Blossoms: Irises on Pennsylvania Avenue. I have a weakness for purple flowers: irises, pansies, violets--I love them all.

Word o' the Day: "Vomitrocious," heard on the children's PBS show, Arthur. Used in a sentence: "Saturday night was so vomitrocious!

Watching: Nick at Nite in the wee hours. I'm getting a little too familiar with Nick's after midnight schedule.

Safe

The sample pages for my next Press project were due today, and I was up late last night working on them. I hadn't heard about the shootings at Columbine High School in Denver until yesterday evening, so we watched CNN for awhile to get the story. After a while I couldn't watch any more footage of students fleeing to safety, hysterical survivors recounting the horror, and frantic parents keeping vigil. I don't know which set of parents I feel worse for: the parents of the victims or the parents of the shooters. What must it feel like to know your child was so alienated and so full of rage that he could take a gun and blow away other kids, laughing while they died?

Our boys are still young, and Tab and I can pretty much control their world right now. We decide who they play with, what books we read, what computer games they play, and what videos or TV shows they watch. I started losing a little of that control when Daniel entered kindergarten. Suddenly he was talking about Godzilla and Spiderman, topics he'd picked up from his friends at school. Little by little my sons will be leaving the safety of our home and experiencing a world that hasn't been sanitized for their protection by mom and dad. They will be making friends or failing to do so, forming cliques or becoming outcasts. I want them to fit in because, as a mother, I don't want my boys to be picked on, but I don't want to think of them victimizing others, either. It shouldn't be an either/or situation, but too often it is.

I criticize my mother-in-law sometimes for being overprotective of the boys, but there is part of me that completely understands and identifies with that desire to keep them safe and untouched by the world.

Tab woke up this morning with a fever and diarrhea so apparently he isn't going to escape the virus after all. He called out sick, something he almost never does, and spent most of the day in bed. He is still "lucky Tab," though, because he didn't throw up. In the ten years I've lived with him, he's only vomited once.

Tab felt well enough this afternoon to help Daniel with his poster. Tomorrow is Daniel's "special day" at school. Each of the kids in his class is assigned one day in April as his or her day. Daniel is supposed to bring in a special snack and his favorite book to share with the class and a poster with pictures of things that are important to him. Parents are encouraged to come in on the child's special day and read the book to the class. Tab and Daniel glued photographs of Daniel and our family on the poster, along with pictures representing some of Daniel's favorite things, clipped from magazines: cats, Legos, and lots of Star Wars images. After they finished the poster, the boys helped me make M&M cookies to take in tomorrow. We're all ready for his special day.

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