After five long years of holding on – my grip growing more tenuous with each day of working motherhood – I’ve finally decided to let go of my hobbies, at least for now. They were old, old friends, my hobbies. I met the New York Times crossword puzzle in college, old editions of which ran in the school newspaper each day. The puzzle accompanied me to boring geology lectures and nursed me through hangovers on Sunday mornings, as I sat with it over bagels and cream cheese, smiling at its cleverness. more

A friend of mine was telling me today about her son’s tennis instructor: tall, gorgeous, Latin, twenty-nine years old, with a Stanford MBA, to boot.  She joked to her husband that she would leave him in a second if the tennis pro ever came on to her, and she confided to me that she always dresses up, just a little, on tennis lesson days.  I knew, of course, exactly what she was talking about, as I’ve had quite a few crushes of my own in the last few years.

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FINALLY, Rosa is back and my life has returned to normal....It’s funny, I thought that I would be counting down the minutes until she returned, but I was actually a little sad when she walked in on Wednesday morning. Of course, it didn’t help that the second Davis saw her he went running over to her, gave her a huge hug, and then informed me that he wanted to stay with Rosa the entire day and that, I quote, “Rosa is the best.” I was definitely a little insulted. I mean, I just spent three weeks straight with the little guy, and you’d think it meant nothing to him.

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I had a brief moment of delusion at the beginning of last week, when I actually thought that my husband might stay home from work for a few days and take care of the kids so that I could get at least a little bit of writing in while Rosa is on vacation.  But the moment quickly passed after I suggested the idea to my husband, whose response was a brusque, “yeah right.”  Why is it, I asked him, that you automatically assume that I will be the one to stay home with the kids and miss work? 

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