Tuesday

I feel like I deserve a medal today because I took Jane shopping and scored her two pairs of shoes and a summer wardrobe for under a hundred bucks. THIS NEVER HAPPENS TO ME. I am the worst, the very worst, at shopping. It is an activity I loathe so intensely, I’ll fling ill-fitting, excessively wrinkle-prone clothing and random credit cards toward the register to buy myself egress five minutes sooner. It doesn’t help that I have all the fashion sense of a chimpanzee. Actually, any chimp with access to an Old Navy could undoubtedly put together an outfit with more panache than I.

Fortunately, Jane does not seem to have inherited my fashionblind eye.

So that was a big chunk of my day. This is a crossing-things-off-the-list kind of week, busy and clerical, and everywhere I turn, books are beckoning. My garden is withering. Where is that nurturing tender of the earth who inhabited my skin in March? This is why novelists shouldn’t plant vegetable gardens. It doesn’t matter if your flowers go to seed while your mind is elsewhere. But you turn your back for one measly chapter and suddenly your arugula has bolted and the tomatoes are limp.

On the learning notes front, I’m thoroughly enjoying my middle daughters’ immersion in German (a language I kinda sorta speak a little) (a very little) via the Living Language app and some Pimsleur CDs we got from the library. Beautifully illustrating the importance of individualized learning methods, Rose prefers the former (more visual) and Beanie the latter (auditory). Jane is hooked on Pimsleur too, but for her it’s Japanese. (Actually, Beanie seems to be listening to both sets. She’ll either turn out a polyglot or a muddle.)

Rilla and I are still luxuriating in Brambly Hedge, and I’m reading Wheel on the School to Bean and Rilla. Wonderboy (who is a dignified eight now and deserves a more mature blog name, but this is no easy feat) falls asleep with Little Bear or Owl at Home on his face every night, and I melt. Huck is madly in love with the new Amy Krouse Rosenthal/Tom Lichtenheld book (but of course—all his favorites are Lichtenheld books), Wumbers. I narrated a gigantic portion of the Quinn Cummings book to Scott today, in the car on the way to the library to pick up a Veronica Mars DVD since the DVR ate the Season One finale and we MUST finish it before Jane heads off to Texas. And that’s about it for our Tuesday!