April 6

That's the date of my surgery. Thank you everyone for leaving me encouraging comments. Thank you for your prayers. My natural pessimism comes out at times like this and I start thinking about resistant strep and catheters. I also have an increasing and (I hope) unreasonable fear of being one of those people who wakes up during surgery paralyzed but fully aware of what's happening. I know I'll get to meet my anesthesiologist briefly, but what--he's going to tell me if anyone's woken up on his watch? The plastic surgeon has already sent me the scripts for post-surgery meds, which is comforting--percoset, valium. They can all be waiting for me on my return. How will Animal Planet look through a haze of percoset and valium? Did I mention that my MIL watches almost nothing but Animal Planet? And the news, which we have to watch in all its awfulness, even though you can go online and get it without having to listen to or look at the talking heads. Oh lordy, I think she watches court tv, too.

I think it will be a good time to watch the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice straight through. And maybe both Bridget Jones movies.

I've also developed an obsession, as usually happens with me during times of stress. Right now it's homeschooling. Dear Husband will attest that I have checked out all the books available on the topic from the local library. And now I've ordered a set of the homeschooling books by Charlotte Mason, who is just way cool. There's a school here that follows her methodology, but it's expensive and you have to sign off on their statement of faith (probably could handle this), and their abortion position (too strict), and their discipline policy (which is mostly gentle but they make you sign up an okay for spanking "if needed"). Actually, anytime a school starts talking about "covenant children" I feel squirmy, as if I've walled my kids up in the Christian ghetto where the only thing on their IPod will be inspirational Christian pop and evolution has been carefully filtered out and replaced with, well, whatever it gets replaced with these days. Not the Bible, because the gigantuous Christian book publishing industry can't leave a marketing niche unfilled, while they continue to crank out Bibles in colors to coordinate with your outfits.

Well, I got a bit off topic there.

And now it's time to get Firecracker and DramaQueen to sleep. Hah.