Another day, another nap.

While Rudy gets her daily three-hour fix of beauty sleep, I spend the first hour cleaning up after lunch and sometimes breakfast, and then doing whatever household tidying is necessary before I move on to other tasks I've been putting off for the past week or more. Today my tidying was putting away groceries and the detritus on the playroom floor, vacuuming up a bowlful of Kix, getting roasted sweet potatoes into the fridge to reheat for dinner, putting Marley's latest pile of library books in their designated box, folding a basket of laundry and getting two other loads going, and sorting through the mail. Then I planned to get through Rudy's birthday party invitations and to finally order the four-months-worth of pictures on Snapfish I last wrote about ordering three weeks ago. It may not sound like a lot, but it's time-consuming. And it can be monotonous. And I know I'm fortunate. I'm just saying.

And before it all gets done, I usually have to leave for field hockey practice or for a game. But tonight I've got a night game. Away. Which means I'll be bouncing along on a school bus with the team at 4 p.m., and again with a sweatier version of the same team sometime before 9 p.m. It isn't my favorite way to travel the open road. In exchange, though, for today I get Rudy's entire nap to actually order the pictures and address the invitations. Plus, catch up on email, figure out how Rudy's birthday and party will actually go, and start planning things like the field hockey end-of-season dinner.

When Rudy's sleeping, Marley usually watches about an hour of television while I'm straightening up. Today it was the Pink Panther, again. And then she gets going with her books or some kind of Marley-Glitter-Pink-Butterfly-Beautiful-Project until her babysitter or one of my sisters is scheduled to watch her and Toot. One afternoon, Bean and I made a delightful little cityscape out of blocks in the living room before I had to race off to coach. And a handful of times this season, her friend Will has run over from his house one street over to pick her up for a spontaneous playdate, which is so, so sweet and cute. And I will remind them of that when I'm taking their pre-prom pictures.

There won't be too many more afternoons like this, though. Because I've only got about another week of field hockey, and then I don't have much to plan around in the afternoon until lacrosse starts up in the early spring. I am so looking forward to having all of Rudy's naps again. Today is like a little preview. But, I'm actually going to miss coaching.

This morning, Bean and Toot and I parked on one side of the downtown fire station and walked by some local firefighters to get to the library on the other side for laptime and storytime. And we smiled at the guys, and then one in particular smiled at me and rocked forward on his heels a little, and said, "Hey, Coach." And I recognized him as the dad of one of my seniors, and I gave him an even bigger smile back and said, Hi," again. And that's the kind of Small-Town, I-Grew-Up-Here kind of thing that makes me so ridiculously happy: the fire fighter saying hey to his daughter's high school coach while she's taking her tiny kids to the library. It was like "Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?" but for real. If only Bob McGrath were there, and the children's librarians popped out to sing along, it would've been a Sesame Street dream come true.

UPDATE: I am leaving for my game. I didn't get the invitations done and the pictures haven't finished uploading yet, so I couldn't order them if I tried. This is like the time I was up before 4 a.m. accomplishing things because I couldn't sleep, and was still ten minutes late for preschool drop-off. Liz was like, "You could pull an all-nighter and you'd still be late."