Fridays always throw me into a state of disarray these days. After three days of working in the morning while the crazy babysitter entertains the crazy toddler, I feel disgruntled when I don�t get to work first thing on Fridays. It�s funny, really, because I resist routine in most areas of my life. When I had an actual job, I had to find a different way to get to work each day because seeing the exact same faces on the el every day drove me to despair. I also tried hard to work out of the office at least once a week, which given my particular job, was not very hard to do. When left to my own devices, though, I find the only way I can get work done is to treat it as if it were a job with a rigid schedule.

AJ woke us up at the horrifying hour of 5 a.m. This is, unfortunately, not unusual, and normally I try to get myself to bed early enough that I am not completely undone by rising at an hour that used to be closer to bedtime than wake-up time. But I was up late last night trying to finish the rather Dickensian project of sewing curtain rings on our new bedroom curtains.

After a couple attempts at returning AJ to his bed, we finally gave up and got up and plopped AJ down in front of the T.V. until I could get enough caffeine in my veins to stop snarling like a pit bull. Suddenly, at a little after 8:00, AJ virtually keeled over with exhaustion. I put him to bed and he slept until 10:45. I should have taken a nap too. Instead, I went to the pool and let myself get tortured by the trainer for an hour before swimming some laps. Let me point out, for those of you not in the Chicago area, that it was 45 degrees out when I got up at 5 and this is not only an outdoor pool, but one for which the heater has not worked since it opened at the beginning of the month. Clearly I was in the mood for torture when I headed out the door. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the pool was warm. Very warm. Steam rising off the waters warm. This, of course, made me incredibly sleepy. While doing laps with the kickboard, I actually dozed off for a moment with my head on the board, only waking up when I started slipping off.

I was fully awake when I emerged from the pool, soaking wet, to bike home, where I stopped only long enough to swap my bike for a car, plunk a sleepy AJ in his bathing suit, add a Finding Nemo� towel to my pool bag, and head out the door back to the pool. AJ, however, was not at all interested in torture. �I�m ready to go home now, Mommy,� he said matter-of-factly as we walked up the hill to the pool. But I was relentless and he eventually squirmed his way into the wat, even allowing me to carry him out to the 4 foot mark for the first time this summer. I�d like to say this is due to my special talent for teaching him to swim, or even to his teacher�s gift. But all of the credit to AJ�s increased courage today goes to an 8 year-old named Christine, who thanks to a scheduling snafu, was making up a lesson at the same time. First Christine coaxed AJ down to the bottom step of the pool, something neither I nor his teacher nor K. has been able to do. Then she got him to stand up in the pool by doing underwater somersaults for him. Finally, he agreed to go all the way in to watch her do flips off the diving board. AJ threw balls for her to chase. They splashed each other and giggled. She pretended to be a circus seal, barking and spinning and bouncing beach balls off her forehead.

Now that I am sitting down to work, I am finally feeling like I might be able to live without a nap. I am on my second cup of coffee of the afternoon and am feeling almost ready to tackle the pile of articles sitting next to my computer waiting for me to read them. Almost.

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