Last weekened T. and I, accompanied by two neighborhood friends, went to a performance of The Sound of Music, put on by a local college. I had taken T. to one play before--Peter Pan. She was young then, about four years old, and while she still remembers the play, it's one thing to see a play at four, and quite another to see it when you are eight, and you love musicals, and you wake up each morning belting out songs from Annie, or The Sound of Music, and your new favorite book is Theater Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild.

I hadn't been to a theatrical production in ages. I might have been as excited as T., and when the lights went dark, and the curtain rustled a little in that magical hold-your-breath moment before it was raised, I had to give T.'s arm a little excited squeeze.

There were good parts, and not-so-good parts. One of the actors had clearly strained his voice over the previous days of performing (we were at the last show), and Maria seemed tired and too-serious ("Mama," T. whispered to me right before the intermission, "Maria is supposed to be happy"). But I don't think T. minded at all and, in the end, I didn't mind one bit, either.

After we dropped our friends off at their house, I pulled away, and looked in the rearview mirror just in time to see T.'s face dissolve into tears.

"What's wrong?" I asked in alarm.

She was so sad that it was over--that performance she'd been waiting for so long, that she'd scored the days leading up to it off on her wall calendar. It was done, the magic faded, and in its wake just a rainy, ordinary Sunday evening.

I think what I will miss the most about my job here at FE, is the space in which to write about my amazing students. I feel incredibly privileged to have the chance to work with them.

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Yesterday I was standing in the hallway at work, fumbling as usual for the keys to my office and a young woman rounded the corner, a chubby-cheeked baby in her arms. I recognized her immediately as one of the students I taught about a year ago--one of the students from this class. She'd been pregnant then--clearly with the little guy she held in her arms.

"Student S.!" I said in surprise. "So good to see you!"

We caught up a little on things--I found out she had taken a semester off after her pregnancy, and she's back now, thank goodness. I have wondered about her from time to time, because she'd promised to visit soon after her baby was born and she never did. I often wonder about my students, especially the ones who make an impact on me (whether negatively or positively). I feel compelled to know their stories, to wonder after them when they're gone; often I worry about them, the way a mother might. And the ones who disappear? They really haunt me. I was happy to see her on the college campus again--happy she brought her son by for a visit.

One Saturday morning a couple of years ago, a spectacular day by all counts: cool like a March day, but with warming sunshine--summer sun, not early spring sun--I sat on the back porch with my dad and watched the kids painting. My dad brought out a few blank “canvases” for them (pieces of flat boards you can buy from Home Depot—they’re really meant to put under vinyl flooring, but my dad buys them, cuts them to canvas size, and they are perfect for painting on) and the kids were creating abstract art masterpieces. I watched L. dab on stripes of green, blue and orange paint. He gave T. an impromptu lesson on abstract art painting as he worked and she got right down to the business of creating a painting of fireworks, with one T.-turned-grown-up-woman standing in the middle of it all.

Then she changed it. It wasn’t fireworks, but a hectic and spectacular scene of her own life—projected somewhere into the future again: a life of colors, and splashes of light, and lots of sun, of course.

“And there’s me,” she said, “standing in the middle.”

“Don’t take offense, T.” L. chimed in (he used to blurt out quite bluntly just what he thought of someone’s work and we have, through lots of coaching, taught him to preface his remarks—if he must make them—with “don’t take offense but…”)

“Don’t take offense T., but I don’t see that in your picture at all.”

“That’s what makes it abstract,” I pointed out.

Each Monday I take both kids to T.’s gymnastics class. We get there about 25 minutes early and T. uses the time before her class to work on her homework. L. spends most of his time on his beloved iPod, despite my best efforts. There is no WiFi at gymnastics (why?), but we can usually poach off free WiFi from a nearby business. Usually. This Monday, though, for reasons we couldn't understand, L.’s iPod would not pick up the WiFi, while mine did.

This was what Scott and I call a setback. We started using that term years ago, mainly to lighten the mood whenever L. encountered one of them. Setbacks have never been good, and L. depends on things going just the way he expects them to go. When all is well in his world, and he’s well-fed, content, and well-rested, he has learned to move through setbacks much better than in the old days, when one could derail him for hours. But things have been rocky lately and he is even more dependent on things being just so.

And they weren’t just so on Monday. I told L. I would let him have my iPod when I was done helping T. with her math, but this wasn’t enough. He was extremely frustrated with the situation; what was supposed to be working wasn’t. He went around and around about it while I tried to deflect him with calm, patient words.

Then I noticed a mom across from us making a raised eyebrow face in our direction. Here it comes, I thought.

“There isn’t actually any WiFi here,” she said.

I gave her a thin smile. “We can usually get it,” I told her. “But it’s not working right today.”

The lady fixed a look on L., who was still venting about the lack of WiFi. “There isn’t actually any WiFi here,” she said again. “So there’s no use getting mad.”

I've been reading a lot lately about umami, one of the five senses. The term "umami" comes from the Japanese term meaning "savory taste." There are many different perspectives on how to satisfy that fifth taste--most people seem to agree that umami is about a satisfying earthiness; a roundness to the taste of the food--neither bitter, nor salty, nor sweet, but an in-between taste.

I got a reminder e-mail yesterday about sending a brief blurb on my "achievements and accomplishments" to my boss, so the information could be disseminated out (if the achievements are notable enough, I presume) at the next faculty meeting. We get the call to do this about once or twice an academic year.

Not only did our toaster give it up this past weekend, but our computer has also decided to cash it all in as well. Accepting this fact was a process that took us all through grief, anger, denial, and then finally acceptance. The computer's absence in our house for four days now has been both a) a curse and b) a blessing.

A pet-related crisis that must have happened during the wee hours of Saturday night necessitated the unearthing of our steam cleaner from the crawl space and the removal of all the furniture out of the office and lots of fussing and snapping from two frazzled parents who couldn't get the soap canister to snap onto the cleaner just right.

You have to view the ups and downs of any trip with kids in an out-of-body-experience way, as if it's all happening to someone else; even huge diaper blowouts on a beach chair miles from a hotel room and with no public restroom in sight, or meltdowns at restaurants, or your child locking all your shoes into the hotel room safe and forgetting the combination, are happening to some other person—someone with a sense of humor, someone who will turn it all into a humorous tale to be retold years down the road--you, but the you in some type of television sitcom.

If you've been following this blog for awhile now, you might have picked up on the fact that here at Professor Mom's house, we're a family that loves a good tradition. And while we might muddle through much of this parenting business, there is one thing I've held onto steadfastly through it all: traditions are important--they are the splashier counterpart to that other important part of daily life: routines. Perhaps the most difficult part of adjusting to parenthood is how you have to give yourself over to routines, so early on.