24/7

The Boss has turned into Harriet F. Houdini. I think we all know what the F stands for. Yesterday, for her first trick, she removed her poop-filled diaper without unsnapping a single closure on her long sleeved, long panted romper. I went up to get her at the tail end of naptime, only to discover a happy, bleating 13 month old, sockless in the southeast corner of her crib amidst a trail of reddish brown viscosity. A diaper, one side agape and fecal, lay on the mattress. I blinked. The Boss was strangely lumpless in a pink and white one-piece outfit with a big wet spot on the leg. The cotton drape of her romper was contoured to the rises and falls of her baby fat, unspoiled by the ugly absorbancy of her diaper. I lifted her up, expecting to see that she had unsnapped the legs of her outfit to make a skirt through which to remove the diaper. Yet, all snaps were secure. I turned her around to look at the closures on the back of her neck, wondering if she somehow pulled the diaper out the

It's time for fairs. I love all those early-autumn staples, filled with hay, fried dough, and tractor pulls. There are young couples in love, wild-eyed mothers pushing double strollers, and groups of old women waddling from stall to stall in bedazzling shirts. It is always hot or cold, rainy or bone dry. It's harvest time in New England. Last year around now, I was in the unglamorous "fourth trimester" of my pregnancy. I know now that I should've kept that baby firmly entrenched in my womb as long as humanly possible, but, at the time, medical science and some Pitocin convinced me otherwise. The Boss was born at almost 42 weeks gestation, but we still weren't ready. The circadian rhythms of my fast paced life were hopelessly out of sync with her more sedate scheduling. She would've been just as happy sucking amniotic fluid from inside a heat-regulated placenta for the next three months, at least. It was toward the end of that amorphous phase that The Partn

I call the long sandwiches with many meats grinders . I call the little ant-like toppings for ice cream shots . I call the fizzy brown stuff Coke (even when it isn't). I call that event wherein I put all my junk in the front yard and sell it a tag sale . I call the shoes I wear while exercising sneakers . I call the place where I buy (a lot of) alcohol the package store . I call getting there a packy run . I measure distance in the time it takes to arrive. I am a child of Connecticut, that expensive, boring state that separates New York City from Boston. It's a nice place to visit your grandparents, but you wouldn't want to live there. It's got some cities, some country, and a lot of suburbs. It has the "highest per capita income" in the country, but all the big heads are down Fairfield County way. We pay for it up here, though, on the eastern side--where the United States Supreme Court decided a house is not your home; where the mills shut down years ago; whe

Every meal time, The Boss takes it upon herself to remind me of our dog's presence. "Dog!" she shrieks, pointing with the hysterical emphasis of a child ingraining a word into her vocabulary. "Dog!" She points again, staring down at the dog perched beside her. She looks at me. She looks at our pet. "Dog!" "Yes, she's a dog. I think you've mentioned that already." "Dog!" "You can do better than that," I say. "I know you have more words." I never had much patience to begin with, but I have even less when I'm trying to nourish a child who insists on using a spoon when she doesn't know how. The Boss casts upon me a sideways look of raised eyebrows and a curl-cornered lip. She takes a piece of chicken and holds it out over the edge of the high chair. Her gaze stays connected to mine. I am afraid. The food falls into the dog's waiting mouth. "Uh-oh," she says. ___

I know nothing about cars. I know nothing about a lot of things, in fact. One could theoretically string together everything I don't know, end to end, till the link of my idiocy reaches the de-planetized Pluto and comes back again, infinitely. But today we're just talking about cars. I'm driving a vehicle that is leaking something into (or out of?) something else and then evaporating off a really hot something in a very rubbery-smelling way. All I know for sure is that when a particular light on the dashboard glows orange--I've been told it's in the shape of a radiator--that I must add coolant to the clear thingy underneath the hood of the car. This is, apparently, a temporary band-aid that will cover my car's wounds until the parts my husband ordered from the Internet arrive at our doorstep. Except that today, I couldn't get the cap off the clear thingy underneath the hood of the car. I tried, but not only am I afraid of opening it because I got psyched out

It appears that The Boss is done sucking at the teat of bewildered maternity. She has had enough. If she could speak coherently, I'm sure she would look me straight in the eye, twerk my nipple, and say "Get that thing away from me, now!" But, instead, she just looks away, points at the ceiling fan, and shrieks "dat." La Leche and Kellymom.com say that it's highly unusual for a child under 18 months to self-wean. Of course, I've heard the "unusual" angle before as it relates to childbearing. If I honestly believed that half of the things that happened during my pregnancy and in the first year of my child's life were so darn strange, I'd have long ago exchanged our home life for a suitcase and the circus. Ladies and Gentlemen! Children of All Ages! Hold onto your hats as we unleash for the first time into civilized society...the Amazing Self-Weaning 13 Month Old and her Bearded Mother! It's been a process in the works for months now,

Sometimes over dinner with the Partner, I will bring up something one of my favorite bloggers said. From the context, it'll sound almost as if I know her, as if I was over her place that morning, drinking coffee with fake vanilla creamer while kids run/scoot/flop around at our feet. "Would you believe GGC's husband was car jacked today in Hollywood?" I might say. Or, perhaps, "I really need to ask for the sangria recipe Mom-101 used at Thalia's birthday party ." And then there's the alliterative " T got a tattoo today !" The Partner always nods along, speaks up in the right places, seems interested enough. He lost the right the comment on the strangeness of talking with such familiarity about people one only knows through the Internet the day he married the girl he met on AOL. The problem arises when a blog stops, sometimes without notice. One day there is a regular post, and the next, nothing. Then more nothing, till it's weeks later

Breastfeeding my one year old daughter these days often involves a game I affectionately refer to as Peek-A-Boobie. The setting is always the same; it's her darkened bedroom, where the Pavlovian response and a lack of anything else going on conspire to keep my wiggling, grasping baby focused on the task at hand. Having strapped on the feedbag, The Boss's game commences. Five fingers, skinny for a baby's, but still with some pudge, come around my breast to settle, splayed, over her visible eye. I say Peek-A-Boo! Her giggle is a pink "O" of tongue, nipple and lips. She covers her eye again. Peek-A-Boobie! I get silly, squeezing her up close to my face in a bicep curl I don't mind doing. She is hot and supple against my forearms. I'm not an overly attentive mother. I'm not too touchy-feely. My daughter is happy entertaining herself because, I'd like to think, I've created a safe environment where she is comfortable doing so. She's not clingy

Today my starving Boss ate dog food right out of the bowl in a swift executive move that gave the phrase "living hand to mouth" an entirely new meaning. Because she only ingested one morsel and didn't seem to have a problem, I let her do it. I know another mother might have swept a purposeful pointer through her child's mouth to rid it of fishmeal and ground barley, but I saw absolutely no reason to get involved in a situation that was obviously under control. I watched The Boss's face for any trace of a reaction. There was nothing but amusement at having swiped something that was not hers for the taking. Then she picked up the bowl and dumped half its contents on the floor. These babies, they don't seem like geniuses. But each day, as their gray matter fills with color, they are able to process so many new aspects of the world. She's eating dry dog dinner now, but I know it won't be too far into the future when I realize that my daughter is smarter th

I will be incommunicado this weekend, and I love nothing more than the idea of setting myself up for something to come back to when I log onto my dear old friend, the Internet. To that end, I am asking for reader participation. I see this site's user statistics, so I know somebody's reading it. Somebody from Alaska. Somebody from California. Somebody from Utah. There should be more from Connecticut than there are. There are a bunch of somebodies from a bunch of states and even a couple countries that aren't mine. On a good day, there are so many readers that adding them up on my fingers won't do, making it so that I must whip out my toes to get an accurate count. So, who are you? Where are you reading from? What brought you here and, more importantly, what makes you stay? If you've never commented before, now's as good a time as any to start. Blogging isn't just about airing laundry in varying states of cleanliness. It's about the community you discover

1. One book that changed your life: Books don't change people. People change people. 2. One book that you've read more than once: Beach Music by Pat Conroy 3. One book you would want on a desert island: The Collected Works of Shakespeare. It would have to be a very barren island. 4. One book that made you laugh: This "one book" thing is limiting. I choose for this category the entire Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. If you are easily embarrassed, don't read these books in public. They force you to laugh like nobody's listening. 5. One book that made you cry: One?!?! Fine. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I was an eighth grader with a burdgeoning penchant for bad boys when I first read it. Oh, how I cried. 6. One book that you wish had been written: I don't know. I've been staring at this question for 25 minutes, trying to dredge up something witty and insightful. I got nothin'. Moving on... 7. One book that you wish had never been writt

The sky was blue like today's. If there were a few cottonball clouds, they were nothing that threatened to gum up the works in that well-designed machine of destruction. I saw metal and fasteners fall from the azure in an industrial rain that rendered temperate summer days forever tainted. The sky was like today's. It still is. My life was different. I was a single woman working in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City as the coordinator of a now defunct catalog. I was unhappy because my boyfriend was far away. I was bored because that's how I am. I drove a black Cadillac Seville STS, a name that still rolls off my tongue with the smooth glide of luxury. Now I am married with a baby. Instead of editing, I write. The Caddy and the boredom are gone. It was mostly a good transition, except that I took something with me from those days that I'm never going to shake. None of us came out empty-handed, of course; that's what binds us together. It's all a matter of w

Last night, as we watched the results of the political primaries held throughout the state, I asked The Partner if he knew what the name Ned was short for. "Nedward," he said, with authority. I hit him close to the kidneys in that loving, wifely way. But it got me thinking about nicknames. I've gone by the name Binky for as long as I can remember. My mother was signing me up for library story time and doctor's appointments under the Binky appellation long before I had any say in the matter. My given name is nothing that such a nickname could be rationally derived from, but that didn't stop my mother. Rationality was never really a sticking point with her. In third grade, I was a dorky Binky with a bad home perm (again, I can thank my mom for that) and Coke bottle eye glasses. In seventh grade, I was presidential-hopeful Binky, running on the "Don't Clown Around, Vote for Binky" platform. When I entered high school, I went by my given name on paper, b

The Boss has a hidden agenda she's not very adept at concealing. It manifested itself for the first time this weekend when The Partner and I took her out for brunch at an eatery in town. I was chowing down on an Egg Beater omelette when I noticed The Boss go rigid in her high chair. She bore down with a look of absolute concentration on her face. The Partner and I assumed it was gas, but we assumed wrong. Below the table, her thighs were flexing and releasing in an exploratory dance as she harnassed the power of kegel muscles she didn't know she had. She was pleased with the discovery. If she was making noise, that would've been one thing, but since she was silent in her occupation, The Partner and I saw no reason to interrupt her. The single-mindedness of her pursuit harkened back to her days as a newborn, when her mouth was like a birdy's beak in search of the worm every time the flap of my nursing bra came down. She had always been a determined girl. The Partner and

Today, I am too busy to blog. Too frustrated to care. Too pissed off to go more than three sentences without taking the sweasy* way out. So instead of offending my readers' delicate sensibilities, I will abide by my mother's favorite truism for her eldest daughter: if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all . It's a good thing I'm not usually so obedient, or I would've gone through childhood as a mute. And I most certainly would've never started a blog. One of the writers I admire greatly wrote a piece several weeks ago that speaks to the kind of overextension I am feeling today. Read it . Maybe tomorrow I'll have something to say. *Cute, huh? I made that up. It means using a lot of swear words, because, quite frankly, it makes me feel better.

This morning I cried my way through the second reading at the funeral mass for my best friend's father. Words like what is seen is transitory and what is unseen is eternal were smeared with tears on the photocopied sheet in front of me . Any intention I had to speak slowly and clearly, while making generous eye contact with the mourners, was soon replaced by the desire to finish the passage without breaking down completely. It was embarrassing. But with a funeral comes perspective, and in that air conditioned church that protected us from the 100 degree temperatures outside, it was easy not to sweat the small stuff. Kelly's mother and sister thanked me profusely and lied about how well I did. They told me it meant a lot to Kelly. I said I was glad to do it. When Kelly thanked me herself, she said "I think dad would've liked that." Then she smiled like she does, and slid in the one-liner. "He was always telling me to be nicer to you."

After yesterday's heavy post, I thought this would be a good time to discuss something that won't kill you--or probably won't, anyway. I'm talking about adherence to the Five Second Rule . A study conducted by an intern at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (did you hear that, Amy ?) came up with a host of results that I am going to summarize thusly: 1) If the food is dry and the floor is dry, 5 seconds probably won't hurt you 2) If it's wet and hairy, don't eat it 3) Women are more likely than men to eat off the floor Before The Boss came into my life with her laissez-faire approach to eating off surfaces upon which others like to walk, the idea of putting into my own mouth something that had only seconds ago kissed the floor was repugnant. To hear the invocation of the Five Second rule was to gag. It turns out that this is only one of many, many things on which I've been forced to do a complete 180 since becoming a mother. Now that my dau