Coming Together Soon!

I'm so behind on news!!!

(I apologize in advance if the formatting on this is horrid, but I can't log into my blog from the Day Job any more, and I always forget to do these from home. So I'm emailing this in, and that always results in peculiar formatting.)

My story, "Bleeding Red", was accepted into the Coming Together Among the Stars anthology, a sci-fi themed collection being edited by my beloved Lynn. I can't believe my story is going to be featured among so many other authors that I love! Look, just look at this Table of Contents!

Introduction, "The Thrust of Curiosity; a little science friction..." - Lynn Townsend

Rose Caraway - Duali-Teaze

Annabeth Leong - Repair Mission

Lynn Townsend - Situation Normal

E.S. Wynn - A Matter of Taste

T.B. Bond - Getting Even

T.B. Bond - Love in a Space Elevator

Elizabeth Black - Longing

Zee Giovanni - Forbidden Goods of the Galaxy

Nobilis Reed - Birth of a Monster Whisperer

Essemoh Teepee - Gyozo's Mate

George Box - Yvette

Jade Waters - The Joy Ride

Nickie Jamison - S.E.T.H.

Elliot DeLocke - Sense-Think-Act 

Delilah Night - Love is a Virus 

V.L. Locey - Rose of High Barbary

Adrik Kemp - Of Gods and Men

Skilja Peregrinarius - A Fully Functional Lo^ghi

Kathleen Tudor - Navigator

Elizabeth L. Brooks - Bleeding Red

Malin James - The Power of Positive Thinking

I don't have a publication date yet, but Lynn thinks it will be by the end of the year, or very early next -- more info when I've got it!

Whet Your Appetite

I don't always plug my book releases here, but Whetting the Appetite just hit the distribution markets and I am so in love with this book, it isn't even funny. It's a collection of 46 ultra-short stories (most of them no more than a page or two) written by KT (in her writing disguise of Lynn Townsend) and me over a period of about six months, and trust me, we've got it all!

It's gender-mixed -- the characters are male and female and trans* and up to your own interpretation (and not all of them are even human). It's orientation-blind -- gay, straight, bisexual, or even more complicated than that. Their ages range from new adult to end-of-life seniors. The relationships swing from the barest beginnings of new romance to the ins and outs of long-term commitments. The genres bounce from contemporary to historical to fantasy to sci-fi to steampunk to horror. The eroticism takes you from warm glances to scorching encounters to sizzling BDSM.

There's something here for everyone, and I'm pretty sure I mean everyone. Please check it out and pass the word!

Book trailer

Postcards (Taste-test the entire table of contents!)

Publisher's link (including excerpts!)

Amazon / Kindle

Barnes & Noble / Nook

All Romance eBooks (your choice of format)

Clean Slate

A former co-worker -- a young thing in her early 20s -- is about to move to a new city to start a new job. She's nervous, but excited -- she hasn't lived so far away from her family since college. Everything she's taking with her will fit in a U-haul trailer, her furniture limited to a bed, a desk, and a chair.

Starting from scratch. A clean slate.

I envy her, a little, for that opportunity. If I moved now, I'd have an entire house-full of things to pack, even with the severest pruning. My mortgage/rent would almost certainly double (at least -- probably triple or quadruple, depending on where I was going). And if I moved more than ten miles or so away, I'd have to be renegotiating custody.

But even with all that hassle... There's some appeal. The thought that I could try again, and this time, I'd know what I was looking at. I'd know what to look for. I'd know the value of things, large and small. A chance to cut away the chaff and pare everything down to what's really important.

Exciting. Exhilarating. Stepping out into the void and trusting in your own wings.

Wile E.

Scene: I'm tucking Alex in bed for the night. We've sung a song, and he's stalling by telling me how he'd like to build a time machine so he can go back and see himself as a baby, or see his sister as a baby, without using pictures.

"Because no one can remember being a baby," he explains. "You can't remember being a baby. But you remember me as a baby! And you remember Penny as a baby!"

"Yep," I agree. "I even, just a little bit, remember your Uncle John as a baby."

Alex pauses in surprise. "How old is Uncle John?"

"Thirty-nine."

"And how old are you?"

"I'm forty-two."

"Daddy is forty."

"Yes, that's right."

"That means you are two years older than Daddy!" he crows in delight.

"I sure am. Can you figure out how much older I am than Uncle John?"

The boy is six, mind you -- if he thinks a moment and then gives up, it's not a big deal. I'll help him to the answer and move on. But Alex continually surprises me with the things he can figure out, and as insanely smart as he is, it's good to push him a little bit, especially as he's already bored with school.

He screws up his face in thought. "I'm not sure."

"Well, if we start at thirty-nine, and then--"

"Wait, I think I know."

"What do you think it is?"

"Three?"

"Yes! Very good! How did you figure it out?"

"I started with forty-two, and then went backward to forty-one, and to forty, and to thirty-nine. And I counted all the jumps and there were three!"

"Huh," I say. "Do you know what math problem you just figured out?"

"What?"

I draw the numbers in the air as I say them (backwards, so they'd look the right way around to him): "42 - 39 = 3."

His eyes get big and round -- as well they might, because this is math at least a grade ahead of what he's learning in kindergarten. "I did?"

"You sure did, buddy. Because there's lots of different ways to figure things out, and you thought about it until you found a way that worked for you."

Alex flops down onto his pillow and squeezes his stuffed animals with delight. "Cool!"

When I took AP Chemistry in high school, the second semester was devoted to lab work. The teacher issued us our school board-mandated books, and then she said, "Now, I want you all to go put those in the bottom of your lockers, and forget them." When we came back, she passed out our real books, which were ancient, grungy, and stained, burnt by acid and fire, and filled with experiments and expected results, tables of reactions, decades-old books that she had hoarded. We just called them "the green books."

She didn't expect us to memorize a damn thing. The tests and exams (there weren't many) were open-book. She led us through the experiments so we could see the reactions with our own eyes, and at the end of the semester, we each were given a coded test tube and two weeks' worth of classroom time to figure out what was in it, using the class store of chemicals and equipment... and our green books. Because that, my teacher stressed, was true learning: not knowing the facts themselves, but knowing where and how to find the facts we needed, and apply them deductively.

It was, arguably, the greatest classroom lesson I ever received. It was a skill I took with me into my professional life, where my greatest skill as a programmer was my ability to pick up any new language within a matter of days, because as soon as I'd found a reference, putting the pieces together to perform a task was simply an exercise. When they moved me to QA and threw me untrained into a CMMI audit, the entire effort became a tedious matter of sifting through paperwork as soon as I'd laid hands on the document that defined the terms.

So much of life is not about what you know, but what you can figure out. And as a parent, I love these times -- I live for these times -- when no matter how bored my kids are with school and education, they can get caught up, if only for a moment, in the thrill of learning.

Fluffy

I've been with the kids 24/7 since last Wednesday afternoon with neither work nor school for a break, thanks to some snow, the weekend, and some teacher workdays. I couldn't work from home today, so I brought them in with me and just now I had to walk out of a meeting because I could hear Alex fake-crying from all the way down the hall and Penny belly-laughing and egging him on. But this was a sweet incident and I'm posting it now because my alternative is to murder one or both of them. (Hi, NSA friends!)

So...

Last night, after dinner, I was sitting at the table, leafing through a couple of catalogs that had come in the mail while the kids finished eating their dinner, and they were looking over my shoulders (well, elbows) and kibbitzing about the clothes and such.

I was in the Pyramid Collection catalog when Penny said, "What's Goddess size mean?"

I said, "It's a nice way of saying they're clothes for fat people, like me." (Yes, I know that's bad, I'm not supposed to do that, but I was tired; cf previous comment about having them with me 24/7 since last Wednesday.)

Alex, indignant: "You're not fat, Mommy!"

"Aw, that's very sweet of you, buddy. Thank you."

"Yeah," Penny piped in, "you're like me -- a little plump! And plump is cute! Like babies and little fluffy chicks!"

You hear that, Internet? I'm not fat; I'm fluffy! (Warning: linked page makes noise.)

MarsCon 2014 Report

This is going to be long. I mean, long. With links and pictures and all kinds of stuff. You are warned.

I don't even know where to begin. I always enjoy cons, but I don't think I've ever had such a great time at one before.

And I'm an introvert, but I think last night I was feeling just a tingle of the phenomenon that KT (an extrovert's extrovert) has told me about so often, where a big event like this ends and instead of being tired and ready to recover, she's aching for more, more, more.

I think it has to do with the kind of introvert that I am. I do not make friends easily. I'm not shy, per se. I don't have a problem talking to people, usually. But I am really bad at starting conversations. It's much easier for me to be in a social situation if there's someone else present that I know who can help me break the ice. Get the ball rolling, so to speak.

And this year, aside from about an hour early on Friday evening before people really started to arrive, I don't think I went anywhere that I didn't encounter someone I knew. Seriously. Half the time I got on the damn elevator, there was someone in there I knew, let alone any of the panels or performances or activities.

And not just the usual suspects, either. Of course there was what I think of as my "usual" crew of friends that grew out of school friendships -- KT and Kevin, DJ and Ora, Greg, and T. Elizabeth, Jenn and Brian all came to MarsCon for the first time this year, and I'm pretty sure they're hooked -- Brian, at least, is already planning a costume for next year. And I had family there as well -- John and Sam, and my kids, and Matt (who I suppose is no longer technically family, but I still think of him that way by way of his being, y'know, the father of my children). And there was also the usual collection of the friends I used to see more often but now run into mainly at cons and the like -- Elliot and Marcy and John D. and John H.

And this year, thanks in large part to KT's obsession with music and filk, I had "music friends" like Jonah and Mikey and Chuck and Bert. And thanks partly to my participation as a guest last year, I had "author friends" like Amy and Kat and Michael. Also, I made new friends of both sorts, like Danny and Nobilis.

There were also random other folks -- people who I've worked with, for instance, and with whom I am Facebook friends, some of whom I didn't even know were geeks, like John T. and Caren and Erika.

There was even an occasion where a bunch of us were sitting around a table and I was the only one who knew everyone.

So pretty much the only times I felt like I was on my own were times that I was actually alone. Which weren't many, because I was insanely busy!

It. Was. Wonderful.

So. Ready for the blow-by-blow? (Click on pictures to embiggen.)

Friday

I took a half-day from work. Came home, ate a good lunch, finished packing, fed the cat, and drove the whopping four miles to the hotel. I got checked in, picked up my badge, and spent most of the rest of the afternoon kind of lounging in my room, until I started to see Facebook posts indicating that people were beginning to arrive. So I changed into my Femme Fatale Red Riding Hood outfit and headed down to the lobby.

This was my one slow period; I did a tour of the public areas and said hi to a few people, then sat in the "pit" (a slightly sunken lounge area in the hotel lobby) for maybe forty-five minutes or so until I spotted some friends arriving.

Around 6 or so, I got a text from Matt that he and the kids had arrived, so I wandered up to the kids' meet-and-greet party. The kids' activities this year were mostly Harry Potter/Hogwarts themed -- the meet-and-greet started with a decorate-your-own wand activity. Then the kids got to choose their Patronuses and draw them on wooden pendants. They had a game that involved using their new wands to keep balloons in the air, and then they had ice cream sundaes.

I left that to go catch the already-in-progress Friday night show (a medley of entertainers), where I joined a whole bunch of friends and we had enormous fun until I had to slip out a bit early to make my way to my first two events.

The first was a re-imagining of the old game show Match Guest. The MC would read out a sentence or two with a blank in it, and everyone in the room would write down our answers to fill in the blanks. Audience members whose answers more-or-less matched what panelists answered got points; at the end, the member with the most points won, essentially, a MarsCon gift certificate. (There were actually two winners who split the prize, because even after three tie-breaker rounds, they were still tied.) This was the "adult" version, in which we did not even think about using any answers that were not at least R-rated. It was hilarious and fun, and I very much hope I can do it again next year!

Immediately following that, there was "Erotic Fairy Tale Rewrites". Each panelist selected a fairy tale to rewrite, and the audience supplied us with: an extra character, a sexy situation, a location, and an object that had to be included. While we wrote, the audience played MadLibs, and then we each read our resulting stories. I was very pleased with how mine turned out, and I'll post it over on the writing blog on Wednesday, so if you're interested, be on the lookout.

That wrapped up earlier than expected, so I gleefully skipped down the hall to jump into Filk and Cookies. I arrived just in time to catch Sam singing her parody of "My Favorite Things" (sideways video posted by my brother), and a bit later, she also sang her parody of "The Impossible Dream" (video posted by me).

Filk and Cookies was supposed to end at 1am, but Mikey and Jonah kept goading each other (and the other guests who brought instruments along) and then there was the whole Corn Palace incident (you had to be there) and they didn't kick us out of the room until well after 2. Still giggling, I stumbled back to my room and went to bed.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention dinner in there anywhere. Which would be because I didn't have any. I had some ice cream at the kids' meet-and-greet, and KT brought me a clementine to the fairy tale rewrite panel, and I had a cookie and some soda at Filk and Cookies, though, so I guess that counts. Right?

Saturday

You'd think that after all that, I'd sleep in, but no; I woke up at about 7:15. I did lounge around in bed for a bit, and then I took a shower and made myself some coffee and got dressed. I left the room around 8:45 or so and headed downstairs to see the kids get sorted into their Hogwarts houses for the day's kids' activities.

I ran into some friends in the hallway, so I missed seeing Penny draw Slytherin, but Matt told me she handled her disappointment with aplomb. I did arrive just as Jess was also sorted into Slytherin, though (which Matt "helped" happen, because after all the Sorting Hat does take your preferences into consideration), and Penny seemed pretty pleased that she'd at least have her friend with her. And then I sidled up to her and suggested that maybe she could pretend she was actually a Gryffindor who was in Slytherin as a spy, and that notion also cheered her considerably. Alex got into Gryffindor, which I think he was pleased about mostly because Penny told him that was good.

A gajillion kudos to the volunteer team who put the "Hogwarts" kids' activity room together, because it was amazing. Not for the first time, I wished I was a kid so I could participate! (I did get sorted, along with several other adults, when all the kids were done and they had a ton of leftover badges.)

They had a "library" in the center, at which each kid was given a small, hardcover blank book. They made their own bookplates for the front, and there were crayons and markers for them to use to decorate it with. Each corner of the room had a "class" stationed there, and they rotated the kids around the stations in their houses, to keep any one station from being swamped, which was a great idea. They had Runes, History, Magical Creatures, and Potions.

Later in the day, they had a Triwizard Tournament, which I gather was sort of a scavenger hunt thing. I missed that because I was sitting on a panel at the same time. It sounded like fun, though.

Right around noon, I wandered back up to my room to collect my publicity handouts and stuff, and also to call my mom (my dad had been admitted to the hospital on Thursday night with several small blood clots in one lung and in his leg, and while he had improved enough for me to feel okay about going to the con, I still wanted to check in). I was in the room for maybe fifteen minutes, and then I went back down and joined a few friends to listen to some music -- the Blibbering Humdingers, Danny Birt, and Jonah Knight.

Then I set up in with a bunch of other authors for signings, though mostly no one even came over to my end of the room -- the people who came in for signings were pretty much there just for the guests of honor. But it was still an enjoyable hour that I spent talking with Nobilis Reed, and toward the end, Caren came in and pity-bought a book from me and we talked for a while, too, so it was still fun.

After that, I sat on a panel to talk about the Hunger Games series -- both the movies and the books -- and that turned out to be tons of fun, too, with a very smart and thoughtful panel and a lively-but-polite audience.

Then I went upstairs to the Con Suite, because aside from that cup of coffee I'd had in my room that morning and a cupcake during Jonah's concert, I hadn't eaten anything all day, and it was now 4 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, because it was 4 in the afternoon, the Con Suite didn't have out any "real" food, so I had some chips and some Chex mix and a cookie. And I sat down with Amy Moler and KT and eventually a whole bunch of other folks as well, including Jenn and Brian and Kevin and Nobilis and I'm absolutely certain that I'm forgetting someone (Greg, maybe?) but the point is: a bunch of us. And we talked about writing and other things for an hour, until it was time for Amy to go collect her family and get some dinner, and the rest of us headed off to other assorted entertainments. Primarily, the big Saturday night entertainment, starting with Mikey Mason's concert, and then segueing into the costume contest.

Alas, technical difficulties in setting up the stage kept us standing in the hall for almost 40 minutes after the concert was supposed to start, and made the concert run well over its planned time. I had to leave as soon as Mikey finished playing in order to get to my evening panels, where I sat at the head of a table with several other romance and erotica professionals to talk about writing and publishing, and the appeal of fairy tale erotica, and sex in roleplaying, and by the time we got to the panel running from 11-midnight, we were so tired that it turned into us just taking questions from the audience and talking about whatever we all felt like talking about. (I'll probably go into a little more detail about these panels over on the writing blog post later this week. And Nobilis recorded some of it for his podcasts, so eventually he will post that, and I will probably put a link over on the writing blog as well, if you're interested.)

I was so tired when that ended that I went back to my room and went straight to bed, without looking around for other activities or parties.

Yes, I missed dinner again. After also missing breakfast and lunch. But I'd had a cupcake, some snacks around four, and I had a drink -- the hotel bar named a delicious fruity concoction after Mikey Mason, and he spent the whole weekend reminding everyone to "put Mikey Mason in your mouth" and that "I'm delicious!" -- during Mikey's concert.

Sunday

Once again with the not sleeping in. I woke up even earlier, not long after six, though I stayed in bed for a good while again.

Sunday is usually a lot slower, programming-wise, than the other days, so I took my time getting dressed and packing up, and I reminded myself to go to the Con Suite for breakfast (whoo, an actual meal for the first time in nearly 48 hours!) where I ran into KT, so I sat down and chatted with her while I ate my eggs and ham. (MarsCon has the best Con Suite ever; I was just too busy to visit it at mealtimes.)

Eventually, I took all my stuff down to the car and plopped down in the lobby to wait for the panel I was interested in actually being an audience member of, but Nobilis came over and talked to me for a while, and just as he was leaving, Matt and the kids came in, and the kids piled on me, so I sat and played with them for a while instead. Eventually, I walked them back down to where Matt was volunteering in the family-oriented games room, and schlepped back across the hotel (it's a huge, sprawling building) to be on the panel of writers for the PG version of Fairy Tale Rewrites. (That one wasn't quite as good -- possibly because I was sleep-deprived -- but I'll include at the end of this post because I thought it was still fairly clever. Though if there had been judging of any sort, I'm pretty certain that Danny Birt would've taken the prize for his extremely dark and grim version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears -- or more precisely, Goldilocks Gets Her Revenge.)

Then I wandered on over to the main programming hall for the closing concert, featuring the Blibbering Humdingers, Jonah Knight, Mikey Mason, and Danny Birt (yeah, the same Danny who'd just kicked my ass at flashfic; he's a talented guy). Everyone was punchy and tired (except Jonah, who had more energy at this show than he'd exhibited all the rest of the con) but that just added to the fun; they were teasing each other and playing around and being silly and it was brilliant.

I took a video of Mikey's trademark 80s Cartoon Theme Songs that, I think, really captures the essence of the whole concert. (That little "ho" contest? Was sort of instigated by me, because I'd been talking to Mikey about it earlier in the day. And that's Sam -- my sister-in-law -- who won it.)

When the con was over, Elizabeth, Jenn, Brian, and Jenn's cousin Chris (who came in just for the one day) and I all went out for a late lunch/early dinner, and that felt pretty con-like, too, even though we weren't in the hotel anymore.

(And after that, I went down to the hospital to visit my dad, who was doing oodles better, and bored enough to be happy to listen to me babble about the con for an hour.)

I'm already looking forward to next year, and I really feel rejuvenated and re-inspired as a writer.

It was the Best Con Ever.

MarsCon 2014 fairy tale rewrite

Original story (chosen by me): Aladdin
Additional elements (chosen by the audience):
A character: Ninja
A setting: Titanic on a good day
A problem: No light
An object: Picture of Mary Todd Lincoln (a callback joke to the erotic rewrites on Friday night)

The story (written in about 20 minutes -- typos are fixed here, but nothing else):

The ninja lurked in a shadowy corner of the Titanic's empty ballroom, and concentrated on his mission -- the theft of a valuable portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln. The gentleman who owned the portrait kept it with him all the time, except during his nightly promenade of the deck. During that time, the ninja would crawl from the ballroom's vents into the gentleman's stateroom, take the portrait, and stash it in the hiding place he had prepared in the second dining room.

The hour was at hand. The ninja crept from his corner and toward the vent... When suddenly, the lights extinguished, all at once.

The ninja was well-acquainted with darkness, being a ninja, but this sudden loss was a bit surprising. Before he could react, though, a brilliant light appeared in the center of the room, brighter than any electric, billowing smoke began the fill the room, and a booming voice declared, "I claim this room for the palace of my master, Aladdin!"

"Wait!" the ninja cried. "At least let me leave first!"

From the smoke, a face emerged, cruel and cold and as tall as the ninja's entire body. "Why should I grant YOUR wish?" the djinn demanded. "You are not my master." The djinn's eyes narrowed. "In fact, my master will require servants for his palace. You will do nicely."

"But I am not a servant," the ninja protested. "I am a thief, a spy, and a sometime assassin!"

"Who am I to question my master's needs?" the djinn said. "My master commanded me to build him a palace, and to that end I have claimed this ballroom and everything in it, and that includes you."

"But why can you not simply create the palace from the ether?" the ninja asked.

The djinn snorted. "Have YOU ever created something from the ether? It's a LOT easier to just steal what's needed."

Well, that was something the ninja could understand, anyway. This Aladdin who commanded the djinn seemed to be someone the ninja could get along with, and to tell the truth, he was tired of running all over the world to steal boring antiquities. "Maybe I could help you with the rest of the palace," he admitted. "What else do we need to steal?"

"A hundred concubines."

The ninja smiled and stepped into the djinn's smoke, and together, they disappeared, along with the Titanic's beautiful ballroom.

End.

Grimm Report

Penny has to do a certain amount of reading each night for her homework. Having finished her latest book last night, she asked if tonight, she could read my copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales.

My copy of Grimm used to be my mother's, and it predates me by quite a bit (if its Library of Congress card number is to be believed, it was published in 1946). Being somewhat elderly, it is also lacking in any level of Disneyfication.

I thought I should warn her, a bit, so I gave her, as an example, some of the changes Disney made to the Cinderella story. Being Penny, she was fine with the stepsisters being pecked to death by birds at the end, but utterly grossed out by their cutting off their toes and heels to make the glass slipper fit.

Grossed out enough, in fact, that she made me flip through the first twenty pages or so and make sure there was nothing else utterly nasty awaiting her. I did, and promised her that although there were some threats of death and some minor bleeding, there were no more bodily mutilations.

She took the book and sat down to read, then looked up with wide eyes. "There's not, like... sex, is there?"

"Not as such, no. I mean, sometimes someone will have a baby, but they don't talk about the sex."

"Whew. 'Cause that would be really gross."

"There's romance, sometimes."

"Well, that's not as gross as someone cutting off bits of their feet."

"...I'm glad we agree on that."

There Is Too Much; Let Me Sum Up.

Holidays ate my brain?

Nope. Nope. No good. No excuses. I was just now looking at my posting numbers for the last few years (you know, the ones you can clearly see in the Archives sidebar) and trying to figure out just what, exactly, happened to cut my number of posts to a TENTH of what it was five years ago.

And the answer is, well, quite a lot of things, really. I had a second kid, and that ate up a lot of energy. Then I became published, and about a year later, started proofing and editing, and those ate up a lot of energy (and also siphoned off about a post a week to the writing blog). I started working part-time, technically, and it was very weird, how much that one extra day off every two weeks rattled my schedule. And then my marriage fell apart, and I couldn't talk about that for a while, but I couldn't really think about anything else, and so I was all but silenced. And then once the fallout from that settled...

Well, the habit of writing regularly had kind of fallen apart. I'd gotten used to making short observations on Twitter rather than long reports here. And then I moved to Facebook, and found that I really liked the fact that any given short observation could turn into an actual conversation. Blogging is great and all, but I don't get a lot of feedback.

I'm not ready to give up blogging entirely, but I don't know if I'm ready to jump back in with both feet, either.

But I might as well put up a general life update...

Did I mention that B and I broke up? Yeah, that happened back in August. (I remember because it actually happened on Penny's birthday.) It was entirely drama-free. We'd both pretty much simultaneously come to the conclusion that we'd been each others' rebound relationship, and that we'd done as much rebounding as we were ready for, and therefore the relationship had run its course. No biggie. We're still friends.

I haven't dated anyone else since, though. I got back on OKCupid for a while, got annoyed by how everyone I looked at seemed either shallow or pretentious, and decided that maybe I just wasn't in the right mindframe for dating. I feel a bit lonely from time to time (dammit but I'd wanted an actual date for Christmas Town this year!) but all in all, I'm surprisingly okay with it. At least emotionally.

The divorce is official now; it came through back in October, though my lawyer still has not sent me a hard copy of the court decree/order. I have a PDF scan of it, though.

The kids continue to surprise me with their awesomeness on a regular basis. I was expecting Christmas afternoon and evening to be full of whining -- you know, once the presents have been opened and they realize they're not getting anything else for the rest of the day? But they actually settled down to playing with their new things, and they were great for the whole day after Christmas, as well, which I found really shocking.

Penny got her hair cut to just above shoulder-length recently. It looks fabulous on her, and is much easier to keep neat. I wish she'd agreed to do it years ago.

Alex managed to stay up all the way to midnight on New Year's Eve, for the first time this year. (He was out cold by 12:05, though.)

The house... I'm very pleased with the house right now, actually, as long as I don't allow myself to look at the mess in playroom and kids' rooms. I expect to need a new water heater by the end of this year, though. (My dad told me, when I got my Christmas check from him and Mom, that he'd considered writing "Happy Water Heater" on the bottom of it instead of "Merry Christmas". I laughed, mostly because there's no way my Christmas check will cover a new water heater... Especially if you consider that they have a lifespan of approximately 15 years, which means the new one is going to endure both kids' teenage years, and is therefore going to have to be pretty bronky.)

I've seen quite a few movies lately, at least for me -- Thor 2, the second Hobbit movie, Frozen, the second Hunger Games movie... Wow, there's a lot of second movies in there, aren't there?

The editing gig is going pretty well; the writing thing... has stalled nearly as badly as this blog. Though I had a long novella/short novel come out in November have a story in an anthology that's coming out this spring or summer, and I'm trying to get on the ball about writing some more, even if it's just a tiny tiny bit each week. It all adds up, right?

In the meantime, I'll be a guest at MarsCon again this year, with a truly insane (for me) schedule. (And keeping in mind that I'll probably be spending a good chunk of the days shepherding one child or the other around, too.)

And I think that just about sums up my life at the moment.

Teacher's Report

On Veteran's Day, we had conferences with both kids' teachers, because the school mandates a conference at the end of the first quarter for all elementary school kids. (I don't know about middle school yet, but since that will be multiple teachers, I'm guessing not.)

Penny's was first. Penny actually has two teachers this year, her homeroom teacher, Mrs. H., and her math/science/social studies teacher, Mrs. F., with whom she spends slightly more than half the day.

Mrs. F. could only talk for a minute, because she had another conference at the same time, but she heard my voice as I was shooing the kids out to the playground and rushed over to tell me that Penny was an "absolute delight" in the classroom.

Before she left, I let her know that she had -- entirely unwittingly -- done the best thing possible as far as gaining Penny's trust: she had screwed up on a particular problem when grading a test, and so she'd gathered them back up, re-graded the problem she'd done incorrectly, adjusted the grades as necessary, and handed them back out. Penny had been floored that a teacher would a) make a mistake, b) admit to the mistake, and c) correct that mistake. It may well turn out to be the most valuable lesson Penny learns this year, and I talked to her about it a little when she told me the story to help it sink in, that being an adult doesn't mean you stop making mistakes; it means you take responsibility for your mistakes and do what you can to fix them. (A lesson that far too many adults have failed to learn, but if I can manage to get my kids to learn it, then I'll count my parenting as a success.) So I told Mrs. F. how flabbergasted and pleased Penny had been, and thanked her for providing us with, as they say, a "teachable moment".

Anyway, the general consensus on Penny was about what we've come to expect: she's a good student, usually quiet and well-behaved in the classroom. She's at the top of her math class (that's my girl!) and doing very well in everything else, even in subjects where her grade is not the best. The problems she has stem from the same places they've always stemmed from -- she'd rather read than do work, so she rushes through her work so she can read, risking sloppy results; she doesn't ask for help when she gets stuck; and she is utterly hopeless at organization, so sometimes things (pieces of paper, homework, notebooks...) get lost.

All of which were problems that I had at her age, as well, so I have confidence (or at least hope) that she'll grow out of them.

All in all, we were pretty well pleased with that conference, and then we went down to talk to Alex's teacher, Mrs. D.

Ahem.

We've known for a couple of years now that Alex was ahead of the curve of most kindergarteners, but it was certainly nice to have that confirmed.

Mrs. D. told us that they'd given all the students a preliminary test that charted reading skills against the kindergarten rubric, comparing them to where students are expected to be at both this point in the year, and where they're expected to be by the end of the year.

Alex... aced the test. As compared to the end of year numbers. Something like 50 questions, and he got two wrong. Two.

Mrs. D. tried him on some other evaluations, and tells us that as near as she can tell, his reading skills are currently about on par with a second-semester 1st grader. Alex is nearly a year and a half ahead in reading. Mrs. D. said that if they grouped students solely on reading ability (...apparently that's not a thing any more?), Alex would be the only one in his group.

And he's likewise ahead of the class in math and science, though they haven't done any testing on those yet.

Mrs. D. wondered if we might possibly consider having him tested for the gifted program?

Yes. Yes, please, as soon as possible, because I cannot bear the idea that Alex might get to second or third grade and turn into one of those kids who loses interest in school and/or becomes a classroom disruption simply because they're bored.

I'm so proud of both of my kids, I could burst.

So Weird!

A conversation I just had with my kids:

Alex: Mom, what's that?

Me: It's a [crochet project of the moment]. When it's finished, it's going to be a Christmas present for [redacted].

Alex: But it's not even Christmas yet!

Me: No, but I'm making crochet presents for several people this year, and making things takes time. I'm starting early to make sure I can get them all done in time.

Penny: That's weird.

Me: Planning ahead is weird?

Penny: Pretty much, yeah.

Comfy

It's a chilly, rainy day, the latest in pretty near on a week of chilly, rainy days. The sort of day that people who dislike autumn point to, to illustrate their point.

Nasty weather or not, the kids were in need of some new clothes and other essentials, so we all went out to the store.

When we came back, I divided up the purchases and asked each of them to take their new clothes up to their room and put them away.

When Penny came back downstairs, she was wearing her fuzzy blue bathrobe, her fuzzy purple PJ bottoms (with cupcakes on them!), and her fuzzy, fleece-lined, cheetah-print slippers. She promptly curled up into a chair and started playing on her phone.

Damned if that doesn't look like just about the best way ever to spend a rainy autumn afternoon. I may join her.

Mad (Yet Healthy) Scientist

Penny is pretty well determined that she's going to be a mad scientist when she grows up.

(Specifically, a mad one. I think -- though she has not voiced it this way -- because mad scientists don't have to follow all those pesky rules like, say, the laws of nature, and therefore it doesn't require that she pay attention in science class.)

Anyway, we were in the car over the weekend and she suddenly popped up with, apropos of nothing that I'm aware of: "Mom? Wouldn't it be cool if we had wings and could fly?"

I allowed as how that would be pretty cool.

"Dad was telling me that sometimes, when people die, we can take like their insides and stuff and put them in other people who need them."

Apparent left-turns in the conversation are pretty common around here, so I took it in stride. "Sure, if the dead person gave their permission before they died. It's called being an organ donor."

But she hadn't veered as far as I'd thought. "When I grow up, I'm going to cut some wings off of really big birds and attach them to people so they can fly."

She launched into her plan, entirely undeterred by my gentle suggestions about such realities as even my extreme layman's science knowledge could conjure up. She would test her transplants first, she assured me, by cutting the wings off of smaller birds and attaching them to mice and rats.

And once she had perfected her technique, she would offer this transformative surgery to all comers for only fifty cents.

When I exclaimed over the low cost and wondered how she would finance her mad science, she blithely reminded me that she was also going to open a restaurant that would serve only healthy, diabetes-friendly meals. The restaurant, she explained, would be open from 10 until 10 every day, and she would do her mad science in the mornings and late evenings. No problem.

I was, all at once, charmed by her generosity and proud of her fearless vision.

And maybe, just a teeny, tiny bit disturbed by the thought of her chopping the wings off hapless birds and sewing them onto poor, innocent rodents.

Busy Day

So... it looks like either Blogger changed something or my Day Job network folks did, but now when I try to start a new Blogger post from work, it gets to the loading screen and just sits there. So no more posting from work.

You can see what this has done to my ability to post (it's had a similar effect on my writing blog as well). My evenings tend to be anything but conducive to blogging, even over here.

But I figured I should make an effort to get something down for today, because today was pretty danged awesome. And busy.

1) This was not actually today, but yesterday, but... last week, I (finally, after having decided to do so a couple of months ago) bought a new cell phone. Which means that Penny inherited my old phone. I'd even bought her a case for it. When I picked her up Friday afternoon and showed her my new phone, it took a few seconds for her to realize what that meant, and then she LOST. HER. SHIT. It was adorable. (Note: It's not a phone any more. All cell functions have been turned off. It's basically just an iPod Touch with a laughably small capacity, now.)

2) We got up at pretty near the usual weekday time so that we could eat breakfast and get dressed and head out to watch Alex play soccer.

(A few weeks ago, Matt told me that Alex had been mentioning soccer a lot as something he enjoyed -- he'd never said a word to me -- and that he was going to sign him up for a kids' league. Matt also, naturally, got roped into coaching.)

I do not like sports much, and I especially don't care much for soccer, but watching teams of 4-5-year-olds play was almost but not entirely unlike soccer anyway. None of them could figure out which direction they were supposed to run. They'd kick at the ball and miss, multiple times in a row. Run up to it to kick and come to a dead halt just before doing so, so precisely it looked like something from a cartoon. Run in a little circle around the ball without ever touching it. Politely stop and wait for an opposing team member to line up his (or her) kick instead of jumping in to steal the ball. It was, in a word, hysterical.

I saw three (minor) injuries during the two games, and not one of them was inflicted by another child (even accidentally!) which I thought was really saying something. Anyway, it was a fun way to spend an hour, much to my surprise.

Then we came home and Alex changed out of his soccer gear and into street clothes so that we could eat an early lunch in preparation for...

3) Ripley's birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese! Okay, the kids' enthusiasm for this entirely outstripped my own, but I actually like CEC's pizza, the kids were mostly pretty well-behaved, and the birthday girl went ga-ga for the stuffed penguin I'd crocheted for her. (So did some of the adults. It was very gratifying.)

4) After that, we went to the mall (breaking my two-year run of successful avoidance of its parking lot) so that Penny could get her ears pierced. I'd told her that she could have it done when she turned 10 (which is when I got mine done the first time), but she'd been waffling over the possible pain until just recently, when a couple of friends from school talked her into it.

I got a bit of sticker shock -- apparently, earrings for piercing cost more than twice what they did back in the early 1990s, when I had my last piercing done. What's up with that?! But once I got over that, Penny gleefully picked out some little studs with her birthstone (peridot) in them. She decided it would be best if she distracted herself with a game on her phone, so she did that while the attendant popped her ears. She did really great, actually. She let out one moderately-loud "Ow!" with each pop, and a series of small "Ow, ow, ow, oh ow"s afterward, as the nerves ricocheted, and then it was done. When we were in the car, she told me they didn't hurt any more, and about an hour or so later, she told me she could touch her ears without them hurting. (She's spent the whole rest of the evening dancing around singing, "I got my ears piereced, I finally got my ears pierced!" in delight.)

5) From the mall, we headed over to my parents' house. This morning, while planning the day, Alex had protested the earring trip with, "What are we going to do for me?" I asked what he wanted to do, and he said, "I miss Grandma and Grandpa." So I called my folks and they enthusiastically agreed that we should come over. So we did, and the kids played happily for a while, and then my parents took us out to dinner. Mmm, Mexican.

It all made for kind of a long day, but both kids were pretty awesome, I have to say. There was some whining here and there, but by and large, they were about as patient and cheerful as anyone could have been expected to be.

'Cause my kids are awesome, that's why.

First Day of School

What kind of mom would I be if I didn't post some pictures of the kids on the first day of school? (The non-embarrassing kind, probably. And where's the fun in that?)

(Note: I took most of these with my nice camera, but I haven't had a chance yet to do any post-processing like color balancing, contrast adjustment, or cropping. When I've done that, I'll post those pics to Flickr.)

First, a nice standing pose:

Then, one that probably captures their relative feelings about the day a little more accurately:

An anecdote worth saving: At orientation last week, as Alex and I were walking down the hall together, I said, "Are you excited to meet your teacher and see your kindergarten class?" and he said, "Mommy, I've been waiting for this my whole life!"

And then one with the pseudo-stepsiblings, which I think of the six bajillion pictures the three adults were taking, may be the only one that got all four kids a) looking generally in the direction of the camera, b) not blinking, and c) not making a goofy face:

And, of course, the obligatory bus stop picture (this one via my cell phone, because the nice camera's battery died on me):

I did, in fact, get just a little choked up as the bus pulled away -- that's my youngest off to kindergarten, and my eldest starting her very last year in elementary school. It's the end of an era.

But more than nostalgic, I'm excited and happy for them. And, also, relieved to not be paying daycare tuition for a while...

Ten

Ten years ago.

Ten?

Holy heck, TEN.

From this:

to this:

How can that be right?!

One whole decade. Happy birthday, my beautiful girl.

My Life Is Awesome

I've been feeling pretty damned good lately.

I talked about it over on my writing blog (because one bit is writing/editing related and just the tiniest bit spicy), so let me encourage you to go check it out, because I whine and bitch and moan enough, and sometimes, it's good to just share some happy: http://everyworldneedslove.blogspot.com/2013/08/i-haz-happee.html

Dinner Deals and Empathy

As previously mentioned, I'm having the dining room and kitchen floor repaired soon. Which means I've moved all my stuff out of the dining room, and a lot of stuff out of the kitchen, so the contractor can get to the floor. "Stuff" in this case includes the dining room table and all the chairs.

So we're eating in the living room, which for the kids is the biggest treat ever.

Except that the number of meals I can make that we can eat in the living room without making an enormous mess is pretty limited. So I told them last night that we'd have some occasional fast food.

Penny wanted Chick-fil-A. Alex wanted Burger King. (Mind you, both of them were voting based on which playground they favored rather than the food they wanted.)

There was no compromise, so eventually I told them to put a sock in it, and we went to the McDonald's drive-through and brought our dinner home. I asked Penny to please not get french fries, since her blood sugar has been wobbly lately, and as a consolation, I promised to heat up some brussels sprouts for her when we got home.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yes.

You heard that correctly. My daughter is willing to accept brussels sprouts as a fair trade for french fries.

I'm pretty sure it's one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Anyway, we got home and I started divvying up burgers and sides and microwave-steaming some brussels sprouts, and they said, "Can we watch a movie while we eat? Pleeeeeeeeease?"

I intensely dislike the TV-while-eating phenomenon (largely because I am, myself, highly susceptible to distraction) but... no dining room table anyway. Might as well. "Okay, fine. What are we watching?"

Alex picked out Despicable Me, but Penny whined. Apparently, she doesn't like the minions. I am flabbergasted and sad; the minions are awesome. But it's not like I can force her to like them. Alex then picked out Monsters Inc.

Yeah, that's good. I haven't seen it in a while. So we popped it in and settled down to our dinner. The kids enjoyed it; they laughed riotously and asked me to rewind a scene or two so they could watch again. Then we got to the almost-end, where Sully has to take Boo home and then leave her... forever.

Alex lost it. He crawled into my lap and started sobbing his heart out.

I hugged him tight and promised him that it would be okay, reminded him that at the end, Sully gets to see Boo again, and he calmed down to watch again. But he snuggled up against me instead of returning to his previous seat on the ottoman, and failed to laugh at the wacky antics until they revealed Boo's mostly-repaired door.

I admit I was a little surprised; I wasn't sure, at 5, that he actually understood what was going on, or possessed enough empathy to be sad for others' partings. But apparently I was wrong.

Huhn. We may be in for a slightly rough period, if he's going to be that sensitive to movie mawkishness.

Well, at least he likes the minions.

Checking In

So, life. Life continues apace.

The kids continue much as reported in the previous update. Penny's birthday is two weeks from today and she's been doing a countdown for over a week. I don't have any really big exciting presents for her, so I hope she's not too disappointed. Both of them have been taking advantage of summer to stay up late -- I don't make Alex go to bed until after 8:30, and Penny's been staying up until 10. I expect there to be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I make them dial it back for school, even if it's only going to be by half an hour.

Most of my energy has been going to the house lately, quite honestly. The front porch has been repaired, and the fix on the dining room floor was supposed to start today, so I scrambled to get the painting done over the weekend... and two hours after we finished, my contractor emailed to tell me another job had been postponed due to weather and so he wouldn't be able to start my floor until next week. The forecast for this week is fairly reasonable, though, so hopefully that won't push out too much further.

I'm pretty happy with my paint, though! John and Sam came over to help me, for which I am eternally grateful. (It was supposed to be John and Dad, but earlier in the week Dad was helping John repair a broken gutter and his cheap-ass ladder crumpled under him and he fell. He got away with only a broken finger, but it sounded pretty harrowing -- Dad's brains got scrambled enough by the fall that he still doesn't remember anything between standing on the ladder and being in the emergency room a couple of hours later.) Anyway, here's some crappy cell phone pictures of the new paint:

Just those two walls are blue in the dining room; everything else is creamy white, about half a shade lighter than what was in there before. And a lot of the blue will be covered up when I can put the hutch back in the room and hang my pictures back up, so it won't look quite so overwhelming then. I'm VERY pleased with the yellow accent wall in the kitchen, though. I've got a picture to hang on it that's going to make it just sing.

I'm pondering alternate placement of my furniture and other less-intense home improvement projects (e.g., new fixtures, wall stickers) for when this is all done.

It's been just over a year since Matt moved out, so I called my lawyer last week and he's prepping the documents so we can get the ball rolling on the divorce. Not much to say there, really; it feels like a non-event, a bureaucratic ribbon on a package already purchased.

I'm editing a lot and writing a little; check the sidebar for my latest story release. Human Aspect is a little more wide-audience than most of my other stuff, being a coming-of-age fantasy story. And KT/Lynn and I are buffing up the shorts we've been writing all year so we can get them assembled into a collection and submit it. I'm really excited about that one -- it's all over the map, and was oodles of fun to do.

And I'm still crocheting, though I haven't accomplished much in the last month, partly because I've lost time to rearranging stuff and furniture to clear the dining room and kitchen for the repair/renovation, and partly because my initial idea for Yog-Sothoth turned out to be way harder to do than I anticipated, so I had to scrap it and start over:

And that's about it at the moment. I keep telling myself that I should go back to writing here every day, just so I don't lose track of the minutiae, the passing thoughts and the anecdotes. But it may be a while before I feel settled enough to make myself get back into that habit.

EDIT (March 2020): Seven years later, I am STILL getting fairly frequent requests for the patterns for these guys. So I've uploaded my patterns to Google Docs (the Cthulhu pattern was something I found online and since seems to have been taken down, alas) and you can get it RIGHT HERE.

Status Update

Still alive!

It's been a while, and lots of stuff has happened, and some more stuff is imminent, so I figured this was as good a time as any to post a status update of sorts.

Alex: Prepping for kindergarten in the fall, of course. Very excited about it. I've got an appointment to turn in most of his paperwork next week (why I need an appointment for that, I have no idea) but it won't be finished until August, because that's the earliest the doctor's office could give him the physical and immunization booster he needs to start school. He's still planning to marry his friend Claudia from daycare. Though they "graduated" preschool a couple of weeks ago, and will be going to different elementary schools. Long distance relationships are pretty hard to maintain.

Penny: She just finished the 4th grade. She's edging into puberty (not to delve into TMI, but I expect she'll need at least a training bra before she turns 11). She alternates between being an infuriating know-it-all and breathlessly generous and loving -- which, as I am given to understand, still puts me ahead of many parents of preteens. After priming me carefully so I would not freak out when she got her first "C" (in social studies, her -- and my -- least favorite subject) she squeaked through with a B anyway and was on the honor roll again for the year. She's two months away from turning 10. Holy hell.

Work: The Day Job is a bit worrisome -- we have contracts that will keep me employed (though not anything like busy) through September (the end of the Government fiscal year) and then... not really anything. I'm fretting about it a bit and considering options, but not terrified. The worst of it will be if I do end up having to look for another job, I'm fairly likely to end up having to move to either the Norfolk or Richmond areas, which will play merry havoc with our carefully-cultivated custody schedule. My mom asked what we'd do if that was the case, and I had to admit that I had no idea whatsoever. The Dream Job is going much better, though it doesn't pay remotely well enough for me to even think about taking it full-time. (I got a 1st-quarter royalty check the other day for -- hold onto your hats -- $7!) But I've got a new story being released tomorrow (June 19th), and this one has a wider readability than most of my others -- a high fantasy story. It's got some romantic elements, and some kind of dark moments, but it's being released by Torquere's YA imprint, Prizm, so you can take that into account. :-) (I'll do a separate post to pimp it when it comes out. I'm really proud of it; it's some of my best writing ever.) And I've sold my first full-length novel (a fantasy m/m romance) to Torquere!

Personal Life:  B. and I are still dating. I suspect it's a relationship with an expiration date; we like each other pretty well, but have pretty wildly different goals and approaches to life, which occasionally leads to some friction. Sometimes that bothers me and makes me wonder why I'm wasting time on something that's most likely doomed, but most of the time I'm just ignoring it and trying to have fun. I've got enough on my plate right now anyway, right? Anyway, I'm technically still married -- though that's getting closer to changing.

I spent almost three hours sitting in my lawyer's office today. The first half-hour of that was with Matt present -- we signed our formal Separation/Property Settlement, so now I guess we're officially and legally separated. In about six weeks, when we've been living apart for a full year, I'll call the lawyer back and we'll get the divorce proceedings rolling. With a no-fault, no-contest divorce, the lawyer says it'll take about six more weeks to finalize. So I should be officially and legally divorced by the end of August or early September. I'm beginning to ponder ways to commemorate the occasion.

House: The other two hours I spent at the lawyer's office were spent signing the paperwork to refinance the house in my own name only. And then I went to the bank and had them cut me a mouth-dryingly large cashier's check to buy out Matt's share of the equity. Which is to say the house is, as of today (well, technically in three days, when the chicken-out period is done and the paperwork all gets filed) solely mine.

I've also written a couple of other mildly huge checks (oh, my aching bank account) to a contractor who is supposed to come in July and August and fix my rotten porch support posts and the rotten board in my dining room, and replace the yellowing vinyl flooring in my kitchen and dining room with tile. And as long as I'll have to empty the rooms anyway, I'm pondering paint as well.

Hobbies: I'm still crocheting a lot, though my efforts have taken a kind of weird turn... It started with this chibi Cthulhu (Cutethulhu?) pattern, because everyone needs a chibi Cthulhu, right? And then KT posted a link to this picture of a whole collection of disturbingly adorable Lovecraftian horrors:

And I was looking at it and thought... Some of those wouldn't be that hard to make, really... So far I've made -- entirely on my own, without recourse to any specific patterns -- a Hastur and a Nyarlathotep. (Nyarlathotep is a little closer to the scarier versions of him I've seen online than the one in this picture, but I'm considering it an inspiration, not a pattern, so that's okay. I'm less okay with the way his "hips" bulge out and make him look like he's an Elder God with a fondness for beer and cupcakes; if I ever do him over, I'll probably try to find a way to slim him down a little. I'm pretty pleased with how the mouth and tongue turned out, though.)

I've been calling them my Little Horrors, and yes, I'm planning to do the whole set. I'll probably do Yog-Sothoth next, now that I have a notion of how I think I want to do it.

(A few days ago, B. texted me and asked what I was up to, and I said, "trying to figure out how to crochet Nyarlathotep." He texted back and said, "Yet another reason why you're my girlfriend," and I responded, "The fact that you find this good rather than disturbing would be on the list of reasons you're my boyfriend.")

Little Mother

6:50 AM: Penny came into the bedroom. "Mom, I did all the math for my diabetes!" She handed me a piece of paper and I pried open a bleary eye while she rattled off the list of what she'd had for breakfast. The math seemed solid, so I gave her the okay. She ran down the stairs, then came back five minutes later with a loaded syringe so I could hold the shot-blocker for her while she gave herself the insulin.

7:05 AM: Alex came into the bedroom to ask if he could borrow my scissors to cut a string off his shirt. I yanked the string off for him. (Against all logic, it is lodged in my head that if you can hand-break a loose thread, it's less likely to unravel again than if you just cut it.) Before I could put the pillow back over my head, Penny asked me about the weather for the day, so I picked up my iPad and pulled up the browser. I reassured her that it's not going to be as rainy as yesterday, and she scampered off. As long as I had the iPad open, I figured I might as well check on my dragons.

7:15 AM: Penny came back in with a folded piece of paper, which she handed to me. "Here's your newspaper!" she chirped. "Alex told me what to write for his side." One side of the paper was an essay by Penny; the other, an essay about Alex. Both essays featured some of their favorite things, and the things they like and dislike about the other members of the household.

7:30 AM: Listening to the kids making their noise downstairs, I figured I'd better get up. I dragged myself up and went into the bathroom. I was about to brush my teeth and wash my face when I heard feet on the stairs. "Surprise!" I turned around to see Penny holding a tray with toast and coffee, and Alex holding a yogurt cup and a spoon.

I blinked. "What's this for?"

"'Cause you're our mom," Penny said.

"This is amazing. Thank you, guys." I reached out to hug them.

Alex backed up a step. "Penny did it," he said. "I just carried the yogurt."

I hugged him anyway. He ran off to watch cartoons while I ate, but Penny sat on the bed with me. Ziggy came in and meowed plaintively.

"Did y'all feed him this morning?" I asked.

"I did, yeah." Penny paused to consider. "I guess I pretty much made breakfast for everyone in the house this morning." (She almost always helps Alex with his breakfast when she does hers.)

"You sure did," I agreed. "You're quite the little mother today."

"Well," she said sagely, "I'm the only other girl. And, you know, I have started puberty."