Midweek and I’m reeling. Some of my dizzying lack of sleep has nice roots. My posse of moms—we call ourselves MOTE, which stands for Mothers on the Edge—met last night. I left the soon-to-end (or so it seemed) gathering at 11:30. As I’ve written about before, these women began getting together to hang out sans kids when our kids—now tenth graders—were in third grade. You can imagine we’ve been through… stuff in our lives.
What happens in MOTE, like Vegas, stays there. Yet I feel comfortable sharing that we did some talking—as many of us have been doing over the past week or so—about the storm and power outage, the climate change it seems impossible to deny or ignore any longer.
When Mr. Gore’s film changed my life (it absolutely did) I felt somewhat lonely, because my old friends weren’t focused upon this issue. I made new friends! My kids’ school started a Green Team; many elementary schools have ‘em. We joined one farm, then later another. I got involved with Grow Food Northampton. So did my wonderful mother-in-law. I’m so not lonely these days, because both newer and older friends are in on this conversation by now.
Grow Food Northampton is showing a film on Sunday evening entitled Farmegeddon. Some local restaurants are donating proceeds from some sales that day, including my Goberry peeps. If you live around here, you should certainly go see the film.
It was also hard to sleep last night because I was so freaking happy that there was such positive election news. Our city has a new mayor, a nice guy who ran a very upbeat and issue-oriented campaign, although his opponent did not (and that’s all I’m saying lest I become snarky at six in the morning). We upheld the Community Preservation Act. We voted for terrific city councilors. The next city over, Holyoke, elected a dynamic young (22, people) mayor. Other places had some victories that mattered, too. I’m talking about you, Mississippi. Fingers crossed this bodes well for one year from now.
The topic of sleep is going around, anyway. My friends are writing about mothers and sleep (go click on the first word for K.J Dell’Antonia’s take on Motherlode where she’s guest-hosting this week and the second for Katherine Ozment’s smart reminder on her Boston Magazine blog). Fall back could be finished not with in bed but into hell for parents whose kids take it as an invitation to wake up in the way dark. Wednesday morning and we seem to have cleared that hurdle in this household. Phew.
Speaking of bedtime, I’ve got two pieces about picture books out in the inter-ether this week: first, the quest for a perfect adoption-themed picture book is up on Babble and some tried-and-true old favorites are listed on Moon Frye, where I’m doing a bit of guest posting. Ping over. The gal who inspired my writing these pieces was cute at during our town’s Novemberween; so was her literary-leaning older brother dressed as Tabby (as in Mr. Putter and). And although it shows, I was very much pleased that Saskia’s costume—she chose fairy wings plus witches’ hat and did not specify what exactly she was in case you were wondering—took exactly 30 seconds to put together. When we met up with Arella, she knew what she was: a frog princess.
