Just in time for it to fall apart

So yesterday I had my first class and.. to be honest, I'm a bit overwhelmed. The syllabus seems manageable, thank god. A research project, a report on the situation at the local school district, a few response papers. I think I can handle the coursework. But the reality is that I haven't been thinking about my field since I stopped working over a year ago. And the last year has been George George George, with the occasional bit of quilting, travel, or shopping thrown in. A balance will need to be struck here, but at the moment I'm struggling and almost pessimistic that it can be found..

Costas is being very flexible and we've decided that he will watch George for the two nights I'm in class. He even said I don't have to rush home afterwords and I can stay and socialize if I want. Nice nice, but the first time it didn't run so smoothly-- George's eating/napping schedule was thrown off and he ended up going to bed by force (read: the three of us climbed in bed and we basically coaxed him to sleep) at 10 p.m. He woke up this morning at 10 to 9. Yeah, 11 hours of sleep is great for him, and my body appreciated it too, but if I sleep on his schedule, when will I get any classwork done?

When he finally went down for a nap this afternoon I sat down at the computer and tried to write a draft of my first short assignment-- I felt...lost. Completely unprepared and truly overwhelmed at the amount of time and effort I should put into doing this right. I didn't understand the terminology she used in the question so I turned to wikipedia, that trusty wealth of knowledge, but once you start there you keep clicking, reading, clicking, reading some more.. Reading through my notes again I found something I had wanted to search for so I found the webpage, but then more reading, clicking, reading.. you get the idea. 90 minutes later I had written 2 paragraphs and George's nap was over.

I go about my day trying to get regular chores done, knowing I won't have time to think about school until he's asleep again. The kicker is that these days he isn't interested in sleeping at night either, we've been trying to put him to bed for the last 2 hours..

So, I'm not exactly at my wit's end, but I'm just wondering how I'll be able to pull it off without taking out my frustration on Costas (as I did this afternoon) or through daily trips to Baskin Robins. The strange part is that while I was reading wikipedia this afternoon, I thought, "wow, this is almost as fun as reading my bloglines."

Ok then, I'll end here and just pray for peace and balance, and think that at the end of it all, I may get to do some quilting again..(pictures are from our trip to Ellis Island last weekend. The museum was really amazing, lots of English language learning history in there...)