Daily Vitals: Number of nights daughter 2 has pooped in bed consecutively since Sunday= 5; number of days left for husband’s business trip (out of 6)= 1; number of extended family members visiting this week (not simultaneously)= 5.; number of scheduled weekend activities in next 36 hours= 3; number of times I have refilled and re-warmed coffee= 3; number of guilty pleasures since waking up at 6:30 this morning for bus-stop drop off and stealing time before daughter 2 wakes up (2—chocolate and The Office/Season 6); number of out loud laughs before 7:30 a.m. (2.5—thanks, Mindy Kaling!)

Husband is on his first international business trip. Though I am thrilled for him and happy to hear it’s going well, I cannot help but notice how off the timing feels, what with daughter two going through some sort of existential bowel crisis and the universe deciding that EVERYTHING must happen in October (including birthday parties for children who don’t actually have birthdays until November). The advent of our school age has meant that for the first time in five years, I am behind in the production of our Halloween costumes. This may seem insignificant to most of you, but making my own Halloween costumes sometimes feels like the crowning achievement of my year, in terms of meeting deadlines, brainstorming, manufacturing, and implementation.  For someone with two degrees in the arts and a repressed memory of her secondary mathematical training, The Halloween Costume is the single most important engineering task of my fiscal year.  Quite frankly, if I didn’t have children, I wouldn’t ever have had to think about design and function in this way in my life at all.

This year’s target looks are Angelia Ballerina (a white mouse with the British accent who jettés around her village in toe-shoes) and Remy the Rat (from Ratatouille).  I am planning on omitting the tail on the latter costume based on occupational difficulties from last year (tails scare daughter 2).

A friend told me a few years ago that her aunt sent her a glue gun as soon as she found out that my friend was expecting her first child.  That observation has stuck with me as one of those profound and little known details about the how-to know-how required of motherhood.  Glue sticks and a glue gun turn a parent into a superhero. At five, daughter 1 has still not arrived at the age when a quick fix with stringy glue seems sloppy.  Scotch tape is still the stuff of miracles. She believes pencil erasers will erase most anything.

So.  It seems that there will not be much downtime this weekend, not enough time to unwind after a pretty hectic week for all of us.  But somehow, all seems fine. I have yet to check in on Daughter 2 to see how much damage she’s done to her diaper this morning, I have yet to change the sheets and get ready for the impending visit from my in-laws, but the air is crisp and the light is the stuff of French paintings. And the orange flash of pumpkins everywhere are somehow harbingers of the fact that people all over the world will be celebrating something together soon.