At what age are leather pants appropriate? Because I'm not sure I'd spend the money on leather trousers for my four-year-old. Good grief, they grow so quickly that the cost alone would be prohibitive, even if I felt they were proper dress for a child.

There are two little Mackenzies in my ten o'clock storytime alone. This is the first time I've seen a group in which the name "Joshua" is less common that "Madison."

I need to watch myself and make sure that I don't give extra attention to the children who remind me of myself. There's a little redheaded girl in my two-year-old group who is the spitting image of my own baby pictures, and whose precocious behavior recalls incidents from my own childhood, as recorded by my mother. Sometimes I catch myself trying to read directly to her and make her laugh, just as I do with another little girl in the older group. That one is a remarkably bright child who loves to play "helper," just like I did at her age. Mental note: do more reaching for the more bashful children, especially the boys. How will they grow to be more involved if I don't make the first move?

There's one bashful little boy in the group of Head Start kids that comes in once a week for stories. He hung to the back of the group until he found out that the library had, of all things, dinosaur books! From the moment I put one in his hands, he was hooked. A few days ago, he came in on an off-day with his father; I waved when I saw him, and it looked for a moment as if he was going to run and hide behind his father. Then he suddenly smiled, filled with some newfound comfort, and ran to hug me about the legs. I've never been so happy with a job before.

I think I want to spend the rest of my life reading stories to two-year-olds. In what other job do you get claps and "Yay!"s after every task is completed?

Tomorrow I go to a workshop on Photoshop; the library is paying my fee. I'm looking forward to learning, but I'm also a little anxious. All we have at home is the limited version of Photoshop that came with our scanner. I'm worried that I'm going to get all fired up to use the software, then come home and be filled with frustration at our pokey little software package.

I was in Michael's Crafts recently, and I almost burst into tears. It seems as if everybody I know is talented at something, and I'm just a clumsy oaf. I can't knit, I can't crochet. I can't paint and I can't sew. I don't scrapbook. I can't even do latchhooks; I get bored after the first row or so, and toss the whole thing to the side. Eric tried to comfort me, saying, "But you do music!" Yeah, but I can't make nice things for my family and friends with that talent. I gave my mother a score once, and it made a nice decoration for the piano, I guess.

Keeping a house clean is hard work for my husband and me. We tend to let things go until they're in extremely bad shape, then spend a weekend doing desperate cleansing and swearing that we'll do better in the future. Before a week has passed, the newspapers and dirty dishes are piling up again.

Candles look nice on tables, but not when they're surrounded by half-empty soda cans.

When we moved into this apartment, we decided not to get cable. For a while, we didn't watch enough TV to warrant the extra bill, and we found time that we never knew we had missed. Then Eric bought an antenna, and we found ourselves slipping back into old habits. We only get the major networks, but now almost every evening has been re-devoted to a few shows.

Is anybody else dying to watch this Fox show tonight, "Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire"? For those who haven't seen the promos, apparently the producers have gathered together a group of lovely, superficial ladies who will compete to marry a loaded mystery man. I think we're planning to watch just to remind ourselves that humanity can always manage to sink to new lows. Plus, Eric likes looking at women in wedding gowns.

Eric likes Ally McBeal more than I do.