Clever Title TK

It Goes to Eleven

2011-11-11T09:24:00.000-05:00

Anyone who was reading this blog about this time last year (which was almost the last time I posted. Oops?) may recall that I'm a big fan of birthdays. Particularly my birthday.

Which is -- ahem -- today. And not only is it 11/11, but of course this year it's 11/11/11, making it even more super special cool.

I share my birthday with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Kurt Vonnegut, Leonardo DiCaprio, Calista Flockhart, Demi Moore, Carson Kressley and Stanley Tucci. Oh, and Jessica Sierra! From American Idol Season Four! An impressive crew, no?

Today also would have been the fourth birthday of someone very special: a beautiful little girl named Madeline Spohr, who died suddenly in April of 2009 from a respiratory infection -- a consequence of her having been born eleven weeks early. Her parents have established a wonderful charity called Friends of Maddie that supports families with preemies in the NICU.

The Spohrs have recently recorded a sweet song that Maddie's dad wrote and are making it available for download --for just .99! -- with all the proceeds going to Friends of Maddie. Read more about the project here. If you would consider spending 99 cents for a really good cause, and/or making a larger donation to Friends of Maddie, it would totally make my day. And more importantly, it will make the day of a family with a new baby going through a difficult time. And that would be really super special cool.

Thanks, friends!

Dude, Where's My Car?

2011-05-26T11:52:00.006-04:00

A week ago today I woke up to discover that we had been (involuntarily) relieved of my trusty ten-year old Volvo station wagon. The previous evening, there had been a rash of car break-ins throughout our neighborhood, and some upstanding individual had managed to make off with our family car, strewn with granola bar wrappers, stuffed with the kids' library books and with their beloved Bop It in tow. I've been joking that justice will be served when the thief sees what's under the carseats, but that joke is wearing thin. We want our car back.

I'm telling you this because I just read this story, about a woman in Boulder, CO whose stolen bike was recovered a mere four hours after she posted about it on Twitter and her blog. It can happen, and I'm confident that our car can be found in much the same way.

Because the car didn't just disappear.

It's somewhere in Baltimore right this very second. We suspect, based on the pattern of other thefts from our neighborhood, that it is somewhere in the vicinity of the Reisterstown Road Plaza, in the neighborhood that stretches towards the intersection of Park Heights and Seven Mile Lane. (When our other car was stolen in '07, my husband had the unbelievable good -- or bad -- luck to see the thief driving our stolen car to run errands at the Plaza Home Depot. A chase ensued, but the thief managed to get away, only to abandon our car a week later.)

So, have you seen our silver 2001 Volvo V-70 wagon?

The license plate starts 8AD.
If the driver is using a blinker, the right one is fast blinking due to a burned out bulb.
There's a campaign '08 bumper sticker on the left rear bumper.

If you spot my car being driven in Baltimore, or see it abandoned somewhere, please call the police. And anything you can do to spread the word would be so appreciated. Because my three year old would really like his favorite Thomas the Tank Engine umbrella back. And his mother would like to be able to teach him that sometimes the good guys win.

Thank you.

Update 6/2/11: Due to an error on the part of the police dispatcher, the car was not reported stolen -- as in, entered into the database -- till yesterday. What this means for its possible recovery, we're not sure. But we're, uh, not very happy about it. Next time, I'm calling Bunk and McNulty.

Did Someone Say "3 Backyards"?

2011-05-13T12:51:00.007-04:00

So it got to the point this spring that I was talking about my brother's latest film so much on Twitter that a follower in North Carolina -- a place that the film has yet to play -- actually dreamed about seeing it. I guess I'm not a bad publicist, huh?

But it occurs to me that while I was quite wrapped up in talking about the film on Twitter and Facebook (Disclosure: I actually run the social media for the film) that I hadn't said a word about it here since this post from last year.

And much has happened since Eric was named Best Director at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, making him the only person in history to do that twice. (Sorry. I had to get that in there.)

Namely, the film was released! In actual theaters! With popcorn! My brother, whom I adore, if that isn't totally obvious, was profiled in the Arts and Leisure Section, among many other places.

And major critics like those in The New York Times and the New Yorker really liked the film. No, no, they really liked it. They used words like "exquisite" and "American independent filmmaking at its best."

But the good news is it's not too late! 3 Backyards continues to play arthouse theaters around the country, with more bookings continually being added. Check this list to see if it's coming to you. You can also buy 3 Backyards on DVD beginning 6/28. Haven't seen the trailer? Well, it's your lucky day!

Which brings me to something fun.

Right after I saw 3 Backyards at Sundance last year, I told Eric it reminded me of a quirky little film called "Winter of the Witch" that we used to watch in elementary school, a film we always just called "the happy pancake movie."

But oddly enough, after seeing the film's New York premiere, actor Stephen Wallem, who co-stars with Eric's best friend Edie Falco on Nurse Jackie, told Eric that 3 Backyards reminded him of ... the happy pancake movie.

Which got me thinking about the happy pancake movie and why it stayed with so many people.

Which led me to write a story about the happy pancake movie and why it stayed with so many people.

A story that appears in this Sunday's New York Times. Hope you like it.

And here's your chance to enjoy 22 minutes of blissful Me-generation nostalgia.

Are you one of the witch faithful? Please let me know!

Hello? Is This Thing On?

2011-05-04T17:00:00.001-04:00

So, um, yes. It's been a little ... quiet in these parts.

I thought it was time to make an appearance and say hello to anyone -- that means both of you! -- who may read this space but who aren't on Facebook or Twitter, where I'm alive and well and sharing brilliant nuggets of wisdom on a regular basis. I also give out toasters and tote bags. Join the fun, won't you?

I wanted to use this opportunity to say something rather shocking. I hope you're prepared.

I do not care about this season of American Idol.

At.

All.

I don't know what's wrong with me. Is it them? Is it me? Is this something I need to discuss with a professional? Or is it that I discovered that I enjoyed the brilliant recaps of P.F. Tompkins more than the show itself?

I don't know. I just...can't watch.

I can't watch that Scotty McCreery. He skeers me, with his man-child freakiness and his eerie resemblance to Alfred E. Neuman and that sideways tilt thing he does with head and the microphone.

I can't watch Jacob Lusk, who shrieks at me, and always seems dangerously close to having a religious epiphany or an aneurysm during every performance.

I can't watch Haley Reinhart, in those dresses they put her in that always seem to make her look like an office temp in 1987.

Not a fan of James, even with his precious back story and his tail thingies. And Lauren? The one I think is probably the most commercially viable and strongest voice? I find myself captivated not by her performances but by the fabulousness of her eyebrows and by the insane amounts of mascara she wears.

I get about everything I need from the recap in the last two minutes, when they show a 20 second highlight of each performance and flash the 866 numbers on the screen. I sometimes fast forward and hear a snippet of the judges, but Good Lord, are the judges boring this season or what? As Time's James Poniewozik said on Twitter, the judging is "like a dial that goes from 'great' to 'awesome.'" (I would add the all-important stop at "I love you, man!" from Steven Tyler.)

Hey! Speaking of which, did you know that I'm the newest "Top Cop" for the Us Weekly Fashion Police? Well, I am. And fittingly, one of my first jokes -- in this week's issue, with the royal wedding on the cover -- is about J. Lo and Steven Tyler. Proving that maybe I have been paying attention. Just a little.

It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2010-10-31T15:06:00.006-04:00

Growing up, I never attached any special significance to the so-called holiday season.

We didn't celebrate Christmas, and Hanukkah was just another in a string of Jewish holidays that was festive, but not really noteworthy. We would light our menorah, eat our latkes, and get chocolate gelt. A crisp dollar bill or two might arrive in an envelope postmarked Miami Beach. But there was no "official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle." No nights rendered sleepless with anticipation. The Christmas season was mostly special because we got off from school.

The most special time of my year was always...this one. It was the first two weeks of November that I looked forward to. They were positively electric.

Why? Because of Halloween. God, how I loved Halloween. I loved dressing up. I loved trick or treating. I loved giving out candy. I loved eating candy, which was otherwise essentially verboten. I still maintain that the smell of a trick or treat bag -- not the smell of any one particular candy, mind you, but the sweet smell of the mingled wrappers -- is one of the best aromas in the universe. Yankee Candle needs to get on that one. (And noodle kugel, while they're at it.)

But it didn't stop there. November 1st is my brother Eric's birthday. So there would be more celebration. And a Pepperidge Farm layer cake, the Mendelsohn family standard. There's a photo of one of Eric's parties where he's blowing out the candles at the kitchen table and you can see all of our trick or treat bags hanging from the doorknob behind him. Now that I'm a parent, I cringe for my mother, wondering how she managed the collective insanity of five small children completely hopped up on sugar.

November 7th is my brother Andrew's birthday. More celebration. More cake. (You're feeling the frenzy by this point, no?)

And then came the jewel in the crown of my year: November 11th. Why, it's Veterans' Day, for God's sake! Is there any holiday that has a bigger hold on little girls' imaginations?

Just kidding.

I mean, it is Veteran's Day. But it's also my birthday.

And I'm a firm believer that the world can be neatly divided into people who don't make a big deal about their birthdays, and people who do. Count me firmly in the latter group. I take after my friend Maggie, who believes the celebration of one's birthday should extend to the entire month of one's birth. Hear, hear.

I always loved being the birthday girl, having my moment in the sun. Waking to find the kitchen festooned with decorations and presents. Having the day off from school. (That was for the veterans, not me, of course, but it only added to the mystique.) Getting to choose my favorite dinner. And of course, the cake. I've never outgrown my passionate love of birthday cake, though I've long since moved on from Pepperidge Farm. I find it virtually impossible to attend a child's birthday party and pass up a piece of cake -- the more icing, the better. (Read about last year's birthday cake debacle here.)

Even now, the crackle of burnished leaves underfoot and the smell of the air at this time of year makes me incredibly wistful and nostalgic, for a time when Halloween signaled the start of all the magic. You can have all your chestnuts roasting on an open fire and your sleigh bells jingling. Just save a Kit Kat and some birthday cake for me.

Sugar and Spice

2010-10-18T13:49:00.016-04:00

I distinctly remember the moment in high school when I realized that every single one of my mother's close friends was a teacher.

Well, to be more precise, it wasn't the moment I realized it, but the moment I realized what it meant.

My mother was a kindergarten teacher, and the fact that virtually all of the adult women I knew were teachers as well -- including every single member of the tight-knit crew with whom my mother had gone to New York's Hunter College -- was just one of those facts that had never merited any special consideration before. It was just something about my world that I had absorbed, like the fact that we were Jewish, or that we lived in the suburbs.

But one day the implications of it finally dawned on me: it wasn't an accident or a coincidence that all of those women were teachers. They all became teachers because there just weren't very many options for women graduating from college in 1952. (Mom also knew a rogue nurse or two, to be fair.)

Perhaps that's why I had always harbored a romantic fascination with the one friend of my mother's who had refused to conform. Sue Slade marched to the beat of her own very distinctive drummer: an honest-to-goodness Bohemian, she became a theater casting agent and even once worked as a secretary for Marlon Brando. Sue eventually wrote a play called Ready When You Are, C.B., which ran for 80 performances on Broadway, directed by theater luminary Joshua Logan. It's still performed in schools and community theater from time to time. Sadly, she committed suicide in 1971, the year she turned 40. I never got to know her.

By the time I graduated from college almost 40 years after my mother and her crew, the idea that women could only be teachers or nurses seemed to me like a quaint relic, something akin to Victrolas and corsets. It had been drummed into my head throughout my childhood (see: Title IX, Free To Be You and Me) that I could be absolutely anything I wanted to be and the fact that I was a girl wouldn't limit me in any way.

I laughed when my first editor after college, after watching me turn around a transcription project at lightning speed, warned me never to let anyone know how fast I could type. It seemed charmingly anachronistic. He was mostly kidding, right? Because no one really thought that way any more, did they?

I'm now the mother of two little boys who have female doctors and female T-ball teammates and a female Senator. Maybe I haven't been watching the messages we're sending little girls these days as vigilantly as I could, but I naively assumed that we were still mostly on the right path. (I do take credit for sending a letter to Nickelodeon four years ago complaining about their sexist marketing of Dora. I loved that my then two-year-old son was a fan of a show with a strong female lead character like Dora. Why did they only make Dora merchandise suitable for little girls? Did they really need to spin off Diego just because he was a boy?)

Which is why I was so disappointed when I opened a recent Land's End catalog and saw this:

See, it turns out that boys and girls "aren't built the same." Girls' coats apparently need to be "pretty & playful" while boys' are "rugged & ready." Really? In 2010? It seemed so ludicrous -- so 1952 -- that I find it incredibly hard to imagine the meeting in which this copy was approved. Did someone think it was an episode of Mad Men, maybe?

Has no one at Land's End heard of Brandi Chastain?

Or Hillary Clinton, a woman who mounted a completely credible bid to be the President of the United States a mere two years ago?

I was irked, but dropped it. An aberration, I decided.

Until last night, surfing around looking for bunk beds for my boys, I came across this:

Sigh. Need I walk through the litany of misconceptions here, starting with the idea that girls "just wanna have style" and need "sweet" bunk bed designs, while their boy counterparts need "manly" bunk beds that are just as "tough and cool" as they are?

For the record, marketers of the world, I'm perfectly ok if my three- and six-year-old sons sleep in "sweet" beds. They are neither particularly tough nor cool, and I'm fine if things remain that way for a while.

But you know who is tough and cool? And rugged and ready? Their seven year old cousin. In fact, like scores of little girls before her, she recently started trekking regularly to the ice rink with big dreams.

You know. To play hockey.

So take that, Land's End and simplybunkbeds.com. I'm choosing to believe that Alexandra is the kind of little girl we should be raising in 2010, one who won't fit in the ridiculously outdated stereotypes you're still trying to sell her. And you know what? I bet Sue Slade would be proud.

Irksome: Some Things Me No Likey

2010-09-21T21:40:00.008-04:00

Because let's be real. My last post was way too Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms. To make things right, here are 10 Things That Irk, Annoy or Otherwise Make Me Unhappy. With apologies to anyone who read an earlier version of this on Facebook.

1. Any food that's well-done or burnt.

2. Heavy metal music. Also, in the same vein: professional wrestling. Although I did once do a story about Stone Cold Steve Austin.

3. Far too many grammatical and spelling mistakes to catalog. But I'll go with people who say "I could care less," when they mean they couldn't care less. Because that's not bad grammar. It's just stupid.

4. Science fiction. The whole damn genre. There, I said it.

5. The default assumption that I wanted mayo on my sandwich, even if I didn't specify. Because I didn't. And while we're at it, bread with caraway seeds. Caraway seeds are the devil. In little Satanic seed form. Or something like that.

6. People in crowded public places (stores, airports, etc.) who don't pay attention to where they're going and back everybody else up with their cluelessness. (See also: entitled highway mergers, non-signaling lane-changers.)

7. The popularity of flats and skinny jeans. Whoever is responsible was clearly not thinking of my needs. I cannot rock this look. Trust me.

8. Getting the cuffs of a wool sweater wet, like while washing my hands. Worst. Sensation. Ever. Also, wet socks.

9. TJ Maxx's ridiculous policy of making you put your items on the dressing room hanger so the attendant can count them for you. Even when it's clear you only have one item. Or, more broadly, any unnecessary, officious formality. Inefficiency, generally speaking, drives me bonkers.

10. Lemon desserts. Why anyone would bother with lemon when there's chocolate to be had is one of life's great mysteries.

Girls in White Dresses With Blue Satin Sashes

2010-09-19T08:50:00.010-04:00

It's been a month since I last blogged, and I thought it was time for a jump start. So I'm taking inspiration from Lisa Bonchek Adams, who was inspired by Kathleen Nolan, to share a list of ten favorite things.

And here they are, in random order. And with the requisite amount of anxiety that these are not necessarily my ten very favorite things. I will try not to make them all about food.

1. Fall: If there is cider, a pumpkin, gourds, Indian corn, or any variety of hay-related fun (see: mazes, rides) to be had, I am there. With bells on. During college I was once invited to a professor's home for dinner on a chilly November evening. His wife was a potter, and we were served individual pumpkin custards in handmade ramekins. I almost wept with joy.

2. The post-beach shower: In the panoply of human sensation, I would argue that there are few that can top this one. Not the shower itself, necessarily, but the way you feel when it's over. I love the way you go from being sand-caked and sticky with sunscreen and slightly sweaty to having your skin feel taut and smooth and warm in that gorgeous sun-drenched way. I love the way your hair feels wet and cool and sweet-smelling. As a corollary, I love emerging from the post-beach shower and putting on a soft cotton tee shirt and old jeans.

3. Cheap flowers: The salary at my very first job was $21,500. And that was just last year. OK, not really. But suffice it to say I've had...lean times. Yet even during the very leanest, I've always let myself splurge on the $5 bouquet from the farmer's market or grocery store. They literally make me happier every time I look at them, especially the fall ones with ~~those fuzzy crimson flowers I don't know the name of~~ coxcomb. I'm a cheap date.

4. Savory/sweet mashups: I like to mix it up. One of my favorite appetizers is prosciutto and parmesan cheese wrapped around a dried fig and drizzled with olive oil. I make a mean Cuban picadillo, a spicy beef chili seasoned with cinnamon and cloves and studded with raisins and green olives. And don't tell Bubbe, but my brisket has dried cranberries in it.

5. Kids in pajamas: Something about the act of putting on pajamas rockets the cuteness level of all children to the stratosphere, especially if there are feet involved. Pajamas just scream...childhood and innocence to me. It's why I have a photo on my mantle of me and two of my brothers, circa 1971, all of us pajama-clad. My brothers are in the old-fashioned kind with lapels and buttons, the kind old men wear. (See also: leather slippers.) I mean, is there anything sweeter? I think part of it is the word. Pajamas. It's just inherently cute.

6. Sunday mornings: Ideally: Bagels and coffee and the New York Times, with classical music playing. (That sounds like an awful cliche, but it's actually exactly how I grew up, with my parents finishing the magazine crossword puzzle just in time for Sunday night Chinese.) I love everything about Sundays: brunch food, the Target circular, trips to the Farmers' Market. It's all good.

7. Blizzards/blackouts, et al: While I can't recommend having a child with a stomach bug during a blizzard, as we did earlier this year (because you know what they say: nothing spells fun like having a vomiting two year old in a dark, cold house where you can't do any laundry!), I love the slightly out-of-time feeling that events like this have. The idea that the everyday rules are suspended for just a while. The way people come out of their homes and gather in the street to compare notes, and someone invites you over for an impromptu spaghetti dinner. The way that, as you dig out your driveway, you feel compelled to say hello to everyone who passes by, although the same people could pass by on any other day and you wouldn't say so much as a word to them. I don't know that we ever talked about it, but I found out that my brother Eric feels the same way; the seminal event in his debut feature film is an eclipse. Watch Madeline Kahn walk the darkened daytime streets pretending to be a "moon explorer" and you'll know what we mean.

8. Non-morning coffee: I am, like most of the adult world, a morning coffee addict. Can't function without. But I have a special fondness for coffee at other times of day. While I've usually had too much already to join her, I love that my friend Max always orders a cup of coffee with lunch. I adore the 4 p.m. pick-me-up latte. And while I know the Italians look in horror upon us Americans and our ridiculous coffee abominations, I love a cappuccino with dessert. Bonus points to anyone who says they want to meet me for "a coffee" as opposed to "coffee." Can't explain why, but I love that.

9. Maps. And not even fancy, beautiful vintage maps, though I love those too. I could pore over the pages of the Rand McNally road atlas for hours, just thinking about what goes where. I have no idea why I associate the two things, but I also love old-fashioned keys.

10. Anything with that dry, crumbly shortbread-ish consistency. Scones? Check. Cobbler? Yes indeed-y. Hamentaschen? You betcha. (This is actually about my love of butter, I think. Right?) Update: I forgot biscuits. And cornbread. Yum.

Want to do a favorite things post? Let us see!

A Plug

2010-08-09T23:00:00.005-04:00

I sometimes think I would have made a good publicist.

When I get excited about something -- a musical artist, a movie, a book -- the urge to share what I'm excited about is kind of uncontrollable. (Cut to Jennifer, circa 2000, forcing virtually everyone who crossed the threshold of her Dupont Circle apartment to watch this Nickel Creek video. Or Jennifer, earlier this year, randomly calling friends to tell them to read this stunning book. Or Jennifer, phone in hand, frantically dialing her brother Matt every time there's a particularly great Roz Chast cartoon in the New Yorker. And don't even get me started on my love for this new blog that skewers furniture catalogs, which I've been pimping incessantly on Facebook and Twitter.)

When the something in question is the product of a someone that I actually know and care about, that urge to share is ratcheted up to astronomical proportions. I'm sure my closest friends must wince a little every time there's a new creative project from one of my brothers, envisioning the barrage of e-mails and Facebook and blog posts that will soon issue forth from me. (Did you know Eric's film is going to the Deauville Film Festival? It is! But I digress.)

So today I'm happy to finally end my blog's embarrassingly long dormant period by sharing something I'm very excited about. And it's the product of someone I know, at least virtually. So be prepared for enthusiasm of the astronomical variety.

A little over a year ago, I stumbled onto a blog called Flotsam, and immediately fell hopelessly in writer love with the rapier wit and warm heart of Alexa Stevenson. I think she roped me in with this post, and this one, in which she provides commentary on the search terms that lead people to her blog. I spit beverages clear onto my computer screen. But Alexa wasn't just funny. She was frighteningly well-read, and thoughtful, and whip smart, and emotionally poised far beyond her years. At some point I wrote Alexa a fawning fan letter. (I think the subject may have actually been "Fawning Fan Letter.") At some point she wrote me back, and we struck up a virtual acquaintanceship.

Not long after I began to read Alexa's blog, she let on that she had landed an agent, and soon thereafter that she had a (well-deserved!) book deal.

Tomorrow marks the official pub date for Alexa's first book, Half Baked: The Story of My Nerves, My Newborn and How We Both Learned to Breathe, which I have just finished reading. In hopes of saving myself the trouble of having to call each of you individually to urge you to read it, I am going to try to cover myself with a single blog post.

Half Baked is a memoir, the story of how Alexa went through infertility treatment and became pregnant with twins through IVF. It's the story of how her son, Ames, died without warning in utero at 22 weeks, and how his sister Simone was born just three weeks later -- a full 15 weeks before her due date -- weighing one pound eleven ounces. (Babies the size of her newborn daughter, she writes, are "nearly impossible to describe without resorting to size comparisons involving produce and small mammals.") It's the story of the harrowing three months Simone spent in the NICU. And it's the story of how weathering a real, honest-to-goodness catastrophe proved -- rather ironically --to be the one thing able to quell Alexa's lifelong anxiety.

Alexa is one of those writers in whose skilled hands I would listen, rapt with attention, to the story of how, say, she went to Jiffy Lube for an oil change, or tried a completely unfamiliar brand of toothpaste. The fact that she has such a moving one to tell, and that she tells it with humor and grace and candor but never resorts to treacle, is just gravy.

Much like her blog, Half Baked is uproariously, side-splittingly funny. (You know, the kind of funny where you're constantly having to read passages to your spouse because you're laughing in bed so much.) She quite literally had me laughing out loud by the second page, in which she discusses why fireworks belonged on a list of things she found "insupportably risky" as a child:

"partly because of an episode of Lassie in which Timmy befriended a boy blinded by a firecracker, and party because of my oft-stated maxim that while suicide bombers or errant landmines may be beyond our control, surely choosing not to detonate explosives for sport is a small, sensible measure we can all take to prolong our time on earth."

Alexa had me at hello. But she never disappoints. She describes her fertility medications as "suspiciously nondescript for agents of reproduction...I would have liked a little drama, say in the form of trumpets that sounded when you popped the plastic cap: dun duh-da DAAAH!" She calls the delicate dance of embryos implanting "terribly dramatic, like a tiny pelvic James Bond movie." By the time she recalls the whirlwind of her emergency C-section ("I was...briefed by an anesthesiologist who read the consent form so rapidly that at the end I half expected him to shout 'SOLD! One C-section to the lady in the hospital johnny!") and her later concern about finally bringing Simone home to her apartment, "where the nurse-to-neonate ratio is suboptimal (0-1)," I was putty in her hands.

There's a feeling I get every time I go to see David Sedaris read, and it's a feeling I can best describe as... satisfaction. I love hearing him, but my enjoyment derives in part from doing so in rooms filled with lots and lots of other people who feel the same way. It makes me enormously satisfied to know that David Sedaris is a best-selling author, not just someone's strange cousin David, an acerbic widget salesman who writes odd essays that nobody in the family quite gets. It may sound trite, but it really just makes me enormously happy -- relieved, even -- that he's found such a wildly appreciative audience for his voice.

In much the same way, I'm so pleased that I'm clearly not alone in my admiration for Alexa Stevenson's writing. I'm so genuinely thrilled that she has this amazing opportunity to be read even more widely than she already is. I believe she is a major new talent, and I want to virtually buttonhole all of you to pay attention and make her book the smashing, rollicking success it deserves to be.

So buy yourself a copy of Alexa's book won't you? Come on! Best $10.17 you'll spend this year, I promise.

And while the blasted book tour powers-that-be are cruelly keeping her from the east coast, denying me the chance to ~~stalk~~ meet her in person, those of you who live in the middle and western parts of our fair nation are lucky enough to have the chance to support Alexa on her book tour. So go hear her read. Tell her I sent you! (And bring her a sidecar. She likes them.)

St. Paul, MN
@ Common Good Books
11 Aug 2010 19:30

Chicago, IL
@ Women and Children First Books
12 Aug 2010 19:30

San Francisco, CA
@ Book Passage
17 Aug 2010 18:00

Portland, OR
@ Annie Bloom's Books
18 Aug 2010 19:30

Seattle, WA
@ University Bookstore
19 Aug 2010 19:00

UPDATE 8/11/10: Charming Q and A with Alexa here, from Twin Cities Metro Magazine.

Crystal Ball

2010-06-16T17:31:00.015-04:00

I don't want to alarm anyone, but I feel as though I have suddenly been given the ability to see into the future.

Because though it isn't even technically summer yet, I have a very strong premonition that I know exactly what this summer is going to look like.

There will be a lot of dining al fresco.

And dancing. Flippers optional.

There will be frolicking.

Followed by serious loafing.

There will be some of this.

And this.

And there will, without a doubt, be a lot of this.

Oh yes. Especially a lot of that. Happy Summer, everyone.

(Close To) Wordless Wednesday: The Reader

2010-05-26T10:37:00.000-04:00

I love those moments where your perspective shifts and you can see yourself in your child's shoes, when you can remember what it felt like to be a kid, right down to what it sounded and smelled like. (Cicadas and onion grass do it for me, every time.)

And while it goes without saying that I love that Ethan seems to have inherited my voracious appetite for reading, I love it even more that completely of his own accord, he found this little spot on a tree stump next to our garage and has made it his de facto reading corner. Eyjafjallajokull could erupt over the house next door and he would stay rooted to that very spot, riveted and entranced by the words on the page.

I remember doing the same exact thing.

Paging Mr. Saluba? Henry Saluba?

2010-05-02T22:02:00.007-04:00

One of the reasons I love my friend Ilise so much is that we were rather frighteningly similar (and, ok, weird) children. (Speaking of Ilise, she recently contributed one of my favorite entries for the Overheard blog. Where's yours? Huh? Huh?)

Anyway, while my third grade self was busy pretending to run a school for international child prodigies from my bedroom -- What? You mean you didn't do the same?? With files on all the students?? -- Ilise had a project of her own. She took her mother's address book and added her own entries to its pages. So when Ilise's mother got to the letter "S," she found, in little girl scrawl, a listing for one of her daughter's imaginary friends:

Saluba, Henry

Just saying the name Henry Saluba -- or even better, Saluba, Henry, just as Ilise wrote it -- still makes me laugh out loud. There's just something so perfect about the name itself: the way it's precisely the kind of slightly off-kilter, not-quite-real-sounding name that a nine year old girl would make up, probably thinking it seemed perfectly legitimate and grown up. For me, Henry's name has become a kind of easy shorthand for that beautiful creative spirit kids have in spades. It speaks of a time when imagination is so powerful it's almost palpable, when there's absolutely no limit to who or what you can invent. There's something a little wistful about his name for me, too. It makes me ache for the way childhood homes felt on quiet days, when the grownup world droned, Charlie Brown-style, at the peripheries, and you lolled around looking for something to do or someone to keep you company. It's the very same feeling I get, by the way, every time I read my boys Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day. (I'm reminded, too, of one of my favorite magazine pieces of all time: Adam Gopnik's "Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli," about the imaginary friend who was always too overscheduled to play with Gopnik's three year old daughter.)

All of which will explain why I found the project Ethan undertook yesterday so hilariously adorable.

He chose 23 of his Thomas trains, drew an elaborate chart on orange construction paper in which he made up last names for all of them, and then...made them all compete on American Idol. (Think of it as an international school for child prodigies. When *I'm* your mother.)

I was drafted into playing Ryan Seacrest and announcing each contestant, after a carefully scripted cue from Ethan. And here, America, are your top 12:

Thomas Starf
Duncan Fairbo
Toby Hedrot
Harold Herdo
Freddie Helno (and his cousin, Marvin Wewontgo?)
Byron Birtonsot
Harvey Hyrton
Arry Artiono (Wasn't he on the Sopranos?)
Proteus Flatbert
Toby Tenrent
Salty Harborn (who I'm pretty sure is a porn star)
and my favorite, Rheneas Flart

I have no idea who was in the engines' bottom three. But I heard that Henry Saluba is the mentor next week.

Hey! Isn't that Thomas Starf?

---
Is there a Henry Saluba story from your childhood? Let's hear it!

In Which We Pause for Some Housekeeping

2010-04-23T21:15:00.003-04:00

Just wanted to keep you up to date on the latest happenings in my world.

Because what the world really needs is...another blog, I started one.

It's called "Overheard: The Blog of Overheard Conversation." And I was about to write a little description of it, but if you can't figure it out from the title, then, well, whatever. Please check it out. And talk it up!

And because I know in today's world you're nothing -- nothing -- unless you have a Facebook Fan Page, I created one for Overheard. And then I thought, 'Well, while I'm at it...' So I created one for this blog as well.

Please shower them both with love.

Oh! And DON'T BE FOOLED BY IMITATIONS.

Our Long National Nightmare is...Urban

2010-04-21T13:34:00.005-04:00

Let the record reflect that last year I was a really good American Idol blogger.

I didn't miss a week, and, if I do say so myself, my predictions were impressively accurate. You say you had no idea Kris "Davey" Allen would upset the unstoppable Adam "Goliath" Lambert in the finale? Well, you should have been reading my blog!

This year? Not so much. The beginning of Season 9 correlated almost exactly with my going back to work. While of course I've been watching, I've barely had time to blog and have instead been sharing most of my Idol wisdom on Twitter.

Which means that I haven't yet had an opportunity to address the blight on our nation that is Tim Urban.

Oh, Tim, Tim, Tim.

I'm well aware that USA Today's Brian Mansfield actually sketched out a scenario where you would win. And I know my good friend Amy, my Idol Yoda, has got your back.

But I do not.

Especially after last night, when my five year old son watched your performance and declared with a sigh that your songs make him feel -- and I quote -- "dreamy."

Now Tim. I don't know what sort of weird, Zac Efronish alien spell you have cast over our fair land, turning us all into moony-eyed Hanson fans, but I need you to stop. You are not good enough to win American Idol. Your singing is good enough to get you...laid in college. (And frequently! I promise.) But you are so out of your depth it's not even funny -- or maybe it is? -- watching you compete each week against Crystal Bowersox and Lee DeWyze (who I mistakenly called an "almost and nearly" in an earlier post, but who is clearly gunning for the finale) and Michael Lynche. (Yes, I like Michael Lynche. Deal with it. Although I've fallen off the Siobhan bandwagon totally.) You are just Sanjaya, minus the faux hawk. You are just John Stevens, minus the Sinatra fetish. And just as was the case with them, the forces of good will triumph and soon send you home. This I know in my heart.

So let me reiterate: You will not win. You should not win. You cannot win. So please, stop the insanity. And give my son his dignity back.

Small Packages

2010-03-26T13:45:00.004-04:00

The other morning, I took Ethan on a little adventure to Barnes and Noble.

We happened to arrive just before a scheduled story time. Great! I thought. What perfect timing!

Unfortunately, story time was aimed at two and three year olds. My kindergartener listened, skeptically, to about three minutes of the cutesy wootsy story and song about ducks and then mortified me by announcing, quite loudly, "THIS IS SO STUPID!" So much for that outing, right?

But something else happened while we were there, something that left an impression on me.

There was an arrestingly adorable boy running around the aisles -- a bright-eyed little towhead named Andrew. He was 19 months old. I know that because I overheard his mother answer a stranger's question. And then I heard the familiar pause, and the apologetic follow-up. "He's just very small for his age."

Oh man, have I been there. My heart sank, reflexively.

I used to say the same thing. Every time. And I still do occasionally, when I can see people looking askance at my tiny son, who at five-and-a-half weighs 33 pounds sopping wet and stands a mighty three foot-four. We used to joke that he was going to drive rear-facing. I know what it feels like to have your husband accidentally dress your almost-four year old in his nine-month-old brother's shorts. And have them fit.

Oh my! said a well-meaning mother at the pool last summer, eying my two boys, who are almost exactly three years apart. You sure had them close together, didn't you?

Well, no. I didn't actually. Not at all.

Ethan has always been small. He was born small -- a few ounces shy of six pounds -- at 38 weeks, due to a somewhat mysterious condition called "IUGR," or intra-uterine growth restriction. Getting him to grow during his first few years was torturous. I held my breath at every weigh-in and familiarized myself with every weight gain trick in the book. One handout from his doctor's office read like some sort of diet parody. "Never eat vegetables plain!" it warns ominously. "Add butter, margarine, cream sauce, hollandaise, cheese sauce, salad dressings, sour cream and mayonnaise." (Not all at once, I hope.) "Plain crackers should have cream cheese, cheese spread, peanut butter, jelly, or margarine to increase calories," it goes on. It recommends canned fruit in heavy syrup over fresh. And my personal favorite, "Choose meats breaded, fried and sauteed in oil or butter." Well, who wouldn't? (There's also a recipe for a chocolate peanut butter milkshake that has -- I kid you not -- 1070 calories a cup. And that's seen as a good thing.)

I never realized, though, that having a child of Ethan's size carries its own unspoken stigma in Momville, where small babies are often viewed as second class citizens. On the mothers' message board I used to frequent, it was standard practice to return from well visits and post your baby's "stats." And though few might admit it aloud, ironically, in a culture where thinness is obsessively prized by adults, when it comes to babies, bigger is most definitely seen as better. "Isabella is in the 95th percentile for weight AGAIN," a mother might crow. Those damned percentiles were seen as scores, as if a baby deemed to be in the 90th percentile for weight was somehow being given a higher grade than one in the 30th. The mothers of babies who were "only" in the 50th percentile or less often posted nervously about what could be wrong with their children. It was hard not to feel defensive, or make self-mocking jokes about our featherweights. My son finally hit 20 pounds at his two year well check. Is there such a thing as a 20 pound two year old?, I asked the pediatrician, only half kidding. He finally debuted on the weight charts -- hello first percentile! -- some time last year.

I know where this comes from, of course. Whether nursed or fed formula, our babies' size can feel like the one tangible, measurable manifestation of our parenting, especially in the first few months of life, when they bring so little else to the table. (Think about it: Why do we put newborns' weight and length on their birth announcements? Um, because there's nothing else to say about them?) Those that grow big and, well, fat, are clearly doing fine, their little plump bodies a literal reflection of their health. And those like Ethan? Their charts are stamped with the gloomy "failure to thrive" label, with all the implications therein.

I watched with great interest, as both a mother and a journalist who's written a great deal on science and health, as the doctors walked the fine line between "He's just small" and "There's something amiss." We tried desperately not to intervene unless it was truly warranted. But one test led to another and another. Poor little -- literally -- Ethan was poked and prodded and schlepped to myriad doctors, one all the way in Philadelphia. At 14 months, after an endoscopy suggested he might have a rare form of food allergy, Ethan was put on a so-called "elemental" diet. For two months, he wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything -- nothing -- but a foul-smelling prescription formula. We propped him in his high chair that Thanksgiving with books and toys, hoping he might not notice the feast he couldn't take part in. For one horrific week I have mostly blocked out of my memory, he had a feeding tube in his nose. Until Dr. Bob Wood, the brilliant guru of pediatric food allergies at Johns Hopkins, stopped the madness. "There are only so many ways you can torture an essentially healthy child," Dr. Wood told us in his measured, reassuring tones. "There's nothing wrong with him."

So in our case, it was all a bad dream. Though he continues to be monitored by doctors we trust, the current feeling is that Ethan is perfectly healthy. He's just...small and thin. Like lots of kids. Like lots of adults. It's nothing for us to be ashamed of. Or apologize for. Or feel the need to explain to random strangers who ask how old he is at the bookstore or the pool. The vessel my amazing, precious son came in is just...small. Not bad. Or diminished. Or lesser. Just small. He's anything but failing to thrive in the things that matter. In fact, I could fill this space with nothing but a record of his breathtaking achievements, the things he can do so effortlessly that belie both his size and his age. But then I would really be breaking a mom rule.

Saccharine aphorisms are hardly my strong suit, but there is one I repeat over and over, like a mantra.

When it comes to Ethan, I always say, we like to focus on the things about him that are big: his heart and his brain.

I shared that thought with Andrew's mom at Barnes and Noble the other morning. I hope one day four years from now, she'll hear another mom defensively explain that her son is small for his age. And she'll pass it on.

Photo by Matt Mendelsohn

Click to see it full-size

And Now Back to our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

2010-03-24T13:05:00.005-04:00

I was all set to kick off my Idol blogging season with a report about Idol fashion. I've long been mesmerized by watching the contestants' transformations, from the awkward (but in a folsky, organic kind of way) mall-clad hopefuls we see during the auditions to the awkward (but in a overly stylized, totally unnatural kind of way) creatures we see during the competition. What exactly is the Idol stylists' aesthetic? I've never quite been able to pin it down.

But just my luck, last night was actually a major disappointment in that regard. Most of the contestants looked -- dare I say -- almost normal? Nice, even? Until we got to Siobhan, that is. During the Miley Cyrus segment, she looked like something out of a teen movie. You know the one I'm talking about. The painfully geeky misfit with a heart of gold (oversized glasses, circa 1983? Check!) gets invited to the movies with the alpha girl cheerleaders. Thrilled beyond words, she puts on the coolest outfit she can think of (My pink jacket! My big necklace! My acid washed jeans!), only to discover that the whole thing was a set up: they only invited her as a goof, to ridicule her. But of course, she then turns out to be telekinetic and douses them all with pigs' blood or something.

"Is she on drugs?" my husband asked, completely seriously, while watching Siobhan be "mentored" by Miley Cyrus. (For the record, he also asked "Who is she?" when Miley got out of her car. And then, "Why isn't she wearing pants?")

And then, because we never do know what to expect, either vocally or fashion-wise, from our friendly neighborhood glass blower, Siobhan channeled what appeared to be...a mid-80s Sheena Easton during her performance. What exactly was going on with the hair, pray tell?

OK, so now that that's out of the way, I have a terrible confession.

All these seasons of Idol watching have left me impatient. I've suddenly lost my taste for watching the heretofore fascinating winnowing process by which our field of 12 is narrowed to a handful of serious contenders and then, finally, to one winner, be it one of the Kelly Clarkson/Carrie Underwood variety or one of the Ruben Studdard/Taylor Hicks variety. I have...Idol fatigue. I just want to get on with it. Meaning right now I have no patience for watching even one more week of the contestants we already know have absolutely zero chance of winning. I just don't have it in me. That means you, Tim "Totally Out of My League" Urban. And you, Andrew "Peaked Too Soon" Garcia. And you, Katie "Give it Four Years" Stevens. And you, Paige "There's Nothing Really Noteworthy About Paige Except Her Very Beautiful Eyes, Which Is Exactly Her Problem" Miles. Oh, and speaking of the 80s? It is my duty to mention how badly Paige stunk up the joint last night, with a Phil Collins song with which I never miss an opportunity to torment my friend Steven, who was a -- how shall we say? -- big fan of it when we were in 11th grade. I even requested it at his wedding. But alas, the band didn't know it.

I mean, can we just stop the charade already? It's very clear already who the serious talents are here: Crystal Bowersox. Michael Lynche. And, of course, Crazy Eyes Killah Siobhan, although interestingly, Dial Idol seems to indicate she doesn't have much of a fan base. It's also clear who the almosts and nearlies will be: Scruffy McMuffin Lee DeWyze and Didi "Brooke White 2.0" Benami. (Who's a Sabra! Who knew?!) And then there are those who seem certain to secure a solid place in the pantheon that includes luminaries like Kevin Covais and Anwar Robinson: Aaron Kelly, who my friend Amy and I have just taken to calling "that creepy 16 year old boy." And Casey James, who, given the thousands of fantastic songs that have graced the top of the Hot 100 chart, went with...a 1985 Huey Lewis song. Need we say more? (Husband's comment: "Nobody will be talking about that at work tomorrow.")

He's absolutely right. Just wake me in six weeks, will you?

About That New York Times Piece...

2010-03-16T15:22:00.005-04:00

I am someone who reads blogs. I love blogs. I was once so moved by the words I read on a blog that I sent a gift to a total stranger who'd suffered an unspeakably cruel loss. I have already pre-ordered my copy of Half-Baked, by the ferociously talented Alexa Stevenson of Flotsam. And I think that Ask Moxie's infant sleep advice is smarter than all the books of Drs. Weissbluth, Karp and Ferber combined. Obviously, I, too, am a mother with a blog, albeit one I post in erratically, and one whose biggest claim to fame until now is that it was the most popular blog at my parents' split level on Long Island.

What I am first and foremost is a storyteller. For almost 20 years, I've had the privilege of dropping into other people's lives and telling their stories, in books and newspapers and magazines. My Sunday Styles piece in the New York Times was a story about an interesting world that many Times readers had no idea existed: a world where hundreds of women are so serious about blogging that they would take a day out of their lives (and even plane fare and the cost of a hotel room for some) to actually take a seminar on how be better at it. And while bloggers themselves know that some of their peers are actually making money by blogging, that many are trying to "brand" themselves, and that major corporations and PR firms are taking notice, many non-bloggers still do not. I didn't know that until not too long ago. That's interesting. That's news.

Mine was not the first story about bloggers, nor will it be the last. It did not touch upon every amazing, transformative and innovative thing going on in the blogosphere. It was a window into a particular slice of life, and gestured to what that slice suggested about the larger community: that mom bloggers had evolved into a "cultural force to be reckoned with." That women "live online" these days and that bloggers are actually the new go-to parenting experts. That blogging had "opened up a whole new world" for some, who felt "empowered" by their new connections to corporate America. I mentioned that there is concern that some bloggers may have gotten caught up in the influx of giveaways and sponsored posts and swag because there is. And that's one part of the story I was telling.

The tone of the piece was light. That's because this was a Styles piece about a cultural trend, not an inquiry into the minutiae of the sub-prime mortgage crisis for the Economist. (If readers disagree with the placement of the piece, they should let the editors of the Times know.)

And here comes my shocking confession: Bloggy Boot Camp seemed like fun. The bare feet? The sippy cups? As a journalist, those are precisely the kinds of textual details that convey a scene to a reader. I included those details because personally, I found them charming, the very thing that made the mood at Boot Camp so unique and fun and, yes, girly. Tiffany Romero was warm and hilarious and clearly very passionate and savvy about social media. I thank her and everyone at Boot Camp for allowing me to observe and talk to them. My intent was never to vilify or belittle Tiffany, SITS, Boot Camp or the world of mom blogs at large. And I'm genuinely saddened that that intent, and my professionalism, could somehow be so grievously misconstrued and called into question by some within the blogging community.

The ferocity and scope of the response within the blogosphere to this single newspaper article suggests to me that there's a bigger story out there, a story that apparently very much still needs to be told. Ultimately, I hope the exposure in the Times and the resulting dialogue will allow both bloggers and journalists to move forward towards getting to the bottom of that story.

Finally, I'm well aware that many readers reacted strongly to the headline and the graphic. I saw neither of them before the story ran and while I suspect they were meant to be humorous, I'm sorry they've turned into such a lightning rod. In the meantime, I can say with certainty that the only children who have ever been neglected due to their mother's blog are my own, who I've barely had a moment for since the story was posted. I think they've watched Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs approximately 250 times. I hope you'll understand.

Disclaimer: In this post, I am speaking as a blogger and freelance journalist, not on behalf of the New York Times.

American Idol: The Drinking Game

2010-03-08T13:53:00.016-05:00

So I'm a little obsessed with American Idol.

I used to sweat my picks in my weekly Idol pool as if the well-being of the entire western hemisphere rested on whether Mandisa or Kellie Pickler was going home. (Knock it all you want, but I did come in second one year.) When the pool ended, I needed an outlet, so I began to grace this space with my trenchant blog posts about Season Eight. Did anyone read them? Not really. But I had fun.

In one of my, um, less stellar moments as a mother, I allowed my then-three-year-old son to watch a little too much of Season Seven. And then I shamelessly ~~exploited him~~ shared his adorableness on You Tube.

But lest you think that eight seasons of attentive Idol watching (I missed the first one; I think I was too busy planning my wedding? Or was that the first season of The Bachelor?) have all been for naught, I give you this, people. Something tangible. Proof that I've been paying attention. You can thank me later.

The Totally Un-Official Clever Title TK American Idol Drinking Game

Drink Once Every Time...

Randy uses the phrase, "You can really sing!" (Drink twice for "Dude, you can really sing!")
Randy says someone has a "[insertartistnamehere] vibe jumping off."
Randy says a song or an artist is one of his all-time favorites. (I mean, for real. The man says this about everything.)
Randy seems uncomfortable having to go first, and gives a review that could sort of go either way, as if he's waiting to see what every one else thought before staking a claim.
Randy calls a performance "dope" or "hot."
Randy says, "You know I'm a fan, right?"
Randy calls anyone "dawg."
Randy says, "I don't know. It was just aw-ight for me."

Drink Once Every Time...

Kara references another contemporary artist that the contestant should have covered, but mostly just shows how much Kara knows about other contemporary artists. ("You could have done Adele, or Duffy, or Lily Allen...")
Kara uses the phrase "changing it up."
Kara references the singer's tone.
Kara calls someone "sweetie" when she's being critical.
Kara uses the word "artistry."

Drink Once Every Time...

Simon calls a performance "cabaret."
Simon calls a performance "indulgent."
Simon uses the phrase "complete and utter" (Drink twice for "complete and utter mess.")
Simon says, "If I'm being honest with you..." (So is he just bullshitting us the rest of the time?)
Simon calls a performance "forgettable."
Simon likens the performance to something he could have seen in a hotel bar.
Simon predicts the contestant won't be coming back next week. (Drink twice if he somehow cleverly links this prediction to the lyrics of the song. Drink three times if Simon predicts the contestant is the winner.)
Simon accuses the singer of shouting or shrieking.

Drink Once Every Time...

Paula says something completely incomprehensible. Oh wait. Paula's not on the show anymore.
Ellen wears a tie.
Ellen comments on the contestant's "look."

(We're thin on Ellen, obviously, because she's yet to show us her go-to phrases. So, just drink every time you see Ellen, 'k?)

Drink Once Every Time

Any of the judges congratulates a contestant for knowing exactly who they are.
Any of the judges scolds a contestant for "not knowing what kind of artist they want to be."
Any of the judges says a song was too big for someone.
Any of the judges lauds a contestant for making a song "their own"
Any of the judges criticizes a contestant for not making a song "their own."
Any of the judges belittles a performance as "karaoke."

You should now be totally drunk. Which is probably the best way to watch Idol anyway.

What about you? Got anything to add? Let's hear it!

We're a Family

2010-03-02T12:38:00.005-05:00

So today marks my big guy's half birthday. Since his birthday typically falls outside the school year, we actually got to celebrate in his classroom this morning. Here he is, walking the earth around an imaginary sun five times to mark each year. (I swear I'm taking him for a haircut this very afternoon.)

Feeling a bit nostalgic, it seemed a perfect time to share something I had long forgotten about. This has to be one of the most amazing moments of the last five and a half years of parenting, and one that we had the unbelievable good fortune to capture on tape.

This is Ethan just before his second birthday. My husband thought it would be fun to make a "day in the life" video, so he was holding the camera as we walked around the neighborhood. What happened next, well...I think it's pretty obvious from my reaction that we didn't script or plan this.

Enjoy! And Happy 5.5, E. We love you to the moon and back.

This is what happens...

2010-02-24T17:00:00.002-05:00

when you be dissin' Alec on the playground:

The Cheese Face: A Retrospective

2010-02-18T11:00:00.021-05:00

Yesterday Alec turned two and a half. (Yes, I'm that mom. I know these things.)

And in his honor, I'm doing something I've been meaning to do for the last six months.

Right around his second birthday, we saw the emergence of Alec's "cheese face." It's his tried and true camera pose: eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide open. The cheese face is like Alec shorthand, a perfect manifestation of the impy, sunny, spirited little munchkin he is.

The seasons have changed -- the balmy summer nights awash with fireflies have given way to Halloween costumes and then, to four foot piles of snow. But, like death and taxes, the cheese face endures. And so, without further ado, I bring you, in roughly chronological order, the Cheese Face: a Retrospective.

You know what they say -- beware of Greeks bearing gifts. And toddlers bearing asparagus.

Please, no more pictures.

OK, that one's a little gross. Sorry.

Ahhh...hot cocoa!

This one almost looks painful.

Best he could muster after a long day in the snow.
So long, cheese fans. Happy Half Birthday, my little man.

Snowmaggedon, Part Deux

2010-02-10T12:42:00.007-05:00

There really is no way to convey the magnitude of what's happening out there right now. It's truly approaching Biblical proportions. We're filled with a strange mix of awe, excitement and an undeniable hint of fear at what a storm of this magnitude could possibly wreak. There's something curiously primal about this experience, about realizing that for all our technological advances, we are still very much at nature's mercy.

In trying to show just how much snow we have, I found this photo, taken out Alec's bedroom window several years ago. The window looks over the flat roof that covers our back addition. This was the "before" photo for the new roof. (Or maybe that goes without saying?) You can make out the ivy-covered brick garage at left.

And these are pictures taken out the same window this morning. The snow, now totaling close to three feet, was just about up to the windowsill; you can see the corner of the garage at left.

My intrepid husband went out and shoveled it, fearing for our temperamental skylights.

For now, we are warm, we are safe. We made chocolate chip cookies. We just watch and wait. And hope for the best.

Snowmaggedon

2010-02-06T11:40:00.007-05:00

And now that I have dug from back door to front, you can see why said door wouldn't open.

Buzzed: The Sundance Wrapup

2010-02-02T22:02:00.007-05:00

One of the most telling moments of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival didn't even happen in Park City. It happened some 1800 miles away.

While I was at Sundance with my brother Matt, my husband very graciously played Mr. Mom for a few days, a job that included taking our two year old to his weekly My Gym class. Chatting with one of the other moms by the trampoline, my husband explained my absence: Matt and I had gone to the festival to be with our brother, Eric, a writer-director whose film, 3 Backyards, was in the dramatic competition.

And so began the inquisition.

So is he out there looking for distribution?

So maybe when he's there they can sell the film, right?

Do you think he'll be able to get an investor interested?

And there you have it.

Whereas Sundance was once a place for film purists to celebrate independent film precisely for its independence from the commercial mainstream, so many people now view the festival as nothing more than a J.V. Hollywood. It's a place where people on bathroom lines chat about which film they think is going to be the next Clerks or Blair Witch Project, a place where buzz reigns supreme and even suburban soccer moms immediately inquire about an indie film's commercial prospects.

Which is why, when kicking off this year's festival, with its "return to roots" ethos, Robert Redford took a shot at none other than Paris Hilton. Redford said Sundance has been "sliding," allowing celebrities, swag and buzz to overshadow the festival's real purpose. "It kind of engulfed what we did," Redford explained. "You end up with parties and celebrities and Paris Hilton...and that's not us. Sundance has nothing to do with any of that."

So perhaps it's only fitting that my 2010 Sundance Film Festival experience was about as far from Paris Hilton as you can get: I saw only one hauntingly beautiful and decidedly un-commercial film the whole time I was there. (Three times!) I didn't attend a single party or see a single celebrity, unless you count the supremely lovely Kathryn Erbe, of Law and Order: Criminal Intent and Oz fame, who is one of the stars of 3 Backyards. Had I gotten there a day earlier, I would have been hanging out with The Sopranos' Edie Falco, but since she's been my brother's dearest friend for almost 30 years, I don't really think of her as a celebrity any more. I wanted desperately to follow Eric's lead and refuse to read any so-called buzz, but alas, the lure of the Twitter search and the google alert proved too great for me.

So how was my Sundance experience? Perfect. We were there solely for moral support -- a nervous Eric told one interviewer he was "still looking for the 'fest' in 'festival'" -- and that's exactly what we provided. Eric introduced me and Matt at one screening, explaining that we had come to "rescue him;" we later joked it was between Haiti and Park City.

And how was 3 Backyards? Come on. I thought it was brilliant. But my brother wrote and directed it, so maybe you'd rather hear what Variety said. Or the Los Angeles Times.

Was it the most buzzed-about film at Sundance? Nope. Not by a long shot. But ultimately Eric transcended the ephemeral buzz and instead received an indisputable piece of actual acclaim: on Saturday night, he was named Best Director of the dramatic competition. You can watch his hilarious and heartfelt acceptance speech below. My screams were so loud I almost woke up the neighborhood.

Congratulations, Eric. Not that you'll ever in a million years read this, but I hope you know I'm so so so very proud of you, not just for "winning" but for being true to who you are and making a film you believe in. I hope you get to make a million more. And that you never, ever, have to work with Paris Hilton.

There She Is...

2010-01-28T11:49:00.005-05:00

I’m posting this from Park City, Utah, where I’ve been consumed with an annual celebrity-studded tradition. Rife with drama, it’s one in which an unknown aspirant with brave creative goals stands poised not only to fulfill a lifelong dream, but to be catapulted onto the national – and perhaps even the world -- stage.

The Sundance Film Festival? Yeah, that, too. But I’m thinking of the Miss America pageant, which airs this Saturday night.

Like most little girls in the 70s, I dutifully watched the pageant each year, sighing with wide-eyed admiration at the contestants, with their hot-rolled feathered hair and powder-blue eye shadow. Armed with sheets of looseleaf paper, I sat in my parents’ bedroom and took notes. I cheered for the prettiest Miss Nebraskas and Iowas, and was aghast when the judges selected a Miss Texas with an unforgivable dress or a Miss Kentucky of only dubious talent.

The contestants – coltish baton twirlers who’d grown up on farms in Wisconsin and earnest, freckle-faced minister’s daughters from North Dakota – were nothing like anyone I knew in my insular, homogenous Long Island home town, peopled, as it was, with Marci Goldbergs and Shari Kopelowitzes. I was positively mesmerized by the unironic slice of Americana the pageant showed me.

But like an awkward teenager who still clings to a love of hopscotch or jacks, my affection for the pageant lingered long past the point at which most of my peers had let go and moved on. Throughout my 20s, I continued to watch alone, albeit with an increasingly sardonic eye for the pageant’s absurdities and anachronisms. Chief among them, of course, was the Miss America Organization’s steadfast insistence that the pageant's primary purpose was to promote scholarship. I won my fair share of college scholarships. Oddly, not one of them required my wearing a bathing suit and heels or playing Feelings on the marimbas.

The turning point in my pageant viewing experience came on September 22, 1996. I was at home in my Dupont Circle apartment reading the Washington Post when a story in the Outlook section jumped out at me.

It was a column by Amy Argetsinger, a college acquaintance who I had heard was working for the paper as a Metro reporter. I had known Amy since our freshman year, when we lived a floor apart. We had many friends in common, but we had never been particularly close.

Until that day.

Because what Amy did in that fateful column was confess to a love of...The Miss America pageant.

"Amy Argetsinger...likes Miss America?" I remember thinking in amazement. It was liberating to find another kindred soul. Another educated woman who would never in a million years be in a beauty pageant, but just couldn't resist getting wrapped up in the delicious cheeseball spectacle that is Miss America.

As Amy wrote at the time:

"I know what some of you are going to say: The Miss America Pageant objectifies women. To which I respond: Who cares? These are not normal women. They're curious specimens of crisp professionalism and rehearsed charm and incandescent optimism, utterly unlike myself and most people of my acquaintance. They are exotic creatures, like thoroughbreds or chess prodigies or prize tomatoes, who have willingly subjected themselves to their years-long regimens of training and discipline. Thus, it is perfectly appropriate -- not to mention hugely entertaining -- to compare and judge them against others of their species."

I immediately called Amy at the Post and told her how much I loved her piece. We met for lunch. And became fast friends. In the intervening 14 years, we've even managed to even make it to the pageant four times, three times in Atlantic City and once in its new home in Las Vegas. (I was 12 weeks pregnant that time. For the record, morning sickness and Vegas are an acutely bad match.) A highlight? Our 2003 morning-after breakfast with my friend Fletcher Foster, a country music industry executive who had actually been one of the judges the previous night. We tried not to be too hard on Fletcher for his part in having given the crown to that ho-hum Miss Florida in the unfortunate yellow dress over our girl, Harvard-educated spunkmeister Miss Virginia, but loved getting the inside dish. (Oh, and that Amy has done alright by herself, by the way. She's now one of the paper's Reliable Source columnists. She just broke a story about a little couple named Salahi? Perhaps you've heard of them?)

Amy and I, along with a solid crew of annual regulars, have turned pageant watching into our very own version of Fantasy Football. Each year, we peruse the field, with its legions of graduates of academic powerhouses like Christopher Newport University, and its countless 21 year old contenders who look exactly like middle-aged local news anchorwomen. Our record for sizing up the competition and spotting comers is eerily impressive.

But like fans of a perpetual losing team, each year my girls and I gear up for another disappointment. We always pin our hopes on the rare real young woman – one with talent that would actually impress outside the pageant stage, or one who seems genuinely bright, not just what passes for smart in the pageant universe -- and once again wonder if this is her year to rise above the pack of "pageant patties." It never is.

In 2006, by then the mother of a young son, I invited some newcomers – most of them friends made on the mom circuit -- to watch the pageant, introducing a whole new legion of born-again fans. I still can hear my friend Natalie, upon watching the totally underwhelming Miss Oklahama take the crown from our favorite. “How do you DO this every year?” she asked with faux disgust.

The fact is that I really am at the Sundance Film Festival right now, supporting my brother as he promotes his film, 3 Backyards. So I haven't even had time yet to do my standard due diligence and make my Top Ten predictions. I hope Amy will understand. Regardless, we'll be watching Saturday night, cosmos in hand, doing our duty as Americans to support the nation's largest scholarship organization for women. Won't you do the same?

A Proper Kvell. For Jem, from Scout.

2010-01-24T15:45:00.001-05:00

As some of you already know, on Tuesday I'll be headed out to the Sundance Film Festival.

A three day vacation! Without any kids! It's going to be great. I just checked out their website. And -- OMG! -- it turns out they show MOVIES there! How cool is that?

Excited? Me? Maybe a little. Enough that in an email about the logistics of my return flight, my husband did feel compelled to remind me that I "do have to come home eventually."

So yes, my brother Matt and I are going to Sundance to see 3 Backyards, written and directed by our brother Eric, and starring Edie Falco, Embeth Davidtz, Elias Koteas and Kathryn Erbe. It's our first time at the festival, but Eric's third; in 1999, he won the Directing Award for his debut feature, Judy Berlin. (A fine addition to your Netflix queue, by the way; it also stars Edie, and features the final, heartbreaking performance of the late great Madeline Kahn.) Since nobody could possibly be less of a horn-tooting attention seeker than my brother, who happens to be one of my very favorite people in the universe, I thought I'd take a moment to sing his praises and link to some of the pre-festival buzz on him and his film, which premieres tonight at 8.

LA Weekly just wrote an amazing piece about Eric and his singular artistic vision, not to mention a few fun tidbits about growing up Mendelsohn. (I even get a mention!) You can read it here.
A short video interview with Eric, talking about the film, here.
Or maybe you'd like to read Emmy-winner Edie "Carmela Soprano" Falco, who also happens to be Eric's best friend, on why it's a crime that Eric hasn't been able to make more movies. That would be here.
The New York Daily News wonders if 3 Backyards is this year's Precious; I'm going to go with, "one can only hope."
Indiewire did this interview with Eric, in which he talks about making the leap to shooting digitally, and in color.

I'm enormously proud of Eric. I don't care if he wins a thing at Sundance. I don't care if I don't get to any celebrity-studded parties. I'm just so pleased that in a cultural climate that prizes all things flashy and commercial and anything-but-subtle, a thoughtful filmmaker like Eric can make exactly the kind of film he wants, and then find a venue like Sundance where his work can be celebrated. I'm proud that he's managed to be so uncompromising and principled as an artist, and I'm thrilled to be there supporting him.

Oh, who am I kidding? I just want to meet Kristen Stewart and James Franco and look cute in my warm sweaters and fake Uggs.

No, seriously. Getting into Sundance -- there were 1058 submissions for the 16 Dramatic Competition slots -- is an extraordinary accomplishment in itself. Please join me in congratulating Eric and the hardworking cast and crew of 3 Backyards on this amazing achievement. Here's to a great time for everyone in Park City. I'll be the one with the enormous smile.

The One in Which I Take a Serious Turn...

2010-01-20T13:53:00.009-05:00

Because it's not all fun and games around here, people. Actually, it is, but today I'm going to pretend to put on my serious hat.

In the five years that I have been a parent, I like to fancy myself a relatively reasonable sort. Though I am admittedly overzealous about carseat safety (we're devotees of Baltimore's own Debbie Baer, The Carseat Lady), and try my best to avoid stuffing my kids with junk food, I have a kind of reflexive cringe for those parents who treat their children like delicate hothouse flowers, hovering and helicoptering and worrying about every single thing their kids ingest, or play with or experience. It's not surprising that many of the philosophies of free-range parenting resonate with me. Or that our playroom boasts a number of -- the horror! -- plastic toys.

But there's a situation afoot I simply have to take a stand on.

My kids watch tv. (See aforementioned plastic toys. So shoot me.) And when my kids watch tv, 99.9 percent of the time, they use Comcast's On Demand menu to choose a show. Their tastes, I am happy to report, are very very mild. They watch Thomas. And Sesame Street. Zoboomafoo and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. (As an aside, I made the mistake of telling my five year old that the Kratt brothers of Zoboomafoo fame had a new show on the National Geographic channel that he might like. As *I* cowered in fear watching a crocodile devour an unsuspecting wildebeest, it dawned on me that he might not yet be ready for real nature programming.)

Anyway, as anyone with children knows, getting two children to agree on what they want to watch is never an easy process. So we linger on that On Demand menu as the boys change their minds about eleventy billion times.

And there's the rub.

For some reason, in this era of scarily intrusive direct advertising -- my friend Allie wrote a blog post about how much she hates Uggs, only to have all the Google ads on her blog immediately turn to ads for Uggs -- Comcast has not yet gotten with the program. Because while we're going through our daily exercise in exasperation, changing our minds for the umpteenth time from Caillou to Diego, promos continue to play in the corner of the On Demand menu. And these ads are not directed at children. In fact, these ads continue to show my children snippets of truly frightening horror movies, or violent ones, or plain old-fashioned inappropriate ones. (Try to explain what's going on in The Hangover trailer to a toddler, will you?)

If you doubt me, just ask my kindergartener. Who continues to insist that the movie he most wants to see is Nine. You know, the Fellini-esque Rob Marshall movie starring Nicole Kidman and Kate Hudson. ("But Mom! It is NOT scary! It looks great!") Yesterday, my boys were treated to images of a wartime explosion and then, what appeared to be a dead soldier lying on the ground, courtesy of the promo for The Hurt Locker. Fine movie, I have no doubt. Just not for the Barney set.

I never thought I'd find myself in a position to *ask* that my children be marketed to, but there you have it. Comcast is missing a perfect opportunity to tailor the promos shown while perusing its Kids On Demand menu to, well, kids.

I have been in touch with Comcast -- specifically a woman named Kathy in the office of Rick Germano, Senior Vice President for Customer Operations -- and they are looking into the situation. If they are your provider, can you please take a moment and send a note asking for the same? It might just get it taken care of if I'm not a lone wolf on this. You can do that here.

And if you don't want to help, that's fine. I'm just going to make you take Ethan to see Nine.

Update: 4:50 p.m. Two things. One: I just learned from my friend Mindy that Ethan is more likely referring to this animated Tim Burton movie called 9. Fair enough. But as if to underscore my point, I just turned on Sesame Street. While choosing the episode, the boys were treated to the "Say hello to my little friend!" scene from Scarface. I couldn't make this stuff up, right? 'Nuf said.

Update: Saturday. So now they're saying the place to give feedback is here. Give it a shot? Thanks.

Hallelujah!

2010-01-19T15:38:00.001-05:00

With the almost incomprehensible suffering and devastation the world has witnessed of late, it's easy to forget that just two weeks ago, there actually had been tremendous jubilation in at least one teeny tiny corner of the globe.

Which corner, you ask? Oh. That would be the one occupied by, well, me.

Why? Because just days before the Haitian tragedy, I reached the stay-at-home motherhood equivalent of nirvana: I now have two children in school. At. the. same. time.

Yep, that's right. For six whole hours a week, I am gloriously, deliriously and entirely kid-free. And not at home with a sleeping child, mind you, but out in the world, with my station wagon revved and ready to like, go places and do stuff. OK, so between pickups and dropoffs, it's really more like four hours. But who's counting? Oh wait: I know. I am! Because that's four more kid-free hours than I had the week before. Actually, that's four more kid free hours than I've had in years.

Sigh. If I treat them really nicely, might they go forth and multiply, those four beautiful little hours? (I keep thinking of George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, cherishing the two dollar bills that keep the Building and Loan from going under: "A toast to Mama Dollar and to Papa Dollar, and if you want to keep this old Building and Loan in business, you better have a family real quick.")

I wish I could say I had grand plans. That I'm going to knit scarves for the children of a Romanian orphanage. Or volunteer at a medical facility for homeless people with cleft palates. Or that I'm going to...I don't know...meditate? Write that novel?

Nope. None of the above. It is a sobering reminder of the level of glamour in my life that what I am really most excited to get to do is...run errands.

Yes, I'm going to run errands. Lots and lots and lots and lots of errands, in which I will be wholly unencumbered by the needs of the five-and-under set. (Picture me, if you will, in aviator sunglasses and a glamorous 1950s headscarf.) In fact, I think I'm going to target random strip malls and devise ways to go into every single establishment therein just to attend to a single piece of errand-y business. Perhaps I'll buy nothing more than some Tic Tacs or a box of Band-Aids at a Walgreen's. I'll go to Whole Foods just to purchase a single slice of organic Slovakian goat cheese. (Too narrow a focus, you say? Why no! I will have no children with me! I can do whatever I want! And quickly!) I'll bring a single shirt to a dry cleaners. Return an unwanted birthday gift to a Target. Pop in Starbucks for a latte. Grab a sandwich elsewhere. Get the oil changed. Go stock up on that frozen Pad Thai I like from Trader Joes.

I'm practically weeping with joy already. Because without my kids in tow, all of that will take me roughly 14 minutes, which still leaves plenty of time for the scarves for the orphans.

You see, one of those little things that nobody ever tells you about parenthood is that it puts a serious crimp in your errand-running mojo. The big tradeoffs? I long ago made peace with those. I get that I can no longer jet off for the weekend on the spur of the moment. (Not that I was really much of a spontaneous jetter off-er pre-kids, but I suppose it was nice to have the option, in theory.) And I'm pretty good with all of the rest: The wiping up of any number of bodily secretions. The endless recitations of godawful Thomas the Tank Engine books. The whining. Yes, yes, and yes. Got it.

But nobody ever told me what being a mother would do to my ability to do something as basic as run errands. It's the speed and efficiency I miss most, the quick satisfaction of a lightning-fast in-and-out retail experience. They slow you down, those kids, to truly agonizing, unbearable levels. Who knew that I would one day stare longingly at a grocery store, just thinking of the lone bunch of cilantro I would love to go in and buy, quickly and gracefully, like a gazelle stalking its prey. Without having to wrestle anyone in or out of a carseat. Without having a Hegelian discourse about which color racing car cart is best and who gets to sits where. Without having to lug three metric tons worth of coloring books with me or purchase roughly 516 unnecessary treats in order to broker peace. Nobody ever told me that I would one day chart a day's worth of errands based solely on the fewest number of egresses from the car required. (That drive-through at my all-time favorite soup and sandwich place, by the way? Heaven. On. Earth.) Nobody ever told me that I would one day have to plan a trip to pick up dry cleaning with the military precision of a tactical maneuver in Falluja. ("This is delta-charlie-bravo 41. I have a visual on the target. I'm going in with the stroller, do you copy?")

And so I salute you, my four little hours, for allowing me to take back a little piece of myself that I had long ago surrendered on the altar of motherhood. I only hope I do you -- and those orphans -- proud.

Wordless Wednesday: Dateline Haiti

2010-01-13T12:00:00.002-05:00

Because there literally are no words.

To add this or another (free) earthquake photo to your blog in tribute, please go here.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

2010-01-09T15:56:00.007-05:00

Two nights ago I put up a quick blog post about Audra McDonald, and how I was moved to tears by a performance of hers eight years ago.

Today, while looking through a box of old photos, something fell out of one of the envelopes. Mind you, the box was full of nothing but photos -- no other ticket stubs or mementoes.

This is what it was. A little freaky, no?

But then again, maybe not: Last week, while flipping channels, I noticed on the cable guide that This is My Life, the 1992 Nora Ephron comedy in which my brother Eric has one line as a waiter, was on. After much back and forth with my husband, who was trying to record something else, we switched to the channel it was on. And literally, at that exact moment, Eric appeared on screen, saying, "Can I get you anything else?" The movie is 105 minutes long, and I've never actually seen it before. What are the chances?

Does this mean I'm supposed to play the lottery or something?

Some Days

2010-01-07T21:12:00.005-05:00

Just as the pregame for the BCS National Championship game began to wind down tonight, I noticed a stream of comments on Twitter about the television actress who sang "God Bless America." "Didn't know Audra Whats-her-name could sing," read a typical one.

Didn't know Audra McDonald could sing? Really?

For me, it was just the opposite. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I might have known that McDonald, a four time Tony winner, is on the ABC show Private Practice these days. But to me, she will always be a singer first and foremost. A singer of singular, almost otherworldly talent. A singer whose mesmerizing, lush voice so moved me during a concert at the Kennedy Center that I began to cry, something that had never happened to me before or since. It was a month after September 11, 2001, and she sang a song called "Some Days." It's a signature piece for her, with lyrics from a poem by the great James Baldwin, including this verse, which seemed almost unbearably poignant at the time:

Some days leave
some days grieve
some days you almost don't believe.
Some days believe you,
some days don't,
some days believe you
and you won't.
Some days weary
some days mad
some days more than make you glad.
Some days, some days,
more than shine,
witnesses, coming on down the line!

Fearful that even a single person out there might think of McDonald as nothing more than a tv doctor, I leave you with this.

I'm not sure if I believe in angels. But this is what I hope they sound like.
(Double click to see best.)

Update: The world really does work in mysterious ways.

Wordless Wednesday: My Kids Are Not From What They Call "The Eaters"

2010-01-05T21:18:00.004-05:00

Exhibit A: What comes back home when you pack half a sandwich in Ethan's lunchbox. Sigh.

The Decade: An Overview

2009-12-30T00:52:00.014-05:00

As I recently noted, I love me a good year-end wrap-up.

So what better opportunity than the close of this decade to do a wrap-up of my own and hit a few of the highs and lows of the last ten years? I'm not talking world events here; I'll leave 9/11 and the tsunami to Time magazine. And trust me. You don't want to hear me try to explain the sub-prime mortgage thing. I'll stick to what I know.

I realized in the shower today that my tenure as a parent very neatly bifurcates the decade: I spent roughly the first five years without kids and the second five with. Or, more precisely, I spent the first half of the decade not appreciating how nice it is to sleep as much as you want and the second half wishing I had. And stepping on a lot of Legos.

On January 1, 2000, I was 31 years old. I lived in a rental apartment in DC's Dupont Circle, drove a ten year old cherry red VW Golf and still used a dialup connection in a pinch. I had been dating my boyfriend (now husband) for seven months, although I think I already suspected he was a keeper. But I still skipped my tenth college reunion that summer because I didn't want to have to hear myself say over and over that I was single and childless.

Let's see what happened next, shall we?

August 9, 2001: I finally go on my first European sojourn. Eschewing those traditional European starter countries like England and France, I go straight for the hard stuff and see Poland and Ukraine. While I am gone, my apartment is destroyed in a freak flood, prompting me to move in with aforementioned boyfriend. His friends still refer to the "flood" with a wink and air quotes. But it was real, I swear!

July 14, 2002: My debut in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. I wish I could say I wrote a clever "Lives" column or a brilliant profile of Jhumpa Lahiri. But no. It was my photograph that appeared in the magazine, along with my brother Daniel's story about our trip to Eastern Europe, which eventually became his award-winning best-seller. A photo of me...cradling my head and crying at a devastatingly sad story about the Holocaust. You know, because when I first appeared in the pages of the Times Magazine, I actually wanted it to be a picture of me sobbing. No, really.

August 11, 2002: Ending years of angst over my certain march towards old maidhood, much of it on the part of my mother's elderly cousin Trudy in Queens, I get married. As I once said in a Washington Post column, I was right to be jealous of my friends all those years: getting married totally rocks. You have a religious obligation to buy jewelry. And you get to register for lots of cool shit you want other people to buy you from Williams-Sonoma. And then you go to Italy and eat mozzarella and prosciutto. For breakfast. (The having a husband/partner/true love part is also pretty great, I must say. He also makes really good scrambled eggs.)

May 1, 2003: We move into our first home. Six and a half years later, I am still traumatized by the process of trying to pick paint colors. That school bus yellow in the dining room? It was supposed to be kind of a warm Tuscan umber. Oops?

September 2, 2004: I give birth to my first child. Without an epidural. And not by choice. Yes, yes, the ends justify the means and all that. But I really would have loved if the means did not have to involve spending 36 hours tethered to a hospital bed, enduring the misery of a failed induction that I was told was necessary because my baby could, you know, well, die. And then dilating from one centimeter to ten in 25 minutes. (Yes, I said 25. I know "My labor was suckier than yours" stories are totally cliche, but I must say I often win the cocktail party contests with that one.) And the ends? The ends are awesome beyond words.

September 22, 2004: The book I helped write comes out and spends one glorious week on the Times bestseller list. Because I have a six week old, and spend most of my time shuttling between nursing, weeping, and actively second guessing the decision to procreate, I am too petrified to try to travel to New York to attend the book party. In my next life, I will totally go and look kickass awesome. Like Mary Louise Parker at the Golden Globes that one year.

October, 2006: I survive my 20th high school reunion without a single person laughing out loud at the fact that they voted me Most Likely to Succeed. I consider this a success.

August 17, 2007: I give birth again, this time with an epidural. Labor? What labor? I laughed. I lounged. I read People. I think I might have gotten a pedicure and an aromatheraphy facial, too. I mean, seriously. This was labor? If the first one had been like this, I could have given Michelle Duggar a run for her money. Plus, I ended up with this. What could be bad?

December 7, 2007: Oh wait. I know what could be bad. Four month old Alec wakes up 12 times in the course of a 12 hour night, shattering all records previously held by his notoriously sleepless older brother, who I was certain was unbeatable. Call it my own personal Pearl Harbor. The next night, in desperation, I decamp to my inlaws'. And second guess the decision to procreate. Again.

November 11, 2008: I turn 40. I still have no idea how this happened to me and walk around in a depressive fog. Wasn't it just last week I was all dressed up in my goomie bracelets on my way to see Madonna's Like a Virgin Tour at Madison Square Garden? Actually, even though I am in denial, I celebrate with a long weekend in Bermuda with my two dearest friends. I'm not complaining. Except for the part where, for the first time in my life, I was actually told by a gate agent that I simply could not get to my destination on the day I was ticketed to do so, not on USAir or any other airline. (Weather-delayed flight, missed connection, etc etc.) There were tears, people. And that was from the agent I smacked upside the head for suggesting that maybe I "just wasn't meant" to go to Bermuda that day. OK, I didn't really hit her. But I wanted to. This trip was far too long in the making. I was 40 fucking years old. I was going to Bermuda that day, missy. By some incredible stroke of good luck, my hairdresser had just told me about USA 3000, a cute little charter airline that flies about three places out of BWI, and one of them happens to be Bermuda. And because they're a charter, they aren't part of the system that the USAir agent was using to search for available flights. I called them. They got me to Bermuda that day. Direct. For like $150. And USAir gave me a refund. I think I actually made $10 on the transaction. When does that ever happen? OK, I take it back. Being 40 might not be so bad.

January 1, 2009: I launch this blog, which quickly becomes a national sensation. I'm using the loose definition of "national sensation," of course, which means, "the most popular blog at my parents' split level on Long Island." The rest, as they say, is history, right?

Happy New Year, everyone. Here's to a new decade filled with many, many bloggable moments.

Virgin

2009-12-20T15:52:00.007-05:00

You thought this post was about Kevin Jonas, didn't you?

Nope. It's about how I'm relatively new to the bloggy/twitter world. A newbie, really. But I've always secretly coveted one of those invitations to participate in some cool meme. It seemed so deliciously insider-y. You like me! You really like me!

And now (excuse me while I sniff back tears) I've actually gotten my very first one.

My friend Becky Sain just sent me this:

What is it, you ask? Why, it's an invitation to be part of a cool meme! I only have to "do a post where I ha(ve) to reveal three things about myself that no one (or hardly anyone) knows." Now I happen to have noticed that Becky was tagged by Judy, who cut the list down from seven things to three. I was originally going to compromise and do five. But who am I kidding? A chance -- nay, an actual, bona fide invitation -- to talk about myself? I'm going for all seven. (Number eight, by the way, would be, "I really really really like to talk about myself.")

I hope you're sitting down. And taking notes. Here we go.

1. I feel incredibly awkward wearing any kind of name tag, particularly the sticker ones where you have to write your name yourself. If I'm given one to wear, I usually try to see if I can get away without putting it on. If the powers that be insist, I slap it on my pants. But something about having my name sprawled across my chest, especially in my own handwriting, really creeps me out.

2. I have surprisingly strong opinions about seemingly inconsequential design matters like fonts and wrapping paper. It actually bums me out when people I like send an invitation or a holiday card with a font I find unattractive. (My favorite font, should you, say, want to make me a birthday card next year, is Bickham. But only the top version, in green; the others are way too swirly.) And I will actually go to another store rather than buy wrapping paper I don't think is pretty, even if it's just something that's going to be torn to shreds and thrown away. I care, people. I care.

3. I am (ahem) over 40 (but just barely!) and I have never been skiing or camping. I don't ski because I have a) a strange fear of not being in control of my feet and b) a pain-in-the-ass medical condition known as Raynaud's phenomenon, which can make being outside in frigid weather for extended periods of time truly unbearable for my hands and feet. The camping I'll blame on my parents, who instilled a love of many wonderful things, like classical music and books. We're Jewish intellectuals from New York. Sleep outside? Appreciate the outdoors? Not so much.

4. I absolutely loathe parties that also include the sale of anything, even the "There's no pressure! Really! Just come drink wine!" ones. If there will be orders taken for cutesy kitchen gadgets, pocketbooks, jewelry, or organic home cleaning products, don't wait up for me. (This one isn't entirely a secret any more because I posted it in a Facebook list of things I hate. But I thought it bore repeating.)

5. I have a soft spot for the rumpled, vaguely college professor-y older man. He's pushing 70, but I still think Sam Waterston is sexy. And I've long had a thing for Newsweek's Evan Thomas.

6. As a kid, I was obsessed with the paranormal, and one of my first career ambitions was to be a parapsychologist. (The others were writer and anthropologist, for those keeping track at home.) I've lost the obsession but still maintain a wholly out-of-character firm belief in things like ghosts and psychics. I'm also ridiculously superstitious.

7. I am the furthest (farthest?) thing from a Luddite you could imagine. But I insist on having a paper calendar rather than an electronic one. I also don't own a Blackberry or an iPod. Which means that if I'm blogging or tweeting, you can picture me doing so in a room with four walls, with my butt planted firmly on a chair. Refreshing, isn't it?

I also really like the smell of hardware stores, don't like onions or chicken on pizza, have been to Ukraine and...Oh wait. It's time to stop now, isn't it?

OK. Now, part of the fun is that I'm passing on the fleurs and the obligation to post about them to some bloggy friends, who must in turn pass it on. And apologies if this is something you've already done, like, years ago; I'm new at this, remember? Be gentle.

My taggees, in random order:
1. Brenna of The Real Bean, who I hope isn't too uncomfortably pregnant to play along!
2. Max Weiss of Hey I'm Maxthegirl, my compadre in all things Long Island, cello and pop culture
3. Ashley of Ashley, Unscripted. If there's a wittier pharmacist on earth, I've yet to meet her.
4. Wendi Aarons, who regularly makes me spit out my coffee
5. Laura Zigman, from whom I may have been separated at birth
6. Julie Klam, whose hilarious memoir I am in the middle of.
7. Brian Shields of Dada-ism, in hopes it will get him to blog again. :-)

Ready? Set? Go!

Monday update: Anyone who would like to play along and share some things about themselves in the comments is more than welcome! It's like a revelation free-for-all around here. Yeeeeeehah!

I Know, I Know...

2009-12-19T14:05:00.006-05:00

there are far more pressing matters facing the world today.

But can someone please invent a sippy cup...

that you can put cocoa in?

(Why yes. That is cocoa in his left eye. Thanks for asking.)

Wordless Wednesday: Hanukkah Edition

2009-12-16T14:29:00.009-05:00

Ethan got very into reading the menorah blessings.

Alec's "cheese" face. Plus yarmulke.

Challenged

2009-12-08T23:03:00.004-05:00

I've always been a sucker for the year-end wrap up.

Hopelessly sentimental, there's nothing I like more than those end-of-the-year issues of magazines, with their tidy accounting of the annual best and the worst, all that assigning of highs and lows. I love seeing the pictures of the year. The stories of the year. The songs of the year.

With 2009 drawing to a close, I'm being asked to participate in my own wrap up, of sorts.

Just about a year ago, I was asked to be part of a challenge to do something extraordinary in 2009. Something bigger than a typical New Year's resolution, but smaller than a midlife crisis stunt. "Somewhere between losing that extra five pounds, and winning a Best Director Oscar," read the invitation.

Sure, I thought. I can do this. The person whose aspiration was deemed the coolest (and who actually achieved it) wins a $50 bottle of booze, not to mention the satisfaction of a job well done. I put forth three proposals. And now it's time to submit my essay explaining why I should win.

So let's have a look at how I did, shall we?

1. To play the cello in public again

Can I just write a big fat FAIL and be done with it? As I write this, I see my cello sitting forlornly in the corner, bathed in dust. The cello that was once so central to who I was. The cello I played for hours each day for years and years, and lugged with me on planes and trains and subways. The cello whose physical presence -- the literal feeling of the calloused flesh of my fingers on its strings and wood -- was what I missed most desperately at first, like a phantom limb. In 2009, I didn't even get as far as opening the case. Play in public? Uhhhhhh.....no. Ain't gonna happen. Next?

2. To have a byline in the New York Times

See, this one is interesting.

I've never written for the Times and still fervently hope to. For years now I've had a vague idea that I could write a piece for "Modern Love," the wonderful column in the Sunday Styles section. It's where my friend Ayelet Waldman secured a berth on Oprah by declaring -- PC parenting police be damned -- that she loved her husband more than her children. It's where writer Amy Sutherland placed her now-famous "Shamu" piece. And it's also the place where one of the most devastatingly moving personal essays I've ever read, Ann Hood's "Now I Need a Place to Hide Away" appeared. (Warning, not for the faint of heart.)

Lifetimes ago, I had a rather colossal romantic disaster of my own, one with all sorts of nuances I suspected would make for perfect Modern Love copy. I've long wanted to take ownership of that experience and write about it. I've had a number of false starts over the years, but, spurred on by the idea that I might actually meet my 2009 goal and place it in the Times, I finally got to work on it in earnest. I spent a long time painstakingly crafting that column. I became a little obsessed, to be honest, revisiting what was undoubtedly the most wrenching time of my life, re-reading exceedingly painful journal entries from that period and dredging up some very unpleasant -- and surprisingly unresolved -- feelings. I found myself writing and re-writing the piece in my head at all hours, to the point where I could quote it almost from memory. And I finally came up with something I really thought captured precisely what I wanted to say.

I let a select few people read the piece, and the response was overwhelmingly favorable. My agent said simply, "Wow."

Would the Times have accepted it? I don't know. And may never. Because ultimately, I decided not to submit it. Perhaps one day I'll feel differently, but for now, I've come to the conclusion that it's a pot best left unstirred, an intensely personal story better left untold.

Case closed, right? I'm 0 for two? On to number three?

Not so fast.

Because a funny thing happened in the wake of writing my erstwhile Modern Love piece. Literally the moment I got the column into its final form, and then made the decision to hold onto it, a calm came over me. Through the very process of writing, of forging the jumbled soup of my inner life into a stream of words that could stand on their own and tell a meaningful story, I made my peace with whatever vestigial ghost of that experience was still haunting me. Any residual hurt I may have held onto was entirely exorcised by the writing process. Vanished. Gone. Poof. Done. It's like it never happened.

I know how therapeutic and empowering the writing process can be. But I had never seen it work quite so transparently before. All that writing and re-writing? Duh! I was...working it out. Literally.

So the New York Times isn't going to happen for me this year. But I'm calling this one a victory nonetheless. It's just not the one I was aiming for.

3. To build a loyal following for this blog that actually includes people I don't already know.

OK. So here we go.

I know there have to be people reading this blog that I didn't know on January 3, 2009, when I posted those words. Because I simply didn't know enough people to match the numbers of hits I'm getting, even if some of them do get here by googling odd things like "diaper love story." (Don't do it. Please. Just trust me.) Besides, my mother doesn't know how to use a computer. My post about experts was recently quoted in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, by a reporter I a) swear is not my mother and b) swear I did not know at all on January 3, 2009 and c) swear I did not pay or sleep with. My "Showtime" post got named one of the best of the week by the Five Star Friday blog. (See aforementioned a, b, and c.)

So yes, I did manage to accomplish this goal, technically speaking. I'm not sure how stickler-ish the judges will be when it comes to proving my readers are loyal, or when it comes to what constitutes a "following" per se. So let's have some fun, shall we?

At the risk of totally humiliating myself by what could be deafening silence, I'll ask: Are you a regular reader of these pages? Did you know me prior to January 3, 2009? Can you attest to your loyalty to Clever Title TK in a comment here, or, if you prefer, an email to blogmail@jenmen.com?

Perhaps you've got the blog name tattooed across your chest? Have a photo of yourself wearing a CTTK logo t-shirt at the top of Mt. Everest or Machu Picchu? Named your baby "CleverTitleTK?" (BTW, a Twitter friend just told me about a kid on the playground named "Treblinka." If that doesn't win every bad name anecdote contest from here to eternity, I quit.) Perhaps you suggested that NASA put one of my cogent analyses of American Idol in a Mars probe, just in case there's intelligent life out there? Didjya? Didjya?

OK, I'm kidding. I'll take anything you've got, even if it's just a simple declaration that you've been here, (Just write, "Present!") only because you were searching for diaper fetish photos. (See? I told you you didn't want to know.)

C'mon. There's booze at stake! Not to mention my honor. So help a girl out, won't you?

Update: December 30. I've just been named to a list of the 50 best mommybloggers who didn't make the real list of 50 best mommybloggers. Granted, all I did was reply to a tweet asking if any moms who blogged had special talents, (mine is that I can always tell how something's going to taste just by looking at it) but I'm taking it. Followers? I got followers. Yay!

Wordless Wednesday: Playground

2009-11-18T17:24:00.001-05:00

And I'll Cry if I Want To

2009-11-12T11:37:00.002-05:00

Hello? Mr. Counterman at the Fancy, Overpriced Bakery I Swore to my Husband I Would No Longer Patronize Because They Charge $9 for Coffee and a Muffin?

A word, please.

When I asked you to walk me through your selection of fancy, overpriced cakes, you oh-so-imperceptibly scoffed when I asked if this one was Oreo. And launched into a ever-so-slightly condescending explanation of how it was made with uber-fancy Valrhona dark chocolate.

"Have you ever had Valrhona?" you asked, a whiff of superiority clinging in the air.

"I don't think so," I said sheepishly. "But really? It looks like an Oreo cake to me."

"Well, it shouldn't," you said, ever-so-slightly patronizingly.

I bought it anyway. It was my birthday, you know. My husband was too sick to get me a cake. And it looked good, whatever the hell it was.

But dude? Valrhona my ass. That is an Oreo. I know from Oreos. Don't mess with me when it comes to Oreos.

That is all.

Experts? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Experts

2009-11-11T15:04:00.001-05:00

Years ago, during the first Dubya presidency, I heard a story on NPR that stopped me dead in my tracks. Just like when the Challenger exploded, I remember exactly where I was when I heard it.

The piece was about how the fact that President Bush didn't have a -- how shall we say? -- intellectual bent really resonated with voters. Like it was a selling point.

People actually liked that he slipped up so often. That he made grammatical mistakes while speaking and spouted non-sequiturs. And that he didn't seem like a wonk, with his head all crammed full of...complicated ideas and whatnot. Apparently that made him more likable. Relatable. People wanted a president who seemed like an average guy, just like them.

Not surprisingly, they re-elected him. Well, sort of, but I'm not going to get into that now.

Me? I'm not ashamed to say I like my Presidents smart. Crazy smart, actually. Sooooo-much- smarter-than-me-it's-not-even-funny smart. Rhodes Scholars? Bring it. Harvard Law Review editors? You got my vote, hon. I want the person with his or her finger on the nuclear button to be so frigging brilliant they can barely be conversant with me. I like my Presidents, in other words, to be...experts.

I was honestly floored that my fellow Americans did not share this view. It was a wakeup call for me, having grown up in a family where smarts were the coin of the realm, trumping just about everything else. You wanted my four brothers and me on your It's Academic squad, not your basketball team.

I've been thinking about that NPR piece a lot lately.

Because there's a trend at play in the social media world that I find worrisome, and it's an offshoot of the same social forces that apparently helped elect George Bush twice. (If it isn't particularly worrisome to you that a man like him could be President of the United States for eight years, maybe you shouldn't read any further.)

It's been said a zillion times that one of the great things about the explosion of social media is its great democratizing effect. And I get that, really I do.

I'm constantly telling my husband what a thrill it is to discover the voices of bloggers who are not professional writers but who regularly craft absolutely haunting, honest, charming or uproarious prose. (Heather, Megan, Stephanie and Ashley come to mind off the top of my head.) I'm so delighted that blogging has allowed their voices to be heard so widely. I also said years ago that the guy who used to write the Bachelor recaps for Television Without Pity deserved a Pulitzer prize.

Nor is it lost on me that that the online readers are often just as funny as the celebrity panel on Us Weekly's Fashion Police. (True story: I was supposed to have a tryout for the Fashion Police right around the first week of September, 2001. It, um, never happened.)

There's a flipside to that same democratic impulse, though, that I find troubling. In this great information revolution, we're throwing the baby out with the bath water. It's undeniably heady to have so many easy means of information transmission at our fingertips, both inside and outside traditional media channels. Just about anyone could, say, send a tweet right now to Wolf Blitzer. Or write a long blog post about how they feel about CNN.

But we're biting off more than we can chew. We're appointing ourselves experts on anything and everything, spouting off simply because we have easy means to do so, not necessarily because we have anything valuable or credible to say. Good, trained reporters are losing their jobs left and right, in favor of doing journalism on the fly by wikipedia and twitter, even when that can sometimes mean getting just about everything wrong.

There's almost no way not to sound hopelessly old-fashioned and/or defensive (I was, after all, a print journalist), but there's something to be said for the trained information gatherer, the careful vetter of sources. Someone who can listen to a cacophony of information, much of it contradictory, and make level-headed sense of it. Someone who's trained to search for unvarnished truth and know when they're being spun. Someone who's trained to talk to experts and glean what's valuable, separating the information wheat from the chaff.

To wit. Last week I saw a link from a popular mommy blogger who'd been invited to write a guest post on another blog about carseat safety, specifically about the benefits of keeping your child rear-facing. Sure! I'll write your guest post. I have a laptop! And a Starbucks down the street! With WiFi! The only problem was that said mommy blogger apparently didn't really know anything about carseat safety; her post basically had her repeating some anecdotal Snopes-ish urban legends she'd heard on when to turn your baby forward facing. But now that post, inaccurate as it is, becomes part of the body of information on the subject.

Then I followed a link touted as "really good information" about the H1N1 vaccine. This time it led to a post from another mommy blogger, who admitted the difficulty of finding credible information supporting the anti-vaccine position. But luckily, she had found some. Well, sort of. Her sources included a few natural health websites and blogs I'd never heard of, one I have heard of, and not in a good way, (the infamous mercola.com,) a Baby Center mommy blog post "with over 100 comments," and my personal favorite, some squirrely, conspiratorial youtube videos of unknown provenance. Oh wait. I forgot the story from Inside Edition.

Once upon a time, in the old timey days of publishing, I was a fact-checker for Time-Life ("Coincidence? You be the judge.") Books, where we had to use something quaintly known as "red check sources" to verify the accuracy of what we printed; none of these, I can assure you, would have passed the red check source test. And I'm not trying to slam said blogger. Really I'm not. I'm sure she fervently believed she was doing readers a service. They thanked her in droves in the comments, actually. I'm just sad that in their zeal not to be taken in by the party line, to RESEARCH THIS INFORMATION YOURSELF, as one of those youtube screeds warns, people are, rather ironically, being taken in. Just not in the way they thought.

This isn't about the vaccine per se. I am not going to use Clever Title TK as a forum to debate the merits of the H1N1 vaccine or get into how the mainstream media is in bed with big pharma and hoodwinking us all about the evils of vaccination. I'm more than happy to admit I have absolutely no credentials to do so. That's just not my thing. I'll leave that to the... (wait for it) experts. (I will, however, thank Queen of Spain for this post, which makes the brilliant observation that refusing the vaccine has become the "hipster parenting move of the moment" and asks us all to "take off our tinfoil hats." OK, I just tipped my hand, didn't I?)

What I will do is argue passionately that while the channels for information distribution can be democratized to the nth degree, and everyone and their cousin's plumber can have a blog and a twitter feed and can make movies on their iPhones and slap them up on youtube, the stubborn fact is that all information is just not equal. Just because something has been published somewhere on the Internet does not automatically lend it credence. Some information is reliable and credible. Some is not. Credibility isn't intrinsic; it needs to be earned. And I will never trust the information coming from your cousin's plumber's sister-in-law in a Facebook comment as much as that coming from the CDC. If you don't want to get the H1N1 shot, that's your prerogative. But please don't tell me that I should be moved not to because of something you saw in the comments of some random blog on Baby Center for God's sake. Please. (I can't help thinking of the person who commented on a recent Newsweek movie review by calling the author -- who happens to have been my brother Daniel -- a "real dick" and a "tool." There are some super people out there in commentland, I tell you.)

I can't help but wonder if this is yet another splinter of the creeping narcissism I wrote about last week. Is it that same seemingly endless hunger to examine our own lives closer and closer, to hear our own voices rather than listen to the words of others? Is that why we have we become so afraid to put our trust in experts?

“It’s shocking,” science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, recently told Wired. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.”

How sad is that? I think we need experts. I like experts. I like expert doctors and expert urban planners and expert Presidents. I like expert washing machine repairmen and expert teachers and expert chefs. I like that they all know things that I don't have to. It's a good system. It works for me.

And before you get all up in my face screaming elitism, I'm well aware that experts are never infallible, and that there will never be a true consensus on who qualifies as one. I know that there are instances when the government, even its scientists, hasn't acted in our best interests. I know we have to advocate for ourselves, even in a democracy. I know the media is far from perfect and Jayson Blair and blah blah blah blah. I know. I know.

But I am not going to allow the random comments of 100 people on a Baby Center blog post -- are they virologists? epidemiologists? doctors? high school graduates, even? -- become the equal of the warnings of the experts at the CDC, in all their peer-reviewed bureaucratic glory. Ever.

And maybe even more importantly, I refuse to be made, in this upside down world, to feel sheepish or worse -- actually stupid -- for valuing genuine expertise, both scientific and otherwise, with all due respect to your neighbor's manicurist's babysitter.

Yes. You heard right. I'm coming out of the closet. I'm an information snob.

My name is Jennifer. And I trust experts.

Wordless Wednesday: Fall Rocks...

2009-11-04T12:24:00.003-05:00

and then it sucks.

Double click to see in all its glory. And that's only part of the yard, mind you.

Showtime

2009-11-02T22:34:00.008-05:00

It's no secret that I love me some good Internet fakery.

I blogged earlier this year about stumbling upon a blog I sensed -- and later proved -- was a fraud. The woman behind it, who had the unmitigated gall to represent herself as a mother devastated by the death of her small daughter, actually wasn't a mother at all, but rather a career scammer with a criminal record to boot. (Note to self: never post stock photo of infant on blog and say it's your daughter; too easy for curious reader to be puzzled as to why a family photo is named "newborn-baby-girl-three-3-days-old-face-closeup-1-DHD.jpg." And then a quick google just might lead them right to a free online image gallery.)

Just a few months later, my brother Matt, who had been one of my three trusty sidekicks in the case of Scooby Doo and the Imaginary Dead Daughter, called me all excited. There was a story on CNN about an even bigger blogger being exposed as a fraud. This time it was the "April Rose" hoax perpetrated by one Beccah Beushausen. Beushausen had strung legions of devoted readers along for months, blogging in great detail about her heartbreaking pregnancy with a child she knew would die at birth, a child who...she totally invented. (Note to self: never try to pass off photo of a doll as photo of a real baby. Those people on the doll forums are totally eagle-eyed, I tell you.)

So naturally, my interest was piqued when I heard that a story causing quite a buzz throughout the twitterverse -- a story I confess I initially passed along without verifying -- turned out to be how shall we say? not quite as it seemed.

I am not going to rehash the details of Nicole White's fifteen minutes of virtual fame; this post does it far more thoroughly than I could ever hope to. The Cliff's Notes version? White used Twitter and her blog to disseminate a highly melodramatic account of having overzealous TSA agents in the Atlanta airport take her 18 month old son away from her while they were being searched at security. It was a story that she apparently knew would generate enormous media interest. (Check out the screen shots of her twitter feed here.) The only problem was that nine different security camera angles begged to differ. Oops.

Nicole White's response to being called out was to insist that she had shared something called "her truth." my truth was told, shared, tweeted out in the hopes of changing something for the better, she wrote in that trademark high school literary mag lowercase prose, in a post entitled "ownership." i own that. it’s up to you whether or not you choose to believe it. (So we each get our own versions of the truth these days, to disseminate as we please? Suh-weet! I knew I loved the interwebs.)

Maybe I'm just jealous. On our way to Boston this summer, those same persnickety TSA agents actually snatched LaLa, Alec's much adored constant companion, right out of his hands as we were about to walk through the metal detector. Full-on hysteria ensued until the two were happily reunited at the end of the belt, but somehow I failed to seize the opportunity to use my trauma (LALA's GONE! THEY TOOK LALA!) to become a minor Internet celebrity. Oh well, there's always next year.

Anyway, as I said before, this post isn't about proving whether or not Nicole White lied about what happened in that airport. Instead, I'm going to get all meta on you.

In one of those awesome moments of serendipity that only Neil Postman or Marshall McLuhan could have concocted, the White story broke the very same day as that ghastly Heene family perpetrated Jiffy Pop-gate, using a similarly terrifying story about a missing child to generate interest in them for a reality show. A story that as we all know, turned out to be false. They presented a distorted version of their "real" lives to broadcast to the world via television. Or, more to the point, they whored out their six-year-old son and scared the shit out of eleventy billion people watching live on CNN so that they could get on tv. (And I'm not even touching the part where the kid then puked on the Today show in the middle of being interviewed. Or that his name is Falcon.)

The TSA and Heene dramas are part of a much bigger cultural ripple that I find alternately fascinating and horrifying: people's lives are increasingly turning into a kind of for-profit performance art. For better or worse, the endless proliferation of media technologies have allowed us countless vehicles for documenting our day-to-day lives in excruciating, mindboggling detail. (Lunchbox blogs, anyone?) And because we have become ever aware that we are, on some level, being watched, we increasingly play to the gaze.

I see it in the faux shock of the spoiled teenagers on My Super Sweet 16 when, inevitably, the car with a ridiculously huge bow is wheeled out for them. There's always a car, kids, always. That's just what happens when you go on this show. Stop pretending we think you're surprised.

I see it in the trainwreck of Jon and Kate Plus 8. Just as McLuhan predicted, the medium trumps all, and the reality these reality shows claim to document inevitably becomes tainted through the very process of showing it. What started as a show depicting the real lives of a family with eight children became a perfect inverse of itself: the Gosselin family's real life became about being on the show, and more and more of what they did/ate/wore/played with (Crooked Houses! Let's play in our Crooked Houses! Wait, did someone just say Crooked House?) became a construct of the show. Eventually, it seemed there was no "real" life left to document. Their very lives, in other words, became a kind of performance. (In one episode, Kate chastised Jon for referring to something having happened in a previous "season" rather than a previous year.) And not surprisingly, their once very real marriage -- a ten year partnership that produced eight very real children -- gave way under the pressure. Didn't the advertisers feel even a little bit...dirty? And why are people, both famous and not, still lining up in droves to be on reality shows?

I see similar forces at work in the blogosphere.

Heather Armstrong, queen of the mommy bloggers, now supports her family of four simply by sharing her family's life -- the cute outbursts, the quirky food aversions, the mind-numbing sleep deprivation -- with millions of readers through her blog. Which means that advertisers sponsor her...life. Don't get me wrong. Given the opportunity, I'd probably do it, too, but am I the only one who thinks there's something a little Truman Show-ish about it all? (Scratch that. I just googled "Dooce" and "The Truman Show." I'm not the only one who thinks that.)

But anyone who blogs publicly, from Heather Armstrong on down to, well, me, is, in effect, conducting a kind of performance. Until we reach that futuristic moment when our actual, unedited lives are streamed live to our "viewers," by blogging we are putting forth versions of ourselves to be consumed. We choose which moments we share, even the unattractive or painful ones, and we choose the words and photos we use to present them. We might be entirely honest, constructing personas that are quite reflective of our "real" selves. But we are, on some level, performing for an audience. And just like being on reality tv changes your reality, the fact that scores of people are paying attention to (and potentially paying money for) your life via your blog changes things, in ways both subtle and not. When traffic to that blog about the contents of your child's lunchbox starts spiking, you feel that much more pressured to actually make your child the kind of lunches that you want people to see on the blog. And voila! The act of blogging has changed, ever so slightly and entirely benignly, your real life. (I believe that mommy bloggers have, via this mechanism, actually forged a new model for contemporary motherhood, but that's a whole 'nother post.)

As the stakes become higher and higher, with more and more eyes watching and more and more advertisers paying, that same benign impulse that makes you pass over the Lunchables in favor of the quinoa salad allows those who traffic in exaggeration and embellishment to waltz right in and take advantage. In this climate, it's rather easy to embellish, and not that much harder to entirely manufacture drama wholesale. It's the Internet equivalent of a publicity stunt during Sweeps Week.

Mercifully, the most egregious lying liars are almost always tripped up eventually by some stubborn piece of evidence of the real world that they've failed or forgotten to hide: a photo, a video or an IP address. But often not before they've sucked in an eager audience which then feels betrayed.

And why does it matter? Because playing to the camera really works.

I'll leave you with a bit of a math problem. (And thanks to Amy at SecretSpinelessWhine for opening my eyes to this.)

For the eight months prior to posting about her TSA experience, (or should that be "experience?") SiteMeter shows that Nicole White's blog received a total 22,512 visitors, for an average of 2,814 a month. But in the month of October, when she told her TSA story, she got an astonishing 161,225 visitors. That's an increase of 5,629 percent. (Or so says the Internet percentage calculator I used.) 'Nuf said.

Now I'd love to stay and chat with you all about this, but there's a homemade spaceship in my backyard that I've been sorely neglecting. I'll be sure to tell my boys to wave for the cameras.

Sniglets for Moms

2009-10-23T14:47:00.006-04:00

I'm probably dating myself a bit, but man how I loved sniglets. You know, words that aren't words but should be.

I still can remember my all-time favorite: lactomangulation. It means, of course, "manhandling the 'open here' spout on a milk carton so badly that one has to resort to using the 'illegal' side."

Brilliant.

The best sniglet of all time, however, is not actually from the show but rather was coined by my dear friend Steven: he calls the cleaning you do before the cleaning people come....pre-maidication.

Brilliant.

Lately I've been finding myself in need of sniglets. Because as a parent, you often find yourself in situations that don't have names...but should.

It happened the other day when I was so pleased that Alec had fallen asleep so quickly and easily for his nap...only to realize -- doh! -- that the monitor wasn't actually on. There should be a name for that, I thought to myself.

Yesterday, just at the very moment that I realized that our lunch server's pokiness was going to make my best friend miss her train to Washington, I also realized that Alec was in emergent need of a diaper change. Both ladies' rooms were occupied. The men's room had nowhere to change him. So I ended up having to change him on...the sidewalk on Cold Spring Lane, on top of an insulated grocery bag from Trader Joes I found in the back of car. The grocery bag, sadly, had to be burned, but Michele did catch the MARC with all of about four seconds to spare, and that was only because she bought a ticket on the train.

Anyway, as I crouched on the sidewalk, frantically trying to subdue my poop-covered octopus of a child, knowing that with every wriggle he was putting nails in the coffin of Michele's timely departure, I couldn't help but think that there should be a name for this: the propensity of children to move their bowels at the most highly inconvenient moments. And the corollary to it, which is that when time is of the essence, you will be forced to change a diaper in the most impractical, inconvenient place possible. (A kindly man actually slowed down and yelled, "Do you need some paper towel?" out his car window. I kid you not.)

And then it happened again today. There was someone I had been hiding in my Facebook feed for months, too wimpy to actually defriend. Something prompted me to look her up today and I realized she had actually defriended me. And I still managed to feel a little pissed. There should be a name for that, I thought.

And a name for that there shall be. We at Jenmen.com World Headquarters are all about public service. So I'm launching a sniglets feature you'll see semi-regularly. I'll post some modern-day situations in desperate need of convenient terminology, like the three I've put out there today. And you will come up with witty names for them. Maybe if I ever get any actual swag, you can win it. For now, you'll just get the glory of a job well done.

So let's see what you've got now, shall we? ;-)

Wordless Wednesday: Fall Rocks

2009-10-21T14:50:00.002-04:00

Double click on this. I beg you.

Who I Am

2009-10-17T12:05:00.002-04:00

I know, I know. I haven't been blogging.

It's because I've been thinking. Ruminating. Churning.

When Ethan turned five last month, it also marked five years since I traded in my long career as a freelance journalist -- much of it writing about celebrities -- to be a stay-at-home mom. My last big professional undertaking was in 2004, helping the fabulous Carson Kressley write his first book. While in New York one frigid January weekend to have a trial work session with Carson, I had my first-ever hot flash. Green to the gills, I swigged ginger ale through our entire meeting. The two pink lines showed up that afternoon, and I was offered a book contract the next day. "Did you ever think I'd come in here and the fact that I had a book deal would be the second most important piece of news I had?" I asked my shrink, one eyebrow raised. When it rains, it pours and all that.

Ethan Alexander made his debut two weeks early, on September 2 of that year; the book, of which I was enormously proud, arrived in stores three weeks later. And Carson, being the world's best fairy goduncle (his term, not mine), sent us the tiniest, most adorable Gucci tuxedo loafers you've ever seen. (One foot is embroidered with "Hug," the other with "Me.") Alas, Ethan had precious few black tie events on his calendar as an infant; we mostly just trotted them out to visitors to ooh and ah over.

Anyway, like so many professional women before me, I made the decision to hit the pause button on my career right about then. Billions of words have already been devoted to the agony of making this choice, and I don't pretend to have anything insightful to add. Largely because I found the decision surprisingly easy and angst-free: after ten long years slogging it out in the freelance trenches, I was really ready to take a break. I'm well aware that I'm extremely lucky to have had this option, which isn't available to every family. I'm equally aware that as a freelancer, making the decision to quit my job was a lot less traumatic and complicated than it is for most women, since technically, I didn't actually have a job. The assumption was always that at some point down the road, I would just hop right back in. It's just like riding a bike, right?

Lately, I've been starting to wonder if that point is...now. (And yes, that's partly because Ethan's school tuition costs more than my college tuition did.)

Anyway, I think the seed may have been planted last January, at my semi-annual Miss America party, where I brought together a bunch of friends both old and new. There was some trading of celebrity gossip. My wonderful friend Heidi, who I met while our kids bonded over turtle time at My Gym, admitted she didn't know that I was such a pop culture junkie. My wonderful friend Maggie, who I've known since college, but haven't seen much of since we both became moms, was completely dumbfounded. "What Jen do you know if not the one that's a pop culture junkie?" she asked. She turned to me with mock horror. "Who are you?"

Good question. Lately, I think I may have become that person I always looked askance at: the one who couldn't identify every starlet on magazine covers, the one who couldn't give you the elevator pitch on every movie on a given marquee. I no longer read a daily newspaper or subscribe to EW. Yes, I'm still razor sharp on American Idol, but I confess I had no idea who Lady Gaga was when she made a guest appearance there. Bryan Cranston won an Emmy this year for Best Actor on a show that...I had never, ever heard of. Not once. I used to be a People magazine reporter, for God's sake. This will not stand. (And if this all seems ridiculously trivial to some of you, fear not: I know the world will not be substantially bettered if I am conversant with Lady Gaga. To me, it's just shorthand to indicate that I am clearly no longer at the top of my game, professionally speaking, having -- cue the schmaltzy cliche alert --traded Lady Gaga for Lady Topham Hatt. Silly as it might sound, knowing who Lady Gaga is was actually part of my job.)

Enter Serendipty, stage left.

A few weeks ago, my former Slate colleague Dahlia Lithwick had the brilliant idea to try to write a chick lit novel in under a month. She asked for input from readers on everything from character names to plot twists. And suddenly, it was like the floodgates opened. Though I haven't written a word of fiction since high school and have never once considered trying, I found myself mesmerized by Dahlia's exercise. As Dahlia asked questions to propel her story forward, I found answers almost effortlessly. Characters began to emerge from my head, etched out in painstaking detail. It was like all the experiences I've had as a reporter, meeting scores and scores of interesting...well, characters, began to brew. Why yes, I knew exactly what the heroine's husband's name would be, and came up with a back story for him on the spot. Actually, I did know what the publisher of a DC legal blog called Bar Czar would eat for lunch. I could hear that woman's voice and see the way she dressed for work. I knew what she smelled like, for God's sake. It was like I began to flex a muscle I wasn't quite aware I had. And it felt really good.

While following Dahlia's project, I learned of a brilliant program called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in which participants agree to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. And I'm having this crazy idea I should give it a whirl, though the idea seems alternately ludicrous, terrifying and exhilarating. Literally within a day or so of first hearing about Nanowrimo, one of my oldest friends randomly e-mailed me out of the blue (or maybe not) to ask if I was familiar with it. I took that as a sign.

Then, Tweet Deck randomly (or not) recommended I follow someone on Twitter. I clicked on the profile, only to learn that she was longtime freelance magazine writer -- a diehard pop culture junkie who's profiled scores of celebs -- who has become a bestselling novelist. I took that as a sign.

Randomly, (or not) I also noticed that an old college acquaintance I haven't thought about in 20 years had replied to a mutual friend's Facebook status. I looked her up, only to learn that she now runs a way cool business as what she calls a "writing/creativity/life coach." She helps creative people focus their energies and find their specific creative calling. I took that as a sign.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer I admire enormously then randomly (or not) sent me a message about my Twitter profile. "Hey, whoever you are: Your name and your bio are excellent," he wrote. There was that question again. Who am I? I took that as a sign.

But then the real sign came. My agent emailed with a potential ghostwriting project. I found myself getting genuinely excited at the idea of working, of flexing those dormant muscles again. The project didn't work out this time, but it's left me craving the chance to do something creative, though I confess I'm not sure what that should be. (The novel? I might just be talking smack.) I find myself unmistakably hungry for the storytelling process that was my lifesblood for so long, for the maddening but blissfully satisfying art of forging something beautiful with words. It's who I am.

A footnote:
To help answer the burning question of Who are you?, (or maybe, more precisely, to answer the question of Who were you?) I've created a new sidebar on my blog. Though until now, CTTK has largely been nothing but a personal forum to showcase how impossibly cute my kids are, I've linked to a small and probably somewhat haphazard sampling of some of the magazine work I used to do. In other words, I've resurrected my professional persona and it will now vie for attention in this space with those two little boys I adore beyond words. I'm hoping in the case of this particular fight, we can find a way for everybody to win.

Wordless Wednesday: Hangman Makes Me Happy

2009-10-13T23:21:00.005-04:00

Ethan was the giver. :-)

And yes, I realize that my blog has become nothing but a series of Wordless Wednesday posts. I'm waiting for... inspiration. Stay tuned.

Wordless Wednesday: The First Pacifier is Just a Gateway Drug

2009-10-07T15:30:00.000-04:00

Wordless Wednesday

2009-09-23T16:47:00.004-04:00

Let's call this one, "Random things you find in your dryer when you're the mother of two small boys." Uhhh...I have no idea. :-0

Hey! Author of "Hands Are Not For Hitting"!!

2009-09-19T14:57:00.004-04:00

We want our money back.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: Lost

2009-09-16T11:19:00.004-04:00

Ethan's discovered The Magic Tree House.

We're thinking we might hear from him again when he's, like, fifteen.

Your Story Here

2009-09-09T21:40:00.004-04:00

I thought at first it was a dead animal. Roadkill.

Instinctively, I averted my gaze and tried not to drive over the pile of matted fur that was lying in the middle of Baltimore's Greenspring Avenue.

But then I got a better look and realized it wasn't a carcass at all. It was just...hair. Human hair. And lots of it. Cascading curls, to be exact. Now I'm no expert on wigs, but I'm pretty sure it was what's called a "fall": a hairpiece meant to be worn in addition to one's own hair rather than in place of it.

But why was it lying in the middle of a busy city thoroughfare? And did it have anything to do with that poor orphaned shoe I wrote about last month?

It's Wednesday. I'm wordless. What have you got? ;-)

Wordless Wednesday: He Wanted to be Cozy

2009-09-09T10:25:00.001-04:00

I love this boy....

Itchy

2009-08-11T14:05:00.013-04:00

So today is my 7th wedding anniversary.

Feeling predictably nostalgic, I started going through my wedding photos and remembering the amazing summer day when I stood in what has to be the most beautiful room in Baltimore -- the Peabody Library -- and said my vows.

(You can click on these photos to see them full size.)

In the jenmen world, however, snark often trumps sentimentality. And humor always trumps everything.

And so, in honor of my anniversary, I present you not with a treacly recounting of my wedding or of the seven blissful years since, but rather, the following.

Greg and I honeymooned on the Amalfi Coast of Italy. Heaven on earth, for sure. And then we spent a few days in Paris. Where we found ourselves, rather predictably, at the Eiffel Tower one morning, trying to get that perfect souvenir photo.

Now let it be said that when it comes to taking photos, it's clear that all the talent in the family went to my brother Matt (who took the photos above, btw.) I have basically no idea what I'm doing with a camera.

And so it was a great relief when we came across a European couple who appeared to be professional photographers. They were grappling with several cameras, and some heavy duty photo equipment, engaged in what appeared to be a heated argument about perspective. Trying to get the perfect shot, they were pretzeling themselves into Twister-like contortions.

We even got a photo of them at work:

Delighted, we asked if they would take our photo.

And this is the shot they got of us:

Wait, let's try that one again, shall we?

OK, maybe next honeymoon.

Thankfully, later that afternoon, a random stranger took this for us, one of my very favorite pictures of the two of us.

The Eiffel Tower skewers my head. Miraculously, I smile. Now that's what I call deliriously happy.

Thanks for seven great years, Greg. Here's to many many many more... Oh, and thanks to Tariq, our awesomely honest Parisian taxi driver, who Fedexed our camera back to us after ~~you~~ we left it in the back of his cab at the airport.

Storytime

2009-08-08T20:56:00.008-04:00

For as long as I can remember, I've been endlessly fascinated by other people's stories. When I go to a wedding or bar mitzvah, even if my connection to the festivities is tangential at best, I feel compelled to learn everything about the celebrating family. I want to know all their back stories -- to figure out which cousin belongs to which black sheep uncle, and which sister-in-law is the Iraq war veteran with a medical degree from Harvard.

When I see a homeless person on the street, I can't help wondering, "How did they end up there?" I want to fill in the missing parts of the trajectory from the little boy running through a sprinkler under a mother's loving, watchful eye, to the man standing on the side of Northern Parkway with a sign asking for money.

It's the storyteller in me, the reason I've spent most of my adult life dropping into other people's lives for a short while to learn their stories, and then telling them in the many magazines and newspapers I've written for. In all honesty, I think it's a bit of cowardice that inspired my professional life. I'm perpetually fearful that I'm not particularly interesting or insightful enough on my own. I prefer to be the empty vessel, filled up with the collective energy from all those amazingly interesting people I've trailed over the years, the Grammy winners and Senators and middle school teachers and good Samaritans.

And it's not even just people's stories that fascinate me. It's any story. Stories about places and things, even. When we pulled out the rusted medicine cabinet in our 1930 bathroom, I was morbidly fascinated by the cache of used straight razor blades we discovered in the empty space in our wall. (Apparently, old-style medicine cabinets had a slot in which to deposit them.) It wasn't quite as shocking as finding, say, a dead body or a dinosaur bone, but it felt almost thrilling to me, somehow. A tangible link connecting us to the stranger who'd stood in our bathroom all those mornings years ago.

Which brings me, somewhat improbably, to a blog post about a shoe.

Specifically, a slightly grannyish, black leather Franco Sarto woman's pump.

At about 5:00 in the evening on Saturday, I dashed out for a last minute run to the grocery store. And as I walked into our neighborhood Shopper's, I couldn't help but notice that there was a single shoe perched rather regally on a concrete ledge facing the parking lot. There was nobody around. Not a soul. (The store is frequented by a heavily Orthodox population and is notoriously empty on Saturdays.)

There was just this....shoe.

I had to take a picture. I just had to.

Immediately, my mind began to wander. How had that shoe -- especially just one of them -- ended up in that spot, at that moment? Where was its owner? Where was its...mate?

I know that there are all sorts of fascinating urban legend-y theories about why shoes get hung over power lines, but I've never heard anything about leaving singletons in grocery store parking lots.

And so I'm putting it out to you.

Use the comments section of this post to create a plausible (or not) explanation for the fate of this poor abandoned piece of footwear. You know it has a story. Everything has a story. So let's see what you've got, shall we?

Wordless Wednesday

2009-08-05T08:51:00.002-04:00

Why not-quite-two year olds are only of limited value when it comes to emptying dishwashers...Thanks, Alec!

Thanks, Kenny B

2009-07-17T19:58:00.006-04:00

So my old friend Ken Baker of E!, who I helped get his job at People magazine way back in the mesozoic era of journalism -- pre-Facebook, pre-Google, pre-Blackberries, and not quite but almost pre-e-mail, gave me a shout out on Twitter today. (Remember when "Ask Jeeves" seemed like the coolest thing ever? And your cell phone weighed about 14 pounds?)

If you're one of Ken's tweeps stopping by, hey! Thanks for visiting. And while you're at it, follow me on Twitter, won't ya? I'm only 14,094 followers behind!

Oh, and tell him I love him, even if he does look just like Murray the Red Wiggle.

Some gratuitous Friday fun

2009-07-17T12:29:00.003-04:00

So do you think this is a statement about my less-than-stellar housekeeping, or about his undying love for Sesame Street? ;-)

Gremlins

2009-07-06T13:08:00.006-04:00

I've never been much of a conspiracy theorist.

Moon landing? Totally happened. 9/11? Bin Laden and Al Queda, plain and simple. And I don't lose any sleep at night thinking that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But lately I have to confess that I'm becoming increasingly gripped with paranoia that a nefarious force is at work in my life. Don't tell anyone, ok? But it's got to be...gremlins.

How else to explain the regularity with which items in my life disappear, as if swallowed up by black holes? Where else could Ethan's "Touchdown" pajamas be? Where in God's name is that years-old Tiffany's gift card, which managed to vanish right after I was (shockingly) actually able to locate it and send Tiffany's a form confirming that I did, in fact, still have it? And why is that when I search and search for the missing cap to a marker, the very moment I finally locate the cap I can no longer find the marker itself??

I'm disorganized. Horribly. Pathologically. I know that. I spend ridiculous amounts of time looking for things. But there's a whimsical quality to my searches, one that has me believing someone is watching and laughing. It's different from the way, that, say, my husband misplaces his wallet and car keys all the time. How, you ask?

Well, I once was determined to reprogram my universal remote. You know, where you do that godawful thing where you try all the different codes to make it actually turn the tv on and off? But I ended up unwittingly acting out what must have looked like an Abbott and Costello routine. As soon as I put my hands on the long lost remote instructions, I swear to God that the remote itself was then nowhere to be found. And as soon as I put my finger on the remote, the instructions would mysteriously vaporize into thin air. This went on for a truly unreasonable period of time. I started to wonder if I were on Candid Camera.

Yesterday, en route to my in-laws' house, I became convinced I had left my sunglass clip at the pool. It's custom-made to fit my glasses; losing it would be a serious pain in the ass. So, upon arriving at their house, I nervously popped the trunk and scrounged through the pool bag. I was so relieved to find it that I did what any normal person would do: I put it in a pocket inside my purse, so I wouldn't misplace it again.

And now I have absolutely no idea where it is. Turned the bag inside out. It's just...gone.

And that's why I think it's gremlins. They saw my concern, the ensuing relief, and...laughed. They mocked my attempt to be pre-emptively organized.

To wit: A few weeks ago, I wanted to return a shirt to Macy's. I was so proud of myself because I actually located the Macy's receipt, no small feat in my world. Or so I thought. Because only after I zoomed up to Macy's during the one 20 minute window I had free that day, and then waited in line at the register, did I realize that I was holding the receipt for something else, and that I'd wasted precious babysitter time on a useless errand. Take that, Miss "I'm Actually Going to File My Receipts So I Can Locate Them."

And here's where the Gremlins come in.

Because the very next day -- the very next day! -- I put on a pair of shorts and felt something in the pocket. And wouldn't you know, it was the receipt for that damned shirt. The weird part, though, is that the receipt was dated February 15. When I think I can pretty safely assume I wasn't wearing those shorts. How did it get in there? I have no earthly idea.

But I think he might.

Go on, laugh. I dare you. But then don't expect to find your car keys.

From the Mouths of Babes

2009-07-03T13:54:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I had one of those moments at the playground.

A chatty little munchkin plopped himself next to me as I sat watching my boys play in the sandbox.

He told me he was four.

And then he said, apropos of nothing, "I know a rhyme!"

What followed was a true Hallmark moment: an impossibly adorable impromptu rhyme slam between the two of us.

He did cat and bat. I did shoe and blue.

Ladida ladida. Aren't little kids just sooooooo creative and delightful, I thought dreamily.

Until it was his turn. And he came up with "digger" and, well, a word that rhymes with it starting with n.

I froze. Literally. About a million things went through my head at once. Was it my place to tell him that that wasn't a nice word? Should I tell his mother? Or was his mother was the one who taught him that word? You know, when you're sitting at home teaching your four-year-old words that rhyme with digger?

In the end, I just decided to believe that it was an unfortunate accident, and that he could have just as easily said "wigger" or "zigger." Because nobody actually sends their four-year-old out into the world anymore thinking it's ok to use that word in public, right??

Right??

Where's the Love?

2009-07-01T14:10:00.009-04:00

So maybe you heard the story that was circulating a couple of weeks ago?

A woman named Danielle Smith, a mommy blogger from Saint Louis, had gotten an unnerving message from a college friend now living in the Czech Republic. Did Danielle know, he asked, that a family photo of hers he'd seen on Facebook -- the Smiths' holiday card photo, actually -- was being used as an advertisement on the front of a local grocery store? Well, no, actually. Danielle didn't know that.

Quite naturally, Danielle blogged about this strange turn of events. And as sometimes happens, her story grew legs and went viral. Thousands of people visited her blog and weighed in on the saga of the stolen Christmas card picture and how she and her family unwittingly ended up shilling for cereal, half a world away. Hundreds of media outlets the world over told her story.

But this post is not about Danielle's photo, per se. What I found even more fascinating is that in the aftermath of her initial post about the stolen photo escapade, Danielle felt obligated to write another post. This one was about the incredible amount of vitriol directed at her. Writing about the quirky little photo caper opened Danielle up to the cesspool of vipers. You know, the anonymous online hordes who spend their time looking to say cruel things about anyone they can? They came to Danielle's blog to tell her that her family was ugly. They belittled Danielle and those who defended her as "soccer moms....clearly bewildered on Bisquick and oven cleaner." They haughtily scoffed at her stupidity for posting photos of her family on her blog or Facebook. Because clearly everybody who does something so supremely idiotic should just sit back and wait for those photos to be plastered on grocery store windows in foreign countries. "Get over yourself," a commenter calling himself "Brighteyedangel" wrote.

Ironically, Danielle herself had marveled just weeks earlier at the depths of hatred online, reeling from a comment on the uber-popular mommy blogger Heather Armstrong's site, dooce.com. Armstrong, who was then 35 weeks pregnant, wrote about an unexpected ultrasound. And this is what she heard in return:

162. Anonymous said:

Too bad. I am still hoping something horrible happens to that troll fetus inside of you. What is it like having such a hideous daughter? I wonder what she’s going to do when all the kids start picking on her for being ugly? Ugh. It’s so disgusting you are bringing another creature into the world. Don’t end up in the looney bin this time. LOL

Anyone who's ever written anything online, whether it be a column, a blog, or a message board posting, inevitably sees it happen. I've seen mothers on a parenting message board ridicule someone else's child as ugly. Years ago, when I wrote a humor column for Slate -- a humor column! -- my work would occasionally be teased on the MSN homepage. Whenever that happened, scores of people who were clearly not regular Slate readers would click on the link. And then they would proceed to leave comments.

What would they say about my lighthearted humor column, you ask? Oh, you know, that I was a stupid f*cking worthless bitch who didn't deserve to live. That I was a moron who had no right to have a column. That sort of thing. I can't even remember all the names and epithets that were hurled at me. For something as innocuous as writing funny columns about the supermarket tabloids. It floored me, seriously. The level of hostility out there is beyond terrifying.

But now I know for certain that no one, and no subject, is immune from this kind of spewing. Blogger Heather Spohr posted yesterday about the ongoing agony she feels as she grieves the unexpected loss of her 17 month old daughter, Maddie.

And look what some peach of a chick named "Kelly" chose to share with her:

I don't want to put too fine a point on it, and I hesitated whether it was even worth drawing further attention to, but just try to imagine, if you will, sitting down at your computer, composing the above and hitting "post" on the blog of a woman whose baby died not quite three months ago. Who are these people? And what in God's name is wrong with them? (Full disclosure: I have left comments on Heather's blog that I later regretted may have come off differently than I intended; it's sometimes hard to say the right thing to someone in pain. But I can say with absolute certainty I was never this far off base.)

And it doesn't stop there. I just came across this terrifying New York Times Magazine article about online trolls. Trolls who make a sport of, say, ridiculing the families of children who've killed themselves. You know, that sort of thing. Lord knows I am no purveyor of puppy dogs and rainbows. I'm as cynical and jaded a former New Yorker as they come. But this makes me feel incredibly naive. And honestly frightened.

What terrifies me is that this can't be just an Internet phenomenon. Anonymous and Brighteyedangel and Kelly aren't just screennames. They're people, with arms and legs and hearts (well, not really.) They work in the cubicle next to us. They serve us fries and a shake. They're our cousin's next door neighbor. They're the mom with three kids we held the door for at Target. And they are so clearly seething with hatred and loathing. Must it bubble up in their real lives as well, or does the Internet simply provide an effortless outlet for them to spew without real consequence?

I'm not sure. And I'm not sure I want to find out.

He Never Forgets a Face. Literally.

2009-06-17T12:33:00.007-04:00

With great trepidation and fear that this is going to make me be that mom, I need to share something remarkable that Alec did yesterday that literally took my breath away.

We've learned in the last six months or so that Alec, who will be two in August, is fiercely gregarious. And he never -- ever -- seems to forget people's names, even people we see only occasionally. I keep joking that he's going to be a politician. Or a car dealer. He likes to repeat people's names. Constantly. He also likes to wave while saying people's names, even when he's in very close proximity to them, a combination I find particularly adorable. (Adults don't usually stand very close to one another, wave and enthusiastically say, "Hi Bill! Hi Bill!" as if they're greeting a long lost relative, especially if they've just said hello not five minutes earlier.) But I'm his mother. Of course I think it's adorable.

Anyway, so here's what happened. I've been taking Alec to a Monday class at My Gym. His regular teachers are named Miss Megan and Miss Megan. (Meaning that during a typical My Gym class, he shouts, "Hi Mitt Megan!!" about eleventy billion times.) But the week of Memorial Day, the gym was closed for the holiday, so we took a makeup class on a Thursday. The Thursday class was led by one of the Miss Megans and another teacher we had never met named Miss Christina.

Fast forward to yesterday. We switched our regular My Gym day to Tuesday. We walk in and see the ever-present Miss Megan. "Hi Mitt Megan!" Alec said with a smile. Standing next to her was Miss Christina, whom he had met once. Two and a half weeks ago.

"What's her name?" I asked for fun, honestly never expecting him to pull it out.

"Mitt Christina!" he said without hesitation.

I clapped my hand over my mouth. Christina's jaw dropped on the floor. Megan started to laugh.

I honestly have no idea how he does this. But someone just told me about this Harvard study, which identified a class of people known as "super recognizers." I'm no scientist, and I have no idea if children even qualify, but I'm saying that has to be what Alec is. I love that it includes the word "super," which makes the whole thing seem vaguely like Spidey powers. But clearly we're onto something.

Now to set up an exploratory committee for Alec's 2042 Congressional bid. I'll just have to pray he's a Democrat.

It Goes to Eleven. Not.

2009-06-07T21:29:00.004-04:00

For the last I don't know how many years, our microwave has not been working optimally.

More specifically, out of the nine digits on the keypad, only the ones in the far left column -- the "1," the "4" and the "7" -- actually work.

Rather than ditching the microwave, this predicament has forced my husband and I to use our creativity. And we've learned, quite refreshingly, that you really only need three digits on a microwave. A frozen pancake is perfect after 44 seconds. 71 seconds works just fine for anything that's supposed to cook for a minute. (1-1-1 will get you there, too, but of course requires an extra keystroke. And it's all about efficiency in our house.) 1-7-1 will get you get you pretty damn close to two minutes. 4-1-1 will reheat a container of Chinese leftovers like nobody's business. And so on and so forth. We've long joked that we were going to write The One-Four-Seven Cookbook, which would only include dishes that can be prepared using those three numbers.

In the last few days, however, we've had a heart-stopping turn of events.

Our 7 no longer works. Our dreams of being perched atop the bestseller list have come crashing down around us.

Because trying to cook with just a 1 and a 4 just might push the limits of our culinary (and mathematical) prowess. I think, sadly, the time has come to retire this microwave. (Or, perhaps, to send it to the Smithsonian?)

I'm sure by week's end there will be a gleaming new little number on our counter, one with nine perfectly good digits just begging to be used. All of them. We'll actually just punch, say, "4-3-0" to heat a Lean Cuisine for four and a half minutes, instead of 4-1-7 or 4-4-4. But I don't know. What fun is that? Where's the challenge? It just seems so...easy.

So I'm taking a moment to bid farewell to our little scrappy microwave, our little $50 piece of Japanese engineering. Despite being, um, differently abled, you've served us well, friend. Godspeed.

2 Cool 2 Be 4Gotten

2009-05-19T23:03:00.009-04:00

So here we are, at the end of yet another season, feeling all wistful and sad, turning our chairs over on our desks and writing in each others' autograph books. Didn't this season just fly by? Will we see each other over the summer? Will we be in the same class next year?

I had a stunning realization last night, one that I wish I had learned much, much earlier in the season: American Idol is ten times more enjoyable when there's a glass of Malbec involved. It made hearing Randy say both "You can sing your face off!" and "You can sing the phone book!" in a single episode that much more tolerable.

It did not, however, make that godawful "coronation" song No Boundaries go down any easier, unfortunately. For the eighth time, I cringed from the first note to the last. Hearing Kara had co-written this one, I was momentarily optimistic. I like her. She seems cool. I thought she might bring something new to the table. They're always blathering about how they want contestants to be contemporary. Perhaps this would be a step in that direction. You know, like actually give them a contemporary song as their first single.

And then I heard the lines, "With every step, I climb another mountain." And I knew it was all over.

Please. For the love of all that is good and holy, make it stop. Whitney Houston had a great version of this song in 1986. It was called The Greatest Love of All and we all heard it at our high school graduations. I can still sing every word. And that was more than 20 years ago. Are we really still doing this, with the dreaming, and the flying, and the climbing mountains and the believing in yourself? Really? It's the same damn crap every time.

And so, without further ado, I present my recipe for an American Idol Coronation song.

1 liberal cup dreaming
1/2 c climbing mountains
1/3 c believing (preferably in yourself)
1/4 c flying
1/4 c breathing

Mix generously with moments, lifetimes and wings. Garnish with schlock, cheese and gagging. Go straight to Billboard Hot 100.

So now you're going to ask me who's going to win tonight, and I'm supposed to get it right. This is a toughie, peeps. A real toughie. Last year I was sooooooooo sure it was David Archuleta. Totally sure. And I was soooooooo wrong.

This year, I feel like common sense says it has to be Adam, the clear front runner. He towered over Kris, if the judges are to believed. He's the best contestant EVER, they tell us. He's the obvious heir to the throne. It's totally Adam, right? But if I predict that, and it's true, that's so....boring.

Could squeaky little under-the-radar Kris play David and slay Adam Lambert's Goliath? Remember that I wondered last week if we've been set up for this "dark horse" story all along. He really wasn't that great last night, at all. If you had watched the show for the very first time last night, like my brother Matt did, you'd never peg him as a star. (Matt predicted "Where are they now" status for both contestants in five years, fwiw.)

Which is why I'm going to say that...Kris Allen is the next American Idol. Ack! Did I really just write that? I'll be so happy if it's true. I'm just still not sure I believe it.

And if he isn't, well, I'm going to take my cue from MTV and look on the bright side. "If Allen loses because of “No Boundaries,” it will be a shame," they wrote. "But even if he loses, he wins, because that means he won’t have to release it as his debut single." Neener, Neener, Adam.

Three's a Crowd

2009-05-13T12:45:00.004-04:00

Oh wait, is there a blog to be written? I'm too busy cowering in the corner from how much Adam Lambert's earpieces had the unfortunate effect of making him look like Dr. Spock last night. I was skeered. But this is the only picture I could find.

So, um, Adam's going to be in the finals. He's got to be, right? Because nobody's listening to what I think. But I'll say it anyway. I'm just so...confused. I sort of had a love/hate relationship with Adam's rendition of One, and a hate/hate relationship with his rendition of Cryin'. Where I think Adam excels, you see, is in the Broadway ballad-y kind of thing. That's where he sometimes gives me chills, and where I see the incredible artistry of his voice. I can totally get that he's in the cast of Rent. Where Adam makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little is when he does his rock god impersonation. It just. doesn't. work. for me. Not ever. Even my husband said last night, "Who's going to buy his record?" I dunno. Maybe they told Freddie Mercury the same thing. And he seemed to do all right in the end.

We all know the only question tonight is whether Adam will face off against scruffily sympathetic widower Danny or dreamboat boy-of-the-moment Kris. Can anyone guess which way I'm leaning? I sort of suspect deep down that my boy Kris will go, just as I (incorrectly) predicted last week. But now I'm starting to wonder if there's more of a wellspring of support for Kris than we've been led to believe. The whole dark horse thing. Remember that they didn't even show a single clip of him in the preliminary rounds. And they seemed to anoint Danny from early on. So, I'm going to put on my rose-colored glasses and send Danny packing. Just for a goof. Say hi to the kids in Sunday school!

Amateur Night

2009-05-06T16:19:00.005-04:00

Over the last umpteen seasons watching American Idol, I've developed a litmus test of sorts. I sit back and watch a performance and try to imagine the singer as an established recording artist performing on an awards show, or say, The Today Show. Would they stick out as egregiously out of place?

Some contestants over the years have passed with flying colors. Fantasia singing "Summertime"? Check. Just about anything Carrie Underwood did? Check.

Last night was one of those nights where almost nobody passed my test. It all felt, to me, like some awful American Idol prom, where the theme was "rock and roll" and all the kids were doing their best to dress up. Even Kara, in her heinous black leather studded getup and tough girl hairdo, seemed like the favorite English teacher, trying to be a cool chaperone.

I know everyone in the universe loves Adam Lambert. I get that. But I can't explain why he just doesn't move me. I hate Led Zeppelin, so probably nothing he could have done would have won me over, but Kara calling him a "rock God"? Really? Am I just completely out of touch? Where is the market for a totally gay, eyeliner-wearing hard rock star? Do 12 year old girls love him? Enlighten me.

My favorite of the night was, well, Kris. I'm starting to see Kris through a pink puffy lens, with Partridge Family songs playing in the background every time he appears. I just love him, and thought he did much better than the judges gave him credit for. I even liked him and Danny doing Styx, an admission that will totally eradicate any hopes I ever have of being considered cool.

Allison was clearly in her element, delivering another solid performance. And her lipstick was positively mesmerizing.

As for Danny, I'm still trying to recover from the trauma induced by his shriek-arific Dream On.

Now, as for who's going home, I have a weird feeling something unexpected might be happening tonight. Did Simon's calling Danny safe mean his fans didn't call, and could it possibly be Danny? (And was that purposeful on Simon's part?) I don't know. I'm going to stay in my safe zone. I'm sure it's either Allison or Kris, and am tempted to flip a coin. I could just predict Allison's departure and be wrong for the third time. (Or is it fourth now?) Anyway, I'm going to be safe and, with a heavy heart, say farewell to Kris. It was good while it lasted, little buddy.

Inspiration

2009-04-30T21:11:00.006-04:00

So remember how I started this blog talking about being challenged to do something really extraordinary in 2009? Not long afterwards, I learned that my friend Leslie Nordin was doing something truly extraordinary: she was training to run the Boston Marathon blindfolded, to teach her son, who is blind, that he could accomplish anything he set his mind to. (You can read my original post about Leslie here.)

Well, I am so thrilled to report that Leslie not only finished the marathon, but she did it in four hours and 17 minutes, which many runners would love to do with their eyes wide open. And in the process, she raised an astonishing $31,000 for the Perkins School for the Blind, where her son Sawyer is a student.

At a time when words like "hero" and phrases like "you're an inspiration" get tossed around far too easily, I think what Leslie did is truly astonishing, and it fills my heart with hope and joy.

"It was simply one of the most life-affirming, uplifting and joyous experiences I've ever been a part of," reports Leslie's sister Natalie. Natalie made a little video of the day, and I'll confess that once again I teared up reading the shirts that Leslie's supporters wore.

I'm working on that New York Times piece I said I would publish this year. Really, I am.

Allison! Allison! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!

2009-04-29T11:43:00.003-04:00

OK, people. From here on out I'm just going to say every week it's Allison. Because I've only been wrong twice this season. And both times it's because I've incorrectly predicted her departure. So if I just keep saying Allison, I have to be right eventually, right?

But I actually loved Allison last night, for doing a bang up job on one of my all-time favorite songs, Someone to Watch Over Me. My boy Kris did a solid The Way You Look Tonight. I'm going to love watching those two battle it out for third place, because unless we have a Oh-My-God-Chris-Daughtry-got-kicked-off-in-4th-place moment, the finals will almost certainly be Adam and Danny. Have I mentioned I don't like Adam? Yes, I think I have. (By the way, I've gotten used to the fact that Adam wears eyeliner, but I could swear he had pink lip gloss on last night, too.) And I'm no huge Danny fan, either. Which makes for a pretty anti-climactic rest of the season for me.

Tonight's departure will, of course, be Matt. Because I don't know what Simon was smoking, or whether it's all part of some grand conspiracy where the judges purposefully prop up or ream certain contestants regardless of their performance, but Matt was just horrible.

He'll be joined in the bottom three by Allison and Kris, but he will depart, just as he should have two weeks ago before they did that whole judges' save nonsense. Buh-bye weird moley-skintag-thingie!

Hot Stuff?

2009-04-22T14:17:00.005-04:00

Disco week, baby!

So here's who I know for sure is not going home tonight on American Idol:
Adam Lambert
Danny Gokey

Here's who I think should go home:
Lil Rounds
Matt Giraud

Here's who I think could go home:
Lil
Matt
Allison
Anoop
and -- I almost can't bear to say it -- my boy Kris, who DialIdol once again has near the bottom, my calls clearly notwithstanding. There should be a muffin named after Kris he's so cute.

If DialIdol is to believed, it's definitely not going to be Lil, but some combo of Anoop, Matt, Kris and Allison.

For once, I really have absolutely no idea. (Excuse me while I pat myself on the back for getting five of the last six weeks correct, btw. Why must this be the year there's no money on it? Why? Why?)

I'm feeling uber-cranky today and can't think of anything funny to say. I have a feeling DialIdol is right and Lil will somehow live to see another week. I once again stubbornly refuse it to be Kris. And while it very well might be Anoop, and I'll go ahead and say he's bottom three, I'm just going to go with Matt and Allison to get the boot, even though I've incorrectly predicted Allison's departure once before. (She's tricky, I tell ya.) I'm tired of looking at that skin taggy mole-ish thing in the center of Matt's forehead, anyway.

Lucky Seven

2009-04-15T14:33:00.003-04:00

Was it just me or has American Idol begun to stall a bit? Last night was, well, it was just alright for me. I found myself just wanting to get it over with already.

The highlights for me? Well number one has nothing to do with American Idol, really, but was the sight of actor Phil LaMarr, who is married to one of my best friends from camp, cowering in the corner in the scene from Pulp Fiction at the opening of the Tarantino tribute. (He was the guy who accidentally gets his head blown off in the back of the car.) So now I can say I know someone who was on American Idol. Kind of.

Anyway, my real number one highlight would be Kris, who is quickly gaining in my affection, choosing the awesome song "Falling Slowly" from the magical little Irish film Once. The highlight wasn't necessarily Kris' performance, which was heartfelt but didn't exactly bring me to my knees, but just that he chose it. It seemed a cool, non-Idolish thing to do. And we like that 'round here. We also think Kris is ridiculously dreamy.

Number two would be Anoop, who will never, in a million years, win this thing, but whose voice I love and whose eyebrows fascinate me. Memo to the stylists, however: Why is he always dressed like he's Archie from the comics, with those letter sweater-looking things and thin ties? Does the fact that he's a graduate student automatically mean your only choice is to dress him like he's going to a fraternity sock hop, circa 1955?

Number three is going to be Danny, only because I'm old enough to have, like, seen Endless Love in a theater and have a huge soft spot for that song, which he delivered pretty spot on. I think Danny will clearly go on to have a career of some sort, whether he wins this thing or not. DialIdol says he was last night's biggest votegetter, no doubt for sentimental reasons.

While I'm clearly in the minority, judging by the reaction in the theater, the lowest point for me was Adam's Born to be Wild screechfest. Adam doing Mad World? Brilliant. Tracks of My Tears? Inspired. But it's when Adam lets loose his inner Steven Tyler that I cringe with embarrassment for him. I'm just not a fan. The eye makeup was flawless, though.

I'll confess I barely watched Allison's competent I Don't Want to Miss a Thing, and felt the judges were a little too harsh on Lil's gospel-inspired The Rose. (Though she once again proved without a doubt she's this season's biggest disappoinment.) And Matt just kind of sleepwalked through another week with Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? I think it's just enough to have him fall through the cracks.

DialIdol puts Kris dead last, followed by Matt and Allison, but we know they said the same thing last week and they were wrong. I'm being stubborn and refusing to think my cutiepie Kris is even in the bottom three.

So I'm going to say bottom three are Matt, Allison and Lil, although I suspect Anoop could very likely be in that third spot instead of Lil. Sayonara Matt.

For Maddie

2009-04-14T16:23:00.003-04:00

Little Maddie Spohr's funeral is beginning right now. I've spent much of today thinking of her parents and wondering how on earth you get up on the day you're going to bury your child.

Like everyone else, I feel so helpless. If only the collective power of caring felt around the world could be harnessed somehow.

And so, in Maddie's honor, I'm posting this photo, as are scores of bloggers all over the world at this exact moment.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

2009-04-12T21:33:00.012-04:00

I got a facebook message Friday night from my friend Vicki, who knows I can't turn away from a sad story. (And who, not coincidentally, is the person who prompted me to blog about one not long ago.)

She follows a woman named Heather Spohr on Twitter. Heather writes a hilarious blog called The Spohrs are Multiplying, about the ups and downs of raising her 17 month old daughter Maddie, who was born 11 weeks early. The blog is enormously popular, with untold thousands of people following Maddie's every adorable move.

It's easy to see why. Maddie is just one of those kids that you see once and never forget. That impish little face. Her other-worldly eyes.

Even the quickest of scans through Heather's blog makes you want her to be your mother. And the love she has for that little imp, who struggled so hard to make it into the world, is all but palpable.

Heather was tweeting last Tuesday that Maddie had been hospitalized after a bad cough that failed to respond to oxygen treatment, which was nothing terribly new for the Spohrs. She joked about the hot EMT in the ambulance, and the lack of choices in the hospital cafeteria. Then, at 4 p.m, she wrote "They're going to intubate her, I'm freaking out." At 9:16 a friend updated Heather's blog saying that Madeline had died. Just like that.

It's times like this I wish I could summon something like a semblance of faith. I envy those who believe there is a higher purpose for an event like this one; I just can't muster one no matter how hard I try. I envy those who can take comfort believing that Maddie is now with God. Or Jesus. To me? I can only see a mother and father forced to suffer a gaping, ferocious, unhealable wound. And a dark spot in the world where once there was a very special little elf of a baby girl who should by all rights be snuggled in bed right now, just like my sons are.

The only comfort I draw is that much like the death of Emilie Lemmons, Maddie Spohr's death has created an overwhelming outpouring of love and support. In just five days, over $23,000 has been raised for the March of Dimes in Maddie's memory. Close to 400 people have blogged about Maddie. The entire blognosh.com site is currently devoted to writings about Maddie. (There's also an article about the Spohrs in today's LA Times.) And thousands of children, including two who happen to live in my house, have no doubt been hugged and kissed with reckless abandon, even after they left half-eaten crackers on the train table. Must. Not. Sweat. Thepettyshit.

Since I'm not a Christian, I don't want to put too fine a point on the fact that today is Easter. But having spent much of the weekend musing on what could possibly be redemptive about a senseless, heartbreaking death, perhaps it's not entirely coincidental that I accidentally stumbled on this today and it made me feel hopeful again. If there's a faith to be had, I feel confident I have faith in whatever this is.

Sound of Music Train Station @ Yahoo! Video

Rest in peace, Maddie.

And if you're feeling inspired, you can use one of these buttons to make a donation, either to the Spohrs themselves, who are self-employed, to help with funeral costs and loss of income, or to the March of Dimes.

The Year They Were Born

2009-04-08T08:07:00.005-04:00

I bet you thought I was going to go on and on about how I'm freaking out they were all born when I was already in high school. Or college. That they're the same age as the kids I used to babysit. Or, in Allison's case, they were born when I was already two years out of college and living on my own. Which makes me easily old enough to be her mother, let alone her babysitter. And probably way too old to be obsessed with this show.

Anyway, that's not what I'm going to go on and on about. I'm going to go on and on about what a strange up and down night it was. Yo-yo indeed, just as Simon said. If you were down last week (Matt, Anoop) you worked it out. If you were up last week (Kris!) you stank. But can I just say that I am so done with Simon calling performances "indulgent, boring, and forgettable"? Kris' wasn't the greatest performance, but it wasn't indulgent. Adam having sex on stage to Ring of Fire was indulgent. Learn some new adjectives, Simon.

Clearly, once again, Adam shone way above the pack. I have a special soft spot in my heart for Tears for Fears, and he was incredible, even though I had to watch him on the web since my DVR cut him off. But I'm starting to wonder if we're being set up here in a Clay Aiken-kind of way. Clear frontrunners sometimes don't win American Idol. I, for one, was completely convinced David Archuleta was a lock last year. Oops.

Anyway, my homeboy Anoop boomeranged back into the top for me, although DialIdol has him in the bottom three. I would hate for him to go. Allison and Danny were predictably solid, but Danny is somehow starting to get really boring for me and verging on grating. Matt was good, although not quite as good as the judges seemed to think.

For me, last night's bottom three were Kris, Lil and Scott. Kris' performance somehow reminded me of a band from my high school doing a much-loved rendition of The Hooters' "And We Danced." I don't think Lil quite deserved the dreaded "it's just karaoke" drubbing she got, although even my somewhat pop culture illiterate mother said, "She's even dancing just like Tina Turner!" during the performance. DialIdol says it's Kris at the very bottom. Could it be? One off week and sayonara to the dark horse of the last two weeks? I hope not.

Personally, I think it's time for Scott say goodbye. And then go get his canine teeth shaved down. I'm a horrible person, aren't I?

Dear Powers That Be

2009-04-07T15:42:00.006-04:00

(Warning, this post is graphic. But might be familiar to any parents who've survived stomach bugs.)

Dear Powers that Be:

Just wanted to let you know that having the drain in my utility sink get clogged with vomit from rinsing out Alec's puke-sodden clothes, causing my washing machine to overflow and flood my entire basement was really not particularly what I needed today. Dealing with extremely sick, inconsolably miserable puking/diarrheaing toddler while trying to prepare to have 18 people here for Passover seder (while older son is off school) was really enough, thanks.

Love,

Jennifer

P.S. I'm not sure if it's mean to post a picture of your sick toddler, but he's so frigging cute in his ragdoll state it's going to break my heart. Oh, and that's not blood on his face, it's the remnants of a cherry Pedialyte popsicle.

American Idol, Week 4

2009-04-01T11:28:00.004-04:00

Um, hello? Kris Allen, anyone? Wow. Just wow.

So I'm thinking that last night broke down neatly into three little trios.

At the top, Kris, Danny and Adam. Who might well be gunning for the final three at this point.

In the middle, Scott (who redeemed himself ever so slightly with a heartfelt "Just the Way You Are" and much better hair, but clearly isn't long for the competition), Lil, (Celine Dion? What-evs. She's been this year's biggest disappointment for me) and Allison, who is clearly so freaking talented it's scary but again, strikes me as someone who'll be gone before long. She's lacking ultra-likability, I think. Dialidol actually has her in the bottom three, which wouldn't surprise me at all. If you could be kicked off for your outfit, she should be.

And then my bottom three. My boy Anoop, who, much as I adore him, sadly proved that he is just way out of his depth here. Then there's the chameleon-like Matt Giraud, who just can't seem to figure out if he's Chris Martin or Ray Charles. And clearly had no idea, judging from his reaction to the judges, that he stank up the place so badly.

And then there's Megan. Oh, Megan. She has quickly become this year's Sanjaya. Or Antonella. I grimace when she takes the stage. And something about her singing reminds me of ventriloquy. Seriously. Just please, America, in the name of all things Good and Right: Send. Her. Packing. Tonight. Thank you.

Motown Week

2009-03-26T13:02:00.003-04:00

There's something about an American Idol week like this one that I both love and hate.

Love it because the bottom three are so patently obvious. Michael, Scott and Megan. I say so. Dialidol says so.

The standouts were also pretty obvious, too. Much as I can't stand Adam, I have to say his performance was in such a different league from the others it was a little embarrassing. It's so funny. You watch the judges try and explain what wasn't great about some of the other performances, struggling to find more interesting things to say than, "It was just alright, dog." Struggling to explain to someone like Scott why it's not just about singing well. At this level of competition, they've all shown they're pretty great singers. It really is, as Kara said, about artistry. And then someone like Adam gets up there and you just want to say, "Yeah. Um. What he did."

But for the record, every time he sang, "Take a good look at my face," all I could think about was how much foundation he wears.

Anyway, what's tricky about weeks like this is when three people so obviously fall well below the line, it's almost impossible to put them in the right order and say who will get the boot. I think it's a total tossup. You might as well put their names in a hat. Actually, you might as well put Michael and Megan's names in a hat. Dialidol says it's Michael, which I would have no problem with. He has the same body type as a particularly egregious former boyfriend; every performance has me reliving a rather unfortunate chapter of my life.

I could just as easily see it being Megan. (And would love -- love! -- to be spared another week of that hands-on-hips bobbing maneuver she appears to think is dancing.)

So what the hell. I'll go with Dialidol and say Buh-Bye Michael. And while we're at it, Buh-Bye to all bad boyfriends everywhere.

Fulfillment

2009-03-24T20:49:00.004-04:00

I went upstairs this afternoon to get Ethan a clean shirt after an unfortunate run-in with a squeeze yogurt.

I told him as I was going upstairs to share his snack with Alec.

While upstairs, I heard E offer his snack to Alec.

Alec said, "Thank you," or, more precisely, "TANK-OO!"

Ethan said, "You're welcome!"

My work on earth is done, right? ;-)

I've been calling this one the new logo of the International Little Brother Association. He wasn't being hurt, mind you. He just didn't want to be in the picture...

Adam Lambert, How Do I Loathe Thee?

2009-03-18T19:58:00.006-04:00

Let me count the ways.

No, actually, let me let a poster from Television Without Pity count the ways. Props to my friend Linda for sharing this with me: (And to my friend Amy for correctly pegging Adam's dated look as "My Chemical Romance, circa 2005." And then helpfully explaining that "Usually American Idol is 10 years behind the zeitgeist.")

And once again Adam screams his way into peoples' hearts. Except mine. He screamed, screeched, yelled, made too many unnecessary frills and runs and swoops, overdid it, fucked me with his range without even buying me dinner first (seriously, put it away, dude, it's not impressive if you don't know how to use it, no matter how big it is), and when he didn't do that, he was too busy moaning and humping the mic stand, making rapeface eyes and generally trying far too hard to act like he's sexy.
He gave this air of "Do you like cake? Do you like my ass? Do you want to eat cake off my ass?" No I don't. Go away. Take your hideous v-neck shirt with you. It doesn't look good on any guy, even an attractive one. Shoo, you 80's hair band reject wannabe.

OK, I feel much better now.

And I'm just so happy that my boy Anoop showed up last night. First Slumdog Millionaire, and now this.

Anyway, as for predictions. I'm having a hard time with this because of the Megan factor. I think she deserved to be bottom three, and DialIdol seems to confirm it, but wonder if a sympathy factor -- both on the part of voters and of the producers -- might come into play. (Oh, and check out this gem, which says the final four are predetermined, as I've long suspected, which makes these weekly predictions even more hopeless.)

My gut says the bottom three are Allison, Michael and Megan. DialIdol says Alexis, not Michael. I'm going to say it's the end of the road for Allison. (And because I don't have a pool and don't actually have to narrow it down, the alternate scenario is that it's Alexis in the bottom three and perhaps even going home, and she'll be "saved" by the judges.)

In the mean time, I'm going to try not to have nightmares about this face.

American Idol, Week One Predictions

2009-03-11T16:14:00.004-04:00

For the last five or six years or so, I've been way into my American Idol pool. Came in second one year. And third last year, if I remember right.

So I was devastated to learn that there will be no pool this year. Woman that runs the thing had the nerve to go and get pregnant.

Without an outlet, I'm going to impose upon all of you and post my weekly predictions. Just for fun and stuff.

Bottom three tonight:
Jasmine (the girl needs three years to grow up, get some edge, and shake that slightly plastic, pageanty vibe she's got going on)
Jorge (something about him feels very 1981)

And just for fun I'll say Megan, although the third spot was kind of a toss up for me. While she's arrestingly pretty, got cool tats and some interesting vocals, she's way too one trick pony to go the distance. And, um, Rockin' Robin??

Going home:
Jorge

Shame on you, ABC

2009-03-03T13:44:00.006-05:00

We've all been bemoaning how low reality tv is sinking. That's nothing new.

But when is ABC going to come to its senses and put a stop to the trainwreck that is The Bachelor? I mean, for real. It's simply gone beyond any semblance of human decency now. 13 seasons. 1 wedding. Congratulations, ABC. You're a regular cupid.

For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, in last night's Season Finale, Bachelor Jason (who proposed to Bachelorette DeAnna Pappas in last season's finale and was rejected) proposed to finalist Melissa. Only to dump her on the "After the Final Rose" special and then ask if the rejected first runner-up, who he sent packing in the Season Finale, might reconsider. And then proceeded to make out with her. On national television. And there's a blogger who claims to have reliable inside information that this was all planned in advance.

I don't want to sound all stick-in-the-muddish, and I don't usually get my back up about stuff like this, but enough is enough. We all have to stop this, as intelligent adults. We, as viewers, must stop watching. Companies, as advertisers, must stop advertising. We, as consumers, must stop supporting those companies who are advertising. The idea that something as important as picking a spouse can be the result of a eight week televised reality competition is disgusting. It's manipulative. It's an embarrassment to the sanctity of marriage...not that that's a loaded phrase or anything.

I distinctly remember one of the voiceovers from a previous season (yes, I've watched many of them) as the final decision loomed. I don't remember which bachelor it was (they all sound alike after a while), but he was bemoaning how difficult the final decision was. "I'm in love with two women. I can't believe how torn I am. How can I possibly make this choice?"

Well, the answer, in the real world, is you don't. If you're really that torn up about loving two people at once, it just might be a sign that this isn't the right time to ask one of them to spend eternity with you. Or, more precisely, to present them with a promotional Neil Lane diamond. (Did you see how prominently that name flashed when he opened the box?? Ugh.)

As I'm writing this, I can't even believe how ridiculous all this sounds. And don't even get me started on the fact that Jason Mesnick is a father, for God's sake. Way to go, dude. Show your son what it means to be an upstanding man. And don't worry. Molly will be a great stepmom! Just look at the way she spent 20 minutes playing kite and splashing in the ocean with you! No prob! A Television Without Pity poster wrote, "I hope Jason's ex-wife is out hiring a lawyer to try to get full custody of Ty." Hear, hear.

Whether it's all scripted, or these people are actually deluded enough to try to find life partners this way, I don't care anymore. Just stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

Something is Rotten in Denmark

2009-02-27T20:10:00.007-05:00

Once upon a time, back in the mid-90's, I was a reporter for a little outfit called People Magazine.

And while at People, I worked on a story that left a deep impression on me. It was about a New Jersey woman -- a frumpy, bespectacled 30something with a high school education -- who was randomly dialing the dorm rooms of Ivy League college students, befriending them and then bilking them out of money. She claimed to be a South African supermodel. She claimed to be dying of leukemia. She claimed to know all sorts of celebrities. The story changed so many times it was impossible to keep track. But people fell for it. She'd supposedly even managed to get a Princeton student to marry her. And she was going on trial for fraud.

My colleague Sarah and I worked this story best as we could, but in the end it never ran. The con woman was slippery as an eel. The college boys, it turned out, were just the tip of the iceberg. This woman's aliases had aliases. She pled to a lesser charge, got five years' probation and we moved on. But we did get in the habit, whenever things just got wacky and unexplainable in our lives, of putting up our hands in resignation and saying her name, ala Seinfeld's Newman! You can learn more about her shenanigans here; apparently, the rise of the Internet and social networking was a huge boon to her. Last I heard she was posing as a 9/11 widow. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog, right?

Many years later, when I was a regular on the wedding planning message boards on the Knot, I thought of my old friend Nancy when the boards were rocked by scandal. AmyLovesRian was the screenname of everyone's favorite, most helpful bride-to-be. She had a picture perfect romance and was planning a destination wedding in the Caribbean. Somewhere during the course of planning, she discovered she was pregnant -- with twins! And then there was that time her fiance surprised her with -- a new house! After the pictures of the beach wedding failed to materialize, Amy's story slowly began to unravel. Someone discovered that all the pictures of her pregnant belly had been borrowed from someone else's pregnancy journal. The picture of Amy and her fiance was supposedly from an advertisement. It was never clear at what point Amy had begun to embellish the truth, or whether she'd ever really been engaged at all. But I distinctly remember the uproar her unmasking caused. How cheated people felt for admiring her and swallowing her story wholesale. One woman was livid that she was constantly finding fault with her own fiance for not being more like the mythical Rian. Amy crawled off the boards with her tail between her legs, never to be heard from again. Or at least not that we knew of. It looks like BabyCenter recently had a similar poser on its boards.

I've always been captivated by this type of fakery. I'm honest to a fault, the kind of reporter who worried constantly about getting every word down verbatim. The idea of being that brazen with the truth completely and utterly fascinates me. And I'm also unhealthily obsessed with sad stories.

Which is why I've spent most of today searching over and over for a plausible explanation for what I've discovered.

Here's the deal.

There's a blog attracting thousands of hits from all over the world. It purports to tell a heartwrenching story about a family tragedy. Strangers have been praying for the blogger and making gracious offers of emotional support. Many tears have been shed. And I'm about 99 percent sure that it's a scam. Or a student's sociology project, or something, but it's definitely not what it purports to be.

There's nothing illegal about what the blogger is doing; no donations have been solicited. Yet. But it literally makes me ill to think of bereaved parents investing even an ounce of emotional energy on a what is almost certainly a fictional story. It's not the first time such a fraud would have been perpetrated. But to whom does one complain about an ethical violation on the Internet? (And while we're at it, are people really still falling for the Nigerian bank thing?)

Anyway, I'm at a loss for what to do. Do I contact the blogger privately with my concerns? She doesn't post an email address, but I'm pretty sure I know how to reach her. Do I post my accusations publicly (anonymously?) on the site so that others will see them and be warned of her deceit? Do I just stay out of it and see where she goes with this? I'm no detective, and there's always the chance I've somehow gotten this all wrong, but while I'd love that to be the case, my gut and a host of evidence say otherwise. I thought something was odd when I realized that every single comment on the blog was from someone who'd seen the blogger's many comments on other blogs and message boards, (she's been drumming up business at an alarming clip) not from anyone who seemed to actually know her and her story in real life. The tragedy, it would appear, is an Internet exclusive.

So I'm putting it out to you, all three of you who've been reading this space. What's the right thing to do?

I'm Crafty, Dammit!

2009-02-23T13:53:00.010-05:00

Like every other adult human being on earth, I recently listed "25 Random Things About Me" in a note on Facebook. And for those three people who haven't yet joined Facebook and can't see that link, I'll share that #24 was "I am completely craft-impaired and get anxious in craft stores. Which partially fuels #17." (#17 being: "I always worry that I'm not creative or patient enough as a mother.")

I can't fully explain my anxiety about craft stores, except to say that it has something to do with endless possibilities. I walk into a craft store and feel completely overwhelmed and ill at ease. I feel like there's a whole universe of craftiness for which I'm missing the decoder ring. I immediately wonder how people know what you're supposed to do with all those materials. Artificial fruit? Glue guns? Styrofoam forms? Little tin watering cans? And don't even get me started on the scrapbook aisle, for which I require almost an entire bottle of Xanax.

I don't like the idea that when it comes to crafts, you can pretty much do whatever you want -- that the very essence of being crafty is that you blaze your own creative trail. Not so much for me. I like activities that have a carefully proscribed beginning, middle and end and precise rules to follow. Not surprisingly, I can only write non-fiction, my former agent's constant insistence that I should try my hand at young adult novels notwithstanding. Making it up just plain scares me.

For nearly 36 perfectly good years, this failing had few real world implications. Yes, yes, I might have saved some money on my wedding if I could have made my own sugared fruit and topiary place card holders, but... whatever. Being un-crafty, however, turns out to make you feel seriously disadvantaged as a mother. The crafty moms are like the popular cheerleaders or the go-getter student government presidents; I'm like the maternal equivalent of an unmotivated burnout. (Do kids still get called burnouts, btw, or am I hopelessly dating myself?)

I look longingly at blogs like No Time for Flashcards or Nie-Nie in the pre-accident days (just look at this interview Cookie magazine did with her about how she decorated her impossibly adorable home) or my uber-crafty friend Vicki's, and picture myself charming my kids with my ability to turn popsicle sticks and cotton balls into a 3-D recreation of the Taj Mahal. Or maybe it's not even their craftiness I covet per se, but rather the idea that the craftiness is emblematic of a more energetic, creative parenting style than mine. I often feel like a mother with -- to quote Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd --"limited wind." Do crafty moms ever feel the urge to plop the kids in front of Caillou and play a few rounds of Scramble just to relax? Not that I've, um, ever done that, of course. I'm just wondering.

My own children, on the other hand, don't do much with popsicle sticks except eat Popsicles. They like to jump on the couch a lot and watch what I'm sure is too much television. Can't you just see the IQ points leaching out of their brains? And no, I have no idea why Ethan has no shirt on.

One of my very first posts to this blog was about making 2009 extraordinary, right? So I wanted it documented that the A. boys did in fact do a craft project. Alert the media.

I got the idea for apple painting from No Time for Flashcards. It seemed like a good baby step, something I could master on limited craft wind. I know how to cut an apple in half! I can pour paint on a paper plate! Woo-hooo!

Alec immediately showed no interest whatsoever -- he actually cried upon being handed the apple -- and instead practiced banging chalk on the table.

Ethan, on the other hand, was way into it.

Next time I'll actually read the directions, which say that you can only use a thin layer of paint or it doesn't work, but this was our finished product.

I came. I saw. I crafted, dammit. Now what?

Cora Paige

2009-02-23T12:19:00.006-05:00

I was recently accused of being the most morose person on earth, an accusation I plan to address more fully in a future blog post. (In my defense, the accusation was leveled while I was serving Cosmopolitans to a house full of girlfriends at my semi-annual Miss America party, so I can't be all that bad, right?)

For now, I plan to channel my dark obsession with sad stories of woe and loss into something positive.

My friend Vicki, the insanely creative and talented force behind Three Wheels Design, recently alerted me to the heartbreaking story of Cora Paige McClenahan, a ten month old girl from Kansas who died earlier this month after being diagnosed only weeks earlier with stage four neuroblastoma. Cora's mom is a blogger, and word quickly went out through the blogosphere of the McClenahan's terrible loss. A project is now underway at etsy.com to raise money for a playground in Cora's honor. 150 different Etsy sellers (including Vicki) are donating the proceeds from the sale of certain items to the effort.

You can read more about the etsy project here and follow links to purchase something. To see Vicki's super-cute daughter Jane modeling her Cora Paige shirt from etsy seller I Love Plum, click here.

I just bought Alec this ridiculously cute I Love Plum shirt in Cora's memory.

Here's a convenient button that will take you right to all the Cora Paige items for sale.

Rest in peace, little Cora Paige.

That's My Boy

2009-02-14T22:21:00.011-05:00

Ethan has always been a pretty easy-going kid. In the year and a half since he's been in preschool, we've really never had reports of bad behavior. A few times the teachers have pulled us aside to tell us there's been an incident of some sort, but it's almost always one in which he was on the receiving end of something. Ethan's just not a troublemaker. Trying in plenty of other ways, I promise, but just not an instigator.

So I knew something was up when I went to pick him up last week and saw the teacher making a beeline for our car in that determined "I need to speak with you" kind of way. There was an unfamiliar edge to her face, something that told me this time was going to be a little different. She motioned for me to open the window.

"I just wanted to let you know something happened today," she began. Sure enough, Ethan was the one who had gotten in trouble.

So what was it that prompted my son's first brush with the law?

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you Exhibit A.

It's, um, a snack cake.

But not just any snack cake. It's a Disney "Racing Cake," specifically put into his lunch box because, of course, it was letter R week, and the kids get special notes if they find things in their lunch that start with the letter of the week. (We're not discussing the fact that for "O" week I actually picked through an entire tub of alphabet cookies and weeded out all the O's for him, only to have him fail to notice. A mother's work is never done, you know.)

So apparently our little man really really really wanted that Racing Cake. So much so that he sneakily threw out his sandwich so that his teachers would think he had eaten it and would allow him to move on to the Racing Cake. Ethan, however, was busted during this little maneuver. And reduced to hysterical tears, though it's unclear whether that was over getting in trouble or over the fact that they told him he wasn't going to get to eat the cake.

What can I say? My boy likes his cake.

To anyone who knows how seriously I take my snack foods, this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Yet one more piece of proof that the apple really doesn't fall far.

Giants Among Us

2009-02-06T11:43:00.005-05:00

In the fall of 1986, when I was ~~eight years old~~ a freshman in college, my friend Natalie came into my dorm room with a cassette tape that a friend had sent her.

"I'm not sure what this is," she told me. "It kind of sounds like two really stoned guys with a keyboard."

What Natalie had discovered was the genius that is They Might Be Giants, and I am forever in her debt. I can't hear the song "Don't Let's Start" without mentally driving up 14th Street in Charlottesville in Natalie's cherry red Jetta, screaming the lyrics out the windows. They were two really stoned guys with a keyboard. But they were frigging awesome.

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

Fast forward twenty-odd years and the Giants, bless their hearts, are still going strong. But in one of those totally mind-meld-y moments of divine inspiration, in the last few years, TMBG have turned their attention to perhaps what they should have been doing all along: kids' music. A little bit off-the-wall, incredibly clever and almost pathologically catchy, is it any wonder that they're the force behind the terrific theme songs for Mickey Mouse Funhouse and Higglytown Heroes? (We won't discuss the weirdness of the latter show, however, or how my friend Kay is suspicious of pizza guy's motives, always wanting to hang around all those children.)

All of us in the parent trenches know how hard it is to find kids' music that doesn't make you want to hurl, and the TMBG kids' CDs (there are now three of them) are so great I want to weep with relief. Who else could come up with a song called "Who Put The Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?" Or envision a conversation between the letters D and W?

"W, you think you're so great."
"Well, I am pretty big."
"Yeah, you're okay. You're just not as great as you think you are."
"How come I never see you around anymore, D?"
"I got this big TV set at home now. And I like to watch the sports."

It does my heart good to watch Ethan rock out to the Giants' latest offering, Here Come The 123s, which includes what might be my all-time favorite song opener, to a gem called "Nonagon:" "Everybody at the party is a many-sided polygon...."

Here Come the 123s is up for a Grammy Sunday night for Best Children's Album. And if there's any justice in the world, they'll win.

LaLa: A Love Story

2009-02-02T12:10:00.018-05:00

Even before I became a parent, I always thought it was especially adorable when little kids had a security blanket or stuffed animal that they couldn't live without it. I'll never forget the night I had dinner with my dear friends Lynn and David and their boys at the Hard Times restaurant in Arlington, only to realize that their son Eric had left his beloved "curly edged diaper" behind. Curly edged diaper was an unassuming white cloth diaper to which, for whatever mysterious reason, Eric had become rather attached. 17 years later, I still remember the ritualistic way Eric would manipulate curly edged diaper, folding over a corner and working it rhythmically through the crook of his hand while fervently sucking his thumb. (A practice I've since learned is oddly universal.) David and I went back to rescue C.E.D. that night, only to realize that white cloth diapers look remarkably like white cloth napkins, of which approximately 974 had been cleared off the tables since we'd left. After explaining to the puzzled kitchen help that we were essentially looking for a rag, we mounted an exhaustive search. Somehow we found it, and all was right with the world again.

When you spend enough time around families with young kids, you start to know their lovies as well. My nephew Jake's attachment to "Bear" was the stuff of legend. His younger sister and brother took up with blankets with no less ferocity of affection. My friend Michele's three kids were all devotees as well; first came Puppy, then Bunny and then Blankie. And then there are my husband's good friends Jason and Cindy. By the time she was about four, their daughter Ellie clung -- quite literally -- to the pieces of what had once been her lovey. I'm not even sure what animal it began life as, because after many years of hard-core affection all that was left was a frayed piece of torso, and maybe an ear, if I remember correctly. But that didn't dampen her enthusiasm. It sort of reminded me of the Victorians, wandering around with those lockets filled with dead people's hair. Or the way people revere religious relics.

And so it was a minor disappointment in our lives when our oldest son, Ethan, fell into that 40% of Western children who aren't attached to a "transitional object," as the psych lit calls them. He definitely had a favorite stuffed animal -- Lambie -- but that was about as far as it went. Lambie was nice. Lambie was quite loved. Lambie was almost always there at nap and nighttime, and we made sure to bring Lambie with us when we traveled, but Lambie could also fall under the crib for days at a time and cause no great stir. Lambie was no curly edged diaper.

And then came Alec.

Alec was an abysmal sleeper as an infant, so bad that I caved and hired one of those baby whisperer people to help me after he once woke up 12 times in a 12 hour night. Oh yeah. We were even on the local news about it.

In my desperate search to figure out how to get him to sleep better -- a search motivated by the growing realization that sleep deprivation was eroding my grip on reality -- I dutifully did all the tricks that the sleep czars recommend. Including introducing a lovey.

For Alec, we chose a blue sailor bear made by Kaloo that we'd been given as a gift when he was born by our friend Tori. The body is actually a small flat blanket, about six or eight inches square, with a stuffed bear head topped with a long nightcap, the kind they wear in The Night Before Christmas. I wore it around in my shirt one day so it would smell like me, just like the books said, and then introduced it to him.

To say that it worked would be the understatement of the decade. Correction. It didn't really help with his sleeping, (neither did the baby whisperer, for that matter, despite what the news report said) but whatever mystical powers make a child attach to a transitional object worked their magic in spades. Alec and LaLa, as he has since been dubbed, are now completely and somewhat maniacally inseparable.

I'm genuinely fascinated by the the power of LaLa. When you go in to get Alec out of his crib in the morning, or after a nap, almost without fail, the first thing he does is hold up LaLa and show him to you. "LaLa," he always declares solemnly, as if he were introducing him for the very first time. It's like he's just reaffirming that LaLa is there and life can proceed as usual. When he plays with LaLa, he just keeps saying LaLa's name over and over again, deliriously happy just to be in LaLa's presence. Even better, he tells LaLa he loves him, using inimitable Alec-speak: "Lah-loooooooooo LaLa!" he sings. He buries his face in him, which is no small feat considering that LaLa, due to Alec's penchant for sucking on him, usually smells like something between a dirty diaper and a rotting carcass. (And this despite the fact that there are now actually two LaLas in rotation, a fact that -- shhhh!!! -- we've taken great pains to conceal from Alec.) And most interesting to me, though we never taught it to him, he's somehow figured out that same ritualistic manipulation, folding down a corner of LaLa and rhythmically working it through his fingers, all the while keeping him close to his face.

If LaLa goes missing, we all get a little frantic. I honestly feel a stab of genuine fear until I can locate him. (Sometimes backup LaLa is in the wash.) Alec can be a little -- how shall we say? -- insistent about most things, but nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to a missing LaLa situation. "LaLa? LaLa?? LALA???? LALA?????!!!??" he'll start repeating, with escalating anxiety. On the flip side, there's nothing quite like the pure unmitigated blast of joy he'll experience when you then find LaLa and give him back. It's nothing short of a religious experience, in which he displays the kind of unabashed affection usually reserved for returning prisoners of war. His eyes actually twinkle.

I have to say I sort of envy Alec for having LaLa. Don't you wish your life were simple enough that there could be an object whose very existence -- the mere sight or feel of it -- could absolutely elate you and instantly comfort you? And no, I know what you're thinking. Wine doesn't count.

Photo courtesy of the fantabulous Dr. Katherine Holman

Update. Sunday, February 7.
Just had to add that this afternoon we gave Alec one of his very favorite things to eat, hummus with pita chips. He decided to forego the chips and use LaLa's paw to scoop up his hummus. That's love, people.

The Last Four and a Half Years in a Nutshell

2009-01-28T13:24:00.005-05:00

Greg was recently fooling around with the video camera and "interviewing" Ethan while he was playing trains. He asked him what his three favorite things to do with Daddy were, and Ethan quickly rattled them off. I don't even remember what they were now, but there were definitely three, and he didn't have to dig deep.

Then it was my turn. "What are your three favorite things to do with Mommy?"

Number one came quickly. "Bake muffins!" Ethan said.

Then there was a long, uncomfortable pause. One that was probably, I don't know, six times as long as it needed to be.

"Watch tv?" Ethan offered tentatively, half statement, half question.

Then there was an interminable wait. Truly interminable. Finally, he spoke again, and plunged his four year old knife as deep as he could into the heart of a stay-at-home mother.

"I can't really think of a third thing."

I can't either, E. I'm too busy dusting off my resume.

Kidding! Kidding! OK, well, maybe not entirely....Sigh.

Oh, Brother

2009-01-24T08:52:00.010-05:00

I know I've only been in the blog business for a few weeks and have probably mentioned my brother Matt nine times already. Not surprising to anyone who knows him, or the close relationship we've shared over the years, including two separate (and surprisingly peaceful) co-habitations and one hilarious cross country trip in an overstuffed Jeep Wrangler, from which my butt still might be a little sore 17 years later.

Matt is a photographer of extraordinary, spine-tingling talent who's traveled around the world shooting everything from Super Bowls to wars to weddings. (Which can sometimes be as exasperating as wars for photographers, I think.) He's also an amazing writer. (Dare you to read this Washington Post story and not cry.) And he might just have the biggest heart of anyone I know. So much so that I've decided to let that infamous carrot-up-the-nose incident of our childhood slide.

So leave it to Matt, just when I thought all my excitement over the inauguration had died down, to give me chills all over again with his touching account of his inaugural experience. Read it here. And I'm voting this my new favorite Obama inaugural picture, hands down. Click on it to see it full size.

Oh, and fear not. I promise in the weeks ahead to give equal air time to the rest of the fabulous Mendelsohn boys -- Andrew, Daniel and Eric. It's just exhausting having this many siblings. ;-)

January 20, 2009

2009-01-20T09:52:00.003-05:00

My mom called yesterday and shared the following gem, which I had to pass on.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk;
Martin walked so Obama could run;
Obama ran so our children can fly!

It sums up how I feel today. I genuinely got choked up telling Ethan why today is so important and have had chills more times than I can count watching the ongoing coverage.

I'm proud of my fellow citizens. I'm proud of America. I'm thrilled to have a leader we can all be proud of. And maybe most importantly, I'm hopeful for my children's future.

The real reason I'm blogging....

2009-01-18T09:06:00.003-05:00

Is to give me a forum to share totally self-indulgent but ridiculously cute things like this twenty seconds of video.

After months and months (well, just about 17, to be exact) of singing him "You Are My Sunshine," Alec surprised us this weekend by showing that he knows it by heart. We're particularly fond of his self-congratulatory (and slightly premature) applause at the end. Enjoy!

Hosanna in the highest

2009-01-16T15:50:00.000-05:00

I made clear when I launched this blog that it is most definitely a work in progress.

I don't really have an agenda yet, except to share my thoughts on whatever grabs me at the moment -- motherhood, pop culture, my concerns that I'm attracted to the President-elect, the ethnopolitics of Micronesia -- you name it. OK, maybe not so much that last one.

But today's offering concerns one of the most pressing issues in the JenMen universe:

Cereal.

Yes, cereal. But not just any cereal. Alpha Bits.

As a kid growing up on Long Island, few things brought me more joy than those lovely, lightly sweetened letter-shaped treats, one of the few sugary things my uber-health conscious mother would allow. I have fond memories of sitting on the redwood benches in our backyard with my beloved Uncle Allan, drenched in summer sun, snacking on green grapes and Alpha Bits.

If you're old enough, sing along, won't you?

As an adult, I'd often turn to Alpha Bits for comfort when the going got tough. Eating a bowl of Alpha Bits could always take the edge off for me. Not quite as out and out guilt -- or cavity -- inducing as, say, a bowl of Cap'n Crunch or Froot Loops. And not as depressing as a bowl of Bran Flakes. Alpha Bits was always just perfect.

And then the bastards took them away.

That's right. Took them away.

One day in the summer of 2005, I went to the grocery store and noticed something looked off about the Alpha Bits box. The colors weren't quite right. And it said something about a new formula with "zero grams of sugar."

How could Alpha-Bits have no sugar? I wondered.

Befuddled, I brought them home. And discovered that they had turned my beloved Alpha Bits into... letter-shaped Cheerios. I was horrified.

Immediately, I e-mailed Kraft. A nice publicist name Donetta delivered the crushing news: "This new version of the cereal will replace all existing versions of the cereal." I began to think very unkind thoughts about one Theresa Choh-Lee, the brand director for Alpha Bits quoted in the chirpy press release touting the introduction of this new whole grain nonsense they were trying to peddle. I scoured ebay, wondering if anyone was smart enough to have stockpiled them. Nada.

I died a little death that day. My Alpha Bits were just...gone. When you're in love with a breakfast cereal, it's not like you can just go and whip some up, either. They were really gone. I tried to find comfort in the fact that others shared my outrage.

Eventually, I noticed you couldn't even find the sugar-free version on the shelves. Maybe it was for the best. Alpha Bits were gone forever.

Years went by and I somehow tried to go on with my life. I had another child. We named him Alec Jaeger. But the hole in my world never completely healed. I put on a good face, mind you, but there was a light that went out in my eyes. I was not quite the same. Hobbled. Hurting.

I'm here today to report, however, that the universe works in mysterious ways. Some time last summer, just as I began to feel hopeful that the political winds might start blowing in the right direction, another little beacon of hope arrived back in our world, and it's called original Alpha Bits. With ten glorious grams of sugar per serving, and all the hydrogenated coconut and palm kernel oil a mom could ask for.

They're back, people. A little tricky to find, but back. I could sit at my desk right now and buy them online. A mere four dollars and 23 cents could bring joy to my heart.

I know there are much more pressing issues in the world right now, but I just wanted to take a moment to say: Thank you, God, for small miracles granted.

Boys will be...?

2009-01-15T12:29:00.001-05:00

Not long ago, Ethan got in the car after preschool and made a devastating announcement.

"Mom, I really think I need a cooler backpack."

I almost had to stop the car. It was something I was totally unprepared to hear.

Cooler? Cooler? Where on earth did my sweet four year old get a hold of that concept? Thomas the Tank Engine, who had steadfastly carried him through the last year of school, was apparently no longer cutting it. He now needed, and I quote, a "yellow Bumblebee Transformer" backpack. Suffice it to say I know nothing of these Transformers he speaks of. We have no Transformers in this house yet; clearly, he learned about them at school.

In the interest of fairness, Ethan might not really understand what "cool" means; he recently refused to wear a certain sweater to school, saying it was "too cool" and that he definitely needed something less cool to wear.

But the backpack incident got me thinking nonetheless. When does that edge start to creep into little boys' lives and erode the pure sweetness that suffuses their early years?

I will confess I'm secretly proud that Ethan's affections are still un-selfconsciously baby-ish. He laughs out loud at Elmo. (He'll still watch Elmo, for crying out loud.) He harbors no particular affinity for Superheroes, or at least no more so than any other character. He asks to hold my hand in public, telling me it "makes him really happy" and makes pronouncements like, "I love my pajamas sooooooooo much!" without so much as a second thought. He wears goofy winter hats with pompoms that make him look so adorable I want to cry.

I harbor no illusions that this is a permanent state. In fact, I hope it's not a permanent state. I'm reminded of my friend Ann, who gently tried to dissuade her son from his adamant assertion that he needed to wear ties every day to kindergarten. Nobody wants their son to be that kid.

But when do little boys cross that line? Is it a gradual process, or do they one day just take a flying leap to cooler pastures and leave Elmo and pompom hats flapping in the breeze?

Whichever it is, given my current obsession with living in the moment, I'm going to remember to savor the Elmo days, and try not to think too hard about those Transformers looming on the horizon.

I tell Ethan all the time that I love him more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Not long ago he told me that he loves me more than all the crabs on all those beaches. It's not exactly poetic, but you get the drift. And I'll take it while I can.