It's the Night Before School and All Through the House the Critical Mom is Finding Things To Do

I'm upstairs in the study trying and failing to decipher the instructions on the wart freeze-off medicine for the nine-year-old when I finally break down and ask my husband . . . and find that my difficulties with the German language were not the only, or even the main, obstacle.  (I'm sure you're all aware that on those multilingual Ikea instructions, the German ones seem much longer, or advise you to call the electrician).  Meanwhile, while we're puzzling out the gizmo you insert in the little wart can to get the freezy stuff out, I hear from downstairs,

"uhhh! Ahhh, OOOOHM!  OHM!  OHMMY!" and realized I'm being paged, and that it's urgent, and that whoever is paging me has lost the use of his lips.  Which can mean only one thing.

My husband, who has turned away from his own urgent, overdue essay to help me, patiently waits while I say, "waitasec a kid is screaming,"

He smiles.  "Isn't it romantic?" he asks.

And as I am barreling down the stairs to the kid--who has just wrested his very loose tooth from his gums, Henry Huggins style--I think, "Yes, it is.  It really, really is."

So then I provide the kid with paper towels, then ice wrapped in paper towels, and since we have all just, yesterday, watched Julie Andrews dueling Dwane Johnson in The Tooth Fairy, we're really prepared.  And I have a lot more to say about all kinds of things, but the rice cooker just popped, the kid and I are about to start a new Rick Riordan book, various emails are overdue, and . . . stay tuned.