I’ve been on a quest of late to find A. the best fire engine, short of getting her a real one, which, let’s face it, we just don’t have the parking space for at our current place. It’s making me really re-think the decision not to buy that firehouse last year. That would’ve been the perfect 4.5-million-dollar solution to our 25-dollar problem.

I found what seemed like a decent FDNY truck at a toy store last week but decided to check it out on Amazon to see what reviewers said before anteing up.

Good thing. The description sounded dangerous.

Irrelevant, but dangerous:

“This 3 piece skewer set is ideal for creating delicious kabobs, roasting marshmallows for smores and cooking hot dogs right on the grill. Each skewer has a wood handle with metal finish. Comes packaged on a blister card with hanging hole. Measures 15” from end to end. Handle is 3 1/2” and skewer is 11 1/2”.”

I’m not an expert in either automotives or machinery, but I’m pretty sure a fire truck equipped with skewers isn’t all that safe. Or realistic. Athough I admit I might’ve missed the skewers the last time I saw one go by. Skewers can be pretty thin.

That aside, it strikes me as tactless to mention cooking smores and kabobs when people’s lives are at risk. That doesn’t send the right message to the youngsters, does it?

I checked back today to see if matters with our fire truck had improved.

They have.

“Add some color to the table with this bright and colorful placemat. Featuring a bright print of butterflies and flowers, this placemat is a nice compliment to the table that’s also easy to clean.”

Now the truck sounds pretty flat. But very cheerful. And not sharp. So that’s two steps forward to one step back.

I’m not sold yet, but I do like the product’s flexibility. Multi-purpose is the wave of the future right? It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping!

From Teresa Wozniak. Nicely put.

You know that scene in horror movies where the idiot family who moved into the weirdly perfect house that inexplicably wouldn’t sell for years realizes officially that their place is damned? I don’t because I can’t watch horror movies and ever sleep again. But I assume that’s how it goes because I accidentally see the occasional preview. That’s what happens, right?

Well, on the anniversary of our moving into our very first house, that’s how it’s looking for us.

Except that I suspected something was wrong with the house - you know: on principle - before we bought it, so I haven’t been caught off guard like the Idiot Family. (Let’s hear it for paranoid low expectations!)

And it’s not haunted. And all in all it’s a pretty nice house.

But it does have

• A 100% half-assed heating system (if that’s mathematically and physiologically possible)
• A stove that was a.) mysteriously not updated when the rest of the kitchen was, and b.) periodically and without provocation stops working in a non-reproducible way.
• Something in or around it that causes our eyes to itch and water pretty much every day.

So it’s not really like those horror houses at all. Except that it’s a house.

And that last thing about our eyes, which is weird, right? It’s not like, “Aargh, I have a knife and live in your wall!” homicidal weird, but it is creeping weird, like, “How can I need eye drops when I’m not allergic to anything and this never happened at our old place fourteen blocks over?” weird. Which is a pretty specialized category of weird. And not that threatening, in itself. But then so is having your walls melt like in all those movies. So the “something sinister and eye-irritating lives in our air” thing + my totally normal, not at all paranoid suspicions = SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS HOUSE.

I wonder if we live on a radon fountain or if the ducts are lined with asbestos or if the place was built on some werewolf burial ground. I wonder if the previous family moved because they knew all these things and they stopped emailing me not because I wouldn’t quit asking very, very politely worded things about what the hell became of the keys to the back door if there ever were any, please? but because they knew about the radon fountain. I wonder these things OFTEN.

If there were a WebMD for houses, I would be on there all the time. I think our house has rickets. That’s a thing, right?

It’s Advent, as of last week, and, as usually directed in Advent sermons, I took a moment to pause and reflect. We are not regular church attendees but old habits die hard, especially when you’re not trying to rid yourself of them: I happen to like Advent.

Our holidays got off to a smooth start with Thanksgiving. We beat my basic criteria of, “No one died,” by quite a bit even though it involved me doing most of the cooking for eleven people. By all accounts it went very well. But, as most holidays are, it was a sprint to the finish, which left me not only tired but wondering, as Oprah and all the editors of women’s magazines do: how do you enjoy the holidays when they are such a project?

The obvious answer is that you make them less of a project. Reduce gift-giving, don’t decorate, attend fewer parties, skip family gatherings and book a hotel in Cabo instead. The thing is though, I like finding and giving gifts, decorating, throwing parties and making merry. I love Christmas.

So what else can be done so I don’t arrive at Christmas gasping for air and a glass of spiked egg nog?

Planning helps, and God and everyone who’s ever worked with me knows, I’m a planner. I’ve bought nearly all of our gifts already, and I’m wrapping them as they arrive so we can avoid the Christmas week blowout of express shipping charges and the Christmas Eve wrapping frenzy. Our tree is up and decorated as of last weekend. The outdoor lights are twinkling.

It’s good, the planning. The last-minute sprint has been removed (if I can define what “done” is and not just stretch out “almost done” till the 24th!), and we will definitely save some money on FedEx and panicked last-minute purchases. Plus, who doesn’t love checking things off a list? I am getting a sense of satisfaction from a job efficiently done. But I’m still feeling pretty frantic. It occurs to me that I may have accidentally just moved the stress forward on the calendar.

I know that clearing some space before the holiday to slow our momentum is a must. As with going on a beach holiday and screeching from 100 mph to 0 just at the edge of the sand, Christmas itself - one evening, one morning - will go by disappointingly quickly if you’ve been on line at UPS, worrying about your sister-in-law’s gift, and stuffing stockings until seconds before Christmas Eve dinner. We are not wired to shift gears from “frantic preparation” to “savoring the holiday” in the space of half an hour. Advent provides that space on the church calendar, and I think we’d do well to find it on our own schedules.

As I so often do, I have a theory. My theory is that the, “how,” not the, “what,” is the issue underlying holiday stress and the “what’s-the-point-itude” that occasionally creeps in as we rush through the weeks before Christmas, piling up packages and not cheer. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the journey, not the destination, matters most (especially when the destination is filled with fantastic Swedish carbohydrates and complicated ribbons), but yes, the journey deserves more of our focus and can be an enjoyable gradual climb to the peak where we enjoy the wonderful view rather than a gravely slide of increasing velocity that leaves us scraped up and exhausted at the bottom of the hill, back at our car, wondering why we went that way again.

Advent is about the “how,” it provides a stretch of time before Christmas to downshift gradually towards Christmas’ celebration so that we arrive intact and joyful. As the weather turns chilly and the air gets crisp, we’re supposed to slow down, have some cocoa and cinnamon toast, pause and consider. (OK, the toast isn’t in the gospels, but if they’d ever had my toast, they’d have put it in. Trust me: I make really good toast.) Advent is the season of reflection, anticipation and contemplation, a reminder to pause and think about the coming holiday.

Whatever your religious beliefs, the winter holidays mean something to you or you wouldn’t get all worked up about them. Whether it’s an opportunity to see friends, shower your sugar-addled child with gifts, celebrate the birth of your Savior, re-engage with family, or just show off your amazing ability not to electrocute yourself while installing a well-lit, over-fed elderly gentleman and his pet caribou on your roof, something is there at the core of your drive, and that’s worth thinking about so it rises to the top of your list.

Even if you consider the holidays a pain in the ass, Advent can be a time of constructive reflection, acceptance and planning. Own your desire to retreat from Aunt Ethel and her terrible fruitcake and plan a lovely, calm day at home with friends instead of booking through O’Hare with 4000 other people on Christmas Eve. Make the holidays your own. Once you accept that they aren’t your bag, you free up space to see what you do want rather than Grinch-ing it up and gnashing your teeth through another December.

Maybe the holidays are your thing but you’re just feeling low and lonely. It’s OK to be a little sad. Advent gives you some time to to acknowledge that and reach out in time to have some light in your window by Christmas. Ask for visits. Plan small outings. Take a short walk on a bright, chilly day. Find a Seattle’s Best Coffee and order the gingerbread latte: they’ll give you lots of whipped cream AND a tiny gingerbread man on top of it.

A couple of years ago, while planning a long-ish trip to New Zealand, we got some great “how” advice in amongst all the “whats”: find a quiet moment, think briefly about all the things you could do, and notice which three rise to the top. Not the Must Do things that everyone says are great: the three things you want to do the most, the ones you think you’ll enjoy, the ones you’ll regret not doing if you miss them. I chose swimming with dolphins, R. picked sailing through the fjords, and I can’t remember what the third thing was because the two we picked were so awesome. Literally awesome. They were the best things. THE BEST. Two of the most fun, most memorable, fantastic things we’ve ever done.

(Even if they hadn’t been the greatest things ever, it doesn’t matter: we knew wanted to do them and we did them. That in itself is a success. If they hadn’t turned out so well, it would have been good information for the next time we planned a trip as well as probably hilarious: fjord trips are pretty much limited to “majestic” or “Bob Saget in a dinghy” experiences, don’t you think?)

This is what I think Advent is for: finding a quiet moment to reflect on what matters to you in your holidays. Think small. Think specific. Think bright! Don’t judge them. It doesn’t matter: they’re yours. It’s your holiday too, not just your kids’ or Aunt Ethel’s. What matters to you? Be open to what some part of you already knows but which is hidden under a pile of candy cane boxes for Timmy’s class party. Prioritize those things. Put them on the list above finding the perfect #$(*&$#! Santa-shaped cake because last year’s fell to pieces and tasted like wet styrofoam.

Focus not just Christmas but the whole season on those. If you love being in touch, make Christmas phone calls throughout December when friends have more time to talk, not just on Christmas where it’s a three-minute chat before rushing off to the matinee showing of Sherlock Holmes (which is a super-great Christmas afternoon idea, by the way, thank you very much). If you love baking - actually love it, not must do it - book a Saturday with yourself and take your time doing it. If you like pleasing people with gifts, yeah sure, go shopping - but plan in it for a time when you can enjoy it and keep the volume to a level and cost that doesn’t stress you out, now or when your bills arrive in January. Or if that’s not working, think more broadly: make someone’s holiday by giving some of your amazing gifts to people in need like homeless kids, the gift-less, toy-less children, or lonely elderly people.

I know this is easier said than done. And checking boxes is a great, great thing. Trust me: I know. It’s just an Advent thought, a reminder that slowing down isn’t just an unrealistic principle that only people who can sit for hours with their legs crossed can manage. Step out of the tide for five minutes in the quiet before everyone else is up in the morning. This is your Advent, your Christmas, your time. What matters to you?

It’s been a rush of holiday prep around here lately, punctuated by feeding my seasonal addiction to Starbucks’ gingerbread lattes (light whip, no nutmeg - yes, I am that person in line in front of you with a lot written on her red cup, thank you very much, it’s only this time of the year, so back on up off-a me, ah-right?)

Today I dashed off to collect my liquid fix while R. got A. and her stroller into the car to go home.

Me: I got lucky! No wait. This whole herd of teenagers came in just after me.
R: Is that the right word? Herd?
Me: Like a gaggle? “An annoy of teenagers?”
R: Like “a murder of crows.”
Me: Yeah.
R: “A punishment of teenagers.”
Me: Yeah, that’s it.

“Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can - using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.”

Looking for brilliant stocking stuffers? Love Swiss Miss’s taste? Both? Great! Tattly is for you. Perfect little packets of temporary tattoos selected by Swiss Miss. Excellent designs from, “Mama,” to a bike made of font bits, and new ones every week. Most, a pair for $5, shipping included. Get ‘em while they’re damp!

Tattly from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

OK, seriously? A shotgun shell wreath? Really? REALLY??

I’m all up on the holiday decor thing and each to their own, but honest to God this is beyond me. Who in their right mind is going to put this up? And who is going to buy it except as a not-funny gift? The guys who don’t just snort the first time they trigger Big Mouth Billy Bass at Walgreens but think he’s a hilarious present? You know what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving weekend? That I don’t know anyone who would give me this wreath.

Oh wait - I just read the full description: “Chamaecyparis, rose hips, and Pheasant Feathers (feathers not pictured in this wreath, but we will update the photo soon!)” Ah. I see why I hate it: it’s because the feathers aren’t in the picture. If it had feathers, it would be 100% awesome.

Lord Almighty. Wow.

Amazing. Photography from inside waves.

New book: The Shorebreak Art of Clark Little. More previews.

This is our daughter’s doll. His name is Cailin because that’s what his box said. He’s French and wears a fetching shorts playsuit year round, regardless of weather or what any particular event calls for. No black tie, no jacket. Ever.

This policy has started to take its toll on the striped suit and is causing a minor gender issues dilemma.

Let’s start at the beginning. Cailin joined the household - we don’t say he was “bought” because that demeans him - from a local toy store. A nice one too. One of those ones where they have a lot of wood toys that cost $150. The choice was between him and another over-dressed, flouncy version of him, so we went with him. He was sleeker in his cap and suit.

(The hat is a thing of the past. There was no keeping it on him. I’m not clear if this was his choice or A.’s, but the hat has been put in storage for the day when sleeping caps make a comeback among the hipster crowd, and it will be cool again to wear it. Sadly, Cailin did not arrive with a full beard or a fixie. If he had, maybe the cap could have stayed as a fashion-forward ironic statement, but on it’s own, it was just too 1850’s.)

The holidays are coming, and I’m sprucing things up around here, so I washed the… let’s call it a pants suit, shall we? And it looks cleaner but still not very interesting. So I did a minor search for a replacement. Turns out Cailin might have to become a girl. Or a cross-dressing boy.

There are two exceptions to the all-girl outfits available for Cailin: a pair of denim overalls retailing for $64 and an MC Hammer top-bottom combo that, with your eyes crossed at an Iranian night club, might suggest “male” or at least raise some questions about the issue. Given that Cailin himself cost less than $40 (shhhh), $64 seems extreme for some tiny glorified jeans. (I know I will be having this argument with A. herself in not so many years, but let’s save later for later.)

All the other choices are some version of a pink dress. So the question is, will transitioning Cailin to being a girl suddenly undermine A.’s confidence in her ability to distinguish the genders or will it be a nice kickstart to her gaydar? (Which she will not have inherited from her mother by the by. I don’t want to get into it, but I’ve all but been on a date before realizing I was being hit on.) Although cross-dressing doesn’t necessarily mean “gay.” Hoover was a fan of the angora cardigan and he wasn’t gay. Creepy, yes. Gay, no. Eddie Izzard loves the ladies and his high heels. So OK, maybe yeah: Cailin just switches back and forth.

On the other hand, maybe Cailin is transgender. In that case, we would, of course, support his decision to make the shift, and we’d have to ramp up to the new outfits by giving him hormone shots. Which, in turn, would make him really moody and hard to be around for a few months. And then there’s the cost of counseling. Huh. That route is starting to look more expensive than the $64 overalls.

Maybe I’m overthinking this and throwing Cailin into a gender crisis he’s not actually experiencing. Maybe he’s just a boy who wears the same clothes day after day after day and has no sense of style. There are boys like that. In that case, I guess my responsibility as his grandmother extends only to making sure he knows how to do his own laundry. The rest is just a lifestyle choice.

You can see how this gets confusing. What to do, what to do. Parenting is so complicated sometimes.

I’m handy.

Correction: I believe I am handy. I have an uncharacteristic can-do attitude when it comes to doing things that I believe I know something about, which includes pretty much everything to do with the house and our garden.

Just to be perfectly up front, this confidence is probably misplaced.

It’s not like I’m some sitcom husband, making disastrous and not very hilarious mistakes in the process of proving my spouse to be correctly exasperated with what an idiot I am for, say, trying to fix the back steps with a watering can and a table saw. I’ve seen most of the stuff I’m trying to do get done. My parents did major construction on all of our houses, much of it themselves, so I’ve witnessed concrete footers being poured, landscapes being leveled, and sheetrock being put up with nail guns. I helped roof my first house when I was eight, which, now that I mention it, was probably not age-appropriate. To be fair to my parents, I don’t think our house or any of the roofing products had any labels like A.’s toys that said, “3+ years,” or, in this case, “16+ years.” Maybe the house’s label was on the bottom. That’s usually where it is. I can see how they missed it.

All this exposure to handiness gave me the impression that a.) all this stuff was possible to do with minimal assistance from professionals, and b.) I was equal to the task.

Both of these impressions are more or less wrong.

Just because my parents didn’t hire professionals didn’t mean the job was getting done right or efficiently, but who was I to judge? I was six and constructing complicated mud pies in the dig area, and then twelve with an impressive backhoe in my backyard, and then fourteen with my dad headed to the emergency room for accidentally cutting the back of his hand open with a chainsaw. That shit is distracting for quality control.

And on that second point, in case you never tried jumping off a tiny platform two stories up to catch a narrow swinging trapeze bar, seeing something isn’t the same as doing it. It wasn’t like I was taking notes when I was eleven and pouring cupfuls of granulated insulation down into the cement block walls of our new basement (which, incidentally, was holy God freezing all the time, so let’s just assess how that all worked out).

What I’m getting at is that not all my This Old House undertakings end with the quick, clean success I came to expect from a childhood foundation of witnessing DIY, mostly unfinished construction jobs. Fancy that.

Most of my projects take considerably longer than I expect, require knowledge that I don’t have, and would be a lot easier with tools that I don’t own. Hence our $800 water bill the first month we lived in our new house: I know how to fix a running toilet! Of course I do! We had an antique one at House #2! Ha ha - you silly house owners without my knowledge, having to call a plumber and pay him all your money! I will fix this myself with only the plumber’s tape that I, the construction-literate genius that I am, just happen to have lying around! It’s as if I were a professional contractor! What’s that you say? $800? For spending the month getting all pruney in my bath of superiority instead of calling a plumber for a fraction of that cost? No one needs to hear from you Mr. Know It All. There’s no need to take a tone with me.

So that happened.

The latest Fix Me! incident was a giant tree branch half snapping off our tree in a storm oh, about two months ago. My noticing and assessment of the situation was like lightning. My subsequent trying to pull it down with brute force and calculated leverage was unsuccessful and could very nearly have led to a head wound. Oh yeah: I forgot to mention in my catalog of misjudgments that I often get hurt. R. usually predicts this and warns against it, but he clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he only has a PhD and no background watching grown-ups do construction work while climbing on a nearby jungle gym.

After a few weeks, I borrowed the right tool to cut down the branch. Great success. Then it lay in the yard for a month because I didn’t have the other right tool to cut it up into pieces that the compost guy would pick up in our bin. I needed a saw. Like the saw I have used every year to hack at the base of our Christmas tree because I refused to invest in a Christmas tree stand big enough for the giant tree I select every year. (What? Christmas is awesome. Back off.)

Our tree to stand ratio is like the older men with half-shaded glasses who work on used car lots: super rotund in the middle, tapering down to skinny little legs and thin shoes on the bottom. The last year I whittled our tree’s stump down to the size of a toothpick, I was six months pregnant, out on our freezing and wet deck and R. was away on a business trip, before which I had 100% totally promised him I would not try to put the tree up by myself. I don’t know why he believed me. I’m a terrible liar.

We got a bigger stand after that. But I needed that Christmas tree saw to deal with this giant tree branch. It was about fourteen feet long with half a dozen sturdy side branches coming off it. I couldn’t find the saw though, probably because my search was hampered by the fact that I didn’t really want to find it. If slimming down a Christmas tree trunk took an hour, all my strength and most of my holiday patience to get the job done, this tree branch + that saw was going to = me sawing off my ankle or something. I needed a new saw.

Two minutes in the saw aisle at Home Depot with Wikipedia up on my iPhone informed me that we had been using a hack saw designed for cutting narrow plastic pipes to take big slabs out of a pine tree trunk. Huh. Well that explains that. Maybe this year we should select a tree with a narrow plastic pipe running up through it. That’s the correct takeaway from the situation, right?

Let’s just say that all’s well that ends well. Instead of replacing our hard-working hack saw, I purchased a hand saw which is what we needed all along. It worked really well. The tree branch is gone. So just shut up about it taking five Christmases worth of blisters and sweat, plus two months of half a tree splayed out in our tiny yard for me to figure out which $14 saw I needed. I got the job done. So yeah, I’m handy.

I found it. It’s my Christmas present AND the most ridiculous thing the Williams-Sonoma, Inc., family has offered for sale since the Electric Vacuum Marinator. It might even be more ridiculous than the marinator because it costs $5000. Five. Thousand. Dollars. For something made by Pottery Barn. I would hope that for five thousand dollars I would actually get a pottery barn. I’m not 100% sure if that’s a barn that stores my pottery (of which I have very little - possibly because I don’t have enough dedicated pottery storage space) or a barn made of pottery. I don’t care which it is: at San Francisco real estate prices, $5K is a bargain for either.

It’s a car. A Bugatti, to be precise. But not an actual one, a miniature one. With no engine. So even if I were two feet tall, I couldn’t drive it around my house, which is a theoretical crying shame.

If it were an actual one, five thousand dollars would be the bargain of the century. But I probably still wouldn’t be able to drive it since it’d be a hundred years old and wildly unsafe, so I guess Pottery Barn hit the nail on the head: why buy the un-driveable real thing for an exorbitant sum when you can spend a slightly less exorbitant sum on an equally un-driveable but much smaller fake thing?

My Christmas present features, “hand-polished aluminum wheels,” which I’m assuming, since they use the present tense, means the car comes with someone to continue the hand-polishing. I’m starting to see where the cost started climbing.

Also, it has a nickel-plated, cast bronze radiator which sounds expensive and like maybe that’s what kind of engagement ring I should’ve held out for. Or what my next stove should have.

(I hate our current stove by the way. Maybe when my tiny car has it’s inevitable catastrophic accident, I will weld the nickel-plated, cast bronze radiator onto my stove, thereby improving it immensely.)

The web site says “…this car isn’t meant to be driven, but that won’t stop it from making your heart race.” I can only imagine. Between the price tag and the frustration at being unable to either fit into it or drive it if I could, my heart is already racing and the car hasn’t even arrived yet. I can’t imagine what kind of stroke/heart attack I’m setting myself up for on Christmas morning. Don’t not get it for me though because of that: this is all I’m asking for this year. Really. I have to have this car, health be damned.

Send me the shipping confirmation when it leaves the miniature Bugatti factory, OK? I need to know when I should go stand by the front window with my nose pressed against the glass.

I’ve never been a handbag girl. I don’t know anyone who is, but I have the impression that there are a lot of them out there, these ladies who spend crazy sums on the latest bedazzled clutch or giant slouchy shoulder bag and store them carefully wrapped in tissue on their own special shelves. (Who has that kind of space?) I feel like I’m always reading magazine articles or chapters in breezy books about these women searching for Birkin bags or extolling the wonders of some awful clutch they won’t be caught dead carrying in a year.

The last one I came across was Laura Bennett in her mommy book, Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday?, in which she described how her Birkin bag was her diaper bag for her five young boys and we should all follow suit. To make sure we know she’s a real DIYer and down-to-earth woman just like me, she assures her readers that she got her Birkin from a consignment shop and could never pay retail.

Well that’s a relief. I was trying to save up the $75,000 the antique one was going to cost me on eBay, but that felt like that might be too much for a diaper bag, so I downgraded my aim to $4,500 for the modern equivalent. It’s such a weight off to think that if I spend my copious free time ingratiating myself with my local consignment shop workers, they’ll ring me when one comes through for a mere $2,500. Whew.

Let’s be clear: I have never spent more than $250 on a bag, and that was only once and for a bag I have taken around the world. I don’t think I - or my budget - are cut out for the bag acquisition team. I have my own indulgences but the only thing I think I’ve ever bought in that price range is a laptop. And a college education.

Each to their own though: I have spent $95 on a single bag of groceries at Whole Foods, so I guess we all have our own financial blind spots.

I am, however, on my third diaper bag, so maybe I should’ve considered an incredibly expensive, crocodile Birkin instead. Perhaps it does have everything I need. My first diaper bag couldn’t stand up to my overpacking and my skinny Air kept falling out of it, so I had to upgrade to a doctor-bag type. That lasted six months until A. got really fast and heavy: you can’t keep upright on our stairs with a bag on one shoulder and a shifting 25-lb weight on your other arm. The bag lost all the time, which must have been discouraging for it, so, out of concern for its feelings, I retired it and, with severe reservations, cut over to a backpack.

Don’t get me wrong: the backpack is the right tool for the job. But much like the hacksaw you pull out to whittle down your Christmas tree every year, it is not chic, and I look uncomfortable in it. (Don’t ask me how I end up wearing the saw. It’s none of your business.) Sherpas and small children are the only people who look good in a backpack and I am neither. The one advantage to it, besides its carrying utility, is that I have my hands free to hit anyone who tells me how silly it looks.

Not that that happens. Handbag Moms are too refined to call out their derision verbally. But I’ll bet when Junior needs a granola bar right this very instant, I can get to mine faster than they get to theirs. Now that I see that in writing, it does seem like a small win. But I’ll take them where I can get them until I can get back to my cool, green world-traveler bag which holds my stuff and only my stuff. In the meantime, I’m hands-free and my kid is cuter than all the others anyway. So there.

OK, so even if I didn’t completely, totally, absolutely, without doubt need to have this, I would still have to buy one because it’s called the “Arsscoot.” I will be pronouncing this “Arse scoot” even if that is not the correct pronounciation.

I definitely need this. I know it’s raining today but my arse needs scooting, and so does A’s little arse and raincoats are readily available. Rain be damned. We’ll get cool leather helmets and matching goggles (because that never looks creepy on moms and kids, right?).

I have a whole plan. We’ll rent one of those little white dogs with short ears that droop at the tips and he’ll wear goggles too and sit with A. in the sidecar. (I can’t abide small dogs, hence the renting. I won’t be able to hear the yipping over the wind noise, right?)

Of course, the three of us won’t be able to go anywhere practical because a.) there will be no room to bring anything along or bring anything back, and b.) by all accounts, these things are super unsafe. We’ll just tool around the ‘hood looking fantastic. There’s a UPS store a few blocks from our place, so we’ll just head there first and buy enough bubble wrap to wrap up baby and puppy. Done.

Wave when you see us! I’m sure we won’t look crazy at all. At. All.

Party City is a paradoxical place. For starters, it’s not really a city. Just FYI. And the party they refer to is not being thrown by them and is not currently underway. So that’s disappointing.

It turns out you have to throw the party. You go to their non-city, their geographical coordinates corresponding more to what you might call a “store” and pay them for all the supplies you will need to throw your own party. As long as your party theme is “Barbie Princess,” “Mylar Gone Wild,” or “Spongebob,” that is. If your party theme is “I have taste and class,” you might want to collect your goods from a place of commerce whose name is not spelled out in giant, crooked, primary colored letters.

I do not always have taste nor class and I am sorry to report that I have a substantial cache of both irony and sarcasm, so I stop by Party City regularly. Not to be too hard on myself, I also have a one year old balloon fan living with me, so there’s that.

There are two things I used to be able to count on at Party City: a.) the goods would be poor quality, and b.) the experience would be moderately depressing. The latter was a function of the former + minimal wage staff + aisles and aisles of tackiness stacked ceiling high. At least I knew what I was getting: noisemakers, plastic plates, and a taste of permanent recession.

But that’s all a thing of the past. Now it’s a different story. Now, there’s Hi Float.

What is Hi Float? As if the store were not already pushing the limit on plastic per square inch, now you can coat the inside of your plastic helium balloons with it. It’s supposed to keep them high and, er, floating. And it adds ten cents to every balloon sale. Which is why I declined the first time they offered it. My reasoning was that balloons themselves are plastic, so what’s the point of a little jacket of more plastic laminated to the inside of plastic?

I’ll tell you: awesomeness is the point. Airborne awesomeness coming out of an industrial-sized squirt pump.

Since we had already spent upwards of a six bazillion dollars on Astrid’s birthday party, what was another $3.60 to test out the limits of our balloons’ floatiness?

Two weeks. That’s how long one of the yellow balloons lasted. And it only died at two weeks because it was murdered by the housecleaner, not because it was lying without dignity on the floor. It had sunk to the level of the door handle but it was still floating. The other 35 balloons had called it quits sooner, but at least half lasted a week. Read my lips, people: one week.

This is revolutionary. Helium balloons historically have the lifespan of a fruit fly. Can you imagine seeing that same fruit fly that was working on your bananas on Thursday still having at it a week Sunday later? No. You can’t. Neither can I. And that’s not just because all fruit flies look alike. And you shouldn’t be saying things like that anyway: it’s racist. Although, let’s be honest, fruit flies probably say that about us too.

Here’s what I want: lifestyle Hi Float. Let’s find a real applications for this miracle of plastic. My Life: Now With More Hi Float! Hi Float, The Lifestyle Pump. Feeling a midweek lull? Stop by for some Hi Float! Abandon reality television marathons! Stop watching from the floor - start living at the ceiling! Learn to whistle! Loom rugs! Win friends! Influence people! Run a mile without stopping (once)! Feel optimistic about your pointless corporate job (briefly)! Become more waterproof!

I think I’m onto something. If we can consume a McDonald’s Happy Meal made mainly out of saturated fat, what could possibly go wrong consuming shots of liquid plastic? Nothing, that’s what. I’m ordering some. Don’t try to stop me. Really. Don’t. My mouse is hovering over the “Order Now” button. I’m not kidding. I’ll see you on the ceiling.

I write on my hand.

Well, my palm. Yes, like in 5th grade, I jot things down on my hand. I write down to dos, reminders, notes. In ink. On my hand.

It’s only on my left hand because, really, how would I write on my right hand since I’m right handed? That would be implausible. And illegible. Come on. Think before you ask a silly question like that.

And OK, yes, while we’re admitting things, I do think there are silly questions. I’m not saying the person asking is silly, just the question, so don’t get your non-judgmental knickers in a twist.

(What are those knickers anyway, while we’re talking of it? Nonjudgmental ones. Sensible bum-covering ones? Brazilian thongs? I’m not sure which way non-judgment would go. Comfortable? Impractically sexy?)

Sorry. I’m a little on edge: I can’t read what I wrote on my hand. It’s kind of stressing me out.

As habits go, writing on your hand isn’t that bad. It’s not expensive or hurtful. Juvenile, maybe. But it is called “handwriting,” right?

OK, fine, yes, it is a little irritating for everyone involved. R. shakes his head when he catches a glimpse of my blackened palm. When we’re watching TV and I reach for a pen, he reaches for a piece of paper to insert between pen and palm. I think he thinks it makes me look, if not deranged, then at least a little obsessive. Or disorganized maybe? I should ask him. I think I already have but I’ve forgotten the answer because it didn’t make sense to me, like how I’ve forgotten everything I “learned” in high school physics. It certainly doesn’t make me look elegant, but then an 18-month-old accessory has pretty much taken the legs out from under elegant already.

I have been thinking about breaking the habit though. Not because it makes me just a tiny bit more like Sarah Palin and attracts sidelong glances from dinner companions but because I think it might be making me a little crazy, in itty bitty tiny increments. See, I wash my hands a lot - dishes, showers, toddler life - which leaves me with notes like the ones I’m trying to decipher now:

“Email moms” Fine. I know which moms I mean and why. Good.

“Take A. to lasers.” Less clear. What lasers? We have lasers? For kids? It probably doesn’t say “lasers.” What it does say washed down the drain with the pancake syrup.

This happens a lot. I hold my hand up close to R.’s face and say, “What does that say? That - there - below, “Tape gnomes.” That. See it? Is that an “f”?”

I can see how this would be annoying for him. It’s annoying for me. And stressful. The lasers probably aren’t important, but not knowing is stressful. Probably more stressful than if I’d just not bothered to write it down at all and assumed that the lasers would present themselves when Laser Time rolled around.

Sometimes, to save myself from splaying my palm out yet again in our most brightly lit room trying to decipher, “Not my rabtyz,” into something English (“rabbits”? “raisins”? why aren’t they mine? I like both of those things…), I just wash my hands and call it a day. It’s not satisfying, but it is an unequivocal resolution.

The other reason to quit is for the children. Well, “child,” but “children,” sounds more magnanimous and We Are The World-y. A. learned a while ago how to pull the cap off the black Uniball pens I leave lying around everywhere in case I need to write something down suddenly. Last week she uncapped one of them, spread out her tiny palm until her fingers bent back, made an unintelligible black mark on it and proudly held it up for me to see.

This habit was not at the top of my list of legacies I wanted to leave my daughter. I was hoping it would be more along the lines of “world domination,” or, “Nobel Prize.” Or, “cheese lover.”

So I might try to quit.

Maybe instead of going cold turkey, I could switch to invisible ink. I’m sure that would make the whole illegibility issue go away too. I might even forget I wrote anything on there at all. It would be like it never happened. And isn’t that next best to it actually not happening?

Anyway, until I decide what to do, I’m going to go have another look around for those lasers. I mean they’re lasers - how well can they hide really?

In case we haven’t seen you in a while:)

You know French Toast? You know how easy it is? But you know how it’s so much better in restaurants? Well, real restaurants for yuppies, not the diner where they make it with Wonderbread. I was trying for a while to make better last-minute French Toast that didn’t involve tracking down brioche on a Saturday morning. Thinking ahead is not my bag re: cooking. I like to spring it on myself so it seems like it doesn’t last that long and I can say breezily, like a real cook, “Oh, I just threw this together.”

While we’re on the subject, after chopping endless numbers of ingredients into different-shaped tiny bits (how is that relaxing? don’t even start with me), the thing I hate the most about cooking is that sinking feeling you get when you read through a recipe and realize their prep time estimate of 15 minutes didn’t include the 4 hours to 4 months you were supposed to marinate/refrigerate/home-cure it before you could actually make anything out of it.

So there you are, all set with your breezy recipe that you didn’t bother to read all the way through, remembering your high school home ec teacher who told you to always, always read through the whole recipe first so could catch tricky, undermining steps like that one you just tripped over.

That’s just mean. If they’re going to ask you to do that, it should be in bold, red, 20-pt. font right under the title. Or better: in the title. “9-Day Pasta Fazool.” “Chicken Divan Your Whole Day Crepes.” Like that.

Speaking of my home ec teacher, she once gave us an unnamed recipe about a page long to make in our little cooking groups. The rule was you had to eat whatever you made, which was a great incentive not to goof off. My group dutifully read through the whole page first and noted that the very last sentence said to skip ingredients 2, 5, and 9, which were, like baking powder, lemon juice, and salt. The recipe was for hot chocolate. Some poor suckers in the other group had to drink down their lemony, foaming cocoa after disobeying her cardinal rule. I thought this was funny at the time but in retrospect, I think she was reading my future, which was weird and impressive.

Back to my French Toast. I have two recipes for you to make your Saturday brunch better.

The first one is easy. Quick tip: always have some decent thick white bread in your freezer. Put a few slices in the microwave for 10 seconds and you’re French Toast-ready. (On the west coast, in the shocking absence of Pepperidge Farm, try Oroweat Country Potato.) If you’re making it for two, mix up three or four eggs with a tablespoon of milk and add a teaspoon of vanilla (which gives is excellent flavor), and a teaspoon of white sugar (which makes is crispy and brown). I didn’t know about the vanilla or the sugar until about six months ago, which was a sad, sad thing. Now my French Toast rules.

The second recipe is a make-ahead French Toast for guests (guests without heart conditions or memberships at Weight Watchers that is). Since you make the whole thing ahead, it’s not like you’re getting hijacked on the day-of. And it’s fab that you can make a brunch dish the night before rather than running around like a crazy person trying to put together an impressive cilantro souffle between cleaning the toilet and trying to find a tablecloth.

It’s Paula Deen’s recipe but with some modifications because you might kill someone if you make the topping she describes.

Baked French Toast Casserole with Maple Syrup

Prep Time: 20 minutes + Inactive Prep Time of 8 hrs/overnight
Plan for 40 minutes of cook time in the morning
Serves: 6-8

Ingredients
• 1 loaf French bread (13 to 16 ounces)
• 8 large eggs
• 2 cups half-and-half
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• Dash salt

• Praline Topping (you’ll need 1/2 stick butter, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, and 1 cup of nuts)
• Maple syrup

Slice French bread into 20 slices, 1-inch each. Arrange slices in a generously buttered 9 by 13-inch flat baking dish in 2 rows, overlapping the slices. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, half-and-half, milk, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt and beat with a rotary beater or whisk until blended but not too bubbly. Pour mixture over the bread slices, making sure all are covered evenly with the milk-egg mixture. Spoon some of the mixture in between the slices. Cover with foil and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, preheat oven to 350 degrees F and make the praline topping:

Modified praline topping:
Half a stick of butter + 1/2 cup of brown sugar + slivered almonds or halved pecans to taste (up to a cup, but I use less). Blend it all together in a bowl. Done.

Spread Praline Topping evenly over the bread and bake for 40 minutes, until puffed and lightly golden. Serve with maple syrup - although you may not need this, honestly. Put it out but try it without the syrup. It’s plenty sweet!

Have a sugar-saturated, tasty, tasty weekend!

I know it doesn’t mean much to your day, but getting our pot rack hooked up to our ceiling has meant a lot to the OCD gnome on my shoulder who has been breathing heavily every time he sees the pots and pans stacked on top of each other’s non-stick surfaces because they have nowhere else to go. I know my gnome could be spending his energy elsewhere - like on reorganizing the dryer lint - but there was no convincing him, so we finally put up the pot rack.

In the process of hanging it, we uncovered further evidence that our house’s skeleton was put together by a crack addict. There is no clear pattern of studs in the walls or ceilings: the stud finders we’ve used (all three of them) indicate that the “crossbeams” start and stop at random. Which means the house might come down at any moment. I either try not to think about this threat, or, when I do, I channel my anxiety into getting excited about the quirky and unknown nature of the future. Ha ha. Ha. Hmmm.

Anyway, tracking down the half-beams to sink the pot rack’s screws into meant making a lot of pencil marks on the ceiling. The gnome, pleased as he is about the rack, is a little irritated by the marks. Erasing them however required a.) an eraser which might or might not be somewhere in R’s very cluttered office upstairs, and b.) some time standing on a stool.

Two steps seemed like a lot.

I know. Don’t even. I have a small child and a lot of competition for my time so just back up on off me. We’re not even at the worst part yet, so save some energy.

I didn’t erase the marks.

Instead, a few days later, when I was in a 5&10 type store, get this: I bought an eraser. Yes, I was that daunted by the prospect of possibly fruitlessly climbing a flight of stairs and spending two and a half minutes tracking down the eraser we probably already have, that I paid a bored clerk 99 cents to give me another one.

And you know what? I think that was a brilliant solution to my problem. It was worth every one of those 99 pennies.

Well, until it didn’t work on the pencil marks at all, that is.

I can feel you and the gnome judging me for my $1 solution to my tiny problem, but I’m still not ashamed.

So now we’re back to square one of the new, not-at-all improved process: a.) drive back to the 5&10 and find a different eraser which might or might not work, b.) give them money for it, and c.) spend some more time on a stool.

No, it hasn’t occurred to me to go upstairs and find that eraser we already have. Just be quiet.

I don’t know if this is going to happen. I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Maybe you and the gnome should go get a stiff drink and check back later.

It’s been time for a while. Everyone else did it when they were teenagers or college students, but I’ve been holding onto mine as those around me fell to necessity and society’s pressure. Last month, I met the man who would handle it for me and, after brief social banter and a discussion of technicalities, I scheduled a time to abandon the few and become one of the many.

My wisdom teeth were coming out.

They were “erupted” (good) but not “impacted” (bad), so it was determined that only two of my remaining three would be taken and recovery would be brief.

(I was surprised I only had three. I thought I still had four. My dentist never mentioned one was missing and I don’t remember ever having it out, so either it’s still in there (bad), it fell to a particularly raucous bit of my late twenties (bad), or the tooth fairy has become professionally over-aggressive. Well, or I was abducted. Bad and bad.)

I scheduled the operation carefully to fall on a day when R. wouldn’t be traveling, the nanny would be with A., and I could devote a couple days to recovery.

That didn’t so much work out.

I cracked one of the two teeth two weeks ago, the day the nanny left on vacation, and rode out the week on Vicodin and Codeine until the earliest available surgery date, which was, naturally, the day our Labor Day weekend guests arrived from New York. Great start.

Thirty seconds before the anesthesia kicked in, the doctor offered to remove a little salivary cyst on my lip as well. Excellent. Two for one. Turns out complementing stitches top and bottom on the back left of your mouth with a set on the front left of your mouth makes for some serious pain and impediment. You know what else doesn’t help? Slamming the left side of your face into the bathroom doorframe the next day when you swing around too quickly on pain medication that, apparently, affects your ability to judge distances.

I hit the frame so hard that I and everyone in the other room thought I broke my nose. I took a chunk out of my tongue because it was between my teeth fiddling with my lip’s stitches, and I narrowly averted a black eye by icing my face for the next two hours as the bruising pooled below my left eye. Yeah, left side again. My glasses saved me: the upper frame has a slide of white paint an inch long.

The next morning, I careened down the last five steps of the staircase while I was carrying the baby. I slid on something beneath my heel (an hilarious banana peel?) and nearly threw A. into the wall at the bottom of the stairs, but managed to save us both by taking some additional bruises on the arms. You can’t say I don’t have follow-through, right?

I thought I was done, but no.

Yesterday afternoon, I fell on our steep concrete front stairs, also while carrying the baby, this time going up. My knee and shin are blacker for it, my pain quotient continues to climb, but again, the baby remains unscathed.

The nanny is still out, and R. is on the other coast for a few days, so A. and I are muddling through the pain and its killers on our own. It’s been a difficult week, to say the least. I have to say, with all the accidents, I do feel as though my wisdom has been diminished. I wonder how you get that back. I think I need it, or I’m going to end up in the hospital. Or as the lost Marx Brother. One or the other.

I know I’ve been in and out recently with the posting. It’s because I’m starting another little family of sites! Hooray!

They’re called Minimalist Mama and are for new and expectant parents who could use a hand sifting through the giant piles of information and advertising about what they should buy, borrow or steal for their new little one. Minimalist Mama is for new parents; Minimalist Mama Expecting is for…well, expectant parents. When I didn’t know what we’d really need and what we could skip, I asked friends, family, doctors, random moms in coffee shops, and parenting mentors, and I read books and magazines and tons of reviews and recommendations on the web. After all my culling and questions, I ended up with a pretty comprehensive spreadsheet of what we were going to get and why, and that giant spreadsheet was the start of Minimalist Mama.

I’m also gathering up the most reasonable advice on parenting subjects that confused or concerned me that I’ve gotten from those same sources. And I’m hoping to add some recommendations on resources in San Francisco and New York that have worked out well for us - classes, playgrounds, mother’s groups and so on.

As the name suggests, the sites are geared towards urban parents or parents who aren’t inclined to buy a ton of stuff for a child who would rather play with measuring spoons anyway. Parents like me and R. The advice is along the same lines: let’s not go overboard but stay healthy and safe - and have a good time!

The sites are still a little disorganized on the tech front and the content’s a little all over the place, but I’m writing like mad and it’s coming together gradually. If you have any suggestions for subjects or questions you’d like answered, do send mail. I’m open to anything that would be useful!

(I’m also hosting Minimalist Mama on Wordpress, which is new for me after my 100% control here on Moveable Type. If you’re en expert on how to use Wordpress’ out-of-the-box offerings to build a segmented site, let me know! I’d love the help.)

I’m excited about the new venture because it will put to good use all the piles of information I gathered and have been sharing piecemeal with friends who get pregnant or have kids. I could have used a reasonable hand when I got pregnant and certainly some local, organized, humorous guidance after A. arrived. I’m hoping I can provide that help for some new and expectant moms out there.

If you or someone you know is expecting or has a young child, come on over and check it out!

My grandmother bought five-pound cans of Maxwell House and perked it on the stove. A drink in the evening was a rare glass of sherry. Suburban aunts made coffee in machines and their husbands drank gin and tonics out of wide glasses with urbane dancing frogs on them.

This is not my liquid life. I live in San Francisco where the drinks are complicated and expensive and there is nary a dancing frog in sight, let alone an ice cube from a freezer tray or, God forbid, coffee in a tin.

I’m not complaining. I drink well here. On our trip to the mountains of Colorado a few weeks ago though, it was back to basics and a welcome break.

First, let’s talk coffee. In Colorado, all the coffees were hot. Super hot. Mountain hot. Boiling hot. And they cost $3.75 for half a gallon of espresso and steamed milk. Well, almost half a gallon. This is fine with me. Hot, caffeinated and not bitter are my morning baselines. Above that line, I can really take it or leave it, even if I can tell the difference.

Back in San Francisco, I had it out with the barista at Ritual Coffee for delivering my coffee at room temperature for the umpteenth time. (This is apparently kind of a thing for me.) The guy said they had a POLICY that they did not steam their milk above a certain temperature because it carmelized the sugars. Apparently I like carmelized sugars based on my liking of apples covered in same and hot *(&#$#! milk in my cafe au lait.

That’s not to say that I don’t like what’s on offer here in general. Ritual Roasters, Four Barrel and Blue Bottle all spring from the Bay Area. Like Folgers crystals before them, they’re served in the finest restaurants around the country. (Another survey of their backgrounds here.) I’m not going to deny they’re good. Well, Blue Bottle and Ritual are good. Four Barrel I don’t get but a lot of people disagree with me so I’m outvoted there. Can I tell that these $4 cups of coffee are better than other coffees? Um, well, sort of. I can tell that they’re better than instant or coffeemaker coffee. And Starbucks. But that much better than much faster, cheaper, no-name coffee that I should pay twice as much? Probably not. Case in point: Dunkin’ Donuts makes my favorite coffee and I think they’re still on the Maxwell House train. So I’m not 100% sure I appreciate the level of precision that coneisseurship has brought to my morning cuppa.

Perhaps I’m being willfully dense here and resisting developing an expensive taste because then I’d have to spend $4 every morning rather than drinking what I can most conveniently get. I do this with wine. If I got hooked on $40 bottles of wine, I wouldn’t be able to drink the $10 bottle. So while I appreciate the expensive wines when they’re presented to me, I try not to take too much notice. I already spend enough money as it is.

Enough about me: if you’re looking around to taste the best of the best and have a nice sit-down while you’re in the city, here are my picks, with a heavy bias toward the south side of the city because that’s where we live.

Ritual Roasters’ original location on the gritty end of Valencia (21st/22nd Streets) will brew your regular coffee cup by cup, as well as serve you any espresso drink (with warm, not hot, milk). Rich flavor gleaned from their blends and their use of whole milk. My favorite of the top three but often crowded (they have free wifi) and they play non-background music - like, edgy, slightly metal indie stuff that’s hard to write to and chat to.

In which case, on a sunny day, you might prefer their new permanent cart in Hayes Valley (on Octavia just off Hayes) where you can sit outside and look in shops with commensurately priced goods of all kinds.

Similar music issues and an even grittier ‘hood, but less crowded and with a Scandinavian vibe, Haus on 24th Street brews Ritual as well and does a good job of it. Bonus: back patio with lots of sun, albeit also the neighbor’s laundry in view. Free wifi and excellent baked goods make up most of the way for the crabby hipster baristas.

Blue Bottle’s original San Francisco location in a garage on a side street in Hayes Valley has become enough of a landmark that now you don’t have to compete with cars: they’ve paved a little plaza in front. You can also pick up a cup at the super trendy, way-overcrowded-at-the-weekend-Farmers-Market yup-fest Ferry Building and downtown on Mint Plaza. Or - brilliant brilliant location choice - at Spin City, a high end laundromat in chic Noe Valley, Blue Bottle is served at the coffee window.

If you want to try Four Barrel, they have a giant, airy space on the other end of Valencia from Ritual, at 15th Street. You decide if you like it or not.

Let’s get back to Colorado and discuss cocktails. I sidled up to our lodge’s bar the first night to order a couple of straightforward cocktails: vodka cranberry and vodka tonic. No big deal. Nothing fancy. Didn’t want to go out on a pisco limb or anything in a building made of logs. The bartender delivers them in about thirty seconds and says, “That’ll be $7.” This prompts a tiny ethical dilemma. Should I tell him he’s only charged me for one, and at happy hour, well-drink prices even though it’s 9PM?

I ask. Turns out it’s not a mistake. Cocktails are $3.50. Cocktails with premium vodka no less. Living where I do and traveling mainly to other places like where I live, cocktails cost $9. Or $12. Or $14 if it’s that trendy and I’m paying for the slab of polished oak they use as a bar that they imported from a speakeasy in the basement of Versailles. Or something like that.

I will admit that I prefer the high-end cocktails at Beretta to the low-end ones at our old neighborhood’s dive bar Il Pirata. But do I notice if the bar makes their own ice using pure water and a special, I don’t know, vaporizing hyperbaric icebox or whatever? No, I do not. Can I tell if they’re using bottled bitters or homemade ones? Um, no. In the new world order or artisinal bars, I am a cretin and, for that, I’d like apologize to my bartender at Beretta who goes to so much trouble to make me happy.

I might be more of a high and mighty in this category if I drank more whiskey, bourbon or gin which seem to be the base of many, if not most, of the new breed of cocktails. I was a gin girl for a long time but have moved on to vodka and tequila for the most part, with a recent strong liking for pisco. This limits my range but it keeps the choosing simple.

I do wish that all bars offered the option of a straightforward drink at Colorado prices the way restaurants offer tap water or bottled. I can tolerate the tiny sneer that follows my, “Tap, please,” and would happily tolerate another if I could get Ketel One and Ocean Spray cranberry juice with tap-water ice cubes in an Ikea cup for half the price of my extra-special Pisco Punch.

Until that happens, here’s where I go.

For artisinal cocktails, it’s hard to beat Beretta. They have excellent food as well and, if you can get a seat (no reservations, go early), a buratta margherita pizza or chicken liver crostini will tide you over to a third drink if you want to hang out.

Bourbon & Branch is also well-reputed but you will need to plan ahead and make a reservation if you want food. I’ve written before about Range and their excellent food, but beware their hipster-looking cocktail menu: they’ve gone off the reservation in my estimation. Tomatoes have no place in evening drinks, unless by “evening” you mean “morning” and it’s a bloody mary you’re after.

We recently rediscovered Smugglers Cove in Hayes Valley (it used to be a trendy, purple-lit place we didn’t enjoy) where you can get a ridiculous number of pirate drinks made one-by-one by their single bartender. It’s not exactly the high-end science of mixology you’ll get at the places listed above, but tiki has been on an upswing the last couple of years and, let’s face it, sometimes you miss Club Med and their sweet, sweet drinks. (I’d advise only going in the week when the locals stop in for libations. We cruised in once on a Saturday and it was a bizarre mix of drunk, overweight, gay tourist developers and tacky bridge and tunnel girlies on a bender.)

Recently (like, yesterday) voted Best of the Bay for their unique happy hour - whoever orders first after 5PM, that’s the discount drink - we’ve latched onto Asiento of late for a not-dive but not-too-trendy evening drink accompanied by crazy good little plates. We haven’t made it there on a Sunday yet, but I hear they serve tater tots. Eighties lunchroom trashy trendy. I like it.

Although I enjoy all the developments in drinking my generation has ushered in, I (and my wallet) miss those dancing frogs and wish there a Dunkin Donuts at the end of my block. Until I find that block - or open a frog/donut outlet of my own - I’ll enjoy what San Francisco has to offer.

Oh, and if you’re in New York, don’t miss the Pisco Punch at Pegu Club. Best. Ever.

Sesame Street breaks it down from Wonderful Creative on Vimeo.

Heading to the car after seeing Captain America:

Me: Did you read Captain America?
R: No.
Me: Why not?
R: He didn’t have any superpowers or gadgets or anything. A shield, I guess…
Me: He does too: he’s almost bionic. And Batman didn’t have any powers.
R: Yeah, but he was dark and twisty.
Me: So his superpower was Most Fucked Up?
R: Yeah.

The Stairmaster is beyond me. Climbing stairs endlessly is like Sisyphus and his hill and who needs more of that in their lives when there are taxes to be done every year not to mention having to cut your nails for the rest of your life?

I don’t understand the appeal of climbing endlessly and slowly. At least on a treadmill you’re moving quickly to get nowhere.

Well, if you’re doing it right anyway. Not like that lady who brings her magazine and sets the machine on, like, 1 mph with no slope. She has definitely spent at least $200 on her outfit though. And then there’s the trip to the grocery checkout for that fashion mag. And maybe she had to walk the gym bill from her car to the post box, so that counts for something. There’s a calorie burn in there somewhere. And she gets points for making me feel better about how hard I’m working, which is not nearly as hard as the girl next to me who must be bionic, really, because who goes that fast?

I’ve gotten off my point. My point is that I’ve stopped going to the gym.

Correction: I’ve stopped paying the gym for not going. I put my membership on hold. Why? Because now I live on a Stairmaster.

Yes, my least favorite gym machine has come into my everyday life. We live on the side of a hill at the top of a hill and the bottom of a hill. Well, really, the top and bottom of several hills. Welcome to Potrero Hill. The views are amazing, but holy God, the hills.

Our beloved former apartment was also in Potrero Hill but just on the edge, on the flat bit leading to other flat, reasonable neighborhoods. My calves will be happy to tell you how much we don’t live there anymore.

Our house is on the up side of the street: we’re perched on bed rock above the street rather than our lower across-the-street neighbors who are also on bedrock but whose front doors are at street level. One steep set of stairs up to our basement level then another set of stairs up to the front door. This is a wonderful set-up for carrying a baby, a stroller, groceries, mail and coffee.

(We have no garage for storing things like strollers: cutting one into the hill will cost, depending on who you ask $50K or $200K, which could be better spent on purchasing and staffing a litter for me and A. to get around. Stripey curtains please, if you’re thinking of springing for it.)

Our house is also the very last house on a half block of flat before a steep downhill slope. This means if I drop anything while unloading the car, it is going to roll away. Far away. Even things not generally considered roll-worthy will have a go at our hill. Why not? It might be their only chance at it. Look at the credit the wheel gets for advancing civilization. Why wouldn’t a square block or a flat book want to even up the score?

In the other direction, beyond the flat bit, we’re at the intersection of the bottom of two just-as-steep hills. There is literally nowhere to go but up.

But let’s get back to the stairs. In some previous owner’s wisdom - or significant budgetary constraints - when they added the living room and our giant upstairs bedroom above it onto the house, they thought it’d be brilliant to use the space under the new stairs for a small bathroom. Excellent. Good. Unfortunately, they failed to put a bathroom on the second floor for the now-sleeping-upstairs residents.

You see where I’m going with this. Any trip to the bathroom from the bedroom involves fourteen stairs down and another fourteen (well, the same fourteen really) back up. In the middle of the night. It’s like a mini workout at 2AM. A very, very unwelcome workout at 2AM.

So as far as stairs are concerned, I’m sorted. Really. Don’t get me stairs for Christmas. I don’t really like them and now I have tons. They’re like tube socks. Or Carters underwear. Stop with the stairs already. Someone get me a slide. Or a human-sized version of that suction tube thing from at the bank drive-through. See, now that would be useful. Why didn’t we look for a place with one of those?

A friend told me this story about her friend’s six-year-old daughter.

A few months ago, the little girl picked her first imaginary friend and named him Charlie Macaroni. Her parents asked about Charlie regularly and got concerned when the little girl said that no matter how many times she rang him, Charlie wouldn’t return her calls. Not so much with the imaginary friend play dates apparently. The parents considered intervening in their daughter’s unsatisfactory friendship but decided her imaginary life was hers and she’d work it out.

A little while later, the little girl reported having a great time with her new imaginary friend Laura. “Excellent,” the parents thought. “A replacement for absent Charlie.”

“Who’s Laura?” they asked their daughter.

“She’s Charlie’s admin,” the little girl replied.

Well, if you can’t lunch with the boss, the secretary might be more fun anyway.

You know that phrase, “Keeping up with the Jonses”? Like, you’ve got your eye on the neighbors and are trying to, well, keep up? If they get an Audi, you need an Audi. If their kid goes to violin lessons, you’re off to the Stradivarius factory? (At which point you realize that you will also need a time machine or a billion dollars because there isn’t one and they haven’t made a violin since the 1720s and Stradivarius.com has been hijacked by a company that makes weird tunic-y clothing that you don’t want your kid wearing because how is that keeping up anyway unless you live on in a German suburb or a pricey commune?) You get the idea.

I don’t think my subconscious has really absorbed the metaphorical meaning of the phrase because my version of keeping up with the Jonses is apparently quite literally wanting to keep up with them. Like follow them around.

Here’s what: every time a neighbor moves, I feel like I should move.

It has nothing to do with where they’re moving to: the last examples I can think of were Dallas, Los Angeles and now our current neighbors are off to San Luis Obispo which was nice the one time I drove through there and spent $500 on an Apple Time Machine (because, apparently, a road trip to LA and seeing all that plastic surgery got me super worried about whether I had enough back-ups of my originals…?) but is in the middle of nowhere and just not my bag at all.

But I still feel left out. I feel like your puppy that whimpers at the door when you head to the car even if you’re going out to run a really boring errand. Why would these people want to go places if they aren’t better than here? It must be better than here. Something amazing must be going on where they’re going or they wouldn’t be going, right?

It doesn’t seem to matter that the “something amazing” might only be amazing to them and not me, like getting into a graduate program in a field I only care about only very slightly because I’m a nice person (rainforest monkey evolution) or pursuing a career opportunity I admire but would not want (portrait photographer) or moving to be closer to other people’s grandparents who would probably not be keen to babysit my child so I could go see Transformers 3 on a weeknight.

I don’t want to be left behind. Period. I’m kind of a joiner and I’m pretty competitive. I need to make sure the party I’m not at isn’t better than the party I am at.

I don’t want to get too into the psychology of it, but here’s what I think: when I was kid we moved and I hated where we moved to, so I’ve wanted to keep moving on ever since. Which is weird ‘cause really if I’d have just stayed put in the first place and I’d have been happy, but some switch got flipped and I got hooked on, “Change is good!” It probably didn’t help that home life was kind of a wreck, so “elsewhere” was generally pretty attractive.

So travel I did and I moved around a lot for a few years. Turns out “there” is often just a different version of “here” as far as your head is concerned, so eventually I settled in New York, which worked out well, because “there” and “here” converge in New York. It was the perfect location for a here-and-there-r: I never felt bad coming home because New York itself was so great, and I never felt like the people who were leaving were really going anywhere better because where could be better than New York?

Then I got cocky and left myself, assuming I’d be back soon. That was eleven years ago. San Francisco isn’t bad - I definitely think it’s better than Dallas or LA - but I’m back to my puppy at the door behavior whenever anyone goes.

Of course the other part of the move envy is that I’ll miss the people who leave. If they were jerks, I’d probably wave from the porch, secretly snide. But our neighbors are great. Two little kids, helpful, willing to chat a bit on the sidewalk. It’s quiet without them and I’m sad to see them go.

Like a number of parents I’ve known, they’re going to where help is - multiple grandparents and siblings to assist with kid care - and maybe we’ll eventually do the same. I’m going to start working on getting all my grandparents and the siblings to move to Brooklyn so when we get there, we’ll be all set. That’s almost the same thing, right? Then everyone gets to move! Winners all around.

Apparently I’m wrong. And I’ve been wrong for a while.

Here’s what: one is “one”. Two is “a couple.” Three is “a few,” and somewhere around six or seven is “several.”

Turns out that’s wrong.

According to Merriam-Webster,

sev·er·al adj \ˈsev-rəl, ˈse-və-\
2a : more than one
b : more than two but fewer than many

So three is “several.” And seven might be “many.”

I have spent the bulk of my life - I don’t know when I first used “several”… “Don’t touch my several Star Wars figures”? - not only misusing the word but judging others for using it too liberally to describe just a little more than a couple.

Well, “misusing” might be too strong. Six might still be several. “Limiting its lower bound,” let’s say, which is a lesser crime and no one is coming for me in a linguistic squad car. (Which would look like what exactly? A Prius? No - a Volt. With a supercilious air. Like mine when I read “several incidents” and find out the journalist means “three.”)

Isn’t “a few” three or four? Doesn’t “several” imply at least seven, given that they share almost all the same letters? And how is that not infallible logic? I didn’t take Latin, but wasn’t there something in third grade, or second, about root words? I think I’m right about this. Really. Someone back me up here.

And, even if it isn’t technically inaccurate, isn’t referring to three of something as “several” kind of an overstatement? If you can use “several” to describe anything from barely more than a few all the way up to, say, twelve, isn’t that like saying “I told you several times not to eat that crayon,” when really this is only the third time just now and who doesn’t want to suck on colorful wax, so back off already, I’m waterproofing my teeth?

All right: I’m soooo sorry if I have inaccurately judged you in the past for using “several” inaccurately when really I was wrong.

Sort of. We both know I’m kind of right still about that overdoing it thing. Kind of.

OK not. But give me a break: “several” to mean “more than one”? Really? “We owned several cars,” when we had a 1986 Corolla and a ‘92 Camry? Really? Really???

Dear Altitude,

Quit it. Just quit it. Really. Enough already.

I got up early this morning, I got us packed, including 75 different snacks for our one year old - since she won’t eat the same thing from one day to the next - and enough hand wipes to clean the plane better than United did. I made pancakes for breakfast before we left, for God’s sake. That’s got to count for something.

Not in your book? Yeah, I figured.

Just so you know, instead of napping, A. ran around the Red Carpet Lounge yelling just at the moment when that quiet guy in the corner on his laptop in the business section seemed like he might be making some progress on whatever he was working on. Then she made me a glass of juice from all the available buttons on the juice machine. Then she poured water down the front of her shirt so she looked like we let her play in the pool before heading to the plane which I think reflects well on my parenting.

I’m just telling you, so you know what kind of morning we had.

Instead of napping on the plane, she was much more interested in talking to the three Japanese businessmen sleeping across the aisle than any of the other passengers who said, “Hi!” and, “Aren’t you cute?” Who needs those guys when there are three people paying no attention to you? All or nothing. Compliments from the willing are for suckers.

I know you don’t care, Altitude. I can tell by your cavalier distribution of headaches and dehydration once we got to where you are. But I thought you should know. Just so you have it in writing. Maybe someday you’ll look back and feel a little bit sorry? No? All right.

The rental car shuttle took forever, by the way. And then it rained. And the car seat the man who tried to get us to upgrade to an RV-sized tank for our three pieces of luggage just handed it to us like we’d know how to install a We-B-Cheap brand car seat. That kid is ours, dude. We like her so we invested in the giant gernade-resistant model that takes the strength of one of those male gorillas to install. The ones with the fangs. We have no idea what to do with this plastic shell that looks like it’s made out of Tupperware covered with ill-fitting velour from the craft store that always confuses me because there are so many, many bins of colorful things I don’t need. Do we need pipe cleaners to attach it to the seat? Safety pins? Whatever, dude. Whatever.

I’m telling you all this so maybe you’d just back on up off us a little. Sinus congestion and a nosebleed aren’t the, “Welcome to Colorado! We serve mixed drinks!” note I was hoping to end my day on.

The restaurant, when we got to our lodge, has a maximum age limit of 12 for their staff, so it took 90 minutes to get seated and I had to leave before dinner because A. was so tired. She fell down in front of me she was so tired. Just fell. No reason. Hard not to take that point. So I ate my now-take-out burger in our bathroom so she could sleep, poor tired thing.

And you know why she’s so tired? Because we’re at 100 billion feet in the air and we live at sea level, Altitude. The views are nice from here, I won’t deny it. But what’s with the thin air? And why suck all the moisture out of it while you’re thinning it out? We needed that humidity. We can’t breathe. God. Who’s mean to a little kid? She’s adorable. Why would you give her a headache? It’s like hating kittens, for cripe’s sake. Be a mensch.

Sigh.

OK. You win. I’ll find the aspirin in the massive pile of stuff unpacked from two suitcases in seven seconds in the near-dark to find A.’s pajamas. And I’ll find some water. And we’ll just pretend you’ll be nicer tomorrow, OK? You can have a word with yourself overnight and see if you can make it out of bed on the right side in the morning. We’ll talk then.

Yours truly,
Emma

Have you seen this list? I seem to read one every year. It’s about which brands will go under in the coming year.

If you’re in finance, I guess doing the list makes you a smarty pants analyst. I’m not in finance, so a.) since I am not a smarty pants in this particular area, I am irritated by people who are (if I were, I would, naturally, be impressed with myself), and b.) there are always some brands on the list that I can’t believe will go under because I need them, so I choose to not believe the list.

A couple of years ago, the list said Borders would go out of business and I was very upset. Borders is where I go to buy magazines, peruse the travel section for vacation destinations where I can go without getting immunization shots, and look at all the books I will then go onto Amazon to buy at a discount. Which is precisely why Borders is going under. But I still buy all those magazines. And coffee. Apparently not in sufficient quantities though because the list makers were right about that one.

This year, they’re predicting the demise of Saab, which makes me, um, well not, you know, but definitely feel sad. I think they’re going under because they drifted away from that retro Porsche-y almond-shaped sillouhette they used to have in the 1980’s. I wanted one of those cars. Also, I like the Swedes, so that’s sad for them.

With A&W on the list, I thought maybe the one root beer brand I can identify was going south, but no, it’s just their restaurant arm. I thought you had to have a time machine to go to the A&W restaurants, and apparently so did everyone else, because they’re going away.

I am not sorry to hear about Soap Opera Digest, which should’ve just cut over to reality TV a while ago, which is way more soapy than the dying soaps, and American Apparel, because I never liked their ads. Not because the billboards were overtly selling sex (who isn’t?) but because they were selling tacky underage1970’s runner shorts sex, which is not my kind of sex. So I better head to the local shop and get R. a bunch of those waffle Ts he likes and another couple sleeveless turtleneck dresses for me and say goodbye.

The brand loss that’s truly breaking my heart is Kellogg’s Corn Pops. Ah, Pops. I loved Corn Pops. When Fruit Loops and Apples Jacks changed their formulas to be less crispy-sugar-coated and more milk-susceptible, I could always turn to Pops to remind me of the good old days when I escaped the “no sugar cereals” ban at home and got my little box of Pops at camp and college cafeterias. Tasty, tasty Pops.

Pops were a staple of my pregnancy diet, along with fruit, which is probably why A. is so cute and awesome and I only gained 18 lbs. (For which I take no credit by the way: who has control over the foods they want to eat while pregnant? No one, that’s who.)

I just threw out my last box of baby-related Pops last week. They had merged into a single Pop in the humidity of the San Francisco rains. I wasn’t eating them fast enough. And now, soon, I may not be able to get more. I might have to look at the whole second child question from a new angle now if s/he will not have the in utero Pops advantage.

Reading further bad news, it turns out that the smarty pants(s) think Pops are on the way out because they aren’t healthy, containing both saturated fat and something called BHT, which doesn’t sound all-natural and turns out isn’t. It’s a component in embalming fluid.

Adding that little detail is just mean. How can I ever look at a Pops box with the same pure desire I had before knowing it has a little bit of embalming fluid in it? It’s like telling me Hugh Jackman kicks puppies. Why did you have to throw that out there on the mat? You’re ruining it for me. What I didn’t know wasn’t hurting me. Or rather, I didn’t know what was hurting me.

Come to that though, how do you know it’s hurting me? It doesn’t sound good, putting embalming fluid ingredients in food, but the smarty pants guys don’t say if they know it’s bad. It might be giving me nice supple skin. They use corn in ethanol, don’t they? Is anyone going after Orville Redenbacher for using an ingredient in auto fuel? No. They’re not. Maybe BHT is like corn: just another harmless ingredient that’s been vilified unjustly by smarty pants(s) taking it out of context.

Although the acronym isn’t helping its case. Acronyms in food sound sinister. Like CRN Pops. It sounds like something robot overlords use to keep their joints lubricated.

I hear people are hoarding old-school light bulbs in preparation for the cutover to fluorescents next year. Maybe I’ll go that route: go buy that retro Saab I’ve always coveted, load up the trunk with 200 boxes of Pops and cruise on over to A&W to get some milk for my cereal. I’ll just circle until they close or I run out of Pops, whichever comes first. Don’t worry about me: the embalming fluid will keep my stamina up.

I’ve never wanted the kind of fame that gets you bothered on the street.

Good thing because I definitely don’t have it.

What I want is the kind of fame where I can do what I want. Like get good tables at New York restaurants and have a mostly bottomless bank account. (It doesn’t have to be completely bottomless. Making decisions is good for you. Sometimes.)

Fran Lebowitz seems to have that but I don’t understand how. Don’t get me wrong: I like her. She’s an excellent writer. Correction: was. She hasn’t published anything in thirty years. And she’s clever, which goes a very, very long way with me. But that smirk in her Wikipedia photo says it all. She’s getting away with something amazing: despite her lack of production, according to today’s Times, she can afford to maintain and garage a 1979 Checkers in Manhattan. And wear Savile Row-tailored suit jackets. WHAT IS GOING ON?

I saw Public Speaking, but nowhere in there did I see an explanation for her wealth. How much can speaking engagements unassociated with any product besides your own wit generate for Pete’s sake? If they do cover what sound like her considerable expenses, I need to get a piece of that. I’m witty. I am. Really.

She’s like the Paris Hilton for Manhattan. Show up, be you, get paid.

Impressive.

Maybe I’ll take the window table at my local cafe every afternoon and just start saying witty things to myself until a crowd gathers. I’ll know what to do after that, right?

My friend Lucie is British, married to Marc, an American, and mother to Ethan, age one.

Me: What are you doing for the Fourth?
Lucie: I don’t know. Dressing Ethan in the Union Jack and sending him out to have at it with Marc.
Me: Sounds uneven.
Lucie: If someone French comes by to help, that’d be fine.

There are people who love the gym and the people who don’t. I don’t. I use the gym to further my plans of world domination. Meaning, if you’re not planning on going to the Olympics, why go to the gym? Why bike if you aren’t headed for the Tour de France? Why run if you aren’t after the New York City Marathon?

“Well,” you say, “there’s also the issue of your basic health and fitness to be attended to.”

I see your point. I do. It’s just not my deal. The gym is super boring. Competition is where it’s at in sports for me. I tend to be a athletics bulimic: binge when there’s a goal, purge when there isn’t. Aim for everything or just skip it.

“But sports can be fun,” you persist.

I agree. Especially when you triumph.

I know. I hear you. This isn’t the healthy approach for body or mind. If the most adaptive of the species survive, I’m in trouble, ‘cause my attitude hasn’t worked well for me. Or my knees. Or ribs. Or hips, neck or back. And I’m still not world champion of anything.

The last time I was in a binge phase, I was training 30-40 hours a week on the trapeze. It was awesome and nerve-wracking. I had bloody palms, huge shoulders and rope burns and bruises all over my limbs and joints. I’ve never been stronger or more tired. That career ended with some irresponsible spotting leading to a couple bad falls that led to a fractured rib and a dislocated one that will never heal.

That event was the equivalent of running my Ferrari into a brick wall: now I have to get a Volvo and drive the speed limit because I can’t survive another accident. Well, maybe not a Volvo: they’re nice and the little ten-year-old Bostonian Izod-lover in me has a soft spot for them. Let’s say I’ve been downgraded to one of those rolling bubbles at the gym so I don’t hurt myself again. Or more.

So you know what I do just to get back at the universe for not being able to obsessively overcompete? I don’t go to the gym at all. So there. I’m sure someone out there is learning a lesson… Right? RIGHT???

*sigh*

Lately however I’ve cracked. I’ve kind of started working out. Accidentally. And only kind of. Even though I don’t think I’m going to be the get a yellow jersey for it. It’s a big concession.

And it’s not really working out per se. It’s walking. But we live on the side of a giant San Francisco hill, so a straight sprint skyward with a baby and a stroller probably counts as a workout, especially since I haven’t gotten any organized exercise in a while.

And by “organized,” I mean, “doing repetitive things on machines where the weight stays in the same place unless you personally stop and move it.” What I have been doing is disorganized. It involves suddenly lifting or catching or pushing up a slide an ever-growing weight (OK, “child”) which is usually in motion itself and whose bulk usually falls on my muscles at an uncomfortable angle that is not ergonomically healthy, tested or approved by the National Council on Fitness, a very thin blonde celebrity or a inhumanly fit former monk/kickboxer.

I’ve taken on the vertical walk in the mornings because there is an odd hour between breakfast and naptime (our daughter’s, not mine - I’m not that much of a sloth) and there is espresso at the midpoint of the rainbow. It’s too early to be too hot to climb the hills, or for me to be awake and focused on anything including hating that hill or not being the Most Best Hill Climber Ever. The need for coffee carries me upward.

But do you think they have that Best Hill Climber thing? ‘Cause if they do, I should definitely get on that. Or maybe Most Moderate Worker Outer? No. That’s not a thing.

I do have a yellow sweatshirt around here somewhere. Maybe I’ll start wearing that to make myself feel more competitive.

I had to miss a baby shower this weekend whose invitation included a request that all the guests bring the expectant mom three beads to include in a rosary-like chain she would use for calming meditation during her labor. I was supposed to assign and then explain a meaning to each bead, for example, “This one represents your patience, which is one of the reasons I think you’ll be a good mom.”

I can see that, from one angle, this is a charming and useful idea. As a carrier of a tiny plastic fawn all through kindergarten, I’m down with security objects. And, against all odds, I’m a convert to meditation. (Don’t tell anyone.)

If someone had tried to give me such a chain when I was pregnant, I would have thanked them politely. I might have even taken it to the hospital with me as a reminder of my nice friends. I also definitely would have wrapped it through another chain of beads, each representing a readily available pain killer or surgical intervention my hospital offers.

I say, do whatever works for you, and what works for me is being as close to medical assistance as possible. I regularly discover bruises of unknown provenance on my arms and legs and the door frame between the kitchen and living room knows my clavicle pretty well, so it’s reasonable to expect that beads might not cover my needs while having a baby.

One of the hundreds of things that “Prepare Yourself for Your Baby!” web sites and books recommend you do before your nine months is up is lay out a birth plan. It’s a “what I want” list from the time you arrive at the hospital door to the time you leave, hopefully 48-72 hours later. There is generally a template included with spaces for preferences ranging from the absurdly specific (overhead lighting) to the pretty basic (painkillers or not) I filled one out. It prompted me to think through the specifics of the upcoming, er, blessed event in the order they would likely happen, and that was useful.

What is less useful is attaching yourself to any of those things actually happening. And if there is anything that the principles of Buddhism have taught me and the experience of parenthood have backed up, it is that the sooner you get comfortable with this reality, the happier you will be.

I know exactly one person whose birth plan went as planned. For everyone else, including myself, things started going off-plan almost as soon as they left the starting gate. I think this is pretty common across all plans - birth, career, life, vacation - and the key to success, despite the deviation (gross or minor), is to detach from the plan almost as soon as you make it.

It’s a neat trick, that.

In my experience, the more I plan, the more attached I get to that exact plan, and the more specific my expectations become. The more specific my expectations become, the more disappointing any divergence will be, even if it’s a really nice divergence. I mean seriously, who would not want to take a two-hour detour to the World’s Largest Ball of Twine? It’s right there for Pete’s sake. Forget your plan - go already!

Of course, it’s good to start with a plan - it helps clarify your desires and helps you think through details that might otherwise be forgotten. But the process of making it often leads to getting fixed on things happening in just that way. So, after years of Type A planning ending in feeling weird and disappointed - what I (try to) do now is

Plan. Not too complicated. Think through things step by step. (Type A extravaganza!)

Re-set.

1. Make a note of the 2-3 priorities that actually matter. (Birth plan goal? Healthy baby. Vacation plan? Get some rest. See that one play with - whaddaya call him? - Spiderman? Oh - scratch that.)


2. Related: if the 2-3 things involve reservations, make ‘em. Also, book your flights.

Re-plan.Take the “not too complicated” part and your priorities to heart and remove half a dozen things to create some open space. (Hang gliding at 6AM? Maaaaybe…)

Settle down and get happy. Your “plan” = “desirable options.” Print it, put it in your folder and refer to it for reminders, ideas and course correction. But not self-punishment.

That’s my plan for planning. It works for me. But feel free to bead on up if that works for you. And if you just have to have a seventeen page birth plan including your own lighting system, a cooler of the sushi you haven’t been allowed to eat, and your personal umbrella holder guy, go for it. And good luck!

9PM, our living room

Me: Dammit! I forgot to have dinner!
R: “Foiled by myself again!”

If you live along a tectonic fault line, it’s a good idea to show the planet who’s boss by packing a backpack of Band-Aids, canned tuna and an extra T-shirt and storing up some water in your basement. Also, get a wrench so you can turn off your gas line. That wrench is going to make all the difference when the earth starts shifting beneath you.

Ah, little humans.

Being one of those humans and, among them, probably on the high end of the liking to be prepared for things you can’t control, I have been planning my Go Bag for several years. Not packing. Planning.

I think I can say with reasonable confidence that I have an alarmingly comprehensive master list of “essentials” for every manner of emergency. I have considered chemical attacks, virus outbreaks and nuclear fallout, in addition to your basic fire and earthquake. I have looked up pricing for personal parachutes. Even though our house only has two stories, we are a flight of steps up from the street, so it seemed prudent to check. I’ve compared iodine tablets that clear drinking water to iodine tablets that counteract radiation. (Sadly, these are not the same product, so you will have to get both. Unless your drinking water is really, really dirty.)

I didn’t actually buy any of these things, mind you, I just researched them to add to my giant Spreadsheet of Terrible Possibilities. I’m not a complete idiot. I’m just worried.

So the spreadsheet sat there and then grew and then sat and then grew and so on until not too long ago when, without consulting it, I filled an old Gap backpack with a pre-made First Aid kit I got from Target, some granola bars and a rain poncho and put it in my garden bench on our deck where it promptly got soaked and molded.

That didn’t so much work out as an emergency plan.

It’s notable at this stage that, despite having a thorough, well-researched, printed checklist of all the things that should be in a Baby Go Bag when you are finally ready to head to the hospital, I did not actually have said bag out or packed when I went into labor. So this is kind of a thing with me, apparently.

Now that we live in a house, I have more room to expand on my Giant Spreadsheet of Disaster and have collected, at last count, four evacuation bags. One has food, one has clothes and baby stuff, one has tools and medical supplies, and then there’s a pile of water. A pile of containers of water to be more exact. Piling water is a waste of time.

There is also a small heap of tools that don’t fit in that bag. And there’s still a list of things I haven’t packed, like copies of essential documents and a T-shirt for R. who, should something happen right now, will be going shirtless. He’ll be like that hot guy on Lost who never seemed to have a shirt handy. He made it through our having-a-baby hospital stay in hospital scrubs though, so he should be OK. I mean R. should be OK, not the guy from Lost. That would be weird if that guy were hanging around the hospital the whole time we were there. And by “weird,” I mean “weird and flattering because, let’s face it, that guy is really, really good looking.”

I considered digging a bunker/irregularly shaped hole/ditch in the backyard to house all my Stuff of Calamity but I like our garden, so instead I’ve scattered the four bags in four different places throughout the house so it will be highly improbable that they will all be accessible in an emergency. My thinking is that it will also be unlikely that all of them will be inaccessible, so, “Mwaha!” to all of you who thought that it was stupid to split them up.

Now, after six years, I’m within reaching distance of the over-prepared finish line, and I’m having some second thoughts.

First, what if the lack of an earthquake so far in my tenure in California is because I haven’t finished my evac bag? Finishing might be the cue for the pending earthquake to strike. What if all these mini earthquakes we’ve been having are just, “What’s up with that Go Bag, Carlson?” reminder quakes and when I finally finish, I am inadvertently inviting disaster?

Here’s where I’m coming from: I was supposed to pack my Baby Go Bag for the hospital the week A. was born (a month before her due date). Maybe she arrived early because the universe sensed a packed bag on the horizon. (I ended up taking several pairs of socks and a bag of jellybeans to the delivery, which worked out fine because it was Easter that weekend and who really needs pants anyway?)

This theory might be excessively self-involved, so I’m trying to table that concern.

Things could go the other way after all. What would happen if there were an earthquake TONIGHT before the bag is complete? I have some time set aside tomorrow to finish up the packing. An earthquake tonight would be be the ultimate ironic game changer. I’d be out on the street - correction: in a doorframe/under a sturdy table - watching an unmounted bookshelf fall towards me without a copy of my most recent tax documents in my hand. Silly Emma. No potassium iodide. No parachute. Scanning my spreadsheet and realizing I don’t have tent stakes, that document would exist solely to mock me. Perhaps I won’t enclose a copy among my emergency papers and hope to survive in the coming wasteland on my wits alone. And a bottle of Similac Extra Sensitive, which I will share with my daughter and my shirtless fiance while I use my crowbar and ecologically sensitive plastic camping fork to dig out my First Aid Bag.

These are not cheerful thoughts. Perhaps I’ll go finish up that packing right now to catch the plates off-guard, and I’ll leave out one thing, just to keep the universe stable. I think I’ll “forget” the wax-dipped matches in a waterproof container and rely on a gas fire to toast my marshmallows because who knows how to to turn off the gas line even if you do have a wrench?

I might have forgotten a couple of things after all.

The wheelchair guy is back. Turns out he has a Chippendales torso silkscreened on the back of his chair. Hmm. That doesn’t look like standard hospital issue… Although this is San Francisco…

I’m not sure I feel so sorry for this guy anymore. If you can afford the mental energy and financial cost of having a mostly naked man applied to the back of your chair, maybe you’re just crazy in one way. The middle-of-the-street cruising way, not the, “I’m not sure where I’m headed way.”

Circling our block isn’t the way to Vegas though. Maybe he doesn’t have GPS. I’ll print out directions to Rio and run down with them. I’ll be right back.

There is a giant Bed Bath & Beyond right next to our grocery store, and they’ve just added a giant drugstore section to their giant kitchen section. Everything there is giant. I guess their store is so gigantic that it crowded out their plan for a giant backstock space because everything is hung or stacked up to the sky. Some morning, I’m going to go in and ask for assistance getting down the one thousand and first spatula up near their 50-foot ceiling because THAT is the one I need. Eye level is for suckers.

Gigantism aside, I went into the baby products aisle and ended up staring at the colorful condom display instead. See, the birth control section is right next to the baby section. So you can stock up on products for your current offspring while making sure no others join her.

I have a lot of questions after looking at my options.

First, do the “Twisted” condoms come with a little man in leather wielding equipment that looks like it belongs in the hardware aisle? Second, what is the Trojan company implying about my sex life when they try to sell me a condom labeled “Sensations”? I feel insulted and intrigued all at once. Third, can you get the Sensitivity pack gift wrapped so I can send it to couple of my ex-boyfriends? Oh never mind. I just read the fine print. That’s not what they meant.

Being a “her,” I appreciate all the boxes that promote all manner of features “for her pleasure.” Thank you.

Not to get too specific about the guys I dated in my 20’s but I think there’s an untapped segment at the other end of the market. “The Pleasure Is All Mine” condom would be super cheap, flimsy, bad at conversation, and be packaged with a dehydrated shot of Jagermeister. Get on that. You could make a killing. You’re welcome, Trojan.

OK, yeah, I’ll just collect my unscented suncreen stick and Mickey Mouse Band-Aids and be on my way.

Thanks to ma bro for this one. Newly married too, what.

Say it in Llama. Isn’t everything better with a little llama in it? Yes. It is. The Llama Font.

It didn’t look like a good idea, going down a 70-degree hill in an electric wheelchair, but he seemed determined.

I’ll back up.

My office overlooks the street. It’s not usually an interesting perspective because we live on a 100% residential block, but the sidewalk in front of our house drops off like a cliff down a steep hill plus we’re on the uphill side of the street, so I can see all of western San Francisco from our perch at two edges. Not with any specificity, mind you - I’d need a telescope to see any funny business going on over in the Castro - but still.

Not much happens on our street except our burglary and the odd family across the street - heavy 70-something mom in a sweatshirt, dapper angry dad, shiftless 40-something son in a porkpie hat and trimmed-flat bears - who move their red Volvo across the street and up and down the block all day long, even on weekends and at night. Maybe they’re running single errands for every individual grocery they need.

Then, last week, an electric wheelchair approached from the flat end of the street. The man in it was bald, old-ish and steering down the middle of the road even though you can’t see any traffic coming up the hill. He was wearing blue hospital pants covered by a lap blanket and a short-sleeved hospital issue shirt.

He veered and slowed as he approached the crest of the hill but didn’t pull up. Straight down at what looked like maximum speed for a motorized chair.

My first thought was, “Huh. A dude in a wheelchair on our hill.” I had to think twice to think twice and consider how odd it was. Like, not a street cleaning move or something.

My next thought was that he’d made an understandable jail break from the nearby hospital.

San Francisco General Hospital is four blocks away. I’ve never been into it and hope to never have to: from what I hear, they cater mainly to gunshot victims, gang members shooting each other in the Mission. When I took a Baby First Aid class, I asked the young EMT if he thought it’d be better to take A. down the hill to the hospital or call 911 if we had an emergency. I said I thought maybe if she’d been shot, I’d head for SF General. He diplomatically suggested I give the ambulance EMTs a try first, then added the caveat that if she’s been shanked, yeah, maybe the hospital should be our first choice.

So that’s SF General. Good for this guy for getting the hell out of there.

This morning, he cruised back by, still in the middle of the road but with no pause at the crest. Just straight down.

Maybe he’s training for something. Our hill attracts that type. Some crazy, middle-aged skinny woman trucks by with a backpack on twice a day like she’s fleeing the Rapture, canned goods and all. Is there Wheelchair Motocross? He could get on that. He needs a better uniform though and maybe some flame detailing. Better yet, some actual flames. Do wheelchairs have exhaust pipes? Maybe I’ll have a word with him next time he tools by. I could be his agent. This is going to be great. New client! Happy Wednesday after all.

This has not been my week. I’m not complaining - stuff happens - I’m just saying I’m glad we’re getting close to Saturday evening and a clean slate tomorrow.

It started last Sunday. I cracked an egg on the edge of the sink since it has a better edge than the bowl. Since I usually drop the eggshell’s contents into the container I’m cracking it on, I went ahead and dropped the egg down the drain.

No big deal. Just an egg.

An hour later, I had filled R’s cup of coffee partway at a cafe when the carafe ran empty. I put a lid on the cup and picked up a full carafe at the counter. Then I pumped boiling hot coffee onto the lid of the cup to fill it up. Caffeinated chaos all over the counter. Burned my hand.

OK. Fine. Accidents happen. Clamp down. Move on.

We were on our way to the beach so A. could have a little fling with the sand. Halfway there we had to turn around because she was crying so hard in the backseat. Teething? Maybe. The risk of being in proximity to a large body of water with me? Smart.

Back home, the neighbors were coming by for dinner, so I started a dessert that involves melting butter in the cake pan in the oven. The pan slips, spilling liquid butter into the oven. Which caught on fire. Not a whoopsie little “fire” either. Actual foot-high flames in the oven. I closed the oven door and just looked at it. I wasn’t surprised. I know where the fire extinguisher is, but what was the point? It would’ve exploded. Or melted. Something. So we all just stood there looking at the flaming oven.

Eventually the fire went out. Good to know. Just stand still so it can’t tell you’re there.

Then I put a spoon down the garbage disposal.

Then I went to bed.

The whole week’s been like that. Just one flaming spoon after another. I’m trying to steer clear of sharp corners and pointy objects until I get to bed tonight. Wish me luck.

So first there was all that hoopla about Apple tracking my whereabouts. I kind of let that one slide because I pretty much assume people are recording my every move anyway. On the flip side, I also assume that a.) whoever “they” are aren’t organized enough to synthesize all that data so they couldn’t actually locate me at my coffee shop until three weeks from now, and b.) I’m not important enough for them to try.

Come to think of it though, if they did try, in three weeks, I’ll probably be back at my coffee shop, so old data’s probably a-OK in my case. I’m just not very wily.

But now there’s this whole Luddite thing with Bin Laden being located by tracking his courier. That’s some old-school sh*t. (Of course it took them ten years, so either that’s one slow-moving courier, one big-ass errand or a hell of lot of stop-offs to explain to the boss.)

It made me think twice about ever sending A. out to run an errand for me. What if she runs up the hill to our local bodega to get a paper and a coffee for her lazy-ass mom and they follow her back to our house?

Not that she’ll be running errands anytime soon. She can’t walk a straight line for three feet and usually falls down after five, so my coffee would be in jeopardy. Right, yes: also her one-year-old safety.

And no one runs up the huge hill by our house anyway except this crazy wiry woman I see every day who appears to be training for the Apocalypse when she’ll have to fight for food and matches.

But my concern remains, impracticalities aside. What if A. just scoots down to the corner on her ride-upon ladybug and some spook follows her that whole half-block home? What if that happened?

I can hear you now: “Sooo…what if it did happen?”

I don’t know. I don’t know what. Probably nothing. But I’m still worried.

I hear you: I know our name is on our mailbox right out in front. It’s not like they’d have to follow little A. home to find us. But they could and it seems like it’s part of their handbook of plans.

I just don’t like the idea of someone being able to follow my courier. It’s so…personal. I like to think of my trackers as guys with interesting motives in masks in black helicopters way up high in the sky. If there are actual SEALs coming up the stairs, that’s more threatening. Should we stop getting Chinese food delivered in case they’re following that guy? It’s not usually the same guy though. That might throw them off the scent.

God. Am I really going to have to start running all my own errands? And wouldn’t that just make their job easier anyway? Is there no way out of this? Other than returning to my right mind and finding something productive to do with my time, I mean.

“Well that speech was shorter than I thought…” - Octopus Patronus.

Since my early crush on Han Solo, I’ve always liked action movies and I haven’t gotten over it. What right-minded girl doesn’t wish she were dating Jason Bourne? He has everything: abs, mental illness, multiple passports. What’s not to love?

Yeah, sure, I went through a grandiose phase in my teens (Greystoke: Legend of Tarzan, anyone?) and I saw a serious lot of drama and tragedy and just all-out weird shit when I studied film in my twenties, but I think I settled out into the middle when I hit my thirties. Comedy, action, rom com, some documentaries and drama.

(I’m still puzzled at why I stopped watching the edgier films when I got together with R. Maybe it coincided with my getting happier. Or because it’s harder to talk to your boyfriend when you’re trying to read subtitles or follow a plot that involves more than a dodgeball.)

Here’s the weird bit though: after we had A. last spring, my tastes narrowed even more. R. and I used to go to the movies a lot pre-A., but when we started going out again, about two months after A. was born, we had to be choosier because we got out less often. So what did we see? The Losers. Then The A-Team (punctuated by me saying, “This is the best movie EVER,” repeatedly to an uncomprehending R. Apparently, there’s no making up for missing out on Dirk Benedict when you were a twelve-year-old girl.) Then Iron Man 2. More recently, Red. Unstoppable. Limitless. The Mechanic. (Statham = reliable awesomeness on a stick.) God help us, we even saw The Expendables which you could tell from the trailers was going to just flat out suck and totally lived up to that expectation.

What is going on??

I have a couple of theories, naturally.

1. I’m trying to keep my adrenaline up to keep up with the baby. Although taking down an assassin with a book and an armoire in Tangiers does seem to require more aerobic exercise ahead of time and more specialized skills than bending over 175 times in a day to pick up a 22-pound weight and trying to aim a rubber spoon accurately between two windmilling arms. Or maybe not.
2. I haven’t fully recovered from ten and a half months of interrupted sleep and only super-bright explosions can keep my attention. Mumbling French people have no chance. Ditto, angsty teens, worried lesbians, bickering couples, and men living alone. Especially with beaver puppets. Bring the fire power, people.
3. I have exhausted my interpretive abilities trying to guess if our tot is hungry, thirsty, tired or reaching for a wall socket, one of her books, or the large glass container of sugar that has recently come within her reach in the lower kitchen cupboard (deadly, much less interesting and bodily harmful, respectively). I have nothing left to apply to complicated emotional situations involving very attractive people I don’t know and who seem to have really very nice lives off-screen from what I can tell in the four and a half seconds I have to read up on them in Us Magazine in the grocery check-out line while R. pays and the baby is momentarily distracted by a passing balloon or piece of lint.
4. I have become shallow.

Or maybe it’s just a phase that will pass when Astrid gets a little older. Then I can start watching Bugs Bunny with her, which demonstrates far greater depth I’m sure than my umpteenth viewing of The Bourne Reluctancy. In the meanwhile, if you need me, I’ll be at the 8:10 showing of The Fast Five.

If you can’t beat ‘em - and I definitely can’t: look at them for Pete’s sake - you might as well join ‘em.

Best Denzel impression I’ve ever seen. (What happened to this guy?)

OK, so you’re in your car with someone else and you live in California so you are constantly getting cut off by $#&*!, um, let’s call them “people” driving 4 mph in a 35 mph zone who have no idea where they’re going but decide that this left turn, yeah that one right there 20 feet away, must be the one they need to take even though they’re in the far right lane, so they nearly kill everyone in their path, not to mention slow traffic speed to a standstill, so they can make their turn.

What do you do?

Take a breath? No.

You yell. You say bad words about stupid people and curse this state’s lax law enforcement and poor driver’s education that allows clearly incompetent, aimless people on the roads with the rest of us.

I’m not saying this is the most constructive response for my blood pressure, but you don’t know: maybe my head would explode if I didn’t let some of the steam out.

In the last year or so though, there’s been an increasingly large wrench in those mechanics, namely that the passenger with me is very small, facing backwards in the backseat, unable to see the offending event, and, even if she could, unaware of traffic laws (written and unwritten). So she understandably believes that the loud expletives from the front seat must be meant for her, same as the little chunks of cheddar cheese that magically appear over the back of her seat with soothing reminders that we’re “almost there”.

It’s probably good that I learn to curb the yelling now before she starts imitating the content which could lead to some X-rated exchanges that’ll get her kicked out of preschool in a couple of years.

Generally, I’ve been trying to keep a handle on what goes into her ears while I still can, but, even before she falls in love with ska and playing the trumpet in the basement, it’s already a seriously heavy lift.

I’ve refrained from introducing A. to our music list beyond our classical collection because she’s always been sound-sensitive and our tastes veer towards heavy beats (too loud) and complaint rock (too whiny). She prefers easy to understand single voices with obvious instrumentation. Like Raffi. And cowbell.

But I can’t listen to that indefinitely, so, since she’s gotten more noise-tolerant lately, I tried our local techno radio station last week. Ah, Rihanna:

” ‘Cause I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it. Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me.”

Let’s let the issue lie of what the hell she’s thinking putting out a song like this after her personal experience with getting the crap kicked out of her by a boyfriend and take up what a one-year-old mind would make of these lyrics.

Probably nothing, right? But I’m not starting that sex-me-up diet this early. She’ll get that from billboards, magazines and the internet soon enough.

(Not to be old-fashioned but, holy God, what twelve year olds are wearing these days is the equivalent of what I wore to college parties when I was feeling particularly sure-I’ll-go-home-with-you. I was walking behind what looked like a pre-teen yesterday and I wasn’t sure she was wearing anything between her giant sweatshirt and her Uggs. Going entirely pantsless is pushing the, “But I’m not cold!” excuse a little far, isn’t it? No? OK. Whatever. I guess any sentence that includes the phrase, “these days” marks me as uncool already. And A. is only one. That doesn’t bode well…)

I switched the station to NPR. The voices are soothing and A. bounces to the theme music. But then I had to turn that off too: a steady stream of bad news, and particularly graphic bad news, about civilian casualties in Libya, pedophilia, tsunamis, reactor meltdowns and the infallibly depressing coverage of our dysfunctional Congress aren’t much better than S&M enthusiasts.

I guess it’s back to swearing and Raffi. At least it’s preparing her for fending off bullies and chatting with longshoremen. That’s something, right?

Do you remember Weebles? “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down”?

By the way, I always thought they were “Weeble Wobbles,” not “Weebles,” which goes to show how effectively that advertising phrase caught on plus how important it was to me at six that everyone have the dignity of a full first and last name.

If you’re not familiar with them, Weebles are egg-shaped plastic “people” with a weight in the bottom. When you tip them to the side, they pop back upright, (unlike real eggs which untidily roll off the counter to their deaths. Which is a bummer for a small child looking for a good time from an egg-shaped friend.) The Weebles’ resilience makes them seem perky and well-balanced. Or out-of-touch, like that friend you have who smiles no matter what and sometimes you think she should really get some therapy, just in case one day it all backs up on her.

Anyway. A. is like that. Not the crazy, the resilience. Like most babies, when she tips over, she pops back up, but it’s not just the fall down/get back up. Her emotional recovery time is remarkable. When she gets shots (not shot, shots), she cries for twenty seconds, looks sad and is on to the next thing. She bumps her head and cries a little if we look worried. Closes a drawer on her fingers? Tiny short-lived weeping. Isn’t allowed to put her fingers in the wall socket? Complains, moves on.

For a while I thought maybe she had that thing that was on House that one time where that girl couldn’t feel pain so her mom had to keep track of her all the time because she could break her leg and not know it or burn her hand and not notice. Sure it’s rare, but so what? A. could have it. She’s special.

I kept asking R. if he thought maybe that’s why she didn’t seem to mind cold diaper wipes when all our friends’ babies freaked out at chilly wetness. It seemed like a reasonable explanation and not an overreaction at all. Like when you have a sore throat and go to Web MD and find out you have dengue fever because you maybe feel like you also have dry mouth and had a headache that one time and the medication you’ll need is still being tested but would cause serious liver damage so you decide maybe you’ll just take some Robitussin in case it’s just a sore throat.

(To read side effects lists, you really have to be surprised that anyone at all still has an intact liver. Liver damage is on pretty much all of them. And all the patients on House end up needing a new one at some point in the episode, so there’s probably a shortage if you do damage yours.)

A. must have gotten that snap-back ability from her father or the good will of the universe, because I definitely do not have that. I have a quick trigger and a long recovery cycle. I’m trying to get more Weeble. Except for the bottom-weighted thing. And the egg shape. That’s just unflattering.

This article appeared in The New York Times last week, a few days after my birthday and a week before A.’s first birthday. The gist of it is that the powers that be have revised their recommendation on when to turn babies’ car seats around to face front. It used to be age one, now it’s two. This is not good news and I think they should just take it back. It’s our birthdays, for Pete’s sake. Have they no consideration?

Here’s the thing. I had a plan. It was a good plan, a birthday plan. A pre-party plan.

A.’s birthday is tomorrow, on a a party-unfriendly Wednesday, so her party isn’t until Saturday. So what was I planning to do to mark her actual birthday? I’ll tell you: stuff that she would actually notice like turning her $#*&$! carseat around so she can see where we’re going and not recline backwards in the backseat with the sun in her eyes, that’s what. I was also planning on feeding her eggs, honey and nuts all at the same time (which you’re not supposed to give them until they’re one). And maybe sushi. And give her a set of nice kitchen knives.

OK, maybe not so much the knives. But the other stuff.

Goddamit. Stupid National Highway Safety Transportation Board and their dumb ideas.

A. hates facing backwards and I get it. It makes me carsick just thinking about it. And paranoid. I hate not seeing where I’m going. I never take the back-facing seats on trains. and I always take the seat in restaurants where I can see the door. It’s like I was in the mob. I want to see who/what is coming and I want to know how to get the hell out of here when and if I have to. Don’t freak out: I’ll take you and A. with me if you’re there. I just know you’re not casing the joint as well as I would, so just give me the seat already and order your sandwich.

You know that scene in movies where the agent/assassin ticks off all the cool stuff he knows just from walking into the diner? Like how many windows there are, the license plates of all the cars outside, the weight of the guy at the counter, who’s carrying a gun, and why that lady is crosseyed? That’s some mad skills and I want ‘em. I used to memorize the license plates on the cars next to us when my mom left us in the car to run an errand when I was, like, eight. Seriously. You know, in case I was interviewed later by the police.

Speaking of which, maybe they’d be interviewing me because my mom left a couple kids in the car while she ran errands.

Anyway, I’m just saying, A. might be better protected in a car accident if she’s facing backwards but is she better prepared for a carjacking where she’ll need a clear view and access to those kitchen knives? Am I right? The article doesn’t mention that scenario anywhere in their assessment. They just go straight for the Swedish stats on babies’ injury and survival rates in rear-facing seats being the best in the world since they force their kiddies to sit with their legs up the backseat until they’re two. Which is weird ‘cause the Swedes are tall, so their kids have gotta be basically sitting in a V position by the time they turn them around, right?

Oh, and for the record, I wasn’t going to flip her around because of some misplaced sense of milestone achievement like the interviewees imply. I was going to do it out of concern for my elbow joint and A.’s vision. They don’t have to be such jerks while they’re ruining our birthday plans, do they? No. They don’t. Thank you.

So here’s what it shakes out to: I spend another year reaching over the top of the car seat to feed A. pieces of cheese and driving only west in the morning and only east in the afternoon so she isn’t blinded by the sun coming in the back window. Or I get tinted windows. Like on the immaculately white CSI SUV that came after we were burglarized. (They parked it laterally on a street where you’re supposed to park perpendicular. Bad ass, right?)

Hey. Maybe that’s the birthday plan. Instead of getting A. a puzzle with farm animals and turning her car seat around, maybe I’ll get her an armored Escalade with blacked out windows. Awesome. That’ll come in at about the same price point, right? You only turn one once, right? I’m totally doing this. It’s going to be great. Happy birthday, A.!!!

More at Lost at E Minor.

It’s been raining in San Francisco for…ever, I guess. Rain has been predicted every day for weeks. Meteorologists being what they are (surprisingly poor guessers, given, um, science), and us living in the sunniest neighborhood in the city, there have been a couple of nice days in there somewhere, but they fade in the memory, doused by the gallon buckets of water that pour down on our heads as we leave the house. In the new global warming world order, I guess San Francisco is will be Indonesia. Maybe we’ll start to get some sun when the monsoons aren’t in town.

Can I just say, on a separate note, that I hate our living room? Hang on - it could be a related note… Here you go: “Much like living in New York spoiled living in San Francisco for me, seeing the previous owners’ living room has made me hate what we’ve done with the place.” Yeah, that’s a stretch, but I’m disgruntled on both counts, so there’s your thread.

One of the owners was a painter, so the colors are subtle but true choices, and the décor was harmonious and cheerful. Room & Board meets someone less cheerful than Dr. Seuss but still very friendly. Our décor isn’t really décor, it’s furniture, and heavy furniture at that, and it weighs the room down.

One of the reasons I loved this house is that the backyard is not only done, which is surprisingly rare in the city where unused wild backyards abound, but well-done. Tiled steps and patio for a table and chairs, well-defined garden beds, sun deck and small lawn, all of which merges into the house at the living room’s double doors. It feels - well, felt - like there was an indoor living room and an outdoor living room. Except now, with our stuff in place, there’s an outdoor living room and your great uncle’s indoor furniture depository. Which is not the same at all.

You know that relationship you had in college with the guy who was a really very sweet but smoked a ton of pot and you thought, “If he were just stoned less, this relationship would be perfect,” and then he cut back and it turned out it wasn’t just that one thing at all and really you couldn’t stand him? It’s like that. It’s not just the Oriental rug (family heirloom, presumably expensive, dark, dark, dark) or the piano (excellent to have, hulking blackness along one wall) or the giant square coffee table (no redeeming value except storage, which we no longer need) or the blocky sofa (first one R. and I bought together - save your, “Aww!” until you’ve tried to lie down on it’s just-too-short-ness) or the waterfall of wires from all the electronics attached to our TV. It’s all of them colluding to make the room feel like we have poor taste and are maybe half-blind.

*sigh*

For the record, this is what I want: this rug, this sofa, this chair. And no more cascading cables from the DVR/TV/Mac Mini/Time Capsule stack.

And I’d like to win the lottery. And I still want that pony. I promise I’ll feed it and take it for walks. Promise.

My doctor left our insurance group last year and I had to choose between staying with my obstetrician or following our GP. Since our GP was treating me for sore throats and my OB would be delivering our child, I picked the OB. Call me crazy.

So this year, we were in the market for a new doctor. We managed to get into a well-rated practice with a doctor who came highly recommended. Here’s an outline of how that went.

Me: I seem to have developed eczema on my hands, which is weird, since I’ve never had any skin problems. But a friend of mine got it postpartum and I’ve done some research and it seems like that’s something that happens. It gets better and then worse and my hands hurt so much sometimes, it burns just getting water on them.
Him: You don’t have eczema.
Me: … [long pause] Is there anything I can do for it?
Him: You don’t have eczema.
Me: …

Me: I’ve also been having severe pain in my hands, so much so that it hurts when I type. It’s hard to pick up A. too. I’m wondering if there’s a possibility of arthritis or something similar?
Him: [picks up one arm, turns it over, looks at my inner wrist for five seconds, puts it down] It’s not arthritis. You’re doing something over and over again that’s causing it. You should stop doing that.
Me: Yes, well, I don’t know what that would be.
Him: You’re texting a lot.
Me: No I’m not.
Him: When I came in, you were on your computer. You’re getting carpal tunnel from typing too much.
Me: I have a one year old. I barely have any time to type at all.
Him: Well, you’re doing something that’s causing it, so you should stop doing that and it’ll go away.
Me: ….

Me: I’m having difficulty sleeping, even when A. sleeps and I have the time to sleep. This has happened before - I get out of synch and can get back-on track with a prescription for a few weeks. Can you prescribe something short-term?
Him: You’re up at night because you have running thoughts.
Me: No, I don’t.
Him: That’s why you’re up. You’re anxious and have running thoughts.
Me: I don’t have running thoughts, but yes, I guess I am anxious.
Him: What are you anxious about?
Me: Well, normal new parent stuff. But that’s not what’s keeping me up. But OK, lately I’ve been worried about A. sleeping on a different floor from us, in case there’s an emergency. Like a fire or an earthquake or something.
Him: Maybe next time you shouldn’t buy a house with her bedroom on a different floor.
Me: … That’s your suggestion to help with my sleep issues? Buy a different house? We just bought this one. We’re not buying another house.
Him: You might think about not buying a wooden house as well.
Me: …

In the end, he prescribes Ambien which I tell him won’t work because I’ve had it before and it doesn’t work. He tells me to call in a few days to report back.

It doesn’t work.

I call back and tell him it doesn’t work.

Him: Well it’s not the Ambien’s fault.

So that’s how well that went.

Now I have an awesome new doctor who is, coincidentally, a bad-ass. It turns out I do have postpartum eczema and there’s a diagnosis for the hand thing and I’m sleeping better - and I didn’t even have to buy a new house. Fancy that.

My daughter, age nearly one, appears to be drawn to self-possessed men. And by “men,” I mean, “boys aged one.”

This is good news since I was concerned she would be drawn to terrorists and drug dealers, since girls gravitate to men who look like their fathers, and, let’s face, it, R.’s long hair (straight, well-kept, not diminishing), and beard (very trimmed), might not represent the most savory general category. Worse: she might be drawn to hippies.

So far though, she has selected two gentle, sandy-haired boys as her favorites. They’re both quiet but outgoing and both of them can walk, which is very attractive. (The whole “standing man” thing and so on.) One even has a car, which can be crucial. I’m glad she’s picked someone with his own transportation - that should make things easier for dating. Fortunately, it’s open-top and lacks a back seat, so there’s no danger of shenanigans.

The other boy has a rocket, which is the equivalent of a motorcycle for a toddler, don’t you think? But there isn’t room for two, so that’s not so friendly.

I don’t think she should really be exclusive with anyone at her age, but it’s nice she’s selected only slightly older boys and not the ones who dive off the sofa onto their heads.

Our nanny has gotten A. a car of her own for her upcoming birthday, so we’ll see what that does to the relationships. Maybe she’ll just drive around in the afternoons instead of heading to the local sandbox. Maybe she’ll meet someone in the suburbs. I just hope he’s not a tiny hippie. If I smell patchoulie in that car, that’s it.

It’s my birthday this weekend. A big birthday, which I will leave to your imagination, which will clearly tell you that it is my 25th, which was the age I was when I became confused and spent two weeks telling people at my new job that I was 27 before I realized I wasn’t. That must have been last month then. Huh. It feels so long ago.

It’s difficult to take stock of your life effectively when you have someone who is not yet one asking for pancakes (with her eyes, of course) and learning to walk. The former is distracting and the latter is a very big deal and not something I can compete with, frankly. When was the last time you learned a brand new major motor skill? I did, like five years ago, and I ended up with a permanently dislocated rib, so not a big long-term win.

Which raises the question, “What counts in your assessment of your Life So Far?” If we’re talking about Life So Far going all the way back, well then I can put learning to walk on my list too, as well as learning to talk, put on socks and not drool in public (except when I’m brushing my teeth, which I don’t understand how everyone else avoids, but they seem to - send instructions please). I’m not sure I have the kind of time that list would require, although I’m sure it would be a very satisfying list.

If Life So Far is the last decade since my last Life So Far moment, I should note that that birthday was fun but pretty messed up and didn’t involve a lot of self-reflection because my boyfriend at the time was such an asshole that introspection was not in my best interest until a few months later when I moved out and he became a drug-addled conspiracy theorist. (You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not.)

But R. was at that birthday party, so it was, in a way, the beginning of the rest of my life, so go me, I guess, in the end, right?

Bringing the measure in closer, if we’re looking at the last year only, I’ve got some sizable checkmarks. Had a baby. Bought a house. Big deals, both. Milestones. Life-changing. Etc.

There’s an odd thing about my brain, though, maybe yours too: I’m of two minds.

Looking at my life, where I started from, I’m proud of what I’ve achieved So Far. I’m grateful for what I’ve been able to achieve, the chances I’ve seen to take that have brought me a list of accomplishments and gifts that exceeded what I was able to imagine even a few years ago.

But there is still that elusive Pulitzer. And my Olympic gold medal. And my Academy Award for my Nobel Prize. And massive wealth without the annoyance of fame. And that Israeli self-defense class I was going to take so I would be a bona fide asskicker. And all the imagined but unrealized achievements that lie in the delta between my actual life (impressive, happy) and that unlikely construct of what my life would be (impressive, likely painful) if I weren’t actually me. That castle is built by little over-anxious elves (well, chemicals and environment, but whatever) bent on keeping me desperate, unsatisfied, and always on the move towards That Big Thing That Will Make Everything Perfect and Then I Can Calm Down.

Of course, That Thing will not, in fact, make me calm down. We all know that. Me and the elves and you and anyone who’s ever won the Super Bowl and woken up the next morning.* The point of that part of your brain is to keep the goalposts moving, to keep the anxiety and the drive going. In the end, as all the books say, it’s the journey, not the endpoint that matters. And that part of the mind is on a panicky path: the elves are craning to see ten years in the future rather than driving the road as it lies.

In addition to my stellar R. and my adorable A. and the opportunity to write and that azalea that I finally got to #$*&^%!ing bloom, yes, I would also like to have a Pulitzer. But it would be for the cupcake pleasure of being recognized and having a party, not because it could compete with having improbably found the love of my life or the good fortune of having an engaging, healthy baby girl (who I think is wonderful and not a burden and how lucky is that?) or the chance to write what I like. I’m not sure, looking back, that I ever thought I would have any of those things - not really, anyway - and those are what make my days interesting and lovely. No disrespect to the Academy, but making my days interesting and lovely might be a tall order for a small statue.

We’re on an unimagined road these days, the elves and I. I won’t lie, it’s been pretty stressful lately, but it’s a good road, a road like the ones we drove in New Zealand: well-maintained, not a lot of traffic and leading who knows where, but the landscape is beautiful, the company is entertaining and the cops, when they pull you over for speeding, are chatty and helpful. So pipe down, elves. Have some cake. Everything is coming together just fine. Let’s enjoy the birthday and settle into today and tomorrow and see what comes along after that.

*All this talk of awards and milestones reminds me of Bill Nighy, who said this when he won a Golden Globe in 2007 for Gideon’s Daughter (which you should see if you have the chance and aren’t in the mood for something fast-paced): “I used to think that prizes were damaging and divisive until I got one. And now they seem sort of meaningful and real.”

A little friend of A.’s just turned one and his dad got his mother a delicate ring with two arching gold bands like arms cradling a tiny pearl. It’s a reference to their lovely pregnancy metaphor of their baby boy as the pearl growing cradled in his mum. Nice, right?

Early on in my pregnancy, before we knew that A. would be a girl or even an anything, when you need to call your pre-baby something other than “it,” we called her Danger, which would, of course, be her middle name, but would leave room to select the first name later. It seemed like a really good choice. As in, “Danger’s my middle name.” Right up until she was born, I was pulling for that as her middle name. How cool would that have been? Come on, right? On the playground? Awesome, right? Yeah, I lost that argument.

Anyway, I tell the charming pearl story to R.

R: So I should get you a gold throwing star for A.’s birthday.
Me: What?
R: You know: A. was “Danger,” so, you know: a throwing star.
Me: Ah. Yeah, that’s nice. Do that.

So much for nice jewelry later this month. I wonder if gold is effective in weaponry. Seems kind of soft…

Well, it’s almost as cute as A. Although it does have the self-cleaning edge. A. can’t do that yet.

So that happened.

And by “that,” I mean we moved into our first house with an eight-month-old in tow, made it through the holidays two weeks later (with decorations and a tree, thank you very much), introduced A. to her first snow, were burglarized at our new house (including my brand new Mac Air), lost our nanny for two weeks afterwards (illness, not like in the jungle), and dug a moat around our property and filled it with sharks to protect ourselves from further theft.

Well, all except that last bit, which I’m only not doing because there’s some silly city ordinance about wild animals and bodily harm. Whatever.

So we’re in a bit of a recovery phase. We weren’t feeling very settled in the new place anyway - only here a month, plus difficult to unpack with a speedy baby - and the burglary set us back considerably: bad feeling about the new neighborhood, panicked about safety while R. travels, and an unwillingness to attach to a place that was the site of a serious scare. (The baby and I were home when it happened.)

Settling in to the point of feeling at home after that feels like going back to that one restaurant I really liked but where I got food poisoning last time, you know? Or going out again with a guy who…I dunno: stole your purse? Which you wouldn’t do. Scratch that one. It’d be like…wait: I’ve got it: it’s be like every time you showed up at the movie theater to see Ben Affleck in anything between Good Will Hunting and The Town. Like that. You just want it to be better but it’s just not happening. Until it does. Finally.

So I’ve been having a really hard time lately, but this week might be that “finally” place. Maybe. We’ll see.

It probably doesn’t hurt that I spent all day yesterday sorting out a security system, packing evacuation kits and testing all the smoke alarms. I’ll admit that that does make me sound like a bit of a freak, but I’m a safe freak, so I’ll chat with you later when you come by to borrow water and canned tuna after the big earthquake. That’s all I’m saying.

Aside from the baby herself, one of the most (or least, depending on the day) entertaining things about having a baby is the sudden education I’ve gotten about products and services I didn’t even know existed a year ago. It’s a whole new world of features, hazards and ridiculous claims, and the suddenness of the onset just makes it that much more bizarre.

Think about it: what if you went from having a rotary-dial home phone to being on the market for a smartphone in the space of a week? Or if you went from herding yak in Tibet to selling multi-featured toaster ovens in San Francisco overnight. It’s like that. Kind of. Except for the whole oppression by the Chinese thing. And the weather. And the unrecognizable clothing. OK, never mind: it’s not like the Tibet thing, but the smartphone example was a good one.

Being unrepentantly Type A, I built a spreadsheet for my baby registry from personal recommendations, discussions with salespeople, and on- and off-line research. Heading into a high-stakes situation where I had no first-hand experience, I think it was natural to be nervous. We didn’t want to get a lot of stuff (small place, personal aesthetics) and I knew the temptation to do so would be intense: America’s consumer emporiums would like nothing better than to help you bury your anxiety under a pile of un-needed, over-engineered products. The choice as I see it is like prepping for your first wilderness tour by buying a bazooka, a military-grade GPS, and a bulletproof anorak to protect you from the wildlife, or buying a sturdy bear can and assuming that common sense and the local general store will cover the rest.

Thanks in part to my spreadsheet, we ended up with the bear can plan. Well, and the anorak, but that’s just because a bulletproof anorak is bad ass.

Last month, we decided we needed a baby monitor. We have a basic radio one but because checking on little A. beyond, “Is she crying?” meant making noise in her room, we joined the herd looking for a model with video. This is when things got weird.

There aren’t that many companies that make video baby monitors, so you’d think it would be easy to pick. But no. Apparently, “fewer companies” means “no pressure to make a coherent line of products.”

You know those clear comparison tables in Consumer Reports? Like, ten columns of features and a rating for each company’s offering in each feature category? Forget it. Every goddam video monitor out there has completely different characteristics, so you have to decide which combo you like best without ever having needed or used one of these products, let alone experienced any of their individual features. It’s like trying to compare four French restaurants except one of them serves Spanish food, one of them is only open on Thursdays for breakfast, and a third one burned down last week.

After several days of boggling around, I whittled the choice down to two models. One would let us pan and zoom the camera remotely, like Big Brother in a black helicopter. The other had a talk-back feature. To clarify, “talk-back” doesn’t mean the monitor makes smart alecky remarks when it hears you discussing your dinner plans; it lets you speak to your baby without going into her room, like a walkie talkie. Both of these options are pretty high on the creepy scale if you ask me. You’re already spying on your child, and these let you do it in close-up or while providing disembodied narration, your choice.

I thought the pan/zoom would be more subtle and less likely to cause her to grow up schizophrenic, so we went for the black helicopter. I haven’t set it up yet, since in our current apartment, we’re usually sitting not more than twenty feet and one glass door away from where she’s sleeping. I’ll let you know how it goes in the new house. I can imagine us going upstairs and sitting on our bed just so we can play with the camera like some single-feature video game. Shut up - we are not losers.

That said, the World Series is the latest worst thing to happen to us re: our delayed move. (We own our new house as of today, but the old owners have until November 30 to move out, sadly for us.)

One of the big down sides to our current place, aside from the size and the outside noise, is the inside noise. We’re on the top floor but, due to some engineering oddity, hear everything that goes on in the apartment below us.

Every alternate tenant has been fine. The problem couple a few years ago was a girl and her 250-lb. boyfriend who owned a local bar and would bring that night’s band back to the apartment at 2AM for an impromptu, drunk jam session. I can’t imagine why we had a problem with that. After he threatened me one night when I complained, our landlady shook their lease at them and they piped down. Kind of. Sometimes. Eventually they moved out, but not before they started a successful company that makes waffle batter in aerosol cans. I don’t like to talk about that.

The couple after that was perfect. She was a yoga instructor and he was a landscape designer. We never heard anything. Ever. I don’t think they spoke to each other. Which worked out well for us but probably contributed to them breaking up a year later and moving out. Remember children: communication matters.

The latest couple introduced themselves to the building by setting up their stereo first thing and moving in to a throbbing beat at ear-shattering volume with their front door open. That spells Trouble, with a capital T, which rhymes with P and stands for “Phuck you.”

They’re friendly and pretty responsive but still a regular noise nuisance. We have a truce that they shut it off at 11PM, which they do 98 times out of 100, but when you’re up three times a night with a baby, sometimes you want to go to bed at 8:30, which you can’t when their thrice-weekly dinner/furniture rearranging parties are in progress.

I’m guessing that they’re in their late 20’s, not malicious or aggressive but doing what people in their late 20’s do, namely being oblivious. R. reminds me regularly that we used to be them, waking our 40-something upstairs neighbor regularly at my old apartment across town. He’s right, of course, but his rightness just makes me a tad more irritated, not less (as true but inconvenient-to-my-present-argument statements often can).

Here’s my point: just because they don’t mean to upset me and little A., just because it’s an intention-less crime, doesn’t make it not a crime, right? Don’t they watch Law & Order? I’m not saying it’s murder noise - it’s manslaughter noise. But you still go to jail for manslaughter, right? Not that they should go to jail. Just their stereo. And maybe all their furniture, which apparently just can’t stay in one place.

Which brings us to the World Series. (See? I get there eventually.) They’re sports fans, these rowdy neighbors of ours. Which relieves us of the necessity of watching any of the World Series games because every time the Giants get a run, the floor heaves with their cheering. Keeps us abreast of the home team’s progress and makes sure no one up here settles in for a quiet evening at home. Which, you know, keeps our civic pride alive. And keeps any nostalgia that might be setting in about our cute little studio apartment firmly at bay. *sigh* That’s a good thing, right? So now I’m just tense about moving to a bigger place and not being settled in in time for a cozy Christmas and I can’t wait to vacate our current place. Maybe we should just rent an RV and park outside our new house until the current tenants (previously the owners) get creeped out and move out more quickly. I think that’d be a lovely way to kick things off with our new neighbors, don’t you?

Here’s what I think about baseball: if you can wear your regular pants belt with your uniform, you might want to re-think whether it’s a serious sport.

I don’t want to diss on baseball too hard though when the Giants are midway through the World Series. They are my current home team, after all, even if I left most of the thin sliver of my heart reserved for “local pride in things I don’t really enjoy” with the Yankees and the Red Sox. Same sliver: Manhattan clam chowder, which is just plain wrong but does have the word “Manhattan” in it.

Let’s just take a moment and be honest, baseball fans: baseball’s really not that interesting. If it were, you wouldn’t need to talk so much about all those stats and put up really good food stands in the parks to keep you occupied, right? I like an afternoon in the sun snacking on sushi and hanging out with friends as much as the next guy but baseball is one slow, slow game. Even the excellent AT&T Park can’t mask the fact that there’s just not that much going on down there on the diamond and that what is going on is moving at a glacial pace. The uniforms look like pajamas and most of the players run like they just lurched out of a Barcalounger. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they look like they’ve been to the gym as recently as I have (let’s not get specific, but “not recently” would be accurate).

All the same, I’d like the Giants to win. I mean, Texas? Really? If 43 is on your side, something must be wrong. So let’s go, Giants.

So, how’ve you been? Good? Great. That’s good to hear. What me? Well, we’ve been busy. You know, the usual. Early mornings, late nights, not enough salads, yada yada yada. Oh - and we bought a house.

Yes, it’s true. The perma-renter has crossed over to the other side. After several aborted feints in that direction, we actually searched for, found, and bought a house. And yes it’s in San Francisco, the city I swore I’d never settle for or in, but here’s the deal we struck: it’s rentable. So if we get it together to move home to New York, we’ll swap it or rent it or, if necessary, put it on a truck and Airstream it to Brooklyn.

So goodbye money down the drain, hello stable investment.

Of course it’s terrifying - mainly the unknown maintenance and very known mortgage - but it’s a great place and a good time to buy. (If any of you remember the property we came within an inch of owning a few years ago, this place is on that same block. Weird, right?) I wanted to buy a condo so we’d have on-site management, but we saw this place and couldn’t walk away.

It’s super sunny, which isn’t a given even in our sunny neighborhood because it’s all hills, so lots of yards or bedrooms face into the hill. Also, that hill is bedrock, which is great for earthquake safety but not so great for yard management. A lot of places we’ve seen have given up and resorted to gravel, and most places have either poor grading or unmanaged trees (presumably latched onto that rock), or both. We’ll actually have a proper yard with a lovely tree, grass, a small sun deck and a lighted dining patio, all of that extending out from double doors in the living room, which makes it feel like a giant Mediterranean living space. The main bedroom has dormer windows, a skylight and two banks of windows facing east and south. And A. will have her own room. Which will be sweet.

I’ll post some photos once it’s a done deal. I don’t want to get too attached before we’re all the way there. But we’re halfway there, so keep your fingers crossed that we’ll make it to moving day. I’m hoping the most stressful part - the finding and getting - is behind us and the move will be all joy (!) Send packing boxes and organizational thinking.

I was cruising around the FAO Schwartz web site last night hoping to preclude actually going into their mayhem of a store when we’re in New York in two weeks when I found this: a five-foot tall polar bear reared up on its back legs.

I’m sorry, but what parent in his right mind is going to get his kid, presumably a small kid, something this large and terrifying? Actually, not even: what person is going to get something this intimidating to live in his home? You don’t have to watch Colbert to know that bears are a threat. And from what I hear, polar bears are especially unpredictable and mean. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be - extreme cold makes me crabby and I don’t usually have to hunt my own lunch further than the ski lodge french fry line in those conditions. Yes, their little cubs are adorable, but I’m just saying, I wouldn’t invite one into my home, even if it is fake and frozen in position.

When I was eight and went to swim in my grandmother’s swimming pool, I was convinced there was a shark in there. I couldn’t see it, but that was because it had seen me and swum down to the other end of the pool, camouflaging itself in the refracted light. Maybe I was wrong, but who’s going to take that chance? Just because no one had lost a limb yet didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It was like Bush’s WMD. Or that joke about elephants painting their toenails red so they can hide in cherry trees: the fact that you haven’t seen one just means it’s working.

My point is, how do you know it’s really a fake polar bear? And if you say you know because it’s smaller than real ones plus obviously made of synthetics, I would say, “Tell that to your brain’s fear center when you see if out of the corner of your eye on the way to the bathroom at 2AM.”

I know whereof I speak. A few years ago, in the middle of a margarita-soaked afternoon, I bought an almost-life-sized cardboard stand-up Aragorn. He hung out in our apartment just barely within my line of sight when I was lying in bed. I had to evict him a few months later because my nerves couldn’t take the strain of waking up to a short-ish, tunic-clad, long-haired intruder in the foyer.

(By the way, why are all these things almost life-sized and not actually life-sized? Aragorn and the bear are both just shy of real height. I say, as soon as you pass “half-sized” you may as well go for the full monty. Really, what is up with shaving off 6-12 inches? That just makes them look short, not “not real.”)

My point is this: the world is intimidating enough when you’re knee-cap height on the rest of the household and dependent on others to provide your Cheerios. You don’t need a giant bear in the corner to keep you in your place. That’s all I’m saying. Shout out to the little people.

I don’t like Microsoft on principle, but this is a great ad. Plus, I must say, “Really?!” a dozen times a day so I feel kind of a weird attachment to it.

This was in my In box yesterday morning: “Now available: “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: With on a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns” by Immanuel Kant on Amazon.com.”

This was also in my In box: “Emma Carlson: 10% Off at Checkout on Board Books for Baby.”

I guess that makes sense: mom reads, baby reads, right? Maybe the little starry spangles on Kant’s new cover are meant to attract a younger reader. I wonder if it comes in a board book. When the pure reason gets frustrating, sometimes a few minutes chewing on a cardboard binding is all you need to set you right.

I get a lot of paranoid email. Some of it’s spam, but the other some isn’t. It’s mail from parenting sites about all the risks and hundreds of horrible things that can happen to our child at specifically her age. Next month will bring a new crop of “information” for that age. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a good piece of paranoia as much as the next guy and am aware of how it’s improved all our lives. For instance, I’ve completely stopped licking the walls of my apartment in case the paint has lead in it, and I make it a rule to no longer eat any toys made in China, which was a big shift.

Honest to God though, some of this stuff definitely falls under the, “Don’t be a $(&#! idiot,” clause and some more of it makes me wonder why the people who raise the Alarm of the Week choose to live on the mean streets of San Francisco and not in a hermetically sealed bubble, which would be more in line with their anxiety levels.

I got a note yesterday from Baby Center telling me that 7 million Fisher-Price children’s tricycles, 2.9 million Fisher-Price infant toys and 1 million Fisher-Price high chairs have been recalled. That’s a big oversight down at the Fisher-Price factory. But it was the last thing on the list that really caught my eye: the Fisher-Price Stand n’ Play Rampway has been called back.

While I am understandably disappointed that I will not be able to get my hands on one of these to test out my ability to entertain myself with one leg higher than the other, this recall doesn’t come as a big surprise. Why? Because if you develop a recreational product for a segment of the population who can barely keep their balance while standing perfectly still (that’s toddlers, not me, thank you very much), and your premise requires them to be able to both stand and play while on an incline, I’m going to go out on a limb and say your idea is ill-conceived. I’d even go so far as to guess that it will be source of injury and ridicule. Much like Anaphylactic Kiddie’s Snack n’ Stab Peanut Butter Stand with Epi Pen and Wonder Bear’s Wiring for Tots Motherboard and Bath Toy.

I’m just saying, some of this stuff does seem obvious, that’s all.

New! Improved! Now with dogs!

You know how, when you get pregnant, one of your friends can’t wait to tell you horror stories about her nine friends who had their babies in the back of cabs or were in labor for, like, a week or gave birth to the antichrist, but how she’s sure you’ll be fine and none of that will happen to you? For all you pregnant and pre-pregnant women out there who were thinking that your magnetism for negative input might diminish once you had your baby, brace yourselves. There’s a whole herd of parents out there waiting to tell you how you should cherish every second while they’re little because (insert disappointed sidelong glance at their own offspring who are standing right there) everything is downhill once they can run around and talk.

This is disconcerting for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that that tyke who’s listening to his mom diss him to me is going to need a dumptruck of therapy. After one such mother stopped by our table at a restaurant, the little girl - maybe seven years old - said, “Yeah, my mom tells us all the time how she wishes we were still babies.” That’s some solid parenting right there. Little shout out from your kid, mom.

It’s also weird, isn’t it, to walk up to a stranger (me) in the coffee line, ask how old her baby is and then indirectly reveal that you don’t particularly like your ten year old? For Pete’s sake, my FedEx guy chatted with me the other day about how he wishes his five year old were still five months. That’s kind of a lot of Oprah-ing to tack onto the, “Sign here, please,” moment, don’t you think?

I have two theories about why this keeps coming up.

First, people like to complain. I do too. It’s a non-threatening way to bond: “I hate my boss,” puts you into a conversation with just about anyone. Opening with, “I love my job,” is more dangerous. Not a lot of people do, so you’re putting yourself in the minority, plus you risk sounding, well, lucky. Lucky feels…vulnerable. Also maybe oblivious or dim-witted. Coming from the northeast (Puritan, understated) and a difficult family situation conditioned me to be very aware of the negative potential in any situation. It takes a lot of work some days to let that lie and pick up the equally possible positive thread instead. Maybe these parents are letting the anxiety of a negative outcome overwhelm their enjoyment of who their kids are turning out to be: a talking, walking child with an extending track record of preferences and skills means limits on your infant’s previously unlimited potential. Complaining may feel like a socially acceptable and safe, if indirect, outlet for that anxiety.

I don’t mean to be judgemental of course. It is also possible that their child is exhibiting distinct terrorist tendencies (stockpiling weaponry, a prediliction for holidays in desert training camps) and is deserving of parental disappointment early in life. That could be. Maybe that seven-year-old girl is disconcertingly adept with a handgun and kidnaps other little girls on the weekends. In that case, yes, her mother should be worried and I take it back all my analysis. Ma’am, you can disregard that previous paragraph.

That case excepted, this brings us to my second theory: that it’s incredibly easy to project onto a baby and having to stop is challenging. I know. I do it. At five months, your baby can be the next President or the next breakout Olympian. Losing that option when your baby turns into an actual person with her own interests has got to be a disappointment if you didn’t think about how to manage those unconscious expectations before your kid got all back chatty and able to run away from your conversations about electoral politics and the luge course in Calgary. Babies are 100% potential. We were too. I remember thinking when I was twelve that, barring sudden advances in bionics, the door to becoming a professional gymnast had almost definitely closed for me. That was quite a blow. Also very disappointing: realizing that my increasing physical similarity to my “family” probably meant that I was not the lost fourth child of the Swedish monarchy.

Here’s the thing: a kid who wants to wear rain boots and only the top half of a bikini out to run errands is very different from an infant you can dress up in that adorable outfit with the matching hat. Sure you can pick up a baby and put her where you want her and she can’t really object. You can talk to her about your day - you’re supposed to, in fact, to help her language skills develop yada yada yada- but there’s a good chance that once there are really two of you in the conversation, you’ll have to start making room for her preference for talking about edible paste and not how unbelievable it was when your one friend didn’t show up on time after you went to all that trouble setting up a nice lunch and everything at that place that’s hard to get into and what the hell was she thinking anyway bringing her new boyfriend who doesn’t know how to chew with his mouth closed when you were hoping for a nice afternoon out? Which is a big shift.

So we’re back to anxiety. You just don’t know what’s next. It’s a legitimate fear that the narrowing of your kid’s options that goes along with developing a personality and a voice (literal and metaphorical) will result in the option that’s left being “mid-level office manager.” Or “crack whore.” So yeah, it’s nerve-wracking. But here’s the thing: what am I going to do about it? Nothing different really. Aside from not forcing her into intensive early training on the violin, the tennis court or the half pipe, I plan on loving her (of course - as I’m sure these other parents love their kiddos), and focusing on enjoying her for wherever she is, six months or six years or sixty, and getting to know who she’s turning out to be. (Which will be even better advice the older she gets, right? Who likes going home from college and being reminded of the braces you had when you were fifteen rather than seen for the sexy sophomore you are now?)

Displacing my unconscious anxiety about who she’ll be or, worse, who I wished she’d be, onto her little self is a bad choice for both of us, I’d think. There’s no way to control for where she ends up - that’ll be a combination of her choice and circumstance - so I’m just focusing on providing her with self-confidence, a great work ethic, a clear playing field and as many self-regulating skills as I can to help her approach her options with a calm heart and clear vision.

So anyway, that’s my Monday Theory. I hope all these parents who keep wishing for babies are also spending a lot of time enjoying their actual kids. Or making more babies. But lay off the reminders if you would. I need that coffee I was headed for when you stopped me. Really. A lot.

Remember that scene in When Harry Met Sally where they discuss how guys can’t get out the door fast enough the morning after? This morning, as I was lying next to little A. trying to get her to go to sleep so I could get up and get going on my morning while she naps, I realized: I’m that guy. I just wait til she falls asleep and then bam, I’m out the door.

“Come on, sweetie, time to sleep. Yeah, that’s right: close your eyes. I’ll be here when you wake up… well, maybe after you wake up… if you cry a little to let me know you’re up… yeah, then I’ll definitely be here. If you just hang out in bed wondering where that nice person went who was there snuggling with you when you fell asleep, the one who seemed sincere about sleeping next to you and keeping you cozy, well, then it might take me a while to get back to you. I mean, I didn’t know you were up and thinking those things - what was I supposed to do? Not go clean my andirons?

… Huh. Well, that’s true, I don’t have a fireplace, but you didn’t know that for sure until I just said it because, let’s face it, you only know the parts of the apartment that I’ve showed you, right? … No, I didn’t mean that I’m keeping things from you. It’s just…we haven’t known each other that long, so there’s still some things you don’t know about me. You know - I’m sure you have those things.

… You don’t? You’re an open book? You’d spend all your time with me if you could? Well, I don’t know what to say to that. Of course I’m flattered, but…what about my andirons? You don’t really want to clean them with me, do you?

… Oh. You do. Well, I’m just not there yet, I guess. Plus they’re kind of sharp and you might hurt yourself.

… No, I didn’t mean to imply anything about your motor skills. I’m sure you’d be fine - I’m just trying to look out for you and now you’re crying again. God.

… OK, I’m sorry. Really, I’m sorry I said that. But it’s a little early in our relationship to be having this conversation, don’t you think? I mean, it’s been less than six months. What’s next - you want to move in together?

… You do? Oh - ‘cause you left all your stuff all over my living room already so now I guess you live here??”

See what I mean? Like that. I’m definitely that guy. She is awfully cute though. I’m probably going to cave. I mean, she’s right - all her stuff is already here…

This weekend was sleep training weekend. If you don’t know what that is, chances are you haven’t had a child in last ten years. I don’t know what people did before that. I guess kids just slept. Weren’t those the days.

Or maybe not: I still don’t sleep very well. Maybe if I’d had some sleep training when I was little, I wouldn’t have to take Unisom every night. Or maybe I was just the designated baby on watch. You know, to protect against tiger attacks. And Huns.

Sleep’s a skill and I don’t have it so I’m eager that A. develop it early and practice often. That’s a parent thing: your child is going to get first what you didn’t have. You’ve been promising that to yourself since you were an angry teen. Don’t deny it.

Also on A.’s list, courtesy of my childhood of privation: an EZBake Oven, a rock polisher, and backwards somersaults. (How do you not break your neck when you roll over yourself backwards? I don’t get that.) Oh - and as little anxiety as possible and the skills to manage it. That too.

Of course, I don’t want to deprive her of the opportunity to make her own list of dos and don’ts for her own theoretical children, so I’ll make a point to fail in some areas. For instance, I’ll try to listen to a lot of 80’s bands to give her a fighting chance at developing hip musical taste. And maybe I should get some Birkenstocks so she doesn’t turn out to be a hippie. I’m not sure I can grit my teeth that hard though. Please God, protect her from hippies and jazz. That’s all I ask. And the anxiety thing. And let’s cover her basic safety while we’re at it. Well, really, not just basic safety. All safety. I don’t want her having to saw off her arm with a pen knife. That’s an edge case but still pretty unwelcome, so let’s make sure weird hippie accidents are covered too.

I digress.

Sleep training comes in all brands - brutal (let them cry as long as it takes) on down to the excrutiatingly drawn out, how-is-this-really-training-at-all?, “never let them cry” method. We chose the “let them cry a little” middle route, also known as the interval method. The only thing I knew about intervals going in was that it might be some misguided method of birth control or the super-painful intervals my coach made me run in high school track practice. This is different and not just because A. can’t stand up on her own, so she’d never make it to the 100 meter mark, let alone back ten times. Although if she tried, she might fall asleep immediately from exhaustion, so there’s a thought.

Here’s how it works. On Thursday night, we put A. in her crib around 7PM. An hour later, she started to cry. The plan kicks in. R. goes to her for a minute and then leaves. She’s still crying. In another minute, he goes back for a minute. Still crying. In three minutes, he goes back for a minute. If she hadn’t stopped - which she didn’t in the 9PM window - he’d up the interval to five minutes. Then ten minutes, then every fifteen minutes up to the point where she’s been upset for an hour.

That hour was our pre-set limit, the point at which all our nerves have shattered on the floor and I’ll do about anything to comfort her, including going out to buy her a pony at 9PM on a weeknight. In a city. In our Prius. Come to think of it, that might not be such a bad errand: it would take me forever and I’d rather spend those hours tracking down a pony, which, let’s face it, I’d be riding myself for the forseeable future, rather than being in the apartment listening to our excellent baby weep, which is awful no matter which way you slice it. Way more awful than finding a pony.

Since A. doesn’t cry that much in general (lucky us), we have almost no practice tolerating her weeping. Also, letting her cry seems especially mean when you have a good-natured baby. If she cried all the time for no reason, it would still suck, of course, but presumably we’d have a tolerance for that particular suckage. We decided to go ahead with the sleep training despite her excellent temperament because, after a month of traveling, she’d gotten into the habit of getting up every couple of hours instead of sleeping five or six in a row the way she did before we left. Yes, you’re right, we broke our baby by flying her all over the place, and now it’s time to clean up the mess so all of us can get some rest.

The training went well, if by “well” you mean, “The baby now sleeps longer at night and can fall asleep on her own in the crib.” If you mean, “The baby’s mother is still functional and does not break down in tears for no reason,” then you would be misusing the word. It was a difficult process and we’re still recovering our own sleep and fractured nerves, but, after nearly a week, I’m willing to say that it worked and we’re back on track.

If you need me, I’ll be out hunting down that pony. What? You don’t know - she might start crying again any minute. I’m just covering our bases.

A. on the High Line. Homesick Sunday.

I noticed you before in the gallery. You were being loud and sounded angry even though it was a Maira Kalman exhibit. She’s not loud or angry. She’s all about being good-natured and wry and taking things in stride. And being amused. You didn’t seem amused.

I don’t know what’s up with you today. Maybe it’s every day. You are in a wheelchair so maybe it’s that. That would be difficult. I don’t know what I’d do if I were in a wheelchair. I hope I’d be one of those inspirational people who take up extreme skiing or sailboarding and get profiled in People or on Good Morning America. I think it would take me a really long time to get there though. I mean the being great about it, not the sailboarding. The sailboarding might take me forever. (I’ve never had very good balance.)

Whatever it is that’s bothering you though, it’s not nice for the rest of us if you take it out on a stranger who didn’t know you were waiting for the mom-with-kids/handicapped bathroom stall in the really nicely designed ladies room at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Honestly, I didn’t know you were waiting when I took my time sorting A. out. Do you think I would’ve kept you waiting on purpose? I hope not. That would be a tough way to go through your day, thinking people who don’t even know you are purposely being rotten.

Not to sound like a mom, but you really didn’t need to take that tone with me. If you’d just politely said you were waiting or made your presence known - a slight cough, an amusing note under the door - I’d have been just as obliging, I promise, but you wouldn’t have put that little bit of unpleasantness into the world by making me and little A. feel bad. I know you can’t feel good about it either. No one does when they’re mean, however justified they feel they are. It backs up on you. I know. I’ve been there.

Please, next time give me a little more credit for being a person who doesn’t knowingly inconvenience strangers. And remember: other people don’t think about us as much as we’d all like to think that they do. Which means that when they drive by you in their cars, even if they seem like they’re looking right at you, they probably didn’t register your amazing ensemble, the one with the alluring hat and the matching socks that you wore specially. (Don’t worry: the people who love you did and that’s what matters.)

But it also means they didn’t mean to cut you off in traffic. They were probably thinking about something else entirely. Like how their boss yelled at them this afternoon or that maybe they married the wrong person. Or maybe they’re rushing to save a kitten, one of the really adorable ones.

Of course, there’s a very slight possibility that you’re right, that that person really did mean to intentionally rain on your day. I’m sorry if that happens to you regularly. That has to be difficult to bear. But take a moment, just today, to consider whether that’s really true, even if you really, really believe it is deep down inside. Think hard. Is the world really not on your side on purpose? Between ourselves, I doubt it. You know why? Because I wasn’t, even though you thought I was.

We - everyone, all of us - are exceptionally bad guessers. It’s the scared part of us that thinks we’re great at guessing and tells us our worst guess is the correct one. The fact is, most of the time, we just don’t have any idea what’s going on with other people, so we may as well decide to believe the nice thing, right? Because in the end, it will make everyone’s day, including yours and mine and tiny A.’s, a little brighter. And we can all use a little sun.

Have a nice afternoon.

Thanks to numupdraft for the photo.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Pants are killing me. Not mine, hers. The baby’s, that is. It doesn’t bode well.

I spent a sizeable chunk of my wardrobe mindspace in my 20’s and earlier 30’s worrying about my pants, so that’s already sorted. (If you’re self-aware, you make your peace with what works - Lucky Easy Riders, yes, please - and what doesn’t, which we’ll just leave with “pink,” “Juicy Couture,” and “ass.”) Fortunately, I’d left my corporate gig before I got pregnant so I didn’t have to buy a new office wardrobe, and, miraculously, I only put on 18 lbs during the pregnancy, so I made it through the nine months pretty comfortably in yoga pants (thanks very much, Lululemon and Prana) and boots with jersey dresses (Cora Kempermann and Susana Monaco, for the record).

Now, though, I have to concern myself with dressing two people, one of them with zero self-awareness so it’s all on me that she doesn’t look idiotic.

Three quarters of the way through the pregnancy, I read a “minimalist moms” list of must-buy items for your newborn. Little side-button shirts until the umbilical cord heals, then tiny bodysuits, long- and short-sleeved. Fine. But she’s not Donald Duck - what’s she wearing on the bottom? I looked everywhere. I asked other moms. Vagueness all around. “We put him in pajamas a lot,” was as specific as it got. I’m all for hanging around in sleepwear, but at the very least you should have some alternatives handy in case of emergencies. Like an earthquake. Or a date. Or the UPS truck. I’m just saying, I don’t know where your personal pants threshold is, but think ahead and be prepared, right?

In all the stacks of stuff people gave me at the baby shower, I swear to God, not one pair of pants. Pajama union suits. Little sacks to sleep in. Tiny dresses. Shoes (useless but cute). No pants. How can you receive a complete wardrobe and no one gives you any bottoms? That’s the like the worst Price is Right package ever. Are most infants just wandering - well, lying - around pantsless? That’s weird, isn’t it? In my view, wearing pants is an issue of human dignity and I think my kid deserves some.

Finally, right after she was born, Baby Gap came to the rescue. Little teensy black pants for my little teensy New York daughter. And - from the boys’ department - navy striped ones that make her look like she’s a tiny escapee from Pirates of Penzance. I got a lot of, “What adorable pants!” comments too, which leads me to believe that most of the baby-witnessing population is used to seeing unclad baby legs.

It was a lot of effort for some very small rewards, and if I were more well-slept, not parenting an infant and generally more focused right now I’d definitely cash in on that market opportunity. (If you have sleep, focus and no infant, that’s my gift to you: start making baby pants. You’re welcome.)

Not to go on about it, but now that that stage is solved, we’ve got a different pants problem. She has pants but she looks…well, she looks like an 85-year-old golfer from Boca. There’s a lot of squirm in a four month old, so her finally-found pants ride up as high as they can but since the bodysuit she’s wearing underneath them is snapped in place, it lies flat. It’s not a good look. If I skip the bodysuit and go with a shirt, that rides up too, making her look like a tacky, midriff-baring MILF with, let’s face it, kind of a muffin top. The only answer is tunics or sweaters which cover not just her waistline but most of the pants, which seems like a shame. Given how hard they’ve been to find, I think the pants should get top billing. Maybe I’ll wrap a string of battery-powered Christmas lights around the pants to make sure people notice them underneath her smocks. She won’t look strange at all. Or like her mother’s deranged. Shut up.

You know how I’m neurotic? Maybe a little paranoid with a tendency to obsess a little? Do you remember that about me? Miss it? Well, I’m happy to oblige with a dose for your summer: here’s how that’s working itself out in my parent world.

Let’s hark back to March. It’s census time. Our census form arrives. Of course it doesn’t go smoothly.

“How many people were living or staying at this house, apartment or mobile home on April 1, 2010?” Let’s leave the mobile home part of the question alone, along with yearning for an Airstream, and move on to the math. Technically only two of us lived here in March, but the baby was pending on April 22. Her pre-personhood deserves to be counted, doesn’t it? Yes, thank you. I elect to answer, “Three.” I fill out Person 1’s information (R) and Person 2’s (mine). So far, so good.

My pencil hovers over the blanks for Person 3. She has no official name yet. That’s a minor detail, really though, no? If I put “Beauregard,” and we name her, “Huffington Baby Spangles Herkimer III,” no one will care, right? They’re counting mainly, they’re not cross-referencing to our birth certificates. Maybe if I put her name in quotes they’ll know it’s kind-of/maybe. Like banks that say, “FDIC-insured,” or restaurants with, “home cooking,” on their signs. Great. Done. Beauregard F_______ it is.

I look at the form again.

“Please report babies as age 0 when the child is less than one year old.” No problem. “0” it is.

“Were there any additional people staying here April 1, 2010 that you did not include in Question 1?” Box 1: Children, such as newborn babies or foster children, etc.”

OK, hold up. First off, I just answered Question 1 not thirty seconds ago. To have omitted someone that recently and to then remember them even more recently is weird. How many people do they think are living with me that I can’t reliably count them? There can’t be that many Duggar situations out there, can there?

Related, if I do have that many people living under our roof - say, I’m training up my own soccer side in the basement - and I forgot one, why would I count that one person under Question 2 instead of just going back to Question 1 and upping the number by one? Maybe I’m passive aggressive and have a chip on my shoulder about just that one member of the household so this is my way of letting out that seething rage that I’ve bottled up until exactly this opportunity to snub them presented itself? Of course, only the government will know that I consider them a separate-question-level-sub-par citizen but I guess that’ll take the edge off my rage for another month…? OK. Maybe.

That’s not the problem though. I am not mentally deficient or passive aggressive (mostly), so I counted properly in Question 1. The main problem is the date: April 1, 2010. I was thinking of holding onto the form and mailing it in late April after the baby was delivered so I wouldn’t technically be lying re: number of persons under the roof. Now it looks like my honesty isn’t the issue. She’s not going to get counted for ten years because she’ll be born three weeks past the deadline. Now that, my friends, is some seriously garbage precedent. How will we get her apportionment of rice or crayons or Skittles or whatever they’re going to send us based on the form? We won’t and that’s the end of it.

This bothers me. I think about it at night. She’ll be ten before she’s counted. That’s messed up. It’s an identity thing, an acknowledgment that she has a space in the world. The census is, of course, missing tons of people who aren’t even prospective infants at the time of the counting, but nevertheless I’m irritated.

Fast forward a month. A. is born three and a half weeks early. On March 30. One day before the census cutoff. I’m lying in my hospital bed. What am I thinking about? How grateful I am we have a healthy daughter? Sure. How great R. has been throughout? Yeah. How cute she is? Fine. What I’m really thinking about is what an idiot I am for having already mailed the census form. So not everything is different when you have kids. Pointless neuroses still firmly intact. Excellent.

All right. I agree. I’ll stop making promises about anything for a few months, including how often I’ll get back to writing for this site. It’s become more than obvious that life with an infant is, while delightful, highly changeable. Not that I didn’t expect that. It’s that voice in the back of my brain - the one that used to think a reasonable day was one in which I got done every single thing done that occurred to me to do, all 400 of them - that gets me into even more trouble than usual since little A. arrived. That part of my brain thinks I can get the first 400 things done plus the other 400 things that I want to do for the baby. That plan is working out great. No pressure at all when I get up in the morning. Really.

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

No big surprise there. Also: most irritating read for teen girls in AP English.

I’m not a fan of house cats but, inexplicably, I love large cats. Come on, look at those cheetah cubs! This looks pretty cat-centric though, so if you just adore zebras, wildebeests and other kitty prey, I’d avoid it.

I’m going to get in line at the movie theater now. It comes out in 2011, so if you could swing by with some snacks and a fresh sleeping bag for me every few weeks, that’d be great. Thanks.

apportunity, (ap-er-too-ni-tee), noun A situation or condition favorable for the conceptualization (and subsequent not building) of an iPhone application, usually when drunk or significantly over-tired, to fill a “need” of an insignificant segment of the market.

Derived from noun, “iPhone app” and tagline, “There’s an app for that.”

Usage: “What do you mean there’s nothing out there to determine the ripeness of this watermelon? There is a huge apportunity here.”

My former employer is on a roll this year producing products that strain the boundaries of their Things No One Really Needs (…Except Maybe If You Have Too Much Time On Your Hands and Lots of Disposable Income) category. They’ve done well filling out that category in the past with their $500 margarita machine and the infamous Electric Vacuum Marinator, both genius ideas that I’m sure will someday achieve the success they deserve in the general marketplace. I’m totally holding my breath for that. I’m a little blue, but I’m hanging in there.

This season, Williams-Sonoma and their sibling, Pottery Barn, are in a dead heat for the top useless spot. WS blew into first place last month with a $300 see-through toaster.

Ever since I saw it, I can hardly imagine a kitchen without one. Why just this morning, a piece of priceless toast was burned to a crisp in my kitchen. Imagine: the tragedy might have been averted had I had the foresight to buy the Magimix Vision Toaster the instant the catalog arrived. Well, that and if someone had been paying attention to the toast in the first place. I think the market here is not really, “People Who Burn Toast,” but, “People Who Still Burn Toast While Standing Over the Toaster Waiting for The Aforementioned Toast,” since you really need to be hanging out right there watching your transparent toaster to avert a sooty conflagration. If you had that kind of loitering time, you probably would’ve been able to avoid burning your breakfast bread in your old toaster too because you could have smelled it going up in smoke, but who’s keeping track of those silly details, right? It’s a glass toaster for Pete’s sake! What’s not to love?

If you needed any other incentive than its obvious excellence and indispensability, the suggested retail on this wonder machine is $350, so you’re actually saving $50 if you buy it from WS instead of, um, well, traveling to Belgium to pick one up from the factory, since no one else in the States seems to carry them. So you’re actually saving, like, $1000 if you factor in the airfare.

Anyway, bravo Williams-Sonoma: you have definitively put to bed that old adage, “A watched toast never boils.” Apparently it does, my friends, apparently it does.

I was so ready to just hand over the blue ribbon to Williams-Sonoma not halfway through 2010 but then, lo and behold, WS’s sister company, Pottery Barn, upped the ante in their most recent catalog with the…wait for it… yes, it’s a giant abacus.
retailing for only $249!! Can you believe it? What luck. Just what I’ve always wanted.

If anything, this is catering to an even smaller market than the magic toaster: “People who need to do a lot of math but can’t. And who can’t work a calculator. And are blind.” Well, huzzah, Pottery Barn for finding a tiny need and filling it with a giant solution.

The abacus is an impressive two feet by four feet which means you’re going to have to do some serious rearranging of your Math Room to make it feel at home, but if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right. And on a bizarrely outsized scale. That’s all I’m saying.

So now the pressure’s on West Elm, the third brand arm of the Williams-Sonoma empire. What’s it going to be, West Elm? A collection of 1000 tiny egg-shaped figurines? A life-size map of Istanbul for your living room? A live elk? Your pals have set a high standard: for the low, low price of $600 I can see my toast and do basic addition and subtraction visible to a sizable audience. The gauntlet is down.

2010 is shaping up to be a big year in retail people. Hang onto your hats.

Me: Why are you looking at me like that?
R: Nothing.
Me: Is my hair weird?
R: No, it’s good. Like done up but messy. Like, “I’m going to the Oscars but I had to get a bike ride in first.”
Me: That’s great.

I always thought that if I had kids, I’d have to break some of my bad habits. Like eating Apple Jacks and Doritos and other things with colors not found in nature. That should probably go. And watching Law & Order re-runs without remorse for several hours running. Probably not good for small children. Or crossing six lanes of traffic in the middle of the block.

(Let’s skip the conversation about how hypocritical it is for me to deprive my offspring of the very things I was denied and coveted and - probably as a result - attached myself to as a needy, media- and junk-food-backward newly independent, TV-owning, grocery-shopping 20-something.)

I didn’t think one of those habits would be writing. To be more precise, writing on things. One day a few years ago, lacking a notebook, I discovered the efficiency of writing notes on my hand. Such a simple solution when you only have half the pen and paper equation at hand. Your hand is, after all, always at hand. Of course, there is the serious down side of accidentally washing away Nobel Prize-winning thoughts while in the bathroom at Ikea. And there’s the inconvenience to one’s partner of being asked, palm extended in face, “What do you think that says? That letter there - could that be a ‘t’? Which would make that word…toupee? What?”

But other than that, it’s a winner of a habit.

Oh yeah, also except that most adults look at you like you’re a.) mildly deranged, or b.) still in second grade. But they’re looking with their head foolishly angled off to the side because they’re trying to read what you wrote all upside down, so who’s the sucker now, huh?

Anyway, R. made me promise early on in the pregnancy that the one habit I would break before she was born would be my tendency to write, in pen, on skin available somewhere below my eye line. No writing on the baby. Fine. Whatever. So I won’t write on the baby.

And I haven’t. So far. But I’ve just distributed pens around the living room so when I’m pinned down beneath the sleeping infant and thinking meaningful thoughts, there is always at least half that equation at hand. Let’s just hope she doesn’t snooze so long that I run out of space on my palms, that’s all I have to say.

She’s here. Three weeks ago today, Astrid Zealand suddenly joined our family. 6 lbs., 7.7 ounces and three and a half weeks early. We couldn’t be more delighted to have her.

Apropos of nothing, my favorite moment in last month’s Oscars broadcast:

Oscars 2010 - Steve Martin "But I don’t think the plural of whores is whores’" sound bite  Oscars 2010 sound bites

More here.

R has a beard, a moustache and long hair. He’s a good-looking guy though, trust me. His furry choices don’t resemble the current Brad Pitt iteration of facial hair or the hipster full beard mistake. He’s Mr. Trim and he knows how to work it. Here’s the thing though: babies don’t like it. I think it’s in the clown category for them. It’s unfamiliar and unfamiliar equals scary. Like beets for me.

We have a one-year-old friend who is otherwise pretty placid, but when he spies R, he goes quiet, assesses for a moment and then his small face crumples.

Our own baby will arrive in a couple of months and we’ve been considering the situation. My thinking is that our child will swing the other way. Not gay (well, maybe gay - who knows?) but hair-friendly instead of hair phobic. After all, what else will she know? R’s the man in her life.

That’s the good news. But you know how girls supposedly end up dating guys who look like their dads? That’s a little creepy all to itself, but now I’m worried she’ll wind up with a preference for the shady end of R’s spectrum, like a.) terrorists, b.) drug dealers, or, worst, c.) hippies.

I’m not sure what to do to prevent her from subconsciously being drawn to kicking it with the Taliban, stoners or the cartel. Maybe we’ll paper her room with stills from Mad Men. Or we could run Magnum P.I. in a loop in the nursery to get her clued in to the retro ‘stache vibe. Or, I guess, we could just hope she’ll swing the other way and go for clean-shaven blondes just to spite us.

I need to start crossing stuff off my anxiety list. This is right behind, “Don’t let her fall off the deck,” and, “No drinking bleach.” I think that’s my priorities in order, right?

(Thanks, Swiss Miss, for the onesie tip-off.)

I’m going home later this week. Maybe I can get a ride…

Maybe naming him Rimbaud wasn’t such a good idea.

(Dwell, February 2009)

This is a brilliant, brilliant site. Check it out: Unhappy Hipsters.

(Thanks, Nicole, for the tip-off!)

Setting aside the fact that its job is to wake me up, it keeps doing it with the most depressing news. (I have, naturally, chosen the NPR news as my 1 of 1000 choices.) The health care plan’s demise. The election of a Republican in my home state of Massachusetts. The Supreme Court’s latest blunder (corporations are people?) Plane crash in Africa. The death toll in Haiti.

I could turn the blame on Obama, on his disappointing lack of specific leadership (like providing the Keystone Kops in Congress with a healthcare blueprint to start from or using his popularity to fulfill campaign promises like allowing gays in the military) or his misreading of how to manage Washington’s self-interested, over-tanned criminals…sorry…Senators, but, as far as I know, he can’t make natural disasters like earthquakes and Rush Limbaugh (yet), so I’m just going to be steamed at my alarm clock. Like I always say, “Shoot the messenger.”

Stupid clock.

1. Mumford,1999, Lawrence Kasdan (weird, right?) with lots of people you know. A comedy about a guy named Mumford pretending to be a therapist in a town called Mumford.
2. Home Fries, 1998, Dean Parisot with Drew Barrymore, Luke Wilson and Catherine O’Hara (Best In Show? Anyone?) Incorrectly marketed as a romantic comedy when it’s actually a weird, cheerful black comedy about a knocked-up drive-through-window waitress, the misguided boy who falls in love with her, a military helicopter and a homicidal stepmother.
3. Happy, Texas, 1999, Mark Illsley. Ex-cons passing themselves off as gay, kiddie-beauty-pageant coaches in small-town Texas. Where else can you find Jeremy Northam, Steve Zahn and William H. Macy all playing light in the loafers?
4. The Imposters, 1998, Stanley Tucci. It’s on all my lists. Wanna-be actors in the 1920’s end up as stowaways on a cruise ship full of insane people.
5. Addicted to Love, 1997, Griffin Dunne. Meg Ryan pre-lip-inflation with Matthew Broderick and Tchéky Karyo in a romantic revenge comedy. Imperfect but original. And funny.
6. A Midwinter’s Tale or In the Bleak Midwinter, 1996, Kenneth Branagh. The most marginal on the list. It’s a slapstick, black and white faux documentary about a production of Hamlet patched together one Christmas. I think Branagh was using it as a workshop before he filmed his full-length Hamlet the next year. Some really excellent actors in it. (Fair warming: Might only be lovable by theaterphiles.)
7. Hamlet, 1996, Kenneth Branagh. The only un-cut version on film, certainly the only one with serious production values. I imagine Branagh cashed in a lot of favors to get this made. No weird interpretations and thankfully missing the Olivier Oedipal hammer, just the entire play with (mostly) good actors. Brace yourself: 4 and a half hours. Yes, that is Jack Lemmon as one of the guards.
8. Emma, the BBC version, 1997, Diarmuid Lawrence, with Kate Beckinsale before she went all Hollywood hottie and Mark Strong before he went all evildoer (which he’s very good at, I agree). The most true-to-the-text Emma out there. I should know.
9. Something to Talk About, 1995, Lasse Hallström. Remarriage comedy with horses and sarcastic southern women (Julia Roberts, Kyra Sedgwick and Gena Rowlands in the role that made me want her to be my bad-ass mom). Also, the only movie in which I have ever liked Robert Duvall.
10. Stranger Than Fiction, 2006, Marc Forster. Brilliant cast, potentially disastrous concept brilliantly executed. Very, very funny. And touching. But not in that creepy Hollywood way.
11. Frost/Nixon, 2008, Ron Howard, with Michael Sheen and Frank Langella (and Oliver Platt - hooray!). I know: it’s Ron Howard, so maybe more than eleven people saw it. On the other hand, it was written as an un-filmable play by the excellent Peter Morgan, so maybe not. David Frost interviews Richard Nixon post-Watergate. (What is up with Michael Sheen being so good and still moonlighting as a campy vampire?)

Did you know that four pounds of the weight you gain during pregnancy is blood? That’s a lot of extra blood to pump and carry. That tidbit makes me feel better about my inability to make it up the stairs in one go: it’s not just the extra weight but the fact that my heart is pumping like a flooded mill.

Another piece of baby trivia: it’s hard to find black baby clothes. This makes no sense since babies spend most of their time making a huge mess and black, as we all know, is the best color to cover that up. The pastels that dominate the market are the worst possible choice to hide the unfortunate accidents that beset a very small person incapable of holding up her own head while eating.

Also, black is slimming, so unless you have a premature infant, a baby in black will look svelter and more chic than her playmates which I’m sure is critical to her later development as a society hostess, fashion editor, or just generally one of those girls you hate because of her preternatural sense of style.

I’m thinking about registering for eight gallons of black Rit dye along with the baby clothes: I’ll just throw the whole batch in the washer together and we’re there.

I’m not sure what to do about the colorful shoes though. Maybe a well-applied Sharpie will do the trick. I did that once with a pair of suit pants I liked that had irritating exposed contrast stitching running down the sides. Unfortunately, the toxic Sharpie smell never went away. Having a meeting with me was like hugging a dry-erase board and I’m guessing a baby can get stoned/brain damaged pretty quickly on Sharpie fumes. Plus, they put things like their shoes in their mouths. Maybe I better come up with a different plan for the shoes.

I did find this: the Black Orbit Rocker Cradle. It’s as close as I can get to a bassinet that would fit in at a Manhattan cocktail party.

I have to be careful here though: if she’s too minimal and stylish as a baby, there’s a chance that when she gets rebellious, she’ll go all hippy or start wearing teddy bear sweaters and collecting Home Shopping Network kitten figurines. Maybe I should suck up the Fisher-Price aesthetic for a few years so she can rebound into Prada later on.

God. So many decisions.

(I admit this is overkill. I’m going to deal with that situation any day now. Or maybe the three of them will rumble some night. Three men enter, one man leaves, if you take my meaning.)

That’s why my cupboard and drawer habits are so puzzling. R recently noted, with admirable good humor, that whenever I leave the kitchen, every hinged door or rolling drawer I opened stays open. Same with the dresser drawers in the bedroom.

I was kind of surprised. My perception is that I’m always tidying up - collecting used glasses from the coffee table, hanging the bathmat, closing the shower curtain - as I move around the apartment. The reality appears to be that I am also leaving behind a chaos of open cereal boxes, left-out butter, Splenda packets, and small spoons.

Why do I do that? It’s weird, right? For someone as tidy-oriented as me, right?

It was a casual question last week, a little passing, “Ha, ha! Isn’t that surprising? Aren’t I quirky?” but this week, since I can’t find a ready answer, it’s starting to really bother me. Why would someone who invariably makes the bed, who straightens the couch pillows every morning on the way through the living room, and who is always lining up the remote controls, why would she leave the kitchen looking like the poltergeist had just taken its revenge? Is it a “leave my mark” thing, like peeing the perimeter or carving my name in a tree? Is it subconscious rebellion? Is it make-work? I am the one who usually, eventually, circles back through and closes everything up again… What the hell is going on?

I’m going to come up with a theory this week. It’s going to be good. It’s going to have a lot of psychological complexity, sub-points and moving parts. That or it’s going to be insane. Like that I’m trying to make sure the invisible beasties that live in our cupboards get enough air and a chance to exercise before I close them back in. Not that I think beasties exist. Of course I don’t. That would be deranged.

Just before we knew we were pregnant, I complained that the general public felt free to ask personal questions about our sex life over cocktails, e.g. when and how many children we intended to produce. Apparently, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Now that I’m obviously pregnant, a whole new world of boundary violations has opened up.

For starters, there’s the touching. I thought we’d all gotten the “show me on the doll” memo when we were kids, but clearly some segment of the population feels that a.) that doesn’t apply to children before they’re born, and b.) it doesn’t apply to other adults who are carrying those children.

Let me ask you this: when was the last time you walked up to someone you haven’t seen in ten years, a co-worker or really anyone you’re not sleeping with, and put your hand on their stomach like you were their high school boyfriend copping a feel between first and second period? Never, that’s when.

I get that it’s interesting that I’m carrying around the equivalent of a bear cub in my abdomen. Yes, it’s weird. Yes, she moves. It’s fine that you’re fascinated. That’s your deal. My deal is that I still retain air-space rights at least several inches around my body. If you want to enter the no-fly zone, you ask. Period.

Then there’s the advice. International law on this one is unclear. The United States offers all kinds of unsolicited input to countries all over the world, especially ones in some kind of transition: don’t stuff your ballot boxes; don’t blow that up; don’t eat that; stop hitting them, and so on. Usually though, there’s a cash incentive (like, we’ll give you money for counter-terrorism) or a serious disincentive (like, we won’t give you snacks).

That makes sense, since, let’s face it, unsolicited advice implies that you’re doing - or about to do - something “wrong” or that you don’t know what you’re doing at all, which, unless you’re really evolved and secure, makes the advice-giver seem like kind of a jerk, however well-intentioned or correct she or he might be. Money softens that blow. It’s kind of like employment: you pay me so I’ll do what you tell me to do.

Apparently where pregnancy and children are concerned though, there is no such arrangement. Advice, usually absurdly specific to the giver’s situation, is not accompanied by a cash incentive.

Just between you and me, if you handed me a roll of twenties before advising me not to take drugs during labor, I would definitely be more receptive to your suggestion.

Worse - and more common - than the advice is the unsolicited negative input. It’s the lazy man’s advice: it just sits in your path like a suicidal frog on a road in a rainstorm. No plans, no suggestions, it’s just out there. I can’t make out what the intent is in recreationally telling someone who is inevitably going to have to deliver a baby in a few months all the things that can go wrong when she does. Unless you have medically relevant information to disclose, discussing disastrous deliveries with an expectant mother is like stopping by the JFK security line to share the latest on airplane crashes.

Also inexplicable: telling me how I’ll be sleep-deprived after the baby arrives (as if I’m not now) or how my life will never be the same again. Since I don’t live in a cave, am sentient, reasonably well-educated, and not sixteen years old, trust me when I say that I am already aware that my life will change and it will, for a while, include less sleep. (We thought of that before we decided to have kids, didn’t you?) So the intent can’t be informative, right?

And don’t tell me it’s just making conversation either, because when you make small talk with a non-pregnant person you barely know in an elevator, I guarantee you don’t start with freak accidents or Things I’m Bitter About. You say pleasant things about rain showers and television shows and puppies. OK, maybe not puppies, but please know that I’d much rather hear about them than how your cousin’s husband cheated on her while she was pregnant, who you know who had a late-term miscarriage or how your daughter grew up to be a teenaged mother living in your basement. I can say unequivocally that I do not want to hear any of those stories because a.) they do not bring any useful information into my life, b.) as stories, they are total downers, c.) I am often awake and paranoid at 4AM and your story’s not helping, and c.) they make me want to kick you in the shins, which is kind a losing proposition for you too.

Let me return the favor and offer some advice of my own: unless an expectant mother asks for your rundown of worst case scenarios or Your Least Favorite Things About Being a Parent, say supportive things. Say happy things. Mention what you love about being a parent. Tell her what’s gone right. If that’s beyond your reach, save it for your close friends, say, “Congratulations!” and move on to the weather and small animal antics. Your shins will thank me.