pretty easygoing ones, but obviously we’re still working out our routines. There are some days when bedtime (for the adults) rolls around and I think “What did I even DO all day?”
But! It’s not all baby, all the time around here. We’ve been doing a decent job of keeping up with the DVR, and as I mentioned in a recent post, we managed to knock out the third season of Orange is the New Black in a timely fashion. I’ve been knitting here and there, and the heat is a contributing factor of why I haven’t been doing that as much lately. AND! I’ve even been writing a bit. Not as much as I did pre-babies (or, let’s be real here, pre-pregnancy), and there are definitely days where I don’t write a single word, but still! There has been some writing!
One baby has a tendency to be a little fussier than her sister and sometimes demands to be held, as babies have been known to do. Sometimes that happens just as I’m getting on a good writing roll, but hey, three-month-olds aren’t known for their timing. The other night, I had just gotten into the swing of things when Miss Fussypants started squawking, and it was my turn to pick her up. I’m getting pretty damn awesome at doing things while holding babies at the same time…but I was up to a sex scene. Awkward.
I think I’ve mentioned before on here that I’m the type of writer who needs to write in order. I thought about jumping to another scene while the baby wiggled around and fell asleep on me, but it didn’t happen. Oh well, I thought. I’ll continue it/finish up tomorrow.
Then, naturally, the same exact thing happened at the same time. The words had just started flowing when one of the little people needed my attention. (The same one, if you’re interested.) So I picked her up, got her snuggled on me, looked at my computer screen with the cursor blinking expectantly….
And I did it. I wrote a sex scene while holding my infant daughter.
Okay, okay, plenty of parents have done worse. (The two of us have probably already done worse in the past three months.) I’m not ashamed of what I write, and it’s not like she’s going to remember it anyway. And it was a very “healthy” sex scene – filled with enthusiastic consent and contraception and all those good things I hope to teach my daughters about. (When they’re 40. Just kidding.)
As I said, things change. We’ll find our new normal eventually. And I probably still have a couple years before I have to start being really careful about what words of mine they can see on the computer screen.