Over the past few weeks, we've had to ask daycare to wake up the kiddo from a nap.

​We do this because, when she naps for more than 15 minutes it throws off her entire sleep schedule. She ends up staying awake until 10:30 or 11 which makes waking her up the next day nearly impossible. She's short on sleep, cranky, and then needs a nap to make it through the day. It's a cycle we don't like. Hence why we ask school to wake her up. We want to keep her nighttime sleep consolidated.

This week, when we messaged about waking her up, a teacher messaged us back saying they would wake her up but they wanted to talk about it more later.

*record scratch*

Here I am, the mom, feeling like I just got in trouble for something. My brain immediately went back to when I did something wrong as a kid. I felt my shoulders slump and I put my head down. It really did feel like I'd just been called to the principal's office.

How is it that, even as adults, we get these feelings? Do we ever grow out of them?

(Everything was fine. Daycare just wanted the full context of why we were asking and to discuss options.)

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Despite fall asleep early each night, I've made my way through almost half of The Sicilian Inheritance already. It's about a woman, whose life is teetering on the edge, trying to figure out the murder of her great-grandmother. The story bounces between the two women's timelines. I find myself more invested in the great-grandmother's story. Also, Sicily, the place, plays a beautiful supporting role. I very much want to visit now

*Books shared here are affiliate links for Bookshop.org

• Doctor of Litter-ature. [WaPo - gift link]

• I don't care if they're shy. No, thank you. [WaPo - gift link]

• We have got to stop putting cars first. [The Atlantic - gift link]

• Seeing the main character from the sidelines. [Big Think - reader submission]

• How much wine is in that bottle? [Wine Folly]

• The science of "If not friend, why friend-shaped?" [Scientific American]

• What we lose by documenting everything. [How to Know What's Real]

• Witty, pretty, and smart Nell. [Noble Blood]

• What it's like to travel with kids. [Atlas Obscura]

• The economics of merch. [The Indicator]

• Relaxing towards success. [Hidden Brain]

• Remote work - your results may vary. [Good on Paper]

• Yes, romance novels are awesome! [Culture Study]

• We domesticated cold. [Atlas Obscura]

• Well this is mesmerizing. [@cook_as_you_feel_it]

• The Catcher Was a Spy should have been a much better movie. It has one hell of a cast - Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti, Jeff Daniels, Mark Strong... and more! The story is a pretty stock biopic. It's loosely based on a true story which had me furiously googling Mo Berg. (I lived in Cooperstown. I should have known about him.) This movie is weirdly slow, even in the battle scenes. That might have been due to the sound mixing. The people sounds were so much louder than everything else (including the guns, tanks, explosions, and music). It's the inverse of most movies. Normally, I don't complain when I hear the dialogue but this was so dialogue forward that it felt like everything else was muffled. [Netflix]

• We are on a roll with watching Jeff Daniels in things. We binged the entire limited series, A Man In Full. Daniels plays a Trumpian character with a southern accent. He's a little hard to understand at times - very grumpy and mumbly. (This is why we are a closed captions on household.) I'm not sure how much of his character was influenced by Trump, but the parallels were there. The kid they cast as his son looks weirdly like Barron, too. The script had some witty writing with great one-liner sass. Daniels was fantastic but, honestly, I was far more interested in the side plots. They are more social justice based and held the true emotions in this series. [Netflix]

• Last week I mentioned that I wanted to try the pizza pinwheels as chicken cordon bleu pinwheels. This week, I did. The Pillsbury crust we bought burst open in our fridge before we could use it. Weird. Luckily, the husband had bought a backup but they were individual crusts. Instead of pinwheels, I sorted of rolled everything into a log. It wasn't what I intended but it worked. We added a drizzle of honey mustard which was clutch. We served a garden salad on the side. [4 Sons 'R' Us]

• The husband wanted breakfast tacos and I never turn down an excuse to eat breakfast for dinner. I put sausage on the shopping list but he came back with ground chorizo from the store. It was way better than what I had in mind. We sauteed that up with some onion. The meat got tossed in a tortilla then topped with scrambled egg and cheddar cheese. I added a smear of avocado from the single serving packet that was chilling in our fridge. We served this with a side of roasted potatoes and onions.

The image here is nothing special. I was, however, just tickled by the beverage they used as sizer for this massive hailstone. [AP]

Do you need to work with someone without actually working with them? Focusmate might be just the thing for you. This service gives you a virtual coworker. You book a session, log on to a video call, and get work down. This is a great way to create space for productivity and accountability.

Three weekends in the pool and, despite all my sunscreening, my tan lines are already something fierce.