It was wise to put bureaucrats in windowless offices.

Brilliant, Molly thought, the cheese samples would absorb the kids while she finished the last bit of shopping for the party - the juice boxes, the rainbow sprinkles, the streamers, the other expenses and excesses of the exhausted mother. What a thing it was, grocery shopping, so tedious and so crucial.

She wondered if other mothers experienced it, this permanent state of mild panic, and worried that perhaps they didn't, that perhaps there was something wrong with her.

Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened / melted, maddened / melted, maddened / melted.

Kitchen-sink cookies," Trishiffany proclaimed. "Sounds disgusting, right? But I've always been so torn about chocolate chips versus butterscotch chips, but here you don't even have to choose. Walnuts and peanuts! Oatmeal and cornflakes! Raisins and dried cherries. Not to mention the shredded coconut. Sometimes we just need our little freedoms, you know?