Light and Momentary

Day in the life

5:46am. I jolt awake from a dream in which I am an uneasy accessory to attempted murder. Can I get back to sleep? 

6:15am. Nope, I cannot get back to sleep. There are a lot of things to do. First up: coffee, Lauds, NYT puzzles. I don't see the Spelling Bee pangram but I need to get moving anyway.

7:15am. Sweet potatoes and beets go in the oven. Except -- wait -- I forgot to make a List. I am going to remember how to cook a big Thanksgiving dinner for company, right? I'm going to ease back into it, just like riding a bike or perhaps like childbirth? I microwave the pumpkin to make it easier to peel and put in my salad. This might have been a bad idea, because now I have very damp pumpkin. I marinate thin-sliced red onion in lemon juice for the salad. I start the bread dough and take the pastry out of the fridge. I definitely put too much water in that pastry yesterday.

7:40am. The Spelling Bee pangram plops obligingly into my brain. I write part of this post and wonder when I can reasonably wake people up to help cook. When does the turkey have to go in? I can't remember how to cook a turkey. I'm going to remember how to cook a turkey, right?

7:58am. I google "how to cook a turkey" and count backwards. Time to roll out some damp pastry. 

8:40am. The pastry rolls out like a dream, but the pumpkin is definitely too wet. What kind of mutant pumpkin is this? Who told my squash it could be squashy?

9:05am. Everybody is awake except Alex, who was coding late into the night. He is sleeping in the room where we keep the batteries, and I need batteries for the kitchen scale so I can make the pecan pie. Should I wake up Alex? Should I wing the pecan pie measurements? I decide to wing the pecan pie measurements. I also discover that I have roasted salted pecans. Eek, they are so salty. Will it be weird if I bathe them to get the salt off? Is bathed-pecan pie a terrible idea? What if this entire meal is a regrettable aggregation of unsuccessful attempts at people's favorite foods? Or...wait...what if I pause and eat a little breakfast?

9:56am. Pies are in, starchy vegetables are all roasted, bread dough is rising, dishes are done. Time for breakfast + KenKens + another installment of this post. I feel some delegating coming on, my friends. I will take a shower while the kids chop and prep.

11:05am. The turkey goes in. The potatoes are peeled, ten pounds of them, and the celery and onion are chopped for the stuffing. 

11:54am. It takes a long time to cube ten pounds of potatoes, but they are done. The Brussels sprouts are roasted and the salad greens are washed. The naked sweet potatoes and beets are awaiting their destinies. I am feeling a little wave of stress. Our guests might be here in half an hour and I am looking decidedly ulotrichous. (This is a word I learned on Tuesday, courtesy of the NYT cryptogram: having woolly or curly hair.) I am going to do battle with my hair so it is more curly and less woolly, and remove all the knitting bags and electronics from the living room, and assign someone to wipe down the downstairs bathroom, and ask Elwood to be the person in charge of beets.

12:30pm. Company arrives. It would have been better if the stuffing and sweet potatoes were already prepped, but I will get them ready now instead.

1:40pm. Marie is here!! She walks in from the train station wearing the giant purple shawl I made for her.

2:05pm. You guys, the turkey is doing something deeply weird. The meat thermometer is up in "probably dry and sad" territory, but there is a puddle of pink juice spilling out of the cavity. How can the top be dry and the juices be pink? Am I going to serve up turkey that is both dry and salmonella-laden? Also, I think I did forget how to host Thanksgiving. I still have to mash the potatoes? and make the gravy? and bake the rolls? and warm up the room-temperature things without drying them out? and share the oven with Joe so he can make a cranberry cake? St. Martha, I'm going to need some help here.

3:05pm. Dinner is served. I always think I don't love Thanksgiving food but I do actually enjoy Thanksgiving food. I know the stories say that the gods on Olympus ate ambrosia but I bet they had some gravy too. The turkey appears to be both cooked and moist. People I love are making happy noises as they eat food I cooked for them. This is one of my favorite things in the world.

4:30pm, maybe, but it's kind of a blur? Dessert! Pecan pie and pumpkin pie and cranberry cake, with plenty of whipped cream. The first dishwasher load gets going and we stash the turkey leftovers in the fridge.

5:15pm-ish. We play Telestrations, which continues to be one of my favorite ways to spend time with groups of 8 or 10 people. Joe is sitting next to me, and he asks me to draw an outhouse with a parking meter and to identify a post-COVID stock market drop. I do my best. I laugh until I cry.

6pm. We play charades. This is a Gladly family holiday tradition. It is, frankly, a little bonkers. I ask Elwood if he thinks TItus Andronicus will be too hard, and then Alex gets it in, like, 20 seconds. It takes us longer to figure out "The Quotations of Mao Zedong," but we get there in the end.

7:05pm. Our guests leave, and Elwood figures out how to fit all of the leftovers into a crowded fridge while I sit on the couch and blog. His task is made more difficult by the fact that I want to save everything. Yes, I want to eat the leftover salad tomorrow (greens with roasted squash, marinated red onions, and pecans -- so yummy and seasonally appropriate). Yes, I want to save the leftover whipped cream. It will go in my coffee tomorrow, naturally. Yes, I want to save all the gravy. ALL THE GRAVY.

7:53pm. I need to go and tackle the rest of the dishes.

7:54pm. Here I go. Tackling in 3-2-1...

8:44pm. That was a lot of dishes. I feel like my batteries are running down as I lurch back to the couch in slow motion. What are the things I want to do before I collapse in a puddle of drool? Finish this blog post, do a quick Duolingo story to keep the streak going, pray the rest of the rosary, brush teeth.

8:52pm. Probably there are some interesting things on Twitter? Maybe I should check, yeah?

8:54pm. I engage Grownup Mode and shut the Twitter tab. I hurl myself bedward.

Today I

• made it through my Adoration hour with Stella in tow (my college student babysitter is gone for break)
• gave the lady in the next pew the benefit of the doubt when I suspected she was looking daggers at us
• got through Stella's two-year well-child exam
• along with the lead test blood draw (the down side of a 1923 frame house)
• picked up supplies for tonight's festival of baking
• wove in ends, wrapped up gifts, taped up packages for goddaughter/nieces/nephew
• mailed off parcels with nary a peep from the sling-riding toddler
• bought the easy part of a fun gift for my husband
• took four children to the fabric store
• and for ice cream
• and got the middle boys to their games club so close to on time that I won't even berate myself a little
• rediscovered how woefully embarrassingly bad I am at Photoshop
• by making my husband look like an alien in our family picture
• got one Snapfish calendar ordered anyway
• made 7 dozen cookies while settling a creeped-out boy and his fussy sister
• emailed the creeped-out boy's teacher to suggest that she pick a more appropriate movie for next year
• wrote a kind of lame blog post
• thought pained thoughts about the quantity of dishes generated by baking 7 dozen cookies and cooking for a family of 7
• decided to do 15 minutes' worth of them and call it a night

Seven Quick Takes: Really Really Speedy Edition

1. I just submitted a grant proposal.

2. That's why I've been scarce.

3. It was surprisingly fun to say, "You should give me thousands of dollars, and here's how I'm going to spend it all." I started the proposal out of a sense of obligation -- grant-writing is a skill I ought to develop -- but I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would.

4. I asked my advisor for a simple (required) letter saying that this project I'm proposing wouldn't interfere with my work duties next year, and she wrote the very nicest, most enthusiastic letter you could imagine. You should totally give that money to Dr. Gladly, she told them, because she will spend it very wisely.

5. Dr. Gladly. It's going to take me awhile to get used to that.

6. I am resurrecting The Vegetable Project, about which more soon.

7. Dishes call.

More quick takes.

Seven Quick Takes: Tempus Fugit Edition

1. Tomorrow, friends, I am posting my BIG list (that's the Butt-In-Gear list -- things I am going to do before I turn 40). I created it on the 19th of March and I've been procrastinating about posting its whereabouts. It's like once I post it on the internet, I have to do it or else look silly.

I hate looking silly. One could argue that it is worse to be silly, whether or not the internet knows it, than to look silly to a bunch of mostly strangers on the internet, but LA LA LA I'm not going to think about that right now.

2. Elizabeth Foss just posted that she never wastes time. Oh, I wish I never wasted time. Why I am I more willing to get behind on folding laundry than to get behind on RSS feeds?

I think one of the tasks on my list needs to be to teach my children to fold laundry to my specifications. Cheerfully. I need to get better at delegating.

3. Today there is no school and I am going to recruit my children to help with some cleaning and organizing. Goals: finish the reorganization of the dining room and the play room. Also, make some progress on the grant I am writing. Also, do some prep work for the two parties we're having this weekend. And write some thank-you notes and work on finishing up some Cub Scout stuff. And maybe warp the space-time continuum because I have trouble with manageable to-do lists.

4. The baby is in a really needy stage. Really really really needy: sick, teething, taking off her diaper at every opportunity. She is a triple handful this week and I only have two hands.

Maybe I could get an extra hand or two grafted on.

Or maybe I could accept that I'm not going to get a whole lot done until that last molar is through and the green snot faucet dries up.

5. I think the RSVP is a lost art. For the two parties this weekend I've received a total of six RSVPs, including two from the grandparents. I have no idea how many gift bags to make up for tomorrow. We might have two guests or we might have twelve.

6. The second party is for Joe's First Communion. Darling Joe -- I keep thinking about the day he was born. He keeps reminding me that he wants to go to confession tomorrow. "I want my soul and my body to be clean for my First Communion," he says. Can do, sweetie. He's come a long way -- here are two posts from the old blog about taking Joe to Mass as a 2- and 3-year-old. He was an octuple handful in those days. (That deacon's homily was probably my most embarrassing moment as a mother. So far, at least.)

7. Baby just climbed into my lap and fell asleep. How about that? Time to get to work.

More quick takes here.

Seven Quick Takes: Burning Down The House Edition

1. We had lamb for Easter. It's always lamb; this time we did a slow braise with a leg of lamb on top of small white beans and veggies. The only pan big enough to accommodate everything was a foil pan that wasn't very sturdy.

It was sturdy enough for me to get it in there, but later in the day I moved it lower in the oven so I could bake a chocolate-raspberry cake on the top rack. It wasn't sturdy enough for that, and winy bean broth with minced onions sloshed onto the oven floor. Rather a lot of bean broth, which soon became charred bean broth. The house got smoky and we turned on the fans. No problem.

2. On Wednesday of last week I cranked up the oven. I was going to bake sweet potatoes and roast asparagus, so I wanted it pretty hot. I slipped in my tray of sweet potatoes and went to play in the yard with the toddler. (She wants to be outside ALL the time these days.) "What's that beeping noise?" I thought to myself a few minutes later.

As you will doubtless have guessed, the beeping noise was the smoke alarm. It's much quieter in the yard, but after a few minutes the light dawned and I went inside to see what the deal was. It was quite smoky and getting smokier. I peeked inside the oven--

--and saw flames. "Hm," I said to myself, "that's not good." I shut off the oven, thinking that the combination of no gas and a closed oven door would quickly put out the fire. Except it didn't-- when I peeked again a little later the flames were higher. "Hm," I said to myself, "that's really not good." How not-good was it? Fire extinguisher not-good? Fire department not-good? Just wait and see not-good? The doorbell rang.

3. Pete had been playing at a friend's house and the mom had just brought him home. "Hi," I said, "could he stay on the porch for a minute with you? There's a fire in my oven."

Somehow saying it aloud made it much more real and I started to feel a little trembly: I had started a fire in my oven and it wasn't just going out like I had hoped.

Mercifully the friend's mom was not at all trembly. She said, "Oh, do you have a fire extinguisher?" We got the fire extinguisher and she was poised to spray. She said, "Are you sure you want me to do this? It's going to make a mess."

I wasn't sure. It was SO helpful -- providentially helpful -- to have someone there thinking along the same lines without the emotional baggage of "all my kids are in this house and I seem to have started a fire a fire a fire a fire in my house my house my house my house."

4. [WAIT! We interrupt this post with an AHA! moment. There's been this irksome low buzzing-humming noise in my house for the past couple of days. Was it a computer? Was it the turtle tank filter in need of attention? I just figured it out: it was the speaker. The toddler turned the volume knob for that speaker all the way to 11 and that was the problem. She gets around, that Stella does.]

5. We peeked again and the flames were lower. We agreed that we could give it another few minutes without risking a fearsome conflagration.

The fire went out, leaving the house full of haze and me very wobbly with adrenaline.

At the other mom's suggestion I sent the kids outside. The middle boys were playing in the room over the porch where the Legos live, and didn't hear me calling from downstairs. I stormed upstairs. "I am summoning you outside URGENTLY because we had a FIRE in our kitchen, and you are playing with Legos as if it doesn't matter to you!" They both got a little panicky ("We couldn't hear you! a fire? A FIRE?") and I felt dreadful.

I ordered a pizza from the front yard and piled them in the van. When we got downtown I said to my husband (who had come home from the bus stop as we were leaving), "Wait, I'm having a moment of panic that something is still smoldering in there and it's going to ignite while we're out eating pizza." I ran back home to check. It was fine, of course. But it shook me up to see flames in my oven, flames that grew when I cut off the gas.

6. I cleaned off the plate that goes over the igniter, and I haven't had any further trouble. (Though you'd better believe I was watching like a hawk the first time I turned it on again.) I've been using it a lot this week because we had a crazy surfeit of eggs: broccoli quiches on Tuesday, spinach souffle on Wednesday, spaghetti pie last night.

But.

The boys asked me for homemade pizza tonight and I agreed. Only later did I remember that you're supposed to bake pizza crust at 500 degrees.

Do I dare?

7. I'll let you know what happens.

More quick takes here.

Sorry, it's a list

I know, it's really boring, COLOSSALLY boring, to read someone else's to-do list. But I need a little extra motivation today, so I am posting it. I love to come back and insert those happy little <s> guys.

1. Send off chapter 2 revisions.
2. Send off chapter 4 revisions.
3. Finish draft of cover letter.
4. Draft last part of conference application.
5. Get three two one more loads of laundry washed and dried so kids need not wear barrels + suspenders to school tomorrow.
6. Send off package that needs returning.

Hastily

1. I have the simple models fitted and their descriptions drafted, and now I am edging my way into more complex model-fitting. I think I can I think I can.
2. Crescent Dragonwagon's gumbo is one of my favorite things to cook and eat. I thought about asking her permission to post the recipe but it is too long for me to type it up. It's in both the Soup & Bread cookbook and Passionate Vegetarian -- check it out. It is a Project, but I am going to be eating delicious veggies for many meals. Passionate Vegetarian halved the recipe from Soup & Bread, but it's not all that much more work to make twice the soup. In for a penny, in for a pound.
3. I think I can only manage about a resolution and a half per day. Today was great on the sugar/veggie front, and not so good on the FlyLady front. Although-- today was also really good on the dissertation front, and there are only so many 15-minute stretches in one day.
4. The boy most likely to be gloomy said something I want to remember today. I went out in the evening to work and Stella was glad to see me when I came home. She wanted me to pick her UP and then sit DOWN and take my coat OFF (the prepositions stand in for emphatic baby grunts and gestures) -- and then she wanted to NURSE already. Her brother said, "It's nice to watch her with you. [hold on, I have to get the paper where I wrote it down, so I could remember exactly what he said...] It reminds me that there is happiness and security in the world and it's right in front of me." Melt! Melt melt melt!
5. My sink is very unshiny and I am off to do something about that.

Seven Quick Takes: Icky Bloody Weary Rainy Feast of St. Augustine Edition

1. Last night one of my boys brought me a small bug on his finger. He said, "My head has been itching and what do you suppose this is?"

Seven Quick Takes: Dead Grass Edition

1. I thought I might call this the coneflower edition, or the Queen Anne's lace edition. But wherever the neighbor tried (mostly unsuccessfully, I might add) to smite the (harmless) cicada killers with his mighty can of insecticide, he killed the grass. Argh.

2. Baby has figured out forward motion in the three days since I last posted. On Tuesday she was frustrated, saying to herself, "I know there's a way to get there but I can't figure it out." Today she is like a little Marine commando-crawling through the jungle -- Dig! Push! Dig! Push! Mission accomplished! -- only her mission is to eat the blow-in cards from Muse magazine and not to suppress terrorist activity or destabilize foreign governments.

3. When I started work on my dissertation transcripts at two weeks postpartum, one of the first things I did was to add a code to all of the abandoned and interrupted utterances so I could exclude them from most of my analyses. It should have been a pretty simple operation, but I made a mistake: I omitted a space from the code, so the program didn't recognize it. I have known for a while now that I would have to go back and fix it, but uuuugggghhhh I didn't want to.

This week I figured out my strategy and fixed the values for the first measure. It's not horrible, just tedious. And I have to get it done before I can move on, so I'll do it as cheerfully as I can. I am tempted to be irritated with my January self, but hey -- I made the choice to go back to work at two weeks postpartum knowing perfectly well what postpartumness does to my brain. Maybe I should just be glad I didn't blow anything up.

4. My other school-related goals for the summer, besides cleaning up the data, are to read a little book about cluster analysis, to make good headway in a big book about multilevel modeling, and to rewrite my method chapter to reflect what I did. (For the preliminary exam, you write your method chapter in future tense.) Summer is flying by here, but I'm making progress. Elwood is off on Friday afternoons and I have high hopes for a productive day.

5. In addition to those school goals, I had a bunch of personal goals for the summer. I think I need more summer. Or maybe fewer Aubrey-Maturin novels. I am enjoying them immensely and perhaps intemperately. (I am on #17 at the moment. The characters make me laugh and laugh, which is not what I expected when I started the series.)

6. Earlier this summer we were going out for a celebratory lunch. It was a special day for one of the boys (like a name day, only not exactly) and we always go to a favorite restaurant to observe it. The boy being honored, though, was having a terrible awful no good very bad day in which he just could not get along with his family. He is still angry about my response. Motherhood is like juggling eggs sometimes -- you can do your best to keep kind and patient going at the same time as firm and protective of siblings, but all you get is a big mess splatted all over.

I am tempted to post the story, but it would be my version of a contested story. The part that is bothering me is that he is also still angry with the friend who was going to lunch with us. I do not know how to encourage forgiveness in this child whose inclination is to hold a grudge.

7. Today is our 16th anniversary. Especially today, when I am thinking about the importance and the difficulty of forgiveness, I look back at the two of us and think about all the things we had to learn. I didn't know, sixteen years ago, how much closer we would be today than we were then. Building a marriage is like learning a secret language -- sometimes we can exchange a single look that speaks volumes. (Lest you think I am going all lofty on you, the most common look exchanged means "Can you believe the organist is playing this hymn so slowly AGAIN?" --"I know! It makes me crazy!") Here's to many more years.

More quick takes here.

Quick Takes: Glisten Edition

1. I am hot. Do you know the southern saying about how horses sweat and men perspire but ladies glisten? I am glistening up a storm. Usually our house stays pretty cool in the summer, courtesy of the big trees on the south side, but not this week.

2. Something is wrong with our AC drain and it has been emptying into the middle of the basement floor, pouring silently under a little carpeted area where my husband stored his ten or twelve linear feet of LPs. Something is also wrong with the expensive system we had installed last spring to deal with the water that leaks in from outside when the rain is heavy. Both repairmen are coming in the early afternoon. Here's to quick easy fixes. Cheap or free would be good too. (The perimeter system is supposed to have a lifetime warranty, so it had better be free.)

3. When I was in college, I lost my passport. I needed it to complete paperwork for a new job, but it was nowhere to be found. In the search for it, I wound up doing a thorough tidying of my disaster-area desk. I found the passport only after I had put away all the other odds and ends. I remember thinking that it seemed providential for the passport to disappear temporarily, because I needed the kick in the pants to clean my desk.

I am trying to be cheerful about the basement leaking water from two different sources. We have long talked about making better use of our basement, and now we will have to get down there and do some work on it -- throw out the carpet, probably, and find a better place to store the LPs, and set up a dehumidifier and hit the mildew-y places with bleach or something (any suggestions for green antifungals?). We might as well do some organizing while we're at it. A providential kick in the pants, just like in college.

I'd rather have a desk to tidy, I'm just saying.

4. On the happy side of the ledger, I am going to see a dear friend this weekend for the first time in a year. I am done with my seminar and it was fairly painless. I think I might take next week off from school and dive back in after the Fourth.

5. In further happy news, the bulging tooth I mentioned last week is through. The boys are all excited about it and have been reaching in to feel the little nub. It's just barely above the gumline, not far enough to do any damage. I'm guessing her first good chomp will cure them of sticking their fingers in there.

6. My boys have asked me to plan a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for them, and some temporarily insane version of me said yes. I played a bit when I was a kid, but D&D is more complicated than it used to be. The last game I played featured a dragon that said "Cowabunga!" when it burst onto the scene. My boys are not so interested in the whimsical -- they are asking me if the hostile zombie wombats will have titanium armor and if the dragon-born paladin can invoke the assistance of a [brain overload here].

To their questions I replied knowledgeably, "...ummm...?" This could be a time sink.

7. On our kids' bookshelf we have a 70s version of Robinson Crusoe in which the men have Leif Garrett hair. It is fairly true to the original, with lots of text and old-fashioned language. Pete, surprisingly, loves it. He told my MIL that she shouldn't just describe the pictures; he wanted to hear all the words. I am ending this post to go read it again. I suppose I should be grateful that I can deal with my glistening problem by calling a repairman, instead of making my lonesome self a goatskin parasol to keep the tropical sun away.

More quick takes here.

Seven Quick Takes: Tiger Lily Edition

1. I am halfway done with something I'd been dreading, and it's not so bad.

Quick Takes for a Quiet Stretch

I've been out of the blogging groove lately. It's been hard to find time to write, which is part of it, but some of it is that the urge to record our life has its own ebb and flow. Recently the tide has been at ebb.

Speaking of tides, I've been having a lot of fun with the Aubrey-Maturin novels. I didn't really expect to enjoy them, but they are a blast. I persuaded my husband, who rarely reads fiction, to tackle the first one, though I doubt he'll go the distance. Since I went back to grad school I've been reading a lot less for pleasure. I've been required to do so much reading that I've sought out other leisure activities, like knitting. It was strange to go from being a person who read three or four books each month to a person who only manages one book a month, and so it's been fun to be immersed in this series -- snatching odd moments to read the next few pages.

I decided that when I finished coding transcripts I would take a little time in which the most complicated thing I thought about was whether to cast on a new sock using size 1 needles or size 2 needles. I chose...both! The toe-up sock is the mate to this one, made from Knitty's Azure pattern in some luxurious locally produced yarn.

Kids are doing well here in the second week of summer vacation. No bloodshed, minimal howling. (My standards are pretty low, you'll notice.) Here is a funny thing -- I have often noticed similarities between Marty and Pete. Pete is the first person in the family to wake up in the mornings, and he often climbs in our bed and tells me his dreams -- long wandering dreams involving Star Wars clones. This morning he was so excited that he was talking on the inhale and the exhale both. Marty did just the same thing when he was that age, the only other boy in our family to do so. Isn't that a funny thing for them to have in common?

Baby is growing beautifully, mostly happy and curious about the world around her. She is inching toward mobility and she has figured out how her hands work, which means that the days in which she would sit quietly while an adult did something else (like grading) are gone. Thankfully I won't have any more grading to do until fall.

One of the posts in my drafts folder is about trying to teach my kids to be diligent without sending messages that will leave them trapped in perfectionist hell. Perfectionism has been breathing down my neck lately, the familiar feeling of not doing anything well enough. Why do I bother knitting when there are always flaws? Why am I working on this dissertation when I will never understand hierarchical linear modeling thoroughly? Let's not even talk about the feelings of mothering inadequacy. This struggle has plagued me for as long as I can remember, sometimes more intensely and sometimes less so. I am not sure quite why it's rearing its head with renewed viciousness right now.

I have high hopes for this summer -- habits to build and habits to break. One of the things I want to do is lots of reading aloud with the kids. At the moment I'm about a third of the way through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Pete and about two-thirds of the way through The Two Towers with Marty and Joe. I am going to wrap up this post and see who wants to curl up with a book. More quick takes here.

7 Quick Takes: Fading Peonies Edition

• This summer I am leading an online discussion of Kimberly Hahn's book Graced and Gifted. It has inspired me to implement some new habits to help our home run more smoothly this summer, but I am tired after this first week of it. I am also tired because Pete is out of preschool and missing his friends. He does not think -- just imagine! -- that coding transcripts is much fun to watch, and so I have been working after all the kids are asleep. Sarah the babysitter is here this morning to play with him and hold the baby and I am grateful for an extra pair of hands. I'm writing these quick takes in between coding tasks.
• Remember the horrible painful syntax analysis that prompted me to ask for help? After the guy said he'd be glad to help me (still can't quite believe he's going to do all that work for me), I figured out the problems that had prevented me from using the better software. It would have seemed like a much, much more manageable task if I'd been using this software from the get-go. I think my frustration was providential, because I would never have asked for help if I hadn't been so overwhelmed. A helpful reminder for me, to remember that God is at work in the midst of my exasperation.
• Barring disaster, I will be done with data collection in two weeks. Done! With data collection! In two weeks!! It has been a long slog, but the end is in sight.
• We've been praying the novena to the Holy Spirit, which I've enjoyed a lot. The boys, not so much. I am looking for some flame-themed fun ideas to celebrate Pentecost -- any thoughts?
• This is the last full day of school -- two of the boys are supposed to go back for an hour next week to collect their report cards. What's up with that, anyway? Does it allow them to fulfill a state requirement for days attended or something?
• Most of my perennials came back up and I have been enjoying them. The weeds, though! The weeds are relentless this year after I let them take over the joint last summer. I need to get out there this weekend and yank them out again. Wonder if the boys would help me if I encouraged them to be Indiana Jones hacking through the jungle?
• Speaking of which, remember how the boys sing the Indiana Jones theme song to comfort the baby if she wails in the car? This morning she was singing to herself in her carseat and I said, "Pete, what song do you think she's singing?" He answered instantly: "Probably the Indiana Jones theme song." I was going to post a picture of Pete in his Indiana Jones hat with his Indiana Jones whip (fabric, plays the theme song) at the ready. But I hit a snag copying the pictures from the card reader, so you will just have to use your imagination.

More quick takes here.

Speedy Bullets

Things accomplished this week:

• Grading midterms, which was loooooooooong and tedious
• Dealing with one of two students who cheated on the midterm :-(
• Guest-lecturing for the class, accomplished entirely with baby in the sling because my advisor is awesome and my baby is awesomer
• Completing analysis #7 of 9 for the dissertation (yes!!)
• Drafting a post on the Hanna Rosin/Judith Warner breastfeeding brouhaha, which I did not post because I had no time for a comments brouhaha here should one arise
• Taking the whole crew to 2/3 Triduum services, with no gnashing of teeth. Didn't even have to leave the pew to deal with unhappy children (see above re: baby awesomeness). This was made easier by the fact that our church does the short version of the vigil, with only 3/7 Old Testament readings. We talked about going to the cathedral, but stuck around here instead.

Things not accomplished this week:

• Folding of laundry
• Filing of taxes
• Filling of Easter baskets (this is where it comes in handy that I have not taught my children to believe in the Easter bunny)

A blessed Easter to you!

Swearing Off

My friends, I solemnly swear: no more searching YouTube for childbirth videos. I just watched one that has me crossing my legs and grimacing sympathetically at its up-close footage of a freshly cut mediolateral episiotomy pouring blood. Eek eek eek. Have you seen this one, though? Love it. Grab a tissue -- the first time I saw it I wasn't even pregnant and it left me weeping.

This afternoon we went to confession together, all six of us. The little guys took along some things to do while they were waiting for us to get through the line, and it went swimmingly. Our parish almost always has long lines for confession, and I was sure they would be huge today since it's the last Saturday before Christmas. When Elwood got home a bit later than planned from running errands (he made an extra stop on one of the craziest shopping days of the year, because he remembered that I was out of red raspberry leaf tea and picked some up for me even though he thinks herbs are a bunch of hooey -- love that man), I suggested that we go to the next-closest parish instead. It was a good call, in part because the pastor there, who wound up hearing my confession, is an especially kind man. I brought up my birth anxiety, which I know is partially normal but which is also partially a control-freak thing, like God needs me to worry about things for him and thus I can interpret "cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you" as "tie yourself into vibrating knots of stressballness and make the people around you miserable."

He had some good advice for me, and a helpful penance, and he said, "May the birth be better than your highest hopes, and as far as possible from your worst imaginings."

Afterward we went to our neighborhood bubble tea shop, which is a cozy place with shelves of games and books. The older boys each grabbed a book, while the younger boys worked a puzzle with Elwood and me and then played a game of chess. (Watching a chess match between a 6yo and a 3yo is not an undertaking for the impatient.) Too often cold and snowy weekend afternoons dissolve into fractiousness, but this was a nice one.

Contractions are ramping up but I don't see them going anywhere this weekend. (Jody asked about the state of the kitchen floor -- it needs mopping.) I am SO grateful that I didn't have any pre-labor action until just recently. With Pete I had weeks of thinking, "Is this it? No. Is this it now? No. Maybe this time? Fooled again." No fun at all. But I can deal with another week or ten days of it. (I think.) And by the end of that window, I should have myself a baby. An actual baby -- imagine that.

T minus 7 weeks (give or take)

Today I am 34 weeks pregnant, which means I will, God willing, be having an actual baby in about 7 weeks. (I know there are some women out there for whom 34 weeks of pregnancy means a baby in 3 or 4 weeks, but I am not one of those women. I appear to have a very comfortable womb, whose occupants are loath to leave it.) I am writing this post to say, Internet, I am giving up sugar. (Again.) I am a sugar junkie but it is bad for my energy level, bad for my disposition, and bad for my plans to wear pants that zip at some point before Easter. I was in the sugar-free groove until bronchitis and Halloween hit me one after the other. Today I am throwing out the rest of the Swedish fish and eating a big salad instead. No sweets until Christmas, when I will be exactly 41 weeks pregnant. (This year I am never uncertain about how many days there are before Christmas.)

One of the things I would like to do with my soon-to-be-burbling font of green leafy energy is to have a FOO -- a Festival of Organization, in which I go through my house room by room and smite clutter and disorganization with the fearsome double-ended blade of willpower and nesting hormones.

Do I need three knitting bags tucked in between the library basket and the end table? Of course not -- away with them.

Will the boys really cry if I implement my proposed plan for Bionicle storage while they are at school, or will they be secretly grateful for the chaos diminishment? Don't answer that. No Bionicles will be harmed in the quest for less chaos, I promise.

Will my husband join in the effort to tidy up the man-cave-ly office which is overrun, at present, with cables and batteries and... and... assorted manly things? I suspect he will encourage me to find more homeless Bionicles instead. We shall see.

I have pretty much decided -- in fact, I am making a firm decision right now as I type -- to delay my attempts to get my early research project published. If you caught the occasional disappearing posts about that project, you might remember that my project director was not as responsive as I might have hoped she would be. Nothing has changed on that front, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to push hard to meet a self-imposed deadline when she isn't answering my emails. Hm, I might need to go back and edit this paragraph later. Upshot: I'm cutting that from my list, thinking I'll shoot for summer when she has fewer administrative responsibilities.

All right! I am going to address some Christmas card envelopes, and buy a couple of Christmas presents, and switch the laundry, and squeeze in a little work before I pick up Pete. Which means I need to move swiftly. See you later.

Faster Than Some Speedy Bullets

• Tomorrow my second son turns nine. No school tomorrow, so I took his favorite spiderweb cupcakes to school today. (That picture is from two years ago but my spiderwebs are still about that wobbly.) Tomorrow my MIL is coming and so are four or five of his pals. Not quite ready for the party but I think we'll manage.
• I am making a note here for future reference that doubling the devil's food cake recipe in the Halloween chapter of Nigella Lawson's Feast gave me 24 cupcakes plus enough batter for an eight-inch layer. Everybody liked the end product too. I would share the recipe but (1) I am trying to be speedy and (2) I have the British version of the book, with measurements in grams, and trust me when I say you don't want me to attempt to convert to cups in a hurry.
• My children seem to have inherited my appreciation for quirky costumes. The almost-nine-year-old has been saying all month that he wanted to be a leviathan for Halloween, using a modified dinosaur costume from three years ago. He talked the six-year-old into agreeing to be an Umber Hulk. I just smiled and nodded because they change their minds, without fail, in the week before Halloween. Sure enough, all three of the trick-or-treaters presented me with new costume ideas (yes, plural) this week. The 3yo is deciding whether he wants to be a doctor or a cat. The 6yo is going to be a skeleton (thankfully, using a costume from the costume chest in lieu of the gorilla costume he asked me to make). The almost-9yo decided to be something really scary when it was discovered that he has grown an astonishing amount in the three years since he last wore the dinosaur costume: he's going to be Steve Ballmer. Why, yes, we are Linux users in this house -- how did you guess? And how does one make a 9yo boy look like Steve Ballmer, exactly? I only have three days to figure this out.
• One of these years, I tell you, I'm going to enforce a Halloween costume deadline. What you say you want to be on October 15 is what you get to be on October 31. Yeah. Maybe next year.
• On the subject of open source software, I have been trying to get The Gimp to lighten up some shadowy faces for our Christmas picture. It is not going well. I have succeeded in making various children look like mutant androids, but this is not really the look I hope to send out in our Christmas letter. Any tips? 
• I am suddenly feeling much more third-trimestery, with backache and symphysis pain and contractions all the livelong day. (I asked Elwood, "Am I looking a lot more pregnant all of a sudden?" because I wondered if baby had had a growth spurt that accounted for the increase in discomfort. Prudent man that he is, he said, "Oh, no, dear, not at all." I guess it's one of those "Do I look fat in this outfit?" kind of questions. But I'm still curious.)
• Ooooooohhhh, there were more things I was going to say but I cannot remember them at the moment. This time of year always gets to me, with the darkening days and the beginning of the end-of-year rush. The election is getting me down too this year. I have been quiet because who wants to read grumping? But I'll go ahead and stick this up for anyone who wondered if we were still alive over here, and be back soon with a cheery knitting post. (I am delighted with the way Joe's Sheldon has turned out. He just needs his last few ends woven in to make him presentable.)

The Good Thing About Pregnancy Insomnia

Petely and Joe slept on the pull-out couch last night (so much more fun than going to bed in the usual spot), but Petely woke up confused and calling me at 4:00 or so. I couldn't get back to sleep after I got him settled, so I stayed up and finished my draft of chapter two. It is emphatically a draft, because my advisor and I haven't spent a ton of time hammering out the details of the measures I will use and because I have a lot to learn about multilevel modeling between now and the time I try to persuade my committee to pass me, but hey! it's submitted!

The boys all woke up around 7 and we piled into a heap on the pulled out couch to read Pippi Longstocking. After a while they scattered and I turned on the stereo -- first "As Cool As I Am" on loud repeat (nothing sends cobwebs scuttling away in terror like a nice loud didgeridoo), and then "The Joy of the Lord" on equally loud repeat, which is a weird pairing but it works for me -- so I could clean. The boys did a pretty good job on the bathrooms while I played Attila Scourge of Dustbunnies. I cannot conquer the Caucasus but by God I can vanquish dirt.

Today I should also vanquish some piles of paper and pummel the checkbook into submission, and perhaps I will squeeze in a nap somewhere because 4am is really danged early. Don't know if that will work (no rest for the scourgely) but we'll see. I have three posts in my draft folder that I'm hoping to finish up now that both my chapters are drafted -- those last thoughts about the wacky caseworker, why I'm not willing to shrug off the locker room nastiness, and a reflection on our friend, the confidence interval (stop laughing! confidence intervals are too our friends!). I am sure I will have a truckload of revising to do in the weeks to come, but regardless -- both the chapters I need for my preliminary exam are drafted!

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

I persuaded the checkbook to balance and the washing machine came back from the dead again. I am caught up on laundry but for one load of clothes that needs folding. I turned 38 yesterday and have been enjoying Carrie Newcomer's new CD, a gift from my husband.

My early research project director accepted my revisions (I did not succumb to the temptation to include a couple of knock-knock jokes to see if she was actually reading the revised version), so as soon as I get comments back from the two people kind enough to proofread it for me, I'll get it printed up. Dissertation ho! (I hope it's clear that it's ho the interjection, as in Yukon __, not the noun.) On Friday my advisor, to my immense surprise, said I should consider myself done for now with reviewing the literature and move on to drafting. (Then she gave me ten more papers to read, but I'm not really complaining.)

Joe is visiting my in-laws this weekend and I am missing him something fierce. It's very quiet without him. Baby, on the other hand, is getting rowdier, thumping me harder and more often. I had persuaded myself that either I had an anterior placenta that was keeping me from feeling movement or else something was wrong.

In a few weeks I am taking the train to Chicago to meet up with all of my college roommates. We are going to see Melissa Etheridge, whose early albums were pretty much always on the turntable or in the tape player (aren't we old?) when we were living together. Funnily enough, three of the five of us are married to the men whose antics inspired us to belt out "Like the Way I Do" with such passion. (I bet I can still recite all the words to that one, though I haven't heard it more than a decade.) What were you listening to in college?

I will leave you with a recipe for the Best Sandwich in the History of the World, a sandwich I've made twice in the past week after thinking about it for a year: pan bagnat. Over and out from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Snippets

You guys know about my aikido black belt, yes? And I've posted before about our top-of-the-line home security system, that wails minatorily when someone even approaches the house with bad intentions? I mention this because my husband is out of the country for the week, and I would hate to have to beat the stuffing out of any stalker types who happened to read this post.

Alex is away at Scout camp this week also, which means I am the only person in the house whose age is measured in double digits. I'm not used to that. It was bad timing to attempt to discontinue the Unisom I've been taking for nausea. I'm almost better, I thought to myself, so I'll probably be fine. OH MY GOODNESS, I was not fine. I think I'll keep right on taking the drugs.

On Friday I am defending my early research project. If I pass, all I'll have left to do for the PhD is my dissertation. (My department abolished comprehensive exams shortly before I entered the program, intending to replace them with something as yet unspecified, but the students in my cohort don't have to take exams or do the mystery new thing either: coursework, early research project, dissertation, we're done.) In order to pass, I should probably prepare for the defense. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten past drawing cracks on a picture of a highway for my opening slide (see above re: only adult in the house and still throwing up).

While things are quiet I should probably work, not blog, so I will leave you with a quick random scramble.

Pete already has the lawyerly tendency that drives me so crazy in his oldest brother. Friday night I said, "Guys. You have to stop running around the house." He replied, "Me not running around house, Mama. Me running across house."

Oh, silly me. Running across the house is A-OK. (She said sarcastically.)

One of the kids on my caseload has the largest tonsils I have ever seen, and I have been trying for months to get a more informed opinion about them. I need to see his velum, which doesn't seem to be doing its job properly, but it's hidden behind his tonsils. His pediatrician has not seemed to be concerned in the slightest about these tonsils that meet in the middle, but the mom finally wangled an ENT referral. The ENT took one look and said, "Oh, those have to come out." He scheduled surgery for a few days later. I could not help but wonder if the pediatrician would have been so laissez-faire with a child who had good insurance. (Here's a tonsil picture if you have only a vague idea where your tonsils really are -- they live in between the two arch-y things you see in the back of your mouth (more properly known as your anterior and posterior faucial pillars). They should not, just in case you wondered, meet in the middle.) But I'm hoping the surgery makes a difference for him.

A pair of mourning doves built a nest on our front porch, and the mama sat on that egg for weeks and weeks. I felt some sympathy for her because she starting setting her eggs right when I found out I was pregnant. I would watch her up there in the cold April wind and think queasily, "It's hard work to help a baby grow, isn't it?" I kept watching and watching, waiting for little baby peeps from the nest. But there were never any peeps. This weekend they gave up. I peeked inside the nest, after weeks of trying to stay away from that corner of the porch, and saw one perfect-looking egg. I should probably toss the nest, because rotting egg is not something I want that close to my house. There's something so sad about an abandoned nest, though.

All right, time to get to work. Wish me luck!