Late Night With...

I don't know how I always manage to stay up late, even when I've had essentially NO sleep the night before. This no sleep thing--gotta go. It's just gotta go. Last night it was the coughing again, and then some protracted tangle with my alarm clock getting set on snooze repeatedly. Ugly. And once the sun is up, Rutledge is ready to start getting up, so sleep is very broken after 6:00. I don't quite know how I got through the whole day.

Today's big news: Ollie is reading a full-length book to himself silently willingly for the first time. He read 90 pages of what Walter describes as "an inappropriate book," while he was with Rebecca this morning, and he was still reading in the car on the way home. It's hard to fully express how big this is for him, because reading novels is not something he has been interested in doing in the past. He'll do Captain Underpants, but this is longer and doesn't have the generous illustrations. I hope this is the first of many happy hours reading for him.

We have this dog problem. Okay, it's a child problem. They're letting out the dogs because they are going in and out the doors so often. I was saying that maybe we need to think about a barrier of some kind. And Kerry replied that we do have a barrier--it's called a door, and it's being left open. Yeah. That's it. My decision on a logical consequence is that they will lose time playing with their friends if they leave open the door and a dog gets out. Everyone is old enough to remember to take the time to fasten gates, shut doors, and watch for escaping things.

We were in the right place at the right time tonight, and one of the Order of the Phoenix tape sets came in while we were at the library tonight. This is such good news because my voice can't seem to handle reading more than 40 or so pages at a sitting, and at the rate we're going, I'll be old and gray before we finish the book with me at the helm. So the tapes will take some burden off of me and allow us to combine actual flesh and blood here and now human interaction reading and the tape and finally make some tracks with this thing.

Other notable finds: complete Land of the Lost seasons.

I'm realizing as I'm typing that my brain is getting increasingly fuzzy. Things are coming out of my fingers that I didn't intend to have happen, and I'm powerless to stop them. I keep having to erase things that make no sense. This is probably my big sign that I should have been in bed an hour ago.