Check it out.

And if you ever hear that I’m planning to wrap up a longterm project — one my husband has been chipping away at for a year and one that takes up increasing amounts of my spare time, too, until we both find ourselves staying up past midnight, several nights running, to meet self-imposed deadlines — during a big holiday week, while my kids are out of school and my parents are in town, you might want to dissuade me.

But it seems to have worked out okay.

Santa Claus has been responsive to us in the past (remember the year of the pogo stick?), so the boys are optimistic about their letters this year. And I have to say, with such reasonable (and relatively old-school!) requests, I think Santa will respond favorably:

First, Eli’s. We do not have a dog, but he takes good care of all his stuffies, and feels the dogs need their own bowls:

two dog bowls
back scratchers
calculator
Please
Love eli Grant

Then Ben’s letter, using his new paper-engineering and cursive-writing skills:

Dear Santa, Could I please have a very large tub of dominoes, a digital wristwatch, and a scientific calculator? From Ben Grant

We’ll set out our plate of cookies & carrots tomorrow night and hope for the best! Merry Christmast to you and yours.

How perfect! A movie about a woman trying to raise two kids in the city while also carving out time to write. I was eager to see Katherine Dieckmann’s new film, Motherhood, especially after reading the interview with her on Literary Mama. Here’s an excerpt from my latest column:

Dressed in jeans and an old fleece, my hair pulled back into a messy bun, I looked exactly like what I am: a mom who’d just barely made it out of the house, leaving the post-dinner mess, homework supervision, and the kids’ bedtime to my husband so that I could see a movie. Glancing around the theater, I saw my compatriots, in ones and twos, one pair with a sling-cozy baby, eating balanced dinners of popcorn and peanut M&Ms.; Not date night, but mom’s night out at the movies as we all waited for the start of Motherhood, Katherine Dieckmann’s day-in-the-life film about Eliza Welsh, New York City mommy-blogger, former fiction writer, wife, and mother of two.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest, and let me know what you think!