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The Boss and Annabel Photo by toyfoto Sometimes making friends is easy. When both parties to something potentially amicable are open and fearless, then striking up a friendship can be a breeze. Other times, the direction of the wind isn't so favorable. The Boss has a propensity for close human interaction that I lack. Maybe that's the difference between 3 and 30. She is now building the relationships that I've been coasting on for decades. My best friends were all made during childhood--as a toddler at parties with the children of my parent's friends, then in elementary school, then high school, then college. Now the legacies of those years are scattered across the country. I keep in touch as best a phone-phobic person like myself can. But when I get together with those tried and true friends (with varying degrees of regularity), it's like old times. Now, when I make an acquaintance, it seems I don't know how to bridge the divide between old times and new. I wan...

Number Two is preparing to join the world on the move. He's not crawling yet; he's not quite sitting on his own. But he's been set in motion. He throws himself from his bouncer like a blond midget kamikaze, then hangs upside-down from his lap belt until I right him again. He repeated the act four times just this morning. Still, I'm not ready to face the idea that my baby has outgrown his first recliner. The Boss was keen to the incongruity the first time she saw her brother pull himself to a full sitting position on that very bouncer. She glanced twice at him, then once at me. "Look, mom," she said, her voice strange in its confusion. "His head is standing." I looked, just like she told me to. And it was so very, very odd to see him like that. He wasn't just there . He wasn't crying. He wasn't sleeping or eating. His eyes weren't everywhere; instead, they were fixed. He was flexing abdominal muscles in expression of his fiercest desir...

This is what our baby would look like if The Partner and I did not produce offspring that refuse to acknowledge my existence in any of their bodily features: For the first time, I'm thankful that our actual children are not our composites. We don't look so hot when merged. Go make your own baby online! It's not as much fun as having sex but it's a lot less painful than childbirth.

The Boss has grabbed on to the same cold I recently acquired. Its main manifestation is a hoarse voice. Yesterday, I asked her how she was doing as I walked her out the door after a day at pre-school. "I'm doing well." The small rasp of her voice was matter-of-fact. I was already chuckling to myself at the grammatical maturity of her statement when she propelled herself to even higher levels of coherence. "The only problem," she told me through the phlegm, "is that I can't speak normally." At times like that I am impressed with her intellect. On other occasions, like when she decides she would rather sleep in a tangle of pee-soaked sheets than inform me she wet the bed, I am less overcome by her mental prowess. Through it all, though, I continue to be amazed by the human being unfolding before me--even when the creases release the odor of hours-old urine. At three, she is her own strange person and her parents' enigma. At three, she is stinki...

A virtual baby shower was held this weekend for GGC and Kristen as each awaits the birth of her second and third child, respectively. Is that sentence even grammatically correct? Oh my God, I have no idea. That's where I am right now. Anyway, I missed the shower. The brain of mine that is currently in hiding from the Strunk and White grammar police also balked at the price of admission to the virtual shower: one blog-ode extolling the virtues of newborn babes. Sometimes I get into this mood where I am unable to write about weighty subjects because I feel I can't do them justice. I am in such a mood now, as I have been for the past weekend. And certainly there are few things weightier than bringing a new life into the world--even if it only comes in at 7 lbs 1 oz, like the baby Boss, or 6 lbs 15 ozs, like my recently-born little boy. So as I sit here typing with the latter in my lap--he's simultaneously eating, sleeping and pooping--I will let these words suffice: Best wis...

I am plagued by frogs. There's a croak beneath each footfall once I step outside the house. As The Partner mows the lawn, I can picture the wet, green whir under the deck of his antique Gravely. I'm disgusted. I just want to sit outside and read. I don't want to scratch my scalp repeatedly in fear of the frog-itch as I hug my knees to my chest on a chair. I'd like to recline beneath the mild sun that still, even after noon, feels damp from the previous night's dew. I can't relax. I start to wonder about other plagues. Layoffs. Chemicals in plastic baby bottles. Foreclosures. Pesticides in my leafy greens. This is why I don't watch current events on TV anymore. It's irrational and alarmist, but that's me. I'm too affected by BREAKING NEWS. And it's all BREAKING NEWS these days. If I see death and devastation in backyard frogs, I see the apocalypse on CNN. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. ___

I am incapacitated by a preponderance of time. With The Boss off at school for six and a half hours each day and with Number Two still in a two-nap-a-day phase, I have moments where I could never collect them before. I have quiet spaces. I have broken chunks of blank slate. It's not that I lack things to do; in fact, I have so much to do that I don't know where to start. There are books to read so that I have novels to write. There are freelance writing jobs for a little cash and some immediate gratification. There are volunteer roles I sometimes wonder why I took on. There's a blog I can't bring myself to update more than once a week. There's a house I haven't cleaned in four months. There are leaves starting to fall. I could be doing something big right now, like starting that novel or increasing my freelancing load so that writing becomes more of a career than a side-job. But I don't know how to structure myself. I see the open expanse of possibilities an...