I'm compelled to write this morning because a while ago, I said I'd blog seven times in April, and today is April 30th. This is my seventh post this month, and so after I hit publish, I will have met my completely arbitrary goal.

This activity--writing here even though I don't feel like it--highlights my best and worst quality. On the best days, my drive to do everything I said I would do AND everything anyone else thought or imagined I might do, looks just great.

I'm highly productive, put together, and accomplished! Wow! How impressive and gold star!

On my worst days? I'm competitive and obsessed. Also unforgiving, rigid, and judgmental. I might be wearing a pedometer hooked to my underwear or fretting at my desk over not writing the best social studies lessons of all time.

Other people are like this, right? Or, is there a way to not be like this?

Anyway, that's the April Blogging Challenge in the bag! Let's do this again soon.

Every time we have a long weekend, it’s a little harder for Shef to go back to school the next week. This is the same for me when I’m teaching. It’s like that little extra taste of home makes the daily grind all the more bitter. Since Shef was sick on Friday, he was especially hesitant to join his class yesterday. Thank God he had show-and-tell. In fact, he was in the middle of it when I came to pick him up. “Just a second, Mom,” he said from where he was standing at the head of the group-time mat, holding his phony mustache-nose-and-glasses disguise. “I’ve just taken my first question.”

When I finally got him into the car and asked how the day was, he told me he’d picked some gunk out of his ear.

“You did what?” I asked.

“There was some stuff in my ear, and I picked it out.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Just some gunk,” he explained. “I’ve never picked anything out of my ear before.” This is as opposed to his nose, which is so frequently mined that he has a scab on the outside of his left nostril.

“Hmmm,” I said. This seemed an appropriate response to me, as we were most likely talking about a finger-full of ear wax. But when I looked in the rear-view mirror, there were tears forming in his little eyes. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, I thought you would be really impressed about it,” he said, dejected. I think the ear wax might have been the high point of the day.