Late start to the day – catching up on sleep after the weekend! Hooray for birthday parties! Mondays are chore days: water plants, do laundry, etc. Odd that this Monday didn’t also include make yogurt or bake bread. We picked beans from both the back yard and the P-Patch plot, as well as tomatoes. Made a garlicky roasted corn soup – must remember to add some notes to the cookbook regarding the extra garlic and onions that went into the soup this time. It’s a lovely, creamy thing – just right for a cool and almost rainy dinner. Also cooked …

Caitlyn seems to have discovered buttons, the kind you push and get some sort of response from. She has a small collection of such toys, from a dancing bear with excerpts of five classical works to a key chain with sounds for a doorbell, a car horn, and a UFO launching (although it’s just as common for her to hold the keys to her ear and say “Ahlo?”). Thinking that maybe more buttons might be interesting, we went looking for our ideal buttoned toy. Only to find that it apparently doesn’t exist. There are lots of toys with buttons and …

A copy of The Stranger materialized in our kitchen the other day, so I had a chance to read this edition of “Savage Love” with an update on “straight rights”: “In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they [fundamentalists and conservatives] want to change the way Americans have sex,” [Russell] Shorto writes [in “The War on Contraception,” in the New York Times Magazine]. “Contraception, by [their] logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality), and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.” Shorto quotes Judie Brown, president of the American Life League: …

“Children are very good at pulling you into the moment, if you will let them.” I watched a mother I know play with her two year old son, trying to wear him out so he would sleep when she took him downstairs to his bedroom. He lay back on a huge, floppy stuffed lion, commanded “onetwothree,” then squirmed and giggled as his mother blew on his side, tickling him with her hair. Evidently, “onetwothree” was inadvertent education. His parents used it as a drumroll when playing games with him. “Get ready…” Now, the child says it back, onetwothree, make me …

“I figure if they don’t come home with scrapes and bruises, then they are not learning anything.” I enjoyed a walk with a certain young man, all of 20 months old, and his parents yesterday. The day was lovely in the way that summer-to-fall transition days often are, simultaneously warm and golden, yet still somehow cool and foggy. We walked among hills burnished with dry grasses and small-leaved members of the sage family, in a sea of feathery pampas grass waving over our heads. By our feet, the blackberry leaves were starting to shift from green to reddish-brown. Our climb …