Preschool Flasher

Eli is prompting lots of new rules for us. In addition to “no cursing until you can say all of your consonants” we’ve added “keep your butt in your pants during services.” Yup if you were at the singing/praying part of Sunday school this morning you might have noted Eli’s little bootie. For some reason during one of the more spiritual songs he decided to yank his pants down and show mommy that “i got no diapa and no undwara nothing just pants.” And no thanks he didn’t need any help puling his pants back up but would do it himself which took an excruciating amount of time. My kid flashed every Jew in Charlottesville this morning. And he’s headed towards being potty training failure number 3 at this rate. His trick is simply holding it in all day which could have long terms medical consequences.

The kids all apparently had a great time with their grandparents. Highlights seem to have involved the Air and Space Museum, Gatsby’s tavern, and Rotisserie chicken. Jonathan has discovered civil war history and thinks we should visit a different battle ground every weekend. Rebecca came back with fabric to make us matching sundresses—the smocked kind that look really cute on little girls and pretty dumb on grown women. I’m thinking pool cover-up. She’s also making tons of pictures and models of George and Martha Washington. Manuel and I had a delightful staycation capstoned by a sunrise hike up old Rag. We were on the summit by 8. The house was really clean yesterday morning and is now back to it’s usual state of total chaos, piles of laundry and random little play mobile guys in ever crevice. I’m predicting that the next three weeks are going to be total hell. It turns out that a few more people are interested in Thomas Jefferson than in Marc Antonio Pasqualini, Antonio Barberini and Caterina Marinelli so the TJ conference is not quite the intimate affair I thought it would be. My graduate students are all working incredibly hard on their papers and I think they’ll all be really good. We will definitely need a class nap when it’s over.

Maneul gets the husband prize for being parent of the week in Sunday school today and leaving me the pleasure of trying to get Eli on the potty and working with a student on her paper. ‘My Sunday school class made three teachers quit during our ten years of religious school and my sense is that the current first grade is headed in that direction. That the class has three sets of twins and many have known each other since they were two makes them formidable. Jonathan’s main contribution seems to involve inserting bits of Roman History. When discussing the fact that breaking the Ten Commandments makes you less of a person he inserted that a roman poet said that “watching the games at the collasium made him less of a man.” He thinks it was SenEca. (long E)