Secretive-like

Recently SAM accused me of having a "secret food blog." I laughed and replied that it wasn't secret, I just didn't think she'd be interested in it because she doesn't cook. It's not even my blog--Rita created it and invited me to contribute. Lately I think my fellow contributors have gotten busy and I must be bored or cooking a lot or just thinking about food too much, because I seem to have become the main recipe poster of the moment.

It's not a fancy food blog, just basic stuff you can easily whip up with minimal cooking skills. But lest I be accused of hoarding food knowledge and building a secret food blog underground, I thought I'd share. Bon apetit!

Ravioli Day

I think I've said before that one of the things I loved about BD from the very beginning was his big Italian family and the fact that they all liked each other so much. Being from a small family myself, I found it fascinating that there were so many of them, and that they were all so themselves together, and that my cooly cynical teenaged boyfriend's face lit up like a little boy when he talked about upcoming get-togethers with all of them. It still does.

One of the traditions from BD's family that we have taken upon ourselves to pass on (ahem, aside from having lots of babies...), is the massive making of his great-grandparents' ravioli recipe each year before the holidays. We've expanded the tradition to include our friends, who truly are family to us. They are the aunts and uncles our kids will remember always having around (in addition to their real ones, of course), and their kids are the passel of cousins our family does not really have in abundance here in town. This past weekend, we all got together and made 58 dozen ravioli from scratch (I originally miscounted, but bagging them up revealed the true numbers). Thanks to Chip for the great pictures. I love ravioli day.

BD and SAM rolling out the dough and passing strips to the assemblers (with Shannon there to document)

Somerset working very diligently

Calvin preparing for the pickup tray.

Me being the pickup lady
Stacey and Jiro bonding over a ravioli moment

The group enjoying the fruits of their labor

Hillary Clinton reflects

This morning when I woke up I was
not The President, again. I lay in bed
pretending for just that last moment before
opening my eyes that it had happened. That
I was Her, the first, and that I was just about to
sit up, swing my legs over the bed and slide
my feet into the fuzzy presidential slippers.

I think that it is time I took up a hobby. Maybe
I'll go away, get a little cottage and grow things. What
is it that people grow when they do that? Orchids? Too
complicated. Rhubarb? Too...something. Where is the right
climate for cucumbers and mint?

I will let my hair grow long and
stop getting it colored. Or color it pink. I will get a bunch
of cats and let them go just shy of feral, knots of blind kittens
in baskets all the time. I will have a democracy of cats,
who will love me.

And Bill can't come.

Hope

This is the most inspiring collection of photographs of the president-elect that I have seen. Enjoy! Look at those crowds!

Facebook, long lines, and various other ramblings

Yesterday I stood in line for over two hours to vote early. I took a book, of course, so it wasn't too bad. A woman behind me held a four month old baby in her arms the whole entire time. I wished so badly that I'd had a sling or something in the car to loan her, but I just had my non-adjustable Hotsling, which would not have fit her. I also felt like I should offer to hold the baby for a bit, but that's always a little weird, isn't it? She and I and two other women in line chatted off and on the whole time, and I think we all wanted to help, but what if she didn't want strangers (as nice and normal as we all may have seemed) holding her baby? Then we'd all have to stand there together feeling awkward for the next hour. Oh well. I did eventually make it to the machines to cast my vote. Woo hoo! I really prefer to vote on election day, but BD is going to be interviewing people at polling places that day, so I figured I'd better go ahead and get it done. Now watch, on Tuesday the big story will be that everyone is in and out in twenty minutes.

Not to delve into a big political discussion, because this is not that blog, but I recently experienced a big boom of people I went to high school with linking up on Facebook. In looking at their profiles, I couldn't help but notice that the vast majority of these people list themselves as "conservative Christian" and Republican. Neither of which, suffice it to say, comes anywhere close to the way I describe myself. I went all the way through elementary and high school with most of these people, so I guess that's why for some reason it surprises me to learn that they are all so different from me. Which is silly, really, because I in fact thought that everyone was Baptist until sixth grade, when I befriended a Jehova's Witness. And then all of us in our little cool girl clique proceeded to tell her that all her beliefs were wrong, that not believing in hell was crazy, and that her religion condoned way more racial mixing than we were led to believe was acceptable. I still want to find that girl and apologize to her. Thinking about her makes me cringe, not only because of our well-meaning bigotry and intolerance, (which were more often than not backed up by our teachers), but because it makes me think "Holy crap, the Jehovah's Witness was the crazy liberal in my world then?" I live in the buckle of the Bible Belt, after all, the city with more churches than gas staions, yada yada yada. I guess I'm just surprised because I grew up that way too, but I'm not that way now, and the path from there to here just seems so natural to me. To realize that the majority of my peers, kids I went to school with for up to ten years, exchanged classroom valentines with, went through puberty with, snuck out and ran around with, turned out so completely other than what I am...it just feels weird, and kind of depressing. It makes me realize how much I float along in my little liberal midtown(ish) bubble, forgetting I'm a blue dot in a sea of red.

I Hung One More Year on the Line

Yesterday was my 36th birthday, and it was wonderful. Between BD surprising me with a shiny new bike, SAM writing me a very nice birthday post and bringing me Chicken Tikka Masala and a lovely French Silk pie, and what felt like hundreds of birthday wishes on Facebook, I felt very loved and happy all day. Who cares if I'm now officially closer to 40 than 30? 36 is looking great so far.

Women's Work

I have a rather un-feminist confession to make: I have never liked the idea of having a man in my kitchen. All the husbands I knew who cooked seemed to get embroiled in these very elaborate recipes that involved blowtorches and trips to multiple specialty markets. Dinner seemed to run quite late on a regular basis, and the wives, between keeping the kids out of the way and then cleaning up the man mess, seemed to end up with as much work, if not more, as if they just cooked themselves. Not for me, I proclaimed.

I grew up cooking. By the time I was in high school, I knew how to make most of my mom's recipes and most days I at least got dinner started when I came home from school. I know how to buy groceries at the biggest grocery store I can find, stock the pantry, fridge, and freezer, and make dinner nightly based on whatever I have on hand. I can take a pot roast from deep freeze to table in one hour (thank you, inventor of the pressure cooker) and serve it up with mashed potatoes and gravy, a green veg, and rolls. I cook like a mom.

Before we had kids, I subscribed to Food and Wine and watched fancy cooking shows and went through phases of baking bread from scratch. I was an adventurous and creative cook, and I looked for opportunities to challenge my skills and cook for a group. But you know, when you cook dinner for nine people at least three nights a week, where's the challenge? Sadly, since the kids started coming, cooking has become less a thrill and more a chore. I've been in a rut.

But things have changed around chez Sassy. BD, he cooks! Since selling the shop and becoming a feelance writer based from home, he has gotten himself a cookbook and started making stuff out of it. I'm not sure if it's because he knows my feelings about the male cooking-as-major-project deal, or if it's just because he's very new to the kitchen, but so far he has stuck to basic-but-good dishes. And I must admit, it has been absolutely wonderful.

I'm not ready to give up cooking altogether, but not having to do it four or five nights a week is very relaxing. And surpisingly, I find myself thinking about branching out and trying new recipes instead of just auto-piloting the old staples. In the past week or so, I've made polenta dishes (cooking my own polenta, not using storebought) and tamales from scratch, much as I might have done ten years ago but would not have felt like doing a month ago. It's been fun. Having a man in the kitchen is not so bad after all! Especially if he happens to be wearing jeans and a black tshirt and have a dishtowel hanging from his back pocket.

You Say It's Your Birthday

A very hAPpy birthday to my girl SAM.

More fun with words

I'm enjoying the feedback from my words post and am still processing. In the meantime, I'm following Rita through the Johari Window. Click on that and follow the directions to help fill in my window, then make your own and link me to it.

The Sound of Silence

In The Writer on Her Work, Volume 2, Joy Williams talks about feeling suspicious of a reader's praise by saying "Words, you know, they're around. They get used a lot."

Lately I have become suspicious of my own facility with words. It has occured to me that I think in complete sentences, and while this thought made me happy when it first dawned on me, now I'm not so sure.

This isn't just about my notorious talkativeness, because I believe I have reined that in quite a bit and it rarely gets away from me anymore. It's more about the internal thought processes that aren't necessarily tied to speech. I'm starting to wonder if words are holding my thoughts prisoner.

I don't know why this never occured to me before. I intentionally avoided teaching my children to read before kindergarten because of the theory that the process shapes their thinking into more rigid patterns. (This was a very popular idea among the Existentialist crowd, many of whom advocated waiting until kids were 8 or 9 before allowing them to read.) Three of my four children showed themselves to be highly verbal from infancy, and I wanted to give them time to develop their other facilities. I never worried that they would have trouble with words. I wanted them to focus on what came less naturally: being creative, musical, physically adroit. But I never thought about myself in those terms.

Today as I was reading a friend's blog, I came across these quotes from Ekhart Tolle's A New Earth. I'm not a New Agey spiritual kind of person, but the quotes struck me especially hard:

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. You don't know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg."

and

"The quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you."

Ouch.

It's funny how we can never see clearly when it comes to ourselves. Recently a student of mine who is also a very serious art student wrote in an essay about feeling that she is not as creative as she was a year ago. I suggested in my comments that she spark her creativity by doing things she wouldn't normally do and pushing herself out of her comfort zone a little bit. Maybe that's what I should do, too.

It has never been lost on me that I get a little thrill from being moved to tears for unfathomable reasons. I like it when a piece of instrumental music has an emotional effect on me, or when I see or experience something that stirs up feelings that I can't logically connect to the impetus. I guess I've always understood in a vague, peripheral part of my mind why that might be. And now I've noticed that my ever-morphing daydreams about escaping my children for a few days have taken a new form. I dream of a few days alone, without words. No talking, no reading, no writing. It might sound extreme, but I feel like my brain needs retraining, and rest.

Weekend Update, sadly still not starring Tina Fey

Sometimes instead of not blogging because I'm busy or lazy, I'm not blogging because I'm having too much fun to stop and tell you how much fun I'm having. This weekend was one of those times.

For starters, BD had a real, actual, two-day weekend! He has worked Saturdays for the past eight years or so, but that's all over now. His excitement over the prospect of having a real weekend was almost as adorable as watching him walk around the house in my robe.

Saturday was the much anticipated Rock-n-Romp starring (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) Garrison Starr. After years of whining about why didn't I have a Garrison Starr CD, I got to buy one directly from her. A CD always sounds better when it was put in your hand by the artist herself, don't you think? See pictures of us having a fabulous time here.
Yesterday I went to the Midsouth Fair with my kids, minus the youngest, and my parents. I rode a lot of rides, ate food on a stick, and got so tired from walking around in the hot sun for five hours that I am back to being too lazy to tell you much more about it.

Hello, I Must Be Going

Beeep: Sassy can't come to the blog right now because she is touring the seventh circle of grading hell. In fact it's possible that she's only recording this message as a means to avoid reading month-old essays. If you really, really miss her, you can visit her here. (She thinks she looks like Petunia in the last picture, but she doesn't want Chip to go back to being afraid to post her picture.) Otherwise, please leave a message.

Rabble Rouser

My school district is in budget crisis. There are a multitude of reasons for that, but the main two are declining enrollment and an ignorant city council that recently forced huge cuts which they justified by saving the average property owner approximately $8 in property taxes (really, I'm not just being snarky. Eight. Dollars. A year.) because, you know, what does a crime-ridden, floundering city need with educated children? Makes 'em uppity, all that book learnin'.

As a result of the declining enrollment, about 70 teachers are being laid off. Normally these "surplussed" teachers would just get moved from a school with lower enrollment to one with too many students for the current staffing level. Apparently, this year we're not so much with the latter. At my school, we lost a single science teacher because our numbers are down for the first time in several years. At this time last year, we got eight additional teachers who had been surplussed from other schools.

As a result of the budget cuts, over 100 non-teaching positions, both filled and vacant, are being eliminated. 40 of those are within the school board and are held by licensed teachers. Those 40 people now have the option, under our MEA-negotiated contract, to "bump" teachers with lesser seniority from their positions.

As a teacher, I'm not that worried about being bumped because I have ten years in the system, and within my department there are probably five teachers less senior than I. (Of course I don't want to see any of them go, though.) But as a parent, this really gets my hackles up. I have three children in a single elementary school in this district. All three of them love their teachers. Calvin, the fifth grader, is especially enamored of his main teacher this year. What if he got bumped by some bitter old hag who left the classroom because she grew to hate the sight of children after thirty years of teaching them? I find myself hoping that this teacher's disability (he is legally blind and active in organizations that lobby for the rights of the visually impaired) will secure his place. Joshua's main teacher is experienced and has won prestigious awards, so she's probably safe. But both of Somerset's teachers are young and have only been teaching for a few years. Will they be bumped? Or, to put it another way, will I have to organize a protest and go raise hell at the board?

I have refused to join the teachers' union every year that I have taught. I'm not opposed to unions in general--I think that workers should have the right to organize and that they should be protected from the arbitrary whims of management. I don't believe that loyal employees with solid histories in their jobs should be systematically replaced by younger, cheaper versions of themselves. I do not, however, believe in closed shops because no one should ever be forced to join any organization, ever, under any circumstances. And I have a specific problem with the MEA: they act as though the school system exists to employ teachers, and I believe that it exists to educate children. It's as simple as that.

It is not in the best interest of children to disrupt their education once the school year is in progress. Teachers and students have spent six weeks establishing procedures and good work habits, getting to know each other, and building the trust that is essential for real learning to take place. Yanking that security out from under them is wrong and could be disasterous in the lives of individual children.

I said as much to a colleague in the library earlier, and she looked at me as if I had three heads. I like this person and we chat each day in the library while in mutual exile from our rooms (we all have floating teachers in our rooms during our planning periods), but the fact that she used to be an MEA area rep somehow never came up before. Oops. I told her why I'd never joined the union and she said "That's fine unless people are trying to plan their lives. You have ten years; if you got surplussed, you wouldn't bump someone else?" And honestly, that's a tough question. I teach high school and those kids are used to being shuffled around and having their schedules changed multiple times, and I might be better at my job than less experienced teachers, and I need my paycheck, so yes, I see that. My students would already be affected by my having been surplussed, because their schedules would change and they'd be crammed into classes already in progress. I think that's different from people who chose to leave the classroom to take a cushy board job. And ultimately, if I had to I'd just find another job. That's life, right? No other business guarantees perpetual employment. Teachers enjoy more job security than most professionals would ever dream of, but sometimes even we will have to suck it up.

1.5 seconds of fame

My little family was on the news! We're about 1 minute 47 seconds in. Aren't we cute? We all look annoyed because the people who redid the shell would not stop talking for 45 minutes, in spite of impending rain that did in fact begin the minute the first musician hit the stage. Oh well.

http://www.wreg.com/Global/story.asp?s=8956174

I am all over this

Among the daily Facebook notifications, MoveOn updates, and MOMS board minutiae, I find each day in my inbox a daily sale email from Newport News. I'm not sure how they have a sale every single day, but trust me, they do.

If you're not familiar with Newport News, you should check them out. I would describe what they sell as trampy secretary clothes, or five-years-out-of-fashionista, or stylish-for-New Mexico. I receive these emails because I have bought bathing suits there. They sell the cheapest bathing suits anywhere, and they have a huge selection. Occasionally I'll see a dress or sweater that I like, but I don't think I've ever ordered any of those things. Based on my bathing suit experience with them, objects around cleavage may be farther than they appear. I'm not exactly built like their models, you know?

So today, I noticed a little box at the bottom of the email about the Secret Daily Deal, and out of curiosity I clicked. Bust out your credit card, because you are definitely going to want in on this.


Who doesn't need a metallic silver one-pece high-cut bathing suit with a long wrap-around belt?

On Contentment

My belly is full of spaghetti, my children are in the other room cooperatively playing one last game of Hangman before their Dad puts them to bed, I'm enjoying a glass of locally grown and produced blackberry wine, I'm up to my happy little eyeballs in Grendel, and a Democrat may actually win the presidency.

Just don't make me watch the absurd waste of time and money that is the convention.

Go Ahead

Tell me my man is not hilarious.

(Back off, random women who keep stopping my man in the street to tell him just how hilarious he is. I've got my eye on you.)

ENFP

Yesterday my best friend was telling me that an overheard conversation at work prompted her to revisit her Myers-Briggs personality profile. She said she took the instrument again and got the same thing she always has. I vaguely remembered taking it at some point, but I couldn't remember my profile, so she urged me to do it again. It turns out I'm an ENFP. That's Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving, in case you didn't know.

I'm not really one for the psychobabble, but I have to admit that some of my elaborated profile was jarringly accurate. It's a strange feeling to see things that I thought were part of my own unique world view spelled out almost to a T by a complete stranger who never even heard of me. And then, ironically, I was annoyed by the few things that I felt did not reflect the real me. Shouldn't I find those small miscalculations comforting?

Here's my basic breakdown:
moderately expressed extravert
distinctively expressed intuitive personality
moderately expressed feeling personality
moderately expressed perceiving personality

The first paragraph of my elaborated profile contains elements of both the startlingly accurate and the annoyingly unflattering incorrect:

ENFPs are both "idea"-people and "people"-people, who see everyone and everything as part of an often bizarre cosmic whole. They want to both help (at least, their own definition of "help") and be liked and admired by other people, on both an individual and a humanitarian level. They are interested in new ideas on principle, but ultimately discard most of them for one reason or another.

The part about everything being part of the bizarre cosmic whole is dead on. And I do like and try to help people. I do get intersted in new ideas and then habitually reject them as flawed. That's why I can't buy into any one system of religious or philosophical beliefs, even the few that I find mostly appealing. But I don't feel that I care about being liked and admired by other people, especially on a humanitarian level. I mean, not that I want people not to like me, but I accepted long ago that some people just won't. It has been my experience that I do not inspire feelings of neutrality in many people. They either like me or strongly and immediately dislike me. And I'm cool with that, really!

It's mostly the extravert stuff that I find to be a tad off in my profile. I am good with people, but I'm also good alone. My seemingly outgoing personality has more to do with a lack of social anxiety than with an inherent love of people. And there's a lot of stuff about having a short attention span in relationships which is obviously not true (exhibit A: my 20 year relationship with BD), and about "zany charm" and sponteneity, which I find laughable. Not so much with the zany, I don't think.

I scored lowest on the "Feeling" part, and I was actually surprised that it wasn't "Thinking," because I answered "yes" to all the logical and analytical questions. But when I read the ENTP profile, it's far less accurate then the ENFP, so I guess they know what they're talking about.

The work habits part was another bull's eye for me. See especially the part about follow through and procrastination:

ENFPs are pleasant, easygoing, and usually fun to work with. They come up with great ideas, and are a major asset in brainstorming sessions. Followthrough tends to be a problem, however; they tend to get bored quickly, especially if a newer, more interesting project comes along. They also tend to be procrastinators, both about meeting hard deadlines and about performing any small, uninteresting tasks that they've been assigned...ENFPs sometimes can be blindsided by their secondary Feeling function. Hasty decisions based on deeply felt values may boil over with unpredictable results. More than one ENFP has abruptly quit a job in such a moment. (Ahem, see numbers 87 and 88)

This part is especially true of me:

The physical world, both geos and kosmos, is the ENFP's primary source of information. Rather than sensing things as they are, dominant intuition is sensitive to things as they might be. These extraverted intuitives are most adept with patterns and connections. Their natural inclination is toward relationships, especially among people or living things.

That's where that bizarre cosmos thing comes in. The part I found most thought-provoking, because I recognize its accuracy even though it's something I have only just recently begun to realize, was this:

Introverted Sensing
Sensing, the least discernible ENFP function, resides in the inner world where reality is reduced to symbols and icons--ideas representing essences of external realities. Under the influence of the ever-present intuition, the ENFP's sensory perceptions are in danger of being replaced by hypothetical data consistent with pattern and paradigm. When it is protected and nourished, introverted sensing provides information about the fixed. From such firm anchoring ENFPs are best equipped to launch into thousands of plausibilities and curiosities yet to be imagined.

I have always recognized my tendency toward conceptual thinking, but only recently have I realized that I can become too quickly confident that I see the essence of a person's behavior and can predict what patterns they will follow. This isn't really fair to the people close to me, and it can and does cause problems at times.

It was also really eye opening to read my friend's profile and see that what it says is her dominant trait is one that I have never really seen expressed. It explained a lot about some things that have been frustratingly out of balance for her, both within our friendship and in the larger world. That's really why I wanted to post about the instrument; because I think it can be a helpful tool for understanding not only yourslf, but the people closest to you. Now go take it and tell me what letters you are!

Super Flake

Here's something not so fun that happened to me last week, the first official week of school.

Back story: Last year, Genevieve was at the Montessori school that my two middle children attended when they were pre-school aged. The school had just opened a Nido program (Montessori for baby room), our previous babysitting arrangement ran out, and we were excited to have her at this cheerful, colorful, less-institutional version of daycare. Only the school doesn't see itself as any kind of daycare. It sees itself as a school. At first I just wanted them to stop doing that. I didn't want to go to meetings and do parent hours or have a semester conference about my two year old's "education." But ultimately I decided that if that was their vision and it didn't work for me, I should probably make other arrangements for my child or just stop griping about it. It didn't help that the two teachers in the baby room seemed to hate BD and me, even though they were never anything but loving toward Genevieve. And then as the year ended, they both bolted, leaving the always-friendly directress high and dry. She called me personally to apologize for things she was just fully realizing had gone on between those two and the parents. It seems we weren't the only ones they'd deemed unworthy of the Montessori "lifestyle." It meant a lot to me that she called, and I'd always been happy with the actual care Genevieve received at the school. So now I was in a quandry: send her back to where I knew she'd be happy, or find a daycare or sitter who was okay with the concept that they existed for my convenience and not the other way around.

I put Genevieve on the waiting list for a nearby daycare of excellent repute, but that didn't pan out. SAM had Mr. Baby on the same list, and we both hoped to have the kids at the same place so that I could help her with pick ups some days. I resigned myself to going back to Montessori, and then I looked at the registration materials. Both tuition and parent hours had increased. In the baby room, the increase was so large that SAM felt it ruled out that option for her all together. Their calendar was not in line with the public schools', meaning they would be closed the last week of August before their official start date after Labor Day. Suddenly, it just felt like too much. We already struggled to afford what we paid last year, and the parent hours were a major thorn in my side. Having her out for that week would mean BD staying away from his business to keep her until I made it home each day at 3:30. Desperately, I posted pleas on a couple of local moms' boards for any SAHMs interested in keeping both kids. And I got a bite!

A woman who lives right around the corner from me, whose friends were my friends on the boards, and who had been to my house for a play date, was interested. Her four-year-old son would be going to preschool three days a week, leaving her home with just her three-year-old daughter. She asked for a very reasonable rate, she was close by--it seemed perfect. I left word at the Montessori school that Genevieve would not be coming after all. Monday and Tuesday, things went well. Mr. Baby hadn't started yet because his father was still on summer break from his job. Genevieve was understandably upset at being left, but then she settled down and played and was fine. Then out of nowhere, mid-morning Wednesday I got a text from the sitter saying "This isn't working out. You need to find other child care." Wha?? I asked what was going on and she sent back that G just didn't seem to be happy there and it was affecting her own kids. Thinking she was just a little overwhelmed, I dashed off an email saying that I understood that the adjustment for both G and her kids was maybe harder than she had anticipated (thinking to myself what the hell did she expect by day three??), and reassuring her that in a week or two, she'd be fine and everyone would be used to the new routine. I asked if there was anything I could do to make things easier, if she needed more money, if she wanted a key to my house so they could play there some and help ease the transition. She replied simply that she had made her decision and as of that afternoon, she was done.

What kind of person does that to someone? Nothing had even happened! Were her expectations so utterly unrealistic that she had no idea any adjustments, on anyone's part, would be necessary? Was she that much of a wus that she couldn't at least finish out the week while I made other arrangements? When did people stop feeling like they needed to honor their commitments, or at the very least, wriggle out of them in a fairly honorable way? Do people no longer believe that they should be held accountable anymore? If something is the slightest bit difficult or unpleasant, it's now okay to just walk away, even when that means other people are left holding the bag?

Don't get me wrong, if she doesn't want to watch over my precious baby, I certainly don't want her to. And I'm glad I found out now rather than later that she's a dysfunctional, irresponsible freakshow of a person. Clearly something is wrong there. I guess some people just aren't capable, in the general sense of the word.

I scrambled and begged and got Genevieve back in Montessori school the very next day. They welcomed us back with open arms, even offering to work with us on tuition, and my gratitude for that goes a long way toward mitigating the minor irritations. Genevieve is doing great there and seems perfectly happy to be back in the familiar setting. So there was a happy ending for her, at least. SAM is still scrambling for childcare.

I hate flaky people.

Anecdote

Lest you think I was super-industrious all weekend, here are some other things I did:

-Read Breaking Dawn in two days. Well, plus a few hours. I bought it Thursday afternoon while grocery shopping for BD's birthday dinner and squeezed in a few minutes of reading before cooking enchiladas and serving them up to the assembled friends and family, then read a little more before bed. But mostly I read it Friday and Saturday, finishing Saturday night (for some reason I woke up at 6:30 Saturday and couldn't go back to sleep, so I had a couple hours of quiet before everyone else woke up). In short, it was somewhat surprising and pretty good, but "Renesmee" is the Worst. Name. Ever. What was she thinking? My formerly and briefly Mormon friend says it's very Mormon sounding. I'll have to take her word for it.

-Unwittingly drank an unfortunate amount of Sweet Tea Vodka Friday night which later caused me to revisit the stromboli I made and consumed during cocktail hour.

-Took the kids to hang out at my folks' for a while on Saturday, during which visit I read, napped briefly on the couch, and observed them fishing from my quilt on the ground, where I read some more.

-Slept in on Sunday, made and ate a big breakfast, went back to bed with the newspaper and eventually napped while BD and the kids watched a Tarzan movie from the box set he got for his birthday. It was after 2:00 when I got up, scavenged lunch for myself and the kids, and got motivated to clean while BD took Genevieve and Calvin with him on a Sam's run for lunchbox fillers.

I'm really quite lazy. I just tend to cram all my activity into short bursts so I can spend the rest of my time lounging around in my jammies at indecent hours. Really!