Marissa Turns Five Years Old

Okay, technically she turns five on Monday, but today was her big birthday bash. And BIG it was. Marissa has a lot of friends, we invited 18 kids (not sure how that happened, LOL) and all 18 came. That's 18 four and five-year-olds, all at Chuck E. Cheese. It was quite the sight. I was really glad we had the party in the morning, because we basically had the whole place to ourselves while her party was going on. It was exhausting keeping track of all those kids but it was fun. We had to be careful not to call it a "birthday party" or Marissa would get upset. Yes, there's a story there. ;) I think it was my fault. I told her one time a few weeks ago that she was growing up too fast or something like that and she took it to heart. She's decided she doesn't want to turn five, she wants to stay four because Mommy doesn't want her to get bigger. Sigh! I tried in the past week to change her mind before the party but she wouldn't have it. I tried telling her she couldn't get birthday presents unless it was her birthday and she responded with "they're party presents", LOL. She had an answer for everything. I told her I was okay with her turning five and that I wanted her to turn five, and that being five would be fun. I don't know, I guess I'll just wait it out until she decides it's okay to be five years old. And THEN silly me forgot to tell the staff at Chuck E. Cheese about her "birthday aversion", and Chuck E. came out and started dancing and singing "Happy Birthday" to Marissa and the tears started. I told them she wanted to sing "Happy Party", LOL... She quickly recovered before the song was over, thank goodness. I have to be careful what I say from now on, she's a sensitive girl... Like her Mom. ;)

After the exhausting party I still managed to go for a run tonight... It didn't go as great as I would have liked, but it was okay. I didn't have enough energy to do the whole session. I'm going to try increasing to four times a week. Some beginner training programs say you should run three times a week and some say four, so I think I'll try four and see if it makes any difference. I'm not improving as fast as I'd like.

The novel is slow-going, I have to admit. I think the story is progressing okay, but I'm not spending enough time on it if I want to finish the 50,000 words on time. In the past week, Marissa's birthday became a priority, and situations with friends, and other life commitments. I'm still determined to catch up though...

A sea of self-doubt

November so far:
1.16 km ran
5097 words written
raw food - (don't even ask, LOL)

Reading back my post from November 1st, I can scarcely remember what it felt like to have the month start off so well. On day one I had a good running session, and also wrote over 2,000 words of my novel, which is more than the daily quota to reach the month's goal of 50,000. I'm bummed to have to report that things went a little downhill from there. Thursday and Friday I wrote zero words. Yikes. I was having kind of an emotional time of it. The only way I can explain it was that I was wallowing in a sea of self-doubt, and I lost motivation because of it. I fell into a "my novel sucks...woe is me...there's no way I can do this" attitude. But luckily I seem to have snapped out of it...mostly. I've come to realize that obviously this is only the first draft of my novel and it's supposed to have issues, LOL. There are a lot of things I like about what I've written so far so I'm going to focus on that, and make notes of what I can do to improve things on the rewrites later. Which is really the whole point of NaNoWriMo anyway. Saturday night I went to a local coffee shop and wrote about another 1800 words. I was very focused and it felt really good to have the words pouring out again. Tonight I went to a write-in with other local NaNoWriMo enthusiasts that I'd met at the Kick-Off and wrote some more, then had a nice chat with one of the other writers afterwards. THEN came home and wrote more, for a total of about 1300 today. I'm happy to at least be back in the swing of things and the novel is moving along. I hope to write at least 3000 words tomorrow to do some catching up. I'm also really itching to go out for a run tomorrow as my running kind of took a backseat this weekend as I snapped myself out of my writing slump. ;)