Best Yankee Swap Gift Ever!
December 31st, 2013 § Comments Off on Best Yankee Swap Gift Ever! § permalink
Friendly New Year’s Competition
December 31st, 2013 § Comments Off on Friendly New Year’s Competition § permalink
So Long 2013
December 31st, 2013 § Comments Off on So Long 2013 § permalink
I had great plans for the last day of 2013. I was going to catch up on all my Goodreads reviews, post photos to the photo blog, take a nap, cook for New Years. Instead, I ate duck fat fries.
So I will enter the new year with the best of intentions and little else. I hope to post pictures as the evening goes, but that could go the way of the nap.
Either way, happy new year to all of you. May it be a year of fulfilled intentions.
Absolute Corruption
December 22nd, 2013 § Comments Off on Absolute Corruption § permalink
Can’t speak of this, because the phones might be tapped. I suspect this blog is being monitored. All I know is we’re in Miami Beach, and corruption is afoot.
Miami is well known for corruption. And I could tell stories about the strange things I’ve seen here as a kid (and, as a matter of fact, I have–I wrote an essay years ago that I really should revise and submit). Crazy things that simply don’t happen anywhere else in the country.
But now it’s reached the upper echelons. It’s gone higher than anyone would have reasonably expected. Corruption has tainted that which was once pure and good.
They’ve gotten to the Tooth Fairy.
This is the only explanation of which I can think: Last night, Doodles had a wiggly tooth. So wiggly it was driving him to distraction. Finally, he just got up and stood in the bathroom going at it until the tooth came out. Great.
“Do you want to leave the tooth here or wait till we get home?” I asked him.
The boy shrugged. “I don’t care.”
I suggested, “Let’s wait till we get home.”
“Okay,” he said.
But then my mother, the Nana, said, “No, no! The Tooth Fairy will come here! You should leave it here!” She was pretty insistent and went on for a bit about how the Tooth Fairy can come to Miami Beach.
I figured it had been a long time since my mom had seen the Tooth Fairy, so I acquiesced. The boy left his tooth under his pillow. I stayed up late, because I wanted to have a little chat with the fairy–you know, let her know that Pie is going to be having some massive tooth work done in the near future. Tooth Fairy and I chatted, she told me she left $2, and that was that.
Until this morning. The boy came running into see me. “The Tooth Fairy left me $12!”
Huh?
He said, “I got two one-dollar bills and a ten-dollar bill.”
I asked, “Was the $10 wrapped up in the $2?” figuring it was late and maybe the Tooth Fairy had just made a big fat error.
“No,” he said. “It was separate.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I saw the Tooth Fairy. She said she was going to leave you $2. Did she accidentally leave you a $10 instead of a $1?”
“No! It was a separate $10. It wasn’t with the $2. It was separate.”
Which must mean that clearly the Tooth Fairy left $2, but the Nana got to her. I bet the Nana is using teeth in some crazy art work.* Why else would the Nana have been so insistent that the Tooth Fairy come to Miami Beach? The Nana must have pressured the Tooth Fairy–I don’t know, for the boy’s tooth? for other kids’ teeth? who can know? Whatever it is, the Tooth Fairy must have sold the tooth either to her or on the tooth black market. I’m only assuming the Tooth Fairy felt a moment of guilt and compassion and decided to give Doodles a cut of her profit,
Corruption in Miami. I’m telling you, it’s real. Protect your family.
* You think I’m exaggerating about the Nana? This is the Nana’s artwork. This all sounds a lot more plausible now, doesn’t it! (And it explains a lot about me, too, doesn’t it?)
My Life: Cold, Peeps, and Butts
December 20th, 2013 § Comments Off on My Life: Cold, Peeps, and Butts § permalink
Note to self: If someone asks, “It there a temperature that’s too cold for you to run?” the answer is not “I’ll run in anything!” but “Screw the run! I’m taking a bubble bath!” Actually the running part is fine. Is the after-run part. Running in “12 degrees, feels like 2” is actually fairly invigorating. Walking home (with coffee) in “12 degrees, feels like 2,” as the body cools off and the sweat on you begins to freeze is miserable. Stupid New England. Luckily the weather has warmed, so no longer do I fear the cold; merely the melting slush that freezes into sheets of ice just in time for my morning run.
And my son isn’t helping things. He gets little rewards at viola lessons for practicing five days a week. This week, Adam went to pick him up, and overheard the boy telling his viola teacher, “I can’t have Peeps. My mom will eat them.” Uh, yeah! Let me tell you there was hell to pay when he got home and I confronted him. “Uh, well, uh…” I just waited. “Well, she was giving them out from the box so they would have gotten yucky in my hand on the ride home.” Excuse me? Have you not seen me eat five-day-old gummy bears that I found on the floor under the counter trim? You think a little boy sweat is going to scare me off? He did give me a big hug and lots of apologies. He’s very lucky that literally the next day, Lilith came to pick her daughter up from our Girl Scout meeting, and she brought me a pack of Peeps. Before this, I might have considered sharing them (note, I wouldn’t share them; but I might have considered it). Now that boy can cry himself Peep-less tears when he goes to bed at night.
Speaking of crazy children, Pie has this thing she’s been doing for about six months now. When she “sees, smells, or hears of anything gross,” her butt hurts. Her butt has been hurting a lot lately. She’s a sensitive kid, that Pie.
In the meantime, I’m sick as a dog because with our impending winter vacation, I’ve had to do laundry, and we all know that doing laundry makes me violently ill. In fact, I think it’s making my butt hurt. Stupid laundry. Stupid butts. Time for Peeps.
Parenting 101
December 17th, 2013 § Comments Off on Parenting 101 § permalink
I have learned the hard way that honesty is not the best policy with my children.
About a week ago, I took Adam out for a birthday dinner. While we were out I left gingerbread, frosting, jelly beans, and M&Ms for the kids and babysitter to enjoy. They each decorated a large gingerbread man, and the boy ate a bit of his cookie before deciding he didn’t really like it, and the girl ate about two-thirds of hers before the babysitter suggested that the cookie/candy/pie (from Adam’s birthday) might be a deadly combo and be contributing to her bouncing off the walls.
The cookies sat around for a few days. Until I got hungry. So I ate the boy’s cookie. Because I knew he wouldn’t care. And then I ate the girl’s cookie. Because I wanted more cookie. However, I discovered that the candy on the cookie wasn’t great, so I picked that off. But the candy was covering large parts of the girl’s cookie, so after I decimated it, there were still chunks of cookie left that I ended up throwing out.
And of course, three days after that, the girl asks, “Where’s my cookie?”
Me: I threw it out.
The girl: WHAT!!??
Me: It was getting gross.So I threw it out.
The girl: You threw it all out?
Me: Yeah. But it’s not like there was much left after I had eaten it.
The girl: [Tears forming in her eye, chin starting to quiver] You. Ate. My. Cookie?
The boy: Duh. What do you think happens to the sweets left here?
Me: It was going bad anyway. So I just ate it before it was too gross.
The girl: You. Ate. My. Cookie?
Me: It wasn’t just you! I ate the boy’s too!
The girl. You. Ate. My. Cookie?
Me, at this point trying to avoid the impending meltdown, and counting on distractibility of child: Who wants to drink hot chocolate in front of a TV show!
The girl, hopping off the kitchen stool: Okay! Me!
Moral of this story: Lie to your children. And make sure not to leave any crumbs. And that, my friends, is parenting at it’s finest.
November Ramblings
November 25th, 2013 § Comments Off on November Ramblings § permalink
- 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!”
Hell Is Halloween
November 12th, 2013 § 2 comments § permalink
I have clearly failed as a mother. As part of her bass practice, Pie is supposed to sing along while she plucks out her tunes. It’s simple. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”
Except… my daughter doesn’t know the words. Seriously? She gets lost somewhere around “Up above the world so high” and just starts making crap up. How can someone make it the age of eight and not know the words to “Twinkle Twinkle”? It’s crazy.
But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. What I really wanted to tell you about was a series of text messages that occurred on the morning of Thursday, October 31. At breakfast, about 7:08 a.m., my boy said, “Is Daddy on the plane right now?”
I replied, “He f’ing better be!”
I’m pretty sure I made it clear in my last post how I feel about Halloween. Let’s just say, I’m not a fan.
The man is clearly a mind reader because at 7:12 a.m. I got the following text: “On my flight. Just in case you were worried.” And a few minutes later, “See you in a little bit.”
I texted back a smiley face. Which was pretty much my kiss of death, because what it really meant was “I am so happy you are coming home to relieve me of the horrors of Halloween and to save me from the hordes of greedy children and the mounds of candy that I’m clearly just begging the universe to f’k with me.”
Because after a quick text exchange about the Red Sox winning the World Series, I got this text: “Hold the phone. Plane has some damage. On ground for at least an hour. May have to change planes. Just got done telling woman next to me my ‘I missed my Halloween flight’ story. She nows thinks I’m a jinx.”
I of course knew better. “This had better be a Halloween prank.”
And when he replied, “For reals,” I may have called him a loser. But not with that word. And not in a friendly upper/lowercase kind of typing.
So what time did his 3:30 arrival land? at 7:25 p.m. Just in time to COMPLETELY miss Halloween. He did write, “On the plus side I’m packing so many gummy bears that I think customs suspects me of being a drug mule.”
He did bring me gummies. Was it “so many”? I’d say it was a good two-days worth.
And I got first dibs on the kids’ reject candy (my kids dislike the oddest things and I ended up with a huge haul of peanut butter cups, butterfingers, and other random goodness). Of course, two days later, I was pissed I had so much kids’ candy, but what can you do? (Don’t say, “Not eat it.” Because that is NOT an option.)
I’ve already started crafting the note I plan on giving Adam’s boss next year:
Dear Mr. Boss Man,
Please excuse Adam from work travel. He will be drawn and quartered if he leaves the Boston vicinity within forty-eight hours of Halloween ever again. If he even thinks about a work trip around Halloween, I will come after every employee of your company. It will not be pretty.
Sincerely,
Epstein’s mother
Have I mentioned how much I hate Halloween?
The Halloween Grinch
October 30th, 2013 § 2 comments § permalink
The other night, I received a text from my husband who was in Berlin for work. “Did you lose internet connection?”
Aw, how sweet. He must have been trying to message me and was concerned when he couldn’t reach me. And then the next text came: “lost connection to sling box.”
Yes, my husband is using our home TV to watch the World Series in Berlin. And now he is in London. Watching the game. At 12:46 a.m. And we’re only in the 5th inning. Does anyone else remember the last time my husband was in London on Halloween? If he misses his flight because he was too tired to get to the airport on time–correction: if he misses his flight for any reason at all–I am leaving him alone with my children, the three-day weekend (because the school doesn’t want to deal with overtired, oversugared kids on Friday, so it’s a “professional development day”), and all the leftover candy while I go find a nice spa that serves bourbon.
I hate October.
I hate that baseball takes over.
I hate those stupid beards.
I hate that my football team sucks and not only sucks but last Sunday lured me into thoughts of “Maybe!” and then sucked the biggest suck they have ever sucked with a team I hate more than any other team in the world. So sucky.
I hate that I can’t stop eating candy corn.
I hate that I am out of candy corn.
I hate costumes.
I hate my kids going out begging for candy.
I hate handing out candy.
I hate that I decided to hand out only Halloween candy that I don’t like so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat any.
I hate that I bought all my favorites anyway.
I hate that the Twizzler/Milk Duds combo pack made the Milk Duds taste like a disgusting strawberry.
I hate that I ate those Milk Duds anyway.
I. Hate. Halloween.
If we could go straight from September to November, I’d be quite happy.
Last night, carving pumpkins (in an attempt to at least make my kids not hate October too much), my son discovered the box of Halloween decorations, things that people have given us over the years or things that I bought in hopes that I could overcome my hatred of Halloween (note: I can’t). He said, “If you’re not going to decorate for Halloween, I am!”
And he did. He put up a string of spider lights. He hung up a vampire and a ghost. The girl helped by putting up a skeleton. He found a few window decorations. He cut up a piece of cardboard to make a tombstone for one Mr. D. Ceased.
He finished and he looked at his handiwork. He said to me, “Don’t you want to say something to me?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like, ‘Thank you,'” he said.
“I should thank you? Thank you for what? Thank you for putting decorations for a holiday I despise? Thank you for mucking up my house with crap? Thank you for putting up all the crap that I’m going to have to clean up, take down myself, and put away next week? I should thank you?”
The boy looked at me and, wisely, turned to his sister. “Anything you want to say to me, Pie?”
To her credit, she said, “Thank you.”
Bah freakin’ humbug.
How Old Do You Think I Am?
October 14th, 2013 § Comments Off on How Old Do You Think I Am? § permalink
The boy: Why do you have a thing on your bulletin board that says, “God bless you. Stay strong. Kick it. Billy Blanks”?
Me: When I was at Amazon, I used to interview people for the Web site. Billy Blanks had a series of workout videos called Tae-Bo that I really liked. When I interviewed him, he signed that for me.
The boy: Oh. I didn’t know that.
Me: I used to interview a lot of people. You know, I interviewed Harrison Ford.
The boy: Cool.
Me: You know who that is, right?
The boy: Yeah. He’s the guy who invented cars, right?
I’m apparently very well preserved.
Where to Find Me
