Late night and early morning in the home office...just as well as I feel out of sorts when Les is traveling. There is an increbibly poignant song called "Where Have You Been?" in which a woman worries and is "just not the same when your away." Nia knows me well enough to have put it on my "mushy mix" CD. :-)

Then the rest of the day was spent taking Kate and Chris and 2 girlfriends on a mall crawl. These are the two girls most likely to make me adore my own daughters :-) I went to get my hair cut and came back and took them to dinner. Both girls talk so loud I was embarassed. They are also competitive with who is controlling a story (note I did not say telling) and tend to argue until one of our daughters gets them to move on. One began to tell the table passionately about why she hated school and how you learned nothing and the teachers just were taught to control, etc, etc.... I tried to divert the conversation to a less passionate (loud) subject and finally she barked at me.

Mmmm, I wanted to leave her and take my daughters home but instead I pointed out that while I understood her emotion, I did not allow my own children to speak to me in that way and certainly could not allow her to either. She looked like I threw cold water on her.

And, I paid for dinner to have this experience!

Wow....I told our daughters from now on it was one or the other not both again.

So when we finally got home we enjoyed quiet pursuits of reading and projects... Katie's Chemistry project is that each student is assigned an element and they have to do the mole calculations for them and make a stuffed mole depicting their element.

Hers is chlorine so she sewed a brown doe seude mole which will then have knotted on wild green floss hair and "red" eyes and an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot bikini. She plans to place her on a diving board.

Great idea I thought. Both the assignment and her execution.

Better hit the bed as I have a busy day tomorrow but when I get back home it will be us four again.

Lovely.