Yesterday was hectic far beyond what I expected. Today is piled with the aftermath. We are due to drive to the American Library Association, arriving in a couple of days, but all plans are up in the air. It is no longer clear when we'll get out the door. One thing that is clear, however, is that its going to rain until we do.

In the paid-subscription section of the Financial Times, Judy Dempsey argues the WMD scandal (though she doesn't use that word) may push the EU to form its own policies on WMDs, rather than letting the US call the shots:

Europe loses its innocence over WMD

Things tend to move slowly in the European Union. And when it comes to foreign policy, things can move very, very slowly.

But change is in the air. Despite all the deep divisions between the US and Europe and among Europeans themselves, the US-led war in Iraq may well have helped to concentrate the minds of EU countries.

The main reason is that even though weapons of mass destruction have so far not been found in Iraq, the run-up to the war showed the Europeans two things.

It is pointless for individual EU countries to go it alone, believing that if they side with the US, they can influence Washington's thinking.

Secondly, even if the Europeans had pulled together, they would have achieved very little because the EU has never defined its strategic interests, has never considered a security doctrine and has never collectively considered what to with states that had weapons of mass destruction failing all diplomatic, economic and political pressure.

Until this week, that is, when EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg spelt out in considerable detail what they called "An Action Plan for the Implementation of the Basic Principles for an EU Strategy against Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction."

This would be all for the good, it seems to me. While one does want proliferation of actual weapons of mass destruction to be held in check, an EU strategy would go far to prevent future fraudulent uses of the issue. One hopes that this happens soon, before the US invades Iran or Syria.

BEFORE I HAD CHILDREN, I envisioned dressing babies as rather like dressing a doll. Actually dressing a baby can be a lot more like trying to dress a cat: she's squirming, she's trying to get away, and she'd rather not have clothes on anyway.