24/7

The Boss stayed with my parents this weekend while The Partner and I went up to his old fraternity house. The Partner helped make repairs to the old brownstone mansion (yes, it's a historical treasure, and yes, it's a long, long story how it ended up housing college-aged males year after year). If you are wondering about the extent of its Victorian grandeur, I will say that a few scenes from the movie Age of Innocence were filmed there. After a day of work, we went out for dinner and then to the old watering hole, wherein we re-enacted the days of yore by getting completely blotto. Who says you can't go home? It was almost like being just-twenty, except that nobody carded us and, if they had, we would've been able to show non-fabricated ID. The next morning we continued to uphold tradition by calming our roiling stomachs with grease at the breakfast spot two blocks over. There is nothing like a fat omelette after a night of bourbon and Coke. Absolutely nothing. I was g...

Today's post is brought to you by Whymommy of Toddler Planet . Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer and with one round of chemo on the books, Whymommy has already put into action an ambitious awareness campaign . As part of that effort, I am featuring her words here today. If you have a blog or an email account and haven't done so already, please consider putting the good ol' copy and paste function to work in order to help spread the message. From Whymommy: We hear a lot about breast cancer these days. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetimes, and there are millions living with it in the U.S. today alone. But did you know that there is more than one type of breast cancer? I didn’t. I thought that breast cancer was all the same. I figured that if I did my monthly breast self-exams , and found no lump, I’d be fine. Oops. It turns out that you don’t have to have a lump to have breast cancer. Six weeks ago, I went to my OB/GYN b...

The Boss embraced the word "no" in the early days of talk and hasn't let go since. I've been expecting "yes" to be added to her vocabulary but continue to be disappointed. The most I can get out of her is "okay." Picture it: our living room, where The Boss sits on the couch. I am grabbing something from the kitchen. "Goldfish." I hear the Boss's plaintive cry. "Goldfish!" A little louder this time. "Ma-ma! Goldfish!" She is a Fury atop a sea devoid of orange finned crackers. I walk into the living room. "What do you say?" "Please. Goldfish." "Hmph." I backtrack to the kitchen to get a snack bowl. Shrieks of "GOLDFISH!" fill my absence. Her eyes are on the crackers as I return. Suddenly she's silent. "Would you like some goldfish?" I inquire. She looks at me--no smile, no grab--and says, in one simple word that carries all the weight of an artful shrug, "ok...

A while back and then more recently , this badge was bestowed upon me: Not only has my status as a girl been validated, but I am a blogger and I rock as well. I am flattered by and very thankful for this gesture by Mrs. Chicky and Whirlwind . But it remains to see if I am " Hot Stuff ." See, GNMparents.com (whose legitimacy can be vouched for by Mrs. Chicken and Slouching Mom , on the grounds that their talented selves are regular contributors) has instituted a weekly contest . I was all kinds of pleased and even more sorts of surprised to see that my post 24/7/730 was nominated. If you check out the post and decide that it's a hellaciously good read deserving of the "Hot Stuff" designation, please cast a quick and easy vote for me over at GNMparents.com . Pandering aside, I will now pass along the mic to some more rockin' girl bloggers. If any of the following have already been deemed rockin' and have moved on, please excuse the reverb. 1. Debbie at...

I love books, but my relationship with libraries is troubled. There's the fact that I can no longer seem to return anything on time. Really, though, that's tangential. My main problem is with the book building itself and its caretakers. I took The Boss to one of the larger libraries in the area and moseyed into the children's section for the first time. She was enamored of the big, blue Elephant book case and the lower laying alligator. She picked out several books and lured me to the "kitchen," which is Boss-speak for the "couch." It seems she has confused the "tch" of kitchen with the "ch" of the couch. She waved the books in front of me and bolted for the institutionally upholstered library seating. "Kitchen, mama! Kitchen!" When I realized the discrepancy, a lot of her daily dialogue made more sense. We sat on the couch/kitchen and read some Clifford. The rest of the room was quiet, with a couple young boys milling about...

I'm a paranoid person. Pessimistic. Hopefully, I'll soon be paranoid, pessimistic and pregnant. But you can imagine that I'm not counting on it being a smooth process. I'm the kind of person who assumes miscarriage over successful pregnancy. Psychologically healthy? Um, no. But altogether unrealistic? I think not. And as if that was not enough baggage to carry, I've now become consumed with the fears of infertility. This one is more unfounded, as my ovarian efficacy has been proven on more than one occasion. But those occasions were not planned. I'm bad at planning and I know it. My plots have a tendency not to work out as I intend. Furthermore, I think the term "planned pregnancy" is a huge oxymoron. How can a person even pretend to have control over 40 (+ or -) weeks of unfolding nature? When it happens, if it sticks, whether or not complications arise--it's an unknowable all around. Still, I can't help thinking about it. And reading about it...

This morning I was consumed by coffee and conversation as I sat with The Partner by the pool, watching The Boss run in circles around the blue shimmers. Suddenly she stopped, tilting an ear toward the treetops. "Owl!" she announced. That was when The Partner and I chose to listen. Indeed, there was a subtle hoo hoo in the distance. We looked at each other below the soft warble. Suddenly there were tweets, too, and the rustle of vivid green leaves, and the smell of sun on dewed dirt. There was everything that had always been there, hovering unnoticed. "Hoo hoo," said The Boss. Sounds can smile--and they did--as we repeated them after her: "Hoo hoo. Hoo hoo!" "Funny owl!" The Boss chortled. Then she set off on another wobbling lap around the pool. This time we heard the slap of tiny feet on cement. We thought we heard the breeze blow back whisps of her hair. And we were in the moment; we were in this moment where The Boss is turning two. Happy birt...

When I was pregnant with The Boss, I was cognizant only of gestation. I was growing a fetus. I read books about those forty weeks. I created a Babies R Us registry for the bump on my belly. I could not see past the line of delivery to the act of growing a child. Perhaps that is partly why parenting a human being came as a complete and utter shock to me. The baby blues? Why didn't anyone...sob...tell me about this? Engorgement? Stop the car now, I need to feed! Poop? What is with my daughter and her explosive ass? I was recently discussing The Boss's birth with one of my best friends, whose sister was about to have a baby of her own. I mentioned my less than ideal birth experience, to which my friend claimed total ignorance. "I didn't know you had a c-section. When I asked you how the birth went and you burst into tears, I figured you didn't want to talk about it." Erring on the side of caution, she buried the subject. It didn't get exhumed for two years...

1. I will be 29 at the end of the month. 2. My mother is one of those women who stopped counting at 29, before I had even started. When I first asked her how old she was and she gave me that overused number, I believed her. Of course I did. I was relentless in passing on the information to anyone who would listen, and was flummoxed and a bit put out each time my proclamation was met with laughter. 3. More than well-rounded 30, odd 29 seems emblematic of offical adulthood. As enviable an age it is for those who've already been there, it's that mysterious to those who have not. When I think of 29, I think of my mother, and I look forward to discovering why she thought it was such a good place to stay. 4. Ten years ago, summertime, I worked from 3-11 p.m. at a snack shack. Afterward, I'd go home to my parent's place, where I'd put on jogging clothes to run the 4 mile round trip from my driveway to the town green. Each time I listened to the mixed tape that my friend ma...

We live downwind of a nuclear power facility. At The Partner's day job, the employees are given potassium iodide pills in case of catastrophe (as if one anti-radiation pill is going to help). On a main roads near Tiger Lily, there is a sign that says "Evacuation Route." I saw that for the first time and said, "oh." I rationalized our proximity to the beach (not so proximate, when you think about it) and pictured a flood. It wasn't until we held our first little get-together over dinner at our new house with some locals that we disocovered the evacuation route was, in fact, the road from nuclear meltdown to complete chaos. It does not make sense to live in fear. I know that. Que sera, sera. But the line between emotional baggage and rational thinking is a thick border crossing not easily traversed. I have a bullshit backpack strapped on ( it's Threat Level Orange, with a reflector strip) and sometimes it feels heavier than others, but it's always ther...

I wake up every morning from terrible dreams to the smell of urine. It is real and thick. I am still groggy from that slow surfacing from the subconscious depths and I think it must be the dog, who maybe isn't adjusting to the move . I tell myself I'll deal with it later. The sun is just rising; I go back down. I wake again, to the sound of The Partner's alarm clock, and the smell is gone. There never was one. I've checked. Our sheets and our floors are unoffensive and unstained. There is no sign of anything amiss, and my recollection of it is tied only to bad dreams. I leave the whiff of memory there and don't think about it again until I sit here to write. And even the act of putting words to a screen, which usually helps me understand things, does nothing. I don't know why my dreams stink.

The Boss is in her sportscaster phase. Her life is a play-by-play. "Running!" she shrieks as her stubby legs and feet that lean away from their arches slam fast across the hardwood floors, or the grass, or the concrete. She calls it like she sees it at the dinner table. "Mommy is eating," she informs The Partner. Her cocked pointer finger is not accusatory, but gleeful. When the dog is sunning herself in a patch of light streaming through the window, The Boss is there with the call: "Doggie sleeping." The dog is always sleeping. Before the verbal trickle became a deluge, her eyes and cries were the only windows into her rapidly expanding brain. Now she is beginning to tell me what she sees. Soon she will tell me what she thinks. We are connected by the communication for now, but independence is on its way. She is almost two. Go ahead, baby girl. Tell it like it is.

10. We moved in on a Thursday and, on Friday, The Partner hopped a party bus to Montreal for a bachelor party weekend, leaving me to unpack the lonely house. 9. My mom and sister came over on Saturday and helped me unload an entire kitchen's worth of boxes, so I'm not as much of a martyr as I make myself sound. 8. There are Tiger Lilies everywhere. I didn't even know what the orange flower was before moving to this region of Connecticut. Now I see them on every residential, commercial and industrial site in a tri-town area. I thought it would be appropriate if, in the name of Internet anonymity, I refer to my new village as "Tiger Lily" in this blog. 7. After it rains, we find roughly 30-40 dead frogs in our pool filters. No exaggeration. 6. The Boss has been staying with her grandparents while we move. Her grandmother is teaching her French. It's like this: "Bonjour!" Then The Boss puts her own kiddie pop-culture PBS spin on it. "Bonjour, ...

I heard that Mrs. Chicky's blog is the place to be on this sunny New England Sunday, so that's where I am. Click on over to check out my temporary digs .

I'm moving in two days. I went to the store to buy labels so that I could assign some semblance of organization to the used boxes we've been filling--ones that have been through so many moves that each one boasts the Sharpie-d scrawl of at least three previous tenants. I figured a fat white sticker on each box with the appropriate destination for THIS move would help clarify things a bit. With sticky paper in hand, I returned to my car only to find that it wouldn't start. The Boss was calm and collected as I tried to jumpstart the battery with a big booster thingy I carry around in the trunk but do not know how to use. Thankfully, two gentleman in a tractor-repair truck pulled in across the parking lot just as I began to get disgruntled. I flagged them down and they not only showed me how to properly affix the jumper cables, but proceeded to diagnose and (temporarily) fix the real problem when the jump start failed to work. I was on my way in about ten minutes, extremely ...