Putting the Sexy Back in Minivans

800px-08_Chrysler_Town_&_Country_TouringYou might have read here that I am on a quest to bring the minivan back.

I’ve been rocking my Town & Country rental all week.

Since I started driving my shiny white beauty following a little run-in with a tractor-trailer, I’ve started thinking a lot about – given all the vehicle’s bells and whistles, not to mention roominess – why so many of us parents insist on driving around the suburbs in big rigs.

It’s got me wondering why we need to define ourselves by the vehicles that we drive and resist being labeled by who and what we really are – moms and dads who spend a fair amount of time hauling kids to school and soccer and the mall.

It’s fascinating that we need to pretend that we are something that we’re not – like a cowboy, maybe, or a contractor— because that’s who should be driving vehicles with a two-ton tow capacity and four-wheel drive.

Why is the SUV cooler, presumably, than the minivan? And why does it matter?

For years I hauled my guys around in a giant Chevy Suburban and while I really loved it and could parallel park that thing like it was a VW Bug, it was a pain in the ass. It ate gas, you had to hoist baby seats up and in because it was so high off the ground, and the extent of any parental conveniences was maybe five cupholders.  My first Suburban even had the back door that swung open off to the side, not even straight up so you had to make sure the coast was clear before you released the hounds, so to speak. 

Minivans are just chock-full-of conveniences for parents, with magic sliding doors and a deep well in the way back to hold $200 worth of groceries and prevent anything from falling out when the door is opened. And if yours is full of a few months’ worth of The New York Times neatly bundled, as is mine, you can STILL load all your groceries on top, as I did yesterday.

I think if Cadillac or Audi made a van, they’d fly out the door.

Over the years, I’ve logged a fair amount of time sitting on my therapist’s couch and talking about why I worried about what others thought of me. Why I needed to feel validated by how I thought things looked to the outside world. It was how I measured my self-worth.

It wasn’t until I started worrying about what was going on underneath the shiny exterior that things started to change.

And it lets me sit next to the other mom driving a Land Rover in the next lane, presumably on her way to a safari, at a red light and not feel weirdly less. 

I’ve become much more concerned about what I think of me rather than what others think of me and while it’s not totally perfect – I still struggle with my vanity and ego – it’s a work in progress.

I was watching Kelly and Michael this week (I haven’t even mentioned how OBSESSED I am with Kelly Ripa) and heard them talking about a recent survey about what ladies consider the sexiest cars for men to drive and the pickup truck was at the top of the list.

Michael joked that the minivan was probably the least sexy vehicle for a dude to drive.

“I don’t know,” said Kelly, wearing some adorable outfit. “I see those guys driving around a whole bunch of kids and think that they’re obviously sexy to somebody.”

When I was younger, it was the glitter of the outer shell that really caught my attention. “OOOOh, shiny,” I’d think, mesmerized by all the flash.

But now I know better. 

Now, I know you need to pop open the hood and  make sure everything is running smoothly underneath. I know now that I like things that make my life easier rather than putting up with shortcomings because of how something looks.

I’d rather have solid and dependable — with good highway mpg — than zero to 60 in a heartbeat.

Because sexy is fun but reliability and practicality are better suited for the long haul.

 

Am I Stupid?

IMG_3742It happened again this week. For maybe the fifth time in his life, I left my youngest child some place he wasn’t supposed to be.

And he’s getting tired of it and frankly, I can’t say I really blame the kid.

Someone should take away my mom license.

I dropped him off yesterday afternoon at the elementary school in town about a mile and a half away from our house for what I thought was a 4:00 basketball practice.

I even had a nagging feeling while doing so — because practices are usually on Wednesdays — but I checked my iPhone and, yup, I was in the right place at the right time, according to my calendar.

I waited as he slowly made the walk from my car to the gym door, a sulky trip since he was mad at me because in his mind, I was somehow the reason kids had homework. Yes, that’s right: I’m the culprit. He’s resisting doing his homework lately, which is really out of character, but he’s busy blaming me, his teacher and really just THE MAN for the nightly 30 minutes of work that takes him away from looking at one screen or another or bouncing a Nerf basketball off his bedroom wall.

I returned home to my laptop, which I spent so much time looking at while working for my former employer that now that I’m out of work, find myself automatically opening up and wondering what to do with myself.

About a half hour later, the doorbell rang and I opened the door to find my 11-year-old standing there on the front step, his big blue eyes brimming with tears.

“Did I mess up the time?” I asked, and he burst past me and stomped up the stairs to his room.

By the time I got him to unlock the door for me, I found him sitting on his bed rubbing his legs, which were bright pink from making the long walk home in his basketball shorts with nothing more than a sweatshirt on top.

Did I mention it was about 20 degrees in my part of New Jersey yesterday afternoon?

I held out some cozy sweatpants to cover his freezing legs and brought him downstairs to the den to lie down on the couch in front of the fire and tucked his favorite blanket around him and left him alone.

After he had some time to pretend to fall asleep, I came in with a big mug of hot chocolate with extra marshmallows and a big splash of half and half, just the way he likes it.

“How about you do your homework in here tonight by the fire?” I suggested, and he took a sip of his cocoa and nodded his head.

His body and his mood thawed and eventually, he was happily showing me how good he was solving the evening’s math problems.

I apologized for the hundredth time as he was getting ready for bed later that night.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said, but really, it’s not. If his dad kept leaving him the wrong place, I’d be all like, “What’s his problem?”

What the hell is my problem?

So far, I’ve left him alone in the neighbor’s basement when he was about four while we all went out to deliver Thanksgiving dinners (he told me he jumped on their trampoline to keep busy until we got back), and at the wrong baseball practice that left him sitting on the curb until I returned some 90 minutes later. I even bought him a cell phone last year to avoid these mixups.

I’ve also left his older sister off the wrong time for a basketball game and left my oldest son, who was probably around 5 at the time, playing outside on the swing set in the backyard while I drove his two younger sisters to a babysitter for the day.

I remember looking into the back of the minivan through my rearview mirror about 10 minutes into the trip and not seeing his head, told him to sit up in his seat.

“He’s not here,” piped up one of the sisters.

Really, you didn’t think this was important information to share with me?

And I don’t know what to cite as the cause. Certainly, it can’t be because I have too many kids (since half are away at school right now). And it’s certainly not because I’m a working mom (because I am currently unemployed).

It’s not even because I was busy making dinner (since the kids went to their dad’s last night for that).

Methinks perhaps I’m stupid.

Which was confirmed earlier today when I loaded about three months worth of New York Times daily papers, all bundled and tied, into the back of my minivan to drop off at town recycling center on my way to the grocery store first thing this morning.

They’d been tied up and sitting on my mudroom floor for about a week and I just couldn’t look at them one more second.

I had noticed on our town website that there would be no recycling pickup on my usual day this week – Wednesday – because of Lincoln’s Birthday (I mean, what?) and the center would be closed as well.

But I forgot today was Wednesday. I thought it was Tuesday. I’m all mixed up in the head.

So I went not once but twice to the recycling center this morning, sitting in my minivan and staring at the locked gate blocking the entrance while mentally composing the snippy phone call I was going to make to borough hall when I returned home.

And then I realized that it was Wednesday.

I drove home and saw my neighbor Susan had put a bunch of cardboard boxes out for recycling pick up and instead of texting her that there was no pick up today, I went and dragged a giant box out of my garage and added it to her pile.

So, what can I chalk this all up to? Super-early dementia? Dumb-dumbiness? I am alarmed.

However, since I was so encouraged to learn the other day that I wasn’t the only one hoarding baby teeth, I’m hoping maybe you guys can share some of your own not-so-stellar-moments in scheduling. Or parenting, I suppose.

I’d like to feel like less of a dope.

 

 

Snow Kidding

photo(102)My cell phone, positioned on the nightstand next to my bed and about three inches from my head, rang at 4:40 this morning and because I have this deep-seeded aversion to answering any calls coming in from 1-800 numbers, I let it go to voicemail.

I figured it was The Gap calling to tell me my payment this month is like, three days late. I could understand if I was three months delinquent in paying something. By all means, give me a heads up and maybe a little attitude. But The Gap gets snippy when you forget to pay within the allotted pay cycle and starts suspending your card and calling to strong-arm you and shit.

Don’t they know I’m well-intentioned? I just tend to put things off, like paying bills and getting things fixed. It’s a character flaw, to be sure. But I’m very friendly.

I would like to know how some people handle the stress of not paying their mortgage for like two years straight. I’ve got straight up PTSD from being a month late to pay The Gap.

Anyway, as I probably should have known had I not been dreaming about getting on an airplane (my go-to dream theme) seconds before the piano ringtone began to trill by my head, The Gap doesn’t begin its strong arming tactics until more traditional business hours and it was instead one of those Code Red calls from the middle school to say that school would have a delayed opening this morning because of the snow.

Wait, what? Snow?

Has it gotten to the point this winter that an impending couple of inches of snowfall doesn’t even register on our radars any more? That it’s snowed so much this winter that we only take note when legit blizzards are bearing down on us? That even the media takes a ho-hum stance and not its usual, “IT’S SNOWMAGEDDEN!! GET TO THE SUPERMARKET NOW AND BUY ALL THE MILK AND BREAD YOU CAN AFFORD.”

Well, that seems to be the case, because I had absolutely no idea that snowfall was imminent and I’d be enjoying the kids’ company a little later than usual this morning.

And for maybe the thousandth time, I am thankful that I work from home. I’m glad I’m not supposed to be up and dressed for a meeting in an office 45 minutes away, and can instead have a proper conference call in the comfort of my leopard onesie while cooking up some French toast for my stragglers.

Of course, it could be worse. I saw a post on Facebook yesterday from my college girlfriend who has been trapped inside her Brooklyn apartment this week with her two little guys because of the wickedly-cold temperatures here in the Northeast, unable to let off some five-year-old steam at the playground. Or another mama I know in the Chicago area whose kids have been home from school for days because of the weather, coating her living room floor in dress up clothes and stuffed animals.

My guys will gone by mid-morning and I’ll be able to return to my regular routine of checking my e-mail and Facebook every 8 minutes and wiping the kitchen counter.

I’ll still be rocking the onesie, though. There is snow on the ground, after all.

 

 

 

 

Guilty As Charged

photo(104)I don’t know if it’s the Catholic in me, the mother in me, the daughter in me or just the woman in me, but I spend a fair percentage of each day feeling guilty about one thing or another.

Whether it’s my reluctance to buy into purchasing organic products, the poison I pay a service to put on my lawn to keep it green that is probably leaching into my children’s drinking water, or that I am morally and ethically opposed to wet cat food although it would probably make her a lot less fat, I feel bad about a lot of stuff.

And so I made a list:

  1. Cheating during spin class
  2. Not drinking enough water
  3. Drinking too much wine
  4. Not doing Kegels
  5. Hitting the snooze button
  6. Not writing in my journal
  7. Blowing off writing for sleep
  8. Watching three episodes of “Scandal” in a row
  9. Spending $300 every time I go to Target even if it’s just to return something
  10. Not reading as much to my younger children as I did with their older siblings
  11. Only getting past Chapter 2 of A Wrinkle in Time with my youngest child
  12. The 500 pages left to read in Middlemarch
  13. The brown sugar I put in my oatmeal
  14. The half and half I put in my coffee
  15. Knowing more about Kelly Ripa than Edward Snowden
  16. The 20,000 (legit) emails in my work inbox
  17. That my children had to live through a divorce
  18. The amount of money I spend on my hair annually
  19. All the unread books on my nightstand
  20. Not sending birthday cards
  21. Having a closet full of grey, black and camel-colored clothing
  22. Those 10 extra pounds that climbed on for the ride a few years ago
  23. That I don’t read the whole newspaper like I used to each day
  24. Buying plastic water bottles
  25. My carbon footprint
  26. Leaving the water running while I brush my teeth
  27. Not flossing every night
  28. The half-finished sweater lying in my crawl space I never finished knitting
  29. Wanting to be as thin as Kelly Ripa
  30. Not cleaning the kitty litter box every day
  31. Being freaked out by online dating
  32. Making my kids feel like they don’t measure up
  33. That I ever wished my kids would grow up
  34. My  constant struggle with forgiveness
  35. Judging a book by its cover
  36. My big ego
  37. My bouts with narcissism
  38. Not going to Mass
  39. Letting my fourth child off the Catholic hook
  40. All the chicken nuggets and mac-n-cheese I’ve fed to my children over the course of 20+ years.
  41. This list

What makes you feel bad? Tell me so I can feel better.

 

 

 

 

 

Being a Mom Never Ends. Dammit.

IMG_2049There are some things about becoming a mother that nobody ever tells you, and I’m not talking about how funky your bottom is for a while after giving birth or that your newborn will probably cry so hard at some point it will briefly not make a sound or that some day that same baby – with whom you spent countless hours up in the middle of the night trying to console – will tell you it hates you. Guaranteed.

No, those are the little tidbits you don’t even consider when you are pregnant with your first child and fantasizing about all the fun things you’d do together some day like visiting museums and joining up for mother-daughter yoga classes.

It’s not fucking happening.

No, the most critical piece of information that anyone who’s gone down that parenting road ahead of you has neglected to mention is that it never stops. There is no end to the job.

Which is funny, because I was under the impression when I took the position that it would be about an 18-year assignment.

You kept all of their fingers and toes in check, fed them the occasional vegetable and made sure they could read and they’d eventually go off to college and you’d get back to whatever it was you were doing before they arrived on the scene.

Like, having fun.

What I’d like to travel around the country and tell expectant parents is that they are signing up for a life sentence. Once that little sucker pops out into the bright light of day, there would be no turning back.

You are in it for the long haul.

(Someone should actually put that as a warning label on a box of condoms. Like how Trident used to use the “4 out of 5 dentists agree” line: “Four out of five parents agree that they should have used a condom.”)

I’m being reminded of this lifetime commitment this week as I watch one of my kids struggle with rejection and feel helpless, unable to make anything better. I keep going over in my mind what more I could have done, something I could have said that would have altered the course of events.

Because of course as parents we want to make the road of life less bumpy for our children. That’s why we cut their steak for them long past the point that they can manage a knife themselves or let them go into school a little late when they’re feeling needy or hand them a $20 bill for gas instead of making them dip into their own limited funds.

We want to shield them from life’s challenges, the many disappointments.

And when they do grow up some day and start making their way out into the world, you’re still connected. It’s like this thin filament that stretches as far as they go but is anchored to your heart. And when they feel pain and sorrow, you feel the zap of sadness, too.

No one told me how much I’d love them and that – even though they’d fly off and start their own lives – they’d always be my babies.

Shit.

So, when I wasn’t fretting about one of my many children this week, I did have this to say:

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photo(95)Broken

The day my husband of 18 years moved out of our house for good, the mirror that had been hanging quietly over our bathroom sink slipped from its nail and crashed onto the floor below.

I had been out of the house while he packed the last of his ties and running shoes, and hadn’t been home long after he left when I heard a thud overhead and the sound of breaking glass. (READ MORE … )

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photo(97)The Divorce Diet

Looking for a sure-fire way to drop 5 to 10 pounds fast?

Forget what you read in all the magazines or the ads you see on TV.

My advice is to get a divorce. (READ MORE … )

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IMG_0582What About College?

Anyone who has seen the Hungtington Learning Center commercial on TV — “Face it! I’m not getting into college!” – has had the pleasure of hearing a dramatic scene taken from the pages of my own life. (READ MORE … )

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What About College?

IMG_0557Anyone who has seen the Hungtington Learning Center commercial on TV — “Face it! I’m not getting into college!” – has had the pleasure of hearing a dramatic scene taken from the pages of my own life.

Let me clarify: I am lucky in that I haven’t had anyone failing out of school. The kids have taken rigorous course loads, held down after school jobs and gotten involved in things like “Model U.N.” and played the saxophone.

But I am starting the third round of the college search process and while I just assumed things would get easier with each consecutive child—that there would be some type of buy-in at the very least – I find I’m running into the same bullshit now that I did a few years ago when my oldest was a junior in high school.

At issue is the broad assumption held by my children that going to college is a figment of their mother’s imagination. They act as if the four-year academic experience practiced by gazillions of people in the United States is some crazy scheme I cooked up, akin to the notion that beets are delicious and NPR is interesting.

They act like where they’re going to spend the next four years is my problem. They have failed to understand that that ship has long since sailed. I’ve already proved to be a fair-to-mediocre student more interested in a certain boy than things like homework and studying and ended up in a big, state school filled with a lot of people from New Jersey just like me.

And I’ll admit: It’s not easy preventing my own dreams and regrets from getting caught up in the process. There’s tons of things I wish I had done differently when I was their age – starting with turning off the TV in my bedroom – and see their futures as a chance to make better choices. A do-over.

But if I can put all that other stuff aside, what I hope my children come away with is expanded horizons. I want them to understand that while this little upper-middle-class-suburban-microcosm that they’ve grown up in is very nice, there is a whole world out there filled with all kinds of different people and different experiences. I want them to be open to the idea that the possibilities are endless.

Because it took me a long time to understand that the ideas I was operating under were way too small.

I am most surprised that my third child has proved to be as resistant to discussing college as her older siblings. It was no shock that those two quickly dismissed any conversations that began with, “So, do you see yourself at a big school or a small school?” or “What part of the country would you prefer?”

They seemed to view every question I posed as a personal affront.

My oldest son and I took a couple of trips to look at schools, driving together across highways bisecting Pennsylvania and along the Northeast coast, and we probably shared about 10 minutes of conversation for all those hours we sat side-by-side.

That might even be an overestimate.

He’d sit next to me in the passenger seat, or if it was a really long haul he’d stretch out in the back of our SUV, wearing headphones from which blared some very intense-sounding rap music, drowning out not only any attempts at conversation, but the audio book I had downloaded for the trip.

There’s nothing like trying to imagine what it’s like to be shipwrecked in the Pacific or get a handle on characters’ crazy Swedish names with Lil Wayne and Eminem shouting vulgar and angry words in the background. It’s disconcerting.

But I am shocked that Kid #3 isn’t embracing my attempts at helping her find the right school. I actually thought that when her turn came to look at schools, we’d have a lot of fun going on tours together and talking about what we liked best here vs. there while lying on our beds at a Hampton Inn in some college town.

Those are the getaways I should have taken with her three years ago, when she still liked me.

I tried again to start a conversation about college at dinnertime the other night. She bristled as I wondered aloud if a certain state school might be worth looking at, and hissed, “I don’t know,” and I really felt like she was seconds away from barking, “Face it! I’m not getting into college!”

When I in turn got all snippy and informed her that the time had come, like it or not, to start talking about college, she agreed but then told me, “You just go about it in the wrong way.”

WTF?

And I get it: She’s probably feeling like she’s under a lot of pressure (first round of SATs this weekend!) and in a little bit of denial.

Growing up is scary and talking about it makes it all seem so stinking real.

The Huntington commercial came on early this morning, while my daughter and I bustled around the kitchen with the TV tuned to the local ABC news that comes on before “Good Morning America,” and the familiar, “What about college?” line seemed to hang in the air.

We both looked up from what we were doing and made eye contact and laughed.

“I am so writing about this,” I told her.

And if that’s the only satisfaction I can derive from this whole stage of my children’s lives – aside from the joy of paying for it – I’ll take it.

 

 

525,600 Something

tumblr_m5b3djsvv01qknpp3o2_250If I were the mathematical sort, I would try to calculate just how many hours there were between fall and spring semesters at the university that my two oldest children attend.

But as I have a hard enough time counting how many times I’ve squatted on a ball or lifted a weight over my head when I work out, I am going to bypass all addition and assume it’s been around 525,600 (which is a standard measurement of something according to the song from “Rent”).

How does one fill all of those hours between final exams and buying new text books, especially when one’s been forbidden to get stoned in one’s own basement?

Hmmm … well, there’s always exercise and then eating things like mashed potatoes in the afternoon or barbeque potato chips at midnight to balance any healthy benefits of that time spent at the gym.

Then there’s the new PS4 console in the basement that the 11 year old got for Christmas, which the older brother has probably logged more hours playing FIFA and NBA games on for hours at a stretch than the gift recipient.

And thank God for “Criminal Minds,” which seems to be like one never-ending episode playing at all hours in my family room and – while I’ve never seen an entire episode myself – I’ve gathered always seems to involve the removal of some poor victim’s eyeball or eyelid and earnest detectives trying to find the bastard who did it.

We’re starting the fourth and final week that the kids are home for break and it’s gotten so boring around here that my 21-year-old son actually volunteered to pick his younger siblings up after school one day last week. He’s also done some grocery shopping for the family and taken his little brother to the barber shop for haircuts.

Not for nothing, but I’ve likened this kid to the big brother on the ABC show “The Middle,” which is a thinly-veiled representation of my life, minus the very tall husband, and frankly I’d like to sue someone for infringing on my hard-won material.

Axl Heck is the classic teenaged oldest brother: He thinks his parents are “lame,” his younger sister a “dork,” and is always walking around in his boxer shorts, a habit I abhor.

Middle1001(I am sorry but at a certain point, even though I spent years toweling you off after baths and wiping your bottom, I do not want to see you in your underwear. We call that having “healthy boundaries.”)

Coincidentally, the TV in my kitchen was turned to an episode of “The Middle” while I was making dinner the other night and one of the plot lines of the show was how bored Axl was between high school sports seasons.

He’s seen in various poses in his boxers complaining to his mother about his plight while draped over the couch or lying on the kitchen floor with his bare legs propped up on the refrigerator.

“Why don’t you try vacuuming?” his mother suggests and before you know it, Axl is not only vacuuming the rugs, he’s working with the attachments and taking the job more seriously than school and certainly his family.

In a later scene the mom is lying on the couch eating popcorn and taunting her vacuum wizard with how she can toss a piece in the air and catch it in her mouth or even eat the popcorn off her shoulder.

“Nailed it!” she cries after gobbling some off her shirt and spilling the rest onto the couch, making her son crazy with the mess.

Oh, how the tables had turned.

It reminded me of how annoyed my older son was when he went to pick his little brother up from school last week during the polar vortex and found himself sitting in the parking lot for about 20 minutes along with all the moms in town in their SUVs only to learn that his brother had wrangled himself a play date and didn’t need the ride.

“BLERGING BLERGY BLERG,” he shouted at me when I called his cell to tell him the news.

He was clearly agitated but I told him to hang out and wait for our neighbor, who still needed the ride, only to learn five minutes later that he was invited to the same play date.

“BLERGIN BLERGIN BLERGER,” my son choked out upon learning the most recent development in the 5th grade social scene. He had clearly lost his marbles at having wasted all those valuable minutes in the parking lot approximately 1/8 of a mile from our house that could have been spent playing Assassain’s Creed or looking in the refrigerator.

He cursed his brother, the little neighbor and me for conspiring to ruin his life and stormed into the house to yell some more before retreating to the basement and the comfort of PlayStation.

Welcome to my world, I thought merrily as I returned to stalking people on Facebook.

I really can’t wait until he has teenagers.

And may they all be girls. Like, four of them, who think he is the most annoying person in the world.

It’s going to be fun. I’ll make the popcorn.

 

 

 

The Polar Vortex Has Frozen My Sense of Style

photo(92)

Brrrrr. The handy thermometer outside my kitchen window read about 2 degrees early Tuesday morning.

By now, we are all well-versed on the potential hazards posed by the record-breaking temperatures that have plunged the country into a deep freeze.

Just turn on the TV for a couple of minutes and you’ll be immediately terrified by the mighty wrath of the polar vortex.

There’s hypothermia and frostbite to combat and slipping and falling on icy surfaces to be avoided.

Power lines are falling and cars, trains and even airplanes are zigzagging all over the place.

Just this morning, I watched a clip on Good Morning America of cars skidding across highways and one video of a vehicle careening off an overpass and crashing onto a frozen pond below.

But perhaps the most critical issue that has been impacted by the subzero temperatures here in the Northeast is my sense of style.

It seems to have frozen.

I have gone from trying to look cute (well, most days) to trying to stay warm and cozy and I am here to report that those two criteria do not go hand-in-hand.

Case in point: I returned home from picking my little guy up from school yesterday afternoon and tried briefly to sit and work in the jeans and turtleneck sweater I was wearing. That lasted about 10 minutes.

I could not deal with the button, the zipper, the funnel gripping my neck or even my bra.

It’s like it’s so cold outside that I just want swath myself in fleece and eat pot roast.

So that’s what I did.

Since about 3:00 yesterday afternoon, I have been wearing this:

photo(91)

My glamorous cheetah suit even has a handy pouch in front, perfect for holding dirty tissues and your cell phone.

I ate soup in it, did some work in it, wasted time on Facebook in it and watched yet another episode of “The Americans” (which everyone needs to watch) in it and drank wine in it.

I took it off to sleep and put it back on this morning. I suppose I’ll have to change out of it again to exercise later because that would be weird.

When I received the classy Forever 21 jumpsuit as a gift this Christmas, I wore it for a day and then hung it up, considering it more of a gag than a critical new piece to add to my daily wardrobe.

But now I’m thinking that if the weather this winter stays as cold and snowy as it’s already been, it could just become a fashion staple. My go-to work-from-home ensemble.

My older children were a little more skeptical when they saw their mother emerge from her room wearing essentially a onesie.

“You’re a grown woman,” observed my 21 year old.

There could be some downsides, like, I almost had a heart attack when the doorbell rang yesterday afternoon (thankfully just the UPS guy who drops and goes). And then I was slightly mortified when some of the items I was grabbing out of the mailbox slipped and fell to the ground. I had been trying to just reach my arm out the front door so as to not have to expose my neighbors to the horror of the cheetah suit and then found myself dashing down the front steps and diving through shrubbery to grab the errant mail.

Is this what things have come to? If this is what cold weather does to me, I can’t imagine what I’ll be wearing during the Zombie Apocalypse.

Michonne will have nothing on me.

Back in the day, I would be slightly concerned about what I wore to drive the kids to school each morning. What if I got into an accident or was stopped by the police? Forget clean underwear. At the very least, I always made sure I was wearing a bra. Or a very big coat.

But had something gone awry during this morning’s early and icy ride to the local high school, the paramedics would have had to have sliced through this getup:

photo(90)

And it makes me wonder, as I pass all the other parents carting their kids to school, am I the only one who has foregone style, and a bra for that matter, for comfort?

Has style taken a backseat to staying warm for you this winter?

Because God knows, my former sense of style is sitting in the third row today. Wearing headphones.

 

 

Waiting for the New Year to Begin

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My mom bought these bastards, that literally come in a giant tin bucket, online from Hahns Old Fashioned Cake Company in Farmindale, NY. www.crumbcake.net

I’m finding it very difficult to embrace the New Year and all the new things I resolved to do and not to do when it still seems like 2013 around here. Actually, you could tell me it’s still 2011 and I wouldn’t really be all that surprised.

The problem might have a little bit to do with the giant bucket of crumbs that have been sitting on my kitchen counter since Christmas (wherein some evil genius decided to completely eliminate the pesky cake portion of coffee cake and package only the sugary topping) that I just can’t bear to toss in the trash.

It’s hard to resist all their little voices, calling out to me as I make my coffee each morning. I hate to be rude.

But the real problem is that I am surrounded, day in and day out, by people who are still on vacation. My college kids don’t go back for two more weeks and now that the holidays are over, they don’t really have much to do but watch Netflix and play video games.

And make paninis.

Just when things started to get back to normal and the younger two kids returned to school on Jan. 2, a Nor’easter slammed New Jersey and deposited those two back on the couch with the older ones the following day.

So I still feel like I’m in a quasi-holiday, snow day, everyday-is-Saturday state of mind.

I did manage to squeeze a little bit of writing in between using my vacation days this past week to load up – once again – on a bizarre amount of dairy products from Costco, take a quick trip to Delaware to see my dad and play untold hours of Walking Dead Monopoly.

Here’s what I had to say:

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babies pix-1Blast From the Past

As noted on this blog ad nauseum, I pretty much killed 2013.

By now, we all know how I launched a blog, went to a blogging conference, traveled to Greece alone and kind of, sort of, tried to date (okay, not the greatest victory there). (READ MORE … )

 

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photo 2How Not to Hate Your Teens

If you’re like me, you are finding that it’s not always so easy to like all the people who you’re living with. Much less love them.

At least once a day, I find myself in a combative situation or heated conversation with someone I gave birth to.

I even made that observation aloud to one of them this week, in the midst of one such episode, “This is not how people usually talk to me.” (READ MORE … )

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And while I did not actually write this post this week, I did reference it on Facebook and folks seemed to like it. Maybe you will too …

DSC00672This 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. He’d be outside for hours, first clearing the driveway and front walk as the snow was falling and then again later, after the storm had passed. He’d clear a path in the back for the dog to get to a spot to do his business and when he ran out of stuff to shovel here, he’d start in at the neighbors’ next door. He never asked for help and we all stayed warm and cozy inside while he labored in the snow. (READ MORE … )

 

 

 

 

How Not to Hate Your Teens

photo(72)If you’re like me, you are finding that it’s not always so easy to like all the people who you’re living with. Much less love them.

At least once a day, I find myself in a combative situation or heated conversation with someone I gave birth to.

I even made that observation aloud to one of them this week, in the midst of one such episode, “This is not how people usually talk to me.”

But he just grunted and kept at it.

Not long ago, I posted a friendly link in the Facebook inboxes of my two older kids about a college coed who had fallen asleep (read: passed out) on a front stoop after a night out in freezing cold temperatures and was now facing amputation of one of her limbs due to hypothermia.

I saw it as a cautionary tale that I wanted to share with them so as to avoid future amputations and the need for any prosthesis. God knows their tuition bills are enough to finance.

I had also recently shared a link with my 21-year-old son to an article reporting that smoking too much cannabis can cause man boobs, which he thought was funny.

Apparently, he did not think the frozen girl was funny or valuable in any way because he called me soon after freaking out about it.

“Don’t send me that shit,” the conversation began and quickly ended with me screaming “Fuck you!” into the phone and hanging up.

I promise you: This was never a part of my grand master parenting plan, nor was the moment after I hung up the phone when I had to walk back into the kitchen to find my two younger children – 16 and 11 – sitting on stools and staring at me.

Not exactly the model of conflict resolution I wanted them to see.

Needless to say, the matter was discussed in-depth with my therapist when we next met and she helped me see that while I thought I was using the poor girl’s possible amputation as a teachable moment for my kids, my son viewed it as a message from me that he would be dumb enough to do something like that in the first place.

He was insulted.

And who knows, maybe the day of that terrible conversation I was getting my period, or ovulating or whatever it is nowadays that makes my hormones go a little crazy, which added fuel to the emotional fire.

But historically, he and I are good at pushing each other’s buttons and quickly making the other one crazy. We tend to jump right out of the frying pan and roll around in the fire.

And it’s not just him. I get into tussles with everyone around here. I like to joke that my little guy’s been strapping on his teenager training wheels lately because sometimes there’s that tone in his voice when he has to answer one of my many, apparently, annoying questions, and he’s given some sassy responses lately, too.

Et tu, my sweet young boy?

And while my therapist recommended things like having follow-up conversations with all the kids about the amputation blow up, meditating and making a jar that I put money in every time I act like an asshole (or something like that), I think I have struck upon the perfect antidote to potentially hostile situations with my kids.

Last week I picked up a box full of home movies I had converted to DVDs at Costco and was reminded – at least for a few hours – of how fucking sweet my children were. Are. Is.

Sure, we’ve got boxes of old pictures and photo albums filled with shots from Christmases of long ago. But to actually see the kids in action and hear their little voices – so young and innocent – and watch how we all interacted was wonderful and terrible all at once.

Like, how did we get from there to here?

In retrospect, some of the scenes are classic signs of personalities to come: my older daughter shy and hesitant in the hospital room meeting her new little sister but super-excited for the candy in her Christmas stocking; the little sister – at 4 – decked out in a kooky lingerie-inspired outfit and belting out some made-up song on her Barbie karaoke machine, pausing only to scream at her older brother to stop “annoying” her.

Total diva.

But to me, one of the most compelling moments of those recordings was watching my oldest son open his Christmas presents, circa 2001. He was in third grade and had just turned 9 and apparently Santa really thought he wanted a lot of books that year. But instead of disgust, he happily opened his deluxe Narnia Chronicles set and lifted the heavy Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tome over his head in victory.

He was that sweet. And I knew just how to make him happy.

Sometimes I tell myself stories about my kids. “He’s always been this way,” or “She’s always been like that.”

And sometimes it’s the truth and other times, it couldn’t be further from it.

But I know that since I watched my son lift that Harry Potter book over his head, I’ve been looking at him a little different over this long break home between semesters. I’m seeing him not in a new light, but the way I used to see him.

The two of us went out to dinner last night and had a great time. The conversation was easy — we talked about everything from Breaking Bad to LeBron James — and there was never any point that I felt like I had to say something annoying, like “Put your napkin on your lap,” or “Use your knife.”

He already knew what to do.

photo 2And I’m reminded that even though he’s a lot taller and hairier than he used to be, inside — and sometimes maybe it’s so deep down in there you’d need an excavation crew to find it — he’s still that same sweet boy I knew all those years ago.

And I’m glad I found him again.