Here's an interesting story about the Sacagewea coin, from fave blogger Mojo Mom. The story is about how the coin was to be retired, and Mojo Mom's kind of sad, because it's the only coin image we have in the US with a mom and her baby. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one of these coins. I fell in love with the sweetness of the picture, having a sling-bound young one around the house as I do...

Since I've been writing about dinner fatigue lately, and considering so many ways to do less domestic work, it's only fitting to say we had a very small Thanksgiving, and what a treat. We roasted our turkey, the rainy weather prohibiting our usual joy of tossing the bird on the BBQ. We cooked up some dishes, but purchased others ahead of time, and spent the morning oohing at the Thanksgiving Day parade, followed by Scrabble, reading (Zadie Smith's On Beauty was my vacation novel), baby-playing, and waiting for any sign of rain let up to send Samira out to run up and down the street on her Heelys.

I must say, it was delightful: five adults around the table, a baby who went quietly to bed in between dinner and dessert. Samira spent the post-dinner hours writing faux pen-pal letters in which she complained that her dad "was talking about work for, I'm estimating, an hour"(yes, we were talking about the perennial favorite topic, education, and alternately solving our society's educational problems, and announcing that such problems were intractable). Our dinner guest had arrived with an all-time excellent kid present: a stack of green computer paper from her office, and a bunch of colorful post-it pads. These were put to good use. Samira continued on to describe her imaginary friends, having been intrigued by the Foster's World of Imaginary Friends float we saw as we watched the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV.

It's predictable that we'll return to big Thanksgivings, lots of people, kids running around. Those too are fun, but try out the small table sometime, we did and had a wonderful time.