the pieces of my life

• A special circle of hell exists for people who mail their holiday cards before Thanksgiving. Freakin’ wait till the turkey carcass is cold, please.
• In our town, every year, the 5th graders go to a science camp in Rhode Island for four days. I remember when Doodles was in kindergarten, watching all those big kids loading up the Peter Pan busses with their suitcases and sleeping bags and thinking that it was crazy and I couldn’t imagine my baby going. Well, my baby went. As we were packing him, I said, “The packing list says pants for every day. You need three pairs of jeans plus what you’ll be wearing on the bus.” Of course we discovered that somehow his jeans had mysteriously disappeared. So Adam did a late-night Old Navy run to buy the boy more pants. I packed that bag beautifully. “You’ll never get it packed like this on the way home,” I said. He shrugged. And yet, when he came home, every pair of jeans was folded beautifully as were a few pairs of underwear, and a couple of shirts. “How did you do that?” I asked.
  He rolled his eyes at me. “I didn’t wear any of those things.” By the way, note to future parents of 5th grade boys: Don’t bother packing the shampoo. It won’t be used either.
• While the boy was away, Adam also had a work trip, so for three nights it was just us gals. I took Pie out to a restaurant that Doodles doesn’t like. Our menu had the Chinese Zodiac printed on it. Pie asked, “Which sign are you?” I told her, “I was born in the Year of the Monkey.” She scanned the menu till she found the monkey:
  She looked at me at said in wonder, “You were born in 1956?!”
  “NO!” I said loudly enough that the folks at the next table glared at me.
  Pie looked at the menu again confused. She asked, “So you were born in 1944?”
• Today I reminded Doodles that next week his Hebrew school class was going to have a field trip to a retirement community to celebrate Hanukkah.
  “Ugh, I don’t want to go,” he said.
  “Why not? It should be fun!”
  “My class re-wrote ‘Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel,’ and the new lyrics are really stupid.”
  “So don’t sing them.”
  “I guess I’ll just lip sync them. They told us one of the creators of the Internet is going to be there. I think they were trying to pump us up.”
  “Well, doesn’t that make you excited?”
  “No! It depresses me!”
  “Why does that depress you?”
  “Because then I have to sing a really stupid song in front of one of the creators of the Internet!”

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