One of those Saturday mornings

listening to "Car Talk" and then "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR.

drinking cafe au lait (though the "cafe" is American and weak) and eating a croissant (one out of a plastic container of 6 bought from WalMart, which would scandalize your average boulanger).

totally not looking forward to trudging through this Argentine novel. It's one thing to read a novel in Spanish. It's quite another to read a boring novel in Spanish. It's just so slow . . . women sitting around giving each other glances pregnant with ambiguity, subjectively remembering the past, having cloudy conversations which does zero to advance the action of the novel . . . por favor, sácame de esta miseria.

thinking about other blah things I must contend with. (Sigh.) What, did I think this was going to be a bright train ride through fields of sunflowery enlightenment? Naw, girl. This is work. Monotony, sometimes. So get used to it, and get it together.

* * * * * * *

The picture of the sunflower in my blog's header is one of the sunflowers grown with my little toddler's class I used to teach before I moved. We would go outside to water them every Sunday with a big, bright, yellow watering can. I miss my little kids. Little adorable, bad kids, crawling under tables, dumping crayons on the floor, spilling apple juice, putting playdoh in their mouths. Getting excited about stickers and animal crackers and bubbles and pouring dry macaroni into containers.

Sometimes I wonder how I will react when I have a baby that starts crying at inopportune times. Will the sound be shrill, annoying? Will I want to do anything to quiet the baby as soon as possible? Probably. But there's a part of me that thinks when I hear my baby cry it will be beautiful, every time. Like, of course I will want to quiet him/her down and alleviate whatever it is that made them cry in the first place, but there's a part of me that thinks I will be taken by hearing it. That I will feel this overwhelming feeling of "my baby is alive" instead of "omg, please stop." But I know that's probably another one of those things that will overturn my romanticism cart with an unmerciful swipe of realism.

Realism. Back to now. Back to the boring Argentine novel. Now.