Yesterday I went for an afternoon walk. Today I’d use open time to take a nap as last night was just ridiculous. The toddler was up for 2.5 hours or so. My husband took the first hour, and then I took the remainder, being the “closer” for the situation. He (the toddler) was willing to lie in his crib while I sat in the rocking chair, so I added a substantial quantity of screen time to my tally for the day. I can attest that a lot of people are tweeting in the middle of the night.

This morning was subsequently dreary. I’m tired. My 14-year-old forgot his Spanish assignment and I drove it to school (I’m listening to Aaron Copland’s Rodeo in the car now after listening to Appalachian Spring ten times or so). We have an appliance installer here finally putting in our new dishwasher and a beverage station. Will this transform my coffee making? We shall see. My husband and I tend to make and share a pot, but the problem is we get off schedule. Someone makes a pot mid-day and we only drink half and then we leave it there and drink the day old coffee the next morning, but day old coffee is not as good as new coffee.

Some fun family news: My father was just elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This year’s class also includes Glenn Close and Salman Rushdie, so that’s kind of fun. You can read Notre Dame’s news release here.

In past-podcast-guest news: Kendra Adachi’s new book, The Lazy Genius Kitchen, came out yesterday. She talks about meal planning, kitchen layout, how to create dishes, and so forth. I think my favorite part is the formula for food at a party. You need six “bites” per person per hour, and three choices per ten people. So if you have 20 people over from 7-10 p.m., you need 6 x 20 x 3 bites, which is 360 bites. Since you have 20 people, and you need 3 choices per ten people, this means you need 6 choices. Ergo, you need 60 bites of six items. It’s just math!

(With seven people in my house, I guess every meal is something of a party. I can tell you that making 12 muffins does not last long. It’s unclear whether everyone can even get a muffin for breakfast the next morning. Guess we need more bites!)

Socializing with other adults can be challenging with little kids, but this concept seemed to work really well. They came over around 4 p.m. — the point on a weekend day when everyone is starting to go crazy and needs some change in direction. They brought appetizers, which was really nice. We had some snacks, then took the little ones up to the play room. They could play there while the adults all had some craft beers from the recent “Beer of the Month” shipment my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas. Peach beer sounds a little strange, but it grows on you! Since both families had toddlers, and we were in the room with them, none of the adults had to skip out on participation to chase after the kids (well, there were a few escapes but nothing major).

Then I ordered pizza and salads from a local place. Thus no one had to cook, and the kids were all happy with the selection. Because the toddlers needed to go to bed, the evening was over by about 7 p.m.

Filling the hours of 4-7 p.m. on a weekend pleasantly — when one has toddlers — is no small thing. So perhaps we will try to repeat this model! My toddler was sufficiently tired out that he slept from 9 p.m. to 7:30 am., which counts as good over here.

In other news: The dining room chandelier I bought for the new house came in a giant box, which is filled with packing peanuts. The box had been sitting there for a few weeks since the chandelier got installed (I lost intensity with unpacking and getting rid of garbage) but the three younger kids just discovered it and have been having a ball with it. They call it the “ball pit” and keep diving in and covering each other in the packing peanuts. Good times.

We went to the Franklin Institute’s Harry Potter exhibit on Sunday. It was fun to see the costumes, and the Great Hall, though I felt like you really needed to have read the books/seen the films to get much enjoyment out of it. I mean, that makes sense, but since my 7-year-old has not done all those things yet, he was not terribly happy during the experience. Oh well. We managed to escape from the gift store, and spent far less cash on pretzels from a street vendor and everyone was OK.

I am reading King John in my Shakespeare reading project. This apparently has the distinction of being one of Shakespeare’s least staged plays.

I ran 6 swift-for-me miles on Saturday morning. And I am about 60 percent of the way through Malibu Rising, so it looks like I’ll probably finish this week. Good, since the book is due back to the library on Friday…

Photo: The “ball pit”

I did get to see some cover concepts this week for Tranquility by Tuesday, and it’s exciting to think about the book coming to fruition. The new (old) house is also nearing completion. I’m rounding into the final sections of War and Peace too. Time passes one way or another and with any big project when you keep making progress, eventually progress is made.

I’m singing in my church’s All Saints service on Sunday. One piece we’re singing is this lovely Jake Runestad number called Let My Love Be Heard. The middle section is…whoa. It will be something and it is good to sing with other people again. I missed it.

The weekend will be cold but the leaves are mostly still on the trees so we’ll be doing at least one fall walk. The kids are not huge fans of walks but…I don’t care. They can get off screens for an hour or two! Hope everyone has a lovely weekend planned.

Photo: Sleeping baby…which he should be more often. 

I have been waking up between 6-6:30 a.m. Theoretically I could set my alarm for, say, 6, and get 10-15 minutes before the kids wake up. But I’m not a naturally early riser and so I’m trying to get as much sleep as I can. Anyway, I have been sleeping in the guest room so I don’t hear the toddler start to babble at 5:30. My husband either ignores him or gets him — I am not really sure which — but has so far not been handing him to me before 6 a.m., so I don’t ask questions.

The morning frenzy really starts at 6:30 when the 14-year-old is woken up. I generally make him breakfast because otherwise he will just eat a piece of bread. Not even toasted. I am doing this while juggling the toddler who, if he hasn’t been fed yet, is yelling “Mommy milk!” (It’s great when they start using their words, right?) Inevitably the dog is downstairs barking in his crate. My husband is either showering or (if he was up at 5:45) sleeping. I might pour a cup of coffee but the toddler has a tendency to wave his arms and legs around while nursing, so this is a dicey proposition. Sometimes we read a story but again, it is an active process.

The 12-year-old needs to be up at 6:50 in order to have a shot of getting ready for the bus. At this point my husband is bringing the dog outside, and then brings him back in, so he’s in the kitchen with the rest of us (sometimes he goes on the porch then, but then he might bark and I’m trying not to be terrible as a neighbor). 7 a.m is peak crazy, as my husband and the 14-year-old are headed out the door for the high school run, I’m getting the 12-year-old breakfast, the dog is barking, the baby is running around, and inevitably the 6-year-old hears the commotion and comes downstairs with his own needs (somehow the 10-year-old sleeps through all this…I have to wake her at 7:45). One of those needs is to be supervised packing his lunch, since he decided after a few weeks of school lunches that he wasn’t going to eat them anymore (to be fair, the last week wasn’t a great week — the district is having supply chain issues, and he’s “selective” — picky — enough that if what he thought was there wasn’t, he just doesn’t eat. The other kids will eat whatever is on offer).

Yes, at the moment, 7:00 a.m. is not my favorite time of day. It does get better. The 12-year-old gets on the bus at 7:25 and if my husband is working from home, he comes home around then from the high school run and I go shower. Our nanny comes to work at 8, the elementary kids are on the bus at 8:30, and the dog often goes into his crate for a morning nap around then, so things settle down considerably. If 7 a.m. is terrible, 8:45 a.m. can be quite lovely. So while it might be nice to trouble shoot the morning rush, and while I’m sure there are things that can be done better, I’m trying to remember that a weekday morning consists of both 7 a.m. and 8:45 a.m., and one is not necessarily more representative than the other.

However, I would like to drink my coffee before 8:45 a.m. So that “uninterrupted cup” is a work in progress…

In other news: This should be a great fall weekend — we’re doing some leaf peeping, seeing a lot of family, hiking, and having cider and donuts. I have been learning the names of fall wildflowers, as I mentioned in my fall fun list. There’s a lot of white snakeroot everywhere (those are the little white flowers), goldenrod (self-explanatory), and asters in various forms.

I may abandon my first fall-themed puzzle, as there are approximately 150 pieces of blue sky to go…and I am just not feeling it.

I had an idea for a novel featuring a character who always does the blue sky in 1000 piece puzzles first….

My little guy is in that phase now. A few months ago, there were just a few words: Mama, Dada, baba (bottle/cup/anything liquid), woof-woof (basically any animal), and “up” when he wished to be picked up. He figured out “what-dat?” fairly early in the process, since it was useful for asking the names of items.

Now there are new words daily. Apple. Strawberry. Banana. Yogurt. Pasta. Pizza. Gummies (sigh…) Please. Thank you. Everyone’s names in his immediate circle. Boat. Crab (there’s one in a favorite book). Choo-choo (he loves the Thomas the Tank Engine set). Hat. Hi. Bye. He sings the “Baby Shark” song and does the motions. He likes to sing “swish, swish, swish” from the wipers verse of the Wheels on the Bus song. “Bus” is another fun one to call out when we take his siblings out to the bus stop in the morning. “No” and “mine” have of course become favorites. It’s interesting to see what words have the most utility. This can change based on the situation (we found out he knew “eye” because he got something in his eye and kept pointing to it and saying “Eye!”). He has made the leap to putting together 2-3 word phases. “Mommy phone” or “Daddy hat.”

It all feels like such a breakthrough, because on such a fundamental level knowing words and knowing how words work enables effective communication. If he’s hungry, he doesn’t have to point and scream if you don’t understand. He can say “strawberry” and “cheese” and you know exactly what he wants for a snack. It doesn’t entirely eliminate the screaming, because he doesn’t always get what he wants (sorry, there is no “up” when we’ve still got 2 hours to go in a car trip…) but it feels much more satisfying. It’s also cool to see his personality revealing itself.

Because he is so much younger than everyone else around here, he is always the “baby.” But since he will be 2 in December he isn’t really a baby anymore! Every day he becomes more and more of a little kid. Though I did think about turning off Cocomelon this morning when the big kid bed song came on. We are *not* ready for that yet…

In other news: A great many people have experienced remote work over the past 18 months, and a great many people would like to keep experiencing it. If that’s going to involve job hunting for you, I want to share a resource: FlexJobs. This company is a long-time friend of this blog, and they specialize in remote/flexible jobs for professionals. As anyone who’s looked for a remote job in the past knows, there are a ton of scams out there, so FlexJobs screens all positions to verify that they are legit. You can sign up for a free trial here.

We are gathering a great community over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon page. I’m really looking forward to our first online gathering next week Tuesday night. If you want to be part of that, please join by then!

And finally, if you’re interested in hearing me speak, check out the UNC School of Medicine’s Women in Medical Sciences retreat this Friday, September 24th. After this event went virtual because of the Delta variant the organizers decided to make it open to the public. It runs from 9 a.m. to a little past noon (eastern) and I will probably be speaking around 10:30, but if you’re signing up please consider coming for the whole thing, because there are other good speakers. See you there! You can register here.