My legs feel funny now

*Cherries for you to drool over.

*We all have a song on our heads that lists off the various countries in Western Europe. It's from a book and CD combination called Geography Songs. Seriously excellent homeschool material, since we can't get it off our brains. We walk around singing "Luxemborg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland..." and so forth.



*Kid A has just successfully destroyed a small sleeping tent that I paid quite a few pennies for. It's Solo's, you see. Both of the cribs that I bought for him in India were apparently made of matchsticks, because they fell apart, and then while we were traveling, he was just sleeping on beds, until it drove me mad because of the number of times I had to put him back in bed before he would fall asleep. My friend had one of these for her daughter, and it turned out to be perfect for Solo, until tonight, when Kid A made a Solo-sized hole in the mesh.

Why do boys do stuff like that? Where is the reasoning? Is there any moment when they think: This is needlessly destructive and I'm probably going to be in big trouble?

ARGH.

ARGH.

Okay, I'm over it. We'll figure it out.

By the way, I highly recommend these tents in place of the back breaking piece of luggage we carried around with us, the dreaded Pack N Play. They keep bugs out too. Just make sure that your seven-year-olds know that ripping holes in them is highly inappropriate. Because you know, IT ISN'T OBVIOUS.

ARGH.

No, no. Moving on.

* I think I tweeted this but didn't write it here.

I was accepted to the Squaw Valley Community of Writer's Workshops, which happens from August 7th to 14th. To say that I am excited about this would be a massive understatement.

I am over the moon.

All I need to do now is finish this revision that I'm working on. Being in our own house is helping, but Chinua is working full-time and I am homeschooling, which leaves approximately negative 2 hours a day to become absorbed in writing.I'm working on solving this problem by getting up before the kids. I was getting up at 6:00, but Solo insisted on getting up at 6:30, so now I've switched to 5:30.

I also need to find a babysitter and raise the rest of the money for the conference. Tonight I had the brainstorm of doing some babysitting trades. Finding three different families who want to trade a day of babysitting or two. Which will mean that I only have to work off five days of babysitting when I get back. Heh heh.

So my manuscript will be treated by other writers, and I'll have a chance to read and offer ideas on theirs. My hope is that I'll learn more about how the book can be helped, and get into the kind of streams that will work toward traditional publication.

We'll see.

*I ran the first day of the Couch to 5K today. I'm very proud of myself. I'm not exactly a couch potato, but I'm definitely not a runner.

*We had spaghetti for dinner tonight, and I suspect that I put cinnamon in it instead of pepper. By accident. But I couldn't really tell. I detected a faint cinnamony taste, but maybe I'm having flashbacks of this morning's oatmeal.

*This concludes my ramble tonight. Have lovely dreams.