Regarding eggs, basketball, garlic, sausage, pickle juice, baseball, chocolate, and hot dates...

Queen Shenaynay

Things I learned during our first days back to school:

1. Watched pots may never boil, but unwatched pots, if filled with eggs and left to do their thing whilst one reads great literature aloud to one's progeny, most definitely will boil. For an hour perhaps. Or until the water is all gone. At which point, if you're a really talented veteran of this homeschooling gig, you can fake a science lesson on the characteristics of rubber and claim it was on purpose.

2. It is pointless to do one's nails before shooting hoops with one's offspring. Utterly pointless.

3. The offspring who finished off the super-garlicky atom-smashing pasta sauce left over from night before last, which has become even more atomically garlicious while lurking in the frig, is NOT the child one should call on to read Robert Burns aloud over tea. No, no.

4. If a jar of dill pickles falls over in the frig and leaks pickle juice on the shelf where one has placed tomorrow's package of breakfast sausage, such that said package could pass for a water balloon with Jimmy Dean ads printed upon it, one should just go directly to IHOP.

5. If spouse agrees to take the young son to a major league baseball game in part so the Mamadah can accomplish many important and pressing things in their absence, they will wind up sitting on the second row directly behind home plate, and will call to inform that they're on Channel 7, whereupon the Mamadah will wind up watching the whole game and otherwise accomplishing nothing because they look so adorable on TV and because she will want to see them catch the inevitable errant ball which they will inevitably bring home and inevitably ask the Mamadah if she saw them catch it. (Which they did, and I did, and they did. It was inevitable.)

6. If an otherwise accomplished and intelligent grown man is found standing in the middle of one's kitchen looking glazed and forlorn and utterly without purpose in life, he probably needs dessert. Particularly if his wife has just been through the first week of homeschooling for the year and has petrified all the eggs and picklefied all the sausage.

7. If one's adoring husband professes an ardent desire to take one out on a Friday night date, despite all of the above, it makes it much easier to get up and try to face it all again next week.