An Uneventful Day

"How will you know if I am really sleeping?" Matilda asks.

"I just will," I assure her, in a voice both commanding and benevolent, "I just will."

I find it useful to perpetuate the idea that I am omniscient when it comes to sleeping children.

The girls are upstairs now, "napping." The house seems quiet and somehow bigger with Steve gone. Every now and then one of the girls will forget that he is in Peru and will ask when he's coming home from work.

With our friends gone for the week (not for good yet, more on that next week) things seem dull and the time that I felt like I just didn't have now seems abundant, making it easy for me to squander it on blogging and virtual shopping with money that I don't have. It's so easy to fill shopping carts online and abandon them recklessly, never even looking back.

We wake up early and stay up late. I let the girls rent Cinderella III, which was a huge concession, but the idea of turning back the clock and rewriting the Cinderella story appeals to me an a metafictiony kind of way. (For those of you know don't - bless your little souls - in this sequel the step-mother uses magic to turn back the clock and make the Prince marry one of her daughters instead of Cinderella.)

I am taking advantage of the quiet and working, working, working, blah, while the girls cover the porch with chalk drawings and make paper hair. Sometimes I like to just be doing nothing much, listening to the hum of the window fan and the tap of my own fingers on the keyboard, barely registering the content of my work, letting my mind wander into what if territory.

The children are not sleeping. I know this not because I am omniscient, but because I can hear the sound of the doll bed being dragged across the playroom floor.