Involved Parenting and Self-Preservation

I decided to be an involved parent yesterday and arranged to meet my friend and her kids at a nearby aviation and aerospace museum. This sort of trip, let me note here, is David's idea of heaven. Brian was pretty excited, too; but Rachel was only lured by the promise of pizza afterwards. Susie is cool with anything, as long as we are nice to her (she started shouting that at the dinner table last night, apropos of nothing, as far as I could tell).

And then, as if that weren't enough parental involvement on my part, we made hamantaschen yesterday afternoon. It isn't that difficult: make the dough, chill it, roll it out, cut out the circles, put a dollop of jam in the middle of each circle, and fold the corners up just right (although how we get corners out of circles is beyond me). Of course, it requires nerves of steel to get through these steps while negotiating with 3 children who exactly gets to do what, when. I sort of needed a drink by the end.

If you have survived all the squabbling over who cuts out the circles and whose turn it is to dish out the jam, you then pop the cookie-laden sheets into the oven. Just make sure you remember to set the timer for 15 minutes. Because I didn't. Luckily, I also forgot to turn the oven on; so nothing burned. Sometimes early-onset Alzheimers can be your friend.

I'm going to have to do absolutely nothing with the children today in order to retain my Idle Parenting credentials.

All around us our friends and their families are being felled mercilessly by some sort of extreme stomach virus. We are avoiding them like...well, like the plague. I am willing to drop off some ginger ale and crackers at their doorsteps (actually, not directly at their doorsteps - I'll stand at the end of the sidewalk and sort of lob it in the direction of their contaminated front doors); but that is the extent of my compassion. I have a family to protect, after all.

Somehow, I don't think I would have been one of those hardy souls who went around nursing the ill and burying the dead during the Plague years; but I definitely would have gotten myself one of those masks.

I wonder, do you have to wear it with the robes for it to be effective? Or would jeans and a sweater do just as well?