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30 days and 9,500 words later , I have fulfilled my NaBloPoMo obligations. I'd like to thank God that it's over. I'd also like to thank my husband for not complaining too loudly when he was forced to wear non-matching socks in the absence of any freshly laundered matches. I can't forget my dog, who ate poop just so I'd have something to write about. Thanks also go out to Blogger for unveiling a beta version that ate up at least one of my posts and ensured that anyone trying to stay abreast of my site via Bloglines got the shaft. I eat your hate like love*. And the one to whom I owe it all: The Boss. You're the reason I started blogging. More than ever, I am truly me because of you . Thank you for being there . Thank you for not being there . Thank you for thanking me . *Current Google research indicates this quote is attributable to the band Bikini Kill, but it came to me on the penultimate page of an issue of Sassy Magazine circa 1990.

The Boss's baby book has not been updated since she was two weeks old. It would've been so simple for me to crack the pastel binding on a more consistent basis, inserting one-liners, dates and strands of my baby's fine hair. It would've been easy, in dribs and drabs. But I've never been one to just fill in the blanks. Empty lines between pre-packaged words are too shallow for my pen. I have to start something, to finish it. Because I have this blog, I'm not sweating the baby book. The milestones are here. It is the way I feel about life, as it happens. But in between the recollections, however complete I believe them to be, is a lack of some simple detail. The plain facts. Truth that has shed its clothes for some good, old fashioned fun. So here are the things I've thought about putting in the baby book lately, but have neglected. - At 16 months of age, The Boss begins to show an interest in books. - They are balloons, but she calls them "balls." -...

Today I brought The Boss with me into the basement. We stepped over puddles that would send any other homeowner running to the nearest sump pump dealer, only to find out there ain't nothing that will keep a 200+ year old house dry. The Boss wobbled her way along the edges of the trench that ran the entire perimeter of the foundation. There was the thin sound of water in a skinny stream. We stopped at the washing machine. I was pleased to find that The Boss is shaping up to be the housekeeper I never was. "Here," I said, handing her a sock. "Will you please help mama do the laundry?" She took the sock. "Thank you," she said. Then she threw it through the front loading portal. I handed her a tee shirt. "Thank you." In it went. Another sock. "Thank you." A pair of boxers. "Thank you." Another "thank you" and she was tangled up in one of her father's shirts. While she tried to extricate herself from the armpit st...

The news on the cover of today's local paper was bleak. Below the fold but still very much on my radar, I learned that we can expect a "colder-than-average winter this year, with an increased chance of snow." Being that cold and snow are the very things I hate most about this tiny section of the USA, I sense that I am on the cusp of four long, dark months in New England. Not the least of my problems with the extreme season is the idea that any barrier between myself and hypothermia cannot be taken for granted. It is not a baseless fear, this image I have in my mind of getting stranded in my temperamental car in -10 degree Fahrenheit weather on the side of a rural road with no cell reception for miles. Winter is a certain kind of helplessness. I've only experienced it a few times, but there is pain that would have you believe cold can crush bone into fragments. It is no coincidence that my husband's grandmother, though she took 97 years to die, did it during the r...

26 days of blogging and a holiday weekend behind me, I am feeling the NaBloPoMo drain. Today I take Mr. Moneybags from the clink to the bank with this Get Out of Jail Free card. See you on the other side of GO, where I can assure you I will not be collecting $200.

I bought a package of fortune cookies from the local supermarket to accompany a stir fry dinner I made a few weeks back. We read our three fortunes that night and I didn't think about the rest of the box until The Boss pulled it out of the cabinet earlier this evening and handed me a little plastic pouch with a thin, hard cookie enclosed. I bit it open with my teeth and handed it her. She wandered away. Not long after, I heard my husband speak out. As I turned the corner, he was reading the fortune strip from the Boss's cookie. "Your ideals are well within your reach," he told her, sagely. Then he thought about it, and he raised an eyebrow. He looked at The Boss, who was stretching a tiny hand, her fingers disproportionately long and slender, high above her head as she extended it over the tabletop in an attempt to grasp the cordless telephone laying in wait. One finger after another crept forward on the laminate until she was able to knock the phone off its perch. Sh...

Thanks to paper plates and giblets wrapped in paper, Thanksgiving at my house went off with relative smoothness. Late the night before, while I prepared the turkey to soak overnight in salt water brine, I did not have high hopes for such a pleasant result. As I stuffed my hand in the main turkey cavity in much the same way I search, blindly, for my glasses if they accidentally fall off the nightstand, I came upon what I presumed to be the neck. It was frozen to the rest of the turkey, which was strange when you consider that the turkey I so carefully selected and paid for was labeled "fresh." Why the inside of my fresh turkey was a flaking ice cube is beyond me. At any rate, I pulled on the neck. It wouldn't budge. Then I pulled some more. It still wouldn't move. Knowing nothing about turkeys, I wondered if was still attached to the spine, or something. Then suddenly it gave. I started, and then I screamed. I screamed so loud that one would have thought the gates of H...

Thanksgiving is a time for stories. It starts in the morning as radio stations play special programming aimed at listeners in the kitchen and on the road. Demographic studies and Arbitron ratings must have proven that today, more than any other day, we focus more on the words than the music: Alice's Restaurant on the local independent rock station ; short stories read by their authors on NPR; tales of the olden days on the A.M. local. Then family and friends roll in, and the stories get personal. Words like wine flow around a table or a fire-lit living room; they skim the heads of scampering kids. Now the words on the radio--snow songs crooned in the background--are secondary. The Thanksgiving picture is one of sound, smell, taste and warmth. It's more complete than yesterday; so much more substantial than tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours. Enjoy the tales and the telling.

Roxie the family pet is making the rounds. Just today she was featured on a Web site catering to the automotive needs of women . If you're wondering what my dog has to do with female drivers, I'll tell you that the connection will become clearer once you stop over to say hi. And after you do that, you should cruise around the rest of the site for a look at the automotive world from a woman's perspective. The site has been featured in papers like the New York Times , the Boston Globe , and was recently a presence at BlogHer '06. As someone who has been reduced to a snot-faced, blathering mess at more than one car repair facility by technicians who were out to take me for a ride, I am all about a Web site devoted to helping women assume the driver's position when it comes to navigating the slaloms of car buying and car maintenance. If only Patty could also teach me how to merge correctly and not to hit curbs. Anyway, check it out. And tell them Roxie sent ya.

The fall of the frostbitten scarecrow. May your November nights be warm and comfortable, and your December days not too much of a pain in the. . .well, you know.

Dear Roxie, Upon my homecoming from the Supermarket today, as I walked through the door with a 20 pound turkey hanging from one hand and a 20 pound girl tucked under the opposite arm, I saw laid out before me the evidence of gratitude. I saw that pit bulls, too, can give thanks. It is in the wag of their hind quarters that shimmies out through their tails; it is in the incessant licking; and it is in the fabric of three sofas ripped open with love. This year, I know who it is that has taken over receipt of your doting energies. I see the bond form a tighter strangle-hold every day. You and The Boss . The Boss and you. She feeds you. You sniff her butt. She drops heavy objects on your back. You eat her socks. The two of you cannot get enough of each other. I'm sorry I did not take you along for the ride to Price Chopper today, as I know how you feel about the separation. I just thought it was a little too cold out to leave you in the car, and supermarkets do not generally smile upon...

Earlier this month I posted a list of 10 Things I Hate About Me . Were this any other month, I would've probably left it at that. But this is NaBloPoMo and, as it's the Monday before Thanksgiving, my time and inspiration are in short supply. To that end, I enlisted my husband's help in following up on the first 10 Things post via this latest bastardization of the game I like to call She Said / He Said . SHE SAID: Please list 10 Things You Love About Me. HE SAID: Would five be enough? SHE DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING, BUT RAISED HER EYEBROWS IN A POINTED MANNER HE SAID: Fine. In no particular order, here goes: 1. talented writer 2. does cute things to surprise me 3. popped out a really cute baby (that looks like me) 4. tries a new recipe for dinner several times a week 5. is a freak in bed 6. pushes me to succeed 7. always wears thongs 8. has good taste in home decorating 9. laughs at my jokes no matter how dumb they are 10. likes to go places and see/do new things 11. dr...

Things I should be doing tonight instead of blogging: - The dishes. - Something that pays money so that I can afford to remodel our kitchen into something that actually includes counters. Because we currently have none. Seriously. None. Okay, maybe one, but it can barely fit a spice rack and a block of Henckel's. In case you were wondering, that's why we keep dirty dishes on the stove. - Figuring out how the heck I am going to cook my first full Thanksgiving meal in the culinary cubicle that is our kitchen.

The states in red? I've visited 'em. The rest is a gray void that I won't be happy 'til I've filled. I want to travel cross-country on a southern bent in a rented Winnebago for the better part of the month of May. Create your own personalized map of the USA

My mother consented to putting a boring, traditional name on my birth certificate because she knew full well it was just a piece of paper. As soon as the ink dried, she set out to tell everyone my nickname. I was Binky from the beginning. When I first expressed an interest in being a writer at the age of 5, she told me I had the perfect name for it. "People won't forget Binky," she said. Even at 5, I must have rolled my eyes. Who knows if I'd ever actually use that name on a published work. It's all moot at this point, as I have yet to commit any fiction of length to my computer screen. The idea of a royalty check signed over to any of my identities is still a dreamy, out-of-focus concept. However, I have recently finished a 25,000 word manuscript for a non-fiction project I was commissioned to write by a trio in the process of building their own publishing company. The agreement I signed precludes me from going into detail until the project is unveiled sometime a...

Because the lack of communication in my family extends not only to the way we convey information but also to how we receive it, I had to deduce the name of my father’s cancer from a few clues dangled in front of me via a telephone call from my mother. “Your father can’t remember the name of his cancer,” she said. “What?” “He said the doctor told him but that it's long and he can't remember it. There are three words and it begins with an ‘sz’ or something.” “You have got to be kidding me.” I sat there a moment in disbelief before practicality overcame me. I held the phone to my ear as I leaned into my computer and fired up Google . “One thing your father did get out of the him is that this cancer has an 80% cure rate.” A lifetime of hope and fear was in the heft of those words. “I couldn’t believe the doctor actually said it. Cancer. The whole time my mother was dying, her doctors never once uttered that word.” “Um-hum. Um-hum.” The computer keys tap-danced staccato under my pr...

The warranty on the dishwasher my husband acquired through marriage has long since expired. Daily, and with a sigh, he resigns himself all over again to glasses that are not quite clean and teflon pans that are indelibly traced with soap scum. This dishwasher--never a finely tuned machine to begin with--gets more unreliable by the day. Still, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't trade me in even if he could. I'm a bad housekeeper. My mop is the dog's tongue and my vacuum is the handheld Black & Decker I nose into corners to remove blatant webs of dust. Only when there is not a single family member left with a clean pair of underwear to his or her name will I do the laundry. Upstairs, where no house guests may roam, it is hard to see the floor for all the clutter. I'd like to clean it all up. I really would. But my messes are slow-growing and layered like certain fungi. To wipe out the scourge would take at least 4 days devoid of any other commitment, including motherhood...

I am going to wait and see if the post I just spent over an hour crafting decides to show up below. As it stands, there is an emtpy space that was NOT there when I hit "publish post" just a few moments ago, so naively satisfied with my words. You can imagine my surprise when I went to view the fruits of my labor and saw that no content conveyed with the title. I was so flustered, in fact, that I proceeded to engage in a series of missteps that made it so the "recover post" feature in Blogger was no longer an option. Though I have some of my post saved, the final third of it is missing, and therein lies my anger. See, I have this problem where I cannot make myself re-write something that has disappeared. I just get too angry. I feel like the Internet has robbed me of words that I will never again be able to come up with, and I get so caught up in the rightous indignation of being the victim that I cannot possibly find any energy left over with which to write somethin...

I am off to deliver belated birthday gifts to my niece and nephew, whose birthdays were in September and October, respectively. I am a bad, bad aunt. The sheer amount of groveling I feel compelled to do at their feet this afternoon precludes me from writing anything of length here today. Instead, I leave you with this photo of The Boss and my shining star of a brother, who could never be construed as bad. Flashback The Good Uncle, December '05

- I slept in till 10:30 this morning. When I picked up The Boss from my parent's house sometime after noon, she was nap-lacking and slap-happy, but she shrieked with the thrill of seeing me. - I dropped off my brother's clean clothes--laundered with love by our mom--at his college dorm and he joined me and The Boss on a trip to the UCONN children's book fair. We shared an oversized umbrella beneath the driving rain. Inside the building, The Boss gave the hairy eyeball to a host of children's book characters. Each time she turned away, unimpressed, I shrugged my shoulders and stuck out my upturned hands in exaggerated deference to the mesh eyeballs of Clifford, A Wild Thing, and one of the Berenstein Bears. - We drove home inside grayness that was sopping like a dirty, wrung-out towel. Upon the completion of the evening's after-dinner diaper change, I took the night-ready Boss into her bedroom for a story. I read to her from a book about penguins with tactile illustr...

I came across Jocelyn's Stories courtesy of this link . Blogging Baby, I owe you one--not for mentioning this here humble little site (though I am surely surprised and thankful) but for bringing to my attention a blog that highlights the everyday wonder of life in posts both verbal and visual. After reading only a few of Jocelyn's stories, I began to think that her son's look of wide-eyed amazement might be his own early acknowledgement of the scope of his mother's talents. I could go on, but I won't. Anything I say will be redundant once you discover Jocelyn's Stories for yourself.

The moon was low and elusive on my winding drive from central Connecticut to the northeast corner. Its half-buddha belly was the fattest I'd ever seen. I turned a bend near the gold dome of the capital building and the shadowed orb disappeared, only to emerge again next to the sillhouette of another insurance building. I sat by myself in the car, except for a strange loneliness that was so thick it seemed to take on its own form. There were only indents in the place where The Boss's carseat had been secured a half hour earlier. Now her seat was latched into my parent's mini-van and she was tucked away sleepily in the room I'd called mine as a child. When I left her for this overnight visit with my parents so I could finish painting our living room, which had been sitting in a semi-finished state for three weeks, The Boss conveyed for the first time a genuine attachment to her mama. I know because she said it--"mama!"--as the tears formed along her lids and her...

My father has a pain in the neck, and this time I'm not talking about my mother. He goes in on Wednesday for a biopsy on the tumor in his throat. There has been a constant stream of nicotine in his system, with no exaggeration whatsoever, since childhood . First, it took the form of Marlboro Reds. About fourteen years ago, after the birth of my younger sister coupled with a stern warning from his doctor that an emphysema diagnosis was immiment, he switched to Kodiak chewing tobacco. My father is not a weak person. He has kicked numerous addictions with not the slightest trace of relapse. If he knew something he was doing--something over which he had control--was hurting someone, he would stop it. My mother told me recently that he confided to her he doesn't think he will live five more years. Furthermore, he doesn't care. This is interesting on many levels, not the least of which is this: I am shocked he and my mother actually talk to each other. Theirs has always been a ma...

1. That my eyesight would've rendered me a casualty of Darwin's theory had I been born before the advent of modern optometry. 2. That I hate talking on the phone. 3. That my hair is too sparse and thin to attractively accomodate the bangs I really need to cover my big forehead. 4. That I am inherently lazy. 5. That verbal expressions of love, sympathy, regret or contrition flow from me like sludge. 6. That I cannot do simple math. 7. That I am persona non grata in public libraries all over the tri state area due to the grotesque nature of my overdue fines. 8. That I am not inherently thoughtful. 9. That, when it comes to house keeping, I am about as effective as a slug--I am slow, I rarely get anything done, and I am more likely than not to leave a nasty residue. 10. That I don't regularly tell my husband how much I love him: for his selflessness; his intelligence; his humor; his contributions to this family; and for the way he has helped me become the person I was always m...

When I carried The Boss into the voting booth today and closed the curtain behind me, I was terrified that she would pull the red lever and finish out my session before I had even made it through the eleven different charter revisions, let alone weighed in the world famous Lieberman/Lamont question. Luckily for me, she was too busy playing Peek-A-Bo over my shoulder by sticking her head through the curtain and ogling the gray haired poll workers situated in front of the booth. At first. My luck ran out somewhere around "state senate," which was conveniently where all the names began to float around in an unrecognizable muddle before me. I struggled to remember who was who. Which guy stood for what. I started wondering about definitions, like what it means to be a Connecticut Libertarian. All the while, The Boss pulled my hair and threated to flip switches. Patience drained out of me. She wiggled. She kicked me in the kidneys. I couldn't remember for the life of me anyone...

The Boss's first Halloween as a semi-cognizant human being has come and gone. She won't remember it, but The Partner and I know it's the start of many childhood memories she'll come to cherish as much as we do. She was a little bopper, all 33 inches of her, in a poodle skirt with her name on it and a sparkly black neck scarf. Wobbly on new saddle shoes, she showed off her new skills in upright navigation . The orange sand pail she clutched in her hands was the best I could do at the last minute after I realized I forgot to buy the plastic pumpkin she really should have had for her initial foray into the land of trick-or-treats. We only visited one house, and it was right next door. To go any further on the main thoroughfare that is our street would've jeopardized all our lives if we chose to walk it and would've been a completely unncessary pain in the hind quarters had we decided to throw her in and out of her carseat for a door-to-door drive. Since she was too...

The Boss thinks anything that goes on her head--including her hair--is a hat. She has been known to sit in her carseat and pat herself on the head repeatedly, all the while chanting "hat," "hat." Yesterday at the store, she put a basket on her head and, with glee, shouted "hat!" Then she did it again, and again. FLASHBACK The Boss's First Hat

With Tuesday's elections drawing near, we interrupt the rhetoric for a little bit of straight talk from one of Virginia's youngest constituents. "Jim Webb is in a contest, and he wants to get a job. The other guy is bad. Well, not like bad . I think he just doesn't say please or thank you...and he might not share." ~ Bella, Age 4

It occurs to me that I've yet to properly introduce myself, despite the fact that this blog has been up and running since July. Well, there's no time like the present, right? That adage doesn't normally slip so easily from my tongue. I'm ECR: wife, mother, writer and supreme procrastinator. College educated in the liberal arts, I work at home as a freelance writer. I've been doing so since my daughter was born in July of 2005. I feel more secure in my own personal and professional identity now that I am a wife and mother than I ever did when it was just me. Free from the distractions of a 40-hour work week outside the home, I’ve been able to concentrate on my family, my writing, and myself. Parenthood hasn’t come easy to my husband and I, not in terms of how we relate to our daughter or how we relate to each other, but it has made us a family. We may not know always how to communicate, but we sure love to talk. We are rabid advocates of free speech, and it is evide...

I am sickened. Not, this time, by Staphylococcus , rotavirus or the flu. Not by the cold that's going around or the expired milk in the fridge. What has been making my stomach turn is the nauseating lack of support for education evident in every referendum, budget vote and public meeting since I moved here almost three years ago. Our public high school was put on academic probation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges in 2004 and a total loss of accreditation is looming with the start of the new year. The lack of support for education is not coming from inside the schools. There, people care. I have heard countless positive stories about teachers and administrators who put priority number one on shaping the amorphous minds of children into thinking, feeling vessels of productivity. They want kids in this town to have every resource possible. They want them to feel part of a community that lives for their future. Inside each elementary, middle and high school, our ...

Dear President's Choice, The other day we bought a package of your chocolate chip cookies. They appeared to be very well sealed as usual. When I opened them that night - a night after a very long day of wrangling two insane children, a night where I felt I deserved a treat with a cup of tea, a night where I thought having a cookie or six would make me feel better - I was very disappointed to bite into the first cookie and find that it was stale. Rather than crunching like I expected it to, it was somewhere between crunchy and soft. It was rather unpleasant and I was very let down since your chocolate chip and chocolate chunk cookies are usually so satisfying. No, I can't take the bag back to the store for a full refund on your behalf or for an exchange. I ate them. All of them. They may have been sort of gross, but I was a desperate woman. Thanks anyway, Sherry --- Dear Dollarama, Thank you for existing. I don't know how anyone ever survived before you. I know my mother use...