Our son’s new school had a First Grade Potluck the other night.  I can cook, more or less. But cooking something and timing it so that the baby’s napping, I can pick the boy up at the bus stop, and it stays the appropriate temperature until the time designated for consumption…that’s more than I want to deal with.  The solution was to purchase four family size boxes of Annie’s Mac n’ Cheese, a couple pounds of grapes, and a pair of foil roasting pans.

I had to boil the boxes sequentially because I knew I wouldn’t be able to control pouring that much boiling water through the strainer (each box called for eight cups…so pouring sixteen cups of boiling water? No thanks!). I layered them in the pan as they cooked up, mixing in a couple tablespoons of canola oil so the noodles wouldn’t stick while waiting. Once all four boxes were cooked up, I popped the pan in the fridge and waited for my next window of opportunity.

While the baby was still napping, about a half an hour before I needed to leave for the bus stop, I slid a 9×13 inch pan of water into my oven and set it about 300 degrees and started to warm the noodles. Approximately fifteen minutes to go, with the baby now balanced on my hip, I taught her how to make cheese sauce using three packets. Tricking the baby into being interested in her own toys for a moment, I mixed the sauce into the noodles and returned the pan to the oven, spritzing the interior oven sides with water to add to the humidity in the hopes the noodles wouldn’t dry out. I hate dry mac n’ cheese.

Then I: picked up the boy from the bus stop; changed the baby; removed the stroller from the trunk; changed myself; pulled the mac out of the oven and tested the internal temp with the instant read thermometer. The result? A satisfying number well above body temperature. I mixed up and poured in the last packet of cheese powder with double the milk. Then, I wrapped the foil-sealed pan in my best, thickest towel to insulate it and put it in the trunk. We packed the grapes, packed the diaper bag, marshaled the kids into the car and took off.

Whereupon the fuel light came on and I stopped at the slowest-pumping gas station I have been to in a couple of years. When I picked up my husband twenty minutes later, I was glad to slump into the passenger’s seat and let him drive to school.

Playing the role of Automated Baby Stand, I never saw the buffet table until the carnage was over. My husband ran two missions to get enough food for the whole family. He reported that there were no fewer than four implementations of mac n’ cheese on the table.  I was worried…for a little while.

As near as I can figure, there are about 75 kids in his grade (there are three classes, and he has 22 or 23 in his class). Could that many kids, with their parents and siblings, consume enough mac n’ cheese that I wouldn’t be left with a big pan of cold, useless, dried-out mac that I would then be forced to throw away?

Oh, yes. All the mac n’ cheese was gone. Mine and everyone else’s. The grapes were gone, too. (They went even faster than the mac.) So, take the easy road: the younger the kids at the potluck, the more you need plenty of mac n’ cheese.  I had gotten the idea because I remembered how relieved people were to see it at a different potluck a couple of years earlier, proudly plunked down on the table amidst more ambitious dishes. I kid you not: actual exclamations of relief. If you’re ever feeling daunted by a looming potluck, just remember that you are one pre-packaged box away from being a Potluck Hero.

NaNoWriMo ‘08 is almost upon us…and by “almost” I mean “next thing I’m really looking forward to.” I like fall. It brings back pleasant memories of when my husband and I started dating. I get a kick out of Halloween, although it’s become stressful since I’ve made a habit of creating elaborate costumes for my son (this year I’ve doubled the pressure with an added offspring). A morning walk in Ravenna Park when the leaves are on the ground and the smell of decomposition is in the air? Excellent! But NaNo really has to take top billing.

I won NaNo the first year I entered, after a year or two of jealously watching my husband participate. At that time, I was in the process of finishing my degree. With college, work, and a preschooler competing for my attention, finding time to write 50,000 words in 30 days would have meant abandoning any pretense of sleeping. I understand plenty of other NaNo participants face those hurdles and win, but I am a better person when I function on a semi-regular schedule. I can pull out the heroics for a couple weeks tops, but longer than that…nope, I’m not cut out for the graveyard shift.

My first novel was a silly, tongue-in-cheek adventure called The Curse of the Evil Monkey Eyes. It was set in a fictionalized, colonial-era Caribbean/Central Mexico/New Orleans. This was before both the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the destruction of New Orleans by hurricane, just to set the record straight. The best part of that NaNo was that for the first time in my life I escaped the nagging voice of my “inner-editor” (the label used by Chris Baty in his book) and just wrote. I had a marvelous time.

However, just like my husband and I discovered that you can’t have the same vacation twice (don’t ask), I haven’t had a good NaNo since. November has erupted in both serious illness and late pregnancy (though not at the same time, thankfully). This doesn’t stop me from hoping that this year I’ll break the curse but it does make my prep work feel bittersweet.

Which brings us to why I’m here in the first place: practice. The idea is to practice two of the skills I’m worst at: one, devoting time to what I really wish I were doing; and two, writing something and then letting go of it and moving on.

Here we go, then: letting go…moving on…