A Good Nana is Hard to Find and other holiday pictures

Actually, if you are a Kirby girl, a good Nana (Great-Grandma) is fairly easy to find! I had a fabulous Nana, and now Cora has one too. As you can see, they already share a sense of humor. Next thing you know they will be doing crosswords together while nibbling peanut crunch from See's Candies. Splitting bottles of chablis. Reading Agatha Christies outloud to each other. Trading newspaper sections. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

And here's a picture from the week after Christmas of Cora with her Grandma Jan, and one with Grandpa Dave, too. They're all completely smitten with each other.

But now we are back to just being the three of us and gradually getting our routines set again. Cora went through about a week of not wanting to be in the saucer, not wanting to be put down, not wanting to be by herself. After two nanny weeks and then a week of grandparents, and also getting a kind of grandparent-timeshare with her friend Eva's grandparents, it has been a while since Cora has had to entertain herself! But now we are back to normal and she will even sometimes take a nap or two for us.

However, now nap time has an additional excruciating element to it - the cry-a-thon that precedes the falling asleep, interspersed with mumbling crying around the thumb. Sometimes she cries for as long as ten minutes! I know this would be considered mere entry-level crying by many babies, but it is kind of a long time for Cora. Maybe she could cry for longer, but I’m not willing to wait more than ten minutes for her to fall asleep. And then, she could sleep anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. But you never know which. Long enough to blog? Long enough to grade a few papers? Long enough to get the reading done?

We may never know. Sure there are papers to grade - review/analysis papers of monster movies - and there is reading to be done - 70 Dracula pages and a short essay on zombie movies and their cultural significance (zombies and Freud, a match made in...well...I’m not sure where, actually.). Why is it that every time what I really need to do is just skim and review, I get sucked into the reading (no pun intended!). This happened last night with Dracula. I really meant to just crawl into bed with my book and quick get reoriented and instead I’m just meandering happily through Jonathan Harker’s verbose Victorian descriptions of the Carpathians and the picturesque peasants.

The papers aren’t even an option. I sorted them from least promising to most promising and the next one up appears to be about the music in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. I’m thinking about banning Disney movies from this assignment. I’m wondering how music can be the focus of a paper that is supposed to analyze what the monster shows us about our culture. But my curiosity is not strong enough to send me downstairs to the papers.

No; what I’m really hoping is that this nap lasts long enough for me to get downstairs, heat up some leftovers for lunch, and eat them! Then we’ll talk about papers and reading and class plans.