Could the world be about to turn?

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

"As Lutheran Christians, our focus on Jesus Christ affects how this church understands justice. Because we are freed in Christ for others, we are able to respond to God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. In society, neighbor love takes the form of neighbor justice."
--From the proposed social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action" (adopted with 97% of the vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, August 2019)

This is a familiar scene for me: sitting down to write after a long day of travel, after a week away from home, after returning from a summer trip and feeling like I should be writing about its moments. The lake in Minnesota, and the way the evening light settled across the sky, lighting the water as I swam after dinner until dark. The way my son dove in as soon as we arrived last Saturday evening and for the next four days could only be coaxed from the water for meals. I should be writing about the completely wonderful and utterly necessary getaway with my best friend, who picked me up and spirited me away to Fargo/Moorhead, where we spent a couple of nearly perfect days visiting our college town for the first time in years. It was deeply good for my soul.

And yet, last summer, the night we returned from our first trip of the summer, this is what I wrote:

Underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame...

I could write exactly that and more tonight.

We had extra time at the airport yesterday after dropping off our rental car, and I finally had a few desperately needed moments to myself. I sat at a wine bar and ordered a turkey sandwich and a flight of white wine and wrote six pages in my journal. I was hardly even writing real sentences; I just poured the messy contents of my mind all over those pages. Migrant workers detained while their children were at school, children who waited in vain to be picked up, or children who went home to empty houses. Children who slept on a gymnasium floor. More shootings. Terrorism at the hands of toxic white men. Why don't we call it that? Why don't we say our country is under terrorist attack? Can we pause to imagine how differently this would play out -- the policy changes on the table -- if the dozens of people murdered in three different states had been murdered by someone other than a white man? How is it a fathomable thing that mass shooters invoke words used by the president literally hundreds of times?

So I slept terribly all week. But I slept terribly in safe, comfortable beds, simply because I happened to win the cosmic lottery of senseless privilege.

And then we have these absurd, obscene discussions. Thoughts and prayers. Mental health. I was stupid enough to read the comments on Steve Bullock's Facebook page. I like the governor of my home state quite a bit, but the trolling comments under literally every post on his page never fail to depress me: Tyranny of the government and "We have the right to access firearms with absolutely no restrictions!" And, of course, "But you don't care about the slaughter of innocent babies." That's about every third comment, including posts that show, for instance, a photograph of the governor eating corn on the cob at the state fair. At that point, I'm utterly reduced to for fuck's sake until I can rally enough to donate to immigration aid and gun control. Again.

The same story of America, in any season.

And then Toni Morrison died. And I just cannot. Cannot.

I've been trying to counter every horror I read about with a tribute to Toni Morrison. There is no shortage of either. All the great writers understand who was the greatest of the greats, the absolute brilliant best: Jesmyn Ward, Marlon James, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, John Irving, Angie Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Chigozie Obioma. And so very many others. I would bet all the money I have that if Pat Conroy were still alive he'd have written something gorgeous about her, too.

This is where I find hope this week. Or maybe not hope, because truth be told, most days I don't have a lot of hope that things will be much better than what they are in my lifetime. But something else, some unnameable feeling fueled by a fierce and consuming combination of rage and love. Who was it that said we are not obliged to finish the task, but neither may we abandon it? That's where I'm at. That's why I keep reading and writing and teaching. That simple human need to connect, only connect. To see something beautiful and true in the artistry of our daily lives, the beauty and truth captured by writers and artists, the thing I have to believe in to keep breathing in and out. The connectedness and not-aloneness, I suppose.

And then other things happened, while I tried to grapple with the juxtaposition of soul-nurturing vacation and the horror happening in my country. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted to become the first "sanctuary church body" in the country during the churchwide assembly. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this means yet, but it could look like providing shelter for undocumented immigrants, equipping folks to serve as first responders during raids, advocating for immigrants in deportation cases, fighting for the end of mass detentions and family separations, and "extended radical hospitality." My own understanding of Christianity means I sort of feel like WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, THEN towards churches that don't already do this, and certainly there are many churches outside the ELCA that engage in this work, service, and love of our neighbors, and who are expansive and inclusive in what it means to call someone a neighbor. Not all churches are silent or complacent in the face of the status quo. All the same, I'm grateful for the vote.

(It's not easy to believe in much, these days.)

Anyway, as I said, we arrived at the airport yesterday with time to spare. After the turkey sandwich, after the wine, after the journalling, the kids and I found seats near our gate while Matt walked around and enjoyed his last pint of Surly's before returning to the Pacific Northwest. I opened up Facebook and saw the posting from the ELCA: the churchwide assembly also voted to adopt the social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action." They included a video of the assembly singing "Canticle of the Turning." It is one of my absolute favorite hymns, and in that moment, listening to all those voices, it gave me chills -- and then it brought me to tears. Right there in the Humphrey Terminal in Minneapolis. I let my kids play on the iPad and I wept openly at the gate. Then I downloaded the statement itself -- all 48 pages -- and read it on the plane. This week I'm going to print out a hard copy. It gives me something close to hope.

I wasn't going to go to church this morning. We were exhausted last night, and the kids really needed some down time because after a week of the lake and grandparents and cousins and wild feral joyful freedom and about ten desserts a day, they weren't really ready to be normal humans in public. But then I remembered that it was my Sunday to help count the week's offering. I even considered just showing up after the service, but I woke up early -- still on Minnesota time -- and I really wanted to go. So I did. But I also felt all kinds of something, so I sat by myself, towards the back. I almost put on a skirt, but then I remembered that we had signed up to run concessions at the Blast Off Soccer Tournament this afternoon, and I didn't really feel like changing, either. So I dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, and I drove my weepy, tired self to church this morning, and I slipped in near the back. And the thing was that I knew it was okay. I knew I could show up in shorts and a t-shirt and be a little weird and people there would still love me, and I really did feel perfectly comfortable slipping into the back by myself. And I felt okay crying a little at times when it didn't really make a lot of sense for me to be crying.

Sometimes I have to laugh a bit when people talk about faith as a crutch, because it would be so much easier not to go to church. It would be easier not to believe in this totally crazy stuff I actually do believe. The church has caused so, so much harm, and it continues to cause harm, and on top of that, it asks us to believe in the impossible. So like, I get it. I get why people leave, and I understand why people don't walk through the door. But somehow, here I am. Maybe this is, again, a consequence of my birth -- I was born into a family who brought me into this messy church, and even though that family has drifted into different faith communities, communities into which I cannot follow and in which I don't really belong, I'm grateful for my roots.

I wasn't much older than my daughter when I read Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals; I think that was where she wrote about someone asking her whether she believed in God without any doubt, and she replied -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that she believed in God with all of her doubts.

Roots and doubts. That's what I have.

What I have might not be hope. But it's not nothing.

My heart shall sing
Of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn!
--Canticle of the Turning

A break...

I should take Facebook breaks more often. I promised myself I wouldn’t read it at all this week, and I didn’t. I actually do think that made a measurable difference in my general attitude. Obviously I have plenty of fun on Facebook; I post quite a bit myself, and it seems to be the way to keep in touch with anyone I don’t actually happen to see every day. (E-mail? Phone calls? Letters? What are those?) But a little over a week ago I found myself muttering out loud at the computer screen things like, “Have you ever met a soapbox you didn’t love?” and “You know what, everyone has a hard job.” (I do think there’s some truth to the idea that the things that bother you are the things you tend to do or find in yourself. I know perfectly well that I have my own well-worn soapboxes, and I’m just as capable of dramatic martyrdom as the next person -- but I also know that posting a meme with a smug little caption is unlikely to do anything but get “likes” from people who already agree with me, and I don’t think I do myself any favors if I try to win the “I’m busier than everyone else” competition. No one has ever offered to make me an award, which makes me a little bitter.)

At this point in the year, when I’m really just enjoying my job and my life, when my sophomores are turning into really cool people and I can see the end of the year from here, I just can’t deal with people’s opinions about the State of Education. I just can’t. I don’t want to talk about Common Core with someone who read one article about it somewhere and suddenly has very strange ideas about what goes on in my classroom. I don’t have the mental space for a ton of righteous indignation when I’m busy getting ready for my students’ poetry performances. And sometimes I reach a point where I just cannot read another article about parenting or car seats or what kind of food we should be feeding our kids. I have opinions about all of these things, and they are objectively important, I suppose, but sometimes I really just want to tell everyone that instead of cooking a beautiful organic dinner after a couple of hours of crafting or taking my kids on a field trip to a local museum or farm or whatever, I made them go play in the (safely fenced!) backyard while I stayed inside, poured myself a glass of wine, and made them dinner out of a box. And I’m not sorry.

What I’m saying is that when I find myself muttering out loud at a computer screen and actually walking into my “real” life feeling annoyed or even angry, or when I find myself disliking people online when I quite like them face-to-face, it’s probably time for a little breathing space. And breathe I did. It has been a wonderful, restorative week -- a break in every sense of the word. We stayed home this year, but I decided that each day we would do something special. We rode the Tacoma Link, ate cupcakes, visited used bookstores, wandered through Pike Place Market, rode on the Great Seattle Wheel, ate lunch in tiny cafes that served, for instance, excellent brie-and-tomato sandwiches (for me) and perfect peanut butter and honey (for Zannah), and took some nature walks. I carved out a little kid-free time with a couple of friends, finished reading a few novels (all of you should run, not walk, to pick up a copy of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena), and watched the Veronica Mars movie (which I loved). This afternoon, I managed a four-mile run in the sunshine, followed by late-afternoon coffee in Seattle while Matt took the kids to REI and a family dinner at Veggie Grill, which is always where the kids want to go when we say, “Hey, where should we eat tonight?” (It’s one of my favorites, too, so no complaints here.)

Life was still normal enough to provide plenty of laundry, bickering between my children, appointments and errands, floors in need of vacuuming, bedtime battles, and a broken lawn mower. I’ve put off most of my “to do” list so that it all needs to happen, oh, tomorrow. But somehow, that bit of daily reality kept me grounded enough to appreciate the moments in which we stepped outside of our ordinary routines every day.

This morning on the radio I listened to a bit on the Benedictine notion of time -- that there is enough time in each day for work, for prayer, for rest, and for play. I started a new writing workshop this weekend, one that will fill up all of the cracks of “spare” time in my day for the next few months. It is a gift that I get to do this. It will actually require that I carve out time I don’t ever think I have, and that will require that I limit the noise I allow in my life. Maybe this week was just training for that.

Everything, just everything

I always feel a little disoriented at the end of a school year -- a little blue, even. This year, the end-of-the-year blues struck harder than usual, possibly because this year I actually was not counting down the minutes until the end. Last year, I think I started my “How many more Sunday nights are left” calculations sometime in March, if not the beginning of second semester. This year was markedly different in so many ways, not the least of which is that I loved all of my classes and didn’t spend approximately one night per week crying to Matt that we had to figure out some way for me to quit my job. Last year, I couldn’t get away fast enough. This year, I’m spending my first week of summer teaching a morning IB credit retrieval course for students who need a little extra help, and I’ve appreciated the fact that it’s easing me away from school a little more gently.

But I do love summer. I love the slowness of everything, the long shadows across the sidewalks when I go running in the evenings, the way the light catches the leaves along the streets near my home. I love picnics with my kiddos, afternoons spent in the backyard or at the splash park, the way they come home smelling like chlorine and sunscreen with their hair stuck to their sweaty foreheads. I love summer reading lists, the anticipation of the road trips we’ll take, keeping my toenails painted, and the sound of the fan in our bedroom at night.

We have all kinds of plans this summer: first, we’re tearing out our old, rotting deck and replacing it with a patio. I’m looking forward to not slapping a coat of stain on those old boards every year, and it will be lovely not to worry about, say, my three-year-old or one of the neighbor boys falling through one of the holes when they’re tearing around the yard. We grilled veggie burgers and ate outside tonight, and I had to say, “No, no -- don’t jump there!” half a dozen times.

Next weekend, the kids and I are road-tripping to Bozeman with my friend Kyanne. It’ll be like bringing home friends during breaks in college, except with car seats and children in the back. Later in July, one of my oldest friends is getting married in Glacier National Park, which is my favorite place in the world, and we’re definitely going to that. And in August, the Winslows are flying to Minnesota for a week or so. This is a good summer line-up. And in between these trips there will be gymnastics (for both kids), and swimming lessons, and picnics and running through the sprinkler and trying to coax our little garden to produce tomatoes and peas and herbs.

I’m also taking a writing workshop all summer. It started last weekend, and I can already tell it’s going to be really, really good and necessary for me. I always make ambitious writing goals during the summer, but since I’ve had children I haven’t been great about letting it out of the pages of my notebook. So I am doing this thing, finally.

In other news, I have a second-grader now.

And this is probably why the end of the year felt even more disorienting to me this year. I have this kid, this lovely little girl who is so aware of her second-gradeness. Two years ago I was pretty much constantly on the verge of barfing all the time, I was so nervous about her starting school -- and now here she is, seven years old, running around with all of these kids on the playground, deeply involved in all of these games that are totally separate from me, bringing home portfolios full of this gorgeous writing and art that burst forth from her own mind with no prompting or assistance from me. It is a beautiful, wonderful thing, but it leaves me spinning. Out of nowhere not long ago she said, “When I’m in twelfth grade, I’ll be seventeen.” And I was all, “Um, that’s...true, but maybe let’s just enjoy first grade for today?” Because what?

It has been a month of birthdays and birthday parties, of her Show Week at The Little Gym, the culmination of a year’s worth of gymnastics. It has been a month of first-grade concerts and end-of-the-year celebrations. Isaac, not to be left out of all the excitement, decided to poop in the potty this week. (Little Dude has been peeing in the potty since last fall -- we don’t even give him treats every time he goes anymore! -- but he staunchly refuses to poop there, preferring instead to hold it until he falls asleep at night, and aren’t you glad you’re reading this?) And on top of that, my seniors went and graduated on me, and one of my best friends is moving to China in a month, which meant that I did some hard, ugly crying in her classroom the last week of school. It is all just entirely too much, and it probably explains why I collapsed fully-clothed on our bed at eight o’clock the other night, fully intending to get up five minutes later and wash Suzannah’s hair before bed. What actually happened is that I fell asleep, dimly aware of Matt closing the bedroom door and saying, “Let’s let Mommy sleep, okay?” I woke up terribly confused at 9:30, and Matt was like, “You know, you could just go to bed for real,” and I was all, “Now?” Because that hasn’t happened since about 2005. But it sounded like a blessedly good idea. And it was.

She loved winter, snow, and ice

Last night was a little too December 2006 for me, only with snow.

Confession: I love snow. I do. I love snow, and winter, and storms, and ice, and the kind of freezing temperatures that call us to sit inside with hot drinks and good books. I could write hundreds of entries about my love affair with this time of year. However, I do not love power outages, or worrying about loved ones who are traveling on icy roads, or driving on icy roads myself. We were hit with a fairly impressive storm this week -- impressive for Seattle, that is -- and yesterday morning when I made my way to school the roads were already thick with ice and slush, with more snow continuing to fall. Unsurprisingly, the kids were released a couple of hours early. Temperatures continued to fall throughout the afternoon, and by dinnertime the wind was flinging snow and leaves and tiny evergreen branches against our windows.

Then, shortly after seven o'clock, just after we had finished with dinner, the power went out. I immediately told Matt that I didn't particularly care about anything else in the freezer, but by God, we were going to save my frozen breastmilk stash. I'm still haunted by the memory of pouring it all down the drain after the Great Windstorm of 2006, in which we lost power for three days. By the time I remembered my stash, it had thawed. And I cried. And I swore, AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, I WILL NEVER WASTE BREASTMILK AGAIN. After I had finished freaking out about that, I decided that there was no immediate need to panic, considering the temperature in the garage was well below freezing and the freezer hadn't been opened, so instead we busied ourselves lighting candles and digging out all the flashlights in the house.

Suzannah thought the whole thing was a grand adventure. She finished up her bath by lamplight and prepared to go "camping" in her room with one of our thick sleeping bags. We handed Isaac a flashlight to play with, and he was equally as thrilled -- best toy ever.

I was pretty much ready for bed by eight o'clock. Not only was there not much to do, but I was so anxious and tense -- but trying not to show it -- that my body kicked into sleepy survival mode. I kept peering out the windows; lights were out everywhere, but the sky was eerily bright from all the snow and I could see across our backyard and into our neighbor's. Little swirls of snow kept rising up out of the covered grass, and the tree branches were tossing violently in the gusty winds. Four years ago, we spent the first night of the power outage huddled in bed with six-month-old Suzannah, listening to the winds howling and praying that our huge tree wouldn't fall on our house. We spent the next two nights huddled in bed, bored to death and freezing and eating Sun Chips and Swedish Fish and watching Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail on Matt's laptop. We spent the afternoons making grilled cheese and soup on our camp stove in the backyard (Matt) and scrubbing the refrigerator (me). The memories are not altogether unpleasant, but the romance wore off quickly, and I wasn't looking forward to days without power again. Something told me it might be a bit more challenging with a four-year-old and a mobile baby.

I wasn't about to let Isaac sleep alone in his freezing room, so I zipped him into his fleece sleep sack and hunkered down in bed with him, saying a little prayer that he would actually sleep. I was just about to nurse him into sleepyland when the hallway lights came on and the heater roared to life.

But it was a pretty traumatic eighty-three minutes. Luckily, school was cancelled both for today and tomorrow, so I have time to recover.

In other news, during the month of November, I do this crazy thing where I write 50,000 words of very rough fiction, which I blame for my lack of writing here. Since 2003, I have participated in National Novel Writing Month; this is my sixth actual attempt. I finished in 2003, 2004, 2006, and 2008. In 2005, I gave up after 10,000 words because throwing up and sleeping took over my life (I was seven weeks pregnant with Suzannah on November first), and last year I skipped it with the excuse that I was just too pregnant and tired and wasn't sure I would make it to November 30 before I gave birth anyway. I skipped 2007 altogether, choosing instead to continue revising the novel I started the previous November, because I was pretty attached to my characters. I still haven't abandoned it, although it hasn't gotten much attention in the last two years. In 2008, I decided at the very last minute to participate again, despite telling myself that I was going to skip it because I didn't have anything to prove. I can write 50,000 words of crappy fiction in a month, and I actually do write at other times of the year, so I didn't need it! But I succumbed on November first anyway, and once I started, I had to finish, because I'm stubborn and weirdly competitive like that.

I had absolutely no intention of doing NaNoWriMo this year. None. I'm busy and I'm stressed and there are plenty of other, more reasonable things I could be doing with my time. But once again, I made the mistake of visiting the site on November first and skimming the message boards, and then I felt all nostalgic, and then I thought, well, I haven't written anything except journal entries for a long time -- it would be good writing practice. And maybe I felt the need to prove to myself that I could be a mother of two children and still write. Maybe not well, but writing is one thing I do that helps me keep breathing. And anyway, 2,000 words a day is not actually an unreasonable amount of writing for people who do it regularly. After all, the only way to write stuff is to write stuff.

Still, I spent most of the first Monday of the month hemming and hawing and having little outbursts about how ridiculous it all is, and I grew increasingly dramatic about it, announcing to my husband that I should just delete everything I'd ever written anyway, it all sucks, I can't write and be a mom and teach, and also THERE IS NO POINT TO ANYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE. At first, he just sighed patiently. By that evening, he was like, OH MY GOD, if you're going to do this all month we will ALL go crazy, so PLEASE JUST GO START WRITING.

So I did. And I'm doing it, mostly at night when the kids are in bed, and I have just over 40,000 words to show for it tonight, on the twenty-third day of November. But I'm pretty sure this is my last year.

Keeping it simple...well, trying to.

This pregnancy is flying by. At the same time, last May -- when I couldn't even sip water without throwing it back up -- seems so long ago. I only have one more monthly appointment with my midwife before I move into the every-two-weeks phase, and I might get three of those before I go once a week if I haven't delivered by then.

Just, wow.

So things are looking good. Baby's heartbeat is strong, and Baby is moving a lot. I'm carrying absurdly high, which is exactly how I carried Suzannah. I'm so grateful for my midwife, who doesn't fret much about fundal height, and especially not in my case when it appears that this is simply normal for me. I've seen far too many women post on pregnancy boards and communities that their doctors recommended inductions or suggested possible C-sections based on that alone, which I find pretty horrifying since it's such an inexact "science," especially at the later stages (Oh no! Your baby will be too big! Surely, you can't birth her normally, so let's just scare you now so you won't give us too much trouble later!). I'm sure I'll be measuring, like, eighty-five weeks ahead the next time I go in. Whatever. As long as Baby's feet aren't in my esophagus, and I can still breathe, I'm cool with it.

The Braxton-Hicks are more intense this time around, but I haven't experienced anything painful or terribly uncomfortable. Matt does worry about me when I overdo it, though, and last night I went to bed at eight o'clock while he took over kitchen clean-up and all the nighttime parenting. The extra rest was wonderful, though, because I'm still trying to find my groove at school and it's taken its toll a bit. (Happily, though, I've been on top of my game enough this week that I don't have any weekend planning, just my very first stack of grading. Give me an hour with a pumpkin spice latte and it'll all be good.)

I feel like I have so many things to update about, but I'm a little overwhelmed by them. Either I think that no one really wants to read about, say, our foray into the realm of cloth diapering (you guys! We are really excited about this!) or what I'm into cooking these days, or I think I should really watch how passionate I get about whatever it is I happen to be passionate about, because someone might get uncomfortable or defensive or whatever. On the other hand, I'm getting over that, because every time I freak myself out and expect hate mail, I'm pleasantly surprised. (Then again, I have disabled anonymous comments here. I don't mind dissenting opinions, but I do think you should be brave enough to own your words.) And anyway, I like having a space to write, and I've been writing online in some capacity for over eight years now -- people come and go and not everyone in the world will love me. That's okay. (True confession, though: Sometimes I really do think I've let my desire to be liked override my desire to speak or write what I feel, and while I don't necessarily want to go out and alienate my friends and family, I don't want them to like me just because they think I always agree with them.)

Perhaps I am over-thinking this. I do that sometimes.

I'm trying to keep it simple tonight, anyway. Matt was home early, and we've spent a cozy evening cooking together while Suzannah runs a grocery store out of the family room. Okay, I am going to talk about cooking, which is probably really boring, but I love reading about this kind of thing in other people's journals: I've been really into roasting huge pans of vegetables -- carrots, broccoli, parsnips, brussels sprouts, zucchini, yellow squash, and whatever else I happen to feel like throwing in -- and we eat those for dinner all the time now. Toss 'em in olive oil with a little salt and pepper, roast them until the broccoli turns slightly black and crispy -- aww, yeah. We've had them with polenta, with brown rice and a little lemon juice, with chicken breasts cooked in white wine, and tonight Matt threw in some diced sausage and potatoes and we topped it all with carmelized onions. Next I want to try them with quinoa, a la Bread and Honey, my latest cooking inspiration. She calls it Hippie Chow, and it's so ridiculously simple and exactly the sort of thing Matt and I like to eat. It's so funny, though. When I was pregnant with Suzannah, I wanted Clucks 'n Fries from Red Robin. I wanted huge milkshakes and chocolate sundaes. Mostly, I just wanted food all the time, but I really never got over my morning sickness-induced distaste of vegetables. This time around, I thought for sure those aversions would stick around since I was so much sicker at the beginning of my pregnancy, but to my happy surprise, nothing has made my pregnant tummy happier over the last month or two than roasting up a ginormous pan of veggies that will last us through at least one full meal and several sides. (On the other hand, the takeout that I found the least repulsive five months ago is still on my DO NOT WANT list. I think this is a good thing. Huge pans of roasted veggies are infinitely cheaper, and also, I feel pretty great.)

(And on another side note: I grew up hating brussels sprouts, probably because you're supposed to hate brussels sprouts. But guess what! They are actually really good, especially roasted! You can even prepare them in ways that make them taste nutty and almost sweet. Want to know what else I've been eating? Sardines. That's right. I've never eaten sardines before because no one is supposed to like sardines. But they're full of protein -- and I've definitely been craving protein during this pregnancy; in fact, I still get pretty queasy if I don't eat it regularly -- yet lack the mercury content of tuna. And they're light and delicious, and I really need to get some good crackers to eat them with. Trader Joe's is my friend.)

Anyway, dinner was simple and fabulous. Our daughter is hilarious and sweet and full of hugs and surprises and imagination and laughter. After she goes to bed, we are going to eat cupcakes and watch Mad Men. Baby Winslow is kicking away. (Seriously, I love, love, love this part of pregnancy. Even though when a certain someone saw my belly jump a little the other day, she yelled, "Aaah! Alien Baby!") I'll save the processing of my latest anxiety attack(s) for another day.

In which Shari writes an entire entry about notebooks

We're trying to watch our spending these days; there are certain expenses we need to allow for before the new baby is born (a new bed and dresser for Suzannah, a cloth diaper stash, a doula, etc.) and we're trying to plan for the tighter budget we'll need to follow when I'm not earning any income for at least eight or nine months. I bought all of my school supplies last spring, so I can bypass my usual school shopping this fall. However, if you've ever spent five minutes around me, you know I have this serious thing for notebooks and pens. I absolutely never leave home without at least one notebook and about twelve pens. Which is why Levenger is kind of a dangerous catalog for me to get. They sell "Tools For Serious Readers." And heeey! I'm a Serious Reader! I need their stuff.

Except that most of it is really high-end, expensive stuff. It's good stuff, but I can't quite justify spending $200 or more for the sexy leather book bag I want. (I don't care about "purses" or "handbags." I also don't care that the sexy leather book bag -- did I mention it's red? -- is essentially a purse or handbag, but they advertise all its room for BOOKS and NOTEBOOKS!) Especially since the only bags I'll be carrying for awhile will be diaper bags. Not that you can't find great diaper bags, but I'm not about to spend two hundred bucks on one of those, either. Nor can I justify spending sixty dollars on a fancy rollerball pen, especially when I have a fondness for a very specific kind of blue Papermate -- which come twelve to a box at Office Max.

A few years ago, I did splurge on an expensive journal. It would have been the most expensive journal I'd ever bought in my life, but it was on clearance for over 50% off. And I loved it. Blank books, notebooks, journals -- those are truly my weakness. I'm always on the lookout for the "perfect" notebook, and when I find it, I buy it. I've filled several leather journals from Barnes and Noble and I love Moleskines, even though people complain that they're overpriced for what they are. Don't care -- still love them.

Last week, I was flipping through my Levenger catalog -- usually I do this quickly and toss it in with our recyclables so I'm not tempted to accidentally order a Pelikan Tradition R200 Rollerball Pen or something -- and the most fabulous set of notebooks caught my eye. Behold:


I wasn't going to do it. I don't, strictly speaking, need any more notebooks.

But I couldn't stop drooling over these babies. They were the perfect size -- large enough to write in comfortably, but small enough to slide into my bag (which I love, and which didn't cost me two hundred dollars). They had the right amount of pages -- not too thick (although it's hard for a great notebook to be too thick for me), not too thin. And the colored paper (which, being from Levenger, I knew would be of high quality) intrigued me.

But I wasn't going to do it. I informed Matt quite virtuously that I would not be buying these notebooks EVEN THOUGH I REALLY, REALLY WANTED THEM. LIKE REALLY BADLY. He was like, that's nice, you know I'm not the boss of you. His refusal to acknowledge my SHINING VIRTUE kind of chipped away at my restraint.

The next day I sent the link to Kyanne. Again with the wanting and all of my shining restraint. (Actually, by then I might just have whined, "I waaaaaants it." I can't remember.) Kyanne replied, "Whatever, I would SO have had those forever ago."

And then? I don't know what happened, but my fingers? They were suddenly disconnected from my body or something. I really couldn't stop them. They flew out and just punched in my credit card number and ORDERED THE NOTEBOOKS, and oh crap, I bought them.

And you know what? I didn't regret it. Sometimes when I have an "Oh, crap, I just bought something I don't need" moment, I have this instant pang of regret. I didn't have that with these notebooks. I felt nothing but sheer elation, and the only thing I regretted a few days later was not spending two more dollars for slightly faster shipping, because a week later, as I was still waiting for them to be delivered, I decided I had suffered much more than two dollars' worth of waiting angst. Maybe this is one of those opportunities for a stupid life lesson in patience, except that I am a mother of a three-year-old and soon I will have a newborn, so I'm pretty sure I don't need my journals to teach me about PATIENCE. I know, patience is a virtue, my mother always, always told me that, I HAVE TOTALLY LEARNED. Anyway (and here are my impressive rationalization skills at work), I think I'm a dying breed; I still write as much or more on paper as I do anywhere else, and when I buy quality notebooks and journals I actually do fill them. (I've often thought that perhaps that's why I like writing. It's nothing to do with actually writing, which, let's be honest, can really just suck sometimes, especially when I don't feel like it, but what can be better than cracking open a great notebook in a coffee shop and spending an hour alone there? I ask you.)

I had this whole speech planned for Matt about how I accidentally bought these notebooks, but! I got three of them, and for three, this price isn't bad -- they cost about what Moleskines do, plus shipping, and did I mention I ordered the slowest, cheapest shipping? Even though the wait would likely TORTURE ME?

"Well, I'm glad you're happy with them," Matt said mildly. Then he smiled. "And patience is a virtue."