Thanks, Steffie, KrazyKat, sugargremlin, pete-puma, and nodopamine! (Did I get everybody?)
KrazyKat, I hope your on-pins-and-needles phase passes as smoothly as it can! Hang in there!
Steffie, you are right about my husband; he’s amazing. I’m betting he’s a bit relieved as well, as in, maybe now he won’t have to do it all by himself! 
Yesterday on the meds was…interesting. As in, is this really the lowest dose? Got lots done and felt really positive about it. The best example: There’s an extra chair by the kitchen table that has had a big pile of books and papers on it since mid-June; the last day of school, to be precise. Yesterday morning I started going through the stack and putting things away, and in the middle of the pile were a couple of writing journals my sons had been doing at school.
Now, normally, when I see something like this, I’d have started reading it, and then started beating myself up for not being more attentive to the kids’ schoolwork all year long….or maybe just felt guilty about how long the thing had been sitting there…or whatever. But I’d have been caught up in my own head and then I’d have quit the project.
But this time, I just grabbed my sons for a cuddle on the couch, and we lay under a blanket and read the journals together, and I complimented them on their great writing – because it really was pretty awesome overall – and we talked about the great word choices in the poems (“Teal is a narrow lake”), we talked about the memories evoked by the stories (“I remember all those crabs on the beach, too!”), we went over the details (“What’s this word here? ‘Quit’? Is that the word you meant?”) and just basically did all that sort of involved-parent schoolwork stuff that I normally hand over to my husband. We had an absolutely lovely time cuddling and reading –
And then, when we were done with the journals, I actually put them away, and went back and KEPT WORKING ON THE PILE TILL IT WAS DONE!
To me that was the most amazing part: that I was able to interrupt a task for a few minutes, and then, return to it and see it through to completion.
Here’s hoping there’s more of that to come!
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