Of routines and other things

A good friend of mine who writes a blog wrote a post about routine, which I read this morning. She's doing the stay-at-home-mom thing and planning to homeschool and is working hard to create a safe haven of domesticity for her son. I read her blog entry and felt pulled into the general coziness of it, but also felt myself screaming "No no no no!" on the inside.

I am not really a routine-based person. My mother is, and it was one of the things that made me most unhappy as a little ENFP child (raised by an ISTJ - you do the...math?). She was about realism and established routine - the bathroom gets cleaned on certain days, certain days are for laundry... I remember not feeling secure because of it, but limited. As I got older it became a goal to break routine. Could I get her out of the house and make her miss her bathroom cleaning? Hmmm....

My work as a professor means that I do have a routine...that lasts 15 weeks. And then it changes to something else. Some semesters I wake early, others I wake late. Sometimes Liftoff Guy and I can carpool to work, some semesters we can't. I can handle the routines because I know they won't last. They'll change eventually into the big open opportunity of winter break or summer vacation, from solid back into liquid. If I find myself establishing a routine at home, I'll break it on purpose. In the mornings I weigh the cat, give the cat her medicine and make coffee. But sometimes I'll make the coffee first and do the next bit while it's brewing. Sometimes I'll weigh her and then give her the medicine and THEN get the coffee going. If I put the water in the coffee maker too many times in a row and save the grinding for afterward, I'll find myself mixing that up. I try to change things all the time.

This means that it's going to be tricky when Liftoff Boy arrives. Babies are supposed to love routine, thrive on it. Well, routine tends to make Mommy miserable, so there will have to be some compromises. I think LG is less routiney than he could be. Maybe we'll have a flexible little boy who enjoys mixing things up and not knowing what comes next.

Despite this, I do feel warm and domesticated here. We usually eat dinner together and sometimes lunch. Last night LG ordered pizza and we settled in with that and watched a video about the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" that sent 1930s Americans into a total panic. Then he went to read the paper while I watched a favorite guilty pleasure, Zoolander.

As for Liftoff Boy, I began working on a baby registry yesterday and have been reading lots about the colic and the "fourth trimester". Since motion seems to be so important I began thinking about the baby carrier by a famous maker that we got on a famous auction site, but also about mechanized sleeping things that move babies around. I found moving sleeping things on the registry site and then lo and behold, the next section of the book I'm reading was about them too. In a positive way. LB is going to get lots of love, but he's also going to have some interesting techy experiences, from mechanical sleeping arrangements (if he's colicky) to pumped milk. I suppose infant care is going to be very routine based, but I'm sure I can mix it up to some extent... I'll figure out how at the time.