"Had we but world enough, and time..."*

I was thinking this morning about how hard it is to do all the things I need to do each day. My to-do list is often left unfinished, as everyday chores, like cooking and laundry and cleaning and running after children, take up most of my time, leaving little for the other things that really need to be done around here, like organizing and weeding out clothes that no longer fit and attempting to unpack more of the boxes I put in the basement when I moved here years ago. Fitting in writing time is sometimes an even bigger challenge, but it's an important one--and also the topic of today's 100 words:

As a writer and a mom, one of the things I struggle most with is finding the time to write. I stay at home with my two very young kids, something I wouldn't trade for anything. I do some writing early in the morning before they get up and some late at night after they're in their beds; however, in both cases, I'm pretty tired and often unfocused. But to paraphrase Tim Gunn on Project Runway, I make it work. I have to. If I have to sacrifice something--sleep--to follow my dream, that's what I'll do.

*Opening lines of "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell

Baby!

This morning's 100 words:

As I write this today, my very good friend is having surgery, a planned C-section. She doesn't know if the baby is a boy or a girl, and all of us--most of all her, her husband, and their two daughters--are eager to find out. She's chosen names but hasn't revealed those yet, either.

Last night I dreamed that her husband called to tell me that the baby was a boy named Jacob. There was static, and I couldn't make out the middle name. When I asked him to repeat himself, he hung up on me.

UPDATE: My friend texted me around 4 p.m. to tell me that her son, Wyatt James, had been born!

Another dream

This morning's 100 words:

I had another weird dream last night, although it turned out to be a lot easier to understand than the one I had the night before. This time, my family and I were in a huge house--definitely not ours--and we were getting ready to leave. I was going crazy, though, because I couldn't get my watch, a wind-up wristwatch that my parents had bought me when I was twelve, to stop beeping. It turned out, of course, that my real-life wake-up alarm, my cell phone, had been going off for quite some time.

I guess all these late NaNo nights are starting to make me sleep-deprived--even more so than I was before November started! My current word count is 23,762, but I'm sure I'll attempt a few more before I go to bed tonight. My story is pretty all over the place right now, but I'm excited to have written so many words in such a short period of time.

How's NaNo been going for the rest of you?