Got Milk?

As many know, I am expecting our second child this summer. I can say expecting "our" second child, but that's about as far as I can go. I will not say "we" are pregnant. I hate that. The guys who say that always have this kind of loopy grin on their face and say "We're pregnant!" as they possessively rub their wives belly and throw back another vodka on the rocks. I read an article recently that said that all of men's need to be the alpha is because of their fundamental anguish that they are unaware to bear children as women can. Are you laughing yet? I mean, I sort of get it, having had children, I understand there is no greater miracle, but still, I laughed.

Anyway, I decided early on to talk to Jack about the new baby, as I had a sense he is going to need the entire 9-month runway to prepare. I was a little worried about broaching the topic with him. I thought; how am I going to explain this complex biology to a 2 year old?! That there was conception from two tiny cells and now there is a baby in mommy’s belly and it will grow up and get big and eventually come out and live with us? I figured he’d find the notion is absurd or worse, be terrified. I braced myself, found a calm and opportune time, and gave him the news. He seemed a little bored and said, “okay”. What I now realize is that a two year olds life is 99% absurdity as they try to figure out the world, so hey, people growing in people? Babies showing up out of the blue? Yeah, seems to fit. Can I go play now?

He seems to have really taken to the invisible baby so far. When getting his snack, he asked if the baby would like some apple juice (his favorite). I told him that when the baby comes out, it will only drink milk. I wasn’t sure if he was paying any attention, but later on when he started coming up to my abdomen and asking loudly “Baby! Do you want some milk?” I got my answer. Of course, like all firstborns being raised as if he were nobility, he doesn’t have any idea of what a second baby will truly mean for his world (as probably neither do his parents!) but we are hopeful that he will be old enough to happily welcome the baby…and maybe do some night feedings. jk.

An Early Visit from the Tooth Fairy

We had our first semi-emergency with Jack earlier this month. He was climbing on and over my husband, Brian, on the floor, who was trying to fix our lifeblood, Tivo, and fell into the coffee table. Knowing it was going to be bad, I ran to him and in this millisecond, thought: Do not blame Brian even though he was playing with him at time…it could happen to anyone…it’s an accident. With this in mind, looking through the blood I heard Brian say- “his front tooth is gone”. I tore up the room looking for the tooth, determined to transplant it myself if need be like I saw once a Discovery Health channel show. When I couldn’t find the tooth, I despondently called a pediatric dentist at home at 9pm at night (isn’t the internet great!), and reported the tooth swallowed and unrecoverable.

In the middle of our emergency, a roofing contractor came by to give a quote (ever notice contractors are ever-present when it’s less than ideal but otherwise impossible to locate?). Brian disappeared for a few minutes with the contractor, who apparently has two boys who knocked their teeth out when they were three. Brian came back announcing “Baby, it’s not a big deal, all boys knock out their front teeth!” I stared at him.

“All boys? What 2 year olds do you know that don’t have front teeth?!”. I was not buying these boys-will-be-boys-and-don’t have-teeth and was already calculating the cost of baby teeth veneers and implants. Amazing enough, after a sleepless night, the dentist located the missing tooth jammed up in Jack's gums and in a stunning turn of good news, said it will probably come back down on its own! So we survived our first medical emergency and as I was congratulating myself on my non-judgmental calm in crises, I overheard Brian on the phone: “so then, she totally freaked out on me…” Argh, what must I do to be recognized as a saint in medical crises!? I think after 15 years, he cheats by reading my mind.

I know all the more seasoned parents are reading this and rolling their eyes;
"A missing tooth? Give me break. Give me a call when he saws off an appendage or sets the neighbors barn on fire" but it's a trauma with training wheels, enough to start out with. I hope I will still be telling this story when he's 22 as the most major of our mishaps. What are my odds?

Almost Brilliant

In the last couple of months Jack has started trying to sound out words and read labels or signs. Sometimes during his bath, I will write words on the wall in bath crayons and have him practice reading Last night I was giving Jack a bath, and we had a bunch of words written on the wall. Jack decided it was time to switch gears to play-cleaning, so he started to wipe down all the walls with a washcloth. Then he stopped suddenly, realizing he was erasing his words, and said “heeeyyyyy, where is my J-A-C-K spells Mama?!”

A Brush with Infertility Scared my Ovaries Into Action

I've been gnawing on this secret for three weeks and my defenses are wearing thin. I'm happy to announce that I am pregnant with baby #2! This joyful news has turned me into a hermit as I have tried to balance caution with the fact that pregnancy tends to turn me into a one-track-mind kind of gal. When friends call and say "What's New?", I'll stammer "uh, um, nothing..." (lie!lie!lie!). So I've dropped off the face of the planet and havn't been calling friends or returning their calls. I tell them via email I'm *really* busy right now. A few friends have actually demanded I honor our pre-existing dinners or engagements and they have found out within 30 seconds that I'm knocked up when I tried to causally say "oh, nothing for me, I'm not drinking tonight". "Oh my god, you re pregnant!" they exclaim. Why did I have to be such a lush? It has given me no cover whatsoever.

And this has been an epic pregnancy in the making. Good lord, all that money wasted on birth control pills in my 20's, when I should have been saving for my reproductive endocrinologist fees. After 9 months of trying without too much stress, I went to my OB for a little help, due to my "advancing age" (33). They naturally filled me to the brim with Clomid for 5 months, which increased the stress level of trying a bit and never landed me a successful pregnancy. Off to the reproductive endocrinologist (RE) for more help.

I don't know what I THOUGHT infertility treatments were like, and honestly I didn't give it much consideration beyond chatting with some unlucky friends, because *I* would never have to go that route, of course. And usually I think everything bad can happen to me, I'm not a "it wont be me" kind of person, so I don't know why I wasn't worried about infertility YEARS ago. I could have gotten a really good head start on my panic.

After one month of infertility diagnostic tests, which included lot of pain, time, money, more pain, annoyance and frustration, they found nothing wrong. I however, by this point, had absolutely convinced myself I would never conceive again. Surely not even IVF would work for a case as bad as mine. Cursed! Why did I wait so long?!

Then I wrecked the schedule for the next months of tests and had to sit it out. And I kept sitting, and sitting, and sitting. I thought: this has been a really long month. And just like that, I was pregnant. 16 months later.

I had my 6.5 week ultrasound earlier this week and the baby was there (good), heartbeat was there (good), more than one baby not there (devastating to my husband, who thinks twins would be "fun"). I have another ultrasound next week, after which I might emerge from seclusion if it still looks good. I don't know why I'm hiding this from friends except I know the minute I tell one, it will make it around the world like a flash fire in some Crisco. We just love our gossip!

So that's my news. It's interesting that this pregnancy is so different from my first, but more on that later.

Shopping Mania

I went to the shopping mall recently with a friend to buy a new dress for a wedding she was attending. She's the type that you really have no choice but to drop everything and accompany, because a true crime against humanity could occur if she was left to her own devices. You would no sooner let this friend pick out her own dress than you would allow your two year old vacation at Disney World unattended, it's just not done.

In any event, as I was doing this selfless act of charity, I had a lot of time on my hands, mostly spent standing outside dressing room doors. I was able to observe some truly suprising sociological trends. Clearly there are some very different philosophies on shopping out there. I couldn’t believe the number of women in "outfits" and stilettos at the mall. I guess I never noticed this before. Why are women dressing up to go to a mall? To impress the other chicks? To catch the eye of the Mall Walking Seniors brigade?

In my mind, shopping is an athletic event. It calls for easy on, easy off clothing (ok yes, specifically a velour sweat suit), and tennis shoes. And it calls for Focus. As in, going shopping should never be construed as code for "let's eat". I've never been a big eating/shopping combo type girl, but since I have had a child, the mere logistics of getting out the door Without Said Child calls for the event to be carefully planned and time, absolutely maximized. No matter how many weekend bachelor parties my husband goes away for or how many months his nighttime intramural league runs, he seemingly has no recollection of all my single parenting whenever I tell him I want to go shopping with the girls (maybe three time a year). It turns into An Ordeal, where he finally gives in saying "Fine! Go Go" and actually, I believe, pouts.

So I finally escape into the car with my girlfriend(s) after all of the drama to leave the house, visions of racks of clothes I can speed walk through sensing the fabric and fit with the tips of my fingertips, planning to cover 10 maybe 15 stores, when inevitably one of them turns to me and says "are you hungry?". It never fails, which is why I've developed somewhat of a reputation for being anti-hunger-friendly. If I have 3 hours to do 4 months of shopping, I do not want to spend it dawdling in a bistro. Dawdling in a Bistro is a perfectly legitimate activity if that is what you set out to do. But not if you set out to buy new leather boots because yours have holes in the bottom and your socks are constantly wet.

I will hesitate before responding, my teeth grinding audibly, and the friend will usually start to back off realizing their mistake. They will say things like "oh ok, well let's just go through Taco Bell, then huh? Ok?" And I will, with the warmth of an Ice Queen, say "Fine.", still internally calculating the diversions cost in time. And they will say, "What do you want?" And if I am starving to death I will say, "Nothing.". Because it’s the principal really.

Speaking of shopping, I had this incredible idea recently to do all my Christmas shopping in November this year. This would replace my pathetic arguments to my relatives and friends in mid December where, after realizing that I, who refuses to stand in long check out lines, have no hope of getting gifts out in time, argues that Christmas is out of control and we shouldn’t exchange gifts this year. Yes, I know it makes sense for adults, but even I, who propagates this argument, have to admit its pretty lame not to get my young nieces and nephews anything. Or my son for that matter.

Imagine my surprise when I ventured out in November to find the stores packed! I felt violated in a way. Sort of like the time I came up with the idea of a device that you could attach to pets or children that would sound an alarm if they fell into a pool, and which I did nothing about, and 6 years later it came out in stores. So, pretty much like my idea was stolen! So much for early shopping. It looks like I will have to shop the internet, which for some reason makes me obsessive about price as I comparison shop across 10 sites and spend a half hour searching online for promo codes for a $20 item. I wonder how long it will take me to get frustrated with that...maybe I should just begin writing...

"Dear Friends and Family,

I've been thinking..."

My Triumphant Return to the Blogosphere

Well since it's been almost a month since I posted, you might imagine I have a large cache of stories to relay. Gosh, are you always so off? I really worry about your judgement.

Or perhaps you assumed that, thanks to my blog, I had become the newest Google Adsense Millionaire and was off spending my fortune on expensive face creams and weekend babysitters. I myself suspected I was building up quite an Adsense pot and you can only imagine my surprise when after showing remarkable restraint, I finally went and checked my Adsense account, only to discover I had earned a total of $.08. Yes, folks, that's 8 cents. I'm sure every penny counts, but it wasn’t enough motivation for me to figure out how to put the ads back on the blog when they were lost in my Blogger Beta upgrade. Take that Google!

The truth is less glamorous I'm afraid. I've just been busy and my son has been sick a lot. A few days ago I was up all night with him throwing up repeatedly (him, not me, though it crossed my mind). The next morning he was completely fine and chipper while I felt like I had been to an all night rave. I asked him if he was sick last night and he looked at me with a serious expression and said "I spit out my tounge. I made a mess." You can say that again.

So while I try to get back into the blogging mindset, I end with the winner for funniest IM today from a friend who told me about his trip to join a special tour for a NASA exhibition:

Mark (10:49:23 AM): So I printed out a map to get the the facility. It took me into this huge residential area instead of to the commercial district

Amy (10:49:28 AM): it sounds like my car's GPS system, you can be in the middle of a 5 lane highway not near and exit and it says "you have reached your destination"

Mark (10:49:42 AM): and i was like "this has got to be the oddest place ever for a govt bldg"

Mark (10:49:52 AM): so i called Nasa

Mark (10:50:06 AM): and they were like "oh, you must have used mapquest - this hapns all the time"

Mark (10:51:00 AM): kind of funny that the only agency on earth tasked with tracking devices traveling interplanetary and beyond, has wrong mapquest directions to its facility, and hasn't lobbied for that to be fixed

Amy (10:51:16 AM): that is funny

Mark (10:51:29 AM): so the receptionist is like:

Mark (10:52:29 AM): "i have no idea how to get you out of that neighborhood, but start heading for the mountains, and hopefully you hit a freeway - when you do, go north for about 10 mins and take exit whatever- you're totally fine - we don't start the tour for at least five more minutes"

Book Review: Jump At The Sun by Kim McLarin

For some time now, authors have made it very difficult for me to follow through on my intention to review the books that I read, by writing books that left not a lot to say about them. Or only negative things to say which makes me look catty. Whenever I read another predictable boring book, I think “I can’t believe that got published! I could write a book if this is the standard!”. Then I remember that I can’t even commit to getting a paragraph out on my blog more than once a week. If that.

Anyway, finally I read a book that was intriguing enough to mention. The book is called Jump At The Sun by Kim McLarin. I’m not getting paid to summarize the plot for you (for that, you can go read all the budding book critics over on Amazon.com who fall all over themselves trying to outdo one another in plot summaries) but to set the framework, the story is about this professional and accomplished married woman with two young children who is struggling to find contentment in her life, who apparently yearns to be free to focus on her work, or at least do as she wishes. In addition to this story line, there is a parallel story line of her ancestors who were slaves, and some of those relatives also seemed to have the anti-settle down gene.

I have a love hate relationship with dual story lines in that it’s kind of a free second story, but it’s also one more thing to keep track of. Given that I usually have to read these in stops and starts, sometimes I can’t remember who is who with just one story, never mind two. And so it is with this book, there are a lot of characters to keep track of and it can get a little muddled. Especially in the historical story line.

This book has a unique story line, which makes it worth reading. It’s clearly not the 500th remake of Bridget Jones Diary, which a lot of authors apparently aspire to (note to them: It’s been done. Please stop.). However, as a warning, this book can be a little harsh for doting parents out there, like me. The woman in the story says she loves her kids, but clearly the less glamorous, tiring, frustrating things about parenting weight more heavily in her mind. It’s a little shocking to read about a mother who is not endlessly devoted or charmed by their children. However, in its darkness, I did find some things I identified with. She is an expert in the frustrations of raising children and she is very proficient in articulating the moments when you think your head is going to explode if your child repeats himself one more time (you know what I mean if this sounds familiar: “I want yogurt. I want yogurt. I want yogurt. Mommy, I want yogurt. I want yogurt...”).

She writes about how as parents, you will be surprised at your behavior occasionally when it comes to children. I suppose she is right that you would never screech like a manic and come within inches of spanking the behind of someone who was NOT your child, but then again, speaking from experience, young children are not regular adult people. Regular adult people don’t laugh when you stub your toe, or pitch a fit when you are trying to drag in heavy groceries from the car, during a hailstorm, while 8 months pregnant, after a full day at work, because they want a purple popsicle RIGHT NOW. For me personally, there are days when I wish I had a camera on me in the house to show off my endless patience, my careful teaching and purposeful interaction, and other days I stick my screaming or misbehaving kid in his crib in the middle of the day and close the door for 5 minutes to avoid having a serious meltdown of my own. At those moments, I know why I have not been signed up to star in my own reality TV series about successful parenting.

For me, it was hard not to project from the woman in the story to the author herself, however unfair that might be. I knew from her writing she had children. “Research” I’m sure is a great tool, but there are some things you can only know by having been there, and I see it in this writing. There are also thoughts in there that I definitely have never had and you can’t help but worry about how someone would even know they existed enough to write them. This is a terrible explanation, but you will know what I mean if you read it. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but feel bad that this person (author or character?) had the dutiful love, but was also consumed with the resentment and frustration. I can’t imagine life without my child, however hard it may sometimes be. Despite the inherent sacrifices of having children, it is by far the best thing I have done. If I think back to the happy highlights of life, my wedding or falling or love or the feeling as a teenage girl heading off with all my friends for a big night out or anything where you get the sense of happiness and optimism about life at that moment, having a child has brought those moments to me sometimes 100 times a day in short bursts. The most random things will bring them out- the way their hair glints in sun, the way they wrinkle their nose when they are thinking hard, or the funny thing they say at dinnertime. Whatever it is, they bring these bursts of happiness that are like a drug. They get you through the hard work of children and they are completely addictive. The love is overwhelming and it changes you forever. Except, I guess, it’s maybe not like that for everyone.

All in all, I found it to be a well written book, with unique content and an interesting, if not dark, perspective. I’ll give it 4 out of 5 stars.

One Sign Your Child Is Spoiled

Ever wonder if you are the parent you think you are? I dont have to wonder so much anymore. Turns out I have some work to do.

Our nanny, Maria, lives with us, in the basement "au pair suite". Which is basically a decked out brand new top of the line pad complete with mutiple rooms, a full kitchen, granite counters and travertine floors. Meanwhile "my" kitchen is 1988's finest, including oak cabinets and laminate counters. But I digress, I can be jealous of the nanny later. Anyway, one of the nice things about my nanny being a live in is that she is a clean freak. So it's sort of a two-in-one, nanny and housekeeper. She is constantly straightening and washing and waxing and all sorts of clean-frenzy activities. I can carefully observe her full range of skills as I lounge on the couch reading the newspaper. Ah, I know, I sound like a "rhymes with witch" but she loves cleaning we couldnt stop her if we tried. Not that we did.

My son loves the nanny. But will drop her like yesterdays news at the first sign of mommy or daddy. He is close to her, but doesnt ask for her when we are around. It's a good sign. He still likes us best.

Occassionally our nanny leaves to go stay with friends over the weekend, as she did this weekend. On Sunday, my son was wrecking havoc in the family room and toys were strewn everywhere as if there had been a massive toy box explosion (or, as in this case, a two year old boy on the loose). As it got closer to bath time, I looked at the mayhem and sighed, it never gets quite this bad with the nanny around. Maybe Jack is neater on weekdays. Then I thought of my friend recently saying how their children put away all their toys every night before bed. So I said (in a stern parental I-aint-kidding manner), "Jack, I want you to clean up this mess and put all the toys away before your bath".

Jack paused and his eyes swept the length of the playroom. He too seemed concerned with the level of destruction and the fact that it was now between him and his bath. He looked at me, and straining for a casual innocence, said "Where's Maria?".

Out of the mouths of babes

Yesterday I was blowing up balloons that Jack found in a drawer. I would let them go without tying them and they would race around the room deflating. He found it very funny so I did it 100 times. The balloons were Halloween themed and some were orange with faces on them so they would look like pumpkins when inflated. One of my nicknames for Jack is "pumpkin" so as I blew up one of the balloons I said to Jack:

"Look Jack, it's a pumpkin balloon! What is Mommy's nickname for YOU sometimes?"

And he looked at me as he thought about it, wrinkling his nose in concentration, and said:

"Be Patient?"

I Want My MTV

Could anyone pinpoint the last time MTV actually played music? I heard recently that MTV celebrated their 25th anniversary. You have to wonder how slow of a news day it must have been for this to make the cut.

However, this news did remind me that I was part of the original MTV generation. My parents didn’t have cable (an inconceivable luxury) and weren’t crazy about the questionable morale value of MTV, so after school I would race across the street to friends’ houses where we would enter a trance-like state watching MTV and waiting for Michael Jackson’s Thriller video to run again. It’s probably similar to today’s teen rebellion where youngsters sneaking around and pop Ecstasy and meet up with strangers they met on My Space.

Now I don’t remember a lot about what we were watching, but I do distinctly recall that it was musical. Flash forward 20 years and my two year old likes to listen to music on TV before going to bed. The preschool channels apparently assume that responsible parents put their young children to bed before 10pm, and therefore are running “Laguna Beach” reruns at that hour and not singing animated toasters. Well, he can watch some MTV I thought, I can’t shelter him forever.

So I finally located MTV like a needle in a satellite-TV-1000-channel-haystack, and it was showing “Cribs” or something where apparently the obscenely wealthy take you through their house and slowly grind away all your self respect until you are weeping at what a loser you are because you don’t have solid gold light switch plates or wall paper made from endangered lizards skin. This isn’t music, I thought.

So I flipped to MTV 2. A second MTV! My goodness, so many videos to run they had to make two channels!? Except this one wasn’t playing music either. Instead they had some sort of show where 16 year olds throw lavish parties costing hundreds of thousands of dollars while their insipid parents, who are apparently unaware of how shallow and manipulated they look, and who presumably signed off on allowing this footage to air, permit themselves to be berated by their snotty teens because they didn’t book the right famous-name band for their big day. But haha, don’t worry, they actually DID book the right famous-name band, they just wanted their sweet pea (now tear-stained and spewing venom) to be surprised! A sad commentary on the life of the entitled. But again, not music.

I flipped to VH1, VH2, BET, Country Music Channel. None played music. Son no longer trusts that mommy really knows where to find music as confidentially expressed 20 minutes ago.

I repeated this survey of the music channels several times over the last couple of weeks. And no kidding, never once was any of them playing music videos. I guess times really have changed.

Fall Fashion Dont's

I am rapidly coming to the realization that I am going to have to sit out the fall fashion season. Have you all been out there? It’s horrifying.

I don’t know what has gotten into the so-called designers, but I see the makings of a national economic emergency when fall clothing funds are unable to be spent because there is nothing to buy. Mere weeks after I made a joke about how the 80’s cannot possibly come back in style, they filled the racks with “skinny” jeans (a façade we all know, its PEG LEG again, no “pegging” required), spandex legging’s and cotton knit sweaters with huge v-necks and horizontal stripes. I haven’t found a sweater yet that wouldn’t require some sort of tank top underneath to make it decent. I do not believe it’s possible to make this whole tank top layered with big v neck sweater to look good. It’s going to look sloppy and you will never find a tank top that really matches. There is something about buying a sweater that you cannot wear by itself that irritates me. It’s like buying a new pair of jeans and they come with a little card that says “find some cute rivets to hold these pants together before wearing”.

Fortunately for me, I constantly fear I will regret getting rid of clothes, so I still have some leggings from the 80’s buried in the back of a drawer. I hope the ones with the little foot strap don’t come back because those I did discard. But I remember when those were the hot item and they really only fit 5% of the population well. The rest either had them sagging around their ankles from their too short legs, or for the taller girls, they had to keep a grip on their waistband to keep them from being pulled down to their knees when they walked.

Well, I thought, I will get some shirts. How wrong can those be? Pretty wrong, as it turns out. The blouses are all equipped with purposely “wrinkled” material and/or ruffles. If you didn’t appear to be in need of liposuction before, plastic surgeons will be handing you their card if you wear one of these shirts in public. And ruffles on grown women?! What good could possible come from this? Ruffles should be outlawed if you are over the age of 7. Period.

It’s possible that I am shopping at the wrong stores. You won’t find me in Neiman Marcus or Saks and for all I know; they are hoarding all the good outfits. But I’m not shopping there. I have a psychological block to paying more for an outfit than I paid for my first car. And I’m not even talking about couture (my first car wasn’t very nice), I’m talking about that simple short sleeve shirt, a less refined person could even refer to it as a “fancy t shirt”, that dangles a price tag of $220.00. While I yearn to be on of those impeccably dressed women, who reek of quality and you know instantly that every outfit she wears could pay for a year of college, I can’t bring myself to surrender my wallet for it. Primarily because no one would notice if I did. A technology company in Washington is not the same as some hip advertising firm in Manhattan. I could wear a paper bag to work here and no one would notice. And as for my husband, he still hasn’t noticed that I dyed my hair a dramatic dark brunette last month, so I highly doubt he would clue in on the fine stitching and quality fabric of a $600 dollar skirt.

I am simply suffering from clothes-in-my-closet boredom, and if I have to be medicated this fall to alleviate this fashion depression, I’m sending the bill to the design houses.

Ontario rated #1 in blog sensibilities

Like all good bloggers, I often check site meter to see if anyone is coming to my blog. My blog is like having a Chia Pet, if you remember those. I would check that silly thing with great anticipation every day to see how much more the sprouts sprouted. Somehow I don’t see Chia Pets taking hold in the market today where the average attention span is about 3 seconds. In any event, according to site meter, you could say I have had 688 visitors to date, or as I prefer to say, I have had 0.000000688 billion visitors. Site meter, being the blabbermouth it is, also tells me that I get a lot of visitors from Ontario.

Curious about what makes these people from Ontario to have such excellent taste in blogs, I set out to learn more about this city. One of the things I learned is I should have paid more attention in geography, because apparently it is a huge providence and not a city at all. I also read that Ontario has 12,634,018 people. I can vouch for this because I grew up in a lakeside city in Pennsylvania where I personally witnessed them all arrive at our mall to buy our tax-free clothes. It always amazed me to see the lines of buses at the mall- I would think "who would get on a tour bus to come to Erie"? But a little tax relief I guess will get a lot of people to brave the diesel bus fumes for two hours. I guess the Canadians should have thrown the tea into the harbor with the Americans.

Anyway, I imagine that those days of global consumer commerce between US and Canada are ticking down. In December, a new law takes effect that requires a passport to cross the border. Americans in general are not good advance planners and getting a passport is something that requires a lot of paperwork and weeks of advance planning. If you are in the 10% of people who's original copies of their key life documents such as marriage certificates, birth certificates, etc., aren’t LOST by the US Passport Agency (don’t worry, if its like mine, it will inexplicably show up in your mailbox 19 months later. At which point, you must resubmit), then you still have to deal with the passport photo lottery. In most cases, the passport photo will make you looks like you escaped from a freak show or circus side show, and thus the passport must be "lost" and you must apply (try, try) again.

As a result, Americans will be forced to sit glumly on the decrepit US side of Niagara Falls listening to the cacophony of bricks falling off vacant buildings, while the Canadians whoop it up on the glitzy Canadian, we-allow-gambling-and-underage-drinking, side. It's going to be bad.

At least you will not need a passport to continue to read my riveting blog (at least I don’t think Bush has introduced that legislation yet), so for that at least, we can all breathe a big sigh of relief.

The Language of Husbands and Wives

I've noticed that, over time, the conversations between husbands and wives can morph into a new language of sorts. You hear about this phenomena among twins, but I haven’t given much thought to it's relevance to those who have been elbowing for room at the bathroom sink for over 10 years. I can't imagine 9 months in utero would have anything on them.

If you had been surreptitiously following us over the past week, you may have overheard, and been perplexed by conversations such as these:

Situation 1: Driving in the car, running errands

Him: "I've decided you are never getting a new car. Ever."
Me: "What ever happened to you keeping me in the manner in which I was planning to become accustomed to?"
Him: "You mean in which you were accustomed?"
Me: "No."

What you don’t know: We have fallen into a stupid habit of making up things while driving and the other seamlessly responds as if it were true. For example, when driving by a new office building under construction, my husband might say: "See that building? I just bought it." and I will respond with thoughts on decorating it, or strategies for leasing it, or advising him that it has been condemned to preserve the historic foundation of a 1820 farmhouse it was built on top of.

Situation 2: Getting Ready for Work with TV Blaring

Him: "…Powerball…(garbled)…Wisconsin…(garbled)…Tell (nanny)."
Me: "What?! The winning Powerball ticket was sold on Wisconsin Avenue???" (becoming agitated and devastated that a winning $250M lottery ticket was sold so close to me, even though the last time I bought a Powerball ticket in DC was over two years ago)
Him: "No, I said we have to tell (nanny) that a Volcano erupted in her homeland."
Me: (impatiently brushing him off) "But what about the PowerBall on Wisconsin Avenue???"
Him: "Do you hear yourself? Anyway, I said the ticket was sold IN WISCONSIN."
Me: "Oh. I thought you said Wisconsin Avenue."

What you don’t know: I have no excuse on this one.

Crosby Stills Nash & Young (CSNY) Concert

We went to a Crosby Still Nash and Young (CSNY) concert over the weekend. We've seen CSN before but never with Neil Young, so we were excited. Apparently, I'm what you call, The Minority, given that we only got one friend to join us. I mentioned the concert at work expecting a few people to thank me for alerting them and rushing out to buy tickets. Instead one person responded "CSN? I thought they were dead?..." and the other said simply, "Hippie". After that, I didn't tell anyone else.

It wasn't the world's greatest concert (a little too much new material), but there is something about being outside on a summer night, with a sky full of stars, lounging on the grass and drinking $8 dollar cups of domestic beer, that makes you happy. I got to thinking about how the majority of my perferred music is from the 1970's- at the latest, and apparently I am now ridiculed for it. The Beatles, CSR, CSNY, Allman Brothers, Grateful Dead, The Stones, The Doors…the list of greats goes on. I am racking my brain trying to figure out what people my age are listening to if not them. Kelly Clarkson? Is that possible?

Even with my love of 1960s or 1970s music, I felt a little robbed, since truthfully, while I was alive (partly), I wasn’t exactly old enough to consider myself an "original" follower. Somehow I got stuck coming of age in the 1980's. Virtually every decade has had a resurgence and become cool again except for the 1980s. It’s the one decade we simply cannot overcome our embarrassment of and bring it back in vogue as "vintage". I feel a little ripped off in that respect. Parachute pants, break-dancing, "zipper jackets" like Michael Jackson, big hair. Ugh, the list of humiliation has no end. I would have rather had the groove of the 70's or the grunge of the 90's than the tackiness of the 80's.

Anyway, CSNY rocked out in the second set. The music transported us back 10, 15 years, and we jammed out to the tunes that were part of the anthem of our youth. For a little while, at least, we were all young again. All in all, not a bad way to spend a beautiful summer night.

Escalators, Trash Cans and Garage Doors, Oh My!

My 2 year old son's favorite things are Dada, Mama, trash cans, elevators, escalators, and garage doors. Not necessarily in that order. I lay awake nights worrying what these obsessions mean for his future. Some days I attempt to introduce NEW obsessions, like 'practicing medicine', mathematics and physics, or NFL-worthy catching of the ball. However, his favorites stand firm.

As a result, we spend most of our carefully planned events to zoos, parks and swimming pools huddled around the trash cans. "There's one!" he will exclaim at every single one, as if he has finally, and just now, found his long sought treasure. Taking him to the mall usually involves 9 minutes of frenzied shopping and an hour and a half of going up and down the escalators like escalator test-dummy-robots. On our nightly walk, we discuss the relative open and closed status of every garage door we pass (about 6 million of them) and then when we gets home, he likes to have me set up the laptop so he can surf the internet for pictures of garage doors.

Last night, I was cuddling him before bed. I like to prep him for the day ahead the night before, when he is calm and sleepy. Last night, I was trying to work in the concept of him wearing his new sneakers since his old ones were worn and "broken". I told him if he wore his new shoes without crying, he could pick out a treat. Sensing opportunity, he said, "Mama, I get escalator in my room?".

At least the kid dreams big.

Why I Wish I Wasnt Too Lazy to Clean My Own House

My maids are walking on thin ice. One would never guess that when we let strangers in our home, to rummage (or "clean", whatever) without supervision that things might go wrong.

Anyway, I was out with the girls the other night, another night where things like "what we like/dislike about our vacuum cleaners" topped the conversation list, as we all silently wondered when we stopped being cool and started being suburban moms.

To make matters worse, shortly after we sat down and ordered drinks, half the county police department showed up and sat down 10 yards from us. Apparently the restaurant is close to a police station and is a known Smokie hang out. We never would have made this kind of error back when we were hip to the scene, I can tell you that much. Not that we were planning on drinking excessively, but it would have been nice to have the option. The cops kept throwing glances over at our table and we debated whether they thought we were hot or if they were trying to make sure they arrested the right women later. We’re hot, we decided.

Figuring the night was shot anyway, I brought up my maid issues. First of all, I said, "they took the Tupperware out of Jack's bathtub that I use to rinse his hair. I have no idea where they put it! Probably back in the kitchen, god forbid, but why move it at all? And I never remember to bring a new one up so every night I curse under my breath as I try to rinse his hair with a little purple stacking cup that holds a thimbles worth of water." Half the moms, who also have maids, nodded knowing, murmuring support. The other half, those who do not have maids, gave me a look that basically said "F--- Off!!", and didn’t elevate their verbal response a whole lot higher. Ok fine, if you don’t have a maid then maybe you are just DYING for some stranger to come in and remove critical rinsing utensils as long as it means they are also washing the floors while they are there, but still, its uncalled for.

Then, this week, they topped themselves. I often suffer from buyers remorse, so I keep bags and receipts around so I can take back whatever junk I bought in a "moment" of whatever. Specifically I had some hair color I decided against as well as a flat iron I decided against. Why I ever decided FOR these items, I cant really say. Especially the flat iron. All my features are large and they look freakishly so with hair plastered against my head. Anyway, I was going to take it all back. Except when I got home and discovered that the maids had unpacked this stuff from its bags, thrown away the receipts and used one of the bags as a garbage can liner.

I don’t know if I was more upset that my maids now feel they can unpack merchandise at their leisure or that they didn’t use a real garbage bag in the trash can. Is a real trash bag in the trash can too much to ask? Do I really have to recycle everything to death including looping shopping bag handles around the handles of my trash can?

I can tell you I would FIRE THESE MAIDS IN A SECOND, if it didn’t also raise my risk of having to clean my house myself.

My Lance Bass Fan Website

Google is out of control. They clearly have way too much time and money on their hands. Have you checked out their "lab" page recently? They have developed tools and programs for everything conceivable. It sick is what it is. From web searches for the blind to Googlized maps of mars to a tool to plan public transportation trips in Portland (and only Portland), Google has developed it. I love Google Suggest which apparently will offer you real time suggestions on better key words than the ones you are currently typing. Ever get annoyed by Microsoft Office trying to force words on you as you type? Yeah, its like that, for the web.

The one feature they don’t have is the one I was looking for. Naturally. After reading an article in today's paper about these 20 year old girls who were making $100,000 a month in Ad Sense revenue from their website which offers free MySpace templates, I decided to immediately jump on that rickety, overcrowded bandwagon (probably along with the Washington Post's 6 million other subscribers). But first, I needed to know what the hot search terms were so I could create a webpage that would lure them in like hungry minnows.

Except Google refuses to tell me. Unless I am to believe that "Lance Bass" is truly the top search term.

I asked my friend: "Do You think it's possible that Lance Bass is the top search term right now?"

She said: "Who is Lance Bass?"

I said: "You know, that gay singer from N synch that just came out of the closet?"

She said: "I'm so out of that scene"

I said: "look, trust me, Im no n-synch fan, but this was on CNN!"

She said: "I havent had the TV on today"

I said: "It was a couple days ago. Are you living in a cave with Osama?"

THEN she changed the subject. Very suspicious, no?

Well, I guess I should get to work on my "Lance Bass" Ad-Filled Website.

The Benefits of Shunning Diversity

Working in a male dominated company is a mixed bag. While my inner feminist weeps, I have to admit it has some benefits. For example, there is the fun of watching your boss squirm and nervously fidget in extreme discomfort as you calmly explain why you are requesting a private office to express your breastmilk because otherwise you intend to do it in your open cube (note only middle management gets the benefit of "immersion with staff to promote openness". Senior management is locked away in a separate wing with full offices). Lets face it, for a mother returning to work bleary-eyed after maternity leave, and after nursing an infant 52 times a day at all hours of the day and night, your squeamishness on openly discussing breastfeeding fades. In these types of male dominated environments, lactation rooms are not real high on the priority list, though we proudly offer foos ball tables, slurpie machines, and streaming media of sporting events. You have to essentially freak out the men enough to the point at which they say- fine! Take it! Just stop talking about female body parts! (now if you want to *show* me some, that’s a different story). So as long as you can say "engorgement" without flinching, the world can be your oyster.

Another benefit is that there are less people in the ladies room. While two men chatting their way into the men's room is a common sight, there is a less common, awkward pause as a man realizes he has "caught you in the hallway" on your way to the ladies room and you aren’t intending to abandon your trip to chat with him. They tend to freeze with a look of confusion about 5 feet away from the door, as if they have been zapped by a canine invisible fence. This always makes me smile as I sail through the door, unaccompanied. As far as I am concerned, the less people in the bathroom, the better. I can't understand those people that want to make small talk in the bathroom. If I had my way, all bathroom stalls would have those full floor to ceiling walls and doors. Substantial enough that the post office would probably deliver your mail there if you slapped a number on it. Stuck with our flimsy metal dividers, I want to get out of there as soon as possible. I will only talk to people in the bathroom in extreme circumstances, like if I am with friends and I don’t want them to know that I’m neurotic. Otherwise, shut up.

Potty Training Report 1: Its not looking good

Now that Jack is 2 and a half, I'm beginning to get concerned that he hasn’t yet woken up one day and decided to potty train himself by dinner time. Which has pretty much been my potty training plan to date. Mission: Wait for Toddler Inspiration.

At Playgroup yesterday, the subject came up, as I'm sure it does in every 2-3 year old playgroup on the planet. One woman said she was amazed at how easy it was. That she made a little chart and the child got stickers for going and the stickers added up to a reward. Within a week, he was trained.

"What kind of reward?" I asked, evaluating just how much funding this reward system approach would take. V-smile systems? High end tricycles?

"Oh, you know, like 5 M&Ms or being allowed to watch a video", she said

Hmmm. I'm trying to imagine Jack waiting for 5 stickers to pile up to earn those rewards. Based on that list, Jack gets rewarded all the time. Like when Mommy wants to read the newspaper. Or when Mommy wants him to stop crying for M&Ms.

Please snip and send any extra diaper coupons you may have, it appears that I will be needing them for a long long time to come.

No Comment

Hey You! Yes, I’m talking to you. Who are you, how on earth did you end up here, and why aren’t you commenting with witty retorts?

I started this blog 3 months ago on a whim, despite never having read a blog myself and knowing I was unfashionably late to the blog party. I was also pretty sure no one would ever find my blog. I’m an internet addict (I sat in the dark for 5 hours last week because the power went off and I was unable to look up the Power Company’s number online to report the outage… I forgot about the Phone Book), and I don’t recall ever stumbling onto a blog. I sure as heck wasn’t going to tell my friends about it, lest they actually come and read it thus ruining my opportunity to use them and their private lives as subject matter. Anyway, It seemed clear that bloggers banded together and went looking for each other and that was that. Blogging was the “back alley” of the WWW if you will.

Somehow, that all naiveté evolved into me reading blogs every day (that www.dooce.com, she’s so funny. Every time I read her I want to go back and burn my blog.) and actually continuing to post on my own occasionally. While these are both surprising, I’m actually the most in shock over the fact that, according to my sitemeter reader, I have had over 400 visitors. Now granted, 80% of those were probably me, but still that means that at least (argh, math) 80 or so people-who-are-not-me have come to my site.

And of those vistors, according to sitemeter, the average visit duration is “0 seconds”. At first, this got me fairly hot under the collar. What the heck, I thought. Does my site give off some sort of Ebola vibes that causes people to immediately yank their computer power cord out of the wall? Then, in my increasing blog savvyness, I realized that it had to do with page views or something like that which has not yet interested me enough to get me to read the entire explanation. I think am partially afraid it will say at the end, “…unless this is in reference to One Day At a Time, in which case your average visit is truly zero seconds. Sorry”.

And I learned something else through sitemeter- the internet actually tells the pages what you typed into a search engine to get to their page and it will go so far as to pinpoint it was someone in your city typing in “unnatural sex acts, biscuits”. Holy cow. For heavens sake, I don’t want to be anyway affiliated with some of my “queries of boredom” as I’ll call them, even within a 100 mile radius. And trust me, some of you should feel the same way, especially visitor number 256 who somehow found my blog by googling “time of sucker management is done in pineapple”.

In any event, I see many of you are men and women of few words. That’s ok (no its not!). Just because I want to ramble on doesn’t mean you have to (you really should). Really, its reward enough to know that I have connected with so many of you (and mostly me) for those precious 0 seconds.

Saying Goodbye to Strandings and Strange Engine Noises

It is the end of an era. My husband and I bit the bullet, took the plunge and pulled out all the stops. Yep, we finally got a new car. It was not outside the realm of possibility to think that this may never happen. We are not what you call rapid decision makers. It took us 3 years to buy a house, 5 years to decide on a dining room set and 6 years to have a child. The cars, well at both 11 years old, they seemed a lot of like permanent fixtures. My husband is met-tic-u-lous when it comes to car care, so they still looked like new, even as engine parts fly off and hit traffic behind us. Aside from the obvious benefit of having forgotten what a car payment was, we weren’t really the type to worry too much about what we drove, despite constant jokes from our friends about our antique classics. My husband, an accountant, was very clear on the concept of "depreciating assets" so we just drove and drove and drove on some more.

However, for his car, we have found over the last year that it’s safest to keep it within a two mile radius of home, unless you are up for an "adventure" that you won’t easily be able to walk home from. His lemonmobile was a 95 Chevy Blazer with 170,000 miles, which was probably technically still considered a new car since every element had been replaced at least once. This car was a disaster from the start, yet my husband continued to insist that it "runs good, its smooth don’t you think"? At least we got great gas mileage since the car was usually in the shop.

Well somehow in the space of a week, we went from "keeping the car to at least 200,000 miles!" to my husband finding a great deal on a 2007 Tahoe LTZ at which point the Blazer "probably wont make it until the end of the month, baby". Although suspicious of this rapid change in attitude (I prefer attitudes to shift gradually over the course of a decade or so), I said, "sure, whatever" to the purchase of a new car. Because I’m hip and I can roll with the punches (other than my two hour lecture on the perils of buying another Chevy beginning with: "are you insane?")

So we have to head up North 6 hours to get the new car, because that’s where the super-duper deal is. Again, though the Blazer had previously been slated to go into the mileage hall of fame, my husband insisted now it was barely scotched taped together and wouldn’t go faster than 60mph. Our son kept yelling "Fast! Fast!" from the baby seat, since my husband usually drives in such a manner as to leave me digging my nails in the leather seats and reflexively punching my feet onto the floor in search of a passenger side brake. The kid didn’t know what we were doing in the right lane being passed by bicyclists.

So as not to entice me by this new safe driving, my husband also came up with a rule that I couldn’t turn on the air conditioning, despite it being literally 95 degrees out. I sat melting into the seat, the open windows created a vortex within so that anything not nailed down was sucked out of the vehicle. My son was draped listlessly in his car seat, hair plastered to his face, eyes squinting from the wind. I said, "what happened to this car being so smooth? Are you trying to ensure my support of this new car by making me as miserable as humanly possible?" Finally, my husband relented and turned on the air conditioning. On bilevel low. Whatever.

At the car dealership, we parked next to the new Tahoe and piled out of the Blazer feeling a little nostalgic. We walked around the Tahoe to inspect and admire, and by the time we got back around, the Blazer was gone. These dealers clearly are taking no chances that you may change your mind. I looked everywhere on the lot and it was nowhere to be found. It probably had already been crushed into a little green can.

In any event, the ride back, after a week of visiting family, was smooth and comfortable. Well, as comfortable as you can get when your two year old refuses to nap and kicks the back of your seat the entire time. Still, it's strange not to see the old car leaking oil on the driveway anymore, I keep thinking my husband has gone to the store, until I step into my garage and have to turn sideways to slither by the behemoth that now occupies it. Ah well, onward and upward, as they say.

Telecommuting

My company has been forced to accept certain degrees of telecommuting over the years. You'd think we were based in Sibera with all the trouble we have finding qualified candidates. To mitigate this, we have hired people from other states to work remotely or retained people after they have moved away for whatever reason.

One of my peers decided to move to California in search of better weather (better than DC with our standard 92 degrees with 98% humidity? What a dreamer.). He's an interesting guy. He's married yet I've had extensive discussions with him about sewing curtains, keeping petunias safe from backyard bunnies, and the saturated fat content of olive oil. I think its called being a metrosexual now. Anyway. He wasn’t online today, which around here means you have been abducted by aliens or are possibly dead. We are all online, all the time. I sent him an email to probe.

I said: "Where are you? You're not online."

He said: "I'm either:
1) Moving again.
2) Having my toes done.
3) Watching American Movie Classics all day.
4) Drifting in and out of consciousness in my chair."

I'm totally unsure which one to pick.

PiMPing it up

A few weeks ago, I became a PiMP. Technically, my certification is "Project Management Professional (PMP)" but everyone I mentioned this to said, "what's a pimp?". Can you believe this is the best name they could come up with? Not only is the acronym bad, but the full title is a little dorky too. Why not "certified project manager" or something? I suggest we charter a project to clean up this mess.

It’s hard to believe that the PMP is the new "hot credential" and is what the CPA is to Accounting for Project Management; except the CPA exam is about 10 times harder. Everyone is trying to get their PMP. I will give it to the Project Management Institute (PMI); they have managed to transform themselves from a somewhat obscure association to a highly sought after credentialing body. Back when I was doing full time project management, this certification didn’t exist or at least was never ever discussed. Having been in management for a while now, I've seen a huge upswing in this credential over the last couple years and when the remaining few project managers on my staff decided to get certified, I decided to go along for the ride. I figured I should probably have this credential if my staff did, and I assumed I could breeze through it with my over 10 years of complex project management experience.

So I signed up and then I looked at the materials. To my absolute horror, the materials didn’t relate to "the real world". They were obscure, academic, and focused on a single process methodology, not widely adopted. I think people who had never managed a project would probably have an advantage on this exam since they would lack any context. I sought in vain for a way to back out of this. I definitely had not anticipated having to "study" for this stupid test and was hugely annoyed that I had gotten myself into this situation, voluntarily no less. Having found no way to exit left, I sucked it up, studied the materials and took the exam. At first I thought I had the wrong exam. The exam didn’t reflect the study materials and it didn’t reflect real-life either. I couldn’t believe I was conned into memorizing all of PMI’s processes and nuances and then the test didn’t even cover most of them. Instead, I was stuck in some sort of PMI parallel universe designed to torture people with strange, "out of the blue" questions. But I passed. Maybe strange becomes me.

My parents couldn’t wait to tell everyone that I had become a Pimp. They conveniently leave out that it was a legitimate credential and abruptly stop the conversation after saying that I'm a pimp in Virginia and doing well. Gotta go!

Dont mind me, I'm insane

You know those women who freak out when they realize they are beginning to sound like their mothers? I should only be so lucky. The things I say in response to my two year old’s antics make me sound like a lunatic.

My son has this ride on truck that he loves. The seat flips up and he stores all his treasured possessions in there. His match box cars, his cheese its, a sippy cup of juice, rocks he found. If it’s important, it’s in the truck.

Earlier today, he had a little baggie of graham crackers I prepared for our walk. He took his sippy cup of juice/water and was trying to shove it into the baggie and obviously it wouldn’t fit. He was getting frustrated. I was also getting frustrated because he was holding up things. I said, exasperated, “Jack, stop trying to put your juice in that bag and put it in your truck where it belongs!”.

Then I stopped, thinking “In the truck where it belongs?” Oh yeah sister, get a grip, you are just barely hanging on here.

I have also recently found myself advising on why we should not put parmesan cheese on ice cream, what mr. peepee diaper had to say, and that if there was another single can of mushrooms stacked on the kitchen table, he was going to the naughty step, mister.

Book Review: And You Know You Should Be Glad by Bob Greene

The last two days I read “And You Know You Should Be Glad” by Bob Greene. I saw it reviewed in the paper and I guess the fact that it was about Bob’s best friend from Kindergarten hit home since my husband is unnaturally attached to his best friend he met in First grade. They talk almost every day. I am a huge supporter of this relationship; having such a close friendship is rare for men, and his friend lives out of town, so it’s no skin off my back.

Anyway, Bob’s books is good, but here’s the deal- a lot of it is walking down memory lane, which for me, never having been a little boy in the 1950’s, wasn’t such a thrill ride. You would be tempted to skip over these parts entirely, except Bob would occasionally come back with some, if not profound, searingly accurate observations. For example, Bob writes:

“It was the first time we had experienced something like that. Later, in the adult world of business and gnawing ambition, we- all of us, everyone who is thrust into that larger and colder world- would go through it time and time again; seeing someone move ahead of us, seeing someone achieve something or be given something that the rest of us can only yearn for. You feel it in your stomach, you feel the sands shifting. Someone has moved beyond you and you are witness. Someone has become something different- something better- than what he or you had been before. And all you can do is watch it happen.”

Ouch. That one hurt a little. I think I’d been chalking some of that up to the Old Boys Club or whatever else. But still, I like recognizing real life in books, so it prompted me to mostly read the entire book. I seem to be getting lazy in my old age, this is the second book I publicly have admitted to skipping parts of.

Anyway, as for the present day story, it’s a tear jerker. I was crying for the last two pages and I don’t even know these guys. Sigh. I always feel so stupid when that happens; completely unsure of how I would explain what exactly I was doing (and why) if someone walked in. Then again, I challenge you *not* to cry, lets see how tough *you* are.

I wish I could find more happy books. These sad stories are like car accidents you can’t not look at. True, it was a story of a beautiful friendship and it made me think about how much I treasure my friends. But it also made me think of all of them dying. Not such a pretty picture. It was a good book. I wish I hadn’t read it.

Book Review: The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult

Last weekend, I read The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult. I’ve read Picoult’s other books, I think I liked them, they are similar to all others in that genre. I started reading the book on a Sunday morning and after sneaking pages in all day in between running after Jack, I was still reading it at 1:00am Monday morning. It was suspenseful and I was reading it like it was crack. I knew I would really regret this in the morning when I had to get up for work, but I couldn’t go to sleep without finishing it. While, despite skimming through a late story line at the end, I did. It was a bit of a “quick finish” where an author tries to tie up 30 loose strings in five pages, but it was done. I went to sleep satisfied.

The next day, I remembered my pledge to start contributing to those forums I visit a lot, like Amazon.com ratings or Allrecipes.com. Damn. Why did I have to pledge to be so consciousnesses? Anyway, feeling guilty, I did go and write a review, giving the book a good review based on how compelling I found it that I read it all in one day.

The next day, I woke up with a major “book hangover”. The more I thought about The Tenth Circle, the more I felt like I had been wearing beer goggles and hooked up with an ugly guy, who had temporarily appeared cute. In retrospect, I don’t think I actually know what the result of the main story line was. What kind of person writes a book where you get to the end and still don’t know what happened? Argh! And geez, that thing on the bridge towards the end, what was THAT about? How unrealistic can you get?!

So I think I have changed my mind. The Tenth Circle is like Chinese food- you’ll be hungry one the soy sauce high wears off. That said, I’m always impressed that anyone has the focus to sit down and write a book from beginning to end, so good for you Jodi. At least you wrote it so armchair critics like me could have something to complain about!

Women are Frigid (and not just if you forget your anniversary)

It is sweltering out. The temperature is in the high 90's. You can see the humidity in the air, lurking; waiting to envelope you as soon as you venture outside. It will jump into your hair molecules to make them stick out in every direction like tiny electrical wires, while ironically, at the same time infusing lackluster limpness. The streets in the distance shimmer with the heat like a mirage. The sun sears the clouds, until there is nothing left but an expanse of empty blue sky. There will be no reprieve from the sun today.

I am wearing a fuzzy white turtleneck sweater. With thick socks and boots. I am almost certain to stroke out from heat exhaustion before reaching my car. Why am I dressed so inappropriately? Simple: I'm going to work. Where no matter the month or the temperature, rain or shine, it's always Antarctica.

I really hate being cold. There is something just very wrong with wearing a sweater in June and still having your arms turn into gooseflesh as soon as you walk through the door. I regularly complain to HR about this "hostile environment" where my nose runs all day and I get back aches from contorting around my space heater trying to starve off frostnip. They insist the thermostat reads 68 degrees for my office. It feels more like 48 degrees.

"Why don’t you get one of those ratty office sweaters like Sally over in Operations?" one of my direct reports suggested. Um yeah. I'm desperate but not crazy. Leave it to a man to suggest such a thing. Men are never cold. Every time I ask my male staff members to come to my office they complain that they become immediately incapacitated by their eyes drying out from my space heater.

Meanwhile, my only female direct report has an identical space heater in her office. I was offsite a few weeks ago for the entire week and she sent me an email: "I took your space heater while you’re gone, I hope you don’t mind. Two is SO much better than one".

At lunch, I race out to my car's black leather interior, which has been super-heated to 800 degrees from the sun. I jump in and shut the door, trapping all the heat as I try to coax my core body temperature to return to at least 90 degrees. Unfortunately, the nirvana point doesn’t last long and once the chill has been chased away, my turtleneck starts to feel a little thick. Then I have to throw operations into full reverse and open the windows and blast the A/C.

Thankfully I only go into the office 3 days a week. If I had to be there everyday, I might seriously consider one of those ratty office sweaters.

A Flash of Brilliance

I am a mostly theoretical inventor. My countless product ideas seeming to hit a snag sometime during execution that prevents them from reaching completion (AKA: “what am I supposed to do next with this thing?”) thus they are all still “theoretical”. Until which time someone else brings them to market 5 years later and I seethe and complain bitterly to my husband about people stealing “my ideas”.

Inspiration usually isn’t my problem; sometimes I wish I could make it through the day without thinking of 15 new lines of business. However, I am always interested in another viewpoint, so I eagerly anticipated my son, Jack, beginning to talk. Based on the clever quips I have read in the back of Parenting Magazine, Children say the darndest things. I had a theory that out of their lack of preconceived notions, and in their precious innocence, they would unknowingly toss out a great product idea. And I fully expected to catch that toss and retire on it.

So after much prodding, my son finally began to talk. The first 6 months were pretty much a waste (I think “turtle” has been done), but finally at 2 he began to string sentences together. I went on high alert, waiting for that flash of brilliance, willing it, vowing that whatever it was, I would do it. I had faith in my boy.

Around this same time, Jack picked up a habit of wanting to relate everything in books or songs, etc. to real objects. If we are reading a book about cars, he races over and dumps all his cars in my lap. If the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” comes on, he runs to get his plastic spider. You get the idea. (and beware of reading those “First Words” books during these phases, you end up buried alive under a heap of representative objects).

So the other day, Jack was watching ESPN (how did that get on?) and some golf show started. I wasn’t really paying attention, but suddenly Jack was running around yelling “Egg! Egg!“. He ran over to the kitchen and came back with an egg from the refrigerator (recall, he is already around 11 feet tall), and kept repeating “Egg!”. I thought, “What the heck is he talking about?” Then I turned around and saw it. Jack was holding an Egg up to the TV where, against the dark green grass, little golf balls looked strikingly similar to, well, yes, eggs.

He looked at me, his angelic face looking for his usual confirmation, “Yes Jack, that is a ____ just like in the book/picture/song/etc”. Except this time Jack thinks that you play golf with Eggs. Then I realized the moment had arrived. Playing golf with eggs is definitely a new product. Sunny Side Golf Course. Add 10% for hard-boiled play. I’d have to buy some chickens…

Then again, I'm not really an early bird, nor do I have a background in livestock. I might need to give this one some more thought. Maybe this was a warm-up idea.

"Don't Like It"

I thought I had dodged the bullet. I've read countless articles where parents lamented that their two year old who's favorite word was "NO!" or they would grab everything in sight and say "Mine!". And yet, my son didn’t. I marveled at his emotional maturity and good nature. Then it struck.

Me: "Jack, eat your toast."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: (confusion setting in, where did he learn this phrase...) "What?"
Jack: "Don't. Like. It."..."No Like It"

Great. Now he was dumbing down his English since it appeared his mother wasn’t "getting" it.

I knew immediately this was bad news. Kids don’t go learning full phrases without a comprehensive plan for incorporating them into constant use. Sure enough, over the next few days, most of our exchanges went like this:

Me: "Jack, time for your bath."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: "Jack, let's read Dick and Jane."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: "Jack, do you want to play with your sidewalk chalk?"
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: (substitute anything I might have said to my son)
Jack: "Don't like it."

Maybe the world wasn’t ending, but it was definitely tettering on the brink as far as I was concerned. I was getting pretty fed up with Mr. Contrary, my son. He wasn't eatting his meals or picking up his toys and was basically fighting me every step of the way (Im thinking: stand aside kid, I'm an "original" on control issues. You're out of your league). So I picked up one of my parenting books, and against all odds, it was the "SuperNanny" book. Yes, as in the TV show lady. It was enough I pulled it off the shelves at the library with other parenting psychology books, but the fact that I was referencing it, well, maybe the world really was ending this time. And yes, and you know what is coming next, I created a Naughty Step at our house. I've only watched the SupperNanny show a few times, but I've seen enough to know that the Naughty Step is central. It shows up every time to cure everything from back talk to hyperactivity to leprosy (I think).

We had a slight glitch in the plan when Jack found the Naughty Step to be a hoot. He loved it. When engaging in his "Don’t Like It" defiance, I would give the prescribed warning; "Jack, if you persist in this behavior I will put you on the Naughty Step". And he would say happily "Naughty Step! Naughty Step!" and run to it giggling and sit down. Not exactly the axis of fear the SuppeNanny described.

Maybe the problem was that I was giving into my son's request for make-up hugs too early ("Hugs? Hugs?"). Lets face it, I'm a sucker for that sweet baby voice and those pudgy arms. After getting really strict and making him wait for a minute on the step, he'd fake wail a bit, get his hug, and…do what I told him. Bet you didn’t expect that! Yeah, me neither. But gosh darn it, the Naughty Step, even when employed incorrectly, seemed to work!

That was the good news. The bad news is that now I have to bear the humiliation of using parenting techniques from a childless British woman who races around in a Plymouth Cruiser saying "I'm on my way!". Sigh.

The Surreal Life

After reading another article on the DC Sniper trials recently, I was thinking about surreal events I've been involved with. It's the strangest sensation; you almost feel that you are on the outside looking on as a spectator. Some of the biggest surreal experiences for me include: being in an armed robbery (they call them "home invasions" now) at age nine with my brother and cousins while our parents were at our grandfather's wake. Several cracked-out, ski-masked, and armed men broke in and terrorized us while ransacking the house. We were so naïve we hid in a closet after we saw them chopping down the back door and it took them all of 15 seconds to find us. I was pretty sure I was going to die, and as a result, everything seemed to go in slow and fast motion all at once. Very surreal.

Another big one is of course September 11th. Living outside of DC, having fighter jets thunder over your house, and knowing you were sitting in a global bulls eye was pretty surreal. Just the day before I had finished with an engagement that had me flying back and forth from Dulles to LA every week, which was one of the routes that was hijacked. It was the most beautiful day, am amazing blue sky with the late summer crispness to the air, it all seemed so impossible. My husband was stuck on his "2-day" Northern CA business trip for almost two weeks and I had the radio and CNN on day and night for probably three days straight.

A little over a year later, we were treated to a rousing rendition of “what it's like to live in an unstable war torn country” when the DC Snipers showed up. You haven’t lived until you found yourself writing a will before taking the dog on a walk. Talk about group paranoia. Two guys in an area of 5 million had us diving into our cars and hiding behind concrete pillars on the rare occasion we were forced to leave our house. It seems surreal thinking about it now, but I actually would run in a zigzag pattern back to my car if I had to leave the house. You would have thought I would have felt silly doing this, but trust me, no one noticed since everyone else was either zigzagging or crossing the parking lot in infantry-style guerrilla crawls. You simply had no idea where they would strike next. No where was considered safe. My husband, as is his nature, managed to find the silver lining of the situation and was delighted when the credit card bill showed up and was the lowest it had been in 13 years. Trust me, I’m a dedicated spender, but “final sale” has a whole new meaning, when going out might in fact make it your final sale. I managed to go for an entire month without going to a gas station (My 3-mile commute work commute paid off again!) and when my husband had to go fill up mid-crisis, we had a phone line support system rigged to notify concerned individuals about the successful 98-octane mission.

So what dredged up these memories? In a word, Maryland. Maryland is retrying the Sniper's years after Virginia found them guilty of about a billion crimes against humanity as well as several counts of murder and sentenced them to death and life in prison, respectively (they are also still considering revoking their concealed weapon permits). I don’t want to draw attention to delicate family matters, but Maryland doesn’t seem to trust Virginia, so they would *also* like to sentence them to death. Ironically, Virginia executes a *lot* more prisoners than Maryland, who I believe turned their electric chair into a garden planter in 1999 after seeing a similar project in Martha Stewart Living's April issue. I suppose Maryland might be concerned about Virginia's decision making abilities and may consider the commonwealth's lack of taste to be a warning sign of instability, I can only guess as a result of our State Welcome Sign.

Haven’t given much thought to your state's Welcome Sign lately? Well, we have! Apparently someone pointed out that our sign was "dated" and I believe one quote was (paraphrasing) "it looks like something my grandma knitted and hung in her kitchen in 1950". So Virginia immediately took action and created five other horribly dated alternatives to choose from and put it to a public vote. I first saw the options printed in the Washington Post and again, felt that touch of surrealism. The first thing that leapt to mind was "What? Are these the right pictures?". It’s as if Virginia couldn’t come up with the money for any new clip art software and decided to reuse the Atari-era graphics and fonts they had on file. Furthermore, the only new slogan they could come up with was "Virginia Welcomes You", which wow, bam, talk about impact. What fools we were with the old slogan; "Welcome to Virginia". You can hardly blame Maryland for being wary, I suppose.

Libya-US Relations Normalized

Thank God we are restoring ties to Libya. I can finally schedule my long-awaited vacation there, and think of all the Libyaneese products that we can finally get our hands on with the end of the trade embargo. Wow!

Actually the kiss-and-make up with Libya is notable to me, and probably many others raised in the 1970’s simply because they were the “original” terrorists. I don’t know what it is about childhood, but everything seemed more authentic then. Who could forget the white VW van filled with Libyan terrorists tearing through the mall parking lot as Michael J Fox raced to get his time machine car working in “Back to the Future”? That’s real drama baby, the kind that sticks with you and forever defines terrorism.

And it wasn’t just defining the bad guys (or waiting for the Soviet’s nuclear missile to arrive and fry us all) but everything back then seemed more real. As I grew up, things became more of an intellectual curiosity. I’m not sure I ever accepted another President after Carter or Reagan, the rest seemed to be on a trial run, like take your daughter to work day. The years seemed to move impossibly fast after 1980 and the world has become a blur. How was it that the wait for a birthday or Christmas appeared to be several eons long when I was age 10, and now I find myself pulling the Christmas decorations out about three weeks after I finally finished mailing out the “belated” gifts from the year before?

I think the sensory experience of childhood is amazing. The tangibleness of long summers where you weren’t hermetically sealed in air conditioned buildings. How sweet the ice cream was on a hot summer day when you had to beg your parents for a quarter instead of throwing it in your cart at the grocery store. The thrill of Saturday morning cartoons long before you realized that the only reasonable thing to do at 6am on Saturday’s was sleep.

It’s the purity of these experiences that lead people (such as myself) to assume that we had an idealized existence and make sweeping declarations that indicate that their path was naturally the best one. I say stupid things all the time like “I never went to preschool (implication: and look at how well I turned out)” or “When I was a kid, we sometimes could only afford hotdogs for dinner (implication: and look at how well I turned out)”.

Still, it’s good to know we have finally made some progress on Libya. President Carter must be really excited.

Photo Finish

Once you have kids, things change. Naptime marks the mad dash to get everything done in two hours that you used to spread over an entire day, traveling requires a pHD in logistics and coordination (a spare prescription of Lithium also helps), and Saturday mornings are booked indefinitely for the never ending parade of other people’s kid’s birthday parties.

Frankly, I’m not even sure who some of these children are or how their cartoon character invitations make it onto my fridge, but like dutiful parents everywhere I drag my progeny to the party anyways, where he will promptly dissolve in a puddle of tears once he realizes the presents aren’t for him and that he is expected to follow a carefully choreographed schedule of fun. Actually, it’s not the birthday parties themselves that I mind so much. Let’s face it, its not as if they were interrupting a long lazy morning in bed reading the paper and eating croissants, but what I truly dread is the inevitable after party photos, which are usually emailed out to half the world, mere seconds after you leave the premises.

Another batch of birthday party photos appeared in my inbox today and as feared, I flipped through and confirmed that I had been had again. An unspeakably horrid photograph of me, now on display for the entire Internet world. One cannot look at this photo without shuttering. I immediately sent off an Instant Message to my friend who hosted the party:

Me: “Thanks a lot for leaving the hideous photo of me in the album”
Her: “lol”
Me: “I’m serious, if it was you, I would have edited that one out.”
Her: “lol”

Now, you may have to know my willowy tall blonde friend, but may not be immediately apparent is that she knows exactly what she did. And she is a good enough friend not to try to deny it. She didn’t say “What bad photo?”. No, She knew. And she also knew by virtue of including it, the photographs of her looked all the more stunning in comparison. It does not help me that some of my friends are strikingly photogenic. Particularly the one I happened to be standing next to when this specific shot was taken. You can take pictures of this friend immediately after 27 hours of hard labor and think, “my she is lovely”. Or the time I took a picture of her heaving after a night of too much drinking and yet one could not help but look at the picture and admire her fine bone structure. It’s absurd that I should have to put up with this.

See, the truth is, I’m not photogenic. In fact, it may not be a stretch to say that I am the least photogenic person on the planet. Of course, you would never know this from looking around my home, where the casual observer might believe that I am a supermodel. What they don’t know is that these pictures represent only a tiny fraction of all pictures ever taken of me. They have been carefully culled to include only the most flattering pictures, often benefiting by overexposure, to the extent that they usually only have the slightest resemblance to me in real life.

I’m sorry to say that my dedication to showcasing only flattering photos of myself is so strong, that others often get run over in the process. For example, of the many pictures taken at my son’s baptism, one was particularly attractive of me, I’m turned slightly to the side to hide my post pregnancy figure so I almost looked thin, and the lighting made my features soft and glowing. Now, unfortunately, it wasn’t the best shot of my son. Lacking any real neck control, his head wasn’t fully supported and appears to be attached to his shoulders by a wet noodle. Aside from the odd angle, his face is mostly obscured. Still, it was damn good picture of me, so I framed it and put it on a shelf. Being unphotogentic can really bring out the worst in people.

There was some improvement with the advent of digital photography, specifically, the ability to edit oneself out of shots. I recall the days of picking of traditional film based prints from the drugstore. Going through these, I imagine I felt the same as homicide detectives reviewing crime scene photos. Each was usually worse than the last. I would gasp in horror, quickly look away, and wonder who *was* this poor incredibly unphotogetic woman in these shots. Could this really be me? I have a mental image of myself that doesn’t seem to reliably match up with real life evidence of my appearance, and never less so than when photographed. The pictures usually ended up buried in the bottom of a box. I should have thrown them away really but I somehow inherited some sort of depression-era quirk where I have a hard time throwing things away.

Now with digital photos, I can quickly review the pictures and crop myself out when I don’t look good. This, combined with the fact that I virtually never appear to be in photos anymore, works out to be a reliable system. I’m sure generations down the line will assume Jack was raised by a single father, since I always seem to be on the other end of the camera. It’s interesting that when we didn’t have kids, we would be quick to flag down an unsuspecting passerby to take a picture of the two of us, because, really, how lame would a shot of only one of us be? But with a child, as long as there is one of us in the frame, well it’s good enough.

At least I have six more whole, blissfully unphotographed, days before the next party. I’ll take what I can get.

It's All Relative

A few days ago I attended the Virginia Gold Cup with my husband. For those not familiar with Gold Cup, it’s a sort of Virginia based Kentucky Derby where the upper crust flocks to an idyllic pasture in Virginia Horse Country to watch horse races on a beautifully manicured course. They wear fancy dresses, elaborate hats and drink heavily as their $400 stilettos sink deep into the rail-side mud. Naturally, being high-class myself, I also attended, albeit wearing wedges.

This wasn’t our first time to Gold Cup and we’ve learned through experience that it’s certainly more fun to attend on someone else’s dime. This time, we arrived with my husband’s cousin at the tent of one of his company’s vendors. That’s how this works: the corporation pays big bucks for the tent and invites their big spending clients to attend with the intention of leaving them forever indebted so they will spend even more money next year. The downside is every so often you have to shake off a few pesky salesmen who keep getting in between you and the guy who set up the informal (and possibly illegal) pony betting pool or the bar. Worse still, it’s usually the same salesman cheerfully introducing himself for the 4th time in an hour since he started drinking while they were setting up the tent six hours ago.

The downside of going under corporate sponsorship is you don’t know anyone else except the people you came with, and standing like a loser in a small huddle for 5 hours can be a drag and ruin the Gold Cup experience. For some, this quick-make-friends requirement would present an insurmountable social challenge, but for my husband, it’s child’s play. I definitely consider myself an extrovert and I’ve even been called bossy, assertive and aggressive at times (don’t get me started…these are standard terms (of endearment Im sure) for women in management where the rest of management are men), but the point is, I’m no wall-flower. However, if my husband is anywhere in the vicinity, the rest of “extroverts” might as well go take a seat, because extrovertness can be relative and he redefines the very concept. The man is big (size) and huge (personality) and massive (voice). And people love him. He draws them in like a magnet. Store clerks, mailmen, customer service reps, health care workers, strangers in line, you name it- they are likely to be in a full-on animated conversation with my husband within moments of brushing by him and swapping business cards 20 minutes later so they can stay in touch. Universally they think he is in Sales (he in corporate finance, chief bean counter, which is an irony that people often cannot recover from.).

In any event, my super-extroverted husband can present a problem for me. Primarily that in purely in comparison I look quiet and dull. This makes me want to scream: “I’m not an introvert! I’m witty, I’m engaging, I’m…” Ah, but why bother, they aren’t paying any attention to me at all, I’m sort of the silent sidekick of my husband. So we’re at Gold Cup and we’ve secured a pub-style table to set our plates on. Now normally, I’d just assume eat in peace and scope out the potential temporary-friends situation afterwards, but my husband is already waving in everyone he sees walk by balancing a plate with their drink and minutes later, it’s so crowded at our table that my purse in on the grass at my feet, and the centerpiece has been pushed over and is now dropping petals onto my sliced pineapple. He’s even managed to land a couple salesmen at our table, which meant we had to pretend to be interested in their business for a few long minutes.

As usual, there are several people who cannot tear themselves away from my husband incessant chatting and are really warming up. A few times, I try to inject, but it’s difficult, since there is never any dead space and you actually can appear quite rude by forcefully interrupting only to say “yeah, I think so too!” or “I remember that!”. So I typically just put this semi-bemused smile on my face and nod. So this woman says to my husband, “You must be in Sales!” Hahaha. No no. He’s not. And she says, “with your personality, I just assumed” and then she looks at me and says (trying to be kind) “And I think you probably have a spark in you too, you take a while to warm up, but I bet it’s in there”. Ugh, condescending! No offense to shy people, but it makes me feel retarded when people assume I can’t function socially out of the gate. Now to my husband’s credit, he raves about me to most people he meets. I don’t know where this enthralled and infatuated man is when we’re at home arguing about whose turn it is to do dishes, but around most strangers, he has me sainted. I’m beautiful, brilliant, stunning in every way. Then he forces these strangers to agree with him. “Isn't she?! Isn’t she?!!” “oh yes, uh huh!” they agree vigorously, because they are under the spell of my husband by this point, and also lets face it, who wants to tick off a big guy?

Well the downside of 15 happy years with someone is you know the stories. You were either actually there when it happened or after hearing about it so many times, you feel like you were. Mostly, you can’t recall which it was anymore, but that doesn’t matter either. The point is, you cannot help to hear a story begin and think “oh boy, here we go again”. At Gold Cup, the first such incident was when my husband started telling a story about our former dog. Now this dog was the biggest doggie-nightmare there ever was. We are talking about a 110lb, barking, drooling, aggressive, non-house trained, epileptic, ball of fur that costs us many, many thousands of dollars and who we loved completely (but had to ditch in favor of our son). The stories from this dog alone, could easily involve an extended weekend stay.

It was clear my husband intended to use an assortment of dog stories on these people, which isn’t in and of itself unusual, but I admit that even I became concerned when he began going into great detail about how we missed the exit on our trip to get the dog from the breeder who lived three hours away (dramatic glance to me as he noted that his navigator dropped the ball and missed the exit). The specifics of this missed exit were beginning to hit the eight minute storytelling mark (‘and so we had to drive to the NEXT exit, which was Route 88, which I think if you took it South would take you all the way to Tennessee and at the off-ramp…”). Now it takes real courage to attempt to entertain people with stories of a missed exit, I mean, when is the last time you missed an exit and thought to yourself “I cant wait to tell people about this one!” But that is what is amazing about my husband- they were riveted, like he was revealing the location of the Holy Grail and giving tomorrow night’s lotto numbers.

Friends often joke that my husband can turn any mundane event into a lively story just by telling it in his booming voice, with his I-appear-to-be-on-amphetamines enthusiasm. But I let them have their jokes; after all, they are the ones who get to hear the endless stories with subjects like taking the garbage, reloading the dishwasher after his wife’s sub-optimal configuration or getting a monthly bank statement.

Naturally my mind was wandering as the dog stories progressed (are my arms getting sunburned evenly? I wonder what I should make for dinner…), until I hear a woman say in a conspiracial whisper, “you should really talk to that woman over there. She had a friend with a big white dog and it bit her arm off”. Whoa. I perked up. “It bit her arm or bit it off?” I asked. “Off. Gone. Right here” She says motioning to her mid forearm. Well, this has never happened before. I’m now getting all excited wanting to talk to this woman about her friends crazy dog, but just then, the announcements for the next race come on so we all rush off to find the “bookie” and place our bets, and I lose sight of the woman in the crowd.

After the horses run by (for the second time in a row my horse wasn’t even there by the time they passed our tent- what the heck is happening to my horses? I’m getting ripped off!), I decide I just cannot take my allergies for another second. The itching is leading to an overwhelming desire to claw at my eyes (which isn’t exactly a couture look), so I asked my husband to hold my drink and I begin to dig in my purse for my allergies medicine. Finding my little miracle blister pack of pills, I raise my head to reclaim my drink, but my husband is gone- my fault for taking my eyes off of him for 30 seconds. Not in the mood to try to gag down a dry pill, I set off in search of him and my drink. I find him towards the back laughing hysterically with an older blond woman I’ve never seen before. As I approach, I see him absentmindedly drop my drink in a nearby trash can. Argh, I’m going to kill him. After a quick detour to the bar, I head over to meet my husband’s newest best friend. He can’t remember her name as usual and the poor woman will have to tell him 15 times in the next 20 minutes until it sinks it, but what the heck. She finds me as cute as a button and thinks she and I look exactly alike. I’m assuming she means other than the 20 years separating us, but I can’t be sure. I excuse myself to go check if I’m suddenly getting crow’s feet.

Fast forward a couple hours and it’s time to leave. I’m beginning to feel guilty about leaving my son with the nanny for so long and after 90 minutes of priming my husband to leave (“5 minutes baby”, “let me just finish this drink baby”, “one more smoke since I don’t smoke anymore baby”), we actually begin walking away from the tent, cousins in tow. The cousins are not used to my husband’s and my rapid walking pace and every 5 minutes, we have to stop for 5 minutes and wait for them to catch up. We finally make it to the car and I’m designated as driver since I was seen drinking a Diet Coke at some point during the afternoon making me most likely to be sober. Actually I suspected this would happen so I did lay off on the booze in anticipation.

We eventually make it home, after a brief stop at the cousins to switch cars and for my husband to have “one quick drink”. We even manage to take our son for his nightly trip to the playground. I can’t say my husband was pushing the stroller in a perfectly straight line, but he did manage to vow that he was giving up the smoking and drinking and now would just do the drinking. He stopped, realizing his vow wasn’t quite the pledge of abstinence it initially appear to be, and we cracked up.

So in the end we survived another year at Gold Cup. Hope to see you there next year (especially if you are the lady with the one-armed friend, I’ve GOT to hear that one).