The other day I made a bunch of hard boiled eggs for breakfast and let the girls peel them.

This has been a big hit ever since that time back in the winter during the snowpocalypse when school was closed but work expected you to be there and I had to bring The Dormouse to work with me. And because I'm pretty much the greatest mother alive, I forgot that she would need any kind of food or sustenance whatsoever and didn't bring anything for her to eat for lunch. There were snow drifts on the ground higher than my waist; all the restaurants in town were closed or serving three day old lettuce. So I marched her downstairs to the 7-11 that's within walking distance of my office where I had $1.99 and a coupon burning a hole in my pocket and I bought her a couple of hard boiled eggs and a 7-11 doughnut.

To this day, that was the greatest single lunch event The Dormouse ever experienced. She thought getting a free doughnut was the pinnacle of human achievement. (Which reminds me, I gots me a reservation for a free spicy chicken sandwich today. I've got to go cash that in.) Since that moment, whenever she comes to the office with me, she announces with solemn gravity, "I want two hard boiled eggs and a glazed doughnut for lunch."

Now, the area of the city where my office is has recently gone through a many year long revitalization process and for the first time in the way-too-many-years-long-period since I've worked there, there are actually many good places eat out that are all within walking distance. But when she's there and someone asks her what she wants for lunch, "Mexican? Thai? Ethiopian? McDonalds? Candy store?" (We don't really have a candy store, but her answer is the same, so either it's that big a deal, or she's on to us.)

"No. I want two hard boiled eggs and a glazed doughnut."

Sometimes it's four hard boiled eggs, but other than that, the menu rarely changes.

Anyway, I made hard boiled eggs for breakfast last week.

Sometime after I put The Dormouse on the school bus and The Caterpillar had beget her fifth fit of the morning (yes, we're going through that again), I put her in her room to calm down. Then I sat down to do some work on the computer. Suddenly - and I know we've all been through this before - my head jerked up and my heart started pounding. It was quiet.

TOO QUIET.

For two seconds, I imagined all the bad things that The Caterpillar could have done in the last ten minutes while I didn't realize she was being quiet: set the house on fire, find the keys to the car and set out on a road trip to Puerto Rico, flush the cat down the toilet... but instead I found her on the floor in front of the door playing with the shells of half a dozen eggs we'd eaten for breakfast and had thrown in the trash. And since the house was not getting any hotter, the car was in the driveway, the cat was safe and dry when I stumbled upon this scene, I just sat back down and went back to work.

Sure I had eggshells in my shoes later on and I had to go looking for attachments to the vacuum cleaner that I haven't considered in a decade, but it gave me another twenty minutes of peace.

Totally worth it.