back again

So, Mike's back is out again.

Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. That's me I'm describing.

I failed to write about the last time this happened - a year ago...on VACATION. ("What do you MEAN you can't pick up the baby?? I'm on VACATION!" Watching Isaac waddle in the direction of the street, I felt not unlike Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka warning away the brats from the dangers of the chocoloate factory. "wait. stop. don't." he managed unmoving.)

Anyway, I did write about the time before that - almost three years ago...when I was PREGNANT. The entry is here.

what it means to have kids

Mike had started cooking dinner and I had completed reading a good eighth of an article on Kurt Vonnegut when Isaac pulled out his dollar store recorder.

Before Izzy came along, I held to the unfounded, untested, and ultimately false belief that when it's your own child you must not hear his noise at quite the same decibel level as when listening to the random brat in the supermarket hollering in his campaign for Fruit Loops. How young and foolish I was.

You may train yourself to eventually tune it out (I am not the authority on such training as I have yet to complete the course) or you may pretend not to hear, but your child shrieking or playing what might pass as a musical instrument is just as painful on the ear drums as any other kid doing same.

Toot-toooooooot, went my son. Emily Cat bounded toward the garage.

Toot- tooooooot-tooooot, he played on. And I applauded, trying not to lose my place as the wisdoms of Mr. Vonnegut were remembered and turned about by lesser writers.

“Done!” Isaac waved at me gleefully and ran to his room.

“Hurray,” I applauded absently. And then he was back.

“Oh, God,” I said aloud, “I've caused an encore.”

And for his next act... “Mama, dum!” He gestured me over. “Daddy, dum!”

The next thing I know we're dancing like maniacs. Mike is spinning; Isaac is flailing his arms; and I am playing the blasted instrument – somehow – I couldn't recreate for you the chain of events that led me there. Family psycho band.

It was soon after that that I changed our answering machine message from the one we'd had for the past two years: “You've reached Kitty, Mike, and Isaac. Please leave a message” to “We can't come to the phone right now; we're probably having a dance party.”

A friend was so thrown by the new recording, she didn't even recognize my voice. “Um, um, this used to be Kitty and Mike's number...” came her startled message on the machine.

Some people just have no idea what it means to have kids.

tell me when it's over

How quickly we become accustomed to what is out of place.

We'd heard the crying creature on and off for three days going on four. The first day I had resolved to go look for what it was, on the instinct that something was in distress. But it stopped for a while and after I got Isaac down for his nap I became distracted with whatever I'd chosen as my nap activity. Likely food or paying the past due bills.

I'd gone out eventually and located where it was coming from – just the other side of the fence by or in my neighbor's tree. The calling stopped when I got close. I'd settled on baby bird waiting for its mother to return and went back inside.

On the fourth day, Judy would be the one to find her.

A baby raccoon had gotten one of its back paws wedged in the slats of the fence and hung head down, its front feet resting on a crossbar.

“Stuck?” Isaac repeated over and over again. “No walk,” he told us, paddling the air with his hands in the ASL sign.

I dialed numbers, and more numbers the people at the first numbers gave me, pacing my garage, cursing myself for not investigating more closely, panicked that I had figured it out too late.

The SPCA wildlife division arrived within half an hour, but not before we tried to feed the little bandit a chopped up apple by broom handle.

“Stuck?” Isaac continued, but he refused to go and see for himself. He just wanted it better “Help,” he told us, “help.”

Yes, they were coming to help we assured him.

The thing is, I get it. In truth, my own gander at the critter was brief. I pawned off the apple on Judy and she took broom handle duty.

There are stories my son once loved that he won't let me read anymore, or at least he stops me before the conflicts arise. There's P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? in which we must skip past the pages showing the “snort” truck that scoops up the baby bird, and Mama, Do You Love Me? which threatens with its page showing the Mama angry.

When I was little, I would leave the room midpoint during the Flintstones. I couldn't stand to watch when Fred messed everything up or while the other set the stage for mishap and misunderstanding. – I just needed everything to work out and for someone else to get it to that point. I'd reclaim my seat on the couch for the happy ending.

You could say occupations like ER nurse never really occurred to me. I'm a poet who's afraid to look. I live with the irony. But what to teach my Isaac?

The baby raccoon was recovered successfully from the fence and I'm hoping to read about her release back into the wild of our neighborhood garbage cans in the next SPCA newsletter.

To witness suffering and help stop it, you must have compassion without caving in, you must hold the other's story gently as if it were your own while remembering it's not.

Isaac is small now and most of the world is out of his control. It's almost unfair to ask him to watch such things, a trapped animal, a scary snort. Life is unfair. I don't know how to nurture his sensitivity while cultivating in him the strength to take action when he can. There is another gap in my parenting knowledge, about the length of a broom handle.

word of the day

“The world is made of names; my son is learning to speak. He has faith. He believes in things. Rock, I tell him, leaf. No, this, he says, holding the rock. This, he says, holding up the leaf.”
--from “Days – poems by Gary Young”


Somehow, in Isaac’s language, the words diaper, table, garbage and strawberry all come out exactly the same: “DIE-boo.”

If you aren’t paying attention, things can start to get all tilt-a-whirl on you.

“You want Mama to draw a diaper truck?”
“You can’t eat garbage for a snack, Little Mister!”
“I see. So, what you’re telling me is the ball has rolled under the strawberry?”

Sometimes I get the exasperated look. You know the one. The one that erases almost four decades of life on the planet and lets you know you know nothing. Zero. Sometimes, I get the sly, slow smile. “Yeah!” he agrees to the diaper truck or the ball vanishing under berries. “Why not,” he implies, handing me the blue crayon.

I’m not always prepared. It’s been years since I’ve lived abroad spending day after day in conversations in which neither party knew the other’s language. I was younger then, quicker on my feet. One more reason that come nightfall parents should be hermetically sealed into sleeping bags while carefully trained elves commute to our houses from their nests in the forest ready to battle any waking children by dancing them back to sleep, bringing them water and warm milk, or gently tying them to the bed. The sooner we organize the elves, the smoother this will all work out.

“DIE-boo!” my son tells me, tapping his fingers on each of his hip bones.
“DIE-boo!” he insists, pointing at the coffee table.
“DIE-boo!” he says, stomping and lifting his arms like a mechanical claw.
“DIE-boo!” he sighs, signing the word for the fruit with his twisting pinky finger.

Dictionaries and vocabularies are for those with less imagination living in the showy world of verbal subtlety. With his whole being, no matter the sounds from his mouth, he is teaching me the same things. The tilt-a-whirl is three tickets to ride. The elves are busy filling dandelion wishes. And, please, pay attention.

July 4, 2007 - Esalen

Big Sur, CA

Here's where we spent our fourth.

my own independence day

Some days I want a little more space than I get.

(Let me start over.)

Some days, what I want is space, away, I mean, more time, I mean, to myself.

(Eh-hem. Again.)

I wish Isaac napped longer. I don’t want to have to choose between lunch, nap, watering the garden or writing.

(Take four:)

Why can’t he play by himself?!? I mean, other babies do it? If he does it, for all of ten minutes it means he’s pooping in his pants. Why potty train the kid when it’s my only respite?

(Wait. Back up. Breathe. Okay.)

Some days I want a little more space than I get. I consider myself to be an emotionally demanding person. Like mother, like son.

They say: “I just read a book, turn off the light, tell him its nap time and leave the room. He goes right to sleep.”
Drinks milk. Asks for more. Finishes that milk. Rejects book number five, asks to read something else. Starts to drift off. Sits back up. Fills his diaper. Change him. Asks for more milk... The tendonitis in my wrists I got from lugging him around as a baby has returned full force because the child seems to have to hold my pinky finger in some awkward angle in order to fall asleep. I want a nap that’s longer than the time it takes me to get him to nap.

Mama, come peez. (Just a minute, Isaac, I’m feeding Emily cat.)
Mama. Mama! Mama!! Mama? Mama!!!
Mama, watch. Mama, watch. Mama, watch. (I’m watching, Isaac.) Mama, watch.

They say: “He just plays by the door while I’m in the shower.”
I can usually count on Isaac freaking out at least once a week when I take a shower – while Mike is home - and several times a week when I tell him I’m going to the bathroom.

Mama, has to go to the bathroom, Izzy. I’ll be right back.
No! Uh-uh. No!
Honey, it’s just the bathroom. I’ll be right back.
No-uh-uh-no. Nooooo! (cries)
Isaac. I have to pee. Can I please pee.
No.
Well, I have to pee anyway. No one changes Mama’s diapers so I have to make it to the potty.
Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (cries frantically and busts through the bathroom door)

They say: “Isaac sleeps through the night now, doesn’t he?”
It took Mike and I three days to finish watching a movie because the creature has it in for us.

Mama, where’d do dough? Mama?

The child is Wearing. Me. Out.

And I wonder why I’m still a clockwatcher. I’m not proud of this in the least. I’m not nearly as bad as when Isaac was first born, but nonetheless, it goes something like this: “Okay, if he sleeps another half hour, but the time he wakes up, I’ll only have two hours to go before Mike gets home.” Shouldn’t it be more like …He wakes up, I drift into the yard with him, play baseball, deadhead some marigolds, he rides his radio flyer around, we watch a spider together, and seamlessly the time passes until, surprised, I look up to discover Mike pulling in the driveway.

Lately I’ve been getting them again. The comments. The ones that assume. The ones that come with shackles attached. The “Don’t you LOVE being a mom?” comments. And “You must enjoy your son SO MUCH!” Immediately, after these lines are spoken, invisible ropes of untold strength shoot toward my wrists and ankles from all directions. THWAAAAPPPP. THWAAAPPP. SHUKSHUKSHUKSHUK. I am bound. Where can I go? I am an awful person. But worse, I am an awful mother.

(NB: Don’t even think about the comment on how someday he’ll not want anything to do with me. Post it and I will eat you.)

one of my favorites: a poem by Gregory Djanikian

(thank you www.poetrymagazine.org)

Immigrant Picnic
by Gregory Djanikian

It's the Fourth of July, the flags
are painting the town,
the plastic forks and knives
are laid out like a parade.

And I'm grilling, I've got my apron,
I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish,
I've got a hat shaped
like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what's his pleasure
and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare,"
and then, "Hamburger, sure,
what's the big difference,"
as if he's really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs,
slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas,
uncap the condiments. The paper napkins
are fluttering away like lost messages.

"You're running around," my mother says,
"like a chicken with its head loose."

"Ma," I say, "you mean cut off,
loose and cut off being as far apart
as, say, son and daughter."

She gives me a quizzical look as though
I've been caught in some impropriety.
"I love you and your sister just the same," she says.
"Sure," my grandmother pipes in,
"you're both our children, so why worry?"

That's not the point I begin telling them,
and I'm comparing words to fish now,
like the ones in the sea at Port Said,
or like birds among the date palms by the Nile,
unrepentantly elusive, wild.

"Sonia," my father says to my mother,
"what the hell is he talking about?"
"He's on a ball," my mother says.

"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands,"
as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll . . . ."

"And what about roll out the barrels?" my mother asks,
and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says,
"let's have some fun," and launches
into a polka, twirling my mother
around and around like the happiest top,

and my uncle is shaking his head, saying
"You could grow nuts listening to us,"

and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai
burgeoning without end,
pecans in the South, the jumbled
flavor of them suddenly in my mouth,
wordless, confusing,
crowding out everything else.

boy at the big water

“Use your words.”

You may have heard caregivers, parents, or teachers patiently offer this advice to the stomping toddler whose toy has just been stolen or who's beet red, fists balled up in a yet undefined rage.

Far be it from me to point out the limitations of language as a creative tool of communication, but I'm beginning to question the “use your words” approach in certain instances.

The truth is, I started to pitch this line myself (limited resources and brainpower, just like our kids, we absorb what we hear). It does seem mostly appropriate at those times, for example, when Isaac has jumped straight to whine without asking outright for what he wants, assuming parental resistance and digging in with impatient demands.

But the other day, I caught myself saying the “words” deal when my obviously overtired baby reached up for me, ignoring my request that he pick out a book. What a stupid thing of me to say. First of all, Isaac only has just so many words, and most of those sound strikingly similar. What did I think he was going to say? His message was crystal clear: “Rock me the hell to sleep, Mom.”

I stopped myself in the very moment and began to wonder what message we might be leaving with children on this point. Are we teaching them that nuance or body language is unimportant or not worthy of our attention? Listening demands something of the listener and should be done with more than the ears. It is not the passive skill it is sometimes billed as .(Nor is reading the passive opposite of writing and the idea that it is contributes to students and citizens without the ability to predict or read critically.)

I witnessed and studied many exchanges as a grad student and teacher of ESL where the breakdown in communication had much less to do with the language ability of the non-native speaker and much more to do with attitudes of the person they were speaking to – someone who assumed no responsibility for the success of the interaction, deciding even before they began that their partner's accent was too unfamiliar or their English too “broken.”

Words are a ridiculously small part of how we move in and understand the world. I'd hate to give my boy only letters in his life portfolio.

crossroads

As I drive along near the fairgrounds one Sunday not far in the past, punching at the radio buttons in a vain search to find music worth listening to, I realize something I've forgotten again. So I turn off the blasted radio and roll down the window. I can hear it, but not well – a sax riff, the beat of a bass, a hum gearing up to the next chorus. It's the last night of the blues festival. I sail through the yellow light into another year's wait.

What's a blog for if not embarrassing confessions?

In eight summers here, half that time living in walking distance to the fairgrounds, I have never gotten to a blues festival. It's weird. Every year I say I want to go and every year I don't.

I seem to hear artists talk all the time about what music filled their houses growing up. Their dads with Sinatra on and their head under the hood of a car, or their parents away and the kids playing the Billie Holiday record over and over again.

What will Isaac say? “I have no idea how I ever came to tour Europe singing opera. Must have been all that talk radio I grew up listening to.”

What kind of artistic environment am I giving my kiddo besides a mom who disappears once in a while to create frustrated half-poems?

Shouldn't art be absorbing what you know and then letting go into possibility and visceral emotion? Sometimes I feel like my “art” is simply about thinking and over thinking. And lately I've been thinking that the problem with this blog isn't that I need to revitalize it, but maybe that I need to put it to rest. Mike says it isn't “Fetal Positions” any more, that it needs a new look and focus.

This is the last official day of my week-long drive to write every day. I did. But I'm not sure to what end. I of course have lots of other stories about my amazing, aggravating, beautiful son who is going to drain every little bit of energy out of me if it's the last thing he does. I've been less able to pull those stories from the pages of my journal in the last months and glean from them any pithy truths or witty verbiage.

If you read this thing, please send a comment and let me know if you do. Now would be the time to check in.

land of the free

Ah, the Fourth of July approaches, a time of year when my neighborhood, already dripping with charm and class – concrete yards featuring red rocks in a star formation, plastic likenesses of Winnie-the-Pooh playing golf, woodland creatures peering out of two-foot chainlink fences – adds kiosk after kiosk of fireworks for sale. I mean, what's a vacant lot for, anyway?

A couple miles in any direction and they're illegal. But not here. No. Here, in my neighborhood where you are far more likely to spot a parole car circling than you are that cute little downtown bus they've dressed up like a trolley, you can buy your very own piece of independence to shoot off at your leisure.

Oh, but don't worry, most of those kiosks are sponsored by the churches. They are fundraisers, since selling dynamite is clearly the Lord's work. And if they continue to wake my baby up with their holy thunder, I'm planning on kicking them from here to the here after.

Imitating bombs. This is what we've come up with for entertainment and, unbelievably, a feeling of freedom.

In an effort to tire Isaac out enough to sleep through the racket, I often take him to the park in the afternoons. We have several in walking distance. The closest one is the least impressive of the lot, but it has Isaac's favorite swings.

I push him “high-high” on the “wee-wah” as instructed, over the glass-riddled sand, until his feet reach above the roofs of the pimped out El Caminos stopping at the corner market for chips and beer, out toward the line of cypress and across to the ocean, his “big water,” until he is giddy, the wind stealing his breath, and he finds another freedom, sees a way out.

it's a boy thing

You may have read about our affinity for salvaging things. When Isaac was still pretty little, Mike came home from one of his second-hand adventures with a little foam-filled kid's couch for Isaac's room. It is covered in blue material patterned with baseballs, footballs, basketballs, and baseball, football and basketball players. I didn't really give it much thought at the time, especially since Isaac didn't, though I knew for certain that I'd never actively seek some such thing out and purchase it new.

Lately, he's taken more interest in the drawings of uniformed men passing and swinging and slamdunking.

“'N' dis?” he questions me, pointing at the baseball player.

“Baseball. You know baseball.”

“Bayball,” he says.

“'N' dis?” pointing to the basketball player.

“Basketball. It's the game you play with the hoop,” I tell him, referring to the little Nerf hoop closed into one of his dresser drawers.

“Bahball.”

“Basketball.”

“Bah-et-ball.”

“Right.”

“'N' dis?” he demands finally, looking to the padded quarterback.

“Football,” I say, keeping any other commentary to myself.

He looks at me curiously and holds out his right toe. “Foot?”

“Uh-huh. Foot. Ball.”

“Football.”

There's a pause.

“Yeah, me, football?”

“You don't have a football, Iz.”

The brow furrows deeply as if to catch rainwater.

“Yeah, me, football!”

“We'll work on it, Izzy.”

Later that night he was out looking for various essentials with his dad, things like a gallon of scented bubbles, when he apparently again took up his campaign for a football. Inexplicably, he requested a “small, small football!” and, inexplicably, Mike found a bag full of tiny superballs in the shape of footballs.

“He must have been excited,” I said when Mike told me the story.

“He danced,” my husband responded.

My house is now confettied in thumb-sized footballs which can look at first glance like little turds lying about, and in these days of potty training, it's not really what you want to see.

My concern is not that my son may develop an interest in various sports, but rather that his myriad interests will be corralled into only what looks acceptable for a boy.

Isaac adores gardening too. Spends inordinate amounts of time planting and watering with me. Weeds at parks before heading for the slide, steps carefully over seedlings, and rescues cutting from the compost to plant them so they'll grow “tall-tall, up da boon!”

Recently, I put my name down on the mailing list at our local cuttings fair, forgetting about it almost immediately, until a week or so ago when I got the call. It was on my voicemail. An invitation to a fancy hat luncheon at the dump.

How can I, in good conscious, expect my son to continue with an activity that culminates in old women sitting around in straw brimmed numbers topped with feathers and sipping chai? (BTW, I'm inventing here, I didn't actually go to the luncheon so I don't actually know what the old ladies' hats were made of or topped with. I don't want to be associated with these groups any more than I imagine Isaac will.)

Short of the idea to get him a loveseat covered with hoes and spades, I feel kind of hopeless. Like all this is already in motion and way beyond my control. Why do “boy” things seem cool and “girl” things seem...girlie? Why can we even understand what that sentence means?

As for the fancy hat luncheons, it's like when you have someone on your side that you know will bring the cause down.

I ask my two-year-old who's driving his truck.

“Um, a guy,” he says.

“Oh. Do ladies drive it sometimes?”

“No.”

“How about this truck? Do any ladies drive it?”

“No.”

“How about your plane? Can a lady drive a plane?”

“No!” he says, impatiently raising his voice. “Guy!”

Show me to the country, the neighborhood, the patch of grass where I can retreat to and rewrite
this script.

play ball

After a mere few innings of watching baseball played on the diamond across the street from the sports center where Mike takes Isaac swimming, Mr Baby has fallen in love with the game he calls “Dough, Bump, Nun.” (First someone doughs the ball, then someone else bumps the ball, and then you have to Nun!!!)

Several times a day he demands I pitch him his squishy orange ball or one of the whiffles that have come over the fence so he can swing himself into a vortex, then run wildly in any direction.

There is a small problem with this affinity for baseball. I am from New York and my husband is from Massachusetts. If people don't know the sincerity of the rivalry, let me tell you that I once attended a game at Yankee stadium with a woman wearing a Boston hat. The only reason we escaped without injury was that she spoke with a British accent and acted confused. On our recent flight to Boston, the flight attendant announced our flying time, the captain's name, and that any Yankee fans on board get off.

My son spent his infanthood in a Boston Red Sox onesie (a gift from my brother- and sister-in-law) with a Yankee bib over it (a gift from my sister – a Mets fan, but she acquiesced.). There is only one known picture of Isaac in the Red Sox get up and its blurry. Color me passive-aggressive.

I think I should win this tug-o-war since until recently, I've watched the Yankees faithfully for a really long time. I remember when Willie Randolph was team captain before he ever thought about standing around holding guys at third base. I know what Phil Rizzuto did before he did commercials for the Money Store. Then there's Mike who's somewhat shaky on the rules.

When Isaac tires of swinging at the air and collecting the whiffle from under the coffee table, he usually resorts to imaginary ball. Something he loved before he ever knew of a bat to bump it with. Imaginary balls are easier to throw, easier to catch. My guy makes a click of his tongue as he swings with perfect timing and his invisible bat makes contact with the invisible ball, sending it far into the seats.

Perhaps Isaac can survive this insurmountable division in his family by suggesting invisible ball be the team we all play for. (Don't forget to click your tongue.) And then maybe we can play imaginary war with invisible bombs. It's a slippery slope, one I'm ready to find myself at the bottom of. It'd be only a matter of time before we'd all tire of that too, and ask to read books.

you know you're a...

I'm currently fighting hard against the urge to write a “you know you're a parent when” piece.

Still, some days, I desperately need confirmation that out there in the world there are others like me - the days of spelling things out to your partner, the anguished cries from the shower, plastic boat sails imbedded in feet, colorful ducks nipping at ankles, the moments of glancing through the entertainment section and thinking, “What am I not taking advantage of any of these cultural events?...Oh yeah...”

Please, the jobs I have - teacher, writer, mother - are isolating at best. Tell me: Are there more of us who linger in friends' living rooms when picking up our children from playdates, so that we can stare into the frames of the wedding pictures on the mantel, look at the couples in those pictures and imagine how they fell in love: his dimple and clear blue eyes, her soft shoulders and wide laugh, and wonder if they wonder, how they got here?

do you remember when mom could fix everything?

Isaac and I are playing the front yard when he halts mid-run and stares at the walk.

“Bee,” he says (bee being his generic word for all bugs).

I come look. It's a dead moth being consumed by a swarm of ants. Nice.

“Yeah, baby, it's a bug,” I confirm.

“Down boom,” he next informs me.

“Yup, it looks like it went down boom.”

“Fly away wings?” he inquires.

“I don't think that one's flying anywhere right now, sweetie.”

“Yeah,” he concludes. “Need mama.”

remember me?

I always check the box.

When I sign in to my blog site with username and password, I check off "Remember me." But sadly, these days with yawning gaps between entries, my computer rarely does. "Oh, did you used to write a blog?" it seems to say, spinning its little hourglass at me. "Okay, let's see here..."

On Sunday, with still one more week to go of Isaac's break from preschool and early deadlines for the paper looming thanks to that bloody (literally) fourth of July b.s., I decided there would never be a good time and so I'd just commit now. Commit to writing a blog entry every day for a full week. So there. Yeah. Mmm-hmmm. C'mon, I'm every woman.

No, your refresh button didn't let you down, I'm afraid there were no entries for Sunday or Monday.

I mentioned to just one other person besides my husband that I was planning this ambitious project, and he talked about blogs that use too much filler and spend too much time referring to other blogs. He maintained that a couple well-written essays a week (i.e., my articles for the paper) were enough for any busy, distracted mom.

And yet, I couldn't help but dip into that unconscious belief honed over sooooo many years against my will that I should be able to do it all - all of it - ALL OF IT. As a man, my friend can't quite appreciate the sincerity and fervor with which society has stoked the fires of such ideals, or how, despite all our talk, advances, my midwife's bumpersticker calling all Uppity Women to Unite, the white noise behind being female hasn't changed much in a whole lot of decades.

In fact, it's grown. We've taken over. We now make choices to do it all, snap our own whip.

I know, I was just talking about a dumb blog for godssake. And now we're knee-deep in the women's rights movement and the mommy wars. As usual, there is likely more in the way of connectors going on in my brain than I have time to spell out here.

When I was little, I had a huge fight with my best friend, Patti, over what the first day of the week was. It was the most significant disagreement we had in our eight-year friendship (from age 2-10) . She said Sunday was the first day. I said it was Monday.

Since I'm currently in a review class of childhood mentality, I'd like to propose that Tuesday is now the first day of the week. I'll be writing a blog every day for this week that begins today - Tuesday. And if you don't think Tuesday is the first day of the week, then I just won't share my playdough with you.

what's in a name?

So there we are, trying to get Isaac to sleep for the night. It's a delicate process that involves a nice exhausting afternoon at the park, a nighttime snack, a long debate about which toothbrush to use, a lot of luck, and the right books. An easy bedtime is the difference between parents who get to enjoy a couple hours of each other's company before collapsing and parents who just collapse. In other words, it's huge.

As the president of PADST (Parents Against Daylight Savings Time), I'd like to say that bedtime is that much harder these days. Not to mention, the routine of bedtime can be mind numbing. We have recently jettisoned our pile of dedicated bedtime books and been testing out new material in an effort to liven things up.

It was time. The tension around whether the duckling will be reunited with his family has long since drained away and so help me, if Corduroy has taken a bath once, he's taken that bath a thousand, freaking times.

It's important in a bedtime book that there not be any flaps to lift, any textures to sit up and feel, any dinosaurs roaring too loudly. We've gone with the sure thing. We've turned to Pooh. Trying to stave off the boredom that will eventually, inevitably come with this new selection of books as well, and being general cute and goofy, Mike plays up the voices. Not known as a man of many accents, my husband does the best he can.

Rabbit, it seems, is from somewhere around Mexico City by way of Moscow. Owl, and, now that I think about it, pretty much all the other occupants of the Hundred Acre Wood minus Eeyore speak in an accent that falls between an Irish brogue and a cockney guy who's just been punched hard in the mouth.

On one particular night recently, I was holding Isaac's hand and Mike was reading along from his odd little UN cast when Eeyore suddenly came out as “Igor.” I shook Isaac's little toddler bed trying to hold in silent laughter. Igor, the depressed donkey, had lost his tail you see, but now Isaac wanted to know what the hell was wrong with Mama and, well, we had to go back to square one on the road to getting him unconscious. I could feel my evening slipping away.

But the Great Story Teller wasn't done.

Peter found Igor's tail hanging as a bell pull outside Owl's house. Yes, that's right, the famous Bear of Very Little Brain? The one with his nose in the honey pots? That one. His name is Peter. Winnie-the-Peter. Suffice to say, that was it for our evening.

When, at well after 9 we left Isaac's room, I cautioned an inquiry: “Peter?? PETER?” “It was dark,” Mike defended. “You're pathetic,” I told him and kissed him goodnight.

playing to strengths

In the spirit of recognizing my Isaac’s strengths, I’d like share why he’d make a great…

- Geologist. Rocks are cool. Rocks on the ground must be picked up. Walking by a rock you could have otherwise pocketed is a sacrilege. More rocks than you can carry are really what you’re after. Rocks are SO cool that they trump trucks, dogs, and dirt in the field of coolest toys ever.

- Astronomer. The moon is cool. Moon trumps sun easily (see below). The moon’s real name is “Boon” and we look for Boon every chance we get, inquire about its whereabouts at 2 in the afternoon, request to be wrapped in a blanket and carried outside in the early morning or right before bed to visit with Boon. We spot it way before Mama or Daddy; we love it in every shape it comes in.

- Underwater cave dweller. When you are a Pisces, Aquarius cusp baby, and you were born in the pouring rain, you gravitate toward dim, watery worlds. Case in point, “Isaac, should Mama open the blinds and let the sun shine in?” Answer: “No.”

- American tourist abroad. If you aren’t understood the first time you ask for something, you should say it slower and louder. Example: “Bloobloolaee?” “What, Isaac?” “BLOO. BLOO. LA. EEEEEE!”

I'm sure the list of lifepaths/career possibilities will only continue to grow, and I, called to duty, will note them down.

sweet dreams: evolution over one generation?

Shorty after Isaac was born, I was digging through my own baby book for stats revealing genetic links to why our son was already popping tooth after tooth painfully out of his gum line. I was happy to have the book to refer to, since we weren't getting any on Mike's side. His “baby book” consisted of half a piece of paper that listed a random weight and height – the end. The youngest of four, his mom was apparently over it by the time baby Mikey hit the scene. I am also the youngest of four, but what might have saved my infant info from a similar fate was the eight year gap since the last baby in the family, marking my birth – whoopsie that it was – something of a novelty once again.

While flipping around my baby book, I came across a small piece of paper that for all intents and purposes seemed to be a recipe written on a doctor's prescription pad. A closer look sent me dialing my mother at once.

“Mom, I found the 'recipe' for my baby 'formula',” I shot into the phone.

“Oh really,” my mother sighed distractedly, unsuspecting.

“Whole milk and sugar?!? Mom.”

“Oh no,” my mother hummed, “You couldn't take the whole milk. We switched to skim.”

“Mom!”

“Yes, dear?”

Let's put aside for a bit the myriad nutritionally misguided and bereft aspects of this diet to focus on one: the sugar.

Caffeine addict I am not. Vegetarian- 100% - no I eat fish if my cousin Larry the chef cooks it. or Free range chicken on the third Mondays of the month. No. Vegetarian. – going on 16 years. But sugar? Well, let's just say that after two weeks of trying to eat healthy alternatives, stuffing carrots and cashews in my face for snacks, I grabbed the front of my husband's shirt in my fist. “I need cookies, see? Cookies, you got it? I NEED cookies!”

Not wanting my boy to take this path of lunacy, plus diabetes prevalent in our family history, formidable dentist bills commonplace, I've done my best to curb (read: hide) my habits and mold my bean's tastebuds into freewheeling lovers of flavors sour and spicy, or natural sugar enhanced.

One Sunday during Isaac's nap, Mike had cooked up a mini-batch of chocolate chip cookies in the toaster oven, when suddenly kiddo was awake - Doh! He pointed at the still-warm treats. “Yeah... yeah,” he nodded. “Oh, give'm a cookie,” I told Mike, resigned.

We all sat down at the table and Isaac proceeded to slowly munch a quarter of a cookie. “Do you like it?” I asked. He nodded rather noncommital.

When he was done his fourth of a cookie, he took up his fork and continued his snack of carrots and beets I had cooked him not long before while Mike and I finished off the cookies beside him.

These days, Isaac gets his cookie fix by asking his dad to make biscuits every day for breakfast so he can cut out the dough in the shape of dinosaurs and Christmas trees.

I'm not simple enough to believe this is the end of sweet temptations, and in fact, I worry that it could just be a fad, those cute things kids do for what feels like a millisecond before dropping them completely. Even if they aren't gone yet, watching, you know someday you'll long for them – things like constantly asking us to draw doors, or announcing proudly whenever asked what cows say “Boo!! Boo!!”, obsessing about nuclear families – if there's a mommy bunny and a baby bunny in the book, for God's sake, where's the daddy?

But for now, in the field of snacks, I'd like to think – I did it!!

The Wuggie Norple Story: a story of addiction and recovery

Perhaps you've heard of the children's author Daniel Pinkwater. Perhaps you know the name because he reviews kids' books for NPR's weekend edition. Or, perhaps, like me, the name didn't ring any bells when you came across it at the dump.

It was a Saturday, and not unlike many Saturdays before this one, I found myself with my family at the dump.

At this point, I should fill you in on a few things. One is that my husband and I revel in scrounging- uh, recycling, if you will. I used to regularly give guests the thrift shop tour of our apartment, informing them which objects used to be part of which others and which pieces of furniture came from which thrift stores, how little we'd paid for them and how they used to look before they were painted, recovered, or otherwise improved upon post-sale.

Just this past weekend we spent a glorious Saturday morning garage saling. We scored a barbecue, a CD rack in the shape of a lizard for Isaac, and several cans of paint with which to paint the bookcase we'd recently dragged home that someone had left out by the curb for trash.

The other thing you need to know (in case you're getting images of my baby boy scaling a land fill and battling seagulls for treasures hidden under rotting garbage) is that our dump has a store. It's called Last Chance Mercantile.

Not long ago, Mike had found Isaac a couple Clifford books there that he adores, so we were again checking out the book section when we discovered an orange hardcover picture book with a cat on the front, and no dust jacket: The Wuggie Norple Story. Flipping through, I knew we wouldn't be leaving behind the illustrations of a groovy hipster family and a cat named Wuggie Norple. Those were two quarters we could part with.

Mike drove home and I read aloud. Lunchbox Louie, the whistle fixer, and his wife, Bigfoot the Chipmunk, had a son, King Waffle, and an ever-growing kitten Wuggie Norple. I couldn't make this up if I tried, but, you see, that's the point, Daniel Pinkwater did. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. The kind of laugh where no noise comes out at first, then it bursts forward in a choked rush of hilarity.

A dog enters the story – Freckleface Chilibean, then a six-year-old razor back hog named Papercup Mixmaster.

I rocked back and forth in my seat gasping, my seatbelt the only thing restraining me from doubling over. Tears swelled in Mike's eyes, and I started to worry that maybe he should pull over.

Behind us, Isaac was growing more and more concerned. “Mama! Mama!” he called frowning and pulling his index fingers down his little cheeks. “No, Isaac, Mama isn't really crying. Well, I am, but I'm happy.” “Mama!” he called again, unappeased.

The horse's name was Exploding Poptart, the elephant's Laughing Gas Alligator. There were wild caterpillars, whistles whittled out of carrots, picnics at Nosewort Pond.

“It's okay, Isaac,” Mike got out between snorts. “Mommy and Daddy are having fun.”

Isaac wouldn't let us read him the book when we got home. “Aw, c'mon!” we begged. “This is the best book ever!” “No!” he said with finality, stomping away.

Okay, so some people even though they love their kids and want the best for them, still can't get off the drugs? It was like that.

Mike and I tag-teamed at the computer, obsessively looking up information about Daniel Pinkwater and Wuggie Norple. His window, open to Pinkwater books on amazon.com was covered over by my window of the Daniel Pinkwater homepage, then both were blotted out with the text of an interview Pinkwater'd done for a publication called “Fat!So?”

I'd arrive home to find the book in the middle of the kitchen table. “Been reading Wuggie?” I asked Mike. “Isaac didn't want to,” he shrugged.

The peak of our addiction came when we discovered copies of the book – paperback edition – were going for like 200+ bucks. Not that we'd part with ours.

Things had just about gotten back to normal, Isaac even let us read him the book once in a while, when, on a trip to the library yesterday I found Pinkwater's book Spaceburger. Isaac would have none of it. I mean, one of the pages didn't even have a picture! “But,Isaac, the boy who said 'Ho' instead of 'Hi;' the song about lovely ravioli!?”

It wasn't easy, but I walked away. I figured I best go home and work on lesser habits - maybe paint our roadside bookcase. I stroked Spaceburger's light blue cover and then turned. I scooped up the truck books, the dinosaurs going to bed, the one about bugs, and didn't look back.