Exiled In Toyland

Little runaways

2012-02-12T03:54:00.000-08:00

Narrowed eyes, twisted lips, feet that stomp around trying to find purpose.

That's how it begins.

Sometimes there's a grand, You'll-Be-Sorry announcement, but its equally likely the dejected will disappear with a rucksack and fill it to the brim with provisions needed to live a life of solitude.

Forever and ever …

With another family …

Who will love them and treat them better than you do.

Did you hear me? I'm running away! FOREVER!

The declaration had come from left field.

Literally.

We'd been playing baseball in the yard and he'd stormed past me and into the house while I tried to straighten out my smile.

He was mad that I was trying to insert rules into his game. He didn't WANT to run counter clockwise. Why should he leave the bat at home plate? What do you mean base runners rarely get to bat from first to second, second to third and third to home? It's possible he was also miffed that the pitcher (me) staunchly refused to hurl using my mitted hand.

“You catch with the mitt, bud, you don't pitch with it.”

“This is not how I play,” he replied in an accusatory tone.

Evidently I'd wracked up my third strike.

“I'm leaving and I'm never ever never coming back. Ever.”

He tossed the bat and the ball onto the porch and stomped upstairs in his cleats, changed his pants -- which had gotten muddied on one knee from sliding into Pretend Home – and started emptying his dresser drawers into his backpack.

I listened from staircase, trying to sound more concerned than amused.

“I'm going to miss you, Kiddo. Don't forget your toothbrush and flossers.”

When I was his age I ran away from home twice: The first time I got as far as the edge of the overhang on the front stoop. It was raining in sheets and I didn't want to get wet. The second time I got all the way to the mailbox, where a neighbor, noticing me just standing there holding my plaid suitcase, packed to nearly bursting with toys and clothes, asked what brought me there.

I told him I was running away from home. He laughed a little, then mentioned I really hadn't gotten that far. I told him it was as far as I could go since I wasn't allowed to cross the street.

A few years from now this moment will seem more serious. It's hard to assert yourself when you’re in preschool. Not if you need your mom to make you lunch and help you tie your shoes.

It's my daughter I worry about, though.

When Ittybit decided to exert her independence (around age 5) I was unpacking groceries. She'd walked past me in her usual flair; with a kind of brisk pounding of feet and a dramatic flounce of hair as she trudged down the hall to her room.

"She's packing ... " my husband said a few minutes later. "She says she wants to leave."

Before she stormed out I had heard her voice chirping away, flittering between octaves "... ip ip ip ip ip ..." as I opened and closed the refrigerator door, "ip ip ip ip ip ip" as I folded another emptied the shopping bag and stowed it with the other recyclables. "Ip ip ip ip ip ip ip. ..." I really hadn't been listening.

But unlike my son, who appeared before me in February wearing a winter coat, shorts and carrying two backpacks – both filled with clothes that will probably fit him … someday – my daughter's bag was lighter and packed with purpose.

It contained only a few things. A dress. A toy and a book. Nothing I'd given her.

She was crying, but she gave me a second chance to listen to her complaint. As we sat on her bed, a tiny lifetime of upset streamed out with her tears. Upset that seemed to go back as far as the hospital ... when she was born.

"I remember another mother. Not you. A mother who was nicer to me. Who listened to me. Who didn't just SAY she was going to do something she DID it. That's the mother I'm going off to find."

I felt her pain. Everything she wanted from me was always just another In-A-Minute away. And my minutes take longer than her minutes … unless I'm timing them at the park. Those minutes, like all the years between my own childhood and theirs, go by all too fast.

Third child

2012-02-05T04:58:00.000-08:00

Our third child – a girl – has arrived.

Via adoption.

At seven months, she's the picture of health and predictably adorable: Brown hair; a cute-as-a-button nose; and she's an angel when she sleeps, which happens suddenly and throughout the day.

She's perfect in almost every way except maybe one (I wish she'd stop chewing the insoles out of my shoes) or two or four dozen other little foibles ...

Such as pooping in our formal living room ...

Or begging at the table ...

Or stealing socks out of the laundry basket and burying them in the couch ...

Or playing keep-away (and then tug-o-war) with my brand new scarf …

That's puppyhood for you. A period of approximately seven years where dogs pretend to be Kato and their caretakers try not to be Inspector Clouseau -- bumbling and ineffective – every time they walk in the door, even if they were gone for only as long as it takes to put garbage into the trash can.

Her name is Roosevelt, but we call her “Rosie” for short. It suits her, for she's surely progressive if not entirely liberal.

After all, she did learn to sit the first day she arrived. Though most everything else – including housebreaking – is a process requiring much oversight and many, many mistakes.

I'd almost forgotten about these training trials when I saw Rosie's cute little face on the shelter organization's website. All I saw was the puppy my old dog had been way back when and remembering what it was like to have a new dog wiggle its way into your heart.

It's not as if I'd been counting the days. When we lost our dearly beloved, albeit incontinent, geriatric dog six months ago, I wasn't sure how long it would be before I'd be ready to welcome another pooch into our lives.

I thought it might be never after so much time had passed. And there were other things to consider.

We have a cat who, quite frankly, seems remarkably doglike, all she needs to do is learn how to bark. We also have a busy home with small children, toys that will be missed if they turn into shredded plastic and more shoes than any four humans should own. And frankly, I'd gotten used to not cleaning up smelly surprises.

The idea of opening our home for inspection and putting our pet-keeping history under the magnifier of scrutiny seemed like a tough pill to swallow as well.

Dogs had always come into our lives when we least expected. They needed us more than we needed them.

But one look at her picture made me remember Dog People, at some point, need dogs. It also reminded me that pills are only bitter until they start making you feel better.

So off we went to the adoption clinic. An hour after meeting her we knew the chance to bring her home would be worth any blazing-fire, hoop jumping required.

In a week we took her home. In short order she made the house her own, complete with nests of chewed up tissue paper and overly enthusiastic airborne greetings … not to mention the not-so-pleasingly aromatic ones.

Even if she isn't perfect. Even if she chews up all of our pencils, or steals food, or scratches the kids with her jumping, she's a good dog and worth the effort.

And her antics are already imparting wisdom that all my parenting efforts have been unable to achieve:

Such as the value of returning toys to the toy box once playtime has ended, or putting shoes in the closet instead of wherever they land, or eating snacks at the table instead of the couch. Chewed bits of prized possessions inspire more motivation than a mother hollering herself horse.

My bark, I assure you, is not worse than a puppy's bite.

Size matters

2012-01-29T06:46:00.001-08:00

“One children's 8, one 12 and a ladies' size 6 please,” I asked the man behind the counter. I slid my driver's license and a twenty-dollar bill through the glass partition. He lined up the skates and passed them to me with a smile and ten dollars change.

Ittybit had disappeared with her friend and the pair of delicate white skates into the ladies' locker room while I labored over her brother, trying to convince his step-sister-stubborn feet to squeeze their way into this strange-looking boot with a blade.

It was hot and the pressure was on.

“I've never done this before,” he said in a whisper. “Ice skating ...”

“It's going to be fun. You'll see.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him that once the skates were tightly strapped to his feet my expertise would reach its end.

I haven't skated since I was 12, and to be quiet honest I'm not sure what I did back then could be called skating. I don't think I managed to glide anywhere effortlessly. How could I? I never strayed from the rails, where I was holding on for dear life. “Graceful” wasn't a word that would describe me now or then.

The fact that I had actually Googled “How to ice skate,” prior to the excursion and taken notes on my arm would have been lost on him.

No matter. The way things were going we were destined to spend our rink time in the “lounge” trying on skates.

As I loosened and stretched the laces – trying to coax his doubled-socked foot into the boot -- I began to doubt my abilities as a mother.

I thought he was an eight, I grumbled under my breath.

“Wait here, OK? I'm going to go back and get the next size up.”

Back to the window.

“Can I exchange these for a nine?”

“Of course.”

A few minutes later, I have his right foot secured and am working on his left, when a terrible realization makes me wish we'd decided on Wii skating instead: His left foot is ever-so-slightly bigger than his right foot.

Back to the window.

“I'm sorry,” I say, pushing the second pair of skates through the glass. “I need whatever size is next.” I am unsure of just what size that might be – 10, 12, 1? – so I don't want to hazard a guess. I can practically feel the motherhood license being ripped from my parenthood wallet and torn into tiny bits.

When I return with the skates The Champ was quieter than usual. The room had filled with skaters who weren't struggling with fit. And though he could see I wasn't much of an expert at lacing either, he didn't accuse me of “getting in all wrong” like he usually does when I make mistakes … such as “frenching” his waffle by leaving it in the iron until it crisps, or playing games by the instructions on the box and not the rules he arbitrarily concocts.

Finally, fitted and laced, he stood on the blades and walked rather confidently up and down the length of the narrow room.

He was ready to go …

I was fumbling with my skates and praying the sweat from my brow wouldn't smear the notes I needed for the next challenge – to actually skate on ice.

“I wish dad were here,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“Why's that, bud,” I asked, assuming the answer would be my final vote of no confidence.

“Because he could take me to the men's locker room,” he said almost wistfully. “I bet it's more funner in there than on the ice.”

Like mother, like son.

Beside the points

2012-01-22T05:46:00.001-08:00

We barely talk anymore.

With work and kids and crazy schedules … we're rarely alone.

Tragically cliché, I know.

There he was … sitting across from me in the living room, sprawled on the couch as the light from the wood stove painted the room in romantic saffron light.

The television was on … playing a movie we'd barely seen because we continually check emails and status upstates and whatever-else lights up the flickering screens of our smartphones.

Evidently, we're no different than at least 40 percent of US smartphone and tablet users who say they routinely surf the web, visit social network sites or check their email while doing other things … such as watching television.

Personally, I think that figure, arrived at by the Nielsen rating people in October of 2011, seems on the low side, especially since the number of people who claimed to only rarely multitask was around 14 percent. A study released about a month later by Yahoo Mobile and Razorfish put the number at 80 percent, which seems more likely given the substance of most television and the infinite possibilities available on YouTube and LOLCats.

As a society, it pains me to think we learn more about ourselves from Damn You Autocorrect than from The Nightly News, but there it is. … the only daily briefing that makes me laugh until I cry.

We hate it, don't we? Yet, even as I lament the march of progress, I fill my cell phone with apps.

Oh sure, we try to fight it. We make rules we both fully intend to follow …

We promise ourselves we won't check our email during dinner.

We will let all calls go to voicemail.

We won't even look at the text massage that scrolls across the screen.

I won't check Twitter. He won't find out which eBay item he's lost to another bidder. And for a time we are successful. We talk about our day or the the things we have to do tomorrow. It almost feels like the old days … before the invention of the wheel or indoor plumbing.

But before too long the lure of the LED backlight draws us back to it like moths to flame.

In our souls we know the danger, we try to to kick the habit, but we're hooked to the gills on technology.

We talk about an intervention. We talk about where all this distraction will take us in two or 10 or 20 years.

Somehow it feels like trying to stop a flood-raised river with a handful of pebbles.

I type quickly and hit send. A generic alert tone dings across the room. He inhales and picks the phone up off his chest, where it was resting like a pet as he inspected the insides of his eyelids.

He read it and snorted.

“Divorce?”

He sounded incredulous, as if I he couldn't believe I was finally getting serious.

“Yeah … D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

“ … for 72 points?”

“I used all my letters and picked up two triple-letter scores.”

“Nicely played. Nicely played.”

If we can't beat them I suppose we might as well join them.

At least it's something we can do together.

The force of habit

2012-01-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

Two weeks into the New Year and I've already reneged on the resolutions I would have made were I prone to making ritual year-end proclamations pertaining to personal improvement.

This year might have been an exception.

In my mind, if not in verbal resolve, I saw myself vowing to make more homemade dinners; taking long, daily walks; and playing family-friendly games after dinner besides “Who has the Remote Control?”

But just as I was just about to say it aloud: “This year I will …”

I was overtaken by viral-turn-bacterial plague. I could barely turn over on the couch, let alone turning over a new leaf.

Truth be told, I'm not used to getting hammered with the mythical “Man Cold.” Something seemingly slight that takes a person down for the count. But by the third week, I began to wonder if I'd ever feel human again.

I also waxed even more dramatic than usual:

“Our time here is so brief. Don't waste it,” I told myself. “Being sick and knowing you will recover is a gift so many people won't receive. Don't take it for granted. ...

“Oh, Hon? Can you get me a glass of ginger ale and a banana?”

Of course, by that point I hadn't handled bedtime bedlam. I hadn't been the heavy behind brushing of teeth or finishing of books. The last-minute sibling squabbles – a standard ploy of the manufactured extension of playtime – had been swept from my room and shushed with a sensitive admonishment: “Mommy needs her rest.”

Oh, how I missed them.

But as I started to feel better – as my achy joints smoothed over and my stuffy head dried out – the idea that I would take pleasure in the small things in life seemed entirely possible again..

I could breath again. I wasn't sneezing or coughing or fearful of spreading contageon. I missed reading stories and good-night kisses.

Until bedtime rolled around on the second night, as it usually does, with overdue housework, overtired kids wanting to hold off visiting the Land of Nodd until they ate everything in the refrigerator, read every word on their book-buckled shelves and secured the OK to brush their teeth in the morning.

One step forward. Three steps backward.

I could taste the familiar threats as they found their way into my throat.

“There will be no books.

“I will shut this door and listen to you cry.

“I don't care. I can find earplugs.

“You'll have no one to blame but yourselves.”

Somehow, perhaps it was a holiday miracle, the words never made it to my lips.

Stopped, perhaps, but a new perspective.

It's not as if we don't have a routine: They always settle down … eventually. They will brush their teeth and they will fall asleep sooner than it seems. Tomorrow we start again.

This is my resolve.

It's not perfect. But, as I look more closely, it certainly doesn't seem broken.

Perhaps the goal shouldn't be to break habits, it should be to smooth edges.

Lucky stars

2012-01-08T08:22:00.000-08:00

I never watched TV on New Year's Eve. I didn't see any of the hoopla that surrounds the lowering of an illuminated crystal ball in Times Square.

Truth be told, I barely made it to the kids' holiday-extended bedtime of 9 p.m.

But I wasn't surprised by the sentiment among my friends that some things should come to an end.

Like Dick Clark's life in front of the camera.

I wasn't offended.

Dick Clark, an entertainment icon whose entire career had exalted Hollywood's ideal of being forever young, hasn't sounded anything like we, the unwashed masses, have come to expect from on-air personalities since he suffered a stroke in 2004.

Ordinarily, aphasia would have ended his career right then and there.

What people thought of the business decision to allow an 82-year-old entertainer with garbled speech to continue to be a presence on a show he created and hosted for more than three decades, is opinion that can only come down to dollars and cents.

But I was sad.

I've made it no secret that my mother had a stroke this summer.

… and that by fall she'd been institutionalized, as she required skilled nursing care.

She's not like Dick Clark.

Her conversations follow a thread few can follow at all and no one can follow for long.

Her presence, with its stream of seemingly idle chatter, has been disruptive to the church goers and the concert audiences and even the performers who come to the facility to cheer the residents.

I must admit, it hurts to think church is an inappropriate place for my formerly devout Catholic mother.

But I understand it's my soul, not hers, that's in jeopardy.

I'd like to think I was more tolerant before I faced my mother's deteriorating condition, but truth is I too felt better when I didn't see the things that can happen to a body before the end of life.

This is just how we are.

Fearful.

Unconfident.

Anemic.

It just seems to come across more often than not as being unkind.

The real problem I see, however, doesn't have much to do with the people who show up in the world to challenge our fears. It has more to do with the millions of folks who wind up in facilities that have suffered under dwindling state revenues, cuts in federal funding, underfunded programs and diminished ability to actually find and retain skilled nurses who care.

To be sure, this time of life is not cheap.

Medicaid pays for the majority of it as people needing acute care have incomes that barely cover moderate expenses let alone medically intensive long-term care. And as we all know, reform is problematic, Medicaid is underfunded and budgets are tight all over.

For most intents and purposes, there is no fiduciary return on such investment.

Not when we have kids to educate and an economy to rescue.

But there are lessons in empathy and humanity that are invaluable.

When I see Dick Clark these days … I see a man who, in addition to being very talented, was also incredibly lucky.

I think we all need him to remind us of those who may have been the former, but haven't been the latter.

A dog, not our own

2012-01-01T15:32:00.000-08:00

The last thing I wanted to do was stop the car.

I'd just chased one child from the dairy aisle to the lobster case and back while the other kid pretended she belonged to another family. My head was pounding. My eyes feeling as if they were bulging and ready to pop. I was d.o.n.e.

All I wanted to do was go home, unpack the provisions and pop a pair of headache-be-gone.

But a little dog walking alone on the street made me change course.

Now ... it's odd in this day in age to see unaccompanied canines, especially ones of the toy variety.

I tried to see if it was tied up as we passed by, but I couldn't be sure. I circled the block, thinking it may have been a fluffy figment of my imagination and would therefore be gone upon a second drive-by. Nope. It was still there: a cream-colored dust mop on the loose.

The kids were quiet when I stopped the car. I imagine, for an instant, they'd thought I was finally following through on that hollow threat: If you don't stop blankety-blank-blanking I'm pulling this car over ...

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING???”

“Stay right here. I'll be right back. I'm going to see if that dog any tags.”

As any sane dog would do, it started to bark at me and bear its tiny little teeth when I approached. What to do ... what to do ... what to do? It ran to one doorway and then another. Neither opened to swallow her up and save her from my feeble attempts at assistance.

I paced the street a little, looking for someone who might belong to this little beast. The whole town seemed empty. Stores were closed. All the windows above street level were dark. No one even looked in our direction as they passed by on their evening commutes.

How could I just leave her alone a hop-skip from rush-hour traffic? One jaunt into the street and it would be all over.

I decided I'd take my chances that its teeth weren't sharp enough to break skin. When I returned to the shivering mass of hair and nerve endings, it had already decided it would rather go with with a stranger than stay out alone in the cold, oversized world.

I combed through the hair around its neck, where I discovered a collar, but no tags.

It didn't protest when I picked it up, tucked it into my coat and then handed her over to Ittybit, who was more than happy to cuddle a quaking pooch during the four-block ride home. Even The Champ settled down.

I'd cautioned him to be on his best behavior. This was a dog, not a toy.

“I think it's a boy. I'm going to call him George. … Hi George!”

Ah … yes. The other thing this dog was not: Ours.

Don't get attached. This is not our dog. This dog belongs to someone.

“His name is George. I'm going to call him George.”

Not. Our. Dog.

“You mean yet.”

“No, I mean this dog belongs to someone who misses it. We'll find the owner soon.”

I called the shelter to report a found dog.

I called the dog warden.

We took her picture and made fliers.

We waited for the phone to ring.

As I made dinner, this furry scoop of vanilla ice cream stood silently by the stove, willing a slice or two of steak to fall from the counter. I obliged with a bowl full of shavings.

The bowl was licked clean in the blink of an eye and the dog was already curled up on the couch sleeping in Ittybit's lap. Snoring.

It occurred to me how much I missed having a wee beast to clean up the leftovers.

Stop. It.

Don't get attached. This is not our dog. This dog belongs to someone.

I thought of another person to call. And then another. A little lost pocketbook dog would surely be easy to find if we just asked the right people.

Six phone calls later and we had a likely owner.

One phone call after that and we had an affirmative answer. Her was named “Chloe.”

A few tears after her departure made it crystal clear.

It's time to start looking for our dog. The one that that will belong to us.

A Merry Crisis to All

2011-12-25T05:26:00.000-08:00

I don't have a middle name.

My first name is worry.

From the moment I sluice out of bed each morning until I pour myself right back in at night, I am a full glass of anxiety.

The whole season leading up to this day just adds to the confusion. Consumerism. Praxises. Pressure.

I move through it like a clockwork mouse – quickly and in circles. So many thoughts. So many directions. Same old things: MOM! Did you send our Santa letters? … HON! Did you get my text? … MOM! When is Grandma coming? … HON! Did you get to the Post Office?

So, I wasn't really terribly surprised when a scratchy throat on Sunday evening turned into a raging fever and crippling body aches by Monday morning. I just grumbled: DAMN YOU, FLU SHOT (that I never got) how could you forsake me?

Only to have the Seasonal Influenza Vaccine reply, “How many times did you go to Target in December? Speak to my plunger, you lilly-livered sap, I KNOW you saw my sign.”

Oh yes. It was laughing at me as I just lay there on the couch in a miserable, radiating heap. “You'll just have to sweat me out.”

My husband took over, bless his atheist soul, and unlike most Hollywood plots would have it he directed the choo-choo station traffic with better precision than I ever seem to manage. I didn't even have to get out of bed to give “kisses goodnight.”

He juggled all the balls I threw his way with grace, but by Friday I was crazed:

I. Am. Going. To. Die. My kids will be motherless. (And they won't even miss me.) Their dad will be a widow. (Until he decides which of my friends to date.)

You can't really blame me. Fevers each day. Feverish dreams each night. But blame you shall: “Get thee to a doctor and muster some little pink soldiers to knock down this invading army of microbes, you twit.”

Or was that my husband?

No matter.

Physician, who had previously advised “Heal thyself,” was now piping: “Here's Z-Pak to-save-the-day.”

Of course, with the first dose I felt better immediately and just in time to witness (if not fully participate in) the amazing three-ring-spectacular that would be a “Craftacular Birthday Party” to mark the start of Ittybit's Year 8.

Three weeks' planning and about 65 tons of glitter went into the extravaganza to which her entire Second Grade class (which if you add for sound and excitement factors equates to approximately 3,004 children) and their siblings (another 5,000) would be invited.

Did I mention it would be at our house?

No?

Should have. Sorry.

Sure the doctor told me to “REST!” but I was feeling better just one day with the Z-Troops. I could go up the stairs. I could go down the stairs. Up. Down. Down. Down. I'm gonna sit down. For a while. Am I having trouble breathing? Do I feel light headed?

I settled the question by answering the 11th hour Phone Call of Concern: “You know, SO-AND-SO nearly DIED when they were recovering from pneumonia? Be VERY careful.”

I'm picturing it all over again.

I. Am. Going. To. Die. My kids will be motherless. (Only this time a birthday will be ruined forever.) Their dad will be a widow. (And he's met many new, potentially single mommies at the party I missed while I went to the ER.)

But I do feel light-headed. I AM having trouble breathing. I need to go get checked out, so a friend takes me.

When the nurse hooks me into the vital statistic pole, it's painfully obvious to me that everything is under control except my anxiety.

I'm lucky it's a slow day at the ER because we're home for the opening of presents.

I'm also lucky to have a husband who is so good in a crisis. I'm even pretty sure he would have been able to talk me out of mine if he hadn't been juggling 8,004 little crafters with only a handful of very lovely assistants.

Merry Christmas to all, and may all your crises be small.

All scars heal

2011-12-18T04:55:00.000-08:00

“Where do babies come from, Mom?”

It's the question du jour from the inquisitive four-year-old.

Especially a four-year-old whose new neighbor is getting ready to celebrate an entirely new birthday come the New Year.

And all this newness seems to attach itself quite indelibly and in opposite proportion to the fact that our little ones aren't so little any more.

It doesn't surprise me that the place to reminisce has always been around cakes with growing number of complexity and an increasing number of candles.

In fact, I'm beginning to think birthday parties and birth stories go together like cake and ice cream.

As you stand there watching your children tear through presents and serenade each other with off-key songs with added verses that have been around since you were a child yourself, or choruses of “cha-cha-chas” as is the new way, you can't help but go hurling back in time however many years to the moment this crazy, whirling dervish came into your life.

How many times have I mentioned that “I can't believe they'd let me take an infant home?” I'd hardly ever so much as babysat an infant besides a few minutes of holding them at arms-length, praying they wouldn't cry before their moms got back from the restroom.

So many women. So many stories.

And though each of us has a slightly different experience, we are part of a collective. I stand there blinking as I learn the majority at this party have had caesarian sections. Only one was lucky enough to go the natural, no-drugs way.

I stop myself from adding to the choruses of reassurance that having the doctor hatch them was the only way that our babies were ever coming out. Could things have been different is something I've filed away in that place that makes the disappointment less of a nagging reminder.

These days, though, I'm not doing a good job of reassuring myself that was entirely the case.

So many children. So many questions.

The Big Question, right about now is not exactly “Where do babies come from?” though, that's just how they ask it. They frown a little when you point to your abdomen and tell them they grew inside. “No no no no no no: “How do babies get out of your tummy?”

My best friend in the entire universe gently steered her son from his train table to a popular birth reality television show when a pushing, grunting, screaming woman brings life into the world the conventional way.

“That's pretty much how it works.”

He thought that was pretty cool.

I thought I got lucky … There's only reality for us.

All I have to do is point to my incision and remind them a doctor had to go in and get them.

As they look at me in naked awe, I know there's no need to rationalize the scars that brought them to me. All scars heal but only some scars remind you of something so amazing.

For sale - best offer

2011-12-11T06:30:00.000-08:00

You ever look at something so closely that you can't quite see it at all?

That word that you say over and over again until it loses its meaning?

Sitting in front of the old coffee shop, waiting for a friend you haven't seen in god-knows-how-many-years. Maybe you're early. So early that you'd drink your weight in caffeinated beverages if you went inside.

So you sit in your car, waiting. Perhaps you run through the radio presets. Check your bag. Write a list. Think of all the things you have left to do before Christmas. You check the time. Still too early, but getting closer. Once you've exhausted the entertainments inside the car, you turn your attention outside.

Place seems dead. Not like the old days. How many customers have come through the door? You've not been paying attention. You don't think much of it. Times change, people find new hotspots, trends come and go.

Squinting through the windshield you start reading signs:

“Parking for customers only.”

… with dramatic emphasis.

“Parking .. foooooooor cuuuuuuuustomers owwwwwnnnnnleeeee.”

“For Sale – Best Offer.”

“FEEEEEEEERRRR SAAAAAAAAAILLLLLLL.”

“BESSSSSSSSSSSSSST OFFAAAH”

“We've Moved!”

Weavemooooooooved.

Weeeee've Mooooooooooooooooooooooved.

“Oh wait … They moved.”

You read the sign a little more closely, and without the Aussie accent, and head over to the new address … where you find an automatic coffee machine and a few packages of individually-wrapped slabs of marshmallow and puffed rice cereal.

And your friend … looking a little lost, too.

That's a little like the way I felt – lost – reading a piece this week in the New York Times about the unwholesome connection between the nation's schools and the food industry.

“How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid's Lunch” tells the story of how 32 million children in this country – 21 million of them eligible for free or reduced priced meals – feast each day on farm surplus food that, in many cases, began its journey through the elementary canal at the commodities level. It begins its round trip as fresh meat, fruit, milk -- provided free – which is then turned over to for-profit food processors, only to return to the schools' defacto kitchens as nutrient-poor chicken nuggets, potato logs and HFC-laiden fruit drinks.

It's not as if I haven't been reading the lunch menu that comes home monthly with Ittybit. I know the lunch choices in any given week offer two kinds of pizza, two kinds of minced and re-formed chicken substances and the wildcard offering: burger, hotdog or taco.

When I was a kid, walking the school lunch line was a different experience. We had pizza and tator tots on special occasions, it's true. But we also had women dishing out food they'd made from the boxes of greens, sacks of potatoes and trays of whole chickens that waited for their attentions – on a loading dock or walk-in-cooler – each morning.

It seems almost a foreign idea to me that school districts ever provided working kitchens, complete with potato mashers and ricers and hair-netted cooks whose job it was to provide scratch meals for 400 or more children each weekday noon-time.

We've become so specialized, we've outsourced virtually everything.

Someone else can do it better. Cheaper. Faster. More appealing to kids and their picky appetites.

Only, according to the Times article, the savings haven't materialized. Schools may have cut the cost of staffing and preparation, but the fees associated with food processing has made it a wash.

As I sit here, blinking at this new legacy we're doling out like rubbery chicken nuggets, a reality that should have been apparent to me all along finally dawns on me: Even our schools are “For Sale – Best Offer.”

Virtue that is patient

2011-12-04T06:25:00.000-08:00

It wasn't going to be a big deal.

We'd checked with all the doctors. All but one were in the network. And the doc who didn't par with the the plan assured us getting approval to leave the green was merely a formality.

After all, he was the only white coat for miles who specialized and The Champ had been his patient since Day One.

But when I called the pediatrician's office the day before the scheduled appointment -- thinking quite naively that this sacred document known as an Out-Of-Network Referral was as easily obtainable as a prescription for antibiotics in the '80s – I learned the wheels of bureaucracy travel from Point A to Point B in roughly four business days.

Patience is a virtue.

That wasn't the worst part, though.

The rescheduling of appointments I could handle. The contradiction was another ballgame entirely.

As one doctor giveth … an office manager taketh away: According to her experience, it was not only possible but “PROBABLE” that my insurance would deny the request and make an in-network referral of their own.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Three offices, five people and seven self-induced heart attacks later I was still holding my breath and my hand firmly on my ...

Eventually it was all sorted out with a few dozen extra steps … Gone was the convenient in-office tests. Replaced with a fun-filled trip to the imaging center of the big hospital, followed by a nearly two-hour layover for the doctor's appointment. Peanuts, however, would be available for a nominal fee at the vending machine.

It would be ok. It really wasn't a big deal. It was just like hopping a connecting flight.

Except I was dreading it.

The instructions were daunting. “Follow the walkway to the main building. Check in at the check-in then go to registration. You will need all of your documents and a picture ID. He needs to be here, with a full bladder, a half hour before the test. … If you have to bring siblings, you will need a second adult to watch them while you accompany your son. If you are late your appointment may need to be rescheduled.”

This is your mission … You have no choice but to accept it.

Truth is, what I really dreaded was spending even a minute in a room marked RADIOLOGY/ONCOLOGY with my boy. I dreaded looking into the faces of mothers whose children weren't there for something routine.

I have to admit, up until that moment, I cursed the insurance company for making me feel as if I were wearing a red foam nose and oversized shoes to jump through their flaming hoops.

But there was my son, dressed in his best worn-out pajamas and bat-winged jacket, selecting a Santa from the coloring sheets and reaching for the crayons one at a time. “He will be a Rainbow Cwaus,” he whispered. “I'll give him to the nice lady at the desk when I'm froo.”

He entertained himself like this from one waiting area to another ... and another ... and another for the better part of hours.

Climbing onto the exam tables. Climbing down. Crawling under chairs. Back up to the exam table. Opening and closing doors. Curtains. Blinds. Fogging the mirrors. Break dancing. Until he realized: The. Rolling. Stool-thing-a-ma-seat!!!!! was out of its garage and ready for a test spin.

He'd just be the valet. He'd drive it on over to the doc once he knock-knocked on the door.

The Champ is one patient who IS truly patient.

Even with the limited space and plentiful requests to stop, sit, shhhh, let go, don't pull on that and leave that thing-I-can't-pronounce alone … he was mostly all smiles … until he had to pee:

“I have to pee.”

“That's good. They're probably going to want a sample.”

“What do they want with my pee?”

“They're going to test it to see if there's anything in it that shouldn't be.”

“Are they going to give it back?”

“Do you want it back?”

And then he was all laughs.

“Only if there's LEGOs in it.”

Rustling up the ghosts of Christmases past

2011-11-27T03:52:00.000-08:00

As I rustle through the stores this holiday season mulling the purchases that will either make Santa a hero or me a zero (because, lets face it, blaming the big guy for getting the wrong toy just isn't done) I thought I'd wander down Memory Lane and remember all the gifts that haven't been forgotten the second the wrapping paper had been cleared away:

BIC Mark-It permanent ink markers – $23

We bought the 36-count set ions ago. Likely before The Champ was even born. We still have all 36 and all of them work. There is no substitute for good markers. And no end to how you can use them. This year we'll be making tie-dye shirts with permanent markers and rubbing alcohol.

Optic Wonder by Toysmith – $7

It's not really a wonder … it's a binocular/compass combo that rarely gets used in our house for either of those functions. But this a $7 hunk of plastic (now missing the compass feature) has certainly repaid its price ten-times over … though I doubt I bought it. Honestly? I had no idea what this mystery gadget was. It just turned up one day and it's been an important tool for propping up toys, spying on sisters and viewing the opera from the living room ever since.

FurReal Newborn Chimpanzee - $14

We call him “Monkey Baby” and The Champ won't leave home (or sleep) without him. Luckily (because of temporary misplacement) we have three of these babies. The “real” part of the monkey – chittering, snoring and squawking have all lost their appeal (not to mention battery juice). Even I must admit it's creepy how cute he is.

Vintage camera, thrift shop - $1

The kids will always dig this baby out of the toy box.

You can find them at etsy, but I'd go to Salvation Army … or Goodwill … yard sales. You might also want to check grandpa's attic.

Haba Geomix blocks - $46

We received these Geomix block by Haba as a gift when Ittybit was two. I'm not sure anyone would outgrow these. Ever.

Hello Kitty Sewing Machine by Janome - $115

Cute. Versatile. Sturdy. Indispensable.

Santa brought a Sew Mini by Janome, ($60) which was handy and good for light-weight crafting, but ended up needing repairs after only a few months. Santa now recommends spending just a little more.

Wooden train set - $50

Their father had a small set … probably from the Brio company.

We went with Circo at Target. Got a 120-piece set for about $50. It's easy to assemble, fits with the old Brio set as well as another plastic model recently and lovingly handed down. I think the best part may be that it's a toy that won't end up in a yard sale.

And it's hours of fun.

Legos – Anywhere from $3 to a small fortune

You will step on them, sweep them up, step on them again … but you will never curse the day they were invented. Neither will your kids.

Littlest Pet Shop - $4 to $40

Ittybit got her first Littlest Pet Shop when she was two. I got an apology from the benefactor. “They're like crack,” she whispered so that her own daughter wouldn't hear. Now we have more than a hundred of these little bobble headed things. Parents hate them. Kids love them. Can't win every battle.

Superstar Mic - $1

Target dollar bin. Looks like the biggest piece of crap going: A plastic ice cream cone housing a metal coil. Batteries not even needed. Big whoop.

Yet … It's been the best dollar Santa ever spent.

This year Santa is looking into

A pottery wheel

A marble chute

A microscope

and an ice cream maker

I'll let you know how my kids think they stack up against the best toy ever made …

The cardboard box.

It's true, actually

2011-11-20T06:58:00.000-08:00

The Champ knows everything. It's true, actually.

The only thing he doesn't seem to grasp is the ability to get my attention without tugging on my shirt.

As I gaze down at the creature testing all his weight on my boiled wool cardigan, he smiles cherubically from under his favorite winter hat, his ears sticking out at an elf-like angle.

I catch his hand and gently peel each finger away from the over-stretched fabric.

“What is it?”

“Did you know bats mostly don't eat blood? It's true, actually. They eat bugs and fruit. We should have a pet bat. Can we get one next time we see a bat store?”

“Sure thing. Let's make a list so we don't forget.”

His expression, now puckered and overly cute, tells me he knows the bat store is a figment of his imagination. I have failed to take the bait.

He continues to quiz me.

“Did you know that there's a wolf what eats nothing but insects? It's true, actually. They're called ART Wolves!!! I think they also eat paint and crayons if it's winter out and the insects go off to hibernate or something. But that's only in the winter time. On all the other days they just eat bugs.”

For a moment, as I make a mental picture of a jackal-like ant-eater snacking away on a waxy stalk of Cornflower Blue in the arctic chill of a South African winter, I consider correcting him. “Aardwolves, a relative of the hyena, eat mostly termites, larvae and carrion. ARTwolves are mythical beasts who eat the crafts of children who don't put away their markers.”

Another failure on my part.

He and his sister are fond of nature shows. They've been watching “Wild Kratts,” a nature series for children on PBS starring the Kratt brothers – Martin and Chris – two science grads who've taken the basic documentary tenant of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and blended it with the modern animation and dramatic license of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

Among recent topics has been the diet of aardwolves, the tracking of Monarch butterflies and how to identify venomous snakes. There's always some tidbit of information that makes you look at whomever else is in the room and repeat what you just heard.

“Did you know Zebras can't see orange?”

The adults will answer: “I had no idea.”

The sprogs will blank stare you as if you just walked in from the moon. “Of course they can't see orange.”

By the time the show is over both kids want to be zoologists, sneaking up on their stuffed animals in an effort to study their behaviors.

But the Kratt brothers sometimes do things you NEVER want to do … Things that will make you think there's a little more Steve Irwin in the brothers' background than Jim Fowler or Marlin Perkins.

Just little things like vexing a venomous viper … or hugging an 80-pound crocodile … cuddling up with a beaver.

It's not as if The Champ is going to be swimming with sharks or aping gorillas any time soon, but I still feel the need to tell him manhandling nature, no matter how gentlemanly, might not be in his (or their) best interest.

“Did you know apes can talk … with their HANDS? It's true, actually. If I saw an ape I would talk to him with my mouth.”

“That's probably a better idea then trying to get his attention by tugging on his shirt.”

You never have all the answers

2011-11-13T04:00:00.001-08:00

“Do you remember when Amah ate paint?”

How could I forget?

No one had seen it coming, least of all The Champ. Certainly not me.

His palette was a circle of dots of tempera paint on a sheet of freezer paper. Paintbrush in hand, he was mulling his choices before deciding what color to paint the engine compartment of the unfinished balsa wood train.

I thought it was a project we could all focus on together.

She was starting to wander. … He was noticing something had changed. We were together for the afternoon.

Everyone seemed confused and agitated.

Painting, I said to myself, would be a pleasant diversion.

Better than watching TV …

or playing games with complicated sets of rules.

Rules that were changing all the time.

But even as her fingers dipped into the light blue paint and mixed a little with the orange next to it, I thought she was forgoing the brush and painting, literally, by hand.

When the swirl of marbled color disappeared into her mouth, I knew nothing would likely be easy again.

I wiped her hands and her mouth, put away the paints and then redirected my son, who was stunned and angry.

“Let's just play with cars until papa comes back from the store.”

Thinking back, it seemed like something that happened years before ... not just weeks ago.

Thing is this thing that happened to her – first the stroke, and then dementia, and finally delirium – has left us all staring into the high-beams of oncoming disbelief.

It's not as if we had to tell the kids. They already knew.

They could plainly see Amah was different. Her conversations ran on the same loop. Mostly questions that cycled repeatedly: How long had we lived here? How long have you had a pool? I didn't know you had a cat? Your dad has a cat, you know … it just showed up one day … looks just like yours.”

She couldn't remember the answers we gave her minutes ago. She couldn't say our names.

It was happening right in front of us. All I could do was try to explain what they were witnessing, even when I barely knew myself. All I could do was ask them if they were OK … if they had questions … and then answer them as best as I could.

“Amah isn't herself. She's had a brain injury and some things are getting confused. It's not something she can help. We have to be patient.”

But patience isn't something that comes without practice.

I expected The Champ to need lots of patience from me. He was angry and scared and wanting to be far away from her. It was a natural response, and one I didn't try to reform.

I gave him time and space. He didn't want to visit. I didn't make him.

Amah knew she wasn't herself. In between the barrage of questions, which I believe was her own way of trying to make sense of this new state in which she found herself, she wanted to make sure the kids weren't hurt by her forgetting.

“I know them. I know who they are.”

“I know, Ma. They know, too. Try not to worry. Rest … don't try to remember.”

But it was all just slipping away from her grasp.

The Champ can see that now, too. But he's no longer mad.

When he comes with me to visit her, she smiles at him and tells him he's amazing in words that aren't exact translations. I just know what she means and tell him so.

He reciprocates by tossing a ball and helping with her exercises.

I praise everything he does for her. I celebrate every smile he gives her and that she returns.

Being helpful makes him feel good in ways I hadn't really understood he needed.

“I want to visit Amah today, too. I want to tell her I'm sorry for being mad at her.”

“I think she knows, buddy. I really think she knows.”

A little about my mother

2011-11-06T04:29:00.000-08:00

Something was wrong. I was playing Words With Friends with my mother and I was winning.

We'd been playing the game together … at night … in our separate houses … 11 miles apart … for more than a year. It was always the same. I would come up with words like “Pro” for six points and she would counter with “Pyxes” for 104 points … and then she would send me a note over the game's little messaging system with an apology.

She always felt bad about winning.

She'd often joke that I'd taken so long coming up with my plays that she'd had to let the game select strangers for her to play with as she waited. She liked that she could juggle 12 games at once.

For a few days, though, her plays were taking longer and resulting in smaller scores. It. Was. Here.

She told me she'd been having trouble finding words in her letters, but I'd just assumed she'd gotten a load of vowels and no consonants … or something like that. It's an excuse I've used all the time to explain my pathetic strategizing.

I wanted to believe her because the thought also crossed my mind that she was letting me win.

Some things we leave unspoken.

When she called on the phone and told me she was having trouble writing an email to a relative, I just assumed she meant that she didn't know what to say. She hated email. She felt self conscious writing sentiments.

We. All. Do. That.

But that wasn't it.

She confessed she'd started putting the tiles into spaces and letting the game tell her if she'd made a word or not. I've done that so many times, I now know that “Qi” is life energy – the central underlying principal in traditional Chinese medicine, thank-you-very-much.

But. Not. Her.

These. Were. The. Words. She. Had. Been. Guessing. Words she could have spelled in her sleep.

It had taken me four days to understand that my mother, who did four crossword puzzles a day, who had the best vocabulary of anyone I knew, couldn't spell simple words.

Oh. My. God.

“Mom, you need to go to a hospital. You may have had a stroke.”

She tried to dismiss it. “I haven't had a stroke,” she said, worried she'd spend all day in an emergency room only to have a smiling resident confirm her worst fear: This was the beginning of dementia.

But she was also a nurse. She knew that stroke doesn't always come with severe headache, unilateral weakness or slurring of speech. It can be silent, too.

My father took her to the emergency room.

Turns out she'd had several strokes all over her brain.

Still we thought the news was good. No one could have known she'd had a brain injury. When she left the hospital a few days later she was in good spirits. She was walking, talking and conversing rather normally.

She still played Words With Friends.

But it was frustrating. Words didn't come any easier with time. She worried that it was getting worse. I joked that the only reason I was winning was because she'd had a stroke. I assured her things would improve.

I never imagined it would get worse. She'd already stopped playing strangers and now she couldn't read the buttons. She kept resigning games instead of submitting plays. The buttons confused her.

Eventually she stopped playing all together.

Her decline was so precipitous, it was as if she had slipped away as we were talking and someone only vaguely familiar took her place.

But hope persists. My father kept saying “it could be worse” even as it was getting worse.

I searched the Internet, I spoke with family and friends who’ve had similar experiences or who work in medicine. We had some success in finding root causes of her worsening condition, treated them, but nothing turned around. Not the way we'd hoped.

Doctors spoke of new baselines and tough roads ahead. Long-term care was something we, like many families, couldn't have predicted. Not even a few months ago.

I just kept thinking about that first diagnosis, and how the doctor had remarked no one who didn't know her would have noticed the difference.

Now she doesn't recognize me until I tell her my name.

Sometimes I think this is the saddest moment of our lives together. Me and my mom.

But then she smiles at me with her familiar crooked smile …

and she tries to spell something.

And I realize:

She's still in the game.

She's still my mother.

Thinking outside of the cardboard box

2011-10-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid costumes were easy.

Or so I assumed.

A week or so before the last day in October some garment so incredibly wonderful and perfect in every way shape and form floated down from the heavens and beckoned me to wear it.

Of course it only seemed special to me if it came in a thin cardboard box with a cellophane oval on the front that revealed a plastic mask stapled on each side with a strand of rubber band.

Special meant store bought. It also meant “would-break-rip-or-become-musty-by-mid-evening.”

The first costume I remember adoring was a vampire assembled out of my mother's navy wool nursing cape, some red lipstick, talcum powder and a touch of burnt cork to hollow out my eyes and cheeks. It was simple, yet effective. Early arrivals were convinced I was the devil, and their shrieks could be heard loud and clear.

I felt bad enough to let my mom take over handing out candy, though not bad enough to change.

The fact that my parents had scoured the closet for old shirts that could be cinched at the waist or stuffed with pillows to recreate any number of clever personas on a smaller scale, was lost on me.

I was equally as oblivious to the sentiments my uncle scrawled – a thickly veiled expletive -- in permanent marker on the sign I paraded around, explaining I was masquerading as “Edith Anne … and you're not. PHPHPH.” It was years before he told us the inside joke on that last bit.

But this is a family paper so I can't spell it out. Let's just say I should have just schlepped around an oversized rocking chair to help people figure out who I was.

But, ahhh. Those were the days. We ebbed and flowed between spontaneous creativity and Saturday morning cartoon as effortlessly as butterflies took flight.

Some things don't change.

My kids have always had a mix of homemade and store-bought costumes. Princess garb has long been a favorite, as have Space Rangers and Spider Men.

And honestly, I've been fine with going the commercial route. Traffic moves faster there.

It took me so many months to come up with a cardboard box parade dragon for Chinese New Year that we finally used it in July.

Although it would give our neighbors a chuckle, I'm not sure I can make the kids wait for Christmas to go Trick-or-Treating.

But it looked like we were heading for Halloween in December this year as each passing day brought no clear decisions from either Ittybit or The Champ.

They knew what they didn't want to be.

“Not a princess.” “Not Batman.” “Someone already took the 'Fire Fairy.'” “And I am not wearing a Pirate outfit.” Racks and racks of perfectly presentable machine-made costumes left them mostly uninspired.

But there was time. Halloween browsing usually starts in mid-July. Stores know this kind of decision making doesn't happen overnight. They plan accordingly. Like right after swimsuit season is over in the Spring.

Still, my kids go down to the wire and eventually come up with stuff so out of the ordinary that even Lady Gaga's designers would have trouble delivering.

This year, in a stroke of inspiration at the break of dawn, a week before the big day, Ittybit appeared at my bedside with grand plans to be a butterfly whisperer.

“You want to whisper to butterflies?”

Her stern look set me straight. No, she will be a girl so sweet and so lovely that she just attracts the fragile insects wherever she goes. They will gather on her clothes, in her hair and drape around her like jewelry.

“She doesn't even wait for the question that is planning to escape after I rub my eyes of sleep.

“Construction paper and hot glue gun.”

It's nice to have a kid who has all the answers.

“Hey … your brother said he's decided he wants to be a superhero skeleton … how can we do that?”

“Oh … he wants to be Metroman when he faked his own death. In the movie, Metroman borrowed a fake skeleton from a nursing school and put it in his cape. You know of any nursing schools?”

“No. But I know where we can borrow a cape.”

Waste not, want not

2011-10-23T04:43:00.000-07:00

Technically we shouldn't have been there.

DropOff SwapOff is a semi-annual event for the community of Concord, Massachusetts, wherein residents drop off piles of hard to recycle recyclables as well as carloads of serviceable items, such as grandma's old sewing machine, and exchange them for things they could use, like a bookcase or a stroller or a big basket. You never know what treasure awaits.

But there we were in in this historic Boston suburb, visiting elderly relatives, smack dab in the middle of the social (and environmental) event of October. How could we miss it?

The idea is pretty self-explanatory: Some people haul their unwanted stuff to the department of public works, and a veritable army of volunteers sort the goods according to destination: Rags here. Lightbulbs there. Hmmm. … What's this? Working telescope? Walk it over to the swap yard.

It is trash and treasure hunting at its finest: A giant yard sale without the hassle of pricing or paying or keeping watch over the shop.

Since dumps have closed in cities and towns across the country, household waste days have by necessity gotten more creative. Most communities have opportunities for residents to pile their unwanted junk at the ends of their driveways so, in the early morning hours, a municipal truck can spirit it away … never to be seen again.

Not all of our seen-better-days stuff winds up in the trash, of course. But that's a conscious decision made by the few, the proud, the willing to dumpster dive. College students, and even first-time apartment dwellers, have long engaged in this brand of midnight curbside shopping.

Scavenger hunts ahead of the garbage trucks, however, aren't the meat as much as the byproduct. Concord, by contrast, puts reuse ahead of refuse.

Waste not, want not has special meaning for this community.

After midday, the SwapOff was still refreshing its second-hand inventory, though now in a trickling stream. One man hauled in a basketball hoop while another schlepped out a pile of lacrosse sticks.

A woman pushes in a tiny tricycle and rolls out with a spiffy, new-to-her two-wheeler.

As I watched the controlled chaos of the exchange it occurred to me that what I was witnessing was so much more than an ordinary clean-up day. It was more like a challenge-your-imagination day.

Smack dab in front of the DPW building, a man wearing a bright orange vest was building an elaborate sculpture out of the junk that no one wanted. His nametag read “Bill.”

“Today I'm really just an editor,” he said as we were walking by. “You can make suggestions. You can even help,” he told the children as they showed some interest.

It was my husband, though, who couldn't resist. He's the real junk-art-aholic.

As they positioned cross-country skis this way and screwed ping-pong paddles to bird feeders that way, I meandered through the SwapOff. I looked back to see the men upending a battered old Dog Igloo onto a floating basketball hoop, and imagined them discussing the finer points of screw guns and duct tape.

I continued browsing, thinking truly there was nothing I needed. That's when I nearly tripped over the wooden two-room doll house sitting alone and unwanted. I picked it up, my mind whirring: the roof drooped from a broken hinge, a window bulged out, the wallpaper was water stained and faded. It was perfect. The toy I always wanted but, as a self-declared tomboy, had never asked for.

I hauled the prize back to my family and our new friend, Bill.

“Is that for ME?” my daughter asked a little nervously. She already has a dollhouse that suits her fine.

“No. It's for me. I always wanted to make a haunted dollhouse. Now I have my chance.”

The look on her face told me I never really had to worry about my tomboy status.

The only thing I have to worry about now is what occasion will bring us back to Concord in May.

Digging out of the money pit

2011-10-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

It all started when I bought him the wallet. Alright … it was, in all likelihood, some time before that … possibly when I told him he could have any money he found under the couch cushions if he helped me vacuum … but that's neither here nor there.

Vacuuming wasn't The Champ's first choice of employment options. With his slight frame and fear of loud noises, it simply wasn't a good match.

The wallet, on the other hand, was the thing that pulled the whole idea together. The wallet meant independence. It also meant incentive.

The fact that the blue, nylon billfold sported an adorable pirate smiling out in sweet cartoonish innocence under a red sticker marked “Half Price” was only incidental.

It was a perfect storm of development milestone meets consumer millstone … a fiduciary accessory that was cute to boot.

Of course it was an impulse purchase.

Regardless, it seemed like the perfect time to introduce the concept of cold hard cash. Shopping trips as of late had become interesting, mostly as a result of his interest in points of purchase and my dwindling income. “Just go to the bank,” was never a viable solution to the perennial “We don't have any money for that frivolous purchase” conundrum anyway

How much things cost was the easy part. How much he was worth, harder. Confusion about why I could not give him a job that could earn him riches beyond his wildest dreams lead to many questions … and then, like any good capitalist, the ignoring of answers all together.

“And then we'll go to the Toy Store … and I will buy my own toy,” he said with the resolve of a thousand boys who'd only just yesterday been thwarted from that very pursuit with a single “No” for an answer.

“Son. You don't have enough money to buy the Super Duper Connecting Blocks Activity Set with the Inlayed Gold and Ruby Encrusted Helipad that I told you we couldn't afford yesterday … and the day before that.”

“But I have a wallet now.”

“And you haven't earned enough money. You only have 16 cents you found in the laundry and a pile of crumbs from the sofa.”

“You could give me more money. I would put it in my wallet and then I could buy the toy.”

“You have to save your money and stop spending it on Alien Attack packages you don't remember two days after you've bought them.”

“But you could …”

“Nice try, but no.

“The. End.

Dusting hands.”

Ok .. it was a string of Nos in rapid succession, but no one behind me in line would challenge my right to use the parenting express lane just because I'd put more than 14 items in my basket. Fourteen Nos are basically one item. Fourteen Nos aren't anything like one No and 13 Maybes … (if you Stop Carrying On like a Spoiled Brat or any number of other potentially mollifying flavors).”

Sounding crazy is just a perk of seat-of-my-pants parenting. I believe most kids intuitively know this and test you at inopportune moments just because they like proving their impish power.

It also shows where the power truly lies … with the squeakiest wheel.

Where was I? Oh yes ...

The empty wallet, which was still a problem in the eyes of The Champ.

“If I had a million dollars, ma, I'd buy you breakfast at Old McDonald's.”

“If you had a million dollars I'd want more than Old McDonald's my friend. I'd want you to pay your fair share of taxes so we could stop firing teachers and start fixing bridges.”

“So how can I earn the money for my Legos?”

I shrug my shoulders.

“Perhaps you should go out to the garden and dig for buried treasure. I'm pretty sure I saw some. All you need to do is clear away the weeds.”

A model husband

2011-10-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

“Did I miss a memo ...?”

His text messages were blinking. It was Sunday night, but his office manager had a pressing question that couldn't wait until Monday.

My husband laughed as he held out his phone so I could see the barrage:

“Is there something I should know? … Such as ... Have you changed professions? Exactly how long have you been a male model?”

She'd been leafing through her copy of This Old House magazine and recognized her employer's face in a Campbell's Soup ad.

Well, actually she only thought she recognized his face. She wasn't exactly sure until she studied the two children balanced on the back of the line-backer-esqe man pretending he was a bucking bronco.

“I'd know those kids anywhere,” she said of Ittybit and The Champ.

He was laughing as he typed a response: … “Ever since I married a photographer.”

He's a good sport.

How could he not be when the focus of my camera often makes my heavy-object-moving, truck-driving husband the target of cheek-biting barbs.

“You sure you can lift that all by yourself? I wouldn't want you to break a nail … or muss your hair ... now that you're a model and all.”

He's a better sport than I'd be, anyway, if my hairdresser had done the double-mirror inspection bit wherein I learned he'd been photoshopping hair on my bald spot ... for years, by the size of it.

I meant well. Really, I did.

But I digress.

I've been selling stock photographs for a few years: A couple of regional ads here, a few website illustrations there. Most of the sales amount to pocket change, which I try to squirrel away so the kids will be able to buy themselves sweatshirts from their college bookstores in 12 or 15 years.

We rarely see the finished advertisements or know where they end up other than the monthly statement of sales telling which ad agency bought what photo. Based on those accountings, it's been apparent that non-US sales are the bread and butter of my little toaster factory. In fact, his minor popularity abroad has become a running joke. He likes to tell people he's “big in Belgium,” though technically his likeness has been licensed more times in Germany.

So being recognized in this country, not to mention finding out (from another Facebook friend) that the same ad appeared in Sports Illustrated was an extra special treat. And one that meant he and I would spend our anniversary “date night” at the newsstand carefully leafing through every possible book that might contain ads for soup.

Honestly. I never knew there were so many magazines. Or so many ads. Or soups.

I think we might have been there an hour learning about the intricacies of advertising one publication at a time. Few ads seemed to be repeated, and don't bother looking for anything save performance enhancing potions in men's fitness magazines.

“So,” I wondered. “If we're blaming fashion magazines for bulimia can we blame fitness magazines for baseball?”

He shrugged.

“Look at this: Page after page of statistics. Honestly, I think I'm missing some genetic component for spectator sports. Reading this kinda thing would make me go blind.”

“Nope. This would make you go blind,” I laugh, holding up the prize he thought I'd overlooked: Maxim. I knew he'd poured over it slowly and carefully as I inspected every single offering in the home design section.

“I think I'll just go through that one more time. I may have missed a page.”

Having influence often means trusting theirs

2011-10-02T07:09:00.001-07:00

Most of the time, as a parent, and even as citizen of the world, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing.

It's not as if I don't look around and see all the things that others do differently. Do better.

The truth is, having so many directions to turn makes every step we take seem precarious. Go this way and you meet a dead end. Turn that way and you may fall off a cliff.

It's enough to make a parent crazy.

Raising children is life's eternal experiment.

Someday we will unleash these people we made into the world, our bath-phobic, pajama-wearing-in-public, screaming-mimi children will eventually be the bosses of themselves. I'm not sure I will ever be ready.

As I think of all the possibilities, I find myself wishing for perseverance instead of luck. In my anxious, hovercraft parent brain, failure is inevitable and luck is not only fleeting it's fickle. The same providence that wins the grand prize in the lottery also temps many a not-so-happy fate, of which we parents can't speak.

Yet, from the important to the seemingly inconsequential, decisions must be made. Navigations charted. And though we can see our destination, we rarely have a clear path to its shores. We can never really know with certainty which choice will affect which outcome.

What should we encourage? What should we dissuade?

I hate dance class. I've made no pretense of liking it though I wish, for Ittybit's sake, I could manage a better poker face.

I've been working on that.

We all carry our own experiences. Prejudices. Pride. Things that makes rebellion so intoxicating.

I talked her out of Girl Scouts and into 4-H.

I plan on indexing flyers for pee-wee football in the revolving file.

I'm wondering if I can convince them Disneyland is really just a bowling alley in southern Maine. "Hey kids ... look ... It says 'Vacationland.' I hope Mickey isn't on vacation."

I'm hoping neither of my kids get tattooed, but I know I'll learn to accept their bodies with scribbles. If I must.

I ebb and flow with and against convention.

She wants to be a ballerina-veterinarian who sings on stage. He wants to run away from home and take me with him. I'm sure he thinks I'll support him, even in his resistance from parental interference.

I shouldn't laugh. Must. Not. Laugh. It probably doesn't matter, I'll always embarrass them.

Instead, I just move from moment to moment wishing for calm and peace and hoping I don't inflict any lasting damage to bodies or psyches.

Who wouldn't like to raise a doctor? So long as they don't have to sell their souls lest they default on student loans.

And yet, when The Champ came to me and said the only thing he wanted for his “fird birfday” was a skateboard, I barely hesitated. Safety first: Helmet. Pads. Board. The three musketeers, all for one and one for all.

I'm not sure what possessed me: I just kept invoking the holy trinity: Helmet. Pads. Board.

And as he was working on balance, low and slow on the driveway, I quietly thanked the force behind his interest that I didn't have to sit in the bleachers at the Little League field passively rooting against someone else's kid on an opposing team.

But I know I can't keep them from the world. I can't even control how they move in it, truth be told. I can only hope to influence and that my influence, even with the best of intentions, isn't misguided.

He's a year older, now, and still dragging his board out on the driveway from time to time.

When a local skatepark opened this week, he wanted to go and bring his board.

But when he saw “the big kids” doing their thing ... he wanted to leave it in the car and just watch.

Then he wanted to go home.

And practice.

Selling it short

2011-09-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

When I learned that our school district was closing two neighborhood schools this year I experienced all the usual emotions a parent feels. I was disappointed that my children wouldn't be able to walk to school, up hill, both ways, in the snow and sleeting rains of September.

They wouldn't learn to diagram sentences or practice fluid writing at the brick school building just a few doors down the street. The joyful noise of students on the playground would be silenced.

As a community member, though, I was resigned. If there really were fewer students to educate, and less money with which to teach them, consolidation was inevitable. I felt sorry for the elderly people who showed up at board meetings voicing a widely held belief that with the economy in its current state something had to give … but it wouldn't be them.

They'd already given enough.

Consolidation wasn't a perfect solution. The buildings would still need to be maintained, though not to the same extent as they would were they being used. The real savings was in the form of jobs. And so it was decided the schools would close. Class size would increase. Scores of teachers would be released to hunt for employment elsewhere.

We weren't an exception to any rule. We fit a pattern that is being cut and sewn across the country. Tighter waistlines everywhere.

Schools nationwide are feeling the pain of this severe recession. Some districts have been decimated; half of their schools and staff already scraped off the chopping block. Schools are combining classes, cutting back on arts, some are even scaling back their hours of education all together. Teachers are buying communal supplies out of their own pockets. Some are ending their school day cleaning their own classrooms as maintenance jobs are eliminated.

Bare bones in the classroom, for some, has even meant doing away with soap and towels in the bathroom, opting instead for anti-bacterial hand sanitizers.

Doing without is something that seems inevitable for everyone in every industry. Unless you happen to be in a corner office in Corporate America, where profits are soaring despite jobs being stagnant.

It seems only the rich are eating their cake and having it, too.

But for how long?

I shake the thought from my mind long enough to help the kids on with their bike helmets. They want to ride to the playground. It will be their first bike ride outside of our meandering driveway.

They've been practicing.

They know they'll have to stop and look before crossing driveways. They're ready and eager to hop off and walk their bikes through intersections.

Getting to the playground under their own pedal power has important meaning. Another step toward independence as they embark on the long road to self-sufficiency.

All was as it should be.

Until we got to the school and found great heaving craters where the playground equipment used to be. Gone were the slides and monkey bars and climbing walls. Gone were the swings. The only thing remaining was an octagonal picnic table and a few chunks of discarded cement.

Where did it go?

I asked ittybit if they maybe moved it to another school, the most likely possibility.

She didn't know. They didn't move it to her school.

Maybe they sold it.

Whatever it was, it wasn't here - in this neighborhood - any more.

Standing there staring at the empty schoolyard felt more than depressing. It felt vaguely apocalyptic.

The only thing that could make that moment worse would have been if we had been holding ice cream cones and accidentally dropped them in the detritus.

Or perhaps a balloon, popped by the need to give investors their profits.

The disappearance of the neighborhood school wasn't so much of a weight lifted as a missing piece.

Small pieces gone for now. Maybe even forever.

If this is the future, I can't help but think we're selling it short.

Making lemons out of lemonade

2011-09-18T06:49:00.000-07:00

She was so busy counting her money that she wasn't listening as her father tried to explain how IT worked.

The IT that was making him turn blue in the face was profit margin.

"Remember how you went to the store and bought all of the supplies?" he said slowly.

"Yes, I remember," she sung in response, pretending his stern look was a part of a game that started yesterday in the grocery store. "Mommy wanted canned and I wanted real lemonade. She won."

"Do you remember who paid for the inventory?"

"What's inventory?"

"The lemonade you sold today."

"Mom paid. We're not shoplifters!"

"No, no you're not shoplifters. But because mom paid for the supplies fair and square, it means she's an investor, and, as a shareholder, some of that money you made selling the lemonade she bought goes back to her."

"What does that mean?"

"You owe mom the cost of the lemonade out of your profits."

"What does THAT mean?"

"Basically, it means half."

She stopped counting her money. Her face clouded and tears filled her eyes.

I'm not sure if he recognized in her expression that telling her a percent more than the initial investment was supposed to come from her earnings, too, would send her over the edge.

He told her anyway, and off the cliff they went.

"This is MY money. I earned it."

"No. Technically, part of it is OUR money and we deserve to be repaid."

In essence, what followed devolved into each of them shouting "mine, mine, mine" at each other like a flock of seagulls at a clam bake.

She was too young for this lesson, I thought as I listened to my husband become more and more adamant about return on investment, and our daughter become more focused on the dollars in her grimy, this-is-why-we-chose-cans hands.

Poor little business girl knew she wasn't going to win this one. She forked over the cash her father had demanded and stormed to her room.

"What was I supposed to do?" he asked me guiltily, as if I had a clue.

Economic principles shouldn't be this hard to explain, I think to myself. You have a business. You buy supplies. The profit comes after you sell the product AND pay back your loans.

But it's never that easy.

I couldn't stop thinking about a story I'd read in the New York Times about how video gaming is the most heavily subsidized industry in the United States because it fits all the criteria for technological research and development, which the government will pay for to bolster the greater good.

Changing the criteria seems almost impossible because no one wants to kill tax breaks or jeopardize jobs, which are both substantial. According to the article, the industry's median job pays $80,000 and the amount it writes off completely is in the neighborhood of $123 billion.

No wonder why education is so screwed up.

Teachers, schmeechers. X-Box is more important than algebra anyway. Even the IRS thinks so.

The more I think about it the closer my shoulders align with my ears. How can I relax when I think the only hope for the future is if the gaming industry hires the teachers we fire so they can educate the next generation of video game makers? But then it strikes me that self-investment is the only viable answer to our own sour lemonade stand-off.

Next time she wants to set up shop, she'll just have to stake her own business. With all the loot she's been hoarding from from birthdays and tooth fairy visits, she's certainly got enough cash to keep from making lemons out of lemonade.

Look both ways, but cross the street

2011-09-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Ittybit & Champ,

On this day ten years ago, at 8:57 a.m., I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of the newspaper's office. Stunned. The radio station had stopped regular programming to announce a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. As I sat there, blinking at the announcer's voice streaming into my car, I thought a small plane had gone off course and struck the building.

I shut the car's engine off, ran upstairs and told the only other soul in the newsroom to turn on the television because a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers. When the picture faded in, we watched as a second plane hit the other tower.

Clearly, this was no accident.

I don't think I've ever been so stunned or uncertain or quiet in my life. I couldn't really absorb what was happening. It was all just rushing around me like waves of ice cold water.

The day went on like that, and the feeling continued into the next, and the next and the next. Whole months went by in a fog.

Things changed. People were nicer to each other (for a time). We made decisions because of (rather than despite) the tragedy. In my case, the hopelessness I felt made marriage and children important where it hadn't been before. It made YOU important.

Then time wore on and we found ourselves in a war that seems meaningless; a war on the crime of terrorism that is as "winable" as the decades-long war on drugs. We find our constitutional rights eroded, and we accept it as the price of safety. We have gone from a nation united in tragedy to one that is divided by ideology.

Ittybit, you attended your first day of pre-school on the fifth year of this tragic anniversary. As I kissed you and watched you greet your teachers, I wondered what will you ultimately learn from this new milestone, school? I wondered what legacy we are handing you and your classmates?

Since the Champ came along we haven't spoken much about the events that in so many ways made you both possible. Made your father and I rethink what it was we were doing together. Playing house? Pretending to be adults? What was the purpose if not to raise children.

Getting married and having children wasn't an act of defiance. It wasn't a political statement. It was the understanding that the rest of our lives started right that very minute and it needed to count. It needed to be more than just us.

Nevertheless, we have come to realize the world we brought you into has changed in ways we can hardly comprehend ourselves.

I know you cannot be safe. None of us can. And yet I am a part of this collective anxiety in which our bodies respond to Code Orange as if it had meaning other than to instill fear and loathing. I want to put it all into perspective, but the constant coverage of what-ifs and could-bes makes it difficult to remain calm.

Home of the free? The brave? It doesn't feel like it much anymore.

Perhaps this is my cause, lovies. Something I want for you more than anything else. To realize our time here is brief and some of it will be tragic. There will be sadness for which we cannot prepare, and yet we have to be brave. To not give in to fear or hatred because it is likely to lead us down the wrong path.

I want to tell you to take chances, my beauties. Play in the mud and the muck and the paint. Get dirty. I want you to learn how to talk to strangers. I want you to come to love them, even when they prove to be imperfect. I want you to be aware that you are not alone in this world. Look around and take it all in. Take precautions, too, but don't let them take over. Look both ways before you cross a street, but cross the street.

And please, little ones, try to play nice, OK?

Love,
Mommy.

We are our own worst frienemies

2011-09-04T06:46:00.000-07:00

Something was in the air.

Ittybit had been scouring the yard for poultry feathers. She had a fistful and I could see her mind turning with all the possibilities. Maybe she'd make pens for writing … or a headdress … or maybe she was planning on cloning an entire Gallus Gallus flock of her very own.

I also noticed she was running toward my friend, who, I noticed, was curling and uncurling her finger in my daughter's direction.

Whisper, whisper, whisper …. Pssst psst, psst, pssssssst … Giggling.

Here it comes ...

“Mommy, Can we take one of their roosters home with us? Abby's mom said it was OK.”

Abby's mom was sitting in the lawn chair, cackling like a possessed chicken, as her flock of fledgelings darted about the yard, diving into mud puddles and hunting down all manner of creepy-crawling things to eat.

As were our children, who, as the weekday backyard birthday party came to a close, were still finding themselves as hungry as if we'd fed all the festive fare to the fowl.

Well … most of our children, anyway. My youngest, filled to the gizzards with cake and ice cream, was sitting on my lap blowing soap bubbles. It would have been an unspeakable horror for him to have to walk on the grass – which was wet from all the make-shift water slide fun – and forever endure the squeaking of his shoes.

“Does he have sensory issues?” one mother had asked discretely. “No, he's just weird,” I laugh.

I was an outsider, a last-minute guest who had never even known such a thing as Weekday Birthday Parties existed.
I marveled at the turnout.

Abby's mom just laughed. “Well, none of them work.”

She wasn't making a judgement, she wasn't picking a fight ... she was just stating the obvious: These women didn't have to punch a time clock or show up at an office to put in eight hours before they could go home to their families.

So here I was, a new member of the maternal organization of free agents, finally seeing all the possibilities.

It's not as if I don't have work … like this column … or photography … it's just that I also have vacuuming … and carting of kids from one event to another ... taking the cat to the vet. I just have to get over the idea that sweeping up dirt that gets tracked into the house is my new job description. ... It is not.

It's not like I died.

I'd just been laid off. My job added to a pile of more than 3,200 positions torched by the news industry in 2011.

But oddly enough, once the shock of timing had worn off, all I was left with was relief.

I can do anything I want to do.

I can be self-employed. I can freelance. I can do whatever I want. ... Sort of ...

I could garden! If-I-could-find-something-that-didn't-need-sun-or-skill-to-grow.

I could write that book! If-I-could-figure-out-a-plot.

I could even raise chickens! If-I-didn't-live-in-a-village-that-has-outlawed-farm-animals-within-its-borders.

“You know, we haven't had a tick all summer and that's pretty amazing for this yard,” my friend gloated, as only a woman who lives outside of zoning can.

I just smile as I try to brainstorm something to reciprocate her kindness. Maybe I'll bring her kids a puppy.

With friendships like these, who needs enemies?

Just another suburban legend

2011-08-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

The wilds of Maine are filled with roaming gangs of feral children. And no amount of logic nor arguing will tame them.

Or so it would seem as we, members of the Clan of Aging Hipsters, filled to the brim with barbecue, gather around the backyard fire pit clutching our bottles of pale ale. We chat idly about the salad days as we watch our progeny organize their rebellion near a giant cedar play set, which is festively draped in Christmas lights.

We are holding court and they are playing the sabatours.

No matter how many times we tell them not to trample flowers, aim foam-blunted projectiles at body parts or tear into delicate tent zippers, they simply nod their heads and continue onward.

Their giant shadows dancing raucously under the rippling dapples of green and red light as their tiny bodies act out all manner of imagined adventures.

Soft swords slash the air and foam bullets ricochet off the tent flies landing smack dab in the center of half-eaten delicacies piled on paper plates.

A three-year-old, the smallest active member of the battalion, is the only one to hit vital targets: My husband's cranium, my cleavage and her own father's groin region. She wasn't even aiming.

There were great roars of laughter and eardrum-piercing squeals of delight as the children darted animately about the yard making memories. We stared unblinkingly into the flickering firelight silently reliving ours.

I listen as Ittybit barks orders to the ranks, some of whom smirk at the novelty of a pint-sized general sounding the battle cry, but they carry out her requests without question or hesitation. Everyone is having fun.

As night falls, so do the children. Their bodies can't keep up with their over-stimulated minds. They trip over tent flies and fall to the grass. Some cry. Others complain. Everyone is losing the plot. Someone herds them inside and turns on a television. An electronic narcotic for all ages.

The air was chill and the bugs were biting. A soft couch and a flashing screen of classic cartoons seemed the perfect end to a perfect day.

We were a little jealous. We mused about how everything seemed easier when we thought our lives would be an adventure ... and that any problems we encountered could be eradicated with a shot of (insert the name of vexing problem here) spray from Batman's utility belt.

For a moment around that fire we were all kids again, trading lines of remembered script as if we were still sitting in the living rooms of our childhood soaking up the latest Johnny Quest, just the the way our kids soak up Sponge Bob.

We peered past the flames to the picture window as someone threw more wood onto the fire. "Holy crow, they're watching Thunder Cats in there," said one of the dads wistfully. "We're all out here talking about cartoons and they're in there watching them."

It occurred to me that the first crack in the generation gap has formed as we continue to compare and contrast the virtues of our cartoons against the vices of theirs.

"Yeah ... but Sponge Bob has nothing on Thunder Cats. They don't make shows like ours anymore. You know that 'Finneas and Ferb' show? I don't get that at all. The sister is always trying to stick it to her brothers but her parents never see what's happening. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. I don't get that."

Of course, once you have had that conversation with your kids you might as well hang up your clicker and your righteous indignation for good.

"Yeah ... Well, how about that Coyote ... always missing the Roadrunner ... Lather, Rinse, Repeat?"

Touche.

As the flickering lights start to fade and the party wanes, a cold gust of air reminds me that summer is also coming to a close ... as are the days in which we rule the kingdom.

Hey, Lady

2011-08-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

Whenever I hear a self-described lady say: "I'm not a feminist, but ..."

I want to stop her right there and tell her whatever she plans on saying next is completely unimportant.

It is of no value or consequence.

Because that's what women were ostensibly told before our grandmothers and great grandmothers fought for the right to vote. Before our mothers secured the ability to be in control of the size of their families. Before they refused to accept the standard choice of careers.

I hold my tongue. Perhaps it's also the lady's choice to define herself and feminism so narrowly.

Feminism, for women like her, has morphed from a word to a dreadful afflictions. Perhaps it references a person she believes to be the opposite of womanly. A pushy broad she'd like to keep at arm's length. A woman she neither liked nor wished to emulate.
A woman exactly like her mother.

Feminism for those women, and lets not forget the men, is something entirely different. To them feminism is the basic component of a free society.
It has nothing to do with who opens doors for whom, or who stays home with the kids. It's not about forcing women into military service or mandating that men mop floors. It isn't about turning people into something they're not. In so many ways feminism is the exact opposite.

Although I'm sure our comfort with specific gender roles does blind us to the real issues of equality.

Personally speaking, I find the idea that feminism can be boiled down to the assigning of household chores insulting. But I had to mature to realize the hubris.

Like many young women trying to find my own voice, I mouthed the same anti-feminist idiocy that took my very existence for granted:

"I'm not a feminist, but ..."

And what I meant was:

"I'm not a man hater."

"I'm not angry."

"I don't think I'm better than you."

" … But I am ... better than you."

What I didn't understand was that feminism wasn't about any of those things.

Feminism isn't about obliterating feminine traits or emasculating men. It's about teaching boys they are not masters of the universe and teaching girls they are not victims of it. It's about having respect for each other, and realizing we need to work together.

In my way of thinking, feminism doesn't even have much to do with personal fulfillment, although that is certainly a benefit. On the contrary, feminism has everything to do with equality. It has everything to do with acknowledging the need for all people to be afforded the same opportunities - regardless of gender - for the betterment of society. It's acknowledging that where you have empowered women you have stronger communities.

Feminists are everywhere women are respected. It doesn't matter what they wear, or what they do, or even which pair of chromosomes they posses. When we accept feminism, it means we believe men are capable of nurturing. We believe women are capable of leadership. It means we are not narrowing the possibilities.

It's not special treatment. It's equitable treatment.

So, dear ladies and gents, if you believe women and men should be treated equally under the laws of society in which we live, you may call it whatever you like, but you are a feminist.

Smart phone. Dumb users.

2011-08-14T05:06:00.000-07:00

I don't usually pick up the phone when I'm driving. Not only is it illegal, but I'm probably one of the few people on the planet who feels that each time I do it successfully I am tempting fate.

But something, perhaps the string of bad news and unfortunate events that had been dogging me that week, made me reach for the phone when I saw my husband's number blink across the screen.

"Where are you?"
"On my way ..."
He didn't let me finish.

Something was wrong. And the phone kept cutting out.

"... I was .. lawn chair. ... finger. ... cut off ... ambulance ... You need to get the (expletive deleted) home NOW!"

I heard that last part loud and clear.

He added an "I love you," to soften the panic in his words before he hung up.

I tossed the phone and concentrated on driving. But my mind was making moving pictures of the possibilities:

He had invited some friends over for swimming. There had been an accident and someone was hurt. Possibly disfigured. My initial understanding was that my husband had cut off a finger in a mishap with a folding chair. That was bad enough, but the mom side of my mind couldn't let go of the idea that maybe it had been a child whose name could rhyme with "I was" if you said it just the right way against the static.

I started driving faster than my usual, senior citizen-like speed concentrating on the road instead of my mental motion picture.When I arrived the ambulance was turning around and ready to leave. I could see my husband on the gurney hugging his arm, wrapped in a towel, to his chest. He smiled painfully.

I breathed a little in relief. "Damage to a finger isn't as bad as damage to a four-year-old's body."

Still, I stood like a deer in the headlights, stopping the ambulance to ask all the questions our guests, waiting inside, could have answered: What happened? Amputation! What hospital? AMC!

Inside the children were watching TV, but not as calmly as it first appeared. Ittybit all but ignored the video and tried, instead, to gauge the situation by parsing how many expletives rushed forth from her father's mouth.

Everyone was trying to change the subject.

As soon as my children saw me their tears started to flow. They had seen more of the accident than they had let on."It's just a bad cut that needs more than a Band-Aid to fix," assured our guests, one of whom had also hunted in the weed-choked yard during the dusk-descending aftermath, for the remnant. The other had called for the rescue squad.I stood silently, nodded and hugged my kids. "It's just a deep cut. Not as bad as it sounds. He's going to get a few stitches and be home before you know it."

It was all true, of course - the cut was neither as bad as it seemed nor as bad as it could have been in the crushing jaws of an ancient, adjustable lawn chair. It was just a mishap gory enough to warrant sewing, antibiotics, a bandage as thick as a boxing glove and at least two visits of follow-up care. Not to mention the investment in updated outdoor furnishings.It would be all right. But it was also going to be a long night. The boy would have his first-ever away-from-home sleepover, the girl would get as much sweetened cereal as she liked, and I would get a security badge and a chair in emergency room B-19.

Oddly enough, when a terrifying event isn't as bad as you'd otherwise expect, you can almost relax and enjoy yourself.

You tell jokes. You make conversation. You take pictures with that very same smart phone you wish you didn't have to answer.

And you call to thank your friends again, and to let them know it's going well ... and not to open any pictures the patient might have sent in his shock-induced frenzy. At least, not if they planned to eat anything for breakfast.

Goodnight, sweet Madeline ... see you in my dreams

2011-08-07T05:02:00.000-07:00

She wasn't the dog I wanted.

The litter of lab mutts she came from had three distinct varieties: Black as night, yellow as the sun and a her — a mix of both with a visible splotch of mid-day hound dog for good measure.

The others had wriggled their way into my lap and were covering me like a blanket of unabashed love. She had sniffed me and walked away.

Oh, I had pick of the litter but I knew the pretty pups had people lined up to adopt them. ... No one wanted the one that looked like a mongrel.

So, home she came with me, this tiny little eight-week-old ball of not-as-attractive fur. I named her Madeline ... the prettiest name I could think of.

Wanted or not, it didn't take long before I knew she was the dog I needed. She was not in my house more than an hour when she moseyed on over to the door, sat down and scratched it.

So smart.

So smart, she could later open the door herself.

So smart, that even when her dumb owner handed her an old shoe, it was the only one she ever chewed.

So smart that she learned to get around the other rules.

Like not eating the food off of plates balanced by humans momentarily looking the other way.

Or becoming so stealth in thieving that she could rise up on her hind legs without jingling her tags and drag a whole pie, pan and all, off a stove top without her nails even clicking. What's more, she could consume her ill-gotten gain, filling, crust and crumbs, with its baker standing within eyesight.

So cunning that NOT hearing her eventually sets off alarms.

A sweet, lovable and obnoxious dog. Wont to bark intermittently for no apparent reason. And knock over small children or step on their feet. A chaser of cats (until she cornered one and then realized they kinda scared the dog out of her). And my personal favorite, always being where I needed to be ... and refusing to move.

Lovingly, I added an initial to her formal name: Madeline J. Dog ... The J standing for Jerk.

I had considered, and then dismissed, adding an “I” for Infuriating.

Of course she was also the dog who would lay by your side, looking at you worriedly, should your back happen to spasm. She would always be there, even when she seemed utterly disinterested. Babies came home and her place in the pecking order changed. Though she seemed to want no part of these crying teacup humans, she couldn't take her eyes off them.

Even though she was standoffish ... she never stood off too far.

Until now. In perpetual sleep.

I gathered some photographs I'd taken of her over these past 16 years, and was surprised by how many pictures she'd been in just around the corners. Never too far from the main activity. I smiled at that thought of her feigning disinterest. How many walks had we taken? Probably not enough. How many sticks had we thrown? She never grew tired of bringing them back. How many times had we said "Bad DOG!" while trying not to laugh? Too many to count.

I know everyone says their dogs seem more human than canine. I'm not going to be different as I look back on her life. Maddy always seemed more playful, more intuitive, more comic and more in tune with us than I ever thought possible. She never stopped changing. Her quirks, likes, dislikes all seemed fluid as she aged. Only her sweet disposition -- and her penchant to jump up suddenly and race out of the room as if it was on fire — remained constant.

Near the end, as I was over-feeding her palliative French fries and marveling at her still keen ability to chase and pin her late-in-life cat friend, or abscond with an entire plate of food mid-meal, I couldn't help but think of all the joy and the life lessons I would have missed had she not been stuck with me.

I never thought I'd miss her infuriating traits: Her running roughshod over the kids, her chewing of all things important, or her petty thievery.

But that was the flip side of all the traits that made her sweet and endearing. too. Without one we wouldn't have appreciated the other.

Sweet dreams, my sweet Madeline. I couldn't have imagined a better friend.

When moms croak and cats fly magic can happen

2011-07-31T04:09:00.000-07:00

"He stole my gnome and then he pinched me on my foot."

"Well, she tookt my esperamint and woozent given it bact."

They've been bickering all morning. He coveted her Lego Gnome figurine with the fishing pole and hat set at a jaunty angle. She wanted his Mad Scientist with the pointy, rubber wig and plastic beaker filled with green bubbles. Neither wanted to trade.

MOM! I NEED YOU!

When they stood shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen door trying to prevent the other from getting to me first, I wanted to run away from home.

The only thing keeping me from screaming right there and then was a case of allergy-induced laryngitis.

"You," I croaked, pointing toward my son: "Stop touching your sister. And you," I turned to my daughter: "Stop tattling on your brother, and handle this yourself. You are a big girl."

Her eyes got all big and she clutched at her chest as if mortally wounded from being falsely accused.

"Me? I'm not tattling. Tattling is when you tell something that isn't true about a person, and he most definitely PINCHED me AND took my Lego. It's not fair."

"No. Telling a lie is 'fibbing.' Tattling is when you tell of someone's actions, hoping to get them into trouble. It's really a breach of confidence."

"No it's not. Not telling when someone hits you is letting them be bullies, and it's not allowed. You have to speak up. Anyway, you're the parent. You are supposed to tell him to apologize for hitting me and then get back my toy."

All I wanted to do was soak my throat in a mug of warm tea and honey, and arguing with a seven-year-old over my perceptions of the effectiveness of Zero Tolerance polices wasn't going to get me anywhere.

The bickering continued and I thought I would lose my mind. Even our mostly-deaf, incontinent dog started to bark, presumably because one of my warring minions had left their breakfast uneaten and teetering just out of her reach.

The only recourse I could muster at that moment was to let loose the full power of my rage and hope it didn't do permanent damage to my vocal chords or the children's tender hearing.

"OK! EVERYBODY STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP! TO YOUR SEPARATE CORNERS! NOW!"

My voice sounded like a cartoon. And yet, only the cat, who launched herself three feet straight up into the air and then shot into the next room as if her tail were on fire, seemed to be upset by my Exorcist-like outburst.

I felt bad for scaring the cat. A little, anyway.

Everyone else (except for the geriatric dog, who still wanted the waffles) started to laugh at the feline's fleetness.

And then a real, Miracle of Supply happened. The boy handed back the girl's Lego and she in turn told him to keep it.

It must have been a true hardship to have lost the appetite for bickering just when the rewards were greatest. For I could see in their eyes how much they wanted to see their old mom make the cat fly again.

Like mother, like son

2011-07-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Champ used to be so sweet.

A happy child. Friendly and amenable. A parent's dream. That's what people called him. Of course, they'd see him playing happily by himself, nary a whine nor whisper of discontent ...

OK. ...

He was never one to immediately share his toys, or anything even remotely resembling toys — lint balls, perhaps from under the bed — with visiting playmates, but eventually the kindness of others would rub off and he would relent. He might even ofter a broken rubber band to the patient guest.

But that's just how kids are sometimes. Selfish little jerks.

Mostly you try to let that stuff pass with small reminders of how we "should be treating our friends," hoping the operative word FRIENDS will eventually make an impression with repeated use.

Lately, though, life with The Champ has seemed a little like being forced to to sit in a darkened movie theater watching sneak previews of his teenage self saying all manner of unscripted lines, in a language I don't quite understand. Only the smell of butter-flavored treats or the feeling of an arm's length detachment would make this "phase" seem less dreamlike.

He growls at strangers when they try to make his acquaintance, or worse, he'll describe physical features instead of using names when asking questions of his own.

Even when he's trying to be pleasant, there's the unmistakable awkwardness of candor:

He'll respond to an emphatic "Thank You Very Much" with an equally effusive "You're not welcome."

"Hey, Mr. Fat Guy, did you ride your bike all day way over here? Dat's pretty cool."

"Mrs. Old Lady. You dropped somepin from your poctet."

"That kid is out of control. I'm not playing wit him."

I smile painfully, wishing I could clasp my hands tightly over his mouth two seconds before the words tumbled out. But there is no two-second delay in real life. ... It only feels like time slows, since the words hang in the air taunting you with the fallacy that they would be so easy to clear away with only the swish of a hand.

Those moments of pure mortification, however, are the flip side of the moments of undeserved perfection.

Like the time, in high school, I walked home from the bus stop and some catcalling seniors drove by in their muscle car making a spectacle of themselves.

I thought it may have been some act of divine intervention when their transmission fell out onto the roadway a few yards after they sailed past me. I remember feeling vindicated as I walked by the broken down jalopy and they were quiet as mice.

Or when my otherwise disobedient pooch, heeded my whistle at the dog park and ran to sit at my side. As a crowd watched.

Even though you know these moments were gifts and unlikely to be repeated, the seed of hope that you can control the universe is planted anyway.

Someday ... if you just keep reminding him ... he will be charming again.

"Oh, Champ. That's not polite. We don't describe people ... we use their names. We try to find something nice to say. We try to avoid things that could hurt people's feelings. What if I said you were out of control and I didn't want to play with you?"

"You do!"

I stand there squinting in the glaring light of truth: Parents can really be jerks sometimes, too.

And justice for ...

2011-07-17T05:29:00.000-07:00

I'm one of those moms people have been talking about.

Kind of. ...

I'm surely the kind who can picture themselves faced with the horror of dealing with a missing child. Or, more likely, not dealing with it. Picturing themselves, instead, crumpled up on a couch somewhere in a darkened room, not coping at all.

Truly, I don’t know how I’d react to such a tragedy, and I hope I never have to find out.

But I’m not the kind of mom who could bear to watch the media coverage of the Casey Anthony trial. And not because I couldn't fathom how a woman could kill her own child. Or how a child could die and a mother move on with her life, seemingly unaffected by the loss.

I can fathom that, and it is soul crushing. No one will ever have satisfying answers. I know this, too.

What I really couldn't stand was to see all the law-abiding citizens lining up for a chance to gawk at a woman they believe murdered her daughter and then covered it up, rationalizing their own behavior as anything other than morbid fascination combined with mob mentality.

I couldn't stand the presumption of guilt.

And then Casey Anthony was acquitted, stunning pretty much everyone except, it seems, folks who believe evidence should weigh more heavily than the circumstances surrounding that evidence. More heavily than emotion. Especially when first-degree murder is charged.

I can understand the shock. I can understand the anger being raw and natural. But I had to admit I was proud of that jury. Proud that they came to such an impartial judgment based on law for an otherwise unlikable woman, especially in light of the vocal, pitch-fork carrying masses.

Most people it would seem, at least the ones who stepped up to the microphone in the immediate aftermath, see the decision as proof of a fatally flawed American justice system. And already states around the country are trying to remedy it with more hastily constructed reactionary laws that will will more likely erode it than strengthen it.

Laws proposed that seek to revoke double jeopardy and the fifth amendment among them.

I hope they come to their senses, though. Because what happened in Florida is how the system is supposed to work. It is supposed to err on the side of the accused, especially in cases where the death penalty will be imposed.

The prosecution has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And it didn't.

They can't just trust their guts. Proof and evidence are not just technicalities. Crimes that call for the death penalty can't be judged on basic instinct. Ever.

Of the many things I heard people say about what they really thought of Casey Anthony in the wake of the verdict, the most interesting to me was how many believed the jury failed because of a technicality. “Her daughter probably did drowned, but Casey Anthony was still responsible because she tried to hide it. ”

That statement alone shows me this jury didn’t fail. The prosecutor did. The crime they describe does not fit the charge of first-degree murder, it is more in line with manslaughter.

And somehow, I think the more we craft laws that are steeped in the emotion of high profile cases, the consequences won't be justice for all. It will be vengeance for the mob.

That's not justice for anyone.

Of mice and men and plans that go askew

2011-07-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

You know how it goes, right?

You get an idea. Perhaps it is the best idea in the history of ideas, though you and just about everyone you have ever known sincerely doubts it. No matter. You have this idea and you must follow it until its bitter end — usually to a place called Harsh Reality.

If you could see me right now I'd be waving and drawing attention to myself.

Yup.

I'm that person.

Rabid with ideas but completely insusceptible to inspiration.

Now, usually these notions are harmless. However sometimes they wake me up at night, which means they are likely waking my husband, too.

And that can be dangerous.

"Who died?"

"Nobody. I just had an idea. ... What if we were to have an art show for children and invite all the neighbors to submit their favorite pieces?”

"Sounds fine .... but it would sound even better sometime other than whatever ungodly hour it is right now. Go to sleep."

Ok ... That's not the best example.

A better one would be the time ... back in January ... when I was trying to keep the kids busy one winter vacation and thought it would be pretty awesome to make a Parade Dragon for Chinese New Year.

Neither fact that the Chinese New Year had already passed nor the reality that the winter months are not optimal for parading around in the Northeast could rain on my parade.

I had cardboard boxes. I had red paint. I had yards and yards of shimmery fabric, and most of all I had a cool idea for Peoples' Parade — an Independence Day extravaganza that brought out all the big-idea and little-idea people together in one place.

Most of all, I had six months to get it all together.

I could just see it play out:

Kids would come from all corners of the county to march to the beat of this drummer.

We'd line the driveway with kids gluing do-dads and twiddly bits and all manner of sparkly attachments to the miles of fabric our dragon would trail.

The kids, as kids are wont to do, would come up with their own labor-intensive additions. In our case, that entailed making dozens of dragon-shaped cookies to be handed out along the parade route.

“Oh ... this will be fun,” you think as you wonder if handing out homemade cookies during a parade is something that one might need a permit to do, or at least a brief but thorough inspection from the health department?

“No,” you answer, fingers crossed. “It's not as if we're selling anything.”

But alas your mind’s eye doesn’t have 20/20 vision:

Vacations. ... Holidays ... schedules ... never seem to match up.

Or that's what you tell yourself ... and the kids ... when folks start declining your invitation and you realize everyone is going to be busy that day doing something other than walking in a parade under a cardboard dragon.

Not that you lose hope. Not even when the kids, who called at the second-to-last minute to join in ... but changed their minds at the actual-last-minute. You know they made the decision BEFORE they saw you walking down the street with your box of Dayglo-colored fluff and your bags of individually-wrapped (and slightly over browned) sugar cookies.

That's just how it goes.

There's always room for improvement.

Something to think about, anyway. ...

For next year.

When your plans will be bigger and better than ever.

Little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

— Robert Burns'

A mother's work is never done, but the cat's is always half finished

2011-07-03T05:51:00.000-07:00

The cat skulked into our room just as the blue-speckled morning light inhaled its first breath of pink from the sun. No one paid any attention until she started to bray.

"Your turn," I say to the mountain of covers to my left. "I already handled a squirrel, two chipmunks and what I can only presume was a bird this week. I'm taking the morning off."

Grumbling a few words I can't make out, he then wordlessly pulls on a shirt and stalks downstairs. "Thank you," I chimed after him.

He passes Ittybit in the hallway, who was awakened by all the commotion.

"Where's he going?" she asks, scooping up the squalling mass of feline flesh as awkwardly as humanly possible. The animal stops yowling and resumes her usual calm demeanor.

In Ittybit's arms, our black, domestic short-haired is more of a rag doll. She just drapes over her arms like a limp rubber band, just barely elastic.

I don't get a chance to answer her question before a stream of expletives and a few Lords'-Names-in-Vain come charging up the stairs.

"OH GOD! JAYSUS CHRIST! OHHHHH, FOR-FUGS-SAKE!"

Curiosity may not have killed our cat, but it always gets the better of me.

"What did she kill?" I yell down, almost proudly.

"Nothing!' he replies, with all the excitement of an undertaker whose work just woke up. "She didn't KILL it. It's still alive and it's running around in the kitchen!"

When I reach the place where my coffee and toast are made, I find him inexplicably standing by the counter, hovering over the coffeemaker. I give him the benefit of the doubt: perhaps he's willing the technologically advanced water boiler to become a Haveaheart trap. Though I suspect he's more interested in getting a cup of caffeine to clear his mind, I say nothing. Helpful hints, at this point, would only be received as criticism.

"Coffee first. Then I'll think about what to do. It could be anywhere at this point."

He’d seen it scoot behind the dog food container and a case of bottled ice tea we store beside the refrigerator. All sorts of critters have gone back there, he figures, never to be seen again.

I couldn't wait.

I moved the containers and found the terrified chipmunk all curled up in a ball. No head nor tail visible in the shadows. On the counter above it I found a small movie popcorn box, saved for reuse because of its red-pin-stripe quaintness and lack of visible butter stains.

I grabbed it and bent to scoop up the cat's escaped snack, half expecting to force an adrenaline rush that would have us all chaotically chasing the rodent around the house.

Instead, the plan worked. Into the popcorn box it went without incident. It scrabbled around for a second and then settled back into its protective orb at the bottom of the container.

I headed for the great out of doors.

Ittybit wanted to help release the varmint, but minded my urgent request to feed the cat as a distraction. I promised I'd wait for her by the tree in front yard.

When she arrives I pour out the popcorn box, kernels, critter and all. For a long moment, the chipmunk crouched all stretched and low to the ground. Frozen. I fan the box in its direction and it skitters up the tree trunk. Ittybit follows, circling the tree and telling it all manner of helpful advice.

"Have a nice life."

"Be more careful."

"Stay away from cats. ... It's for your own good."

As she skipped around the tree — a first-grade Ann Landers in Hello Kitty pajamas — the rescued rodent chittered at her loudly.

She was delighted.

"You're welcome!"

Silence might just be the new voice of parenting

2011-06-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

Zombified, Ittybit sat staring at the T.V. watching a pint-sized prodigy perform a song from Phantom of The Opera.

The little girl, Jackie Evancho, is tiny but her voice is bigger than life.

"I want to be like that girl," she said emphatically. "I want to be famous."

It wasn't for art's sake that Ittybit wanted to make her voice lift above the songs she hears on popular radio stations. Although the beauty of the music drew her in, it was the sight of a pretty little girl in a floor-length dress that held her imagination hostage. "She's only a kid ... and she's on TeeeeVeeee!"

"You don't want to be that girl," I say immediately and without thinking. Just as quickly I want to kick myself for saying it that way.

Of course she wants to be just like that little girl. She wants to flesh out the mental picture we all have about fame. How special it would be. How good it would feel to be adored by strangers. How happy it would make you.

It's easy to find fault with the logic, but more difficult to dismiss the emotion behind it. Don't we all have some degree of desire for acknowledgement and adoration? Only we want the well-deserved kind of fame that wipes its feet when we invite it in, doesn't snoop in our drawers when it uses our facilities, and never wears out its welcome.

"No. I do want to be like her. I want to sing on a stage in front of lots of people. Or I want to publish a book. Or I want to act in the movies. I definitely want to be on TV."

I try a different approach.

"Well, I wouldn't want to be that girl. I was listening to an interview with her and she seemed extremely anxious for a little girl. She was worried about what would happen to her career when she became an adult. Would she be able to keep the momentum? Would her voice change? Would it be as pretty when it did?

“I just think that's a lot of worry for a little girl to handle."

Ittybit shrugs her shoulders. She doesn't share my concern. Time is fleeting. Even at her age she understands the importance of youth. The gun has fired and the stopwatch has started. The time to make your mark, she thinks, is now.

"She's already 11. Maybe that would be a problem if she were not yet 10," she explains as if she's already decided it's all over once you reach the chronological double digits.

Maybe I should have mentioned the hours of practice, the stress of performing for a crowd night after night after night and the lack of time to just play.

But that just takes the stance that hard work ise something to be avoided at all cost. And the idea that childhood is supposed to be carefree and easy, is just another lie we tell ourselves.

I just smile and let her dream alone.

What does her old mother know about fame and what it's like, anyway?

Maybe the best thing I can do is nothing at all. Don't help. Don't hinder.

We all have our dreams and anxieties no matter where we go or what we do. We all swim against tides. We walk down roads others travel and they're always new to us. The only thing I can really advise her to do is to follow what makes her happy until it makes her miserable. Then maybe she'll be ready to forge her own path.

The business of childhood

2011-06-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

The guest room was awash in orangey-pink light. "Sunrise never ceases to amaze me," I thought to myself as I dragged my broom past its doorway, whisking a cloud of dirt and debris from the mudroom toward the laundry area.

"What are we going to do today," she asks fretfully, and then answers herself: "Probably nothing. Again."

Saturdays around our house aren't the joyous, lazy affairs they once seemed to be. Each passing year brings with it taller children, bigger messes, larger laundry piles and fewer days of the week for restoring order and restocking closets.

"I just need to get this done," I reason, "and then we can do something fun."

She just shrugs. She's heard it all before. I can’t blame her. I don’t believe me, either.

As I bend to try and sweep a week's worth of dog hair and snack crumbs into the dustpan, I know I've barely made a dent. This will take me all day.

The phone rings. I pick it up and hear the welcome voice of another mother who's trying to find something for her kid to do so she won't have to make dolls dance and ponies talk.

Magical timing.

Ittybit is squinting at me as I tell her her day — and mine — has been saved by a last-minute play date.

When her friend arrives the two girls skip off to discuss their plans for world domination, trailed by the "Little Bother." It's an often spoken rule in our house that if there are to be play dates little brothers are to be included in all plans for world domination or they are to be given chores that will make them less likely to require intervention from the Hague.

Oh sure, there are disagreements.

Blah-blah ... "It's not fair." Blah-blah "Why doesn't he have his own play date. Blah-blah "He won't leave us alone ..."

But I find that reciting the rules to myself, above the din of any screaming, seems to work to everyone's advantage.

That and "Maybe I should just call her mother and tell her it's time to call it a play day."

Silence. "No, no. Never mind."

It's amazing how fast they figure it out for themselves.

It's also quite something to realize that together, two little minds can come up with so much more entertainment value than any of the things my mind can scrounge.

They will build cities out of sofa cushions as I vacuum under the couch. They will have picnics of finger foods they forage from the fridge on the front porch.

It takes no more than an hour before they've settled on a plan that will take them all day to execute and be of no interest to the Little Bother. When they get my approval, the pair disappears into the guest room, which also houses my office, a stash of fabric for crafting and two sewing machines.

There is quiet. Which should be the first clue for any parent of trouble. And then there are more questions:

Can we use some of this fabric?

How about this fabric?

Do you have any glue?

What about tape?

Eventually they hit an impasse and came to find me.

The same orangey-pink light from the morning is spilling out into the hallway as I approach the room. This time, however, the sun has nothing to do with it; it was the light reflecting off a sea of fabrics they'd cut up and strewn about the floor.

I didn't even have time to be annoyed when I saw what was left of the stash: Two perfectly lovely doll quilts arranged on the guest bed awaiting a few sweeps through the sewing machine.

"Can you help us sew them?" Ittybit asked. "We've got to get them finished so we can start working on the marketing campaign."

Not everything gets lost in translation

2011-06-12T05:23:00.000-07:00

"He was a Wego man but he didn't have arms, so my mom got me a new Wego man who did have arms, but I didn't wike his hair. I took it off. But now I can't find it. I frink I left him outside, but the cat won't bover it. I hope. I don't know. Dad said she awmust kiwed a bunny what's not living in our house anymore. If I were a bunny I would not like that."

The Champ was standing in the driveway, in his pajamas, talking a mile a minute and waving a toothbrush for emphasis. He looked like an eccentric professor.

A grandmotherly woman is smiling at him and nodding her head. He takes a breath and asks her: "Did you see dat?" She looks up at me. Her smile has tightened and I realize she didn't understand a word of what he was so emphatically telling her.

I perform a loose translation: His Lego figure lost its arms and so I bought him another one, however he lost it outside and he's slightly worried that the cat — who attacked a young rabbit recently and brought its stunned but still living body into the house — also may be hunting his toys. He was wondering if you may have come across any bald Lego people?

She pats his head as he hugs her legs. He tells her he has to wear "Aqua Arms in the pool swim."

"He wears a life preserver when he goes into the swimming pool," I say, and then whisper, "which is next on the to-do list today."

The Champ starts to bounce. We have to move on.

Schedules must be kept. We're on the meter. And everything has to be just so:

He's got his underwear perfectly positioned backwards so the Super Hero is in the front (where you can see it).

He's wearing his black Spider-Man shirt (pajamas) with his dinosaur pants (also pajamas), although he's changed twice because he spilled a drop of water near a cuff when he was brushing his teeth.

He's wearing his favorite shoes (his "golf shoes," though no one he's ever met plays the game) that must be worn at all times with socks, which are never the first ones you grabbed out of the drawer. His feet, once property encased, can never touch water — not even slight dampness — lest he have to deal with the dreaded squeaking.

His "packback" must have at least one toy, which is different from the toy he brought three weeks ago yesterday. And it must be red. ... Or blue. ... Or green. Though not today. Today is anyone's guess.

He's sleepy at nighttime and "watchy" in the morning time. Curious George on PBS is his favorite show, although sometimes he wants to watch Lego Spider-Man movies on YouTube ... unless he wants to watch "Not Wego Spider-Man moobies" on Hulu.com.

Food is a whole other kettle of fish, and even my own understanding of what he'll eat is precarious.

Did I pack the right sandwich? Was it peanut butter on Daddy's Bread (wheat) that he wanted or was it Turkey Lurkey on a Pillow (roll)?

His father, holding out a buttered bagel the boy had just begged him to make, doesn't understand why he's now so upset.

"YOU FRENCHED IT!"

"He didn't want his bagel toasted," I explain. "He likes it hot with butter, but not toasted. The brown bits make him sad. Microwave, 20 seconds."

Everything seems to get lost in translation, especially patience.

"Why does he get to do everything HIS way? Someday he's going to have to put his two feet on the ground even if it's raining," complains his sister, who only recently began wearing her left and right shoes on their proper feet.

"Because, little miss 'I-Don't-Want-To-Wear-Jeans-Because-They-Feel-Ichy,' you know as well as I do that some battles aren't worth fighting.

"And besides, I'm saving my energy for clean pajamas and brushed teeth."

Attachment disorder in the reverse

2011-06-05T05:25:00.000-07:00

I push on the door. It silently protests. It doesn't want to budge. I press harder against its panels, feeling as if I'm trying to move a big, lazy dog who is behind it, fast asleep. Slowly it opens.

Standing on the threshold, I stare into the eye of the disaster.

She's only seven but her room is teaming with a lifetime's worth of things. In the same way Dog Years inflate Earthly time, the Toy Years have a tendency of magnifying tiny collections and making mountains out of MEGA Bloks.

A pile of books leans precariously as it balances a full-sized China tea cup. All of them gifts from the neighbor's garage sale. A herd of stuffed animals, released from their basket holding pen, graze around the dust bunnies that have grown to freakish size in the darkness under her bed. All manner of skirts and shoes and socks, dropped where they were changed, mingle with dolls and drawing pads and greeting cards and bits of paper saved for no discernible reason.

I leaf through a stack that has spilled all askew.

The shiny, colorful postcards are emphatic: "SAVE BIG! TRACTOR SUPPLIES! PORTABLE GREENHOUSES! DOOR BUSTERS!"

So this is where all the junk mail goes. ...

And the cardboard out of the recycling pile. …

And sheets of bubble wrap, with only two cells left to pop. ...

And the plastic tags from the back of Band-Aids.

The shock of pink walls and chalkboard decals are muted by the realization that I can find no evidence of a structural surface below them. Not anywhere. The floors are carpeted with bath towels and blankets an all manner of trip-ables. The window ledges are encrusted with legions of colorful figurines.

I'm raising a hoarder.

Even the dresser is packed to overflowing. There are winter duds stubbornly planted amid the short sleeves and bathing suits. Didn't I pull these out and pack them away? I shrug. I consider culling the clothes again, but I know it's a waste of time. Instead I try to close the drawers, which are stuck open at perfect, stair-like intervals. It is another losing battle. The drawer exacts a fair price in winning, pinching my fingers as I try to tuck and stow its proud contents.

I am here, in her room, because she is not. My motive is spurred not by well-founded fears of fire hazard but a random request for "outgrown princess dresses." ... Dresses she couldn't find if I asked her for them, and wouldn't part with despite being unable to squeeze their size-infant bodices over her growing-girl body.

Attachment disorder in the reverse.

It took some doing, but I found oodles of the lacy, shimmery gowns in a bag at the bottom of her closet. They were big puffs of nylon and net that, by volume, could fill the room but when folded and slipped into a bag would compress to the size of a small pillow.

Mission accomplished, I was standing at the threshold again looking at the room. Satisfied there was no noticeable sign of my having been there. I knew she'd never miss the dresses I'd hauled away. But I wasn't as sure that I wouldn't miss them.

The weight of the bag was so light in comparison to the weight of what I was doing: a thief, in the afternoon, carting away her childhood one donation at a time.

Not much difference between an Apple and a pear tree

2011-05-29T05:26:00.000-07:00

Birthday breakfast made by a seven-year-old and delivered at the crack of dawn with the help of her father.

Check.

French toast and hot coffee in bed.

Check.

A slice of yellowing apple with a bite already missing.

Sigh, check.

Breakfast-skippers be damned. You will eat the delicate little heart-shaped toasts and you will LIKE them. The burned bits, you'll exclaim, are a delicacy.

It's a little daunting, though, when the whole family perches on the end of the bed, staring at you as you lift the fork to your mouth.

Extending my plate I offer samples to those who are salivating.

"Maybe we can go get your mom's present today," says the husband, who is always slightly behind on his special-occasion shopping. "This is a Birthday-Fourth-of-July-Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-and-New-Year's present," he says with a wink and a nod.

I had dropped a hint that I would like an iPad.

"You know ... I think I might actually like an iPad," I said when he asked what I might want for my birthday. "I don't know. ... I'm just thinking that I'd like one for reading books. I read so rarely since the kids were born. And there are so many books being distributed electronically ... I'm just thinking ... maybe it's not as bad as I thought. Maybe I'd actually read more if I didn't worry about collecting books or library fines ... "

It was more of an inner-monologue gone astray than a hint, but he got the message.

He was still smiling at me as I looked at him in furtive horror.

"You got me an iPad?" I asked with the tiniest bit of apprehension.

His answer was all important: If he HAD ordered the tablet computer I would have be “thrilled” and immediately commenced searching the land of electronic libraries for available titles. But if he hadn't gotten the thing I would be … relieved.

"I didn't order it yet. I was trying to figure out whether we should get one that's 3G or not."

"Let's just forget it, OK?” I tell him.” Don't get an iPad. As it is, with the phones and the computer and twitter and facebook and flickr and texts — and all the other made up words that sell gadgets — I'm already distracted enough. I don't want another screen through which the kids have to compete for my attention. You say all the time how much we're missing ... Let's not add to it ... "

I didn’t want to start a war based on the last time we argued over attentions paid to machinery, but there it was.

I knew he agreed with me, yet I could still see a sliver of disappointment. The problem of being without a gift was still at hand.

"I'd be happy with a tomato plant," I said. "We could go to the plant center."

He's a stickler, though. A $4 plant I would likely kill within 48 hours wasn't going to cut it for him.

"Let's go get a tree. What do you think? Wouldn't it be nice to have a fruit tree?"

I was a little skeptical. Trees are expensive ... and you probably need two if you want them to bear fruit. ... And then there's the thing of planting them ... and caring for them. ... "Maybe we should just research this a little before we jump in."

"You Google, I'll get the keys."

Before I knew what was happening, there we were at the apple tree store peering at rows of fruit-bearing plants. As we stood there reading the tags, the kids careened down the stone-covered walkways dragging the garden center's big-wheeled wagon behind them as if they had just been let loose in a theme park.

It dawned on me that the Apple store, with its many sales people and its knee-high computers loaded with games, may have been a less complicated place.

"What I don't get is what's the difference between the apple trees and the pear trees," he said to no one in particular.

I choked back laughter and any hope of a clever response: "Really! Really?"

He just smiled and said he was going to find someone who could help us.

"OK, but please don't ask that question when you get to The Genius Bar."

It's not fun unless you guess

2011-05-22T05:27:00.000-07:00

"Mommy! Mommy! Guess what I found!"

She was gently cupping something in her dirt-ground hands. And I was afraid.

I hope whatever it is it hasn't been dead long, I say to myself with complete disregard for the child who stood before me beaming. I was remembering a first grader from long ago, in the salad days before I was a parent, who lead a parade of preschoolers up a dusty hill carrying a flattened squirrel as a flag.

It took a long time after witnessing that macabre cavalcade before I thought I was up to the job of parenting.

"I can't guess," I tell her hoping to return to pulling weeds from my garden of ...well, more weeds.

"Try. It's not fun unless you guess."

"OK, let me think. ... It's not the neighbor's cat ..."

"MOM! The neighbor doesn't HAVE a cat!"

"Yeah ... that's why I've ruled that out. Smart, right?"

She squints in playful exasperation. "Really? OK ... I'll give you a hint: It starts with an E. What's your guess?"

"I dunno .. an earthworm."

Her mouth twists into the unmistakable expression deflated surprise. "Oh-how-soon-ye-adult-types-cop-out-of-this-very-fun-game-of-guessing."

I take another stab at an answer. "Is it a earworm?"

"An earworm?" She exclaims. “That's gross.”

"Oh, it most certainly is. ... I've had one all day from that ‘Kidz Bop’ CD you've been playing in your room."

We could play at this game all day if I had the patience of a saint. But I barely have the patience of a three-year-old and she knows it.

"So you give up then?"

"I give up."

Her hands open like a flower and inside is a tiny porcelain elephant.

She gives it to me so I can see it better. The elephant is a watery blue color, about an inch tall. It's striking a circus pose, standing with its truck tucked under and its legs evenly placed on a circular dais.

"I found it buried in the garden."

"Wow. That's amazing," I said trying to channel my own seven-year-old self as I handed her back the treasure. "You've found yourself a mystery for sure."

She looked it over more carefully, and read the letters she found embossed on the base. "'WADE, ENG'. ... What do you think that means?"

I slip my phone out of my pocket and start up the search engine. "I'm not sure, but we can find out."

I type the words into the machine and slowly it takes me to a well-known tea company. The figures, made in England, are modern and still given out as premiums with the purchase of tea. I start to tell her about their origins, but she holds up her hand and begs me to stop reading.

She likes her mysteries with fewer facts.

"I need to do more investigation. I have to search for clues," she says running into the house. "Where's my notebook?"

I slip my answers-at-hand back into my pocket and continue my halfhearted attempts at pulling weeds. I wonder if I can find some more of that tea.

Mom never warned me about zombies

2011-05-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

Ah. Modern times. Or are they Post Modern? We're probably beyond all that at this point. Ah, yes, I checked with Wikipedia. We're staring directly into the face of Hypermodernity.

I'm sure there's an App to figure it all out, but one thing seems clear: History, always repeating itself, seems to have recorded some new tracks as it careens at break-neck speed down the high-speed internet.

Of course we're often wrong about such things. History runs in some strange and asymmetrical loop that can only be figured out by scholars or small children. Certainly not mothers, whose conversations with scholars and small children haven't changed since humanoids first started painting on cave walls.

Until now.

Let me set the scene:

It's the morning commute on a gray, rain-threatening day. The landscape, still crisp with fall colors though it has been spring for some time, rolls past our windows at 45 miles-per-hour. The boy is in his car seat talking non-stop about the things he sees - asking and often answering his own questions. The mother is only half listening.

"Ders a guy with wandry. Where's he going? Maybe to da wandrymat."

"Can we go the wong way? I yike the wong way. It's faster than the short way."

She wonders if she and her mother ever had conversations like this.

"The long way it is."

They drive past school buildings and playgrounds. Past apple orchards and cattle ranches. Past miles and miles of fields.

"Is that a farm?" He asks as they drive past acres of wide open land.

"Yes. That's a farm," she answer absently, momentarily wondering to herself if there will be a train at the crossing up ahead.

"What do they grow there?"

"Oh, I don't know," she says, trying to focus a little more on his conversation. "It's a pretty big field. It could be hay or corn, or something like that."

"Don't they grow zombies there? I bet they grow zombies there."

She starts to laugh. She and her mom never had this conversation, that's for sure. Her childhood nestled safely in an era before smart phone apps provided a crystal clear windows into the agricultural practices of the undead.

"That's just a computer game," she answers. "There's no such thing as zombies."

"Well ... I think it would be fun if they did grow zombies. Because if they grew zombies I could keep one for a pet."

"If zombies were real," she tells him (as if this is the most natural conversation in the world to be having with a three-year-old) you most definitely would NOT want one for a pet."

"I would. too. I would keep him in a cage and feed him every day. I would be a good zombie owner!"

"What would you feed him?"

"I don't know ... maybe Zombie Food. It costs five dollars and you can buy it at the store."

"I don't know how to break it to you bud, but zombies - which are not real anyway so don't go chasing nightmares - eat human brains. And that makes it completely unsafe to own a zombie."

"Well ... If I had a zombie I would train him not to eat human brains. That's what I would do."

She excitedly thinkis of how this moment will look stretched out over the walls of her Facebook page. She can picture the primitive drawings she might use as illustration. And then she realizes history may be on repeat after all. Caves have just gone viral.

The day to celebrate hasn’t yet arrived

2011-05-08T05:10:00.000-07:00

Where were you when you heard commercial airline planes had crashed into the World Trade Center? Or the Pentagon? Or that that one had crashed in a Pennsylvania field on its way to a Washington landmark, possibly the White House, on Sept. 11, 2001?

The events of that day created a picture you won’t ever forget.

We know where we were and even remember every detail of that day, and the days that followed, because it was more than somber, it was sobering. In our minds that day changed everything.

Now, nearly 10 years later, we mark a new memory in our minds' indelible ink -- the killing of the man largely blamed responsible for the terrorist events that killed nearly 3,000 people on U.S. soil.

When I heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death I was watching the end of an episode of "Treme," an HBO series depicting another American tragedy -- New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

As I watch TV these days I find myself a slave to not only the ripped-from-the-headlines dramas, but also my smartphone, obsessively turning it on and off to allow the programs for email and text messages to update. (The latter obsession being the demon my husband would like to cast out.)

As he sees it, it’s not enough that we’re there on the couch, together, that matters anymore. With the constant contact of thoughts and ideas swirling around the ether, it’s what the world has to say about what we’re seeing that adds the spice.

It’s both alarming and amazing: We witnessed revolutions and every manner of revulsion alike, with strangers we know only by their avatars.

It is what it is, I tell myself in a brief sadness for the seeming demise of the simple life. Taking stock of an electronic timeline is just part of our present and probable future:

At 8:40 p.m. My children, just barely ideas before the first anniversary of 9/11, were now peacefully asleep upstairs.

At 9 p.m. we are watching television on the couch.

At 5 minute intervals I check my phone.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Until 10:43 p.m. when the New York Times email alert read: "Osama bin Laden is Dead."

For a moment I wondered if his previously reported health problems had caught up with him. But opening the email I saw the word "killed" and realized it was not incidental.

I didn't feel anything. Numbness, perhaps. Definitely not the celebratory vibe that took hold overnight and lasted well into the next morning. I didn't even feel a sense of relief.

It's not over. We haven't closed the book on terror, or even finished the chapter. We've just torn out one sheet of paper as the prevailing wind fans all the other pages.

But it's not fear I'm feeling, either. It’s more of a low-grade dread. This interconnectedness we feel online offers the biggest disconnect of all:

As the picture on the television (now changed to a news broadcast) shows celebratory crowds in Washington and New York, I feel even greater dismay.

Not for the first time, I stare down at my phone and realize the crowd streaming into my life via the pound sign, are merely adding noise to my life instead of nuance.

I stop checking messages. I can’t be a witness to spontaneous outbursts of celebration. I can’t help them grow.

As a mother, I’m finding it’s the line I can’t cross.

There is something inherently wrong about celebrating a murder, regardless of how reviled the character.

May 2nd was an historic day, and one that will be pondered well into the infinite future. It was a day of reckoning. But it was not a day for jubilation. The day we all stand together as mothers and brothers and friends in reconciliation; that will be the day to celebrate.

Mirror images

2011-05-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

"Are we there yet? When will we get there? Are we there yet? "How far have we gone? Are we there yet?"

"Yes! We're there!" I say with eye-squinted sarcasm. "And in a few minutes we'll be there, too."

She looks at me skeptically. She knew as well as I that we'd not yet passed the edge of town and it was going to be a long drive until we reached our destination.

What she didn't know was the exact number of hours in which she could continue making us wish we were rendered temporarily deaf.

"When the clock says ‘3:00’ we will be there," I instruct in my most stern Don't-Be-A-Pest voice.

I don't expect it to work.

It's not as if she were the first child to join the Society for Sapping Parents' Sanity. It's an institution that predates history. I'm sure somewhere, on the walls of a cave, there are drawings of bison hunts in which large stick figures are depicted holding their hands over their ears as smaller stick figures are cushioned by bubbles of text that would loosely translate as: "When do we eat?"

As much as we all complain about being a captive audience in a cross-over vehicle, it's all so tame compared to how it will be once we get to the hotel.

The questions don't stop they are just addressed elsewhere, often embarrassingly so.

"Why does that guy have a towel on his head? Did he forget to hang it by the tub after he showered?"

These are the kind of questions that make you wish you could just keep kids in their car seats and drive them right to the room. In fact you daydream that the entire vacation could be experienced via drive-in:In your mind a visit to the pool would be the same as popping the trunk, filling it with water and handing them swim goggles. Go ahead, kids, splash away.

The big problem we face as parents, though, seems to have little to do with our kids' big-mouthed questions and more to do with our pathetic and shriveled answers.

Often we just don't know what to say so we pretend we don't hear.

And thus continues the never-ending cycle. We avert our eyes and when we raise them again we are always catching the glinty-eyed disapproval of fellow travelers. Perfect strangers, we think, until they scrunch their noses in our direction and wonder aloud about children being seen and not heard.

We are THOSE parents. The ones all the single people hope not to be and newly retired folks have, up until now, successfully avoided. We feel slightly panicked by the notion that our kids could be an annoyance to the childless, but not enough to make us book our destination to Kid Central instead. I can't face that roller coaster just yet.

We just repeat The Rules as often as we can.

“You can not bother the desk clerk. It is not their job to get you a cookie.

“Your seat is next to mine. Do NOT try to sit on lap of the lady at the next table.

“We are not getting room service. Put down the phone. “

Thing is, children will be children wherever they go.

Ittybit strikes up a conversation with another little girl poolside and is delighted to learn they share not only the same grade number but also the same name, spelling and all. After the discovery the pair will be inseparable in their minds if not their activities roster. They call out their own names in novel delight.

The questions become more pointed.

“When can I see her again?

“Can we go to dinner?

“Can I see her room?

“Can we play tomorrow?

“Can we have a sleepover?”

I see where this is going.

"We are not going to stalk this little girl and her family. I am not asking the hotel for her room number. ... We can go to the pool and the lobby and if they're there fine ... but I don't want you to get your hopes up. Families have plans and they're not likely to include perfect strangers you meet at a pool."

She gave me the squinted-eye look again. I knew exactly what it meant.

Somewhere in the hotel was a mirror of the same conversation, being begged by a girl named Ittybit with a different last name. ... And we WERE going to stalk them.

Eventually we'd find each other and know that the really wonderful part about being THAT parent is the realization that we're not alone. And the only reason we gain this wisdom is because our children refuse to stop asking questions.

Reaching the sugar glass ceiling

2011-04-24T03:17:00.000-07:00

In the blink of an eye the mystery of Easter was forever mangled by the silver screen: The Easter Bunny (or E.B. as he's known in the diminutive) was sitting on the hood of a Volvo, hunched up his haunches. There was a clattering sound and when he stepped aside ... a pile of candy.

Ewwwwwwwwwww.

"That kind of gives new meaning to 'you're full of beans, doesn't it, mom?" said Ittybit, first as a whisper and then a wall of giggles. "Full of beans."

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

It was too late. A new understanding had already taken root. "Hop's" jelly bean fountain overflowing with a rainbow of color, which had made us all gasp at its beauty as we sat in the darkened theater, was nothing more than cartoon sewer system for all the animated inhabitants of Easter Island.

Eww.

Shh.

A tub of popcorn accidentally spilt on the floor. Two trips to the snack bar later and the credits started to roll. With them rolled Ittybit's questions: "Mom?" she said cautiously in a whisper: "Is there really an Easter bunny?"

Ah ... the seven-year-itch. The phrase generally accepted to mean the time in a marriage when the strength of fidelity weakens. The magic is gone or maybe it wasn't ever there to begin with.

In my mind that kind of thinking may start at the average age of seven, when we begin to understand that Santa was just a nice old man with whiskers moonlighting at Macy's to supplement his pension.

The gossip was probably all over school.

I knew it was only a matter of time. The fabric of the fantasy was beginning to unravel around the edges ... all those threads that were just at loose ends were now starting to fray.

I was silent. I didn't want my baby to disappear completely. Even as I roll my eyes and wish she could read the pulpy fairy stories by herself already, I didn't want all the magic to vanish.

"Did you hear me? Mom? Is the Easter Bunny real?"

"What do you think? Do you think he's real?" I ask with equal care. I don't want to douse the magic but I don't want to be accused of perpetrating an outright lie."

"I don't think there is one," she said softly, not wanting to tip off her happily oblivious brother to the possibility. Maybe she didn't even want to be right. "I think parents bring the candy."

I shrug my shoulders. What can I say? The story always seemed a little unclear. ... A rabbit, dressed in velvet and silk, hopping around the world delivering baskets of treats to kids as they sleep? ... And doing it all without thumbs?

She's probably been asking herself the same questions.
How would a rabbit even hold the baskets? Why do some children get toys and others get candy? Sometimes he hides the baskets and sometimes he just leaves them out in plain sight. And how does he deliver to all the children of the world in just one night? It takes us two hours just to go to the grocery store. It just doesn't make sense.

And those inconsistencies don't begin to explain the reasons why Hollywood has cast every single bunny as a boy. Ittybit finds it completely unfair, especially seeing as her favorite Easter story is about a mommy bunny with 21 children who defies all odds and is chosen to be The Easter Bunny. There must be a sugar glass ceiling in Movieland's ornate panoramic eggs.

It's all too complicated. There has to be a simple answer: The Easter bunny isn't real.

She takes a deep breath.

"You're the Easter bunny, aren't you?"

I shrug my shoulders.

"I can't explain magic," I tell her. "I just believe."

She smiles and accepts my explanation. But she can tell it's just the icing of denial spread thinly over a bitter-sweet chocolate cake. She only wants the frosting anyway so It's not hard to swallow. Her truth is underneath it still, waiting for her to take a bite.

It's a bargain, I tell you

2011-04-17T05:26:00.000-07:00

I couldn't sell ice water in hell, and not because my conscience prevents me from profiting from another person's pain.

In fact, I'm fairly certain that were my life to depend upon getting some thirsty soul to pony up a few pennies for a drink, I'd be pushing up daisies in short order.

Weighing the value of time and energy against the perception of a finished commodity has long made me uncomfortable. It might all boil down to the fact that I hate to ask for money. I'm much better at forking it over one paycheck at a time.

My daughter, on the other hand, is at the age where there is no better use of her playtime than selling some chunk of rubbish to an unsuspecting neighbor.

The wily world of finance has her rapt attention: "This lovely piece of crystal can be yours for only five cents," she calls over the fence toward Sunday strollers.

She's always working some angle.

It was a beautiful day; the first in weeks in which people ventured out of their houses on foot. Just the sight of all the people walking past our house gave Ittybit hope that her shop would be a wild success.

Behind the fence ... yards from the road and sidewalk ... she continued to hawk her wares.

"We got rocks. Lots of rocks. ... and crystals ... Pretty crystals for sale. Five cents a pieces. Buy one get one free. Pay no money down ... Just a nickel. That's it, just a thin nickel. Give us a quarter and we'll give you back two dimes. That's 20 whole cents you'll get back. ... It's the bargain of the day."

"Get yer rocks here. We got yer rocks here."

It was all so intoxicating to her as she gathered supplies and readied her shop for the onslaught. She lined up her wares — two dozen ancient wine bottle corks, a handful of gravel and two chunks of driveway sheared off during winter plowing — and set them in neat little rows.

Repetitively she pawed through a tin box full of change and separated each coin by denomination.

"There is so much to do," she fretted, as she taped a few cardboard signs to the fence.

"5 cents per cristal!!!!!" and "Get your rocks here, cheep!!!!"

A few kind souls ventured down the length of driveway where the shop stood a safe distance from traffic. They exchanged a few nickels for rocks.

Emboldened by the transaction, she taped another sign to a pencil and handed it to The Champ.

"Your job is to walk back and forth with the sign. Don't forget to hold it up."

He waved the piece of cardboard in front of my face. Crossed out was: "We have ALL colors" In its place read: "We have RED rocks."

I turned and saw that all the colors of the rainbow had spilled out onto the driveway.

She watches me look at the puddle of paint.

"Sorry. Will it come out?"

Yes. It will come out ... of your profits," I say with a laugh and a faux stern look.

"Ok ... but the rest I'm donating to charity."

Turns out she's not terribly fond of profiting from another person's pain either.

In marriage, some assembly required

2011-04-10T05:29:00.000-07:00

The next order of business: The purchase of a ground-based structure resembling an aviation contraption in which many children can play at different altitudes. It comes in a box. A heavy, heavy box. With many pieces.

Who would like to second?

All in favor?

"AYE! WILL VOLUNTEER MY HUSBAND TO ASSEMBLE IT!" I blurted, a little too eagerly, as I registered my vote during the monthly board meeting of the Marilla Cuthbert Academy for Unspeakably Charming Children.

I was angry with him, you see, and could think of no better way to express my true feelings than to sign him up to sift through a-thousand-and-one teeter-totter pieces. I was giddy just imagining him having to fuse the parts all together with a million-and-one bolts ... on his day off.

Oh, I could see it all so clearly: He'd bring all his tools ... except the one that would REALLY help. The first bolt he'd need, the M80-10, would be in a mislabeled packet on the bottom of the pile, and would turn out to be missing two pieces to boot.

The drawings wouldn't look anything like the parts strewn about the play yard, and some frowny-faced emoticon would vex him as the realization set in that some way, some how, he'd managed to install the whole contraption backwards or inside out.

My voice would ring in his head in sing-song annoyance: "You should have read the directions first."

I pictured a black cloud, heavy with his expletives, hanging low over the playground like a cartoon bubble. Unable to be borne by the wind, it would hover there until Monday when the children arrived, hopefully wearing ear muffs.

For him — a fabricator and installer of large scale sculpture — it would be more like a dare than a busman's holiday. He'd do it, of course, because there's nothing that makes a man feel bigger than when his son thinks he's a superhero. And there's nothing that says superhero more perfectly than a shiny new toy assembled out of shapes no mere mortal could ever imagine.

In this crowd of knee-high beings, there are few paths to superherodom: Wearing a suit of all one color, driving trucks that crush solid waste or being responsible for the coolest plaything on Earth.

Oh sure, he'd be swearing under his breath as he turned the directions this way and that; he'd be demanding to see the designer's credentials once the drawing diverged from reality. But that's just part of the fun. The moment his son gazed at the Not-An-Actual-Flying-Toy (Nor to Be Used as a Flotation Device) and realized HIS FATHER had been the man who made it happen, it would all be worth it. There would be a ticker-tape parade in his honor. There would be praise and adulation. There may even be the unsolicited gift of pie. Pecan pie.

Then there would be the let down. The moment when the gift horse is asked to open its mouth. The moment that inevitably reveals the punishment for that particular good deed.

"That's ... uh ... really nice ... but it would look better over on the other side of the playground. Can you just move it, please?"

I was practically salivating at all the myriad ways this simple mission would be miserable.

*Clap* *clap* *clap*

His applause brings me back from my demented daydream.

"That will be great," he answers cheerfully, giving me a sly look. "We can all go to the school on Sunday and work together as a family!"

Turns out my husband has a few bones to pick with me, as well.

Cupcakes for dinner and other shared traits

2011-04-03T05:31:00.000-07:00

She couldn't keep her hands out of her hair. Or maybe she couldn't extract her hands from her hair. Her knotted, bedraggled hair.

Realizing the finer point of distinction, such as it is, I find it hard to tell. I try to smooth it, saying her hair needs some kind of protein salve or cream rinse or some other product of detanglement that has thus far eluded me, too.

"Leave it be," she says and shoos my hand away.

So I rationalize her smile outshines her lank locks. That's what I tell myself as we are out in the world, just the two of us. My mini me, or so has been marveled by many-a stranger.

"She looks just like you," they'll say with a smile. I wonder if it's the long messy hair that people see in common ... or the clothes that seem to have been selected by covering the closet in kibble and seeing what the dog drags out. It can't be our features or our personalities.

As I look at her, with her easy smile and solid profile, I see each feature in terms of fruit tossed into a salad by the family tree. She has father's eyes and her grandfather's nose. She has one grandmother's hair, and the other grandmother's hands.

I find it curious how all these bits and pieces seem to have played genetic hop-scotch in shaping her, and yet I don't see myself in her at all. Especially in personality, she seems to be my polar opposite.

Yet it's near impossible to put yourself down when someone is comparing you to your child.

She is easy going. Cautious but not shy. Once she's jumped in, I know pulling her out will take all my resolve. "How much do we really need to be home by bedtime?" is a question I've asked myself far too often. We all know who runs the show.

These thoughts and more (like how long can a person go without food before they start to shake and growl and chew at their clothes) were going through my head as Ittybit snaked her way through the crowded Art Center, trying to fill up her passport sheet with stamps from each workshop station.

Drawing, check. Jewelry, check. Printmaking, check. Pottery, check. Swing dance, check. Art installation, check. Music, check.

"Hey, look. ... Cupcakes! Let's go check the kitchen."

I follow her, knowing she is following her own drum beats. And we might get lost along the way.

It's girls' night, after all. And it's a rare event. Time alone with mom usually means bursting into the bathroom unannounced and being shooed out unceremoniously. It might also mean sitting in a darkened room, crying, whilst listening to mom rattle off a laundry list of reasons why playing hide and seek with your brother must include actually going to look for him.

Doing something fun together is as rare as eating cake for dinner.

"Have one," she says, holding up a her creation: A Chocolate Vanilla Delight"

"You'll like it ... it has protein."

I bend down, brush the hair from my own face and take a bite. I don't have to tell her how many times I've eaten cake for dinner.

No one really wants to rain on a parade

2011-03-27T05:49:00.000-07:00

Ittybit was brimming with excitement. When I got home from work she greeted me at the door holding a familiar drawing, enhanced with new and unfamiliar autographs.

She'd been reticent to go to her after-school program but unable to pinpoint why. With gigantic huffs and theatrical eye rolls, she recants a litany of complaints: "It's no fun. There are bullies. No one plays with me. I can't get to the craft table soon enough. I just sit there. And. Wait."

We didn't want to minimize her concerns, but the four days a week she attends its programs getting her to leave has been similar to extracting a confession from a statue. It's just that Tuesdays, the day after her three-day respite from respite, that seem to be the problem. It's all in the lead up.

So, in an effort to get her past this moment of dread, I offer a vast and changing array of suggestions: "You could bring a game or a toy? You could bring a book and read? "Maybe you could get a game of Freeze Dance going? You love Freeze Dance."

It was plain from the tilt of her head and the diminished distance between her eyelids that I'd grown another head.

I was not deterred.

"How about you bring some drawing paper and pens?"

Her eyes widen and her head balances evenly on her neck. I had her attention.

"You know, we need kids to help us with the parade dragon we've been making. ... Maybe, if you take the drawing with you, you can explain what it is we're doing and recruit volunteers."

She liked that. It appealed to the wee little art director in her soul. And as her face brightens, I can picture her flitting from student to student trying to gain their interest.

As she stood there ... beaming up at me gripping her autographed plans, she wanted me to know the day had been G-R-E-A-T. Everyone loved the idea and wanted to be a part of it. It was going to be the best parade ever and she'd be making flyers and cookies for all who came to dance down the road under a cardboard box trailing a quarter-mile of iridescent fabric.

"Look," she said, thrusting the paper in my direction.

I turned over the drawing and found a list of names neatly printed alongside a column of phone numbers.

Numbers like 555-1234.

"When should we call them?" she wondered. "A month before? A week? How about tomorrow?"

“Next Tuesday in Never” sprang to mind, but I knew I'd need to put it more delicately.

"Honey, these phone numbers aren't real phone numbers. We can't call these. My guess is you asked some older kids who didn't want to say "No" but didn't want to get a phone call either."

"Are you sure?" she asked with a wry little smile. "Would someone really give a little kid like me a phony phone number?" she said squinting at the numbers.

"There's too many patterns. Most real numbers don't go in such clear order," I explained and showed her a listing from a phone book.

She just shrugged her shoulders and skipped off. Every bounce of her being proclaiming it "Their loss."

They won't get any of the special "dragon cookies" she'd been planning to bake for the crew. They wouldn't get to throw candy at the crowds who gather at the edges of their driveways. They would miss the best parade of the year and they wouldn't even know it.

My shoulders weren't as relaxed as I wondered aloud if I should have mentioned the deception. I could have just as easily asked her about all the kids we know well, children her own age, who'd actually LIKE to be in her parade.

My husband just shrugged his shoulders. "I think it's best to tell her the truth. She'll find out anyway. If someone's going to rain on her parade, it's probably better that it's you."

Worries linger but construction paper fades

2011-03-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

I had imagined parents the world over have been quietly slipping their children’s artwork in with the recycling — saving only the most precious for posterity — since the invention of paper thousands of years ago. But I had no idea it was a subject of great consternation until the New York Times in January published a much-shared expose on the most ruthless of all art critics: Mom.

Maybe the stick figure families committed to scrap paper make it to the refrigerator before finding their way into the trash, maybe they don’t. Or maybe the squiggle-made “elephant” of an undecipherable color helps start a fire moments after it is prodigiously praised for the arch of its trunk and the way its girth fills up the page space.

Health care premiums sky high, education budgets in the toilet; taxes up, jobs down – those worries will always be with us while the color on construction paper fades.

First-World problems, perhaps, but serious business nonetheless, and one more reason our kids will end up in therapy. “Mom is throwing out ART WORK? HO-MY-GAD!”

To be brutally honest, there’s only so much construction paper a one-family construction can hold. But how do we know WHAT we should be saving what we can safely toss?

Some parents have told me they save only "original works of art" that come from the child’s imagination, as opposed to a web-site’s step-by-step instructions. We hate these folks (except for my husband) and have crossed them off our Christmas card list.

Others — *cough*NOT ME*cough* — will save only the stuff their kids insist on sleeping with because they know if they take their eyes off it for even a millisecond, their glorious glitter-covered princess will be art napped and never heard from again.

There rest of us fall somewhere in between. We save probably more than we should, push it around our desks for a while. Moving it from closet to closet — maybe even from old house to new house — before we decide to let some of it go.

We know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so most of us tend to save art work based on our own preferences. In addition to just "liking" something, I tend to save anything that has words used in explanation or that include stories. (Drawings containing misspelled expletives are framed).

But HOW we save it becomes another conundrum.

The following is a list of the most popular methods for saving cherished works of kinderart, which vary by cost and complexity:

Hold the dough, sauce and cheese-y goodness The most cost effective storage: Use a clean, empty pizza box to store artwork by year. Use one box per school: Elementary and Middle school. (High Schooler’s works will probably be off limits. They save what they want themselves). These can easily be stored on closet shelf or under a bed.

Artist Colony You can save all kinds of flat work a handled portfolio case. They are relatively compact but are large enough (if you are discriminating in what you save) to hold most two-dimensional creations a child makes during their entire educational career, unless they plan on going to an art college. In which case they will likely burn all their old drawing and use the case for their "real work."

Artistic Ant Colony This would be similar to the above portfolio case option, but scaled down in size to fit into ordinary office binders. This means parents are limited to keeping only art that conforms to the standard 8 ½” by 11” paper size. Think Origami originals.

Art Recycling Using techniques of collage, create new artworks from old ones: Laminate and make placemats or bookmarks or greeting cards. Use as gift wrap. Or literally recycle by putting lesser-loved works the revolving file ... in the middle of the night ... on the eve of recycling day ... whilst your petite Picasso sleeps. (Then pray the truck makes it to the curb before the bus comes).

The Mother of All Storage Schemes The overachiever parents among us** are digitally documenting each and every work of art Junior makes — from his pencil squiggles to his pipe-cleaner sculptures — and using any one of a growing number of self-publishing sites to turn them into carefully composed coffee table books that can be admired and cherished for generations.

**I have not done this … though I have take pictures of some of my favorites and uploaded them to the photosharing website flickr, where I’ve tagged them as "art" so I can search for them later. (But I pray, perhaps even more fervently than for schools to hold on to their arts programs, that flickr doesn’t go out of business taking all my carefully archived photos with it into the ethosphere).

Now, with the Whats and the Hows solved, the only question left is Why? What will eventually happen to all this pent up creativity?

One day you'll drag it out, dust it off and present it in all its musty glory to the artist, now grown and in possession of piles of his own children's creative genius. What he does with the collection will be the final answer to what has been the real question all along: whether hoarding ... like artistic prowess ... is an inherited trait.

All roads lead to the highway ... except the ones that lead to oatmeal

2011-03-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

I took a left when I should have taken a right.

I was out of my element, more than an hour from home and it was dark.

As I turned I'd had the feeling I'd gone in the wrong direction, but continued on just for confirmation.

I thought about turning around.

One street. Two streets. A mile of streets. Another mile of streets.

Might as well keep going, I tell myself. Eventually I'll find something I recognize.

In a day in age when gasoline prices are eating into food budgets and car exhaust is poisoning the planet, other motorists might retrace their steps and cut their losses. I motor on through. I tend to think there are only six streets of separation from me and any major highway, and that all roads eventually lead to some place I'll recognize. I reason, maybe the drive will, at the very least, help my over-stimulated children, bickering side by side in their car seats, fall asleep.

I can hear my husband's voice in my head ...

"What are you doing? This is crazy. Turn around."

Even when he's not in the car, he tells me how to drive.

In fact I'm sure, were I to think on it any further, he'd intervene with some form of pocket-sized salvation designed to contradict my fabricated understanding of the universe.

"Being lost isn't the worst thing. Sometimes it leads you to places beyond your wildest dreams."

The bickering stops for a blessed moment. I checked the rear-view mirror. Ittybit's eyes were wide.

"You don't KNOW where we ARE!?!"

"I said some of that out loud, didn't I?"

"We're LOST!?"

"We're not lost, really. I know generally where we are, I just don't know exactly where we are."

"You know what this means, right?"

"It's going to take us longer to get home?"

"No. We are going to have to sleep in our car, and in the morning we'll have to go to one of these houses and beg for food. ... Only they probably won't give food to you, because nobody will give food to an adult ... so I'll have to go up to the door and you'll have to hide in the bushes. ..."

"I am not hiding in the bushes," I say emphatically. "We are not going to pull a bait and switch on a homeowner. Besides, we are NOT going to be lost for long ... I'll find the highway and we'll be home before you know it."

"You know," she continues as if I hadn't spoken. "If they have oatmeal you will have to eat it. Beggars can't be choosers."

"We are not going to have to beg for food. Look, there's a sign for the highway. We're almost back to where we started. Why don't you just relax and listen to the radio."

She's quiet for a while as I turn onto the highway.

"Ah ... mom?"

"What, hon?"

"We're on the highway?"

"Yep. We are. It's the highway alright."

"You know what this means, right?"

"We'll be home soon?"

"No. It means we are going to STARVE! There are no houses on this road."

Some roads lead to highway, others oatmeal

I took a left when I should have taken a right.

I was out of my element, more than an hour from home and it was dark.

As I turned I'd had the feeling I'd gone in the wrong direction, but continued on just for confirmation.

I thought about turning around.

One street. Two streets. A mile of streets. Another mile of streets.

Might as well keep going, I tell myself. Eventually I'll find something I recognize.

In a day in age when gasoline prices are eating into food budgets and car exhaust is poisoning the planet, other motorists might retrace their steps and cut their losses. I motor on through. I tend to think there are only six streets of separation from me and any major highway, and that all roads lead eventually lead to some place I'll recognize. I reason, maybe the drive will, at the very least, help my over-stimulated children, bickering side by side in their car seats, fall asleep.

I can hear my husband's voice in my head ...

"What are you doing? This is crazy. Turn around."

Even when he's not in the car, he tells me how to drive.

In fact I'm sure, were I to think on it any further, he'd intervene with some form of pocket-sized salvation designed to contradict my fabricated understanding of the universe.

"Being lost isn't the worst thing. Sometimes it leads you to places beyond your wildest dreams."

The bickering stops for a blessed moment. I checked the rear-view mirror. Ittybit's eyes were wide.

"You don't KNOW where we ARE!?!"

"I said some of that out loud, didn't I?"

"We're LOST!?"

"We're not lost, really. I know generally where we are, I just don't know exactly where we are."

"You know what this means, right?"

"It's going to take us longer to get home?"

"No. We are going to have to sleep in our car, and in the morning we'll have to go to one of these houses and beg for food. ... Only they probably won't give food to you, because nobody will give food to an adult ... so I'll have to go up to the door and you'll have to hide in the bushes. ..."

"I am not hiding in the bushes," I say emphatically. "We are not going to pull a bait and switch on a homeowner. Besides, we are NOT going to be lost for long ... I'll find the highway and we'll be home before you know it."

"You know," she continues as if I hadn't spoken. "If they have oatmeal you will have to eat it. Beggars can't be choosers."

"We are not going to have to beg for food. Look, there's a sign for the highway. We're almost back to where we started. Why don't you just relax and listen to the radio."

She's quiet for a while as I turn onto the highway.

"Ah ... mom?"

"What, hon?"

"We're on the highway?"

"Yep. We are. It's the highway alright."

"You know what this means, right?"

"We'll be home soon?"

"No. It means we are going to STARVE! There are no houses on this road."

Putting out small fires is just part of the job

2011-03-06T05:06:00.000-08:00

We can tell ourselves "parenting isn't a job it's a relationship" and other philosophical truths. But we all know it's work. And work can be exhausting. Vacations, on the other hand, are supposed to be refreshing. Yet, while the family may be doing something different for a week at a time, someone still has to do the laundry. And dispose of kitty litter. And put out small fires.

You may plan to be a tourist in your own town, sit poolside or read The Weekly World News to your heart's content, but when the junior miss and mister are bickering over who gets the last pretzel, and the boy sprays purple grape juice over the girl to make his point, it's likely to be you who is called to put out the fire.

It's just a fact. Similar to the understanding marriage is work, though no one would ever call it a job.

Now I'm not trying to create a gender war, here. Mom isn't the only one separating skirmishing siblings and scrubbing purple from duds. Although many-a-smart man has had the laundry duties removed from his Honey-Do List permanently if for no other reason than to ensure that her favorite cream-color wool zippered cardigan doesn't end up doll-sized and pink.

Let's just call it a matter of drathers.

I'd rather fold laundry than shovel sidewalks.

He'd rather shovel than have me drive his tractor into the house.

I'd rather scoop kitty litter than trap mice.

He'd rather be hung by his toenails and drained of blood than deal with the cat's recycled Nine Lives.

I'd rather clean bathrooms than cook dinner.

He'd like to eat.

So it's really not a he-said, she-said kind of fight I'm picking.

It's more of a everyone's going to be blind after we get done getting our eye for an eye.

For instance. Let's just say a certain person -- HIM -- discovered the kitty litter had been disposed of improperly.

Dumped unceremoniously into the backyard with the dog poo.

Now, to the dump scofflaw -- ME -- it's all poo, and it will be cleaned up in the spring.

However the dump discoverer -- HIM -- figures .. it's gross and I'm the one who's going to get the shovel job.

Commence the launching of arms:

Don't you know the dog sees this as a delicacy? It's gross. What will the neighbors say? It's gross.

Counter attack:

It's poo. I will clean it up in the spring. There's a fence. I said I would clean it up.

Fight, fight, bicker, bicker. Fight some more.

It's never really the thing you're fighting about that's the problem. It's the WAY you both do it.

Poke. Eyes. Poke. Eyes. Until each of you sit there blinking back blinding rage.

Eventually the argument ends and you try and put it behind you. Chalk it up to stress and short tempers. It's only kitty litter. Even the name of the stuff sounds funny. Kitty litter.

But some piece of it stays with you like sand from the beach.

Hurtful words that can't be taken back easily.

I'm still thinking about it as I load the wood stove, improperly. And the log I now realize won't fit completely into the stove is catching on fire. The gloves aren't where they should be. Nor is the fire extinguisher.

I calmly tell the kids to get on their coats and go outside to wait for me to call them back inside. And then I call him in a panic, yelling the words no one wants to hear after they sing-song a happy "Hello."

"WHERE IS THE FIRE EXTINQUISHER?"

What? Huh? What's going on?

Long story made shortened by another JUST TELL ME WHERE IT IS ... A log is on fire and I can't shut the stove door.

Just throw the log out into the snow! He says.

THERE'S NO GLOVE!

Use my good gloves. They're leather. They'll work.

I find them, return to the stove and the log still balanced precariously, and quickly open the door to the backyard.

But I'm standing there, now with the flaming log securely in his dress gloves ready to toss it into the snow, I can't help but laugh at what I see.

The Christmas tree he disposed of in late January is just a few paces from my little pile of improperly discarded kitty litter.

I toss the log between the two.

As the hiss of snow extinguishes the log, my shoulders release their grip on my ears. I won't say a word to him about this epiphany, or my feeling of victory. I'll just tell the neighbors.

Mommy intuition not included

2011-02-27T08:03:00.001-08:00

I could see it in the doctor's eyes as he wondered what symptoms had brought us in.

I was wasting his time.

No fever? No sore throat? No runny nose?

No. No. Um, no.

I was worried about the rash-y skin.

But up until the moment I decided I couldn't wait until Monday to call their regular doctor, I had been holding off, applying cream and hoping for spontaneous healing.

Winter skin. Chapped, dry, over-licked, eczema skin.

It's just a rash, I tell myself. The little voice in my head, though, the one that listens to pharmaceutical ads as if they were horror movies come to life, clucks at my rational self and starts tossing words around like streptococci and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus … more commonly known as MRSA.

Don't jump to conclusions, I tell myself. You always jump to the worst-possible-scenario.

It's just my natural response ever since pharmaceutical companies started to cast their nets for potential patients, turning every ache or pain into the the beginning of the end. Even if you would rather have the disease than the cure, you listen unblinkingly to the laundry list of potential side effects that have rarely, though sometimes, been associated with the unpronounceable chemical cure.

I tend to switch channels as fast as I can so I don't end up calling the doctor to see if I shouldn't be taking something for whatever dysfunction their selling.

But having lunch with parents from Ittybit's class, who casually noted this was the year of symptom-less streptococci infection, I started thinking. …

She's in their classes …

Been on play dates.

She had a fever when all their kids were coming down with strep.

She had a headache.

I worried about it a little at the time. But it went away.

And then I didn't worry about it. There had been no sore throat. No excessive coughing. No lethargy or listlessness. The kids were their usual selves.

98.6 degrees of normal.

I never said anything to my friends they recited a commercial-sized list of symptoms that can be overlooked, I just listened with wide eyes.

It's just unusual, they said. They don't always exhibit classic symptoms. They sometimes get rashes. Strange coloring on their faces. Sometimes nothing at all. …

Which lead me to obsessing …

Which then lead to Googling …

Which ultimately lead to a Sunday morning visit to an Urgent Care.

It's just a simple swab to put my mind at ease, I tell myself.

Negative.

Funny, though It doesn't put my mind at ease.

It just proves the instincts I thought came with the job are nowhere to be found.

Worry for nothing, and the waste of a perfectly good afternoon. The kids are starving and tired, and look at me with faces that could have done so many other things beside play Angry Birds and wait.

Let's pretend ... to like each other

2011-02-20T05:58:00.000-08:00

I wish we could all share in the true sentiment of primary school Valentines.

When we are in primary school the beauty of its simplicity is wasted on us. A little past primary and we get caught up in the emotion of romantic love … mostly the complexity of it … and in the confusion the whole thing tends to leave a bad taste in our mouths.

Somewhere between this angst-y state of desire and some version of mature fulfillment we decide Valentine's Day is just some ridiculous notion cooked up by marketers to relieve us of our hard-earned cash.

So, we dust our hands of it, happy to be rid of its fakery.

That is … until our kids reach the age when paper hearts and printed confections are as exciting as the sunrise on a brand new day. Then, like it or not, our hands become soiled again in glitter and glue.

I know a lot of folks would like to see the tiny hearts of this holiday shrivel up and blow away. I'm sure at one time or another I was one of them. No thing is the same for any one of us, after all. Some of us can't be bothered, others are bothered beyond belief.

But it wasn't until I helped Ittybit make a class-load of valentines that I understood what I'd been missing all those years.

She selected a project that seemed easy enough. She'd draw pictures of each of her classmates using the class picture as a reference. Taking some advice from the internet, I drew the chins, necks and ears to make the sizes similar. She drew the hair, faces and wrote in the names.

It took us two days and a slew of do-overs until she was satisfied with the results.

In those two days we talked about each of her friends. What made them unique. What made them special.

She didn't like Isaac's nose. So she erased it … made it better. More like the nose she was used to seeing on him.

Corrine's hair was all wrong. She wore it loose, not in pig tails. Erase, erase, erase. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Scratch, scratch, scratch. That's better.

She asked me how to spell "sweet" and "treat," and wondered if we could include some with the cards.

I nodded.

I could never have imagined this scene only a few years ago. I would have railed against the idea that children should be conduits-of trumped up emotion in all its lace-doily artifice. I would have wondered if maybe all this forced friendship wasn't the beginning of some soul-crushing lie.

We spend hours laboring over some sweet nothing that is destined to be tossed in the trash.

"What's the point?" We ask our selves. "It means nothing." Or maybe the opposite, it means too much.

We try to reason that we can't like everyone, so why should we pretend we can? Don't our problems as adults come from stuffing these feelings of discord so far down in our psyches that the pressure of it eventually threatens to blow a hole the size of a heart in our souls?

For whatever reason, we think this false holiday fosters the potential for dashed hopes and unrealistic dreams.

Wouldn't it be better to celebrate any one of the OTHER manufactured holidays that fall on February 14?

There would be no hard feelings over Clean Out Your Computer Day, League of Women Voters Day or Library Lovers Day. Who wouldn't go all in for National Ferris Wheel Day or Race Relations Day? Because, certainly, if there was no Valentine's Day no one would have to create a Quirky Alone Day, or National Call In Single Day.

Yet, instead of throwing Valentine's Day away, I find myself wishing we could boil it down to its purest form and bottle it.

Even if we have to pretend, liking each other seems so much better than the alternative.

Just a little something to stuff in the suggestion box

2011-02-13T05:12:00.000-08:00

There is nothing more loathsome than that note home from school ...

You know the one. It's sitting in your kid's bag just waiting to reveal your failure as a parent.

Oh sure, it's usually disguised as a suggestion ... an easy way to make learning fun and to reinforce all the hard work they're doing in school. You know, pretty much all the stuff you are undoing on weekends and over the spate of recent snow days by letting them watch TV and play video games until their eyes cross.

But when you read it you almost wish it was a bad grade or a notice of expulsion.
Anything is better than the three words that top the list of contributions we could be making to society via parenting: Family. Game. Night.

Now, I don't know what happens in your house, but you take one competitive and rules-obsessed dad, a fun-loving but slightly devious first-grader, a strong-willed and impishly sly preschooler, a mother who'd rather smooth the waters than ride a wave and mash them around a table to play a game of Monopoly Junior and you are just asking for the war to end all wars.

In fact the only reason I can even fathom why a teacher would suggest such a thing is if he or she had a couple of brothers named Parker, or the kids in their family skipped the ages of three through six.

"Well that's the point, really," you imagine them saying over your objections. "It helps children learn rules and sequences. It gives them practice reading, counting and taking turns," they'll explain. "Everyone can have fun together. And what a memory you'll be making."

All the happy well-adjusted people in the world add on that last one just rub your face in the fact that they're pretty sure your kids will spend their adulthood trying to blot out all their childhood recollections.

And you can't really disagree if the game of Dora the Explorer Chutes and Ladders you played in the falls, winters and springs of 2008, 2009 and 2010 were any indication.

They all kind of blur together in my memory, but the scenes have an uncanny similarity: The dad, sitting on the ground, legs all knotted in a pretzel, tries to keep an eye on his game piece (Boots the monkey) while objecting to the willful disregard of simple rules; The Champ takes every opportunity to move Boots around the board, knocking over his sister's Dora piece, who is screaming her objections until the room erupts into an irritating series of squawks. "Hey, dude. You are Diego. Where's Diego?"

The boy shrugs his shoulders.

"Great," I groan. "Now I'm going to get to scour the house looking for a two-inch plastic explorer or accept the fact that none of our games will ever be yard sale worthy."

The eyes upon me after that remark reveal that I have won the Bad Sport Award, and it doesn't matter that I took one for the team by selecting the cootie-filled Backpack as my game piece.

I know eventually it will be fun to play a game of Crazy 8s or Apples to Apples with the apples of my eye, but right now feels a little like tooth extraction: one kid makes up her own rules, which are designed to bring her a win while the other is putting the dice down his pants or trying to deal cards all over the living room. Add in a husband who using Parliamentary Procedure to interpret the game outcomes. They're all taking turns being sore losers and bad winners.

We'll spend a few more minutes trying to bring the game into earnest play, before we hurl the remaining pieces back in the box and trade it all in for Family Movie Night ... a choice that has yet to appear on any lists of scholarly suggestions.

Seriously.

If the makers of boardgames were legally bound to show a Your-Results-May-Vary representation of the gaming experience on the box top, Monopoly money would be everywhere, the families would be crying, whining, showing pouty faces (one parent would be screaming), and a tiny, besmudged little hand would be tossing the game pieces as far as their little arm could throw.

I'm guessing if that scene were plastered all over game boxes Family Movie Night would have a shot of getting into the teacher's suggestion box.

Sometimes we miss the point until they've gone beyond it

2011-02-06T05:20:00.000-08:00

She received an IllusStory for her birthday, which is the perfect gift for a kid who wants to write (and publish) her first book before she's forced to blow out an even 10 candles on her cake ...

No. ... Wait. ...

That was me ... (never mind).

Although she has told me she wants to be a writer, she hasn't revealed any timetable that's breathing down her neck. I envy her calm.

Where was I?

IlluStory.

This is essentially a writing kit that helps kids formulate an outline and create a book in a series of pages you then mail off to some place that prints it, binds it and mails it back.

Amazing times, huh?

Anywhooo.

Ittybit unearths this creative gem from her pile of presents that she's been slowly savoring since December, and decides she'd like to make it a biography, which happens to be the first suggestion on the instruction sheet.

Being in the news business, I wonder aloud if she might want to interview one of her grandparents and write her book based on those interviews. First-person interviews, I think, will be easier to teach than footnotes, and wondering aloud makes it seem as if I'm not married to the idea. If I play it cool she just might take my suggestion as her own.

For a second, as I waited for her answer, I had this flash: She would ask all the questions people wish they'd asked a grandparent but never got the chance ...

She shook her head. And that second ended. Nope. She'd decided. She wanted to write her biography about Martin Luther King Jr.

Now, I can't say I wasn't surprised. I would have guessed she'd have chosen someone in pop culture -- a Justin Bieber or a Taylor Swift -- but I knew Martin Luther King Jr. had been a topic of study in preparation for the celebration of his birth in January and Black HIstory Month in February. She'd been asking questions about him, too.

So I asked her how I could help.

"You can help me find interesting facts about him," she said pointing to the computer as she sharpened a pencil.

As I Googled, she came and sat on my lap to look at the computer screen.

"When was he born?"

"Where was he born?"

"Who were his parents?"

"Where did he go to school?"

"What's his most important accomplishment?"

We talked about what we found. We looked at a map. She was interested that he was originally named Michael, and that his father changed it to honor Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation.

We discussed what the word assassinated means.

I don't know how to explain the courage it takes to stand up against a wrong that had been so widely accepted and so fervently protected.

But I try. His legacy, I say, is everwhere we look.

We were both silent for a while.

She uncapped her markers and went to work drawing his likeness for the cover.

She asked me to write the words so they'd be neat, and got to work on designing the first page, a picture of a family in a living room - a mother holding an infant and a father looking down at the child from his seat next to them on the sofa.

She took her time and drew carefully.

It wasn't until after I'd convinced her two pages was enough for the first day's work and was rummaging through her book bag for homework that I found the stapled booklet of coloring papers she'd brought home from school: "He Had a Dream."

I held it up: "Hey ... maybe we could use this to research your biography."

She looked at me in horror, like I'd lost my mind.

"No! That book doesn't say anything about Martin Luther King Jr. other than his name in the beginning, it's all about people he brought together.

"He needs his own book."

Evergreen until green no more

2011-01-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

For most folks, Christmas is pretty much over in the early days of January.

You unplug the lights, pack away the decorations and tactfully dispose of all those photo cards from family and friends and the end of a year of change and growth is officially over.

Oh ye of sharp efficiency ... weeks ago your Christmas trees sat curbside, having by now received their final mulch. You've dusted your hands and moved onward into the New Year.

I envy you.

I have always had trouble letting go of Christmas' past.

This has to be the earliest I’ve even considered dismantling a tree. Most years, it's Valentine’s Day before I gather up the gumption to toss our bone-dry tree and stow away the ephemera that collects during the jois de’ yule. One year I watched my husband drag out a bare, needle-less stick with branches a few days before St. Patrick’s Day.

I considered that year a personal triumph. Most folks would assume it’s a keen laziness that keeps a person from putting all the pomp back into the shoe boxes in a timely, efficient manner. But I believe it's a softer kind of laziness that supplies the reason for procrastination. Although the enthusiasm for putting away the holiday flair rarely matches the exuberance for putting it out.

It also doesn't help that the kids have named the tree "Firdinand" and were checking daily to see if he'd like a cool beverage.

With the house empty and no one mourning the demise of poor Fird-y, I take the opportunity to snag my clothes on the parched pine needles and collect the pieces of glitter-covered cardboard hanging from its branches in peace. I’ll have to find more boxes to store the ornaments that multiply with each passing year.

Throwing away any piece of the collection doesn’t seem like an option.

There’s a new paper plate angel a reindeer with hand print horns a Santa made of construction paper, Poly-fil and Froot Loops. I pluck from the tree six balsa wood stockings that have been painted in the style of Jackson Pollock and 12 colorful paper orbs scratched from black paint. There’s a mouse made of chocolate kisses, a felt owl and a long paper chain with each link numbered in order. Scattered around here and there I find 17 stars and one wonderfully misspelled solar system — Sun, Murky, Venis, Earth, Marz, Joopeter, Sater, Yernis, Neptude and Paluto — carefully colored in crayon.

How can I slip these holiday creations in with the coffee grounds, sink strainer contents and whatever leftovers became the science project at the back of the fridge? It doesn’t seem right.

As I dropped little "Paluto" into a hastily procured storage box I pictured Ittybit’s face —her knitted brow as she came to me to ask if it was alright to include the little lost planet in her project, her smile when I told her it could orbit our tree. After all, it has been difficult for many of us to come to terms with its universal demotion. It's never easy to lose something familiar.

Eventually, though, we do have to say "goodbye," or at least "farewell for now," and move on.

I know someday the kids will stand around the boxes I’ve filled with stuff and wonder why their mother kept a paper cup with yarn hair and googly eyes, or a smear of paint on a chip of wood. I hope they will turn over each one and find their names in early handwriting.

In the end, though, I hope they do toss these faded bits of paper and mouse-eaten breakfast cereal masterpieces … I just hope it doesn’t happen before they have trees of their own filled with ornaments just like them.

Cat fight

2011-01-23T05:14:00.000-08:00

In her Wall Street Journal essay “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” Yale professor and author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua poked a sharp stick at her newly acquired nemesis, The Mama Grizzly. In her essay, she pegged the American parenting style as lax and deemed it responsible for producing children who can’t live up to their potential because they aren’t forced to do so.

Her memoir, she says, gives readers a deeper look into the inner workings of a family that raises “stereotypically successful kids.”

She knows what it takes to make musical prodigies and math whizzes, she says, because she’s done it ... with an iron fist. And it takes metal she doesn't see in western parenting methods. For instance, her daughters were never allowed to have play dates, attend sleepovers or select their own extra curricular activities. They were not allowed to play an instrument that wasn't a violin or piano, but they had to play one or the other ... for three hours per day, minimum. They were not allowed to get any grade below an A and they were expected to be the top student in every subject that mattered to her — no excuses.

Reading the essay is gut wrenching. But not because of the presence of stark competition we've systematically tried to erase from our children's childhood experience. Nor is it because of the implied competitiveness we parents have started recording in permanent ink. It's painful because in some way we know none of us — mothers especially — can be sure our children won't resent us regardless of how they were raised.

We all make mistakes.

Chua's are magnified by her candor.

She unapologetically describes calling her children “garbage,” threatening their toys and screaming herself horse as they continue to flub their music lessons … hour after tedious hour. She is jaundiced by her own light even as her daughters get straight As and win prestigious musical competitions.

Parents from all corners of the ethosphere came out swinging.

They called her abusive, surmised she was raising robots who would have no stars to reach in adulthood after playing Carnegie Hall in their teens. They wonder about her husband, and how he could stay married to such a ferocious beast. They predicted the damage she was doing to her family would come full force – or to a deafening silence – when the lessons stopped, bags packed and the return visits never begin.

Nevertheless, her mistakes don’t seem so uncommon.

I pictured myself where her critics picture her: Alone in her advancing years. The difference being that I'll be shunned for saying horrible things in the heat of frustration whilst trying to get my kids to pick up their toys.

One of the most cogent Grizzlies awakened by this Tiger’s memoir, oddly enough, seems to be New York Times Columnist David Brooks, who contends Chua’s Tiger isn’t so much a cultural phenomenon as a class one — and not a new one at that. He says she’s doing everything pushy, over-bearing, upper middle class parents do in trying to give their kids advantages, she’s just more relentless. When he raps her knuckles, he does it by calling her a wimp for protecting her kids from the most demanding of tasks -- understanding where they fit in with the rest of society.

“Where,” he asks, claws extended, “do they learn to detect their own shortcomings?”

I imagine Chua would just smile her pointed tiger teeth and growl at him in response. Why, from her, of course.

It’s a fascinating subject, really.

Here we are in a time when the U.S. seems at the precipice of losing its generations-old grasp of the top of the world food chain; schools are losing education funding left, right and sideways; and jobs are going where wages are cheaper and fear is rampant.

We have precious little control in our lives when it pertains to others, and more ideas about what it is we're supposed to be doing as parents than we have experience actually doing. We tend to raise our kids as we were raised, making changes based upon any number of influences … Chua and Brooks among them.

But we aren't convinced our ways are right either, are we?

I wonder if we’d be so outraged if we didn’t think there was a sliver of truth in what Chua said, despite her grandstanding.

For me, I suppose, the takeaway wasn’t about being relentless in the pursuit of excellence or the acceptance of limitations. It is that self esteem isn't something we can give our kids by protecting them from failure. It's something they take for themselves when they learn from their mistakes. It's the natural outcome of doing something they thought impossible.

I’m know I don't have the killer instinct to be a Tiger Mother or a Mama Grizzly, but I think I can certainly learn from both breeds.

You never know

2011-01-16T05:34:00.000-08:00

He wasn't happy. He didn't want to be in the parking lot of the ski area watching his sister schlep herself and a pair of rented skis across the road to the trail where a group of colorfully clad classmates are waiting.

But the lesson wasn't for him. He was too young to participate.

"Next year buddy," I tried to be reassuring. "Next year you will be old enough to go, too."

Cue waterworks.

So I did the only thing I could think to do; I picked him up, snowshoes and all, and carried him across the road and joined the group.

"We'll just follow along," I said to myself as I set him in the snow.

As the class started to slide awkwardly into the woods he muscled through the snow with ease if not grace.

"They're skis are longer than mine," he started to complain. "They aren't slipping."

His sister -- who was trying diligently to turn around by making "stars in the snow," or keep her skis straight out ahead like "French fries," or shape them into a wedge for controlling her speed -- was having a hard time staying upright.

So when he pitched forward and face planted into a drift of pure white powder I knew it wasn't an accident. He just wanted to do everything the other kids were doing, even falling.

It's funny how you can see their minds turning sometimes. You notice the smile in their eyes when the big ideas come to them. You know it as if you'd thought of it yourself.

When I picked him up and stuck him upright in the snow he was giggling. It's an intoxicating laughter, enough to make you think you know everything about your kids.

Yet, as one kid is muscling through the winter landscape, the other is struggling to stay on top of it. She's doing what the instructor advises, but everything is new and awkward. Her skis cross. She falls. It's hard to get back up. People are watching. Some kids are speeding past her with a combination of co-ordination and fearlessness. She falls again.

I put myself in her place and help her up again. I see the tears and try talking them away with "dust-your-self-off" encouragements.

She just stands there.

I smile painfully at the instructor, whose made the same assessment of the situation: Things are not going well.

Soon the class will be over. I walk, she skis next to me and we don't speak of what has happened.

I assume she's not going to want to return, though I don't want to make it official.

She's getting older, more aware of how things look if not how they seem. I have to be careful not to put things in her mind that weren't there to begin with.

Of course I'm not thinking about any of this as I trudged and she swooshed along the snow-covered path toward the final hill of the day. I'm just thinking about next week and what types of acrobatics it would take to get her out here again. I'm replaying all the variables I know of and imagine "if at first your don't succeed" speech falling victim to the "Because I said so, that's why" edict.

When we reach the rest of the group, I stay silent as she tells the instructor she'd rather walk down the last hill. But I smile when she changes her mind. As she starts downward, It takes every ounce of my flabby self-control not to reach out and catch her as she starts to wobble and lean backward.

She steadies herself and stays upright, and I bend over backwards in overdone praise. Her eyes glaze over.

I know that last bit of hill wasn't enough to erase the hour-long frustration of skiing. I fall silent again.

She schleps the gear back across the road, still sniffling. I'm afraid to ask, yet she volunteers: "That was really fun. I can't wait for next week."

As my children head toward the lodge together I stand in the parking lot with an odd sense of relief, but also an unsettling wisdom: You just never know.

You can't fail if you don't tell anyone

2011-01-09T05:30:00.000-08:00

The war is on.

The new year is upon us and resolutions are whizzing around as if catapulted by slingshot. We're collectively going to exercise 24 hours a day and lose a few trillion pounds. We're going to stop smoking and start living healthier lives. We're going to be different. We're going to be better. We're going to be happy.

It's nothing, really. Just a moment in the wee hours when we promise to make changes, great and small, that we hope will stick.

Hope being the key word and preeminent weapon in this internal war on our interminable human shortcomings.

Of course, not everyone shares the desire to engage in the annual ritual.

Occasionally, however, one of these forward-thinking missiles ricochets off some soft object and hits a hard-boiled cynic, causing them to hoot and holler and dance around swearing a stream of obscenities that would make a sailor blush.

Resolutions, this kitten-hating group thinks, are for the romantic saps who, by January's close, will be outside freezing their fingers off in the designated smoking areas near the dumpsters, bumming cigarettes from their friends who didn't quit buying.

Cynicism, therefore, is for anyone whose ever bought a lottery ticket that didn't pay out. Why bother trying?

I shrug my shoulders. Who am I to judge?

From midnight to midnight on the cusp of any given year I have no idea on which side I'll be standing amid the skirmish.

Will I be taking my last bite of a white-flour-refined-sugar confection or swearing off striving for an iota of improvement?

The side of me that wants to eat more vegetables, get exercise and make choices that lead to fewer regrets is counter balanced by the side that wants to foster a greater acceptance for that which isn't perfect.

Acceptance of ourselves and others seems to be the thing in shortest supply.

Some folks think that's as it should be. Acceptance, after all, is just as easily defined as acquiescence rather than agreement. It is the tarnish instead of the silver. Silver can only be polished with hard work and caustic chemicals.

Who is right? Who is wrong? Who really cares?

Truth be told, I've found agreeing to disagree to be the utmost of challenges.

As I surf through my social network I see the difficulty isn't a growing problem so much as a lingering one. The same old slights and complaints rise in daily status reports. Thumbs Up for hating Mean People. Sure. That's easy. All Nice People hate Mean People. Deciding which is which, though, that's the trick isn't it?

I should stop reading status reports.

Maybe I'll vow to stop searching stat counters and worrying about how many people are following, unfollowing or unfriending me. I wish those terms and others (refutiated) never web crawled their way into my lexicon.

I've tried to be the righter of wrongs. I've repeated mistakes as much as I've learned from them. "Look before you leap," I tell myself. "Don't be so quick to judge." I've spoken in superlatives and jumped on bandwagons that have subsequently overturned.

Balance isn't as easy as it seems.

Maybe that's my mission as this new year opens to a host of possibilities: Whether I resolve or revolve, it matters not. So long as I keep it to myself, I can't fail.

Coming in from the cold

2011-01-02T05:09:00.000-08:00

I don't have clear memories of spending hours building giant snow fortresses or populating the front yard with lopsided snow people. I'd always just assumed that's what happened since I clearly remember the results. I'd just figured a substantial chunk of my childhood winters were spent thawing out, just as I'd spent an entire month of every summer submerged under water. My lips would be blue and my teeth chattering and still I'd insist I was fine.

"I don't know where they get the energy," said tired moms over every kitchen table where I sat sipping cocoa and swinging my legs, as my boots stood helter skelter in an ever-expanding puddle of melting snow on the linoleum.

Perhaps I just have the seasons confused. Maybe the puddles were from waterlogged towels.

I certainly remember the sky blue-colored snow suit with the faux fur around the hood. After I'd outgrown it came a royal blue colored replacement with a hook-closure belt and yellow racing stripes along one side. I called it my snowmobile suit, though no one I knew ever zipped around on one.

Things felt different back then.

I remember a world that seemed perpetually white after the Thanksgiving leftovers had been polished off. I remember the excitement of waiting for a big enough dump of snow to bury the school day ... maybe even two.

I remember having popsicle toes. On more than one occasion.

What I don't remember is how long it took to get dressed in the prerequisite layers of thermal duds, the degree of difficulty in getting last year's boots over three layers of socks, or the dilemma of whether to tuck the pants into the boots or put the boots over the pants.

The holy grail was to keep any and all elements from getting through the armor. The smallest amount of precipitation down a boot or the back of a sweater would put the brakes on everything, except perhaps cocoa commotion.

I don't remember searching for matching gloves or a hat that fit. I don't remember getting a scarf wrapped around my entire body like a snake coiling its dinner. I certainly don't remember taking hours to put on all the gear and spending mere minutes in the snow.

I don't remember my mother pretending to be a horse and racing through knee-deep drifts of snow hoping to recreate the feeling of sledding since the grade of our hill was as flat as Florida.

Florida. It's warm there ... although not lately.

Bad example.

I digress.

Back then it never occurred to me I'd be standing in waist-high snow with two kids laying prone on a red toboggan behind me as the wind grinds fine crystals of snow into their cheeks. One pass through a make-shift sled run and the novelty has already worn off.

"I want to go back inside."

I look at my watch. It had taken 45 minutes to turn my children into trussed up turkeys and six minutes for their pop-up thermometers to blast off.

"Yeah, I'm cold, too. My wrists are freezing. I can't feel my nose."

They're too young to remember this, I tell myself as I drag the sled back toward the house. They just stare up at the sky and moan melodramatically ... "We can't even see the house it's so far away."

I tell them we will be home and warm soon but they aren't convinced.

"We'll freeze like ice cubes before we get there. I'm so hungry. I might even starve. It's already been hours."

"No it hasn't," I assure them. "It will just seem that way."

Gaining perspective on a Sunday Morning

2010-12-26T05:33:00.000-08:00

It’s Sunday morning. And since it is Sunday morning, more than likely my husband and I are on the couch watching “Sunday Morning” with Charles Osgood. It’s practically a family tradition, one that dates back to the Charles Kuralt days ... before children. Before we even knew each other.

The kids complain for a while when they realize the tube isn’t transmitting their two–dimensional friends.

That’s practically a tradition, too.

They give up their protests, however, when it’s pointed out that parents sometimes get to commandeer the remote control, especially when there are copious amounts of toys corralled in their rooms. … Toys that are lonely. … And potentially in need of new owners. … Owners who WILL play with them. Nicely.

They'll dart away — eyeing us with squinted scrutiny — to make sure nary a plaything has been toy-napped.

In the peace and quiet I've cajoled with threats against forgotten presents, we'll listen to the segments enjoying music, art and nature. We'll laugh at Bill Geist and wish we had a job like his. Any job that includes visiting the National Taxidermy Championship or reporting on the ugliest of Christmas sweaters would be worth its weight in sculpted butter, especially if it included travel expenses.

For 90 minutes we sit back and are entertained. Time slows down.

There’s no Earth-moving scoops or stories that seem too far out of the ordinary. Instead of The News, It feels more like sitting down with an old friend who tells a good story.

But it's not always easy listening to friends. Sometimes their stories make you visit places you've heard of but try to avoid.

It's not as if I hadn't heard about Beads of Courage, a nationwide project that offers glass beads to children battling cancer. It was just the type of story I try to hum through, as if NOT knowing the details could protect the people I love. After all, it seemed so simple as to be insignificant anyway — glass artisans make beads and give them to children with cancer. But seeing the children on Sunday Morning and listening to their stories, I couldn't look away.

Just a token, perhaps, and yet each bead represents something that the child has endured: Hair loss. Tests. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Surgeries. Transfusions. A list that is daunting and seemingly never-ending. These beads, strung together, are weighty reminders of the strength and courage of the children who wear them.

I couldn't help but cry. Especially when the mother of a child who lost her battle spoke of how her daughter's necklace, now enshrined in a shadowbox on the wall, gives her strength to get out of bed in the morning and go on living.

I can imagine losing a child. What I can't imagine is having the strength to face it with such amazing grace and courage.

My face is puffy and red when my kids make their way downstairs again, having no doubt counted and recounted their most prized possessions until they were satisfied all was well. The show had transitioned into its closing segment. Ittybit wonders why the birds, gently chirping against the sound of water flowing downstream, have upset me so.

It's not as if I've forgotten how lucky I am. It's not as if I don't know that this luck I feel could change come Monday morning. It's just that sometimes we all need a friend to remind us that life really is beautiful, even in places and at times you'd least expect.

Happy Holidays to you and your family, from me and mine.

On birthdays, bribary and brainstorming

2010-12-19T05:23:00.000-08:00

Dear Ittybit,

I know I should feel terribly embarrassed by all the excess we’ve exhibited at birthday parties.

More than two dozen people invited to a two-hour event. At Christmas time, no less.

But I don't feel embarrassed.

Conflicted, maybe, but not embarrassed.

The much reviled gift bag is in full production mode at our house. You are busy choosing tiny toys and notebooks for each of the kids who will be in attendance.

I understand the disdain for such things. Before I was even born, I've been told, the party WAS the present.

However, when I was growing up a few kids would go home with prizes, which was probably how all this excess was born. Everyone, as they start having children and hosting yearly parties of their own, remembers feeling like a loser as they left time after time empty handed.

Here we are — adults, a whole lifetime later — trying to compensate for all the mild disappointments with small bag of trinkets to be handed out to the children we sugared up and are sending home with their parents, who will no doubt, at some point during the year, repay the favor.

Entitlement and consumerism are blamed for what happens these days.

Some of us — but not all — rent places and spaces, trying to create memories that will last until next year ... when we'll try to top ourselves. We hire horses and clowns and enthusiasts of all ilk to entertain. The naysayers tell us we want to be the envy of our friends.

In the abstract it sounds so much more of an indictment of modern life than it seems in practice: “It's only money” is nothing if not the polar opposite of “it's such a waste.”

I watch you as you plan and prep the bags. All my angst and anticipation channeled into a plastic and paper assembly line of things that don't really matter; things that will wind up forgotten at the bottom of a drawer.

... Except that they do, somehow, matter in the moment we are here together “brainstorming.” In the minutes we spend planning, shopping and producing we are sharing a moment that may be or may never be forgotten.

Only time will tell.

I had begun to think it didn't matter; that it doesn't matter. But I've shrugged that feeling off. It does matter.

The thing we lose by being so caught up in the details is the big picture; this celebration of birth and belonging and life gets lost in the minutia of the minute.

More than seven years ago, when I sat on an examining table in a paper robe listening to the doctor telling me I would have a Christmas baby ... I felt sorry for you, a person I didn’t yet know.

Back then, I thought you would be forgotten in the hoopla that is the holidays.

I had no way of knowing what a gift I would get in you that Christmas. I didn't have the forethought or clarity — and still don't — to understand how Christmas would be forever changed because of it. Each year brings a new revelation.

So as we ready for the day you will turn seven, I want to tell you to just enjoy this moment for all that it is and for all it could be. And I'll try to do the same.

Time has a way of changing things … not always for the worse.

Love and just-about-birthday kisses,

— Mommy

Sign of the times

2010-12-12T05:07:00.000-08:00

The sign on the bedroom door — though affixed with a single thumbtack and curling at all four edges — couldn't have been more unequivocal: "Do Not Enter."

Whom it was supposed to keep out, however, was a little unclear.

We had just arrived at the party and the hostesses' daughter was sequestered in her room with several children who'd accompanied their parents to the late afternoon soiree.

Ittybit stood next to me at first, and then slid behind me, holding onto my jacket and hiding her face. I'm sure she thought it was yet another place she wouldn't be allowed. Even a year's difference, for a bigger girl, could make her out to look like a baby.

Whenever we go some place new it takes a few minutes for the kids to find their place in the fray. Ittybit observes for a while before she jumps in and tries to take over. The Champ usually hides in inconvenient locations and pretends he is a super agent spy.

Mostly he gets shooed out of bathrooms.

I didn't think the sign was meant for her. I knocked and poked my head through the paneled door. The tiny hostess smiled and greeted us warmly. "Come in, come in" she said excitedly to my girl.

Turned out the sign wasn't even meant to deter The Champ, our three-year-old whirling dervish, who doesn't readily take "No" for an answer anyway.

The sign remained a bit of a mystery as I made several trips from Adult Conversationland downstairs to the Fantastical World of Primary Folks happening simultaneously upstairs. ... just to make sure all was going smoothly.

The first time I trudged up the stairs I had noticed a chandelier over the dinning room table -directly under the floor on which they were bouncing - swing to and fro with the uneasy vibrations.

"Oh ... it's nothing. Just a pig pile," said my cherubic daughter, who peeked out of the door when I knocked. "They've decided to stop. Too dangerous," she whispered.

I went back downstairs.

Until I heard some screaming ... that could have been the gleeful shrieks of girlish delight ... or might have been the feral wail of a little boy being locked in a closet. Such things have been known to happen.

Her face was again cherubic as she came to the door.

"Oh that? That was just a little fun. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all."

Next it was their turn to venture forth.

A few would snake between the throngs of party guests, gathering up provisions and ferrying the loot to their party upstairs. I couldn't help but laugh at the sight of it; they resembled overburdened drones hauling mother lodes of baked goods and juice boxes to their queen.

"What are they doing up there?" asked one mom, who thought it might be time for an intervention.

"I don't really know. I've seen six clothing changes for each girl, and there seems to be dress-up clothes all over the bathroom."

The mom smiled a knowing smile. "Project Runway. My kid LOVES that show." There was no need to be concerned.

The idea that the sign — which was probably written well before the party and forgotten was meant for people who'd either reached the age of maturity or were allowed to play with matches — hadn't occurred to me until that moment.

For all the kvetching I do about NOT being able to have an adult conversation, you'd think I'd be a little more ready for the closing of doors. I'd always just been there, hanging out with the kids, sitting under tables taking pictures.

I had an idea and knocked on the door.

"You know, Fashion Runway has cameras ... I could ..."

But they were onto me.

"No pictures," said one girl with the smile of play but the stance of steadfast.

"That's my mom. Always with the camera," said Ittybit, feeling the need no doubt to smooth over my transgression.

"Oh, don't listen to them," said the motherly hostess. "I bet if you just sit with them for a while they'll forget you're even there."

I knew she was probably right, but it wouldn't be the same.

This is the beginning of their secret life. The one that doesn't always include me. That can't include me. The life that either sorts itself out or that travels down the stairs in an avalanche of jumbled words that need to be smoothed.

It was time to let them have their party. To put away my camera and let the moment go undocumented. And that's what I did.

I suppose I knew all along the sign on the door was for me.

Christmas all wrapped up in lights

2010-12-05T05:31:00.000-08:00

It felt like I should have a major award. Or something.

We'd selected the tree, rigged it up in the stand and dragged out the ornaments, just as we have every year at around this time since I don't know when.

It's all so rote at this point but having decorating done and over with seemed like something to celebrate; Lights. Camera. Christmas.

Yet this time, as I plugged in the extension end of the three-strand band of lights, which had been carefully connected and wrapped around the tree, there was nothing.

I tried the nearest light switch. Maybe it had closed off the juice to the outlet.

Up. Down. Up. Down. Up-down-up-down and one more time, up, just in case. Nothing.

Well, almost nothing. As I jostled the branches of the tree, the strand of lights saddled around the middle blinked on with a moment's hesitation. It was as if the midsection had burst out from having too much Thanksgiving dinner while the other lights couldn't wake up from their tryptophan comas.

What twinkling there was seemed more fire-hazard-y than jolly.

So out we went to the hardware store to buy a new set of lights.

I'm ashamed to admit, it was kind of exciting.

I couldn't remember when we’d bought the last set. It's not something that tends to burn itself into memory, like where I was when I learned of Sept. 11 or what was playing on the radio when we found out we were having a girl.

I'm sure, way back then lights were lights. You had your "Tasteful and Unobtrusive Holiday White" bulbs, and then you had the "Holy Holiday Batman, Who Robbed the Crayon Factory and Added a Disco Strobe Color" bulbs.

These days you have the choice of regular lights (which are impossible to find, and just pretend I hadn't mentioned them) and the energy-saving LED lights in bright white, warm white, red, green, blue, gold, pink, orange and purple, also multicolored. They come shaped as strawberries, raspberries, snowflakes, stars and teddy bears. They come in cords and nets and icicle dangles. You can get trunk lights, twinkle lights, and battery operated candle lights.

Staring at the shelves reaching to the ceiling, piled higher than I could reach with a ladder, I just wanted to turn around and go home. The 'No End' to the possibilities could very well have been literal.

I don't want to care about Christmas lights.

"Just pick something already and get it over with" came the demand from by overtired brain, which at that moment wanted nothing more than to just settle down for a long winter's nap.

And so I let the kids decide.

Who does this? Just moments earlier Ittybit and The Champ had been occupied with trying to get out of their coats without unzipping them, all the while trying to out stare each other. So it really was without a hint of parental scrutiny that one 100-count strawberry strand in traditional warm white, one strand of bright white snowflake minis and one strand of multi-colored snowflake minis went unceremoniously into the cart, through the check out and into the car.

Still, I was feeling pretty good as we drove up to the house; the tree was up, the shopping was done all that was left was the decorating. Sitting around drinking cocoa in our holiday-illuminated house would be the reward.

As we unwound the coiled wires and got ready to drape them around the tree, I became entangled at each turn in the little plastic nubbins that jutted out from the snowflake lights. They attached to each other, and then to my sweater and then on each other again. They snagged on everything excepting the tree.

I swore under my breath, calling them every name in the book. I lost patience and reason. Every move felt as if I were being strangled by twinkle lights.

When I was finally free of the lights — having removed them from the tree and restrung them twice — I plugged them in and held my breath.

They lit up. ...

Like a striped shirt of clashing colors.

Before I had time to process the sight, I had a flash of understanding. It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thought:

Up until that very moment I had identified with all the long-suffering mother of A Christmas Story. I was the mother whose kids hadn't eaten voluntarily since they were born ... or who hadn't had a hot meal for herself in 15 years.

But in the glare of the mix and match lit tree I knew I was more like the father; swearing under my breath on the one hand and clinging to my "special award" with the other. We were both beaming in gaudiness from front window ... for everyone to see.

'Good Parents' just have less experience

2010-11-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

Her gaze was sharp as I unfolded the sheet of paper she'd just handed me:

It read: "Will you com to are show?"

"Check 'yes' or 'no'" she said, jabbing her finger toward the rectangular shapes she'd drawn under the invitation, which was more of a misspelled demand gussied up in a question mark.

"The E in 'come' is silent," I said taking the pencil from her, erasing ARE and rewriting OUR.

What I neglected to do was check a box.

She frowned and asked again.

"Is it a 'Yes' or a 'No?' What's your answer?" she said, tapping her fingers repetitively on the paper as her foot stamped at the floor.

I stalled. Trying to think.

A good parent would be excited their child was displaying such creativity.

A good parent would happily check the box marked “Yes.”

A good parent would call the neighbors. Invite the grandparents. Get out the video camera.

A good parent would then follow their pint-sized usher toward the bedroom where The Show to End All Shows had been prepared.

A good parent would smile and applaud the unscripted play in which anything (though not likely anything good) could happen.

A good parent would wait around patiently until the bitter (and I do mean BITTER) end and demand an encore.

I was a "good parent" once, the experience changed me.

The last play I was invited to witness lasted longer than The Ring of the Nibelung and ended when the not-old-enough-for-prime-time players bounced precariously on the "bed stage" and started tossing all their props into the audience with gleeful, though ear-splitting, shrieks.

It was the elementary school equivalent of a 15-hour opera.

This new production had all the same earmarks.

"What is this play about?" I inquired pointedly.

"That's up to you," she said craftily, explaining that she and her friend had produced several themes from which we, the audience, could choose. "Like at the movie theater."

"No. Definitely not. I am not going to your show."

Her eyes narrowed to mere slits.

"Why not?"

"Let's just say not everyone finds unscripted entertainments entertaining."

"That's so MEAN! Why won't you come to our show?"

"Because ... if it's anything like past shows, it will end in drama. And drama isn't our strong suit. Drama just leads to time outs, rescinded dessert offerings and early bedtimes."

"This time will be different," she pleaded. "I'm in First Grade now."

But I know it won't be different. There will be a darkened bedroom theater with no place to sit but the floor. There will be a kerfluffle over the gate -- most likely one that questions the authenticity of The Champ's ticket. There will be a long list of previews, the titles of which will verge on inappropriate, but no feature performance. And someone will end up crying either because they weren't allowed to finish or they fell off the stage.

I'm serious when I say "Nothing good can come of a play."

The potential for hurt feelings is more real and the duration could go on forever. Think: the airing of family squabbles. Think: How some folks REALLY FEEL about stuff they just barely tolerate. Think: Do I really swear like a long-haul trucker? I must because she's added it to the script.

"Well what WILL you watch then?"

How about a music video? We'll pick a song and you can dance and sing, and it will only last two and a half minutes -- tops.

Making allowances for personal hygiene

2010-11-21T05:24:00.000-08:00

I leaned across the breakfast table and smelled her hair.

“You owe me two dollars,” I said calmly.

She just stared at me, her expression slightly askew, as if her lips couldn’t decide in which direction to curl.

“… for the shampoo,” I added, looking in her direction from my peripheral vision as I poured coffee into my cup.

One half of her face decided to meet the other in a smiling grimace.

“Too much? Right?”

The fake cherry smell from the no-tears formula brand had followed me from the kids’ bathroom, down the stairs and into the kitchen. And yet, Ittybit’s hair still smelled of grit and grime.

“What I’d like to know is how is it possible for you to use an entire bottle of shampoo yet manage NOT to wash your hair?”

She shrugs her shoulders and says: "I'm sorry."

I'm Sorry is a pretty effective panacea at our place. Said with any degree of sincerity, an I'm Sorry is the universal Get Out of Jail Free card. It's akin to five minutes in the penalty box for murder via hockey stick. It's pretty much how we prefer to dust our hands of all unpleasantness.

But not this time. This is a battle I've decided to fight. This time it's serious.

“No, seriously, you owe me money.”

"I said I was sorry. I won't do it again."

Ah ... the "I-Won't-Do-It-Again" pledge.

The thing everyone says because they have a certain amount of security that the I'm Sorry card is actually a fairly equivalent substitution for the Get Out Of Jail Free card.

In fact, the only thing that seems to trump the cards she's stuffed up her sleeve is the calendar, and how quickly the numbers are careening toward Christmas, which is barreling toward my wallet at an ill-advised speed.

Slowing it down seems imperative.

The obstacles we've already encountered seem to indicate an epic crash is heading our way. We've seen grocery bills balloon, fuel prices rocket, not to mention having to bid farewell to a few hundred paper presidents we had planned to put elsewhere.

It's only money, we like to think. But the costs add up faster than a tub full of suds.

“Two. Dollars. Please.”

“Well,” she begins, “You know … I would pay you, because I've saved a lot of money -- from birthdays, chores, the tooth fairy -- but I have it hidden all over the house and it won't be that easy to find.

“Right. Now.”

“Well, eh-heh. This is kind of funny, because I've been thinking of all the things we could do to SAVE money and I think once The Champ is completely out of diapers we can use more shampoo.”

She thinks I'm bluffing.

“This is not interchangeable poo. This empty bottle of shampoo is a waste of unnatural resources, and you still owe me two bucks.”

“Speaking of poo … have you smelled The Champ?”

“Don't change the subject.”

“Well he IS in need of changing.”

“I tell you what. I'll give you two dollars if you change him.”

She smiled, her nose pitched in a knowing crinkle, as she disappeared into her room. A few minutes later she returned with a wadded up Lincoln.

“You owe me three bucks.”

It's hard to accept the 'gift' of the present

2010-11-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

“Are you finished?” the waitress asked.

I looked down at my half-eaten swiss cheese omelette. Three plates were already piled on top of it.

‘It didn't get much more finished than that’ I thought as she lifted up the rattling tower of breakfast dishes. She was still waiting for my answer, her gaze smiling after my children who had just left with their father.

“Oh … I'm finished. Thank you,” I said and went back to finishing my coffee.

“So just the two, then.”

I laughed. She wasn't talking about food.

No matter. My answer was still the same: “Oh yes, two and through.”

It's rare that we go out for breakfast. One child only eats bacon and sausage and the other refuses to eat anything but chocolate and air. Trying to coax them into eating something relatively healthy, at least for appearances sake, doesn't usually make for a pleasant meal. For anyone.

She'll ask for juice, but she'll twist her mouth and scrunch her nose at all the offerings.

And while she's deciding, he'll drop his knife … and then he'll drop his fork.

She'll want syrup with her plate of cholesterol, which is masquerading as meat.

Having retrieved his fork and knife from under the table, he'll drop them again.

Then he'll ask for yours.

The food will arrive and be inhaled … literally. There will be no noticeable depreciation as they declare themselves finished and ready to go.

“Eat one more bite,” is the mantra I've adopted through each and every meal since they've been chewing on solid food.

It's also rare in these moments to have the luxury of finishing a cup of coffee while it's still warm There's always a game of 20 questions aimed in my direction. …

“What are we doing now? Are you finished yet? What are we doing next? Are you finished yet? Can we go now? I'm done. Are you done yet?”

The more I think of it, the more I realize it's usually a variation of two questions asked 20 or more times.

“When I'm finished with my meal then we will go.” This is neither a satisfactory nor satisfying answer.

“But when will that be?”

“Soon. I'll be finished soon. Try to be patient.”

My husband is just as eager to get moving. He knows from experience that antsy children are just one outburst away from potential implosion. He's failed at noticing the warning signs before, and he's none too excited about witnessing a epic meltdown.

I don't blame him. Time is something that only moves slowly when you're looking forward to what comes next.

When it's not something you relish, time spins out of control.

It's the biggest cliché going, and I'm living it. Not too long ago, these tiny people begging me to finish my breakfast weren't even thoughts in my mind. Now, I'm fairly certain I won't recognize them by the time I pay the check, pull on my coat and walk the two blocks to the library to meet them.

My children won't even be there, I imagine. The librarian will inform me the girl had gone backpacking through Europe and the boy was in just last week with his own kids. She'll console me by directing me to the audiobooks, where my husband will still be searching for the latest titles.

He'll be grumbling something about the how few adventures are left.

But, as usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Failing to live “in the moment,” as it were. I rush ahead to a future I can't fully imagine for no other reason than the present is what I've been coaching myself to “get through.”

Of course when I get there, the children are as they'd left me, knee-high and needing help reading titles. When they see me they drop everything and run toward me. In this moment I don't need reminding that the present isn't just another chore … it's a gift.

He's neither tired nor shy ... he's three

2010-11-07T05:18:00.000-08:00

Whenever you take your kids out in public ... more specifically, to any place wherein they are likely to come into contact with human beings who aren't genetically programmed to think they are the most adorable, intelligent, sweetly humorous, amazingly adorable beings to ever have walked on the planet ... you are on rented time.

The best of the best have daily errands down to a science.

"I can go grocery shopping between 10 and noon, so long as we are finished at noon so junior can have lunch and a two-hour nap. ...

"If for some reason we can't leave for the supermarket by quarter-past 10, we will have to wait until 2:30 when nap time is over and little pumpkin has had the smallest of wee snacks.

"Of course once we get there we will have to visit the lobsters first thing. Squash blossom really likes to count them, and really, it's not a lot of fun combing through the produce aisle when kids have their hearts (and their constant chatter) set on crustaceans.

"Now, to prevent any potential disruptions in the shopping excursion, we'll make sure junior is occupied with any of the 1,001 tiny distractions I've shrewdly stowed in my bottomless purse."

“Whenever we need to do something IMPORTANT we call a sitter.”

Ah ... to be so prepared.

That scenario is so far from me that the light from “That Scenario” would take 100,000 years to get to the place I am right now, which seems to be located somewhere between “Holding My Breath” and “Winging It.”

Grocery shopping for me -- a time that used to be filled with a moderate amount of welcome revelation when the children were still in arms -- has become a race to gather enough provisions before The Champ, who DEMANDS to use the aisle-wide car cart but REFUSES to sit in its cockpit for longer than it takes to navigate through the produce section, disappears into the bakery department not even glancing back.

Lumbering after him in a cart that barely fits past the pastries without upturning some flaky delight seems like the height of humiliation.

But it gets worse.

Worse are the times when you are forced to explain your child's "completely unusual behavior" to a kindly person who just wanted to strike up a casual conversation with your precious pumpkin and they were snubbed. Maybe even screamed at to "LEAVE ME AWONE!"

All of these things and more go through my head as I took my son to work on Election Day, hoping above hope that he would allow me to get just a few photographs of the candidate and his wife before the boy's head spun around and pea soup started spewing forth.

You hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Those times when your precious little pea pod actually thanks the grandmotherly pollster for her offer of a cookie or a doughnut are so remote you don't even hope for them anymore. All you can do is apologize profusely when he scowls and hides his face.

"He's just tired."

"He's a little shy."

"He's unusually grumpy today."

None of that is entirely true.

“It’s 9 a.m.”

"He's three."

“He wanted ice cream for breakfast.”

It doesn't really matter what you tell them. Most people understand timing can be everything. They might even understand your kid's meter just ran out.

Closing our ears to parenting failures

2010-10-31T05:24:00.000-07:00

"Did I show you the video?" my husband asks over breakfast the day after The Party.

Video? I stared at him. "Of her dancing," he answered the question my expression asked before my mouth even opened.

He clicks on his phone and holds it out for me to see. The music's volume strains the tiny speakers as the wispy figure of our daughter twirls and gyrates between splashes of strobe lights. She's not afraid to be the only person dancing.

"That's pretty loud," I say sucking my teeth. I should have remembered to bring earplugs.

I smile as I watch the tiny dancer strut her stuff on the dance floor. When I was her age I'd have been standing behind my mother's legs hoping no one would notice me. I never would have braved an empty dance floor.

None of this is new for us, though.

Since she started walking, Ittybit's been making her way to the front of the audience so she can dance with the band. And not just kids' performers, either. The bands she's seen live are accustomed to performing for adult-only crowds.

I hesitated to say this in the context of parenting since the often lamented observation that our children are losing their childhood in some ill-considered rush to attain maturity often pits parents against each other. The last thing I want to do is open a dialog about the rights and wrongs of popular culture or the parenting shortfalls that are pushing civilization toward the brink of extinction.

But it's on my mind and it just slips out.

"Do you think she's dancing inappropriately?"

He is quiet, having thought the same thing and dismissed it. "She's just having fun," he says reassuringly.

She is just doing what she's always done at parties we attend as a family. She loves the music. She loves to dance. The only difference is that she's growing up: She's attending school, choosing clothes that match and asking me to check for smudges on her face before we leave the house. She's just a little girl who knows, by heart, the lyrics of songs I've never heard before.

She's growing up. That's what's makes the off-hand remark "You're going to have to lock her up when she's a teenager" send a slight chill down my spine. I've seen the future. And it's frightening.

Usually I just shrug my shoulders an soldier on. I'm not a mom who covers my kids' eyes even when I probably should. I just don't usually notice age inappropriateness unless the little miss points it out with her own keen powers of observation.

I've become accustomed to trying to explain these awkward moments using terms I think she can understand. And then rephrasing several times until she either gets the gist or gives up in frustration.

"It's the conversation that matters, not the answers," I tell myself. I want to believe that the questions are the solution, not the problem. I tend to think that our answers have a tendency to changing with perspective and experience, each of which takes time.

Time seems to have a way of changing everything without really changing much at all.

For several decades at least, little girls shaking their hips to suggestive music wasn't something folks have had to look too hard to find: Madonna was the mother of all Britneys and Hannah Montanas.

I don't really think scantily-clad celebrities foretell the end of society, yet I can't be entirely sure.

I project my teenage self onto Ittybit's future teenager: "Go Listen to Lawrence Welk ... or what-ever-it-is-you-old-folks-listen-to ... and leave me alone with my Lady Gaga already. Sheesh."

We're not having that exact disagreement yet -- we may not be anywhere near there for all I know — but its time is coming.

My girl is growing up and she won't be mine forever.

That she will choose paths I wouldn't recommend is a certainty. Just as I did. Just as her father did. There will be mistakes and recriminations and justifications for all of us. Hopefully, there will be growth and revelations, too.

Maybe, instead of locking her up, we'll be able to let her go and she'll have the confidence to dance her way back.

No regrets

2010-10-24T05:25:00.000-07:00

I called the number on the invitation fully expecting to extend our regrets for the Saturday afternoon birthday party.

The RSVP date had already passed. I'd waited to reply for no good reason, a combination forgetfulness and dread. It’s just one more thing to put off doing.

Saturday is filled with things to do: Shopping, laundry, cleaning ... a mid-day party would put us over the top and over extended.

Yet, when the birthday boy's mom answered the phone I inexplicably accepted.

It was something about the sound of her voice as she said hello. Something I recognized as joyful curiosity, even though she didn't know me or the reason for my call. Before I knew what was happening I was sizing her up, making imaginary comparisons and liking our differences.

Optimism. I may not come by it naturally, but I like to think I can acquire it if I keep it in proximity.

Of course, making friends seems like just another chore, one that takes effort and skills that have somehow evaporated with your ability to sleep past the crack of dawn. Even if it were easy, you would put up imaginary barriers: “Just because our kids are friends doesn't mean WE have to be,” you tell yourself.

A series of these thoughts worm their way through your rituals:

I will go, but I won't stay. I will stay but I won't chat. I will chat but I won't be chummy.

But before you know it conversations about the weather evolve — in a graduated sequence — into polite comparisons of thoughts on school, teachers, how often you've driven the kids to school after they missed the bus.

She tells me about how many hours she slaved trying to make a pig-shaped cake. I like her immediately when she puts her foot down over the request it have a filling of strawberry jam. She didn't want to hack into the cake and recreate Texas Chainsaw Massacre … Bed time is hard enough as it is.

How can I not admire her for letting her mind go there …

I tell her about making 25 super hero capes out of bath towels the night before my son's third birthday.

She looked at me with the same “You are Crazy” admiration.

Our conversation progresses to the slightly more personal: plots of television programs, what phone carrier, who makes the best pizza. We end up talking about the joys of motherhood, both sincere and satirical. You kvetch about homework, high fructose corn syrup, our inability to make our kids wear socks. Bodily functions become a competitive sport. There's talk of projectile vomit and toilet clogging poop.

Oh yes, we go there. It’s what moms do.

It's all gearing up for the most intimate of mom-bonding moments: Swapping birth stories. Each detail memorized and shared with photographic clarity. Each story seems fascinatingly familiar. We revel in the comparisons: where we were when we went into labor, we recount a formulary of drugs and times they were administered. She pushed for 24 minutes but it felt like 24 hours. I wound up with a labor that didn't progress and a c-section. She thinks I got lucky … even with the surgical scar that healed from the inside out. You think she did … even with the episiotomy and third-degree tear.

By the time the party is waning, the few men in attendance are awkwardly smiling at us from the other side of the room. They are talking about the weather, sports or making shelves with a new band saw they bought off of ebay.

We are undeterred.

We've made elaborate birthday cakes, bath towels super hero capes … and humans. We made humans … who are stuffing their faces with pig shaped cake with a red butter cream center.

As we're leaving she asks if I still have her number. I promise to call and set up a play date.

This has the best party ever, I'm so glad I had no regrets.

Tick Tock

2010-10-17T05:49:00.000-07:00

I almost couldn't believe it. But there it was, crawling across the screen of my iPhone, illuminated by new messages in my gmail inbox.

"I hate apple picking," I said, standing up slowly from the couch, keeping my eyes on the tiny tick making its way toward my thumb, which had been hovering over "delete." I blamed the day's outing for its presence. The last tick I found hitched a ride on the dog, causing me to rethink, albeit momentarily, my ardor for household pets.

"Well ... you didn't want a BlackBerry," my husband says smiling at his own joke. "Seriously, though. You have to cut its head off with your fingernail. Those things are nasty."

I take it into the kitchen and practically set the place on fire trying to rid myself of the reason I'd never set foot outdoors if it were a viable option (and one that wouldn't deprive my kids of a relatively normal childhood, fresh air or Vitamin D).

The half bag of hand-picked apples is mocking me from its place on the counter. Little does it know its contents will be peeled and sliced and baked into pies. Probably tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. Because who doesn't like pie? I'm not even going to jest about that possibility.

What's wrong with going to the farmer's market and getting the kind that are already picked? Not that I'd really ask that question aloud. Not only would it be crazy talk, but it would be met with tearful protest from the minions.

There's some magical element embodied in the Pick-Your-Own produce craze that has helped generations of Americans retain the illusion that they are still in touch with their agricultural heritage ... Not that I'm cynical ... Or bitter from the simple fact I can't even grow a cactus. I'm just willing to ride the wave on my hypocritical surfboard.

Feeling the inertia of a sedentary life may be part of it, too. I dread the weight of the bushel bags we buy from the farm stand and the weight of the pressure to fill them up.We paid for a bushel after all. I also dread the task of searching for apples that are still on the trees and not laying in a fragrant but rotting carpet on the ground beneath them.

The weight of the waste weighs on me, too.

This year, to my delight, the orchard had changed its policy. The bags they provided were smaller and the apples were sold by the pound. The pressure to fill to bursting was lifted. Pick-Your-Own for the first time ceased to be the elephant sitting on the outing.

For the first time I could admit that I really do go apple picking for the Rockwell of it.

I go because I have a friend who I don't get to see as often as I'd like. I go because it's become a tradition that is simple and easy and satisfying for the five children we have between us. We go to the same place year after year because watching our children find bliss at the end of a branch while we shoot the breeze is worth its weight in gold.

It's even worth the occasional arachnid on my Apple.

If you give a sheep a stamp pad ...

2010-10-10T05:14:00.000-07:00

The air is crisp and chilly, the kind of weather that begs you to go outdoors at the crack of dawn.

How long has it been since you've watched the sun burn off fog that is rolling over a working farmyard? I'm telling you, no matter how much anyone grumbles or grouches about having to get out of warm beds at the crack of dawn on a weekend morning, it's worth the effort (even if you have to stop the car and retrieve the cell phone you dropped out the window as you were speeding by trying to capture the moment … but I digress).

You've stopped for doughnuts and some warm cider or coffee.

You might still be a little sleepy as you ramble onward toward, say, a somewhat famous sheep farm. You are careful to finish every morsel of the cinnamon-sugar-covered confection before you slog through the barns to take in the sites.

You could even be sleepwalking for all the quaint nostalgia presented by such a family outing.

The whirr-slosh, whirr-slosh sloshing of the milking machines is oddly comforting as you slurp from your paper cup, the coffee finally losing enough heat to drink. You ignore the smell wafting over the lid as you inhale.

The tour is self guided with no signage, but your children are still of the age in which they actually respect that you know everything. They pepper you with questions:

"Why are the sheep lower than the machines?"

"How do they get them in there?"

"Where does the milk go?"

"How do they get them out again?"

You try your best not to disappoint them, but you must admit you have no idea, only a rough guess. You curse that the Smart Phone is on the fritz or doesn't get reception.

The potential for you to be found out as knowing very little about the particulars of the sheep cheese trade, however, is offset by forward movement and fresh sights.

Not that it's rocket science. If you're observant enough, you think you can probably figure it out.

Such as … did you know they dock the tails of sheep? It's not a revelation to rival the decoding of DNA, but there is something uniquely satisfying about noticing a pattern and drawing a conclusion … based upon the obvious: The littlest lambs in the nursery, tails; the oldest, no tails; the middling lambs … rubber bands and tails in various states of atrophy.

"Why do they do that, mom?"

"My guess it is more hygienic for them if their tails aren't caked in … well … poo."

Hey, I'm not squeamish. I read the books by Taro Gomi and Shinta Cho. But again, I digress.

The widdle wambs are cute and all, but you're amazed you've been able to heed the signs forbidding you to touch them. The meter is running out on your ability to police tiny hands.

It's time for a longer walk along the pasture road.

You revel in all the things you and the children have noticed: The solar-powered electric fence, the electric coil at the bottom of the water trough to keep it from turning solid in winter, the gap in the fence where a ewe got separated from the herd. You watch as she finds her way back from being frantic.

And as you turn to leave your husband may notice something strange.

Such as a ram with a nylon harness, and something that looks like a green, felted jewel on his chest.

Maybe he'll joke about what he must have done to deserve such special treatment.

And then your kids will notice all the other sheep behind the fence … must be half of them … with green splashed across their rumps.

They will start to ask you questions.

“What is that for?”

“How did it get there?”

“No, really. How DID it get there?”

And you will find out, on this glorious fall morning at the sheep farm, that in you've also encountered the birds and the bees. And you may wish you hadn't dropped the Smart Phone.

Jumping the Shark

2010-10-03T05:16:00.000-07:00

"MOMMMMEEEEEEEEEE!" He appears in the doorway to greet me; he's used to his father picking him up from babysitting. Mommy showing up before 6 p.m. is a special treat.

I bend to gather his things; a backpack, a jacket, his lunchbox, some drawings …

But there wasn't the expected clatter of movement toward the door. There wasn't much sound at all.

The silence was eerie.

Our babysitter stared at me with her head cocked and lips pressed to almost disappearing. Her expression was apologetic and awkward in the way that usually precedes bad news. It reminded me of the time when the kids had accidentally seen a shopping supplement and had used it to create the ultimate Christmas wish list — stuff so rare that Santa himself couldn't procure.

"He knows what he wants to be for Halloween," she tells me sheepishly.

"Didn't you tell her what you wanted to be for Halloween?" she called after my son, who was back in the playroom pretending the toys would reassemble themselves into the boxes from which they came.

More silence.

"That would be a 'No.'"

She speaks to him again, quelling a laugh.

"Go ahead, tell her. … Tell your mom what you want to be for Halloween."

He darts into the room and stands at my feet. His stance is wide and his hands are at his hips.

"I'm going to be a humpback whale," he blurts out proudly.

I just stare at him, blinking. The first year that he has had any interest in dressing up … and he's fishing for something I will never be able to land, no matter how much web surfing I do.

The babysitter looks at me and mouths the words "I'm Sorry."

I turn my attention to her. My eyes narrow as I momentarily wish for a caretaker who would have plopped our children in front of the television set instead of helping them exercise their imaginations.

"Dang you, National Geographic!"

"It was a Diego book," she says protesting the questionable wisdom she sees spinning in my mind. "And Diego was going to be a fruit bat for Halloween not a Humpback whale," she says, chortling sinisterly.

I brighten momentarily. "I have an old shark costume from two years ago that he wouldn't wear … "Maybe if I …"

The babysitter's mouth twists slightly to the side. She sucks air in through her teeth and exhales the words that describe what I already know to be true: "That probably isn't going to work. He knows the difference between a shark and a whale."

I imagine she's picturing me as I am picturing myself in the not-too-distant future: sitting behind the sewing machine, pulling my hair out strand by strand as I try to make a humpback whale out of a backpack and a few old bath towels.

"I may have been able to make a bat costume … but a humpback whale?"

"Well, if any one can do it, you can," she says, adding the perfect backhanded complement: "You are amazing."

She's mocking me, of course. Sweatshop laboring last summer to make a few dozen superhero bath capes for birthday party gift bags doesn't really amount to "amazing." In fact, at the time, I think she referred to me as "insane."

Ideas roll around in my head like square marbles, akwardly and with audible effort.

She pats my back as I turn to leave. "Don't worry. You will think of something."

In that instant, I thought of it: "I know what to do! YOU will convince him to be a fruit bat," I tell her.

She starts blinking.

It was my turn to smile. Sometimes tricks really are treats.

What’s wrong with getting it all wrong?

2010-09-26T05:02:00.000-07:00

Most parents look forward to the opening of the school year.

Their kids, who have been sitting around all summer begging for something to do (because they have been SOOOOOOOOOOOO Bore-DAH!) traipse happily back to school with their fresh supplies and snappy new clothes. They can't wait to meet up with friends and have their experiences structured in neat, 42-minute intervals.

As soon as the doors close on the Yellow Bus that first day, parents generally dust their hands and breathe a sigh of relief into their morning coffee. As their kids go back to school, they soak in those first peaceful hours and feel back to normal.

I wish that were me.

School, in my anxiety-addled mind, presents a huge opportunity to fail as a parent in embarrassing and potentially devastating ways. Collectively, we think these missteps are destined to ensure that Harvard and Yale have already heard of our children and are in the process of hiring security. The way we're mucking up their lives, they scoff, it will be amazing if Astoria Trucking will accept their transcripts.

Everyone says the early years are most important. I sure hope that's not the case ...

Hmmm. … Who was it who forgot to attend their daughter's first school Birthday Party? Forgot to bring a birthday snack? Oh right, that was me.

Bad mom.

There are so many dates in the calendar destined to be forgotten: When does school start? An orientation? Which day was that?

Bad mom.

Parenthood feels like a state of life in which no amount of preparation is enough, and not enough preparation sets your kids on the road to an address under a bridge.

Did we do enough reading over the summer? Did we practice any numbers? Holy mackerel, she can't tie her shoes.

Shoulders up to my ears, I endure the long days with a thousand what ifs.

What if she doesn't like her new teacher? What if her teacher doesn't like her? What if she doesn't like the after-school program? What happens then?

Worry, worry, worry.

Looking at opportunity from the wrong direction is exactly how anxiety distorts a person's outlook. Backward thinking. It keeps us from having faith or hope. So I force myself to think past my fears.

It doesn't hurt that you get a "do-over" with your second child ... or a doing it all wrong again, but I'm not going there.

When I dropped off The Champ for his first day of preschool this year I felt a little of both. He was wearing pajamas and a smudge of breakfast on his face. He said goodbye, I kissed his cheek and pasted a smile on my face as I walked past the teachers.

There were no tears, no 'mommy stays.' There was just him, playing, sleepwear and all.

Still, I felt as if I were holding my breath for the rest of the day.

More what ifs crowd out any happy thoughts. … What if he growls at other children who want to play? What if he won't share toys? What if he sits in the corner and sulks?

I've seen so many sides of my children I'm never quite sure which will come out or when. I worry that first impressions will imprint themselves incorrectly ... and that the judgment will follow them forever.

Will he be needy or clingy or difficult? Will he be charming and social and funny?

I feel disloyal as I wait for the teacher to give her verdict.

When she tells me "He's so great!" I relax a little. I know it's true, he is great. And it occurs to me that maybe the only thing wrong about "getting it all wrong" is worrying about it.

Can’t hear the noise for all the decibels

2010-09-19T05:48:00.000-07:00

"How long has it been making THAT noise?" my husband asked in alarm.

"Huh?" I hesitated. "What noise?"

"THAT noise," he repeated, flicking off the radio so I could hear the rev of the engine as it cleared its mechanical throat of some kind of gear or gasket. "Pretty soon it will sound like a tank. It's probably the manifold."

"Oh … that. I don't know when it began exactly. Probably the same time I turned up the radio to try and drowned it out. Really. Not long."

It wasn't a lie but it was hiding an inconvenient truth: I didn't want to think about the potential need for a new car. I had been keeping this one rolling along for more years than any other car in the neighborhood, and it had become a source of pride. Drowning out each new noise with circa '90s rock rebellion was so much more satisfying than worrying about repairs.

I didn't mention the dance - a sort of shaking shimmy - the car convulses with at unpredictable times. That can't be good. But it's not happening at the moment. Out of sight … out of my mind.

He shakes his head. He knows the drill. Someday soon … hopefully on a warm, non-precipitous day, preferably once the kids are in school or at the sitter's … he'll be summoned to meet me wherever the old girl has decided to conk out. I'm hoping the rendezvous will be nearby a coffee shop with toothsome treats. He's hoping he won't be along a highway at rush hour.

Either way, it's more than likely my cell phone will be out of juice or sitting in its charger at home.

I keep chugging along as the car steps up its noisy commute. Clunkety, clunk, clunk. Lately it feels as if I'm pushing the car uphill with the sheer force of will and my foot pressed firmly to the floorboard. Still, I feel the heat of the scorn from the cars behind me … unable to drive faster than 30 miles per hour … and unable to pass on the upward curve.

I'm sure they are surprised, when they get a chance to pass, that the woman behind the wheel doesn't have blue hair or bifocals … yet.

Procrastination, at least when it comes to visiting the mechanic, is all the ratio of risk and reward. If you are risking your life savings for two months of smooth sailing in a land yacht there's more reason to take your chances on a long-distance tow.

Strange how things change.

I used to be so conscientious about the car. But so many other things have usurped its importance. It's been quite a while since tune ups and scheduled maintenance had actually been scheduled.

It used to be a running joke that "nothing" was ever wrong with a car until the man of the house experienced the symptoms while he was driving it.

You could tell him all about how the brakes that locked up or replicate the squeal that escaped from under the hood until you were blue in the face. These strange and disturbing occurrences were the mechanical equivalent of the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

But now the joke is on me.

Trees could be falling all around me and I'd just turn up the radio.

Write to Siobhan Connally at sconnally@troyrecord.com or read more online at www.troyrecord.com, click on “Blogs.”

Just a sec ... Mommy's iPhoning it in

2010-09-12T05:43:00.000-07:00

Hello. My name is Siobhan. And I’m addicted to TapFish.

I stupidly downloaded the virtual aquarium game onto my "smart phone" thinking it would give the kids something to do while we were driving (besides pestering me about going the wrong way or being lost all together).

However, my virtual conscience kept me up late at night, feeding the kids’ "fish" so they wouldn’t go belly up. I even found myself just visiting neighboring "tanks" to see how the other wannabe pisciculturalists are fairing. Sometimes I feed their fish, too.

"Did ya see me?" she squeals, the excitement of whatever it was I missed bubbling into a froth. "Did ya see? Did ya see?"

No, honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t see, I was feeding your fish. Can you do it again?

But the magic is over. No matter how she sits or spins or contorts, it’s obvious from her expression there is no recreation possible.

"Oh!" She says with disappointed tone. "That’s too bad."

I wish I was making up what she said next. Without a hint of malice and without ever having heard a single stanza, she channeled the spirit of Harry Chapin to lecture me …

"You’re missing everything. And you know, someday, when I’m a grown woman and you want my attention, I probably will be too busy for you. That’s how it is you know."

The words sting.

I flip through the journal she’s been keeping for summer homework. She’s drawn colorful pictures and written mostly legible entries about her activities over the past two months:

"We went to the park … I climbed the BIG jungle gym."

"I went to the pool and swam underwater!"

"I made snow angels in the sand. It was funny."

"I saw bees at the beekeeper’s house! I didn’t even get stung."

None of the entries were things she’d done with me. All the really memorable stuff she experienced over her summer vacation she did with friends and baby sitters and grandparents while I was working.

That stung, too.

I have to admit, however painful, that as a working mom whose desk has magically teleported to her cell phone, distractions are ever-present. I spend so much more of my time with my head bowed to a hand-held device. Even when I turn it off, it’s never truly disconnected.

The fact is, whenever it’s in my hand, I feel compelled to check on it more than I’ve ever felt compelled to check on the kids. So even when I’m here, I’m not really there.

I know I’m not alone. Research consistently being churned out rubs our noses in the mess we’re creating with technology overload. Technological addiction isn’t debated as much as it is denied: “I’m not ignoring my kids. I’m just not bending to their whims. I can stop anytime I like.”

Yet it just seems like a sign of the apocalypse how video games are being designed to help us get our expanding rear-ends off the couch.

I’m not casting the first stone but I certainly know that if I don’t do something soon, I’ll be facing a chip off the old block.

"Mom. Mom. Mom. Mom. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

"Wha?"

"Didn’t you hear me? I’ve been calling your name for like a hundred years."

"I’m sorry. I was reading an email. What did you say?"

"Can I play with your iPhone now? I have to feed my fish."

Photoshop, not a diamond, is a girl’s best friend

2010-09-05T05:52:00.001-07:00

Did I ever tell you that I once had the job title "Wedding Consultant?" for a formerly local-ish studio photography company?

No?

It was way back when I was the girl who never wanted to get married, never wanted to have children. ... just wanted to roam around with a camera and see new things.

Tragically clichéd, I realize now.

I was perhaps (depending on your position on sales) the worst wedding consultant in the history of wedding consultants. I'd routinely tell folks to buy the least expensive package ... and save their money for a down payment on a house … or a car … or the honeymoon.

I reckoned there would be the same amount of photos to choose from the finished album would just be bigger. "You can always upgrade," is what I’d advise.
That was a fun job.

There were a lot of hilariously imaginative requests.

"Can you make the wall green? I meant to have that room painted before the wedding but never got to do it."

"I am not speaking to my sister anymore. Can you crop her out of the photos?"

"My husband had too much to drink at the cocktail hour and then hung out with his friends all night in the bar. Can you work some magic and put him in some pictures with me at the reception?"

Ah … true love. …

As entertaining as sales can be, nothing compares to my early days in newspapers, where I learned wedding and engagement announcements have their own hidden appeal. You not only get to peek into the lives of different kinds of folks who are all doing the same thing — getting married — you also get to laugh a little at what the hype and hoopla makes them do.

Such as the woman whose engagement photo was a photocopy of a snapshot that had another photocopy of the groom-to-be's head taped next to the bride-to-be. At first I laughed, thinking the unprintable art project was the result of timing and desperation. Maybe they didn't have any good photos together yet?

Yeah ... No.

I later learned the bride-to-be didn't like her intended's physique so she taped a picture of her beloved's head onto her ex-boyfriend's body. She had a nice smile in that old picture, too, and thought it was a shame to waste it.

I will not tell you what odds I placed on the longevity of that marriage, but I imagined the wedding proofs should be speedy if the photographer wanted to get paid.

Sure, I laughed … but I never really understood how much I had in common with that vain bride until I had an engagement of my own to announce.

I set up my tripod and my Yashicamat twin lens reflex in a make-shift studio and demanded my intended smile for the camera.

I set the timer and ran to his side a dozen times.

When the roll was developed it seemed apparent to me that while there were frames that flattered us both, there were none that flatter us together.

So I did what any self-respecting Bridezilla would do. I picked photograph that flattered me best and I pasted his head from another into the frame.

Turns out Photoshop, more than diamonds, is a girl's best friend.

They don’t call ’em ‘action figures’ for nothing

2010-08-29T05:13:00.000-07:00

"Mama! I can't find Monkey Baby," said my teary little boy, his grip on my slacks threatening embarrassment.

"He must be here," I soothed, uncurling his little vice grips from my legs and hiking up my pants. "You just had him a minute ago. I just saw him."

But lo … Monkey Baby — a recent purchase and identical to a Monkey Baby his sister adopted the week prior — was nowhere to behold.

Three weeks of sifting through garbage, moving furniture and scuttling through toy boxes proved fruitless.

It's a little more than creepy if you ask me.

The phenomenon of the sock missing from the dryer is nothing compared to the mystery of the black hole that has apparently formed somewhere in our home. It absconds with toys.

And not just broken playthings, or old, unused or annoying things that some nefarious parent-like person might store away in a cardboard box in the garage for a two-week trial period.

Typically, in such toy abductions, if the disappearance goes unnoticed, the plastic hostages are sent on vacation to the lovely and exciting lands of Salvation and Goodwill.

Ahem. Not that I would know anything about such things. …

This toy black hole sucks in some of our new and more expensive toys, never to be seen nor heard from again. Like Monkey Baby, whose replacement was engineered by a special shopping expedition.

I mentioned the plight to our babysitter, and her eyes widened.

"You're KIDDING me!" she exclaims in a way that made the hair on my neck stand up. "Buzz Lightyear and the Batman Cape have disappeared from my house, too. They were there and then they were gone. I've even moved the furniture. Poof, gone."

I didn't know what to say. My mind was spinning out of control. "Is there a hole in the universe that takes toys? Because, really, this stuff is just GONE. It would totally explain why the Toy Story trilogy is so compelling: it's partly based in fact …"

Blank. Stare.

I'd gone over the edge of Reality into the chasm of Just Plain Silly.

"It must be here," she said in a calm, measured voice. "Eventually this stuff will turn up."

She's right, I tell myself. Our houses are warrens of nooks and crannies. There are any number of places toys might be deposited and overlooked. …

But I don't really believe. …

The phone rings. It is Ittybit asking if I will bring "Amy," the expensive dolly her Amah gave her. She forgot it and Amah has splurged on new clothes.

I think nothing of the request until after I search her bedroom, the toy bins and even my closet where Ittybit has been known to play with her plastic doppelganger.

She's gone.

I ask my husband to check the house … he comes up with nothing either.

I call the babysitter, it's a long shot but I have to try.

"Have you seen Amy, Ittybit's super-expensive-grandma-doll? I can't find it anywhere. She didn't take it to your house, did she?"

"Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen that doll," she replied.

And then there was that eerie silence.

"There has to be a simple explanation," she says, hopefully.

"Yeah. I'm sure you're right. I bet Amy's just off some place playing Super Heroes with Monkey Baby and Buzz."

Facing life’s flow, ebb in the dog days of summer

2010-08-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

"I remember the first time I ever saw mommy cry," Ittybit announced as I opened the car door, officially ending a tiresome five-hour drive and our two-week New England vacation. The car was ripe with the smell of damp bathing suits and wet dog.

She was still sitting in her car seat, surrounded by the necessities of travel and the trinkets of tourism, as I tried to catch empty bottles rolling out onto our driveway.

"What did you say?" I asked, catching the words but dropping their meaning.

"I remember the first time I ever saw you cry," she said directly and with careful enunciation, as if I had recently stopped understanding English.

I cocked my head, interested.

She stopped smiling and said "it was when Maggie …" Her voice trailed off.

We both looked down at Maddy, the surviving member of our canine duo, now 105 in dog years. The champ never met Maggie, her older sister. She left us a few months before he was born.

Maddy just lay there waiting for help down. She was tired from two weeks in vaguely familiar places just outside the ordinary routine of "eat, sleep and eat some more."

My husband helped her down from the car he had helped her into. No one said anything as we hauled the bags from the trunk and carried them inside, but we were all thinking "It won’t be long now…"

That sentence always seems to float around unfinished and unspoken when conversations lead to our furry friend.

It’s what I thought last summer at the beach, and in the fall when her incontinence seemed unmanageable, and at Christmas when she stopped going up stairs. It’s what I think with the increasing dosages and decreasing agility. "It won’t be long now …"

I’m never able to complete the thought, however, despite having spoken aloud that "I can’t wait for her to go."

It’s not true. It’s just gallows humor. Fear talking.

I even hate bringing her to the vet because I know one day she won’t be coming home. I hold my breath until the moment the vet gives his diagnosis. I wonder what expression he sees on my face as he tells me the news: "Other than the incontinence, she seems really healthy," his voice apologetic, as if my suffering was worse than hers.

I didn’t wonder why Ittybit chose that moment to bring back the memory of Maggie or my sadness in saying ‘Goodbye‘ to her, although I imagine she’s turning the same thought over in her fertile mind about Maddy's slow but steady decline. I just assume she can read my expressions better than our veterinarian can.

She was in swim class when I took Maddy for a morning walk the last day at the beach. Our morning walks with the dogs (now singular) have been a summer ritual more than a decade old. Ittybit didn’t see the tears the wind dried as my dog – my first non-human child – stumbled in the sand trying to keep up with me. Ittybit doesn’t have clear memories of her bounding into the surf, oblivious of the pounding waves. Those are pictures that play over and over in my mind.

The playful puppy is gone as are her more troublesome behaviors … the pulling and barking and running away seem like distant memories. On this day, as we walk, Maddy barely touches the moist sand and stops often to rest. She no longer needs a leash.

"It won’t be long now …" I think as I bend to pet her flank and she appears to smile.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to hope for one more summer.

Oh, snap

2010-08-15T05:51:00.000-07:00

Her hands moved quickly and efficiently through the paperwork. School rules can be so complicated. Had I filled everything out correctly? Her eyebrows stayed at a steady angle. Never raising, never lowering. Everything must be fine.

She was older, a grandmother perhaps. My attention was drawn from the task to the colorful elastics she wore on her wrist. I knew them immediately as Silly Bandz, the silicone rubber bands molded to look like just about anything. They had become notorious during the last months of the previous school year.

Kids ringed their arms with them until not a smidgen of skin was left showing. Teachers and administrators scorned them, since the effect of their existence may be cause for disruption. They had even made their way on to my own wrist, plucked - as I imagine this woman came by hers - from the floor while sweeping.

Innocuous and yet infuriating.

Ittybit came home from school with one of the demon bands a few days after news flooded the world about these dastardly abominations of office supply. Her school bus driver had given it to her. It might as well have been a band of gold for all her gloat.

"Isn’t it beautiful?" she asked, not at all like a question.

"It sure is," I laughed, thinking of the half-dozen rubber bands – virtually identical -- I'd bought on impulse at a museum shop four years ago … a pink pig, a yellow goose, a green goat. … I don’t remember what else, beside the original set having a much higher price tag and a lower rate of interest. They disappeared into the crevices of our home within a matter of days.

They were rubber bands, after all, and in addition to being easily forgotten were also prone to higher mammals (such as my husband) launching them toward small objects in an effort to knock them over for imaginary points. "Pig goes in for the pepper, but Goose gets in there for an upset. And the crowd goes wild … HARR."

Not everyone has such an imagination.

Certainly not the mother waiting in line behind us with paperwork of her own, who gave Ittybit the stink-eye the moment she saw the band wrapped around her wrist. I was smiling when she rushed over to me with an accusingly helpful tone of alarm: "You do realize her teachers don't allow those in the classrooms," she hissed. "I don't even let my daughter have them. Such a distraction, you know. Awful, awful distraction."

I just laughed and said I thought it was silly.

"They are not the devil incarnate. They are just rubber bands. Silly, clever little elastics that serve any number of purposes. Admiration, in the form of collectible shapes and phosphorescent shades, is probably long overdue."

I can't say as I blame her for keeping her distance after that. The cardinal rule in parenting has always been to disavow whatever it is that Kids Today are into. Short dresses, fast cars, long hair, rock music, pierced body parts, rubber bands that look like cows … All that stuff leads to sex and drugs and civil disobedience. There are rules. They must be followed.

Silly Bandz must be stopped.

Admittedly, I didn't care much about the Silly Bandz protests when the media plucked them off of Twitter one slow news day. I was more concerned about schools requiring doctors' orders and med-certified staff members to apply sunscreen to my kid before going outside mid-day.

And yes, I did make a pest of myself trying to get a reason why the administration would adopt a sun policy that undermined health curriculum, which stresses the use of protective clothing and sunscreen.

The first answer I got was an administrative one: There’s a tremendous increase in the number of children with allergies. I didn’t buy it. One child that the nurse knew of didn’t seem to me to be an overwhelming increase.

I asked again. "Teachers take the time to have children wash their hands before they eat. They require hats, boots and snow pants for winter weather. Why not practice the importance of wearing of hats in the sun and the use of sunscreen?"

The second answer was more honest at least: It's not fair to expect teachers to do a parent's job. If a parent wants their child to have sunscreen, they should apply it before school. The End. Thank you for calling.

I asked other parents but found few interested in raising any eyebrows let alone pitchforks. Sun damage doesn’t seem high on anyone’s radar. It’s definitely not as fun as ranting on Silly Bandz. Twenty years down the road, after all, isn't as pressing as right this very minute.

I shrugged my shoulders and let it drop. I decided to pick up a package of fruit-shaped elastics instead.

Listening to your own Inside Voice

2010-08-08T05:50:00.000-07:00

"Where is he now?" I groaned, tired of trying to cast my attention over three places at once. "He was just here." … I'm struck by my own voice as I called his name. Louder than I intended. I sound like a prickly teenager told she must mind her baby brother.

Ittybit sounds more like the mom.

"Shush," she hissed at me. "We're supposed to be quiet in here."

We were in Barnes and Nobel.

Bookstore … Library … Makes no difference to Ittybit, the ad hoc librarian. Books in stacks or shelves, in any place other than our home, require the reverence of clean hands and hushed tones.

Library Voice, in her mind, is different than Inside Voice. The former is just a click or two above Silent, whereas the latter is always a few decibels too close to Playground.

It was obvious I was the one in violation.

"Shhhhh," she admonished again when I called for her brother to come out from wherever he was hiding.

She wasn't worried about him. She knew he'd not gone far. He was probably watching us, giggling. She was worried about me, and that my obvious disregard for library etiquette would get us banned from books.

Oh how the tables have turned.

Going shopping with children in tow can make a parent feel as boneless as the limp child they're trying to coax off the floor or away from the Dora the Explorer yogurt. It's why we take every opportunity to shop while we're temporarily childless.

On my way to work I stop for toiletries. On my way home I stop at the grocery store. I browse online, happily paying outrageous shipping fees just so I don't have to deal with corralling my roaming minions as I compare ingredients and prices.

I chuckle to myself sometimes as I linger in cosmetics taking a little more time than needed to decide on New and Improved or Trusted for Generations. These days being alone anywhere – even the bathroom of my own home – feels like a miniature vacation. "I'll take a load off AND a gooey blender drink in Aisle Six," I think as I picture a chaise lounge and pulp fiction waiting for me at the check-out counter.

But I'm not one of those people who needs a vacation from my children. I really don't see them enough. A few hours in the morning and at night on weekdays is something most parents get a taste of in the teen years when interactions include mostly blank stares, eye-rolls and unanswered questions. By then the limited face time extends to weekends as well.

"It all goes by so quickly," everyone – including our own Inner Voice – is prone to advise. "Drink it all in. Don't waste a drop. Savor every moment."

I know all too well. I'm a witness to this time-space continuum. Just yesterday he was born. Now he's gone. Gone momentarily, maybe, but still able to go.

"Where is he?" I say, more playfully this time. "Where is my boy?"

"Here I am," he yells in his best Playground Voice. He darts from under the bargain bin with his squint-eyed grin about to burst into laughter.

"He really is cute," she says, forgetting for a moment her role as sibling arbiter of appropriate behavior.

"But we really should use our Inside Voices," I whisper, remembering my maternal one.

‘Don’t worry, mom’ just another oxymoron

2010-08-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

She doesn’t want me to talk about it, and I can’t say as I blame her. The physical manifestations of tummy troubles are personal and often unpleasant. I get that.

Most people don’t want to know about the cut, color and clarity of the inner workings of the intestines, either. We’re not making diamonds after all. I get that, too.

Still, I was worried.

She’d run to the bathroom so many times. … More than usual anyway. Urgency with her isn’t new.

I’d always chalked it up to a combination of being lost in play and not being fully literate in her body’s cues. But, this was different. It had been days. It wasn’t getting any better and I was rethinking my assumptions. Maybe it’s something worse.

Worry, worry, worry.

A family history of tummy trouble coupled with the feeling that the entire world is on the edge of an immune-compromised cliff had me on the brink of panic.

Think, think, think. …

“Remember you were drinking from the garden hose … when was that?”

“Mom, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, you were swimming in the creek Sunday. Maybe …”

“MOM!”

Pester, pester, pester.

"When did this start?"

"Stop."

"What have you eaten today?"

"Please, stop."

"Are you drinking enough?"

"Enough, mom! Enough."

She didn’t want to show me anything. She didn’t want me following her. She’d begun looking for my location, and then sneaking into the bathroom furthest from me. She was hiding evidence of accidents. She was tired of my questions and increasing alarm. I was scaring her, too.

But as a parent, I believe I prove the point that "Don’t Worry, Mom" is an oxymoron.

She didn’t want to go to the doctor, I didn’t either, but I was sitting on my hands trying to keep from consulting Dr. Google. It was probably just a virus, but Dr. Quackdotcom was bound to take me someplace even more dark and frightening than my mind was already heading. Her real doctor, I hoped, would be more reassuring.

I convince her (and myself) going to the doctor will be the best thing. She’s not so sure, especially when we return home with instructions for a bland diet and a "hat" in which she should … never mind.

She was curious as to how the whole testing matter would work, and therefore positively gleeful when her stomach started its nightly rumble. It wasn’t pleasant, for sure. But oddly enough, having a scientific purpose for poking around in her private affairs made my interest less awkward for her. And it gave my fears something to do beside wring their hands and pace.

In the morning I was somewhat relieved see a little improvement. She wasn’t right as rain, but at least it was no longer thundering. I took the samples to the lab and crossed my fingers hoping the improvement was as sign, and getting the results would force my worries to rest.

I’m sure my fears would have rather been sitting in a beach chair with a mystery novel and a fruity drink instead of on a counter marked "biohazard," but who are they to complain? A holiday is a holiday.

The world looks different at five a.m.

2010-07-25T05:46:00.000-07:00

The house is sleeping, however I am awake.

I extract myself from the blankets, which have tangled during the night with the unconscious acrobatics of every living thing that inhabits our home. As if I were removing a shawl, I lift The Champ's legs from my arm and unfurl the cat from around my shoulders. I only vaguely remember when they became part of my sleepwear during the night.

I slide out of bed with the stiffness of a cardboard cutout but feel more like myself as I move around the room trying to dress without opening drawers or making noise. I avoid the third floorboard from the doorway as I walk through it, holding my shoes in my hands as I tiptoe down the stairs. I forget the second step down creaks, however, and freeze the moment the silence is broken by its protest of my stepping there.

Silence — or what there is of it amid the whirring of fans and other mechanical sleep soothers — mends itself and I continue to creep down the staircase to the porch.

It is a perfect morning for a walk. The sun is still low and covered in clouds. It is humid but there is a breeze a few gusts beyond gentle that, if you close your eyes, could trick a person into believing they were by the seashore.

The traffic is light and no one else is in sight as I close the door and set off toward the street. Though my destination is to return to where I started, how long it will take me to get back home will determine the route. A half hour? An hour? Shall I be efficient, direct … or shall I meander?

I walk a few blocks toward the center of town with neither hesitation nor contemplation. The cardboard cutout, now in need of caffeine, has returned to be my navigator. There are people waiting for the Surly Drip to open, and I momentarily think about stopping for a to-go cup.

Shrugging my shoulders and smiling to myself, I continue walking as I remember all the modern necessities in life - including cash and cell phone - are at home with my snoring family.

I think of the last time I did this — just go for a walk. It has been quite a while. The boy was a baby, still small enough to schlep around in a sling. He was a silent, sleeping, partner. Walks since then have seemed more like Stops … Many, many, stops: Tantrums, stop; Farmers' Market, stop; stick on the sidewalk, stop.

Mostly, I've not bothered to start.

I shake off the stiffness and change direction, taking a left when I usually take a right. As I walk I see things I've never noticed before: two houses in the same shade of pink; chickens running around a farmyard, chasing each other in a playful way I've never imagined chickens could display; a dog's footprints are sealed in the cement sidewalk and a name, in a child's handwriting, appears a few blocks farther. Hammocks, almost identical in appearance, mirror each other in two postage stamp-sized front yards. I wonder whether the neighbors are head to head or feet to feet when they are reclining there.

"Such odd things to notice," I think to myself as I keep walking. I am Alice. This morning is Wonderland.

Lights are starting to blaze in houses, now. The clang of pots and pans ring out from the open kitchen windows. Breakfast will soon be ready.

In another mile I'll be back to where I began.

It is six a.m. when I return.

The house is awake now and struggling to find acceptance in my absence. The smells of coffee and bacon - maybe even blueberry waffles - greet me, along with the tear-stained face of my son, as I open the door and kick off my shoes.

"See, I told you she'd be home soon. She just went for a walk."

Having too much fun? You may be over joyed

2010-07-18T05:38:00.000-07:00

"Not another red light! That's the third one in a row. It will take six hundred years to get there," she smiles, adding a dramatic fainting droop for effect.

I'm looking at her face, a reflection in the rearview mirror, as she's asking me a variation of: "When we get there can I …?" for the sixteenth-thousand time. She is a gushing stream of non-stop talk.

Sometimes she finishes her sentence with "get popcorn AND candy?" Other times it’s "pick the seats?" or "buy … hold … hand over the tickets?"

All I want is a moment's silence as I drive to the theater, lest I wind up in a place far from our destination. These days it doesn't take much to drive me to distraction.

Instead, she's dancing around like a whirling dervish. Hair flying, dress flouncing, body hopping like a baby chick. She stops just long enough to flash a beamish grin and bat her eyes.

Even bound to a car seat she's an uncommon force of nature.

I squint a little, thinking about how her expression might change if I were to suddenly thrust my forehead toward the steering column and commence banging.

"Better not," I tell myself, as if beating one's head against a dashboard were a valid response to kinetic excitement. Not to mention that the horn still works even if the air conditioning doesn't. With my luck, it's bound to stick and be cause for even more excitement.

More questions fire toward the front seat as she sets off twirling again. This time, however, she pairs her questions to a classic melody she's heard on Nickelodeon's Wonder Pets.

"Later … Will there be fireworks?

Can we make s'mores?

Can we go swimming? Remember that bowling place? Can we go there sometime?

How about

‘More Flags More Fun’?

I've. never.

been-there-before."

She takes a breath and starts another chorus:

"Have the blueberries bloomed? Do you think the birds have eaten all the

raspberries?

Am I going to go to summer camp? When can I have a sleepover? Did you bring any water? … When will we get there? When. Will. We. Get. There?

Which is when her brother takes his hands from his ears (he despises singing even more than I do) and joins in the cacophony: "Are we there yet?"

I am too old for this. We're only going to the movies, but we may as well be going on vacation for all the excitement bouncing around in the car. I need a nap.

The Champ is losing the plot. "MAAAA! Maybe I said 'Are we THERE yet'?" he yells using THE BIG VOICE. "Maybe I don't want to know are we THERE YET!"

I laugh. He's so contrary these days he contradicts himself.

"We are very nearly almost red hot, but not quite there yet," I answer, thinking if I can't really join them maybe I can beat them at their own game.

"This is See-wee-us," he chastises me using the voice of the Wonder Pets duck.

"I know," I say, reinforcing the educational TV speech impediment with a smattering of Spanish, "I am muy, muy see-wee-us!

"Now all I have to do is find the street …”

"You went past it didn't you mom?"

"I might have … Being over joyed sure is a distraction."

Unmasking the myth

2010-07-11T05:23:00.000-07:00

It was midnight. The cat was circling my legs. And the only noise in the house beside the occasional feline roar was the whirring of my sewing machine.

Scratch that. Ittybit's sewing machine. The one I'd bought her for Christmas. Wait. What am I talking about? The sewing machine SANTA had gotten her for Christmas.

See what I mean? I don't think straight these days … It must be the heat … or the job … or worries stacked on top of stress, balancing on a thin wire of I-don’t-know-what.

Or maybe it’s just the myth of parenthood as a selfless act.

Why else would I think it would be fun to make superhero cape towels for every kid that attended The Champ's summer birthday sprinkler party?

Another lie. I knew exactly what I was thinking.

I am Super-ego Mom.

I was thinking monogrammed cape towels – half a bath towel, a few inches of ribbon, a hem, a washcloth for a shield and some letters sloppily snipped from scraps of fleece – would REALLY impress our guests.

I was thinking ours would be THE party of the summer, the stuff of legend, my ticket to popularity. People would be talking about me - more specifically the creative Supermom I always wanted to be - for years. Moms everywhere would say my name in hushed and reverent tones.

WHIRR, WHIRR, WHIRR, WHIRR … Clunk.

I don't really know how to sew.

Moreover, I don't know how to fix a sewing machine that all of a sudden, a mere 14 hours before The Legendary Party of the Century, decides it can't sew another stitch either.

"Honey?" (I call him "Honey" when I want him to do something unpleasant, such as cleaning up the dog yard or dragging the recycling to the curb.)

"What Dear?" (He calls me "Dear" when he plans to ask for something unpleasant in return, such as burying whatever the cat killed or dragging the recycling rejects back to the house).

"Can you take a look at my … uh, Ittybit’s … sewing machine. It stopped working completely and there's one towel left. …"

I can practically hear is left eyebrow raise. He can't really say no. He kept telling people to "just stop on by" long after the invitations had been sent. Yet he's not above trying to stay right where he planted himself after a long, hard day. He doesn't want to peel himself away from the couch and cable TV.

"But you don't have to make THEM towels … They might not even come," he says in protest.

"Fine," I say with all the inflection of the opposite. "I'm sure they won't feel left out. … ‘Everyone at the party has a super cape except for YOU little heartbroken boy and his tear-stained sister. … I'll just put some marker on a tissue and Scotch tape it to your shoulders'."

"OK. I'll get my screwdriver."

He's a good guy, my husband, for managing a smile as he trades mindless TV for a few more stitches of my insanity. In the morning he even tries to make this midnight crafting madness seem as if it were a redeeming quality.

"Your mom really is Supermom," he announces to The Champ over bagels.

"No she's not," the birthday boy answers between bites, "she's Super-ego Mom."

Reach Siobhan Connally at sconnally@troyrecord.com

Celebrating 'Interdependence Day' instead

2010-07-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

- George Bernard Shaw

I've been thinking a lot about independence recently.

I find it strange and contradicting how our society craves and covets it; we seek it for ourselves, we demand it of others, we hope to instill it in our children, we even toy with the possibility we can squeeze it out of oil.

As a group, we define Independence as freedom.

Dependency, on the otherhand, is little more than loathesome. Yet in trying to avoid it we tend to forget what it is that really makes us strong -- the fibers that weave us together.

Maybe I am focused on this line of thought because I am a mother, and as a mother my success is largely based on my ability to raise children who are capable of making their own way in the world. Without me.

From the moment they take their first steps, they are essentially walking away from us.

Maybe I'm angry at Disney for always killing the mother (or in rare instances, the dad).

Maybe I'm just jaded, thinking the real desire for independence is all about money.

We are so focused on money - acquiring wealth and accumulating stuff - we don't see what this "savings" cost us.

Maybe it's as simple as realizing one person's independence is another person's lack of purpose. Planned obsolescence engineered by progress. We are all just one modifier away from becoming a dangling participle.

It's not as if I want my children to need me to tie their shoes or balance their checkbooks when they return from college to live with me for the requisite 2.75 years until a low-wage job or ill-advised significant other takes them three states away. But I don't want them to forget they are part of something bigger.

I'm just not sure that independence has anything to do with capability or capacity for success. Ultimately, I wonder if this passion for independence has more to do with the erosion of those qualities. I wonder if in trying to set ourselves apart we are tearing ourselves asunder.

Standing on our own two feet gives us the courage and the strength to do amazing things. Yet, we fool ourselves if we think we're untethered. It has been through the strenth of groups, such as unions fighting for fair labor practices, that has made it possible for individuals to experience independence.

Yet we declare independence from the drudgery of everyday life with the same convictions. … We declared independence from agrarian society and got factory farms; we declared independence from caring for grandmother in her old age and got squalid nursing homes. We declared independence from the cost of someone else's efforts and we end up finding ourselves unable to support our way of life. We declared independence from paying a living wage and found our jobs outsourced.

We demanded automation and declared independence from thing from which we can never be free: Each other.

Freedom has a price, and it's steep.

Red states. Blues states. Me states. You states.

Maybe, on this day, it's time we celebrate our Interdependence for a change.

Because in the end, perhaps now more than ever, we are all connected. We're all in this together.

I think about all of this as I watch my kids grow into themselves. They may walk away, they may run, but I will always be a part of them. And the fact that I am in their DNA will dawn on them when they least expect it. They will have their "Oh My God, I sound like my mother" moment one day, too.

Wherever I am at that moment, you can bet I'll be taking some of the credit

Places, like newspapers, need people

2010-06-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

I found this picture recently as I was searching for a travel photograph to call my favorite.

It was Ittybit's first plane ride. The year was 2004, and we were going to Boulder, Colo. to meet her new cousin. The young man in the picture was traveling alone and had what some might describe as the misfortune of sitting next to a baby on the plane. Now, I could be mistaken … it was a long flight, but I don't think he minded.

People can surprise you if you let them.

I have to admit, even to myself, travel photography isn't my favorite. No matter where I go or what I do, the pictures I take might have been taken anywhere: A street scene in New Zealand could be one in New York City for all the details my lens leaves out.

There are brief moments of awe, of course, just as there are an infinite number of interesting places we can go, and people we can meet once we get to our destinations.

But once we return home, unpack and get around to organizing and printing photos, the results never seem as brilliant as the memories we were intending to capture.

Trees aren't as lush. Mountains aren't as majestic. Oceans aren't as deep.

For me, family always ends up the focus, while the travel becomes a prop or just a blurry backdrop. Places, I think, need people.

So, here's where you come in ...

As some of you may know, The Record is embarking on an interesting exercise to create a newspaper — both in print and online — that is meaningful to the community but that uses little or no proprietary software.

None of that really means much to you, I imagine, since what we do behind the scenes is hard to picture, let alone explain.

The part we are more excited about, however, is the part that harnesses the power of the collective voice — you, the readers.

My piece in the initiative is to entice you fine people to send me photographs and thoughts about your travels in life from the literal to the figurative.

Through Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, I've asked folks to send me photographs from the places they’ve seen, as well as photographs from their weddings. I've asked for brief accounts of memorable moments from each event to share with our readership.

I've been honored with a small but healthy response. I admit, reading what’s come in so far has been a treat.

I hope for more. There is still a week left and I want to ask you a favor.

I want you to become part of the story I've been telling here these past few years. Please send me your photographs and thoughts. If you need assistance — scanning old photographs or even putting your thoughts into words — I humbly offer my help.

I promise to treat your memories with even more care than I give my own.

To participate, e-mail Siobhan Connally at siobhanconnally@gmail.com or call 518.270.1285

No dancing around it, the devil’s in the details

2010-06-20T05:31:00.000-07:00

I unzipped the garment bag and released an explosion of white, feathery fluff.

"Is this it?" I wondered trying to recall the catalog photograph the dance instructor had shown us months ago when she’d decided on a costume. This puff of polyester seems a little too small, a little too sheer, a little too … risqué for a student recital.

As Ittybit stepped into the bodice, I helped work its straps over her shoulders, trying to figure out where the feathers are supposed to go. I was about to give up when another parent motioned in pantomime … 'Oh … over her head.' ..

Tongue out and holding my breath, I struggle to get the thing into place.

When I step back to check my work it just seems … wrong. Had she really grown that much? I wondered, trying to tease out a little more length from the tiny dance costume.

The mental picture I ended up with was from a different sort of catalog.

Immediately, I close my eyes, blotting out the light.

"Don’t go there," I tell myself. "Just let it go."

Think "happy," think "pretty," think "they are just having fun" thoughts.

Truly, it has been difficult for me to think happy thoughts when it comes to dance class.

I try to be positive but I stumble over the business model and the months-long preparation for recital.

I don’t really care about the details and I make no pretense of hiding my disinterest. In not caring, though, I know I am as bad as the mom hissing angrily to her child from backstage: "Pay closer attention to what you’re doing."

Have I learned nothing in these years? I don’t care about dance, but I don’t want her to think I don’t care about her.

"She is what matters," I think to myself as I write a check for the studio … and the costume … and the photographs … and the $12 per ticket for the recital … we need six, I think.

On this particular day, however, the torture for me is standing by as she has her pictures taken by someone else. Because I know when it arrives in our mailbox in four to six weeks, I will barely recognize the girl in the photograph. She will be wearing a smile I only see through the glassine windows of large envelopes. They are smiles she gives to other people.

But I’m not jealous.

It’s just a mindset. It’s just money. It doesn’t matter if you don’t let it. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I tell myself those things, too, before I open my eyes again.

She is twirling, flicking her legs from one side to another. Jumping up and down.

She happily dances to the beat of their drummer, but I know she’s more likely to get lasting joy from the tunes playing in her own head.

I don’t need to worry.

She may have gotten taller, more muscular, but inside she hasn’t changed. Ittybit is still the sweet and curious, little girl with wildly mismatched clothes and hair like an unmade bed. She’s still asking questions and figuring it all out for herself.

When it’s her turn to go before the camera, she tells me she feels silly in the dress.

I wonder whether she’s seeking reassurance or trying to reassure me.

"Well you don’t look silly," I tell her. "You look like an angel with wings."

Begging a thousand pardons is easier

2010-06-13T05:10:00.000-07:00

I'm not good at being right.

I don't think many of us are.

Now, I'm not talking about the kind of right that takes courage. The courageous kind of right requires fortitude and endurance. It takes a willingness to subject one's self to the majority belief that you are, in fact, not only wrong, but that you are SO wrong that you must therefore be completely and totally dangerous to all you encounter.

That kind of right is important. But being good at that kind of right isn't something a person always decides for themselves. More often than not, that kind of right gives you no choice. It latches on to you when you are praying it will find someone else and it makes you choose a direction before you even know where you are going.

No, the kind of right to which I'm referring is the kind of right that so often leads a person to being just plain wrong.

It's the kind of right that requires noisy acknowledgement from everyone who's ever met you, including the little creep from fourth grade who teased you mercilessly until you punched him in the stomach, which was also his fault. He still owes you an apology, by the way.

Yes, the kind of right I'm talking about requires those who wronged us to beg a thousand pardons and sing our praises to the rooftop. It begs the question: 'Here's my chest, where's my medal?'

It's the kind of right that leads to hurt feelings and road rage, ulsers, lost friendships and long, long silences or even estrangements between family members.

It's the kind of right that turns good people into demons and lawyers into ambulance chasers.

That kind of right is never satisfied. It just festers in the memory of being wronged and chokes out any hint of what might have been wonderful.

It's the type of right that hangs on to every thoughtless act and turns it into reasoned and intricately planned treachery.

"She did that on purpose."

"He only does what he wants to do."

"So inconsiderate."

It tarnishes both sides of the coin.

It places every word ever uttered in your general direction under a microscope for examination, where in your expert (though completely biased opinion) will be found anemic or potentially deadly.

Suspicion will fester.

"You don't want to help me," we say, "You want to do whatever it is and have me thank you for doing something you want done anyway."

That type of right keeps a running tally. Until the score is even, at which point you might apologize and go along your merry way.

It's easier to be wrong. Of course, that's not to say we're any better at being wrong, it's just easier to put our wrongs behind us.

"Oops, forgot the turn signal. Sorry, my bad. …

“I didn't see you waiting for that parking space, or crossing in the crosswalk. You Ok? …

“Were standing there waiting for me. For an hour. While I forgot I was supposed to meet you. Whoops! …

“Did I forget your birthday again? I feel terrible.”

We may feel bad about our stupidity, but we don't let being wrong haunt us for years. We hardly let it haunt us for minutes.

Maybe it’s because deep down, when we really think about it, we tend to come to the logical conclusion that it (whatever it is) really isn’t our fault.

Seriously. He should have reminded me it was his birthday. He knows how absent minded I am.

Still hanging on to dog with an iron stomach

2010-06-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

Do you know how many people don't give their pets the same consideration they would give their children when it comes to keeping them safe from potentially poisonous household products?

No?

Well, you might if you were on hold with the ASPCA's poison control hotline like I was recently.

They are happy to lecture about all the things you’re probably doing wrong as you wait for an operator to tell you whether you are going to be making a trip to doggy emergency room. But only after you hand over a major credit card, promising to pay $65 for their invaluable service, which might help keep your obviously unloved pooch from perishing.

Of course.

It all started when my husband noticed the toilet bowl was empty save for a stain of blue on the bottom.

"Did you clean the toilet," he asked sheepishly?

"Uhm ... I ... don't remember. I think I did."

Well ... I don't think you flushed.

So there I was, on the telephone holding a bottle of "natural" toilet bowl cleaner, ready to read off the ingredients to the person who would save me from the pre-recorded lecture I was getting instead of muzak.

The minutes ticked away.

Why is "WON'T HURT THE ENVIRONMENT OR YOUR FAMILY" prominently listed, in large print, on the front of the bottle and "in case of ingestion do not induce vomiting, contact poison control and your doctor immediately" in teensy-tiny print on the back?

For the same reason shampoo bottles still give instructions. The dolts among us wouldn't know whether to "wash, rinse and repeat" or "brush along gumline in a circular motion" without them.

I had called our vet, whose after-hours message instructed me to call the veterinary emergency clinic, you know ... in case of emergencies.

Which I did next.

The folks there said there was "probably" nothing to worry about, but to be sure I should "probably" call the ASPCA's emergency hotline and they would have the definitive answer.

Still on hold.

Do I let her drink clean water, flush it out?

Do I make her eat food?

Do I have to get her stomach pumped?

OK, ew. Don't want to think about that. ....

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.

I'll go online and check the ingredients myself.

“Sodium Lactate” is sandwiched in between "if this is swallowed" and "call a doctor."

Let's check with the Doctor Google School of medicine on that substance, shall we?

Preservative.

Food additive.

Naturally occurring salt in fermentation process.

The dog starts to bark her usual FEED ME bark.

This is a dog who has eaten her weight in chocolate, onions and grapes in the 15 years we've known her. She has chewed through countless sneakers, eaten carrion and dead crabs off the beach. I've lost track of all the literal garbage that she's ingested.

I hang up the phone.

"What'd they say?" my husband asks.

"I was still on hold when I hung up. I found their household cleaning list on the website and I figured she'll be alright. It's diluted and she's an iron stomach. Right now I bet she'd like a dish soap chaser."

The dog wagged her tail in agreement.

I think she was trying to tell me "Mountain Fresh" is her favorite.

Her bags are packed, she’s ready to go

2010-05-30T05:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t remember what things I packed, but I remember the red plaid and black vinyl, soft-sided suitcase I’d dragged to my first ever sleepover at a friend’s house when I was in third grade.

It was the same piece of luggage I’d hauled to the mailbox the evening I ran away from home a few years earlier. The mailbox was as far as I’d gotten since I was only in Kindergarten and not allowed to cross the street.

Historic occasions, I figured, call for handbags with a history.

Nevertheless, the things I assembled and squashed into that old suitcase were probably similar to the possessions Ittybit packed into her princess backpack with the telescoping handle and rolling wheels.

I couldn’t help but smile when I unzipped the top and found the little pink mouse she calls "Mini" sitting atop two changes of clothes, a favorite night gown and about a half-dozen books. No toothpaste, no hairbrush anywhere.

Although, I must admit she’s probably more prepared than I ever was as a traveler.

She is only six, after all, and she thinks about outfits and spills and changing her mind.

I’m *cough-cough-clears-throat-much-older-than-six* and I’m patting myself on the back for checking her overnight bag and inserting the missing items for basic hygiene. Last summer we asked her to pack her own bag for a family vacation and, because I didn’t bother to check her work, I didn’t realize until we got to our destination she’d packed nothing but toys, books and winter shirts.

Sleepovers, however, always seem to be more of a kid-pestering readiness decision for parents as opposed to something that is based on chronological age.

Geography is also a likely determining factor as to whether a child is ready to drag their blankets and other lovies to some strange house and sleep there the night.

After all, no one wants to drive too far at 2 a.m. to retrieve a crying child. Likewise, no one wants to impose a lengthy period of waiting while another parent has to sooth your homesick sprog.

Parent readiness can’t really be overlooked in the decision, either.

Which brings us to where we stand now, quivering on the bank of new territory as Ittybit dips her toe into the shallow waters of independence.

(OK. That's a little dramatic, mom.)

"It's not a big deal. It's just a few hours," I tell myself.

But there's no denying this waking desire for independence is also a trickle in the river of emotion that will one day separate us.

(Again, with the drama!)

It’s not as if she’s packing for college or moving to Tibet. This is more like taking her first big-kid amusement park ride all by herself.

I could have picked some age as a benchmark that she would have to reach before she could ride this particular ride.

Yet, unlike an amusement park regulation, I know any measure I create would be arbitrary.

She's ready now.

She is brave and willing to explore — now.

She’s confident and comfortable with her friend’s people. She knows she can tell them she’d like to go home and no one with think "the worser" of her for it.

I figure the excitement of the novelty may keep them awake and giggling far longer than will be humorous to the other parents, but when she finally closes her eyes, she'll likely sleep through until morning.

If I'm wrong, it's only a few minutes of lost sleep and a few miles in the car.

But I am not wrong. When I go to pick her up the next morning she’s happy to see me … for only a moment. I recognize the expression on her face immediately as the best kind of "I can do it" pride. And then she remembers why I’ve come.

"Just five more minutes, mom … please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please?."

"OK. Five more minutes then. I’ll get your bag."