bearing blog

Ogling.

President Obama is exonerated, but Nicolas Sarkozy is busted.

Night weaning commences?

Sort of.   Mark finally returned from a business trip, a day late.  I'm exhausted.  We had said we would start working on the night weaning as soon as he got back, but I wasn't sure I had the stamina to start tonight.

(I mentioned a while back I was going to night-wean MJ, who will be 3 next month, sometime during the pregnancy.  I don't do nighttime tandem nursing.)

I nursed MJ to sleep -- that's part of the plan, I am not planning to cut out this nursing session -- and fell asleep next to her (instead of switching places with Mark next to her, per the night-weaning plan).  About 3 in the morning she tossed and turned and I woke Mark up and asked him to take her to the toilet, something we have to do once a night to prevent bedwetting.  

He brought her back to me.  I wasn't going to refuse to nurse her, but I admit I was a little slow to deploy the breast.  That's when she started pummeling me.  Kicking and squealing.  "Hey!  Hey!" I muttered, putting my hands up to block the little drumming feet.  "What's wrong?"

She sat up to a kneeling position, balled her little hands into fists, and began to pound on my back.  "I hate you!" she informed me.

"Mark, she's beating me up," I muttered, and rolled myself into a ball and went back to sleep as Mark picked her up.  This is the first-trimester privilege:  Dealing with pummeling, squealing children in the middle of the night is Not My Job.  I didn't bother to listen to find out whether Mark carried her downstairs or cuddled her in the other bed or what.  The pummeling stopped and that meant I could go back to sleep.

She didn't ask to nurse again, but slept through (and is still sleeping at quarter to nine in the morning).  I wonder if she wasn't awake, but was dreaming?  Anyway, that was the first night.  I suppose you'll think I'm silly if I exclaim that it went much better than I expected?

Bad directions.

So when a chunk of local infrastructure is so poorly designed that it annoys thousands of people every year, but it's been that way for so long that many locals are used to it, is it a waste of taxpayer money to improve the design, or not?

It depends on whether the design improvement actually solves the problem. 

Based on the number of comments on the Star Tribune story, apparently the hottest topic in the Twin Cities isn't the Minnesota Senate race, but airport signage.  And apparently most of my fellow citizens are of the opinion that if you get lost on the way to the airport because of confusing signs, it's your own damn fault. 

A little background for the out-of-towners.

We have one major airport here in the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport, with one three-letter airport code, MSP.   That airport has two terminals.

1. What everyone calls the "Main Terminal," but which is really named the Charles A. Lindbergh Terminal, and which is served by all but a few airlines.
2. The "Humphrey Terminal," i.e., the Hubert H. Humphrey Terminal, which is served by AirTran, JetAmerica, IcelandAir, Southwest, Sun Country, and several charter lines including Aeroméxico.

So far this is not unusual for a mid-sized American city:  one airport, two terminals, check.  Here is the unusual part.  The two terminals are not accessed by the same exit on the highway.   You can take the train from one terminal to the other, but it isn't a trivial operation -- we're not talking about a little airport peoplemover, I mean you can take the light-rail line from one stop to the next.  Let's just say that if you arrived at the wrong terminal with not much time to spare, you might well miss your plane.   (Below:  Google Map taking you from Humphrey to Lindbergh in nine minutes, not counting time spent in parking garages or figuring out you're in the wrong terminal.)

View Larger Map

Okay, so, here's where the signage comes into play.  Most cities I've been to with multiple terminals work like this.  You take the (only) exit from the highway that goes to the airport.  Once you're on the airport grounds, airport signs direct you to the correct terminal, usually by the airline you're flying.  Northwest flies out of here, USAirways out of here, etc. etc. etc.  Most cities, the key piece of information you need as you drive to the airport is what airline.  You can just sort of assume that this will get you to the right building.

Not so here.  As you're driving to the airport you are greeted with signs that tell you to take this exit for the Humphrey Terminal and that exit for the Lindbergh terminal.  No mention of airlines, charter vs. scheduled flights, domestic vs. international, or any such useful information.  Leaving you, perhaps a hapless non-Minnesotan, to guess whom Minnesotans hold in high enough regard to honor with the MAIN terminal name, and whom Minnesotans hold in, oh,  a sort of small auxiliary regard.  The erstwhile politician, or the famous aviator?   And wait a minute, if you're on a kind of a small airline anyway, are you even sure you belong in the main terminal?

OK, so the airports commission just voted $2.2 million to improve the signs by referring to the terminals as "1" and "2" (maybe that's a little laughable, but I think this is an improvement, at least if Lindbergh "Main" becomes "1" since at least the ordinal numbers imply a primary and a secondary terminal) and, more importantly, signs that tell drivers where to go for which airline.

Let's leave aside the possibility that the sum is exorbitant.  I do not have enough information to know whether $2.2 million is a good deal for the signage.  I haven't the foggiest idea how much highway signs cost, and none of the news articles have offered any useful context (how much does MNDOT spend on signage per year statewide, for instance?) I'll just take them at their word here.

So... the hostility in the comments on the article towards the improved signage is mind-blowing to me.  "If you're too stupid to find your way to the airport, you're too stupid to fly."  (Hey, maybe we should just eliminate all road signage while we're at it.)  Or "They should just put up one sign for international, one fo""r domestic."  (Huh?  International and domestic flights take off and land from both terminals.)  Or "Everybody knows you should find out which terminal you're going to ahead of time." (Not necessary in most American cities.)  Or, my favorite, "We don't need signs --how hard is it to read what's written on your ticket?"  (What is this artifact, this ticket you speak of?)

Anyway, I for one am glad they're fixing it, if only because it annoys me every time I drive by the signs.  I do hope they don't spend more on the signs than they need to, but matching the exits to the airlines strikes me as the minimum adequate signage.  Look, it would have been nice if they had done it right in the first place and not had to spend the money this year, but when government screws up I think we should expect them to fix it.   I'm glad there are so many people annoyed by government money-wasting, but the money-wasting happened long ago when they made the spectacularly bad signage from the highway.

Cautionary words on the new encyclical.

Until you get around to reading it -- I know I don't have time for at least a couple more days -- bear in mind what Jimmy Akin has to say.  Especially this part:

1) Do not put weight on anything you read in the newspaper or on secular talk radio regarding the encyclical. The mainstream media simply does not "get" religion, and they are too incompetent on matters of religion to report accurately anything that the pope says or does. Sorry, but it's the truth.

Yup.  I saw a couple of headlines yesterday as I read the news, one of which went something like "POPE CALLS FOR ALL-WORLD GOVERNMENT TO CONTROL THE GLOBAL ECONOMY."  The proper response to something like this is eye-rolling and a muttered "Yeah, can't wait to see where they got that from."

 

"In Search of Dignity."

An interesting, if flawed, little op-ed in the NYT (h/t Instapundit) that begins with an anecdote about George Washington.  

First, a comment on Washington's well-known copybook --- okay, it's well-known to classical/traditional/Charlotte Mason homeschoolers anyway.  I can't count how many times I've seen people suggest using pieces of this as copywork for children of the right ages, for history, handwriting, or grammar practice, and maybe they'll absorb some of the rules while they're at it:

When George Washington was a young man, he copied out a list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” Some of the rules in his list dealt with the niceties of going to a dinner party or meeting somebody on the street.

“Lean not upon anyone,” was one of the rules. “Read no letter, books or papers in company,” was another. “If any one come to speak to you while you are sitting, stand up,” was a third.

But, as the biographer Richard Brookhiser has noted, these rules, which Washington derived from a 16th-century guidebook, were not just etiquette tips. They were designed to improve inner morals by shaping the outward man. Washington took them very seriously. He worked hard to follow them. Throughout his life, he remained acutely conscious of his own rectitude.
In so doing, he turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

Washington absorbed, and later came to personify what you might call the dignity code. The code was based on the same premise as the nation’s Constitution — that human beings are flawed creatures who live in constant peril of falling into disasters caused by their own passions. Artificial systems have to be created to balance and restrain their desires.

I like this characterization of Washington, and of the premise mentioned in the last paragraph.

Is it a bit precious to draw a connection between the first president and the latest based on this? Particularly since there is no obvious evidence that President Obama shares the philosophical premise implicitly imputed to President Washington in that paragraph.  It's more about... bearing:

Americans still admire dignity. But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.

But it’s not right to end on a note of cultural pessimism because there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

I think the writer is correct that President Obama has a dignified bearing, and I think that is part of his popular appeal because it is refreshing.  It isn't clear, though, whether President Obama's bearing is an outward expression of an inner conviction, like the one almost universally depicted by Washington's biographers, or if it's the result of something else.  It would be nice if the country got used to a little dignity and started expecting it of its leaders -- more on the outside might raise the probability that we'd get more on the inside.

Readers know that I am a policy voter, not a personality voter, so bearing (a personality trait, and one that can be used to soothe opponents into complacency) isn't something I take much into account at the ballot box.   But it is something I appreciate.   As anyone might guess.

Herbs.

Kind of a neat article, with photos, about local farmer Bonnie Dehn and her herb/salad/flower/houseplant operation.  I recognized the Dehn name immediately as the one on the little plastic boxes of dill, mint, or basil we buy at the supermarket.  I don't wish to be a farmer, but I wish I had volunteer dill growing all over my yard.

(Amber in the comments to the post below about fried eggs suggested I try growing pot greens -- We attempted to have a vegetable garden exactly once, using the Square Foot Gardening method, and the only thing that I  could coax out of the ground was the chard, which produced prodigiously.  If I ever garden again -- and I am thinking about putting a raised bed or two in my front yard -- I swore the only thing I would attempt next time would be things like chard, kale, and arugula.  I eat tons of the stuff anyway, it doesn't mind much neglect, and it likes Minnesota weather.)

(Don't hold it against the Square Foot Gardening method.  I am just a major slacker.  SFG is awesome for the small back yard.)

Everything you know about the foreclosure crisis might be wrong.

Maybe it wasn't subprime loans.  Maybe it wasn't fraudulent paperwork.  Maybe the culprit is really no-money-down:

Many policy makers and ordinary people blame the rise of foreclosures squarely on subprime mortgage lenders who presumably misled borrowers into taking out complex loans at low initial interest rates. Those hapless individuals were then supposedly unable to make the higher monthly payments when their mortgage rates reset upwards.

But the focus on subprimes ignores the widely available industry facts...that 51% of all foreclosed homes had prime loans, not subprime, and that the foreclosure rate for prime loans grew by 488% compared to a growth rate of 200% for subprime foreclosures.... 

Sharing the blame in the popular imagination are other loans where lenders were largely at fault -- such as "liar loans," where lenders never attempted to validate a borrower's income or assets.

This common narrative also appears to be wrong...The analysis indicates that, by far, the most important factor related to foreclosures is the extent to which the homeowner now has or ever had positive equity in a home.

(h/t Instapundit)

It certainly shakes up the narrative, but it isn't hard to construct an alternative narrative that makes sense.  When you owe more money on your house than it's worth, walking away from the mortgage can be rational behavior.  And what of the "has or ever had" positive equity?  Not surprising that even having ever, once, held equity in your home, tends to keep people from walking away, especially when you consider how strongly people become attached to the notion of "I invested in this house, dammit" to the point where they won't sell it at a paper loss in the face of all rational evidence that they should cut their losses.  

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were still promoting no-money-down purchases last June when the foreclosure wave was gathering steam.  

There are all sorts of ways for government and nonprofits to help people financially -- I am getting more and more convinced that the best assistance is that which doesn't destroy people's sense of having invested their own resources in their success.  Yes, it means that people with less resources have fewer options than those with comparatively more.  Still, it seems to be safer for the economy, and I think more respectful of human autonomy.

In praise of this morning's breakfast: Fried egg and pot greens.

It's nothing terribly special, and I think I have mentioned similar things before, but I thought it was a particularly elegant solution to my dual problems of "get more green leafies into me since they aren't appealing to me very much" and "what to put under my egg in the morning so I don't overload on carby things."

• 1/2 to 1 cup cooked leafy greens (with about a tablespoon of pot liquor if you have it)
• 1  tsp balsamic vinegar, or to taste 
• Up to 2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil -- at minimum, just a bit more than you need to fry the egg comfortably
• 1 egg  
• Salt and pepper to taste 

Toss the hot greens in a bowl with balsamic vinegar and pot liquor.

Fry egg in the generous pour of olive oil.  When the egg is done to your liking (me:  crispy on the edges, over very easy) slide the egg, oil and all, on top of the hot cooked greens.  Hear the sizzle as the hot oil comes into contact with the greens?  Top with salt and pepper to taste, pierce the yolk, and dig in.

Let's talk about the greens.  The easiest way to make this dish a quick weekday morning breakfast for one is to keep some precooked pot greens in their pot liquor in the fridge.   It's a great use for leftovers.  But you could also begin with fresh tender greens, like spinach or chard or young kale, and quickly steam-saute them in a little water in the egg pan before transferring them to the bowl.  Wipe out  the pan, then fry the egg.   

The culinarily gifted will immediately see ways to make this dish more interesting and/or fancy.  The two most obvious to me are (1) saute some sliced garlic in the oil and remove it before adding the egg and (2) same thing with chopped bacon, use less oil. If you are desperate to eat less fat, you could toss just a drizzle of olive oil with the greens and use a poached egg; it is quite nice that way.  If you like Asian flavors for breakfast, you could do coconut oil and a bit of fish or soy sauce instead of olive oil.  But I think my version is simple, rich, and healthful.  It is good down to the last drop of vinegary, egg-yolky pot liquor at the bottom of the bowl.  

I have not tried this with frozen greens.  We eat a lot of frozen greens in this house because they're so conveniently added to almost any meal, but I much prefer fresh.  In almost any season, pot greens are among the best bargains in the produce department, especially if you measure nutritional bang for the buck, so there's no excuse not to buy some fresh every week.

P.S.  I would think that if fate has dealt you an egg allergy, that some fried Canadian Bacon would be a very tasty thing to put on top of your greens for breakfast, and would be just about as quick and easy. Sausage is another possibility -- I would choose a leaner sausage here so that the olive oil provided a higher proportion of the fat.  Maybe a turkey kielbasa.

Wedding night blues.

I should have pointed to this post by MrsDarwin when it was fresh, but better late than never.  Here's the opening paragraph:

When I was a newly-wed, I worked at a theater. One afternoon, as I was working on tech with two other girls, the subject of sex came up, and both were surprised to hear that I had been a virgin when I got married. That set them off reminiscing about their first times. For all our cultural and moral and experiential disparity, we could all agree on one thing: the first time had been awkward, painful, and kind of alarming. This was a bit surprising to me -- surely the heat of the moment ought to be more conducive to getting it on than after a long and stressful wedding day? Not so much, it seems.

It's a good post, but particularly because of the comments -- she got a little flak for being, in the eyes of some readers, insufficiently reverent toward marital intimacy.  Others (including yours truly) disagreed.  I'm glad she didn't take the post down.

Occasionally I will hear someone defend premarital sexual activity as a positive good, even necessary, as a way of making sure that the couple is "sexually compatible" with each other before making a long-term commitment.  Pragmatically, I suppose that argument has its own logic, but even pragmatically it falls flat.  There are no guarantees that the superficially sexually compatible will remain so.  The one guarantee is that you're both going to get older, and things are going to change, some for better and some for worse.   So why be so fixated on whether you're "sexually compatible" at this one particular moment in time?  The inexperienced will gain experience; the interesting will become mundane.  Libido will wax and wane in response to all the myriad influences of rest and exhaustion and presence and absence, in the cycles of childbearing and childrearing.  Medical problems may intervene.  So why not just accept one another where you are, and learn together how to be together as you go?  It's the philosophy of the young, foolish, and naive, and yet... it has served many people very well, including Mark and me.  

Pragmatically, I suppose it requires patience, generosity, honesty, and a sense of humor.  But then, maybe it can help develop those things too.

If you haven't read the stories I speak of, this post won't mean much to you.

With all the resting and putting my feet up, I've been doing more reading for pleasure.   A couple of weeks ago I pulled out and re-read The Habit of Being, the volume of collected letters of Flannery O'Connor edited by Sally Fitzgerald.  I am intrigued by reading somebody else's correspondence -- maybe it is the sense of eavesdropping, maybe it is the mystery of only getting one side of the conversation, and having to fill in the interlocutors' questions and responses with guesswork, or else just let it go.

Re-reading THOB got me in the mood to read O'Connor's stories again, so I opened up my copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find, and again, having finished that, requested the collection Everything that Rises Must Converge from the library.  I was struck again by the first impression I had upon reading straight through a volume of O'Connor's short stories:  I do not think the best way to read them for the first time is several all at once.  The overall impact is dulled.  One can only be shocked by the grotesque so many times in one afternoon.   (I remember this happening, too, with stories by Roald Dahl when I encountered them in junior high.)  I think Flannery O'Connor deserves to be read one story at a time, at least the first time.

And yet, when you are coming back to them for the second or third or tenth time, there is an entertaining dimension to reading them all together.  This time through it -- with both AGMIHTF and ETRMC in hand, and able to turn back and forth from the earlier stories to the later ones over a period of several days while I let them percolate through my brain -- I noticed the stories having a peculiar effect on me.  

In many of the stories, Flannery's omniscient narrator is more omniscient than most.  The protagonists of her stories are all deeply flawed people --- everyone in the stories is deeply flawed, and if I had to guess I'd guess her point is that people in general are deeply flawed.  They are also people who often have an inaccurate view of their own motivations.  But it's so crisp and precise -- it has taken me a while to put my finger on it, but I think the peculiar brilliance is that her narrator simply, objectively, and faithfully tells the inner monologue of the characters, completely nonjudgmentally,  but in a way that lays bare to the reader all the character's flaws and prejudices and self-aggrandizements, leaving only the pure inner thoughts.   You know what the character is thinking, and the character knows what she is thinking, but somehow you can know the character better than the character does.  It is a clarity that burns away all the facades, the ones erected for others and the ones erected to protect the self from self-knowledge. 

So, the effect on me.  After reading some of these stories in a row (to name a few, the ones that have really stood out for me this time around are "Revelation," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," "The Enduring Chill" especially, also my dearly beloved "A Temple of the Holy Ghost", and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" which I didn't appreciate nearly as much the last time I read it)...

...I started to get this weird sense of my own mind being laid out like that on the page.  I had a notion, a brief one, of what it would read on the page if Flannery's narrator were inspired with my own internal monologue.  It was kind of horrifying to think what my thoughts would look like if I had the ill fortune to be a character in a Flannery O'Connor story.  Because after reading a number of the stories in a row, I started to feel like I would fit right in among them.  We can't all be Southern, and we can't all have artificial legs or hated overbearing mothers, but we can all be a little grotesque.  

Just a brief, fleeting glimpse of "what if I could read Flannery's narration of my own inner thoughts?" followed by the chilling certainty that it would be, um, a purgatorial experience.  

Something else to look at.

After reading my last post, Christy P pointed me to a blog on Slate called "The Happiness Project."  It looks like there's a lot of thought-provoking reading there.  

For example, a post called Forgive an Accident.  Which is Harder Than it Sounds.  That one hits home -- it ought to, for almost anyone who lives with small children.  Isn't it astonishing the things that make us needlessly angry?

Immediate results.

I'm sitting in an Eat Street diner called the Bad Waitress, musing about inflation.  Remember the Five Dollar Milkshake in Pulp Fiction?  This place has milkshakes for $5.25.  (Bananas in your milkshake will set you back an additional dollar).

Waiting for my eggs Benedict.  I just finished my morning swim, so I think I've earned it.  It comes with asparagus.  That's a vegetable.  (UPDATE:  Two stalks?  That's a garnish, not a comes-with.  Sheesh.  Oh well, it was REALLY good hollandaise.  I'm not going to have to eat lunch now, I'm sure of it.)

Thinking about habits and about outcomes.

What do you really want to change about yourself?  I mean -- among the things that you could change.  Really.

I know I have a long list.  I wish I reflexively, automatically, responded to my children by strengthening connections, not rupturing them.   I wish that desire for the Lord, rather than duty, would draw me to prayer several times a day.  I wish that my irritation at an untidy house didn't get in the way of welcoming people into my home;  I wish I was more generous to my friends.  I wish I had a better grasp on how much money I spend.  I wish I knew how to teach my children love for Jesus as well as I think I know how to teach them theology and logic.  I wish I didn't waste any time sitting in front of the computer each day.   The list goes on.

Once I would have said "I wish I wasn't so heavy and out of shape."  I don't say that anymore.  So:  hope.

And skill.  I have a theory -- still untested -- that I can apply something I learned with the heavy/out of shape thing, to all those other wishes and longings.  It's the meta-advice that I do dispense to people who really mean it when they ask me, "How did you lose the weight?  How can I not be so fat anymore?"  And that is to let go of the outcome, as much as possible----let go of what you want to BE ---and concentrate on the relevant behavior---what you DO.   Yes, I had weight loss on my mind that whole time, how could I not?  But I tried to put all my mental effort, self-blame and self-praise, onto the habits of regular exercise and control of my eating.  I tried to want those things for themselves.  And as time went on I did want those things for themselves.  That has made the difference.  I am now the sort of person who wants to wait for a nibble till lunch.  I am now the sort of person who looks forward to a vigorous swim.

This is the insight I would like most to share with people who ask me how I did it, how to do it.  A lot of the answers are "I don't know."  I simply don't know why last year and not any of the 20 years before that.  I don't know what changed.  Some grace, I think, an answered prayer, but I would never want to suggest that your problem is that you haven't prayed the right prayer or prayed hard enough.  But I do sincerely believe that cultivating the desire for new behaviors -- not slavishly adhering to behaviors because I thought they would gain me my far-off desire -- was a truly new, truly different, ultimately successful strategy.

It's sort of like "fake it till you make it."  I tried to behave like a healthy, athletic person, and to want to do the things a healthy, athletic person would do, rather than just wish I were healthy and athletic and hope that this wish would drive me to do the right things.

I've wondered in this space before if it is possible to MAKE yourself want something.  The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is yes.  Some things are probably harder to want than others.  But why not try?

Can I apply this to the other things I would like to change about myself?  Probably not all at once, but I could pick one thing and work on it.  Take my response to the children.  I cannot make myself be patient and self-giving.  I can resolve to change behaviors, and I can really want to change them.   Here is an example, a tiny one.  I have an image in my mind of myself that I do not like.  It comes from a day when my five-year-old got a hold of the camera and walked around the house taking pictures -- you know the kind, all the furniture slightly distorted from the kid's-eye view.  There are several pictures of me in that set.  They are all pictures of my back, hunched over the computer.  I do not want my kids to think of me as focused on the computer.  In the picture, it is impossible to tell whether I am reading blogs, or writing email to good friends, or planning the school day.  The kids don't see this.  All they see is my back to them.  I know I do not want to spend their lives with my back to them and my face turned to the computer screen.  If I concentrate on this image, I think I can make myself feel dissatisfied with looking at the screen instead of them.  I think I can make myself want to save the computer time for the blocks I have set aside for it, for early mornings, for the after-lunch recess, for daddy's bedtime story time, for Saturday mornings at the coffee shop.  I think I can make myself want to turn it off when the first child comes stumbling and yawning down the stairs wanting breakfast, so that the first thing he sees is a smile and a good morning, not "Aaagh!  What are you doing up already!?"

"I will be more connected" -- overwhelming, open-ended, vague.  "I will learn to keep the computer in its place --" much more do-able.  And more immediate, too.  At the end of the day I can feel good about having turned it off when I was supposed to and saved it for the right time, even if I don't feel any more patient or connected or different in any way than yesterday.  And the next day is another day.  And then there is another, a string of opportunities for success as long as life lasts.

Schedule.

The odd thing about this time through the first trimester (10 weeks today by conventional counting):

You know, not that many weeks ago I was a fairly effective person.  I rarely accomplished every task I had on my mental to-do list each morning, but I tended to hit Minimum-Plus with some regularity.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all made and eaten.  Schoolwork was done.  I ran the dishwasher at least once.  I answered email and wrote a blog post or two.  Some house-tidying and/or laundry happened.  I nursed my daughter a few times and got the next day's school more or less ready.  If it was an exercise day, I got my workout; if a kid had a lesson, he got to it.  I had time for a beer or at least a cup of tea with my husband at the end of the day.  Usually a few things got left off the list, but I think my family and friends would agree that I got around to the really important things, and carved a bit off the optional things, every day.

Now I'm scratching my head.  How did I do that?  Because from where I'm sitting (or sometimes lying with my feet up) I really don't see how the math all works out.  How many hours are there in a day again?  What time did I get up in the morning?   How many cups of coffee did I drink?  How long of a break did I take?  When did all these things happen?

Even if I subtract off the daily nap I am needing every day, it just doesn't seem possible that I could have done all that.  I try and I don't even come close.  I teach one child some math and I don't have time to read to the other.  I get some laundry done, and dinner has to be peanut butter sandwiches.  The only answer is that I am simply moving a lot SLOWER.

One of those things you just have to shrug off, I guess.  It's the first trimester.  It happens.  On the housework end, Mark is cheerfully picking up the slack; on the schoolwork end, well, it's summer, and even though I theoretically school year round, I'm not going to sweat it if we have some days of building blocks and an excursion to the playground and, yes, a video or two so I can doze off for an hour.  The one thing hanging ominously over my head is that I haven't finished my school planning for next year, and next year has to begin on August 18 (because of the block of time off in the middle of the year when the baby's born), so I'm quickly approaching the point at which it's impossible to get all the books I need from the library in time to figure out the reading schedule for American History.

That's why I am announcing that I expect to have all my energy back TWO WEEKS from today.  Hear that, body?  Get your naps now.  The clock is ticking.