Lenten Librarian: Days 4, 5, & 6

Here I am as a non-mom.

So, it's pretty hard to do something forty days in a row.  It's hard to do something even four days in a row.  While I thought about my LRP over the weekend, I never found my way to a computer to write about it.  Perhaps that's ok, and much of what I did do was in an effort to address my research questions.  Here is how I reviewed my sources and moved forward with my research:

1. I spent time with friends I haven't seen much since my son was born.  This was in an effort to intentionally develop a relationship both with my former self and with two people who knew that former self quite well.

2. My son spent the night at his grandmother's, so I spent time behaving as a non-mom.  I slept in, I stayed up late, I didn't worry about what anyone else was going to eat for dinner.  While I missed him, I also felt free and free of worry.

3. I went book shopping.  This is one of my all-time favorite things to do, but now that I'm a mom, most of my book shopping takes place in the picture book section.  This time I went to two used bookstores and just browsed.  It was fantastic.

I'm not sure where all of this is taking me.  If I look back at my original research questions,

1. What aspects of my personality have changed in the last two years?  
2. What has been added to my life since becoming a mother (besides the obvious)?  Does each addition result in the subtraction of something, or is it possible to add without taking away?
3. What do I want to cultivate?  How does my behavior teach my son how to be, and what do I want him to learn?
4. Am I still interested in things I used to love?  

I'm not sure that I'm addressing them.  In fact, a few of them are starting to seem like the same thing.  If I were advising students, I would tell them to feel free to combine, revise, eliminate, or add to their research questions.  I think the answer to number 4 just yes, and so it was not a very good research question in the first place.  I should have known better than to include a yes/no question! I think it should be absorbed by number 3, which is the deeper question.  It's not enough to identify that I want to pursue certain things; I must also consider how to pursue them.  Perhaps I have to make some decisions about what is realistic, what may need to wait until my son is older and I have more time.  

I think question 1 is a little facile.  The question requires a simple list for an answer, which is not useful to me.  I think it should be absorbed by question 2, which is the same thing, but better.

So now I'm down to two research questions:

1. What has been added to my life since becoming a mother (besides the obvious)?  Does each addition result in the subtraction of something, or is it possible to add without taking away?
2. What do I want to cultivate?  How does my behavior teach my son how to be, and what do I want him to learn?

These are realistic in terms of the amount of time I have to spend on this project.  They are also questions that require complex answers, as a good research question must.

Ok, so onward.  Back to my sources.  In the next few days, I will review my old teaching blog carefully and post excerpts from it here in order to begin to answer Q2 more fully.