Poem for Tuesday

Lost in thought, the baby
By Rebecca Wolff

Primarily

I am a mother.
When he was sick;

I engaged his imagination
with a book—

the perfect—I seized it; his
weakened defenses.

This is the way I have
filled his mind

egg and milk and butter and bread
all together—

that's a lot for a small child to take in.
Like Maisie

in the novel is a sieve.
What we want to cultivate in him:

A fat man's
personality on a thin man.

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Younger son started school on Monday with a minimum of wailing and gnashing of teeth -- since the kids are being taken by bus to the building where the middle school will hold classes while the building is torn down and reconstructed, it's still a bit of an adventure, and he has two good friends on the same bus. Older son did not have classes because the high school starts with just the freshmen in attendance, but that did not spare him from agony and torture since I dragged him to Kohl's and Target to buy him clothes, since his legs are about two inches longer than most of his pants. He would prefer to wear sweats every day and hates jeans, so we settled on cargo pants -- I am hoping that as it gets colder, denim and corduroy will seem less odious. Target has the 2009 Pink Halloween Barbie dolls in stock -- she has a pink witch hat and spiderwebs on her skirt -- so to make son's life even worse, he had to be seen with someone carrying a Barbie doll and carry the boxes of Cheerios himself. To his great amusement, I did get a ShamWow.

Here are some more photos of the Mediaeval Baebes at the Maryland Renaissance Festival over the weekend:

















Afternoon and evening consisted of filling out and signing a half-dozen school forms -- more to come tomorrow, I'm sure -- plus sorting school supplies, discussing younger son's vocabulary words with him, reading and approving the county eighth grade health sex ed curriculum (which mentions the word "abstinence" at least 15 times), and watching two episodes of Due South, which I realized only after the fact we are watching out of order because they're packaged that way in the DVD set. Anyway, now I've seen Stella -- I'm not overly impressed -- and Ray K fighting -- I'm not overly impressed with that, either. And I miss Ray V. But hey, the season is young and I wouldn't miss "Mountie on the Bounty" for anything.