A friend and I took our kids to see Cheaper by the Dozen today, a film about domesticity run amok. In this comedy, the Baker family, Tom, Kate and their twelve kids, falls to pieces when Tom takes a posh coaching job and they move to a snooty neighborhood in suburban Chicago. Kate writes a book (about having 12 kids, what else?) and goes on a book tour. Although the film cuts her some slack about needing a life of her own outside her family, the underlying message still is that home just isn't home without mom. The kids do bad in school, the oldest son gets kicked off the football team, one child runs away and a frog named Beanie dies. If mom hadn't gone on that darned book tour none of this would have happened. For all the talk about "family" and "caring" in this film, this family has a desolate quality. Don't they have any friends or relatives to help out? Couldn't Tom's employers give him some family time? Like many American families, they have to fend for themselves, but never ask why they get so little support. They internalize their failure to cope and idealize the idea of the "family" even more. And who gets stuck carrying the load? Mom.

Here's a more benign view of the backyard than yesterday's gloomy photo. It may look deceptively rural, but there's actually a busy highway not far from our development. The sound of traffic is a constant hum, but the sense of space is nice. There were strange looking animal footprints in the snow when I went out yesterday. I got excited, was it a bear? Deer? Bigfoot? My husband, who is an ex-Eagle Scout, went out and examined them and gave me the bad news. Just rabbit tracks . . . the snow melted and made their tracks look bigger. The rabbits live underneath our deck. They're a nuisance, since they eat any vegetables we've tried to grow, but we're too soft-hearted to do anything about them.