After a mere ninety minutes, the baby is finally down for her nap. This is my chance to get some work done while the house is quiet. I should check my to-do list:

• Do laundry.
• Clean the kitchen.
• Get down to Inbox Zero. Or at least Inbox 7,329, which would still be a big improvement.
• Pay all the medical bills that I intend to pay, which is about a third of them.
• Volunteer at a local food bank.
• Finish that book proposal that I actually never started.
• Run a marathon. If I can’t complete the mileage during the nap, I can finish up during my other large chunk of free time—after the baby “goes to sleep” at night.
• Catch up with all my old college friends by commenting, “Cute!” on their most recent Instagram posts.
• While on Instagram, notice that there are kittens up for adoption.
• Adopt them.
• All of them.
• I mean, they need homes, and I have the time. The baby is asleep.
• Order six hundred pounds of kitten food on Amazon. For cost efficiency, choose a sketchy third-party vender. We’re talking forty-seven kittens, after all—we’ll need to cut some corners.
• Get an e-mail from the seller asking if I can help them with a “small shipping issue.”
• Agree to help, because what else am I doing? My baby’s asleep.
• But, first, do some digging on the vender, and discover that their “kitten food” business is actually a front for an interstate drug-smuggling operation. Typical. If it’s not spit-up, it’s some other mess!
• Call in all of this information to the F.B.I. tip line. I’m never going to get to the laundry if I try to solve this problem all on my own. It’s O.K. for moms to ask for help—that’s what everyone says on Reddit.
• Learn from the F.B.I. that it wasn’t just an interstate drug-smuggling situation. I successfully exposed a multinational spy ring! It’s all very “Ocean’s Eleven.” Or “Ocean’s Twelve.” Or, I don’t know—whichever one was all girls.
• Receive a classified briefing via Zoom (camera off because I’m pumping). Learn that the spy ring was planning to hack the global water supply, and that I provided the critical intel to stop them.
• Accept the congratulations of several major heads of state. Not the hot one, though, because unfortunately it turns out that Canadians voted him out. Bummer.
• Decline an invitation to the Nobel Prize ceremony because it doesn’t align with the baby’s wake windows.

Or, anyway, that’s what I would do, if she slept for thirty minutes. But at around minute eighteen, I hear her wails through the monitor. Tomorrow, I’ll definitely get to the laundry. And Monday, I’ll do the spy-ring thing. ♦