What makes a Sunday morning even better? Flipping hot pumpkin pancakes over the griddle while listening to your kids play Monopoly with your parents. L. loves the game, and could play it uninterrupted for hours if given the chance. When I was growing up my brother and sister and I would set up a game on the dining room table and play and play until we had to clear it all up for dinner. I still love a good Monopoly challenge, but let’s face it, the game goes on forever and I seldom have the time to set aside hours to play it to its completion (who does?).

Yesterday was a first for me. I took my little iBook laptop--the hand-me-down one I got from my mom when she upgraded her laptop--to T.’s speech therapy appointment and I finished this column, worked on a syllabus for a class, and tinkered with some ideas for future posts. It’s not that I haven’t thought about taking the laptop to T.'s appointments before, or thought about that golden sliver of time--those precious 45 minutes of uninterrupted quiet time to work.

I'm sick, which means that I have some yucky upper respiratory thing brewing in my chest. I've found that everyone gets sick in certain signature ways (T. gets a stuffy nose; L. gets stomach viruses; Scott never gets sick), and for me it's always some bronchial virus that leaves me with a raspy voice and sometimes a cough and that wheezy feeling in my chest. My students love me this time of the year.

Monday was my Day Off. All this week I have work-related workshops to attend--all designed for my professional and personal betterment. But on Monday I snatched 25 minutes of extra-warm snuggle time in bed with T., and I got to pack L.'s school lunch while still in my pajamas; I got to pour myself a second cup of coffee, and I got to spend a good hour and a half playing Mama Bird and Baby Bird with T. until it was almost 10:00 and definitely time for a change.