How long does it take...

for two kids (ages 8 and 5) to clean a bathroom?

Unsupervised, about four hours. With jelly beans as a reward for each completed task, about three. You gain some efficiency on getting the tub scrubbed well if you put the kids in bathing suits and give them buckets. Preps the floor for washing, too!

How long does it take Mom to clean the bathroom after it's 'clean'? Twenty minutes of "Come back and do this part (that you forgot)" plus five minutes to sigh and clean the truly hopeless-to-expect areas.

But if you factor in that Mom got in three hours of work time, it's a pretty good deal.

On the air

Or at least recording. The interview will air next weekend, at various sites around the country. Not here, though.

Mother Goose meets Kafka

My two youngest are singing this ditty:

It's raining, it's drizzling,
The old man is sizzling
He bumped his head on the frying pan
And he woke up as scrambled eggs.

Something I've never done before

Tomorrow Andrew and I are going to record a radio broadcast. It's one of those odd situations which seem to pop up in life from time to time, like finding out that your child's ballet friend's father is a Pulitzer Prize winner, or being given expensive seats for a show because someone you know knows the lead actor and got the tix for free.

We're not famous. We don't move in heady social circles. Thankfully, we've never been on the front page of a tabloid (in my 20s, my acid test for whether or not I should give into a wild temptation was How would this look on the front page of the Post?) However, there are 700,000 or so people who read Andrew's book each year, and every month we get a handful of letters from people telling us we feel like family. That's humbling.

Which is why we are doing this radio interview. Because of the book. Next year is the 35th anniversary of Daily Guideposts, so there's publicity and all that. The radio show is part of it. So tomorrow I get to have a new experience. Sounds fun.

Breakfast

True confession: I bake breakfast almost every day. I do it because it's less expensive, because I know what goes into the food, and because it's a lot easier to rouse kids from bed when the house smells like something tasty. But the real reason I do it is because when I was a teenager my dad got up every morning and made me breakfast. He baked cornbread, gingerbread, made real rice cereal (not from a box), or mush of some kind. He rarely said anything in those early hours (my school bus left at 7:05), just sat there with his cup of coffee, quietly, while I ate.

Once I asked him why he got up so early to do it. His reply: "It's the one time of day I know I can be with you. Even if we don't say much, I enjoy that."

It made an impression!

November means clementines and cranberries. Today's breakfast is cranberry-orange muffins, and lemme tell ya, they're good! The bag of clementines that I bought yesterday afternoon was devoured by the evening. I put a limit of three per person, but one was used to create a lunar landing module:

Three guesses who had that idea!

Amusements

Little Guy is a punster, and lately he's been popping out funny things faster than I can remember to write them down. Two that stick in my mind:

Andrew was telling Little Guy a bedtime story which involved a marsupial elephant. Delighted, Little Guy said, "Oh! A pouchyderm!"

Tonight Little Guy was singing a song that lists the countries of northern Africa. He got to Algeria, paused, and said, "I guess they have a lot of allergies there!"

Sleep studies