Preemptive strike

I’m supposed to be taking a nap right now, but I’m not. It was a Sunday afternoon present from Mr. David Copperfield. He is sweet that way.

I asked the kids to have the laundry put away by the time I came out of my room. It had all been folded and was stacked in neat piles on the sewing table, and I have this crazy notion that I might actually sew something this afternoon. Or next month, whenever.

Just now someone slipped a note under my door. (And it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to nap because you just KNOW the little shooshing sound of paper sliding on a hardwood floor would have roused me just at that delicious moment when I was sinking into slumber)

All the laundry on the table is YOURS, the note says. Proclaims, one might say. Firmly. Not quite belligerently. Sternly, perhaps. You have assigned us two contradictory objectives, is the subtext. Your instructions cancel each other out, Mother. There is no way we can leave you alone for a little while so you can get some rest AND put away *all* the laundry. It is physically and even metaphysically impossible for us to do everything we are supposed to do at this point in time.

To which I say: Welcome to my world.

Time (and) flies

It cannot possibly be mid-September already. Before yesterday, the last time I posted to this blog was in August. Of 2007. I don’t understand how that happened. I think it’s possible I still owe thank-you notes for some presents from Christmas ’06.

I had to take my blogroll down because half the links were outdated. I hadn’t noticed before because I do all my blog-reading on Google Reader now. Boy, people sure did move their blogs around a lot this year. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons so many stay-at-home moms have blogs now is because of the easy makeoverability. Painting my bedroom is way too overwhelming a project to contemplate. All those books to move, and I’d have to face the herd of dust buffalo under the bed and the dead fly in the corner of the windowsill. I have been avoiding that fly for three months, sort of hoping in the back of my mind that he’ll just, I don’t know, decompose into oblivion or something.

I guess he’ll be there until I delete him. Just like this blog.

No wonder I got soaked during the last invisible rainstorm

Her Royal Highness comes to me with her hand upraised, fingers curled around something that isn’t there.

“Dis my um-rella,” she informs me gravely.

“Oh! That’s your umbrella?” I echo, because that is what mothers are supposed to do for their two-year-olds; that is what the two-year-old expects and, indeed, demands.

But this two-year-old is looking at me like I have an umbrella where my head should be.

“No,” she says in tones of exasperation and bewilderment—how could I be so silly?—”Dis my fish.”