My students have been working on a debate project these past two weeks--preparing and writing opening statements, and presenting these in the formal setting of an actual in-class debate. It hasn't been all smooth, I have to say. I've done this project three semesters now, and every semester I learn something new; I tweak the assignment accordingly for the next time I use it, then I learn something more and tweak again, and so on.

On Friday, the one day of the week when I don’t have afternoon office hours, I left work, swung by the pizza shop, and met L. for lunch at his school. With the new changes in place for this second quarter, two days/week he has Lunch Bunch in the guidance counselor’s room (he gets to pick a friend to eat with him) and on Fridays I try and bring him pizza and eat in the cafeteria with him. Scott usually swings by on Monday afternoons—sometimes to bring him a slice, if the timing works out—other times just to check up on how he’s doing. So on any given week, L.

In an episode of Parenthood recently, Christina Braverman, mother of Max, agonizes over a statistic she heard: that married couples raising a child on the spectrum suffer an 80% divorce rate. I was taken aback by the statistic as well, but a little research and article-reading proved that the alarming 80% rate as been recently debunked by the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute.

One Wednesday out of every month is a Whirlwind Wednesday. On this particular Wednesday, I always have two meetings: one in the early afternoon and one two hours later. Because of how these two meetings are sandwiched into the day, I have to leave work early, pick up L. early from school, then drive across town to pick up T. early from school. Then I take the kids to Scott's work, where they will bounce around his office while he teaches his last class of the day, and I turn around and head back to work, and back to that last meeting.

Our house has been decorated to the nines for some weeks now in preparation for Halloween. The day we broke out the decorations T. was beside herself with excitement. As we pulled out the Rubbermaid bins with the decorations we spied the Christmas bins lurking not far behind them, and then on top of a shelf I found the Thanksgiving placements from the preschool years: T.'s with her funny handprint leaves and L.'s with a splash of colors.

We don't leave our kids much. When they were babies, we had the occasional night out, timed for when grandparents visited. In the past few years, our sitter money has gone to cover meetings, and every now and then, we have left the kids with a grandparent and skipped out to see a film. But that is more of an annual, or semi-annual occurrence--certainly not a monthly one. Will it shock you too much to know we have never, ever, the both of us together, left them for a whole night?

Oh wait, you were expecting chocolate-pumpkin brownies, weren't you?

This week and last week, we've been talking about conversation rituals in my freshman composition classes. Recently we spent a week discussing public space--what it is, and how we come to learn the rituals for moving acceptably in and out of it.

T. has a cold. It's not one of those stay-home-from-school colds (thank goodness), but one of those I-feel-cruddy-at-night colds. Most nights, on average, T. sleeps in her own bed until about 6:00 am or so. On weekends she'll wake and come rushing into our room, where she'll climb into bed between us, snuggle down, throw her arm across my neck, and we all go back to sleep--until 8:30 or even 9:00 in the morning. As T.'s grown older, she's been spending more and more time in her own bed, just as I expected she would.

Last spring I told T. a made-up story, about a little girl who had no toys, and who made a doll for herself. For some reason, she was enchanted by this story, and I promptly made a sock doll for her, which she loved, and carried around for awhile until the hair fell off.