Hazardous working conditions

It's really amazing how much work I can get done in a single quiet morning when I'm home by myself. This happens on exactly one day a week, and I milk it for all it's worth. This morning, I plowed through a whole bunch of writing assignments for my Writing & Research Methods class, AND calculated a workload estimate for a master's thesis I'm editing (this semester's editing season has started already! I can't believe it). I was a machine.

Then the kids got home from school and things came screeching to a halt. I've been working on my only remaining active writing assignment (which is due tomorrow) for five hours now, and I've only just barely punched out a reasonable draft that I can work with. I was working for four hours on and off, of course, hacking out a sentence here and there between trips to the kitchen to get the girls a snack and trips to the bedroom to get a new pair of panties for the 3-year-old and trips to the playroom to break up squabbles. It's a miracle I've written down even one coherent thought, really.

Sometimes I get to thinking about trying to be a mom + grad student (or a mom + anything, really), and I realized that a lot of men would never stand for such working conditions:

She's a very cute workplace productivity hazard, but she definitely takes her toll. And I love that my "office" (= a corner of the living room) is constantly strewn with kid projects and toys and trails of sand from outside.

So what I finally did, to get a stretch of unbroken work time, was send the girls outside with a fun-size leftover-Halloween-candy Twix each, telling them it was a piece of meat and they were pioneer girls who had been walking on the Oregon Trail all day. They immediately grabbed some play dishes and headed out to the back alley to cook it up.

OK, OK, so I gave them each TWO Twix bars. I'm that desperate to get some writing done, all right??