I’m working on a project at the moment, one that I need to finish in the next couple of weeks or so. (3 down…9 to go!) That’s why I’m being such a bad blogger. But that’s not the only thing – I’m reaching the point at which I really just need everyone to go to school. My ability to think is diminishing by the day – simply because I’m one of those people (an "I" on the discredited Myers-Briggs "test" – one who needs time alone in order to recharge, as opposed to an "E" who needs contact with others to be recharged. Whether or not the M-B is bunk, the thing gave me a little bit of insight into my oldest son, whom I finally decided was an "E" – a trip to the grocery store with him and his siblings was a never ending "leave him alone" "stop pestering her" – why? I finally decided it was because he needed to be interacting with others in order to feel alive. I’m the opposite. Which made for some interesting moments.)

But anyway, I never cease to be delighted by the children who are home right now. Katie sits and knits or reads Emma and asks me if I know how many times Meryl Streep has been nominated for an Academy Award and comments that isn’t it weird that she got Good News from Netflix right after June Allyson died. (Don’t worry, she’s normal. Testy conversation about why she wouldn’t be allowed to go see John Tucker Must Die along with everyone else).

Michael the Baby runs into bookcases, resulting in the obligatory three-days-we-can’t-take-him-out-in-public-or-who-knows-what-people-will-think moment and expands his vocabulary by leaps and bounds every day, even structuring primitive sentences, usually in moments of great stress, as when he’s been put in the play yard: "Me – get – out! I’an get out! GET OUT ME!"

And Joseph – well, Joseph has his moments. Today it was this:

I went out last night to walk, and returned an hour later to see that Joseph was already alseep in his bed. Why? Because he had taken one of Katie’s dolls – she never had many, but this was one of the few – a Madeleine doll – and told Katie he would surprise her.

Which he did when he proudly returned the doll to her with half of her hair chopped off.

He was apparently crushed when she wasn’t impressed.

Hence the early meeting with the bed.

This morning, I found a pair of nail scissors on his dresser, and I asked him if this was what he used to cut the doll’s hair. He nodded, tight-lipped, really unwilling to admit to me what he had done. I thought that was it.

Then tonight, I was doing a bigger clean-up of his room, putting up a little wall shelf on which he could put his souvenirs from his travels (so far – a wooden carved cactus from Arizona, a small Gateway Arch, a cannon from Castille de San Marcos, a little water pump from the Lincoln Log Cabin site, seashells from Florida, and a Pinocchio pen, toy airplane and Centurion figure from Rome), and I opened one of the top drawers of his dresser.

What did I find?

Two beard trimmers, with a small pile of red Madeleine-hair.

He was sitting on his bed, looking at a book, and really, I didn’t see the point in any more scolding. It was just too funny. So I went and got Michael and just said, "Look in that drawer." He matched my look of bemused disbelief, then told Joseph, as sternly as he could manage, that these things were dangerous, and he was never to touch them again.

Joseph nodded, without looking up from his book.

Busted.

So really, I don’t have it in my head to write much.

But then…what was it I just did?