This is about the first time all week I've had time to catch my breath. Work was a bit crazy earlier on, and at home Drew's been keeping us both busy -- he's decided he doesn't like to go to bed until 11 or 12 at night. Ouch.

I think he just takes a while to wind down, and since I don't get to see him much during the week, I take the opportunity to hold him and try to get him to sleep. Last night, Lizzie was so tired out (they've been running errands during the day, which tires them both out) she went to bed 'round 8, and I had Drew Sleep Duty.

So there we were, watching UNC tromp all over Georgia Tech in basketball, juggling Drew on my lap, sometimes quiet, mostly yelling. Man, the little guy has quite the set of lungs. And he gets MAD. I finally broke down and gave him some of the bottle his mom had pumped earlier this week (oh, did I mention he likes to eat about every HOUR?), and he still wasn't satisfied.

What did the trick, about 10 p.m. or so, was when I turned on our on-its-very-last-legs dishwasher. Surrounded by the roar of rusty machinery and swishing water and suds, Drew was asleep within two minutes. Little turkey.

So I put him to bed, walked the dog, and got back to speed-reading my SF novel before I sent it out.

There's something nice about skimming over 460 pages of fiction that you've created, even if you're not reading every single word, even if you're just flipping through and coming back to scenes you'd written a long time ago, feeling a weird sort of nostalgia for them. Or, even better, I enjoyed coming across a scene or an interaction between characters or even a description and saying, "Damn, that's pretty good." Sort of like meeting an old friend again and having a great chat with them over a couple beers and a plate of wings. Even if the wings, the beers, and the friend were all created by me and me alone...

So now I'm looking forward to doing the same thing to my baseball novel. I'm going to see if I can slip away for a couple hours on Sunday (yes, it's safe -- no Tar Heel basketball game that afternoon!) and re-read the entire manuscript of The All Nations Team. I'm getting more and more excited about that book, the more I think about it. I may head to the library and read -- they have one of those "Quiet Rooms (and We Mean It)" -- and maybe find some good books to use for research as well.

We shall see if we can fit that into our weekend schedule. We've got a dishwasher to replace first, though given its effectiveness with Drew Sleep Duty, maybe we should suck it up and put up with cloudy glasses and gritty dishes... Later!

(Oh, and forgot to note -- a new entry on the Novel Blog is up! Things sort of twisted and turned in a nice way at the end of this chapter. More to come tomorrow, we hope!)