The amount of dirt that we trek into this house is beyond comprehension. Between the garden, the parks, the sandbox, the yard (no grass, just pine needles), and, oh, I don’t know, perhaps the dust from the universe, I end up sweeping a mountain of dirt every evening. It almost makes me look forward to winter, where all of the dirt will be covered by snow or ensconced in ice. Carter manages to stash it in the most unlikely places, such as his diaper, or his pockets, so when he gets undressed for tubby-time an entire beach tumbles out. This is so disheartening if I have already swept. And it is not just the floor that suffers. You should see what happens to the tub.

Both kids got up at 5:45 today. Which was fine, since I got into bed at 8:30 last night, but it made the latter part of the afternoon a little interesting. Ava went to St Agnes this morning and slipped into the black hole of preschool, where she does things that I will never learn about. I know for certain that she fed the turtle, and she pet the guinea pig. Carter is terrified but irresistibly drawn to the guinea pig. We have to go look at it every time we get there, and he gets within 2 feet and stops and starts to make the funniest noises—pretty much a nervous giggle, but he won’t get any closer, and if the thing so much as moves, he jumps a mile.

While Ava was at school, Carter and I went to the gym. I actually went to the gym. This was superb. There is a little class for itty-bitties, and Carter stayed there, tumbling, while I spun my feet in the fastest ellipses I could make for 20 minutes. This was sheer heaven.

The rest of the day was mellow—we came home and relaxed, and brought more dirt into the house, but Carter never took an afternoon nap. So they both were in bed before 6:30. This may come around and bite me in the tushie tomorrow, but I really had no choice—he was flinging himself at me, screaming for night night.

Fine by me. I am going to go read my library book. I am amazingly out of magazines and I have not started a new novel, so I cheated and got a book out of the library, further setting myself back in accomplishing my goal of reading everything in the boxes labeled “to read” in the basement. The book is ok, it is called “Hothouse Kids” and is about gifted kids that are pushed to excel too early and suffer later in life. It is a pretty predictable book, but offers little tidbits of useful information. A mush better book was Howard Gardner’s book “The Unschooled Child.” This was outrageously dense with educational, psychological and philosophical theory, but very illuminating and helpful. All of these books will do a good job of scaring you away from mainstream education though. And if I read another scathing assessment of The No Child Left Behind Act, I am going to scream. If it is as awful as it appears to be, we are in a whole lot of trouble. I will go out on a real limb here and suggest that perhaps there are a lot of people in this country that have a vested interest in seeing a large swath of our population doomed to failure, and thus they come up with programs that guarantee that-- and then they put the old sugar-coating on it. I suppose this is not surprising, but it is so reprehensible.