Time for another Day in a Life! I always do this on a Monday, but I can't honestly say this is a typical Monday. At least by the afternoon. You'll see.

Important things to know: we live in Minnesota, the kids are now 6 (John), 4 (Therese), and 14 months (Felicity). we're homeschooling the 1st grader and preschooler, I am home with them during the day and pursue theater by night. Pursue in the "audition", not necessarily "doing", sense. 

Here we go!

6:30 - Wake up, take temp

7:00 - The baby is still asleep, so I have coffee and read the paper while the big kids have breakfast

7:15 - Matt leaves for work. Biking to work made more pleasant by our freakishly warm December (for Minnesota).

7:30 - I assume the baby must be awake by now, just really quiet, but she's STILL ASLEEP. Big kids are not quiet coming upstairs to get dressed, so I grab the groggy baby and bring her downstairs to eat.

8:00 - Bring Felicity back upstairs for changing. The big kids are playing in the day nursery now, so I set the baby free after she's dressed to go join them. I get myself dressed and start morning prayer time.

8:15 - Baby comes to find me. I bring her downstairs to do morning chores with me.

8:30 - Load of laundry started and air drying dishes from last night put away. I let the baby play in the library so I can put away the diapers that I washed yesterday. Tell the big kids I'm setting a timer for five minutes and they have to beat the clock to clean up.

8:40 - I've unwrapped John's new twin size IKEA mattress (finally graduating from his toddler mattress!) and put away diapers. The kids have generally controlled the toy crazy and fixed their blankets, so I'll call it good.

8:45 - Give Felicity her milk, then change her and put her down for morning nap. She doesn't always sleep in the morning, but her hypermobility means she tires out a lot faster than most kids - so a morning rest is typically still needed.

9:00 - Put on Magic School Bus for the big kids so I can do my weekly planning. I'm wrapping up a big audition weekend with a final audition tonight, so I didn't get around to any planning over the weekend.

The best part of a roll top desk is I don't have to see my papers when I'm not working on something!

9:30 - Switch laundry to dryer.

9:35 - Remembered this is an Ember Week (thanks planning time!) Post to Facebook about it just in case anyone else forgot about it in the pre-Christmas busy.

9:40 - Also see I have an Everyday Ediths post due later this week on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Decide to get started on that by looking up what those are...

9:45 - School boxes are down and we hit the books! I printed out syllabi to the end of the semester last week and told the kids they can work as fast as they want to the finish, as long as they do it well. John is one lesson away from being done with math. Therese really finished her semester a while ago, but I haven't told her that. She LOVES school.

9:50 - Kids are going well on school. Time to get the baby up and changed before her physical therapist arrives.

10:00 - Felicity's PT is here! She is doing once a week in-home therapy visits through a school district program. Minnesota is amazing.

10:20 - Attempt at keeping kids going on school while the therapist is here is not going well. Send kids upstairs to play.

10:30 - Big kids still rowdy. They get bundled up and sent outside to play.

11:00 - Therapy over! Kids come back in and I get lunch going. Mac and Cheese Shells + steamed carrots for the kids and salad for me. I have a moment, so I pre-fill the pasta pot with water and put the lid on it for dinner prep.

11:20 - Lunch is served.

11:35 - Everyone is mostly done eating. Read aloud time!

Current read aloud. Not as beloved as All-of-a-Kind Family for us.

11:45 - Felicity is not content to play on the floor or sit on the couch with us anymore. I go put her down for nap a little early. She's normally more tired on therapy days.

Reading couch selfie!

11:50 - Back downstairs. Reading time resumes.

Therese insisted I include this one.

12:04 - Finished our chapter. Time for Therese to go for nap and for John to finish his math speed drills.

12:10 - Therese is in bed (No tears or drama! Miracle!) I get John going again while I start the kitchen clean up. I had set some herbal tea to seep during lunch, so I strain that and sip on it while I work.

12:22 - Dishwasher unloaded. John almost done.

12:30 - Dishwasher re-loaded and John is on his last drill. I love having the school table in the kitchen!

12:35 - Getting ready for Phonics time. Put the kettle on for tea.

1:00 - Successful completion of a Phonics lesson earns him an episode of Star Wars Clone Wars. Our deal is one lesson for one episode. I heard Therese moving around upstairs during the lesson so I listen for her while I bring up the clean laundry and start folding.

Star Wars is serious business here.

1:07 - As suspected, Therese was up and roving. Remind her of our plans to go to the Y after nap. Laundry is folded so I head back downstairs after re-tucking her into bed.

1:10 - Tea time! I'm reading A Secular Age right now. Very slowly. It's a tome.

1:16 - My finger joints have just about had it with me so I put a heat pack on those while I read. #selfcare

1:57 - John is putting his math skills to use counting down the exact minutes until 2:00. 2pm is when snack is a possibility and quiet time is no longer enforced in our house. Hopefully the girls will be up in not too long so we can make moves toward the Y.

2:00 - John joyfully gets a snack (pretzels). Duolingo time for me! I'm on the French course. My speaking is still weak, but my reading is greatly improved.

2:08 - Therese is up! She join in the pretzel snack.

2:20 - Felicity is up! Heard her babbling. She wakes up full of thoughts. I get her changed and start packing for the Y.

2:25 - Send John out to get the mail.

2:30 - Out the door!

2:35 - Kids are all buckled in the car and... I can't find my phone. I consider going without it, but decide that might be tempting fate.

2:45 - After searching the house twice, and the car once, I finally find my phone hidden on the side of my desk. NOW we're off.

2:47 - Realize I should probably get gas now so I'm ready to head straight to my audition after dinner. There's a station on the way so this should be a quick stop.

2:50 - For some reason all the other cars have pulled into the first pumps, and effectively blocked all the others. I have to go around and do a parallel parking maneuver into the one slot I can find.

2:52 - The pump is defective. It keeps switching off every 1/2 - 1 gallon. Even though I know the tank is almost empty. I close out and restart only to remember that the discount I had was used up in the faulty transaction.

2:55 - I call it quits and decide to fight this fight another day. I have antsy kids in the car and I really want to get a workout and some stretching in today.

3:10 - At the Y. My kids have the Kids Spot all to themselves. They're making construction paper mosaic gingerbread men today. Therese is thrilled.

3:15 - Finally getting to my workout!

When I got on here and pushed "go" it set my time goal to an hour. I laughed and reminded the machine of who was using it.

3:50 - Not as long of a workout as I would have liked, but I need to get home and start dinner.

3:55 - I go to pick up the kids and they don't want to leave. I swear they love me.

4:15 - Home! I turn on the burner for the ready to go pasta pot. Pat myself on the back for remembering that afternoon Kirby is much less put together than morning Kirby. Dinner plan is open ended pasta something, so we'll see what I create!

4:30 - Water is close to boiling. I settle on making a beefed up pasta sauce with rigatoni noodles. I use up leftover taco meat and frozen broccoli, plus a diced onion, garlic, and a few spices to jazz up my jarred pasta sauce.

4:45 - Matt's home! The baby insists he drop everything to hold her. Daddy's girl is a real thing.

Then I stopped taking notes because things started to go sideways. Here's the gist.

Felicity wants to eat the pasta, but only if Daddy feeds her. 

John loves the pasta, but Therese has sudden, overwhelming, existential angst about: using a fork, eating a bite, knowing which bite to eat, sitting, and how anyone looks at her. D R A M A ensues.

After much cajoling, yelling, time outs, hugs, and re-starts Therese finally eats dinner about an hour after we started.

But I feel nauseous. Really nauseous. That taco meat better not have been bad. I do the math and conclude there is no reason to think it would be rancid. It smelled fine and was only a few days old. Images of being up at 2am with vomiting kids fill my head anyway.

Matt has put on Lord of the Rings for the big kids while he finishes cleaning up. He is hosting a book group at our house tonight, so it needs to happen. At least we succeeded in keeping most messes contained this afternoon (yet another reason I love going to the Y.)

I've started sipping ginger ale, but have to conclude that tonight's audition is looking ill advised.

Matt tells me to go rest and that he's got it. I know he really does got it, but I still feel totally crappy about this whole evening. I put myself in bed with a Harry Potter book and try to distract myself from the nausea. 

Matt gets the baby bathed and put down, gets the bigs to bed, and tells me to feel better on his way back downstairs to play host. He's kind of amazing.

I finally start feeling better about 8:30, but the auditions end at 9:00 and it's unlikely I could make it there in time. I console myself by remembering that Anne Frank isn't really a show where I'm likely to get cast in a strong role anyway. It's fine. I'm fine. 

I scroll through Netflix trying to find a feel better distraction show, but come up short.

An unknown Minneapolis number calls me. I let it go to voicemail assuming it's some medical appointment reminder call. Whoever it was left a voicemail, so I check it real fast. 

It's from the director who I auditioned for on Saturday.
She wants to talk about my audition.
There is zero reason for a director to personally call an actor unless there is casting news. I try and call her back immediately, but get sent straight to voicemail.

I remind myself she has a whole cast to call, if that's what she's doing, so I should give it a few minutes.

I give it exactly three minutes and I call her again.

She wants to offer me a role.
Not a callback. A role. Even the role I wanted!
I accept the offer and try to sound cool, happy, and calm all at the same time. I probably failed, but whatever, first impression time is over anyway.

I roll out of bed and walk into the living room filled with the new book group people. I think for five seconds I might be able to tell Matt quietly about the news without interrupting the meeting, but it's clearly at the tail end of things and everyone is doing the polite Minnesota thing of trying to include the new person who just walked in.
So I announce it to everybody! Varying levels of excitement, confusion, and congratulations float up from the mostly male crowd. About what I expected. I go hang out in the library with the one female attendee plus baby.

After the book group leaves, Matt and I powwow what this casting means for family logistics. Mostly ok. Figuring out how to get John to Catechism classes on Wednesday nights is the biggest hurtle, but we'll figure something out.

For now I'm just so grateful to have a bone. Getting callbacks is a nice reassurance that I'm not just completely un-talented, but, over a year into being serious about auditioning in the Twin Cities, it's soooooo much better to have an honest to goodness show to put on the resume.

Got to bed sometime around 11pm. 

I tried to pick a normal day, y'all. God laughed at me.

Previous Day in a Life posts:

January 2018

December 2016

April 2016

Finding a New Beautiful in Postpartum

Life with three kids - it's a turning point. Three is when there are more kids than adults, more needs than time, and the list of "shoulds" ("I should be getting dinner ready by now." "I should be reading more with the big kids.") reaches heights never before seen as a family of four.

I am a type A person. An overdoer. A constant planner. But even my hat juggling skills are being put to the test.

The temptation to hide in my house and pretend I got this is STRONG. Because I DO "got this" to some extent.
I can get the laundry done (even with all the cloth diaper laundry).
I can manage to feed everyone (even with their insistence that three meals a day are necessary).
I can even manage to homeschool since it directs the energy and attention of the big kids.
....but I can do it a lot better, and as a less stressed mom, if I let people help.

For the past weeks since Matt went back to work, we have been blessed to have postpartum doulas with our family once or twice a week. For someone with my personality, it is a helpful and a humbling experience to have the postpartum doulas here. It means allowing someone to step and and do tasks as good, or better, than I.

It also lets me see that, even with the extra set of hands, the list of tasks does not run out. In some odd way it is freeing to know that even if I had two of me it STILL would not be all done. That list of shoulds would be just as long, and no amount of efficiency would allow me to plow through them all to my satisfaction.

Ultimately the postpartum doulas are my scaffold while we come out of postpartum survival mode and continue to move forward into the beauty of being a family of five. Earlier this year I wrote about the need to value myself enough to move out of survival mode and into the beautiful.
The beauty of friendship.
The beauty of faith.
The beauty of art.
The beauty of connection.
Postpartum is an opportunity to find a new beautiful. 

This is the sixth postpartum week for me. These past weeks I have been preparing to return to the arts I love and activity I crave.
But auditioning postpartum is tough.
Returning to an exercise routine and ballet is tough.
The temptation to just let it go and not put myself out there to be rejected over and over again is high. I don't LIKE being rejected, but rejection is necessary to have the opportunity to perform the art I love. I will be more authentically myself if I am vulnerable enough to go through the (likely) rejections.

In Which I Finally Get Cast!

If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram you've already heard this news, but here it is again, I FINALLY GOT CAST Y'ALL!
After two pretty horrendous theater auditions, third times the charm. I will be playing Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest with Actors Ensemble of Berkeley! We open on January 20th in Berkeley. If you're in the area, you're invited to come see it!

Thursday night was our first read through.

Yes, we're rehearsing in a mattress store. It works surprisingly well.

I cannot say how excited I am to work with a cast where everyone is more experienced than me! I learned in Ballet that it's best to stand by the most talented dancer in class. I, in comparison, will look terrible for a while, but it's the fastest way to pick up those little tips and tricks that are so subtle no one would even think about them. I'm essentially doing that in theater now.

The audition process can be arduous and full of emotional turmoil. I normally go through three stages (so to speak): perseverance, waiting, and doubt.

Perseverance comes in for just getting it together to audition: picking a monologue or song (or both), rehearsing your piece(s), researching the productions, script, characters, production team, theater group, really anything and everything to give me a better idea of what I'm walking into. If I make it to callbacks, those are often long and full of redirections, re-imaginings, and turnarounds.

Then the waiting begins. This is the worst part for me.  It's so hard not to be running the film of the audition in my head about what I did wrong, what I did right, what could be better. I normally take this time to start a new book, pick something I can improve on within a week (like spotting my turns for Ballet), and intentionally do something fun and different (often this means date night!).

Eventually we reach doubt. I'm more Type A then basically everyone else in the performing arts (except ballet people - we seem to share this quirk). I hit my "no one-liked-me-enough-to-even-let-me-know-its-a-no" wall of despair well before it has probably occurred to the casting team to email people. At this point I often start messaging my theater friends about my audition woes, and the conversation always goes something like this:

Me: "I must have been terrible, and they hated me, and what does 'we'll let you know next week' even MEAN on a SUNDAY!!"

Friend: "They'll probably let you know soon. I've had shorter notice when I got a part."

Me: "Oh. Probably. You're right. I'm fine now."

Eventually, the news comes. Up until now that was often bad news so I went and did my usual stuff to deal with rejection. This time is was good news! There was a scramble of texting husband, checking calendars, changing a few plans, and getting to accept a role!

Now I'm throwing myself into specific character building and role research for Cecily. My homework this week is to watch British television (diction study) so I get to watch Downton Abbey and call it work. ;)

*******************

Here's My Sunday Best!

Dress (worn as skirt): Kohls
Sweater: stolen from husband's closet
Shoes: Target
Belt: JCPenney 

It's Call Back Day!

Really it's a lot of things today, but I'm perhaps most excited about call backs for the Importance of Being Earnest this afternoon!

It's my first call back since starting to audition again.
We're talking the first time since high school.

Some of you might recall how my first audition went....

And a lot of this:

But third time's a charm!

If I go through and get cast, awesome. I adore British humor and this script is chock full of the good stuff.

If not, at least I got further along in this process than I have done thus far.

Progress!

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Here's My Sunday Best:

Dress: Kohls
Shoes: Payless
Headband: Actually a magnetic necklace!

Dealing with Rejection

I had my second theater audition this week, and my second rejection without a call back.

Doing anything in the performing arts means gaining some necessary skills in rejection. There will always be someone better. Someone prettier, more talented, stronger, better technique, better range - you name it really.

I have found that I have a very established pattern in dealing with rejections. It starts with what I don't do.

I don't push it out of my head

Even though this is counter to some other advice (to "forget about it and move on") I mentally run through the whole experience again. If there is something there that wasn't ideal, I need to notice so I don't keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

In auditions you're nervous and it feels like time is moving very quickly. In order to slow it down and really see what was going on, I need this second look. 

I don't get hung up on the whys

While looking back to see where you can improve your auditions is a good thing, it's not helpful to get hung up on the whys of rejection. Often, it was not really about your performance - it was about the needs of the company and cast.

Maybe I was too young, or too old, or too short, or had the wrong hair color, or they had enough people who fit my description already. None of those things are really within my control - nor do I want to change them. Best to consider that part a wash and focus on improving the things I can improve.

So enough with the don'ts. Here is what I do.

I do throw myself back into disciplines

I like to look back through the last few weeks and see if there are any disciplines that have fallen by the wayside a bit. Did I fudge that morning pilates routine? Skipping taking vitamins? Decided I would say that rosary later, but never did? This is when I climb back on that horse!

The relevance to the audition is not what matters. It is taking something that you had previously let slip, taking it back up, and trying again. It gives me an achievable success in the wake of a failure.

I do tell people 

I will update people who knew I was auditioning about the rejection. This is partly because it is polite not to leave people hanging, but it is also to normalize the failure. Not getting a call back is not some deep dark secret. Allowing my friends and family (and now y'all, lovely readers) into my failures is what allows me to fully celebrate with them my successes.

I keep looking

Even if I really do not want to, I keep looking at audition listings every couple of days. It is good to remind myself that there are other shows, companies, and schools out there for me to consider. This was not a once in a lifetime shot.

Did I leave anything out? Do you handle rejection completely differently? I would love to hear it!

How NOT To Do An Audition

Last week I had my first ever real musical theater audition!

It went.....

Terrible.

I was terrible.

The kind of terrible where I left the theater laughing a bit because it really was just that ludicrously bad.

So, what exactly happened?

Kicker: I stopped and asked to start again.

Instead of just making do with what happened, my brain switched into rehearsal mode and got all perfectionist on me.

But theater people are (almost disconcertedly) nice.

The whole audition panel is like:

That was nice, but definitely not enough to convince my voice to get un-nervoused after that fiasco.

So needless to say, that's not going to be happening.

Brightside: found out the rehearsal schedule would almost certainly have conflicted with dance rehearsals for the May performance. So, in the end, probably a good thing it's not going forward.

I learned a lot from this.

I want to do a lot more training, and figure out a way to get reliable rehearsals pre-audition.

A lot of this is happening. 

Barre is great for distraction and for being able to make discernible improvement on my own.