I managed to wake up before AJ but after my husband this morning, so I scavenged a few moments of blissful quiet, catching up on a little reading and yoga before opening the curtains to brilliant sunshine. Already the day is looking to be a significant improvement over yesterday.

I had the odd experience last night of waking up completely convinced it was time to get up, only to discover after fumbling around for my glasses and applying them to my face that it was only ten minutes to 1. How could I have been so mistaken. I lay awake thinking about how to teach Music 101 for a while before I realized that I was on the road to insomnia and instead began my tried and true litany for sleep � naming state capitals in alphabetical order by state: Alabama � Montgomery, Alaska � Juneau� I keep track on my fingers to make sure I haven�t missed any. As a kid I either learned or figured out a way to count to 99 on my fingers where the fingers of the right hand equal 1 and the thumb 5 and the left hand fingers are 10 and the thumb 50. In my sleepiness, however, I find I confuse my left and my right. The rules of the let�s fall asleep game say that if you lose track, you must start over. Last night, after several false starts, I think I only made it through Louisiana � Baton Rouge.

Despite my attempts at enforcing artistic endeavors this morning, AJ and K. are parked in front of the TV again. In an hour, however, they will be going to the playground, a more or less scheduled event that I think I�m going to try to enforce daily, weather permitting.

I will spend my morning doing some long overdue filing and contemplating my teaching philosophy statement, a document that is still a bit of a mystery to me. I�ve always thought I had a very strong sense of purpose in the classroom and that my expectations and methods of self-evaluation were clear. However, when confronted with the opportunity of putting it all down on paper, I find I am surprisingly inarticulate about it. There are so many intangible aspects and so many variables from student to student. It�s hard to know when to be specific and when to be vague. I�m actually finding the exact same problem when it comes to talking to the nanny about AJ.

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Lately, when AJ comes into my bathroom after dinner to brush his teeth, he is taken in by the array of mirrors. The bathroom has two bays of three-part mirrors, one over each sink. The outer edges of the bays � the ones along the walls � are longer than the ones in the middle, making for an impressive optical effect of two rows of yourself extending into infinity on your left and right. Every night, AJ pronounces, �Wow! Look at all the AJs!� and then demands to know how many AJs there are. It is impossible to count the army of AJs, I say. But he insists on a number � everything in AJ�s world has a number. While I admit there is some appeal to the idea of an army of AJs, I am a little taken aback at the prospect of explaining infinity to a three-year-old. I have already attempted inertia (when explaining why the swing doesn�t stop right away and why it takes a few swings to get it as high as he likes), gravity (�Why do I slide DOWN the slide, Mommy? I want to slide up!�), and centrifugal force (The Sit-�n-Spin as physics experiment). But for some reason, infinity has me stymied. How do you describe something so big that you can�t describe it? So I try my usual parental copout when AJ asks unanswerable questions: �How many AJs do YOU think there are?� I ask. He peers into the mirror. All the AJs peer back at him. �I think there are nine.� �Nine?� I say skeptically. �Yes. I think nine is enough.� The AJs in the mirror looked satisfied with the answer too. Apparently nine is the point at which number is synonymous with �a lot.� Nine is infinity defined and domesticated. It doesn�t require complicated arrangements of fingers to count. It is as big as it gets before needing an extra digit. An elegant solution, really. He�s never going to buy that the symbol for infinity is a sleepy eight.

In our family, we all have ways of making numbers work magic. Nine was actually my obsession too. I remember discovering as a kid the unique properties of raising a series of digits of nine to their own power:

9x9=81

99x99=9801

999x999=998001

9999x9999=99980001

99999x99999=9999800001

and so on.

I can�t remember how far out I did the calculations, but I kept going and going � I was convinced that at some point the chain would break. It never did and I became frustrated with my inability to ever finish the job. Another vote for infinity=9. Except in that case, nine was never enough.

My husband�s numerology is not about calculation but about memory. He remembers long chains of numbers by stringing together his favorite childhood sports heroes � 42 is Jackie Robinson, 23 is Michael Jordan, and countless others that I�ve never heard of. This is, perhaps, another way of domesticating numbers. Numbers become people or images of things remembered. They are concretized, tamed. Theoretically, there is a finite number of possibilities, as it is theoretically possible to count everyone who has ever played professional sports in the United States, even though the total would be extremely large and even though there are numerous ways of combining the numbers. This is the infinite disguised as the finite � number nine again.

Perhaps it is time to introduce AJ to Toy Story. When he hears Buzz Lightyear proclaim, �To infinity and beyond!� I can now explain what is beyond infinity: 10.

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