The only problem with journalscape is the limited selections of moods to choose from. Where are "frazzled", "exhausted", or "I want to bang my head on the keyboard"? Or, perhaps, "cautiously optimistic", "not too pessimistic", or "really feeling as if things might be coming together, maybe, but I wouldn't want to jinx anything"?

I'm such an Eyeore.

Good news today, though -- Ethan took his first two steps on his own. Yay!!!! And they were to me instead of Andy! Yay again!!! The other two walked when I was in the shower or out of the room. After all, it's not like I spent 98% of my time with them or anything. With toddlers, odds just don't seem to matter. Unless, of course, you're talking about the odds that you'll find a Cuisenaire rod jammed into your disk drive on any given day. Those odds are pretty good.

We've spent the week cleaning in preparation of grandparent arrival this weekend, and running errands. I guess we're giving this unschooling thing a go, because I'm tired of trying to bully the kids into doing math workbooks and handwriting. (Therefore, the attempt to work in math and handwriting has gone into covert mode. Call it stealth homeschooling. Although I'm not sure if you can ever convince a kid that practicing their letters is fun, particularly an eight year old boy who would rather be setting up mock battles with his Playmobil pirates and knights. A victory, though, lately -- something seems to have clicked with G's reading in the past couple weeks or so, and he's doing *much* better at it. His problem is all the easy stuff bores him, and he's not quite ready for all the hard stuff yet. But it's coming, if I grit my teeth and remind myself to wait patiently.)

The kids decided they wanted to try to make a dinosaur scultpure like the ones in Brian Cooley's book _Make-a-Saurus_ this week. Cooley is an artist who specializes in dinosaurs and the book has instructions in the back for how to build your own dinosaur out of wire, plaster bandages, and papier mache. Building the wire armature is turning out to be a little more difficult than I thought, and I'm wondering if maybe I got the wrong kind of wire. All I could find at Michael's was floral wire. We may need something stronger. Since the kids picked smallish dinosaurs -- archaeopteryx and lagosuchus -- the scultptures are going to turn out close to life-size.

I hope.

Still working on "Evergreen", but the toddler not sleeping, birthday parties, and houseguests are cutting into my writing time. I'm up to about 19 handwritten pages, and it seems to be all over the place. Also, it seems to be a bit soapboxy, and I don't like that. This story involves issues I feel very strongly about -- like the relationship of people with nature and dosing gazillions of kids with Ritalin -- and while it's true that anything you feel strongly about can provide a story with a depth you won't get if the subject matter bores you, it's also easy to walk out of the painting and up to the lectern instead. Which isn't nearly as interesting. In the end I'm writing about people, not issues. Of course it's all in black and green Sharpie marker right now, so nothing is set in stone yet.