Once again overdue

I am very overdue for a post, and it's banging around in my head, but now it's so long and complicated and digressive that I can't quite get at it or to it. I'm also long overdue on a work project - I should have taken a leave of absence, but decided instead that I really could do it as long as dh watched Miss I for four hours per week and I stayed up really late every night. Foolishness. Exhaustion.

But in the meantime, in all my spare time, I'm reading There is No Me Without You, and pushing it on other people. It's an amazing story, or set of stories, and my daughter figures in it everywhere and nowhere. She is not an AIDS orphan directly (the focus of the book) but every Ethiopian orphan is an AIDS orphan in that nothing before HIV -- not even widespread famine -- had destroyed the extended family networks that would have absorbed children without parents. And now, for every one Miss I., there are 10,000 more Ethiopian children without families.

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Lunch and nap were overdue today, too (part of the theme today). Miss I. began screaming in the car five minutes from home, gesturing wildly, chewing nothing. As soon as we got in, we handed her a peanut butter sandwich. She fell asleep eating it, clasped it to her chest, and wouldn't let go.