When you have a potentially stressful day, the kind of day filled with every day stresses and craziness and chaos...and when you are channeling your inner Maggie Moore creating hippos and crocodiles coming to the watering hole and pillars and Sphinxes (okay, just one Sphinx, but a really big one), and your dinner turns into spaghetti sauce out of a jar and salad out of a bag, 
it helps to have made baguettes in the morning (when you are up at 6 AM because you smell something really funky in the kitchen garbage and you can't sleep another minute). 
And to let a precocious one year-old play with anything that won't kill him. That usually means the plasticware cabinet...and apparently shoes.And to make a chocolate cake that starts with a mix (to which you add sour cream, pudding, chocolate chips, and pecans among other things) and becomes a warm, gooey, moist yumminess which your precious daughter will pronounce the best cake she's ever eaten.
And you eat said cake dreaming of a machine that folds laundry while giving you a pedicure and rubbing your shoulders.
