I’ve been calling Shef’s daycare every day around noon to see how he’s doing and to decide whether I should come rescue him immediately, or let him try to gut it out through naptime until three o’clock.

On the second day, Diana told me that I should come and get him – he was tired and crying and ready to go home. I raced out the door, of course, arrived breathless, and swooped him out of Tina’s arms.

“Ma ma,” he whispered pathetically. His eyes were puffy and he was weepy; but in the car on the way home, he listed the names of his new school friends.

“Ahn-dy,” he said. “Net! New-ah! Dew!”*

This was a good sign, I thought.

Sure enough, on the third day, he recognized the parking lot of St. Paul’s as we pulled in. “Pahw’s!” he exclaimed. “Ahn-dy!”

When I called at noon, Diana told me that he’d been crying a bit, but that they wanted to try him for nap. If he didn’t fall asleep, she assured me they’d call me to pick him up.

"Please do, I said. "I can come any time."

After 1:00, the beginning of nap, I checked my phone every five minutes, sure that it wasn’t working – that the ringer had been turned off or that my service was down. Surely, Shef, The Child Who Would Not Sleep, had not succumbed to the schedule at Paul's.

When I finally walked in to his classroom at 3:00 on the nose, he didn’t notice me at first. He was busy wandering around after Tina, pointing at things and talking to her. He had fallen asleep next to Terese at one, and had just woken moments before.

A miracle.


*I never know if I should quote Shef phonetically or write what he means. This is what he sounded like saying, “Andy! Nate! Noah! Drew!”

If a professor of mine is good at his job – if he has obviously read the assigned text book and more about the topic covered in the course he’s teaching, there’s no way I would comment about his boil-like facial growth on my blog. That would be mean-spirited and, therefore, off-limits.

On the other hand, if a boil-faced professor happened to know very little about the subject of his course – if, say, a student asked a question about the topic; he responded, “I’m not really clear on the history of that;” and then the student opened her textbook to page one and promptly read the answer to her own question – you better believe his lesions are fair-game.

Aesthetics aside, I had pretty much decided to drop my summer school class in the first twenty minutes of the three-and-a-half hour session when the prof launched into an interminable lecture about the horrors of plagiarism, which were outlined in his syllabus. He’d know if we did it, he said, because he’d look on the internet. We’d get in big trouble, and he always has a “sense” when something is fishy about a paper. We shouldn’t try to engage in any questionable activity. Or else.

When he got around to the last page of the syllabus, which was a list of references for further reading about the topic of the course, a student noticed that one of the citations was dated 1966.

“This one seems old,” she said. “Is this a pivotal study? Particularly important to the field?”

“Oh,” he said, “I’m not familiar with that one.”

The woman seemed surprised, as he had listed the article as an important supplemental resource for the course he was teaching.

“Well,” he explained, “I inherited the syllabus.”

Things got worse at the end of the night when we asked him to summarize the findings of a study we’d seen described on a video tape he’d just shown us.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen the end.”

Congratulations to Shef, who has made it through his first day of day care. He began the day with breakfast in a big-kid chair, and the only snafu was grabbing and eating off of the plate that belonged to Nate, his unlucky table neighbor.

Kind teacher Tina fixed this problem by offering Chow Hound another muffin.

When I picked him up, Diana told me that he’d cried off and on, and that he’d gotten so tired that he couldn’t stay up any longer. She handed off deep-sleeping Shef, who woke screaming and yelling, “NOAH!” (the name of one of his classmates) when I put him in his car seat.

We’ll try the whole thing again tomorrow.

I try to support Dan in his career as much as possible -- encouraging him to socialize with his colleagues, trying to be understanding about the long hours, accompanying him to firm events, even when they're hours-long river boat rides that are inexplicably beverage-free.

It was in this spirit that I tried to remain nonchalant about his revelation that he'll be in the midst of pre-trial mayhem around the time of our third anniversary this summer.

"Oh that's okay," I said, waving my hand dismissively. "You know I don't really care that much about it anyway."

Dan found this comment less supportive than cold-hearted, and was (I suppose) rightfully indignant at my flagrant lack of marital sensitivity.

Dan and I are simply desperate to remodel the bathroom. What with the shit-brown tile, the unfinished plywood walls, the washed-out blue wainscoting, and the maroon linoleum – not to mention the obsessive bat-checking accompanied by intense claustrophobia incited by closing the door – we just can’t deal with it for much longer.

Thank goodness genius architect Jackie arrived this evening with alternative plans. She can’t guarantee a guano-free environment, but she did suggest a clawfoot tub.

And bless her for not flat-out accusing me of insanity for thinking the work could begin before September.

It all started innocently enough with a purely academic interest in online identity formation, and now, here I am, counting the hours until I get to imbibe a little with these blogging pals.




(Lee prefers to remain mysterious.)

Despite his own personal television, placed perfectly for scissor distraction, Shef staged an impressive protest



while being transformed from winged wonder



to savvy, trim toddler