What Do You DO All Day?

9:15 am Wake up later than I like to, with the kids cuddled up to me in my bed, Brian already off to work. I had insomnia last night, so I must have needed the sleep, I figure. Glad I have a lifestyle that allows me extra sleep when I need it, but I suspect sleeping late could throw off the whole day's rhythm if I let it. I decide I'll try to approach it as an opportunity for what Ann Lahrson-Fisher calls "joyful disruption" in her book Fundamentals of Homeschooling. Discover a wet spot on Cass's side of my bed. Wake everybody up and get vinegar on the wet spot to neutralize the pee smell.

9:30 B. tries to look at one of Cassidy's First Ladies library books. She protests that that book is HERS. After a fair amount of tussling, we negotiate and decide to look at the book together. Read about the first dozen or so first ladies while munching dry cereal in Cassidy's (dry) bed.

10:00 Breakfast. Bridger gives Cassidy a Lego alien villain he's made and a small gold bar to go with it as an early Christmas and late birthday present.

10:15 Bridger and Cass play a story with Legos figures while I drink my coffee and prepare materials for a paper Santa Lucia crown Cassidy wants to make.

11:45 Play Stratego with B. while simultaneously helping Cass glue together pieces of her Santa Lucia crown. Work to stay relaxed about doing very different tasks at once and try to help B. stay relaxed and patient when I have to take frequent breaks from the game to glue and cut.

12:15 Came from behind and beat B. at Stratego in a surprise upset, just when he thought he had it made. He is crushed and swears he'll never play a game of any kind with me ever again. I feel intensely glad I just started re-reading Naomi Aldort's Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves to fortify myself for my mom's upcoming visit, and consequently I don't feel AS strong a desire as usual to give Bridger a big unwanted pep talk about the value of losing as a learning experience--a sentiment I show a distinct inability to apply easily or painlessly in my own life. "I'll never be in such a good position again!" B. laments. "I had the most powerful person on the board and I should have been able to wipe you out." I can understand why he's crying. None of us wants to think we can get beaten like that, just when we believe we're guaranteed to win.

12:30 Leave Bridger in his room to grieve a little more in private. Play the game Hullabaloo with Cassidy in our sunny attic, just cleaned up yesterday by me. Feel a rush of gratitude for this sunny, open space with its view into the top branches of our boulevard ash tree. Feel another rush of gratitude when Bridger joins us in the game and even smiles and laughs.

12: 45 A finger-food lunch upstairs while the three of us try to play Earthopoly together. It's too nice up here to break the momentum to come down for lunch. The Earthopoly game goes surprisingly well, with Cass tracking with the gist of it with a lot of help from Bridger and me. Bridger plays banker to free me up to coach Cass.

2:00 Quiet time--so to speak. Bridger retreats to his room to listen to a book-on-CD for an hour or so. While I clean the living room, our top clutter zone, Cassidy pretends I'm Cinderella and she's a stepsister ordering me around while I sweep. Then, once I go to the ball, she says, "Now I want to be Cinderella," and I become a stepsister. At times I feel myself getting edgy and thinking longingly of what it would be like to clean house without a constant stream-of-consciousness monologue from Cass. Then I imagine how I'll probably look back nostalgically on this very kind of moment. Then Bridger comes down and things shift again.

3:00 Kids messing around with watching home videos of our family on the computer. I get a call from a fellow library advocate and neighbor, one of the people I respect most in the world. We strategize a little about the library, and she asks how I'm doing after a presentation I made to the library board, which I wrote about here. I decompress about my regrets about the presentation and the things I think I've learned from my missteps. She listens thoughtfully, then says slowly and with great care, "I think sometimes our egos get in our way at the very places we could have great power." I take what she says two ways: one, that my egotistic pleasure in having a soapbox about the library issue and fancying myself a "community leader" can get in the way of me seeing the truth and being as effective as I could be in serving the library, which I think is absolutely true; and two, that my insecurity and fixation on my own mistakes can block me from fully accessing my power to create, construct, and connect.

I feel as if a warm, slow-burning fire has been lit in my chest. I feel healed and at the same time challenged to get over myself and get to work.

3:30 Not wanting to slow down the big cleaning momentum I had going earlier (and because we're going to a friend's house tomorrow morning, making it impossible to do our usual Friday morning DVD routine), I ask the kids if they'd like to watch their movie o' the week today instead of tomorrow. Uh, duh. Of course they say yes. I pop some popcorn and they settle in with some Curious George. I hear lots of laughter as I clean, then finally run out of steam and join them for the last half-hour or so. Good stuff about metamorphosis, deductive reasoning, seeds, and genuinely endearing and funny. I'm impressed.

5:15 The witching hour. Bridger asks Cassidy where the gold Lego bar he gave her this morning is. She doesn't know. He wails and cries and moans and tells her he'll never trust her with anything important ever again. I almost succeed in refraining from lecturing him, but not quite--I do have to get in a little mini-lecture. "It's a little piece of plastic, and you didn't tell her, 'Make sure you keep track of this Lego at all times.' Next time you give someone something, make sure you are clear about what your expectations about the gift are and let them know, too." Uh-huh. Are most adults even capable of this kind of clarity around gift-giving? I'm sure as hell not.

Bridger and Cassidy work together to try to find the gold piece, a missing pair of Lego handcuffs, and a green laser. I start getting ready for dinner.

5:45 Bridger sets the table, belting out "I Will Work With Joy," a song I've been known to warble through chores, from the book Seven Times the Sun. One verse goes, "Persistence and pride, creation unfolds,/As I work hard to reach my goals." Bridger sings it, "As I work hard to reach Mom's goals." I have to laugh at how damn perceptive he is.

Then Bridger starts chanting, "Cassidy is on the fork side of me, Cassidy is on the fork side of me," his mnemonic device for remembering silverware placement. "That's mean!" Cassidy howls, apparently thinking he's making fun of her somehow. Bridger continues to sing the offending song. Cassidy continues to howl. Finally, I ask him, "If Cass was singing a song that really got on your nerves, and you asked her to stop, what would you want her to do?" He stops singing, and task done, darts into the living room without answering. At least not directly.

6:00 We sit down for an early dinner before Bri gets home, because I have a meeting tonight. The kids are chatty and silly and loud. Brian walks in the back door to the kitchen just as we're tucking into our lentil burgers and sweet potato fries. He sits down and does a mock (?) shell-shocked look at me across the table at the level of noise and incoherence at the table.

6:15 Finished with dinner, Bridger and Cass go in the living room and start fighting over the one blanket on the couch. "I'm cold!" "But I'm colder!" I suggest they go get another blanket from upstairs or figure out a deal for how to share it, then walk away, which is very hard for me to do. I always worry they'll come to blows. The next time I peek in, they're snuggling under the blanket together on the living room floor, laughing.

6:30 I walk to a meeting at our neighborhood library and sit around a table with eight awesome women, including the neighbor I talked to on the phone earlier who helped me so much. We laugh, kid around about our fundraising goals (we'd like to start with a country spa retreat for us, then go from there to make the world a better place). We dream about how to help our library stay open. This is my nerdy idea of a pretty dang good time.

8:30 I get home. The kids are in their jammies, having a bedtime snack at the kitchen table. Cassidy tells me, "I took a bath, and Daddy read Richard Scarry to me."

"What heaven!" I say. "Being read to in the bathtub!"

Cass agreed. "I have a lucky life," she agreed.

9ish The kids and I read part of a beautiful picture book by Diane Stanley about Michelangelo, then Brian tells them a "lights-out story" in the dark. Brian leaves, and I go in for the ceremonial bedtime cuddling in Cassidy's bed before they fall asleep together there. We say our modified, Zen-flavored version of St. Francis's "Instrument of Peace" prayer. One of the lines is "May I seek to understand, even more than I seek to be understood." Bridger mutters under his breath, "May I seek to understand, even more than I seek to annoy."

Here's my prayer, silently offered up as my children drift into sleep: May our luck hold a little longer. Or, may we learn to keep finding joy, even when an attack we didn't see coming takes us by surprise, just when we thought we were home free.