Watering My Flower

A Goal Garden

Tyler Perry gave some great advice, he said something like, Instead of having a bunch of projects, just choose one and focus on that until it's a success. He compared this to a garden, he says instead of watering every flower, just focus on the most important flower, and that will prove to be the fastest way to get all your flowers watered.
I'm constantly referencing Perry's idea because I have around five things floating on the top of my goals list, and it could easily explode to twenty if I didn't have some project self control. When I get carried away signing up for different adult education classes, I have to take a step back and say, "Alicia, is this the flower you want to water? Sure, ukulele lessons sound fun, but those hours could be spent on the screenplay you wrote and need to edit and reedit."
This morning I woke up thinking about chocolate croissants. I don't feel like witnessing bum fights downtown, so I decided to make them at home. I should have read the instructions all the way through before committing to this project, because after mixing the ingredients, I found out making croissants is a laborious process. Throughout the day I have been tending to my croissants; the butter layer is inserted, but I have a couple more steps of rolling out and folding back up.
I'm also working on a short story. I was writing and watching Sleater-Kinney music videos while George watched cartoons, and played with toys on the living room carpet. The story plays out in entirety in my head, like examining a sphere, and the most challenging part is getting it into linear form. Like most flowers, it needs time to grow.
As I watched Sleater-Kinney rock out, I was thinking of my daughter and her upcoming Suzuki guitar courses. Our days in group music classes are coming to an end since there is a drastic difference between how my 4 year old reacts to a song and how a 12 month old. Kiki is like a bull in a China shop. She beats on her instruments with reckless abandon, and other moms look on thinking, "Oh shit, if Kiki's maraca goes flying into my baby's eye, my kid will suffer a lifelong injury."

I don't want to try and tame the rock, so it's time for us to move onto an environment where she can let loose. Thats why I'm choosing a rigorously structured music curriculum. I know, it doesn't make sense. The first eight weeks of the course involves me meeting with the teacher, and then taking the information home, and working with my daughter daily, and after we have accomplished certain goals, she enters into one-on-one lessons with the teacher.
My 2016 activities are starting to stack up, along with weekly Suzuki lessons, I have playwriting class at the community college, and I need to put more time into conversational German. I was day dreaming about jamming on the guitar with my daughter, while exploring Dusseldorf as a native speaker, finding a Bakers Mann to discuss perfecting the Shokolade Croissant.
George grew bored of his cartoon, and employed his most common method to get my attention, doing something that gets him a time-out. He ran up and pinched me hard, time out. He ripped a Christmas ornament from the tree and screamed, "Oh no, we lost a core memory!" Time out.
This guy is a good talker, and there is something I should not have shouted 6 months ago in a moment of road rage, but how was I to know my 18 month old would adopt it into his vocabulary, and pull it out from memory to get an immediate reaction. George's last resort to get my attention, even after the time outs and redirecting his attention, was to scream, "Move your fucking car!"
I yelled, "Time out!!!" and put him in his room.
After George pulled the Fuck card, I had to flip my laptop shut and take him to the park. He was letting me know that I was neglecting him, by writing and surfing the web, but mostly surfing the web. We walked around the park for an hour and went out to lunch before picking up Kiki from school.
I haven't had the chance to dive back into my story, but maybe tonight I can resume watering my most important flower, that is, if I don't get the urge to water my other flower. My garden has urges. Eventually, I will get better at this one flower at a time thing. I'm going to make that a flower.