It’s Saturday morning, and I woke up with a sore throat, swollen glands, and 100.5 fever. Yuck. Gracie has a back-to-school cold and I guess I caught that. We sent Matt and Whit off to hike with the Lavallees and now Grace is lying inanimate in front of the TV, rousing only occasionally to hack up a lung, and I’m in bed. Must admit, this is pretty divine, despite feeling lousy.

There is one Cookie magazine columnist that I just love. She writes book reviews, but I prefer her own writing to any of the books she refers to. A few excerpts, from this month’s article about parenting lessons she’s learned from fiction:

“You will spend your life trying to describe the holy mountainous landscape of motherhood with accuracy, and without defensiveness…. Literature will tell you that you are not alone. It will show you that others feel the same intense zig and zag of emotion pulsing through them every day.”

“‘The hours pass slowly,’ a friend once remarked about staying home with a newborn, ‘but the days go quickly.’ This shifting quality of time persists, mainly because the sacred and the mundane are forever commingling. Over the days, your life moves dutifully from one errand to the next, and yet over the years, it takes on an epic quality. ‘Is life fascinating or boring?’ a mother asks in Diane Johnson’s wonderful and eccentric novel The Shadow Knows. ‘Is everything clear and decided, or are there possibilities for wonder unbounded?’ The ansewr, of course is: both.”

“In the first few months after having a baby, I was so tired, I wasn’t even tired anymore. I felt as if God had reached down and pressed eacho f his thumbs into my eyes, leaving me with a kind of starry sensation, a surreal sense of my big, new life as it hurried on around me.”