The snow is looking rather serious this afternoon. A good day to curl up on the windowseat with a pot of tea and a good book. AJ, however, has other plans. He�s been coming up with all kinds of elaborate activities today. First we had to make cookies. I was out of eggs, so the only recipe in my box besides shortbread (I didn�t have all that butter either) that was doable was a gingerbread cookie recipe. However between AJ�s measuring skills and my anti-Crisco improvisational substitutions, we ended up with some pretty strange cookies. Good with tea and relatively innocuous. But not really worth the calories. AJ, however loved them. And since I made them with less sugar than usual, wheat flour and applesauce, I�m pretty happy about that.

The best thing about the cookies is that the house smells like gingerbread. Perfect for a snowy day. After the cookies, we embarked on a sticker and rubber stamp extravaganza. AJ, like many toddlers, loves stickers even more than he loves cookies. However his little fingers have yet to acquire the skill of removing the stickers from their sheets. So I spend all of my time peeling the tiny things off and trying to hand them to him without dropping them or turning them upside down. We covered pages and pages with stickers of letters, numbers, assorted athletic equipment, animals and hearts. Some of us also put stickers on our shirts:

It was absolutely mind-numbing. Probably the best possible preparation for this afternoons work on the public/private sphere theories of Habermas and related feminist theory. I can pretty much guarantee that by the end of today�s work session pulling my fingernails out is going to sound like fun.

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