Posted by Amy Byrnes

Dear Men of the World,

I learned an interesting thing about how it seems I am perceived by you fellas – as a divorced lady – when I hosted a party the other night.

Initially, I did consider hosting an all-lady event – a luncheon, say, or a gathering on a Thursday night. The kind of party that included low-carb appetizers, pretty pink drinks and plenty of conversations about hot flashes and insomnia.

We middle-aged ladies are sexy, I know.

But I decided to go with a Friday night cocktail party and, to me anyway, that seemed to signal an equal-opportunity affair. That seemed like the kind of party you didn’t need to have a vagina at which to have fun.

I even went so far as to include – on the little envelope that magically spun around when you opened the invite online – the names of both members of all the couples I knew.

There it was: Kathy & Rob. Susan & Michael.

But I guess because I am without a more manly half right now, the assumption was that boys were not invited because many women showed up stag. Husbands were left home to watch the kids or just stay out of their wives hair so they could get gorgeous and come over and have fun.

But I think it’s interesting that folks assumed I could only be friends with the female-halves of all those couples.

Let it be know then, for once and for all, that I like dudes. I really do. Look, I even gave birth to two of them and that’s helped me like you guys even more.

In some ways I am even like a dude: I am totally into zombies, vampires and all-things Game of Thrones. I am prone to indiscriminate cursing, am not much of a crier and love getting my neighbor Michael’s old issues of Rolling Stone.

See? If I only liked sports and was better at math, you’d think I was one of you.

Now, I’ll admit that when I was married, my husband was kind of the buffer between me and all the guys that we knew. We’d go out with all our other couple friends, and inevitably, the boys would sit at one end of the table and the girls at the other. So I never really spent much time talking to the men at our gatherings because I was so busy comparing pregnancy and potty training stories with the ladies.

But honestly, I don’t even think I was interested in talking to the guys anyway. I wasn’t interested in hearing what you boys had to say. Maybe I just assumed you were all alike – macho and self-serving – and I didn’t really need any more of that in my life.

But now that I am single, I feel like I see you boys in a whole new light. Who knew you had thoughts and feelings, just like me?

I’ve developed some great friendships with members of your species and have had terrific conversations about not only zombies and vampires but about books and current events. We even have talked about life and love, just the way I do with my girlfriends.

And one of the most satisfying things that has happened along the way is that a bunch of you have started reading my blog and tell me that you really like it.

Cool.

My neighbors had a party the night after mine and a couple of guys were there whose wives had come solo to my shindig. “I didn’t know I was invited!” the guys told me.

So boys, now you know. I like talking to you as much as I like talking to your wives. Because people can be smart and interesting and funny and it doesn’t matter what’s going on in their underpants.

Party on, dudes,

Amy

Dec

2013

Amy’s Week in Review: Dec. 16-23 (YIKES!)

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Here is the secret to staying calm around Christmas: plan a cocktail party five days before and invite 75 of your nearest and dearest. By the time it’s over — provided you have not had a heart attack at the prospect of all of those people standing in your usually messy kitchen — everything else will seem like a piece of cake.

So even though, as of this writing Sunday morning, I still have numerous gifts to wrap, eight dozen cookies to bake (that is literally the truth) and still no gift for a very important person on my list, I’m feeling pretty freaking calm.

Naturally, I’m concerned.

But I am trying to apply the same philosophy to Christmas that I used for Friday night’s party — courtesy of Jennifer the Therapist who throws so many valuable nuggets my way that I figure I might as well apply some of them since I am paying for them anyway — that things just don’t have to be perfect.

And that’s pretty new concept for me because in my previous life as a wife, I needed everything to look just so. And on the outside, it was all shiny and perfect.

But the inside, not so good.

So on Friday, as I stood amidst all the people who have lifted me up over the last five years, I didn’t focus on the coating of dust on the lights in my kitchen or the way one of the kids arranged crackers all crazy on a tray. I opened wine bottles, poured drinks, passed crab cakes and smiled a lot at seeing all of the people I really like standing in my kitchen at the same time.

In a few days, I’m hoping to apply the same strategy. On Christmas, some gifts will be hits while others will fall flat. Inevitably, one of the kids will feel shortchanged. But that’s okay, because I’ll know that I did the best that I could and that, really, it’s just one day.

And there’s always next year.

Take a break from your wrapping, baking and online shopping and check out some of the stuff I was thinking about last week when I wasn’t making lists or sitting in holiday traffic:

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100 Down: Celebrating a Year of Blogging

For many years while my children were going through our local elementary school, the highlight of the long winter months would be the celebration of the 100^th day of school.

To commemorate that special day, inevitably the kids would need to bring in 100 of an item to be counted or added or divided or something math-related. Over time, I got pretty good at hot gluing things like pennies and buttons onto old baseball caps or poster board without burning my fingers or dripping globs of the sticky stuff onto the kitchen table. (READ MORE … )

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Twas 6 Days Before Christmas: An Ode to Stress

Twas six days before Christmas and all through my house,

I’ve got so much shit to do I almost wished I had a spouse.

The stockings are stuffed in my mudroom without care

In hopes that come Christmas Eve they get pulled out of there. (READ MORE … )

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A handy way to keep up with me and all my worrying is by signing up to get new posts emailed straight to your inbox. You don’t even have to find me through Facebook. Legit.

Just fill your email address in the “Subscribe to blog via email” box, which is to the right of this post if you’re on your laptop or if you scroll way to the bottom if you’re reading this on your phone. Just keep scrolling, it’s there. Fill in your email address and then go to your inbox where an email will be waiting that you need to open to confirm your subscription.

Dec

2013

Twas 6 Days Before Christmas: An Ode to Stress

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Twas six days before Christmas and all through my house,

I’ve got so much shit to do I almost wished I had a spouse.

The stockings are stuffed in my mudroom without care

In hopes that come Christmas Eve they get pulled out of there.

The children will be sleeping until noon in their beds

While visions of PS4, iPhones and spring break trips dance in their heads.

And Mama in her scrunchie, with piles of lists on her lap,

Is hiding in bed, sipping a nightcap.

And so, my friends, that’s all the cleverness I can muster because I’ve got to get to the outlets, yo, for some last-minute gifts. And the grocery store. The liquor store. The post office. Dry cleaner.

Oh, and work. I’ve got that job.

Any attempt to blog this week has been sidelined by the Internet, ironically. I’ll quickly pop over to Firefox to, in theory, check my emails and all of a sudden I’m ordering something on Amazon and admiring folks Christmas trees and cats on Facebook.

But whilst trolling Facebook, I did come across the following ad from Apple and, as the mother of a reformed teen age boy who has been known to have his nose in his smartphone, it just resonated with me.

It’s not easy being a teenager, or the mom of a teenager, and I think we probably have no idea what those darling creatures are thinking most of the time. And while none of my kids have ever produced such a clever and moving video, they have endured many a family gathering over the years and sometimes even smiled.

Get out your tissues and some wrapping paper while you’re at it so at least you’re doing something about getting ready for next week while surfing the web.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImlmVqH_5HM

Dec

2013

100 Down: Celebrating a Year of Blogging

Posted by Amy Byrnes

My trusty notebook is filled with lots of crazy quotes my kids say and ideas for future blog posts. In other words, it’s a gold mine of content.

For many years while my children were going through our local elementary school, the highlight of the long winter months would be the celebration of the 100^th day of school.

So when I noticed last week that I was nearing the 100^th post on my blog, I really wanted to break out the gun and start gluing stuff to celebrate.

When the blog was just something I talked about (rather than did anything about), I worried that I would run out of things to write about. But luckily, kids and ex-husbands make for excellent blog fodder. They’re an endless source of content.

And while I still struggle with how much is too much information to share with the general public, here I am at Post #100 with a notebook full of ideas for future posts and life constantly providing other items of interest to blog about.

So instead of gluing things together – and really, we probably have enough boxes full of things our kids have stuck together – I thought I’d reshare the top 10 most viewed posts of 2013, as this also coincides with the almost one-year anniversary of the blog’s launch.

I have to say, it’s really exciting to have created something from scratch and watched it grow. A blog is like a child you have total control over. I can tell it what to say, not to talk with its mouth full and to go to bed at bedtime and, damn, the blog always does what I say.

But most importantly, blogging about my life has given me great comfort learning that I am not alone. We all are trying our best — balancing the good with the bad — and want to know that our voice has been heard.

I love hearing from all of you and am thankful for your support. Thank you for listening to me.

Looking forward to the next 100.

10. The College Good-Bye

There’s a picture pinned to the bulletin board in my kitchen, half hidden by silly greeting cards and bumper stickers that I fancy, which is our iconic family back-to-school photo. In it, my oldest two children stand on the front step of our old house, a basket of late-summer impatiens drooping behind them, on the occasion of the eldest’s first day of preschool, just shy of his fourth birthday. (READ MORE … )

9. This is How I Miss Him

In the almost four years since my ex-husband moved out, there have been a few times that I really wished the guy was still around. Like when it snows. Say what you will, but that man could shovel like a motherfucker. (READ MORE … )

8. Divorce 101

I’ve always been ahead of the curve when it comes to major life events.

I was in a huge rush to get married and had the ring on my finger by the time I was 23 and two years later, I was pregnant with my first child. I am familiar with being the one to provide all the firsts as the oldest sibling in my family and oldest grandchild on both sides of my family. But I also stood alone in my close circle of girlfriends in thinking that getting hitched and knocked up so young were especially good ideas, so became the first among us to sail into those unchartered – and as it turned out – stormy waters. (READ MORE … )

7. Young Amy: A Cautionary Tale

Over the course of the, like, bazillion hours my college girlfriends and I sat around talking during a girls’ weekend earlier this month, the topic of how much you should let your children know about your past antics came up. (READ MORE … )

6. Mismatch.com

I went on a date last night with an amazing guy.

Really, we were totally on the same page and I thoroughly enjoyed his company. I liked chatting with him and watching how he talked with his hands. And he was really cute, too, with beautiful blue eyes. (READ MORE … )

5. On Being Catholic: The Mystery of Faith

My 10-year-old son had a play date after school the other day and when the friend’s mom came to pick him up, she asked if we were in a rush to get my guy to CCD.

“A lot of kids seem to go on Tuesdays,” she said.

“Um, we’re taking a break from being Catholic right now,” I told her, and she laughed at my joke, but I still feel really guilty about the whole thing.

It must be the Catholic in me. (READ MORE … )

4. Old School (Or That Time I Drank Jungle Juice)

I drank something called jungle juice this weekend and as I lifted the Solo cup brimming with the icy yellow liquid to my mouth, I realized that I needed to retract a statement I made recently – that you couldn’t go home again – because dudes, sometimes it’s like you never left.

Let me explain. (READ MORE … )

3. November is the Cruelest Month for Moms

Anyone who agrees with T.S. Eliot’s assessment that “April is the cruelest month” has obviously never spent time trying to be a mom in New Jersey during November.

This week alone, my fifth grader has three days off. Three days. I didn’t even know about one of them until this weekend. (READ MORE … )

2. The Girls

Between us, we have 19 kids, 9 weddings, 3 ex-husbands, 2 boyfriends, over 25 years of memories and a lot of opinions.

Since we met as students at the University of Delaware in the mid-80s, our gang of 8 friends has come a long way from our days of sitting around dorm rooms and sorority dens in oversized Forenza sweaters and big Jersey hairdos, telling each other what to do. (READ MORE … )

1. Cheez-Its: A Love Story

It wasn’t until my ex-husband moved out more than four years ago that my late night nibbling began.

Until then, we’d finish dinner and maybe I’d have a bowl of ice cream with the kids (I was younger then and could get away with those kinds of things) and we would have eating wrapped up by 6:30 most nights. (READ MORE … )

Dec

2013

Amy’s Week in Review: Dec. 9-15

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Last year’s finished product. Tasteful, jewel-toned lights included.

Does anyone hate Christmas tree lights as much as I hate Christmas tree lights?

They are the bane of my existence. Even when I was married, they were my problem but more because I had a lot of opinions about them than anything else. I don’t know why I have to be so bossy about things.

They are torturous to get on – wrapping them up and down branches and around and around the tree – and highly unpredictable. You never know when half a strand will just poop out the next day.

I made the sad discovery yesterday, after of hours of driving around and loading up at big box stores for gifts and groceries before a snowstorm hit, that the six strands waiting to be strung on the tree that afternoon had decided they weren’t up to the task this year. I even went down the line of unlit bulbs on one strand trying to replace each bulb with a working bulb to see if that would improve the situation.

Zip.

I got into my car during the height of Saturday’s snowstorm and drove north along the main highway around here in search of replacement lights.

However, I am particular. It can’t be any old type of lights. They need to be colored lights for my tree. That is my tradition.

And it can’t be these gross new LED lights with super-bright colors like purple. I can’t have purple on my tree.

My old, trusty lights I used for years were jewel-toned and had a globe-shaped bulb. They were really just lovely, glowing their tasteful reds and greens on my tree.

So I drove about 20 minutes north to a Kmart that said it had the type I wanted in stock but when I got there, there was like, a sad box of colored icicle lights left of the shelf.

And that was it.

“Oh, the website is usually a day or two behind what we have in stock,” said the very nice stockboy whom I barked at when I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

It’s the Internet, for fuck’s sake. Get it together, Kmart.

I found the same solitary box of random lights on the shelves of the nearby Lowes and Target and when I wondered aloud if someone was eating goddamn Christmas tree lights or something, one women in a similar dilemma next to me said, “A lot of people around here lost all their stuff during the hurricane.”

Curses to you, Sandy.

So, it’s 7:30 a.m. and I’m preparing to head south this time in search of lights.

And I’m not as picky as I was a little more than 12 hours ago. Now LCD lights of any sort are starting to look pretty good.

While I’m out foraging for decorations, here are a couple of tidbits I was also mulling over last week.

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Why My Son Says, ‘Everything is Ruined’

The Elf didn’t start out as a thorn in my side.

At first, he actually helped keep my then-preschooler – and the youngest of my four children – in line.

If my son put up a fuss about going to bed at the appointed hour or carried on in Target about not getting a toy he totally wanted (“PLLLLLLLEASE, MOM.”), I’d have to pull the old Elf card out of my back pocket.

“I’d hate for Alex the Elf to have to tell Santa about this,” I’d say with a smile, looking at him lying on the floor of the toy aisle, and then usually, the tantrum would cease as quickly as it began. (READ MORE … )

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One Mom Tries to Make Sense of Guns After Newtown Shooting

I have always enjoyed group activities with large groups of women.

Over the years, I’ve learned to knit, trained for triathlons, talked about a lot of books and drank plenty of wine in the company of women.

And while I’m more than comfortable going cross country skiing or traveling to a desert spa with a group of girls, I was surprised to find myself early one Saturday morning last month at a gun range with eight other women. (READ MORE … )

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And finally, I know you’re all racking your brains, trying to come up with the perfect gift for me. Let me help you out.

The greatest thing you could give me is the gift of sharing my blog posts on Facebook with all of your friends. I’d like to become the Clairol Herbal Essence of bloggers, so if you could tell two friends about a post you like, and maybe they end up telling two friends, we can get the whole “and so on” thing going.

Plus, it’s free and doesn’t need to be wrapped, which is almost like a gift right back to you.

Dec

2013

One Mom Tries to Make Sense of Guns After Newtown Shooting

Posted by Amy Byrnes

I have always enjoyed group activities with large groups of women.

Over the years, I’ve learned to knit, trained for triathlons, talked about a lot of books and drank plenty of wine in the company of women.

“Shooting is like the new bowling,” reported The Wall Street Journal earlier this week and apparently, I am right on trend.

Shooting alleys are the latest destination for a ladies’ night out, according to the article, with women becoming one of the largest growing segments of gun buyers.

I can’t tell you how confusing this is to me.

I don’t like guns. In fact, I believe in my heart that the world would be a much better place if firearms were left in the hands of trained professionals.

I was driving in my car on the morning of Dec. 14 last year when I first heard about the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. I listened in shock as reporters described the chaotic scene as emergency workers and frantic parents descended on the school.

I quickly made my way home and sat on a stool in my kitchen and spent the rest of the day watching the tragedy unfold on CNN. Slowly, pieces of the terrible puzzle came together: the small elementary school, quiet New England town, faces of the tiny victims and the teachers and administrators who so bravely tried to protect their young students.

Watching the hours of non-stop media coverage – the aerial view of the scene with the lines of children being rushed away from the school and the armed guards walking past colorful playground equipment – I was struck by how familiar so much of it looked.

It’s the stuff my days were made of. School age children. Backpacks. Jungle gyms. Bike racks. Drop off and pick up.

Maybe that’s why I cried so much that day. I could feel deep in my bones the horror that tore through that community on a quiet December morning a few weeks before Christmas.

I live in a quiet town, with a small elementary school that my four children attended filled with artwork lining the hallways and loving teachers in the classrooms. Like Sandy Hook, our school is locked up tight and visitors need to be buzzed in by the main office and students and staff often performed lockdown drills.

But none of that mattered in Newtown. All of those safety measures would not have mattered at any school that day.

And this brings me back to the confused part: Why are we not trying to curtail the number of guns circulating in this country or at the very least, passing legislation to make it tougher to obtain a weapon in the first place?

I spent a week last summer sailing with people from all over the world – Canadians, Europeans, Australians – who wondered the same things about our country. They expressed dismay over American’s unwillingness to let go of their right to bear arms unlike many of their own countries that have enacted stricter gun laws following mass shootings.

According to a report in The New York Times, we have more guns per capita than any other country, with some 300 million firearms in circulation. That’s nearly one for every adult.

And we have the murder rate to show for it; ours is roughly 15 times that of other wealthy countries.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself nearly a year after all those children and teachers were killed in Newtown, holding a Glock pistol and feeling the weapon recoil as I fired at a target 20 feet away.

I had wanted to understand the fiercely-protected Second Ammendment and the rights it guaranteed me. I wanted to know what the fuss was all about.

The women I went with were part of a newly-formed group looking to try new experiences and when one of the women suggested a trip to the gun range as a possible activity, I immediately said, “I’m in.”

And it was a really fun day.

We all joked about the pink revolvers for sale in the glass display case and that we would all be prepared in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

We were required to take an exhaustive two-hour class prior to the actual shooting. Our instructor Bob – wearing a Smith & Wesson t-shirt and a belt around his waist supporting a holster, his cellphone and a large ring of keys – went over everything from home invasion to cleaning a gun barrel. (I would like to add a side note that it is not mandatory for gun buyers here in New Jersey to take any type of safety or how-to class prior to purchase.)

You could tell Bob, who was maybe a little younger than my dad, got a kick out of us but he also took gun safety – and the right to bear arms – very, very seriously and I admired that.

He patiently answered questions about permits and registration and passed around his own hand guns — a .22, .45, Glock and revolver — so the group could hold them and feel their heft. We were able to observe the parts of the weapons close up: the muzzle, the hammer and the barrel. We could look into the bullet chambers and feel the free play of the trigger.

When Bob had finally imparted all he deemed necessary for us to shoot a firearm, we headed off to the adjoining range and donned the mandatory ear and eye protection before entering through a metal door plastered with warning signs.

It’s a large and loud room with 10 stalls divided by thin partitions, various targets pinned to cardboard sheets that automatically move forward and back and empty casings pooling on the floor around the feet of the shooters that one of the men patrolling the range would occasionally come by with a big broom to sweep out of the way.

And sure enough, we weren’t the only women there shooting that day. But while the women in my group were all in the late-40s-to-early-50s range, most of the other women looked to be more in their 20s and accompanied by boyfriends or husbands. And while our group was sensibly dressed in long sleeves and sneakers, the other women looked like they could be spending their day shopping at the mall. One of the girls wore skinny jeans with ballet flats in an animal print, a thin, gold chain wrapped around her ankle.

We took turns shooting with Bob and I watched several members of my group go before I took my place before a counter upon which sat a .22 caliber handgun, a box of bullets and a magazine. Bob instructed me to fill the magazine with the small bullets much the way you would load Pez candy into, say, a Bart Simpson dispenser.

And while it was super-satisfying being able to slam the magazine into the handle when I was done, Angelina Jolie-style, the actual firing of the weapon was nerve wracking. There’s a lot to keep straight – between the positioning of your hands and lining up your sights on the intended target, and I didn’t really set any records with my shooting. Bob stood alongside me the whole time, adjusting my stance and instructing me to lift the gun higher and not to put my finger on the trigger until I was told to do so.

After each shot, he’d say, “Good girl.”

As the day progressed, the group was very busy taking pictures of each other and posting our badass selves all over social media. We all went out to lunch afterwards and did a round of Fireball shots to celebrate our experience.

“Are you having a mid-life crisis?” my 19-year-old daughter posted on Facebook when she saw the picture of me shooting a gun.

I sent a picture of myself shooting the .22 to a friend of mine who is a big gun advocate and happened to be away hunting for the weekend.

“Nice!” he texted back. “Did you love it?”

But I didn’t respond because I didn’t know what to say. As much as I really enjoyed the experience of shooting a gun, I still don’t get it. It wasn’t like when I tried kayaking a couple of summers ago and now dream about owning a kayak.

I don’t think I’ll ever buy myself a gun.

I thought shooting at a target was kind of boring after a while and couldn’t wait to get out of the gun range and go get something to eat. Maybe shooting at a picture of a zombie would have been more fun.

And I still don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know what would have prevented the rampage at the Sandy Hook School last December. And I still cry when I think about all of those lives that were lost.

But I have to imagine that more guns won’t solve anything.

Dec

2013

Why My Son Says, ‘Everything is Ruined’

Posted by Amy Byrnes

The Elf didn’t start out as a thorn in my side.

At first, he actually helped keep my then-preschooler – and the youngest of my four children – in line.

Problem solved.

I am well past negotiating with children. Just do what I say, please. And don’t make me count to 3 (don’t ask but for some reason, when I start counting, my kids start listening).

I liked that I could bring Alex the Elf in as the bad cop around here when we had a situation. Life is so much better when you don’t always have to be the heavy.

Don’t want to eat your vegetables? I’m really sorry to hear that, but I think the Elf hiding over there on top of the kitchen light is going to have to report that infraction.

Trying to pull one over on your mom by just wetting your hair a bit in the sink instead of taking a shower with actual soap and shampoo? Dude, I know, cleanliness can be so annoying and eats into valuable YouTube time. But Santa only brings presents to clean little boys and Alex is sitting in the pantry, keeping track.

But as the years passed, the onus of keeping up the charade of the Elf became like a part-time job for someone who has a hard enough time remembering when it’s time to start cooking dinner or move the laundry along.

I am easily distracted and have terrible short-term memory skills.

By last year, my son would come bounding out of bed during the month of December and immediately start rooting around the house, looking for the Elf. More likely than not, the dude was still in the same spot it had been in the day before. Eventually, my 15-year-old had to intervene and started hiding the Elf each night after her little brother went to bed.

She got kind of into it, as many people seem to do and document with some regularity on Facebook. Alex the Elf would be perched atop the cow milk pitcher in our cabinet surrounded by stacks of plates and bowls or sitting on top of our oven hood.

Apparently, Alex sometimes needed some disciplining of his own, as evidenced by this scene:

And then came the inevitable: one day this summer my son opened a drawer of the pine hutch that sits in our family room, a piece of furniture generally of no interest to someone his age. The bottom holds all my china, silver and serving platters we pull out for Thanksgiving. The drawers are filled with placemats and assorted candlesticks. None of these are of interest to a 10-year-old boy.

But for some reason, he pulled a drawer open one day in June and found, to his dismay, the folded up body of Alex within.

“I knew it!” my son shouted, glaring at me with contempt.

As if I had come up with the evil Elf charade and wasn’t just a cog in an elaborate wheel of make-believe.

Truth be told, Alex was still hanging around the house Christmas morning last year and I grabbed him and stuffed him in the drawer before my little guy noticed the Elf was still in New Jersey and not back home in the North Pole chilling until his return to our house the following December.

I asked my son recently why he was so upset by the discovery of Alex in the drawer.

“It just ruined everything,” he told me.

“Did you want to believe?” I asked him gently, seeing his eyes fill with tears.

“I really did,” he said. “But now all I can do is pretend.

“It’s the best I can do, Mom,” he added.

Welcome to the club.

Dec

2013

Amy’s Week in Review: Dec. 2-8

Posted by Amy Byrnes

The holidays are off and running around here.

Last week, I was able to cross a bunch of big holiday to-do items off my list, like ordering Christmas cards, figuring out what I was going to bake for the annual cookie exchange (chocolate pretzel cookies) and spending so much money on Cyber Monday that Wells Fargo’s fraud division shut down my VISA card until they could confirm it was me making all those purchases and not some half-drunk identity thief in Caracas.

But now that the kids go to their dad’s more regularly every-other-weekend, it kind of puts a pause on the holiday spirit. It’s just no fun decorating the house or doing any other Christmas-y activity without them around to complain about it.

Instead, I spent most of Saturday organizing the crawl space in our basement that was a hodgepodge of Rubbermaid containers and black garbage bags full of all the Christmas paraphenalia I’ve collected over the last 20-odd years. Usually, there’s some order to all the luggage, ski helmets and old sports gear that the holiday stuff shares the cramped space with, but after my older children so kindly disassembled and stashed our holiday decorations last year (unprompted!), the storage area was a little haphazard, to say the least.

Beggars can’t be choosers. I’d rather deal with a disorganized crawl space than taking down the Christmas tree any day of the week.

I hauled out the giant boxes filled with Pottery Barn mercury glass trees, the red velvet skirt that goes under our tree each year and the banners my oldest child made in nursery school some 15 years ago that used his tiny hand print to make angels and reindeer and reminds me of Christmases long ago.

All the boxes and bags are now lined up at the bottom of the basement stairs, waiting for next weekend when the kids will be home and we can stuff all the holiday joy and kvetching into one weekend.

After all the physical labor, I went and got a sparkly manicure and pedicure and all was right with the world.

If you’ve already ordered your cards and trimmed your tree and lit all of the bushes in front of your house and are looking for something to do this Sunday, perhaps you’d like to spend some time catching up on what I haven’t been doing. You’ll feel good about yourself.

Swear.

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Let the Holidays Begin! Sigh.

Over the course of this past weekend, I had to yell at not one but two of my neighbors – both grown men – for causing me undue stress and anxiety.

There they were, with the Thanksgiving dinner a not-so-distant-memory, wrapping lights around anything not moving in front of their houses. There were wreaths and swags and twinkling shrubbery while over at my ranch there’s just a lone pumpkin leftover from Halloween sitting on the front step.

Fuck. (READ MORE … )

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Holiday Cards 101: How to Market Your Family

It started the day after Thanksgiving this year, the annual marketing campaign going on in homes across the country that gives new meaning to the term Black Friday.

Inside my mailbox on that day, along with 20 pounds of Pottery Barn catalogs and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, sat the first holiday card of the season.

Ho ho ho. (READ MORE … )

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Offensive Driving

You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

You’d think that my arms wouldn’t fly up to shield my head reflexively as we hurtled past parked cars or stop signs, preparing for imminent impact.

By now you’d think that I’d gotten used to how angry they become when I shout things from the passenger seat like, “Move away from the curb!” or “Slow down for the turn ahead!”

It hurts their feelings. (READ MORE … )

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And finally, I know you’re all racking your brains, trying to come up with the perfect gift for me. Let me help you out.

Plus, it’s free and doesn’t need to be wrapped, which is almost like a gift right back to you.

Dec

2013

Offensive Driving

Posted by Amy Byrnes

You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

You’d think that by now my arms wouldn’t fly up to shield my head reflexively as we hurtle past parked cars and stop signs, preparing for imminent impact.

By now you’d think that I’d gotten used to how angry they become when I shout things from the passenger seat like, “Move away from the curb!” or “Slow down for the turn ahead!”

It hurts their feelings.

Listen, I’m just trying to get through this in one piece and hurt feelings are the least of my concern.

I am in the midst of surviving my third child learning how to drive and I don’t know if my heart, or my pocketbook, will be able to handle doing this a fourth and final time when my youngest gets ready to take the wheel in a few years.

I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on a professional driving teacher who took my daughter out for the mandatory practice hours required to get her driver’s permit before she turned 16. Now we just need to make it her to her 17^th birthday which, if her last turn at the wheel is any indication, is not looking so good.

The kids and I had been trying to squeeze in a date to see “Catching Fire” over Thanksgiving break before my oldest daughter headed back to college, and we decided the only time we could fit it in was that Saturday night.

As we piled into the car for the 7:00 show, I decided that the driver-in-training needed some nighttime experience and insisted that she take the wheel.

Damn you, hindsight.

So, in New Jersey at the end of November, the streets are lined with large piles of leaves. For all you know, there could be a large crate of glass bottles, boxes full of nails or at the very least a super-sharp set of kitchen knives lurking under all that foliage.

Which it seems there was, because after my daughter plowed her way through four or five large piles of leaves – as she instinctively shied away from the middle of the road and hugged the curb – we heard a thumping beneath the car.

“Do you hear that sound?” yelled my older daughter from the back seat.

I quickly turned down the deafening music from my daughter’s iPhone filling the car with Daft Punk and heard the unmistakable cuh-cunk of a flat tire.

Okay, this is where I kind of lose my cool and get a bit hysterical. Fearing the dreaded bent tire rim, I started screaming for her to pull over. What I was trying to say was, “Take the next right,” but what was coming out instead was “Pull over. Wait! No! There’s a … stop! No. Go! Turn! Up Ahead!” so that the driver didn’t know what the fuck I wanted her to do and became equally, if not more, hysterical.

Katniss was off the table for the evening as we waited in the dark for the AAA tow truck to arrive to swap out the damaged tire for a spare. By the time we headed home, the bad driver already had a Plan B in place for her night and needed a ride to the high school football game.

This time I drove.

When I brought the car into the mechanic a few days later to see if the tire could be saved, I learned the gash was so big, I would need to purchase a whole new tire instead.

Here’s that equation: New Tire + SUV = Mucho Dinero.

It was just another in a long line of expenses my children have racked up since they started to drive.

We’ve had numerous parking lot fender-benders, so many in fact that I started to wonder what the fuck was wrong with my kids. Did we need to, like, wrap our car in rubber or something for the good of other drivers? The kids were like pinballs, knocking and banging our car off everything in sight.

In the last four years, I’ve had the police arrive at my door to inform me a car registered in my name had been involved in a hit-and-run in the parking lot of a local pizza joint.

I’ve had to hunt down a very nice older woman and fellow member of our beach club on a hot day in August to inform her that her shiny BMW SUV had been sideswiped by one of my children.

And one time an angry Cadillac owner called to tell me one of my kids had backed into his car while trying to pull out of a parallel parking spot. Please let the record reflect that my car comes equipped with a rear view camera that beeps if you get too close to the object behind it.

My insurance company probably has an employee lunchroom at its headquarters somewhere in the Midwest named in honor of my children and their driving gaffes.

I thought the answer to the first round of bad driving was a lack of experience and figured I’d remedy that this time by making the 16-year-old drive all the time.

But now I’m not so sure.

The good news is by the time my fourth child needs to learn how to drive, he’ll probably employ the same method he used to learn to tie his shoes and ride a bike: He’ll teach himself.

It cuts down on shouting and then everyone is happy.

Dec

2013

Holiday Cards 101: How to Market Your Family

Posted by Amy Byrnes

Christmas card 2002. Caption read, “Look what Santa left under our tree.”

It started the day after Thanksgiving this year, the annual marketing campaign going on in homes across the country that gives new meaning to the term Black Friday.

Inside my mailbox on that day, along with 20 pounds of Pottery Barn catalogs and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, sat the first holiday card of the season.

Ho ho ho.

I think the special delivery vexed me for two reasons. First, it was a reminder that I needed to get my act together to accomplish a great many things in the ensuing weeks (weeks!) before Christmas, which included dealing with all the Christmas tchotchkes crammed into about a dozen boxes in my basement and the stupid Elf on a Shelf.

Secondly, that card signaled that I needed to plan how I would be marketing my own family this holiday season because that, let’s be honest, is what it’s all about.

Branding.

I want you, along with my college roommate and cousin in Connecticut, to see just how attractive, smart, accomplished and well-traveled we are, via a 5 X 7 card.

It’s like the paper-version of Facebook.

But don’t get me wrong: I drank the Christmas card Kool-Aid years ago and have spent a lot of time, money and patience creating the annual aren’t-we-something campaign. I am the ultimate Mad Mom.

Parents nowadays have no idea what it was like producing a card back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and before digital cameras were de rigeur. When I, and every mom within a 10-mile radius, had to bring my roll of film (actual film) to the CVS to be developed and wait a few days in hopes that at least one of the 24 shots would be a winner. I prayed for that one frame where all eyes would be open, looking straight at the camera and not rolled up in small heads in disgust.

Then I had to get 100 copies made of that one tolerable photo and then stuff said photos into cards, that needed to be signed and maybe a bow needed to be tied, and then stuffed into envelopes, licked and addressed, stamped and mailed.

I’m not saying you young moms have it easy, but seriously, you have it so freaking easy.

Nowadays, you just scroll through a photo gallery and upload a variety of images to an adorable card that’s personalized and ready to be mailed when the shipment arrives on your doorstep. It’s fucking magic.

I thought I could make a clean break from sending cards out when my husband moved out in December 2008. It was such a terrible time and I figured I’d have to be some kind of marketing genius to generate a card that said, “Look how happy we are.”

So I just kind of knocked it off my mental check-list of holiday tasks for that year until one of the kids asked about it.

“I’m thinking we’re not gonna send one this year,” I told my oldest daughter.

“Wait, what? You’re not doing a card?” she asked. “It’s our tradition.”

The other kids sitting in the kitchen nodded in agreement and I realized that the stupid card had become about more than how others see our family. It had become about how we see ourselves, too.

And sending out a card that year signaled to the kids that life would still go on, even after their dad moved out. There would still be cards, wrapping paper and Christmas for them.

Just like everyone else.

I decided to bang my cards out earlier than usual this year and take advantage of all the Cyber Monday sales this week. I checked a couple of sites for the best deals and instructed the older kids to send me photos of themselves to use since we didn’t have any great shots of all of us together this year.

I struggled, as I have these last few years, with how to personalize the card since the kids and I have different last names. Hyphenating the two seemed weird and just using the kids’ name, the one I had used for 20 years, didn’t seem right either.

So I finally settled on sending love to all our friends and family this Christmas from “4 Walsacks and a Byrnes.” Awkward, perhaps, but it just felt more right than the other options. I included all of our names and then finished it off with “& The Cat,” because she might look and act like a raccoon, but that critter is a strange part of our family now, too.

I think the end-result, while far from perfect, says, “We’re doing okay.”

I walked across the street to steal a glass of wine from my girlfriend and celebrate knocking such a big item off my holiday to-do list, and bragged to her about my accomplishment.

“Oh, do you want to see mine?” she asked, turning around to pull a festive card covered with great pictures from her family’s trip last summer to the Grand Canyon out of a little brown box.

“You already fucking HAVE your cards?” I said, and we both started to laugh. “I am totally writing about this.”

And now I have.

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Offensive Driving

Holiday Cards 101: How to Market Your Family