I have kids.  It is school holidays here, and whenever this happens, I spend a little time lost.  My youngest is 9 now, so it’s not a onerous as it once was, but I still find working at home with kids a rough stretch.

I think it’s also the nature of the stage of the thesis that I’m at now.  I’m 8 months in, and still mostly reading and making mildly coherent notes.  My other main job in the first year is to write the confirmation document and presentation, which I’m starting to outline now (and when I say outline, I mean it: I have headings.  That’s it.).  So my work is a lot of thinking about stuff like the nature of being a person, what is an adult, or how complex social security administrative law works (I’ll have to get back to myself on that one!), and this is kind of hard, even if your kid is mostly self sufficient.  Even if she mostly does for her herself, she and her friends sure are noisy!  And seem to need food an awful lot.

And if Daelle is home, it seems impossible!  There’s something about it that means I find it hard to divide my attention.  I’m not sure if it’s a something I should work on and try strategies to “fix”, or if it’s something that just IS and I should accept.  Having a profoundly disabled child is not just physical but is a mostly emotional labour, and maybe my thinking bits (a technical term) are too taken up with that and there’s no room for hard thinking too.

Of course, there’s the issue of my topic being at times very very close to home.  Which is another entry (or ten) to come…