I almost always have a List in progress. I add to it as household tasks occur to me, or recur throughout the week. Every week or so I start working on a new piece of paper. Every day, a subset of the List is The List for the day.

I’ll start reciting it as I’m getting ready for the day. “Today I just have to….” Often this includes some subterfuge, eliding some details about later tasks so that the list doesn’t take terribly long to rehearse — I’d never get out of the house and off to work if the list sounded too long. Throughout the day, this rehearsal of The List continues until I’ve either done the things or decided not to do them. Nearly every day, as I reach the end of The List for the day, a new List takes over — the List of all the steps involved in going to bed (a surprising and sometimes utterly daunting number of steps).

When my health is playing me up, The List might include all the steps included in getting to work in the morning, and later all the steps involved in getting home. In between I’ll try to be realistic about capacity and deadlines, and The List will include only the bare minimum, even if that’s just “be there and be pleasant” during the day, or even “call in sick and rest until tomorrow.” Those then become my mission, necessitating firm control of my expectations and activities for the day. Resting can be hard work, too.

I didn’t get through The List today, but one of the goals can be accomplished tomorrow without penalty, so that’s the new plan. Tomorrow I just have to….

Lil J calls J “Asikee.” When he’s wheedling it’s more like “Asi-keeeee.” When, for example, it looks like J’ll do the dishes before Lil J can pull his chair over to help, it’s more like “AH-sikee WAIT.” I’m very consistently “ah-TI-ris.” When he doesn’t want someone near him he’ll tell them to walk [away]. “Walk-a-Mama, walk. Walk-a-Mama.” Or “Stay Back.”

The first night, I wasn’t used to him playing imagination games — that’s apparently new within the last couple of weeks — so I was in an even more handicapped position for understanding him when he was say “Br fissing — br fissing — br fissing.” He was getting upset when J finally figured it out and asked “You’re a bear going fishing?” By that time he was too frustrated, hand over his mouth in the sign for “angry,” and starting to cry. I said, “It’s frustrating when I can’t understand you, I know.” He nodded, hand over mouth, crying. I said, “I’m sorry, I’ll try harder.” “Try HARDER,” he agreed with a whimper. Luckily, he’s usually pretty easy to redirect with offers of things like feeding the cat, feeding the bird, or looking at pictures on an iDevice.

Unluckily, his requests for pictures have gotten a lot harder to comply with. He used to run through whatever nouns he was interested in: trains, stars, tractors, trucks, cars, balls (be sure to search for “billiard balls”), girls, boys, babies, etc. Now he does all that plus things like “blue bike? … trumpet on airplane? Mommy on tractor?… Baby on truck?… diapers? … poop in diapers?…” (yes, that last one yields a million extremely gross pictures that Lil J did NOT want me to move away from, not even with promises of pictures of Thomas the Tank Engine. So the iPad is still his on-demand picture book, but it’s gotten a lot more complicated.

One night after too little nap and too much chest cold, he was having trouble making it through dinner, so I took him in the other room to look at pictures on the iPad with me. At one point he asked for Baby Signing Time, so we hopped over to YouTube for that. Then he wanted “movie deer? movie deer?” So I searched for “deer” and the first title looked so promising: Cranbrook Deer. It involves a cat befriending a tiny fawn. What could go wrong? Well, I’ll tell you what: a few minutes in the mommy deer suddenly charges a family’s pet dog and starts beating it horrifically while a woman screams in horror! Meanwhile I’m jabbing my finger seemingly ineffectually at the iPad screen trying to get the video to STOP FOR THE LOVE OF TODDLERS STOOOOOP.

He was a little disappointed that there was no more deer on his screen, so I clicked on a video in the sidebar that said “Mother Deer and Baby Deer…” Whew, peaceful forest scene with a mother and two fawns ambling happily beside an old train track. What a relief. Then I glanced down at the now-full title: “Mother Deer and Baby Deer Hit By A Train.” ACK STOP STOP STOP.

So then we just looked at still pictures. Turns out, there are no more videos on atIris’ iPad. Too bad.

On Saturday A came for nearly the whole day. We even played half a game of Liverpool Rum, which we used to play at least once a week as a family but haven’t played all together in probably 10 years. I looked around the table thinking about how last time I was probably in grad school and everyone else in college or high school, and now we’re professionals and have families and house insurance and car payments and office politics. It’s so odd.

The bird started molting while we were there, poor thing. For the first few days she was having a grand old time as the center of doggy attention. If Sophie-the-Dog ever looked away or got tired, the bird would call her back. I’ve never seen her so jazzed up. But then yesterday she just hunkered down in her swing and didn’t really want to play, and sure enough there were little yellow and green feathers all over the bottom of her cage. Today her face is starting to look spiky with pinfeathers. So she’s in for a miserable stretch here as the pinfeathers poke through, poor thing. Other than that, though, she withstood the traveling very well, sitting in her swing in her travel cage in the car and not complaining very much at all. The cat could take some lessons from her…