It's laundry & library day at the Rockethome. Today I'm doing laundry that should've been done weeks ago. (Maybe if I had got around to this massive pile, the Boy wouldn't be shuffling despairingly through his drawers in the morning while I'm trying to sleep.) Usually I do cute little loads of laundry: diapers, baby clothes and the like. All afternoon the line flaps adorably under the weight of these precious garments, buying me the time to sit on my butt & sing songs to the baby. It's Cute. But today I'm doing Blake's daddy's pants, so the line is bowed down with the weight of heavy denim. This is, as you may gather, Not Cute.

But I have a set response to homespun domestic crises: even as I struggle to pin the sodden pants on a flimsy retractable clothesline, I ask myself WWID or What Would the Ingallses Do? I wouldn't say that I'm obsessed with the Little House series (books, not teevee!!), but countless re-readings of the series (books! Not teevee!!) did something permanent to my psyche. Let's just say that I was strongly imprinted. And Ma Ingalls – that tough old racist broad with pretensions of high-falutin' Eastern education – would not admit defeat in the face of three heavy wet pairs of pants. So I didn't either.

Somehow I feel like I just scored a victory over Michael Landon. Strange.

As for the library component of the day, it mostly consisted of returning all of the overdue materials I've accumulated over the past month. Goodbye Value of X and The Big Rumpus, you were fabulous inter-library loans. Goodbye So Many Bunnies with your cute little alphabetical drawings. Goodbye The First Two Lives of Something-Something, a rather weak entry in the Lloyd Alexander oeuvre. And goodbye Woody Guthrie's "Nursery Days" & "Songs to Grow on for Mother & Child," my brilliant aural companions of the last few weeks.

If all these partings sound traumatic, you should've seen me at the library itself. Blake was possessed by demons today; I would no sooner set him down than he would race off and start pulling himself up on the legs of strangers. He even started sucking on a woman's toes before I could peel him off. When I stood in the checkout line, arms full of books & baby, he took the golden opportunity to snatch my glasses (the ultimate in forbidden fruit). And when I wearied of removing his hands from the computer cords on the desk and dared to set him on the ground for a moment, he saw his opportunity to escape. Even as I frantically stuffed books in my backpack, he scooted over the carpet, between the gates and out the door. He'll be a leashed toddler, you can bet on it.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 10/08/2004 08:24:00 p.m.