Eureka! Moments

In general, I think one of the best thing about having kids -- after the full-body, full-speed-ahead, gleefully-shouting hugs of greeting when one walks in the door from work -- is watching them learn. I don't mean necessarily the skills we work so hard to teach, though it is of course wonderful to see them learning to swim or to use a spoon without soiling yet another shirt. I am thinking more about the conceptual learning that seems to happen without overt teaching. The ah-ha! light-bulb moments when they suddenly grasp a new idea, or use a hard new word correctly in a sentence, or master an etiquette milestone without anyone reminding them about the appropriate relative positions for fingers, noses, and kleenex.

Son, at four-and-a-half, has been having a lot of these moments lately. After working for a long time to contain his jack-in-the-box eating style (in the chair, hop out of the chair, in the chair, hop out of the chair...), he has begun to sit for longer stretches at the table. It is apparently too much to ask of his energy level and enthusiasm to sit on his bottom, facing the same direction, without squirming or gesticulating wildly even once during a meal, but he is now remaining with at least one body part on the seat of the chair at all times until he's done with dinner. For a child who, not long ago, was completely incapable of sitting there and eating without multiple interruptions to go get a toy (though they're not allowed at the table), to hop up and down on one foot between bites, to go get a project he did at school to show it to us right now, and so on, this is a major accomplishment. And lo and behold! as he has begun to be able to sit(ish) in his chair throughout dinner, he has suddenly recalled unprompted a lesson we were working to instill a month or so ago. For the last several days, he has sat nicely in his chair throughout his whole meal, eaten all the food on his plate, looked up smiling and said, "May I please be excused?" and then waited until we said "Yes" before getting up from his chair.

I KNOW! I was outside looking for signs of the spaceship too. I wanted to ask the aliens who'd abducted him what they'd done with my real Son, or at least thank them for the one they returned to me. But so far, I haven't made contact. So, this is my public thank you to the universe: alien manners are much appreciated here at Chez MommyTime; please come back for Daughter as soon as she's old enough to see onto her plate without having to sit on her knees in the chair. m'kay? (We would, of course, like her returned to us with her Improved Mealtime Politeness Chip installed as well.)

In other news of revelations: A few weeks ago, Son was watching Shrek the Third for maybe the fourth time, and I swear the power of his epiphany would have recharged my laptop battery for a week if I could have harnessed it. There's a scene towards the end of the movie where a whole slew of fairy tale bad guys form a menacing circle around poor Prince Arthur. They move in for the attack, at the command of the evil ringleader Prince Charming (love that he's a villain, by the way), when Arthur speaks up and asks them what they're all doing. They respond that they're doing what they always do: being bad guys. He gives a rousing little speech about how they don't have to follow along just because they've always done so, blah blah blah, change the pattern, etc. etc. It's inspiring in a canned-obligatory-moral-lesson kind of way.

I was tuning out the moral when suddenly Son sat bolt upright in his chair, held up his index finger in that classic Eureka! pose, and said (and I wrote this down the moment he said it, so it's verbatim), "Hey-yy...wait a minute! He has a point there! Maybe the bad guys are simply too bad. Maybe they don't need to be so bad. Maybe they just only need to be bad to bad guys, and to good guys, they don't need to be bad at all."

Apart from nearly falling over myself trying not to laugh at "He has a point there!" I was delighted to see him apparently internalizing an important lesson about machismo and unwarranted violence. It has, of course, not much dimmed his enthusiasm for playing swords or building mouse traps for invisible mice (his latest victims), but I am heartened by his ability to articulate the notion that badness just for badness sake really might be misplaced and excessive.

On the language front, his favorite new word is voracious. He pronounces it four-racious, but he uses it correctly, though he hasn't quite mastered its superlatives. He told me on the way home from school recently, "I'm even more four-racious-er than I was yesterday, Mama." And he proceeded to list about three entrees and five side dishes he was hoping to eat when we got home.

He did eat very well that night. But what has me even happier is his apparently four-racious appetite for consuming knowledge. I can't wait to watch what he learns this week.

Plagiarism Kills Teachers, One Student at a Time

I don't write much about my work on this blog, on purpose. Although I will never be able to leave my work at the office (there is always grading to do, a book to read, an article to write), I have enough workplace drama at work, so I prefer to keep this little sanctuary free of those stressors.

But lately, there's a topic that I just can't get away from, and I want to hear from you about it: Plagiarism.

It's an ugly word, and it's an ugly thing to find in student work. And, let me tell you, it is RAMPANT. Every semester, I have The Discussion with more than one student about why his or her work is unacceptable for the very simple reason that it is not in fact his or her work at all but the work of someone else being passed off as original for a grade.

Frankly, I find plagiarism to be among the very very worst kind of lies. I'll freely admit that lying about a homicide would be worse. And I'm not drama-queen enough to call plagiarism "intellectual murder," though I sort of wish I were. But here's what students don't get: when you copy down what someone else wrote and turn it in with your name on it as if you thought up that particular constellation of words and ideas yourself, you are doing damage in so many areas.

You deprive yourself of the education you are paying for by not doing the work the professor has designed as a way to help you with the learning process.

You forever tarnish your integrity in the eyes of the professor to whom you've handed the phony work. If you turn in a paper that I discover is plagiarized, I will google sentences and phrases out of every single thing you turn in for the rest of the term. I will be suspicious of every idea you voice, wondering where you actually read it or whether you could possibly have thought it up yourself. I will kick myself, if the plagiarized paper was not the first written work you turned in to me, for not noticing that you might have plagiarized in earlier papers, and I will wonder whether any good grades you have gotten not only from me but from any other professors I know are actually based on uncaught lies. I will find myself suspicious of your brains, concerned that they are not, in fact, yours. And YOU made me this suspicious.

You short-change your classmates because once I've got an instance of plagiarism in a class, I begin to worry and wonder about every eloquent turn of phrase I come across. I find myself double-checking for plagiarism in papers by students I know are smart because suddenly I wonder how much I really know about what goes on in any student's writing space late at night. And then, occasionally, I heave a giant sigh of sadness and regret that I am suspecting a student who in fact seems to be genuinely insightful.

You create a silent monster in your professors, a growing feeling of resentment that festers and threatens to take over every interaction between us. I am livid that you make me doubt not only your own mind but that of your classmates. I do not WANT to be suspicious of my students. I want them to be brilliant. I want to write in the margins of their papers comments like "how insightful" and "fascinating" and "what an original interpretation" and "this is very eloquent." I love it when I get to write that rare end-note after reading a paper where I tell a student that I've never thought of a text in this particular way before, or that I had always thought something, but that the student has opened my eyes to new ideas. I get all giddy when I get to ask a student for a clean copy of a particularly wonderful paper and permission to pass it on to other subsequent classes as an example.

And when a student kills that joy, that spirit of mutual discovery, that opportunity for the classroom to be a place in which teachers both convey information and learn from their students; when a student turns me from a facilitator into a policewoman, I become infuriated.

I have had incidents of plagiarism in the past year in everything from introductory survey courses for freshman to graduate seminars. With first-year-students, I am extremely stern, but I am also careful to pay close attention to the root causes of the problem: is the student overscheduled? Overwhelmed? Unsure how to quote sources properly? The last is pretty easy to spot because there are typically markers in the paper that suggest an effort to show that the ideas are not all the student's own, although there is a deplorable lack of quotation marks and page number references. That is an easy problem to solve and a teachable moment.

But when a student stands in my office and says he or she "did not mean to copy" something that is cut and pasted from Wikipedia in complete verbatim paragraphs, I get so angry that I start to shake. Such copying cannot be inadvertent. And to say to my face that it was only compounds the lie by insisting that a deliberate action of laziness, inconsiderateness, and stealing was somehow an accident. And if said assertion comes from a graduate student who has no excuse for not knowing better? Steam begins to pour out of my ears as we speak.

Apart from loosing the wrath that is MommyTime Indignant on such students (and failing them for the assignment), I do not know how to stem what seems to me to be a growing problem.

As students every year are more and more internet savvy, they seem more and more likely to turn to online sources for a quick fix. It's terrible that there are term-paper sites online where you can purchase papers--canned ones on popular novels, or, for more money, custom written ones with the requisite number of sources. But it's even more problematic that students have figured out that there is a wealth of information out there that is free and ripe for picking--and that they have no internal compass to help them see the vast difference between "reading up" on a topic (a skill I am already teaching my four-year-old) and passing off someone else's intellectual property as one's own.

My students are on average extremely hard-working, first generation to go to college, putting themselves through school types. The vast majority of them have a very clear idea of the value of an education and would never dream of plagiarizing a paper. They would give me a speech on how this was wasting their own money if I asked. But the ones who do plagiarize, a small-but- growing minority, don't tend to pay for papers (I think) because there is so much out there that is free. That, actually, makes it easier for me to catch plagiarism. If I google suspect phrases, almost always, the first 2-3 hits turns out to be the site from which they copied the text; whereas with a bought paper, I would have a harder time tracking down the original source.

Some of these online sites even allow you to indicate a writing level, so that the paper's style will not be suspiciously above that of the level of the course. But students who are willing to plagiarize tend not to realize that writers have styles and that if they drop a paragraph in here or there that reads as if it is publishable quality (because it was actually already published), I will notice the abrupt change in style from their writing.

Call me crazy, but I would so much rather read something slightly less eloquent that is the product of a student's own mind than read an article by a famous scholar (badly) passed off as student work.

I have had a few occasions of a particularly absurd incident in the online class I teach, where students copy things directly from my lecture notes into their papers or exams. As if I would not notice that the lectures that I wrote were being handed to me credited to being written by someone else! It takes guts to do something like that. Or a complete lack of logical functioning in the brain.

I am almost at my wits' end, though. What do I do about this? I write complex paper topics that require comparisons of texts, the turning in of drafts, and analyses of particular scenes, in an effort to ensure that there is no single source that would be copy-able that really answers the question. I have plagiarism statements with the university's policy clearly spelled out on my syllabi. Now I am starting to feel like at the beginning of every semester, I have to have The Talk with the entire class, complete with involuntary shaking of my body and quavering fury in my voice to make an impression. But that doesn't really seem like the way to meet a class on the first day and start things off in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and respectful discussion.

I know that this is a problem too, in Blogland, which is why I'm posting now. Some of you may have had experience with this. What would you do not just to address the problem after it happens (I have plenty of means at my disposal for that) but to help nip it in the bud before it starts? What I want is to receive fewer plagiarized papers in the first place, so that I can stop being suspicious every time something wonderfully written comes across my desk. I want to get back to that time -- not so long ago -- when I could revel in my students' successes instead of always having a niggling thought at the back of my mind, "What if this work is all a lie, and I just haven't found the original source yet?" That isn't fair to my students, and it's exhausting for me.

I signed up to be a teacher, not the police. I want my original job back.

Green Up Your Thumb, part 4

If you are lucky enough to have a sun-filled yard, then your choices about what to plant are almost endless in the flower department. But if you have lots of glorious old trees, well, your air conditioning bill is a whole lot lower in summer. And your flower beds? They may look a little sparse. After years of gardening in homes that had beds that were much more shaded than otherwise, though, I've slowly gathered a list of flowers and plants that thrive in the dappled sunlight available in a bed at the foot of a tree. Some of them are well-known shade-lovers; others are simply surprisingly versatile.

Do keep in mind that my list is coming from a garden that is in zone 5b (or 6a, depending on whom you ask) and has plenty of moisture. If you are in a radically different climate, you will need to do some research of your own to seek shade-lovers. But don't discount the plants I list here. Look them up first. Many gardening books and websites will identify perennials as "hardy in zones..." and list a range which tells you whether the plant will come back bigger and better every year in your area too.

Bleeding heart -- leaves begin reddish when plant sprouts, turning green as they unfold; flowers last weeks; plants double in size every year, becoming 2 feet high eventually; dies back completely to the ground in fall.

Pictured here is a single plant that I've been growing for about three years; it is about two feet high and three feet across now; tucked at its base you can see both of the following:

Sweet woodruff -- pretty, low (approx. 4" tall) spreading plant with tiny white flowers that bloom most of the summer; makes a nice, easily controllable cover under taller plants; spreads slowly; and

Forget-me-not -- clear, tiny blue flowers on plants about 8" tall; forms clumps; self-sows and will spread slowly.

Columbine -- delicate green leaves somewhat heart-shaped; plant is about 8-10" tall, with flower spikes nearly double that height; flowers can be pale pink or blue or purple (see left); may take some time to establish, but self-seeds and spreads like a weed once it gets going.

Huechera (coral bells) -- broad, dark reddish or purplish leaves with a ruffled edge; comes in many varieties ranging from so lightly reddish as to be streaked with green to so dark purple as to be nearly black; some prefer more sun than others; tall delicate stems sport tiny bell shaped flowers in white or light coral pink; flowers in mid- to late-summer (mine still haven't flowered this year, as you can see).

Astilbe -- clumps of dark green leaves with tall feathery flowers atop long stems; flowers can range from white through pink to deep burgundy; clumps grow larger each year but do not otherwise seem to spread.

Hosta / Plantain lilies -- the standard fall-back for shade gardens is the boring variegated hosta with its striped green and white leaves and medium purple flowers; I'm not knocking it; I have plenty in my garden; but it comes in so many more interesting varieties, with deeply ribbed dark green leaves and trumpet-shaped white flowers (Plantain lilies), or heavy silvery grey leaves with white flowers, or a variegated one that's green and yellow (see left); forms clumps that enlarge slowly but can get extremely big eventually; useful because the foliage is lovely and lasts till fall, even though flowers die back long before that; foliage also comes out much later than many plants, so you can put hosta near things that die back very early (like tulips or daffodils that bloom before the leaves are fully on the trees), and then as those early plants are dying back, the hosta will stretch out to cover those spaces.

Lily of the Valley -- really the most wonderful smelling plant ever; spreads by sending out runners from its roots; it will beautifully fill in sections under trees where little else can grow because the tree roots are close to the surface; it's ugly brown as it sl-o-o-w-ly dies back, though, so it's worth planting next to something else that will distract the eye from that process.

Vinca (periwinkle) -- a ground cover that is amazingly resilient, and can thrive in sun as well as shade; the first year you plant/transplant it, it won't spread much; the second year, you'll have to beat it back with a rake; but the good news is: unlike ivy, it won't climb brickwork or trees, and it has extremely shallow small roots, so you just have to prune its ends or pull gently to keep it where you want it

Ferns of all types -- another fall back for shady places; while the "Boston" fern is the most recognizable type, there are lots of different kinds that, like hosta, will allow you to paint with foliage in interesting ways; many ferns are attractive from June-September.

And the best thing about gardening in the shade? You're less likely to get a sunburn while doing it.

*****
For the rest of the Green Up Your Thumb series, see here:
Part 1: Planning
Part 2: Selecting Plants
Part 3: Laying out Flower Beds
Part 5: Maintenance (coming next)

The Rhythm of Days

I am not a person who likes a rigid schedule. It's not that I can't make it to meetings (though I don't love a day filled with them) or that I lose my calendar (it's on the fridge). It's that I like my activities to last as long as I have the attention span, and then I like to move on. Some days, that means I want to write for eight hours straight; other days, I'm lucky if I stay focused for 20 minutes before getting up for a snack, to do the laundry, wash the dog, or partake of any other distraction available. But I am also a person who gets much more done under a deadline, who works best when there are multiple things that need doing, who tends to fritter away time when there is nothing pressing going on. It is no coincidence, I think, that I have done more professional writing, and gotten more work published, since I had kids than I did before.

As I face the long weeks of summer, and the short days of daycare (two per week), I have to figure out how to get my own research and writing done. Although professors are technically "off" during the summer, what that means is that we don't have to go to committee meetings, meet with students weekly about their theses, or teach classes. Instead, we have to do research. Our jobs (and, for many of us, our career satisfaction) depend on spending time in libraries and archives, in coffee shops reading books, in comfy desk chairs taking notes and writing. Without the articles and books, we do not get tenure or promotions. Or academic respect.

In the seven weeks since the regular semester was over, I have taught two sections of an online course (extra work for extra pay = college funds for Son and Daughter), done a lot of gardening, frequented the gym, spent a delightful week with my brother's family, immersed myself in blogs I love to read, built a cardboard racecar and canoe, played countless games with the kids, and caught one huge fish. These have been useful, satisfying, and in many cases relaxing ways to spend my time, and I feel like I've gotten a good break from the burn-out that can result from the frenetic schedule of the regular academic year.

But I have done not one ounce of research and writing work. The work I adore. The work I need to do for so many reasons, including feeling intellectually satisfied with the balance of my life.

I have been thinking lately about the times in the past when I have been most productive. One was when I was pregnant with Daughter, and I never want to have a schedule that demanding again. I got a tremendous amount done, but when the semester was over (she was born during the last week of classes), all I wanted to do was sleep for three months to recover -- and that doesn't even count the tiredness of having a brand new baby. The other most productive time in my life was when I was studying for my qualifying exams in graduate school. I would wake up, have breakfast and make coffee, and sip and read all morning till I started feeling stir crazy. Then I would go for a run, shower, have lunch, and read all afternoon. Near dinnertime, I would hop on my bike for a spin down to the terrace on the lake to meet friends for a beer, or I would make some phone calls, or do something else social. (Keep in mind, I had probably not spoken a single word all day long.) After dinner: more reading until bedtime.

I think the reason I got so much done that summer (I read 30 novels in a month -- Victorian novels, none of which were shorter than 400 pages, and many of which were longer -- plus had a month of poetry and a month of prose reading to do) is that I had a rhythm but not a schedule. I had a long-term goal of what I needed to accomplish over the 3 months, and I had a calendar of what needed to happen weekly, as well as daily goals. But, honestly, I did what I wanted to. If I really couldn't stand to read anymore, which happened the day I quit reading Bleak House, then I would go hiking or roller blade around the lake on the bike trail, or do something completely un-thinky. If I couldn't focus, I would change tracks. But my days had a lovely rhythm: eat - read - physical activity - eat - read - social activity - eat - read - sleep. It was a nice pattern that worked for me because I had no kids, no boyfriend, no obligations except to study incredibly hard and pass the exams so that I could start writing my dissertation.

I have come to the conclusion that I need to recapture that goal of having an established rhythm for my days. I obviously can't have that particular pattern any more, but I think I could get into a rhythm that would work for me and for my kids. We need a little structure. It is too easy to fritter away time, whether online or procrastinating over household tasks. I don't want the summer to disappear in a haze of errands run and clothes folded and moments snatched to read blogs. I want some chunks of time devoted to writing, others for reading. I want to be fully present while doing projects with my kids, rather than thinking constantly "I still have to pay the bills and check email." It will take me a little time to figure out a plan, but I'm going to do it tonight and even write it down. It will be general, and have room for the improvisation that is such a vital part of living one's very best life, but it is my hope that it will become a predictable rhythm for the kids, who also seem to thrive when they know what is coming next. Something like this might work:

eat - read - physical activity - eat - rest(kids)/write(mama) - chores - playtime/projects - eat - read - sleep

One could do worse than a life organized this way. Do your days have a rhythm?

The Best New Thing Online

Today it's launched! The online magazine you'll want to bookmark, subscribe to, read, submit to, and nibble on every single day. (And finally, for those of you who have been wondering, an explanation for that button in my sidebar!)

Collecting the best, magazine-quality content from blogs you love and blogs you'll love to meet, Blog Nosh Magazine will publish 3-5 posts a day on a wide range of topics. Everything from gardening to parenting an autistic child to technology to cooking to business to politics will show up in Blog Nosh. In the channels of Blog Nosh, you'll find writing that's eloquent, hilarious, informative, heart-warming, and provocative from people whose interests mesh with yours and whose perspective you'll be glad to read.

We have a large group of editors, broken up into the different Channels that comprise our primary topics. Editors will choose content, approach writers for pieces, and put together short bios to let you know more about the bloggers whose work you're reading. As you read what gets posted on Blog Nosh, we hope you'll enjoy great content, get to know the tastes of different editors and look forward to their latest picks, and meet some new bloggers you'll be delighted to add to your blogroll.

We also hope you will get involved. Blog Nosh republishes the very best of your archived posts, selectively providing a mix of styles and topics. If I read your blog regularly, it's a good bet that at some point, I'll approach you to ask if you are interested in republishing one of your best posts. I am editing on the Family Channel, and I'm always on the lookout for knockout posts on all aspects of family life. But while Editors will actively seek out content we remember resonated with us when we first read it, we'll also consider posts you want to self nominate.

You can increase your exposure and traffic, and become part of this great community of bloggers who are featured in Blog Nosh. If you have a post you think might be appropriate, check out Blog Nosh. If it's a Family post, email me and tell me about it. If it better suits another channel, or you're not sure, check out the Editors' page and meet the other Editors. Email whomever seems most appropriate, and offer up your post. There's an FAQ page with all the details you'll need about how to self-nominate.

And whether or not you want to see your work republished in Blog Nosh Magazine, I hope you'll check it out. It's fun, thoughtful, smart, timely, entertaining. In short, it's the perfect little nibble to go with your morning coffee. * nom nom nom nom * As Daugher says, "mmmm...BE-licious."

Do You Have "Mom Hair"?

My sister-in-law has hair that is the stuff of which fairy tales were made. Thick and curly, it is many shades of blond – from pale straw, to golden honey, to wheaten. In the sun, it catches the light and looks almost like a halo. She has always had lovely hair, with its golden curls framing her face, but she has been letting it grow, and now it is waist-length. Although for convenience she often wears it up in complex twists and braids, when she lets it down the other day, I found myself catching my breath. I always thought the pre-Raphaelite painters were exaggerating.

Now I know better.


And this visit has got me thinking about hair. I'd been feeling rather dissatisfied by my own before she arrived. Mine is long (not as long as hers, though below my shoulder blades) and curly (though not as tightly curly as hers) and many shades of brown. I've gotten to the point too long past my last haircut where I just pull it up into a ponytail, or twist it up somehow, and ignore it. In short, I've been feeling like I have "mom hair" -- that attractively mussed twist on the back of my head that says to all the world "I have preschoolers and you're lucky I showered today; please don't expect a blow-out too."

I've been thinking I should cut it off pretty substantially, to my shoulders or so, just to give it some sense of style. But now that I see my sister-in-law's gorgeous very long hair, I wonder if it's possible for me to keep it long without inevitably looking too "Mom" about it.

So here's my question for you: how long do you find it easiest to keep your hair? How do you feel most attractive? What is the longest your hair can be without turning into "Mom" hair? And what should I do with mine that will be both easy to care for and not super-short?

Summertime, and the Livin' is Easy

It doesn't take much to have a good time when you have a house full of kids.

Over the weekend, we had a lot of fun getting muddy

hanging around in trees

and picking wildflowers.

Auntie very ingeniously packed costumes amongst the luggage, so this morning the boys have been playing superheroes (both have red capes, courtesy of Nana), and cowboys, and fire-fighters. Soon we're off for a fishing expedition. I'm not sure how poles with real hooks will work out with four little ones in the vicinity...but it should be an interesting experiment. If nothing else, we'll make some lasting memories.

Oh, Those Little Faces

I've always loved candid photos of kids. I used to be able to get good shots with my old, manual-everything, film camera. But who can afford to take 100 pictures in film these days, then wait for developing, only to find out there are only two usable ones in the batch? Our point- and-shoot digital was getting me down because the lag time in focusing meant I was missing everything I wanted to capture. And so, finally, I got a d-SLR camera in April, and I've been taking hundreds of pictures a week since, trying to learn the ropes.

In this vein, OHmommy has a little challenge going on over at Classy Chaos. To help us all become better photographers, the first task she has set is to take pictures of our kids' heads, preferably from above. Here are my efforts. The first is a shot I took since she issued the challenge; the second I took last week, but it's by far the best recent head shot of Son, so I'm including it too.

Watching Robins

Backyard Water Day

If you want to try it yourself, it's a great experiment. Put up your photos, and be sure to link up on OHmommy's Mr. Linky so she can see them too.

Cousins Rock

My brother, his wife, and their kids arrived last night. Son spent the whole day yesterday wistfully drifting around the house, waiting for his cowboy- and pirate-loving four-year-old boy cousin to arrive. (The Little Sister, he asserted, could play with Daughter.) "Will they be here soon?" "When are they coming?" At dinner he looked up from his plate, fork suspended in mid-air before his first bite, and said plaintively "But Cousin isn't here yet!" I promised they would arrive before bedtime.

When the knock finally came, Son ran shrieking through the house, "Cousin! Cousin! Cousin! Cousin!" to answer the door. They were instant friends, although they haven't seen each other in more than a year. Which, if you're four, is a quarter of your life, so we might have expected a little hesitation. But no. Immediate pals. They are inseparable.

At bedtime, I was reading stories to the two boys, one snuggled under the covers on either side of me, when they both laughed uproariously at something having to do with a small duck afraid to learn to swim. Son stopped mid-laugh, looked adoringly at his still-giggling cousin, and said earnestly, "I wish you could stay here FOREVER."

This is going to be a fun week.

Who Knew A Martini Could Look This Good?

Ahhh... Judith Shakespeare, that's who. If you're reading this in a reader, click on through to see the magic she's wrought. The whole place looks so wonderful that it makes me want to throw a martini party and invite everyone I know. As soon as I figure out how to send you a chocolate martini over the internet, I'll do it. In the meantime, here's to the magic of JudithShakes Designs and the oh-so-elegant new digs here at Mommy's Martini. Cheers!

Thank you Judith. A thousand thousand times!!

Our House Was a Very Very Very Fine House...

Lately I look around at all the gas guzzling cars that fill the great state of Michigan, and contemplate a summer of high energy costs, and try to think about all the things that I personally might do to help the planet out just a wee bit. Along these lines, it occurred to me the other day that one very nice way to save water would be to use the laundry water on my flower beds. I will admit, this was not entirely my own brilliant idea. I think I read it somewhere. Or heard the suggestion on the radio. Or dreamed it. I'm not sure. But here's the thing: it IS genius. I do, on average, ten loads of laundry a week on the "super-mega-large load" setting. I don't know how many gallons the washer takes to fill, but if you figure a tubfull for washing, another for rinsing, and that's 20 laundry tubs of water a week. That could sustain a whole lot of petunias.

It wouldn't be too difficult, either. My washer doesn't even drain into any permanent plumbing. It's got one of those old-fashioned black tubes that snakes out the back of the washer and hangs in the laundry tub into which it spits its contents. Now I'm wondering: could I rig up some kind of flexible hose to the end of that drain-pipe, and then poke the hose out the laundry room window, and attach a sprayer on the end, and water the flower beds at the end of every rinse cycle?

To be sure, this would be a little bit of a pain in the neck. It's hard enough to remember to put the laundry promptly into the dryer so that it doesn't get that old-gym-bag smell and have to be re-washed. So I can imagine that it might become somewhat inconvenient to have to run outside every time I hear a spin cycle start so that I can give the geraniums a drink before the pipe backs up and sprays water all over the inside of my laundry room...

I'll admit, there are a few kinks to work out in the plan. But isn't it a great idea?

And thinking of this excellent method of saving water (well, at least of recycling it; no one could accuse me of wasting much water on my garden, which I tend to leave to fend for itself against the heat of July, but there's really no reason to let so much useful water go to waste, now is there?)...anyway, thinking about all of this got me to thinking about the house we used to live in. Perhaps the loveliest house I will ever own in my life.

It was an old farmhouse, built in 1927. White clapboards on the outside, a Craftsman bungalow style with a porch across the whole front and a large double dormer on the second floor to create headroom for the main bedroom. Inside, oak floors gleamed from decades of polishing, and 10" wide wood trim glowed along the baseboards, the color of rich dark honey.

The house had plenty of quirks.
* Only one full bathroom, and that with a tub that stretched along the short wall under the eaves, so that you couldn't install a regular shower even if you wanted to, because you had to tilt your head to stand upright under the sloping ceiling.
* A second 1/4 bath downstairs. 1/4 rather than 1/2 because it was only a toilet, plunked unceremoniously into the center of what had once been the closet under the stairs. No sink. For that you had to go to the kitchen.
* A door to the backyard direct from the landing on the staircase to the basement, so that from the kitchen, you had to go partway down the basement stairs to let the dog in and out. (The benefit of this, however, was that Dog learned to knock on the screen door to be let in. Very handy. And so polite.)
* A separate key to unlock the door to every single room in the house. I spent a pleasant hour in the first week we moved in, walking from room to room with the box of old-fashioned keys, trying them in every lock, and leaving them where they belonged: one each for kitchen, study, main bedroom, bathroom, 1/4 bath, guest bedroom, main house door, and each of three closets. When I was done, I was left with one keyless closet and several leftover keys. Very mysterious.
* Plaster walls that were filled with the trunks of sapling trees for added insulation. (We know this because when we tried to install a wall-mounted microwave, the stud finder gizmo was telling us that the whole wall was studs, and we thought "stupid, cheap stud finder gizmo" until we started drilling into the wall and found it was filled with trees.)
* Fabulously bizarre pseudo-Chinese wallpaper from the 1920s on one dining room wall under the old-lady pink-and-silver cabbage roses we chose to remove when we first moved in.

The house had only 1400 square feet, but every inch of it was useable space. Large rooms opened directly into one another with none of the shenanigans of intervening hallways. It was on an acre and surrounded by 75-foot-tall maple trees, so that there were only a very few days in midsummer when we had to turn on the window air conditioners. It did have a railroad track running across the back edge of the property, used regularly by high-speed freight trains whose rumbling literally made the walls murmur and drowned out the sound of the television or a phone conversation. Details.

It also -- and lo! suddenly there was a segue! -- had two giant cisterns in the basement. Enormous rectangles of concrete, nearly 6 feet deep, these were originally designed as holding tanks for a system that caught rainwater runoff from the roof. There was even a simple motorized pump attached to a hose designed to allow you to use this water on your garden.

And this connection between today's need to be better to our planet and yesterday's house points out something that strikes me as an important fact. As we have "advanced" technologically, we have sadly forgotten things our great-grandparents knew were important. That conserving water was a good idea. That planting trees could keep a house cool. That energy (and vegetables) could be saved by centralizing a water source for washing and gardening. Those people back before air-conditioning and dishwashers and cell phones and the internet knew a thing or two more than we do about being nice to Mother Earth. These are lessons we would do well to recall.

If for no other reason than recalling them might keep me from having to run like a maniac in my pajamas while chewing a bite of waffle in order to water the garden when the spin cycle started. If only the house I lived in now had a cistern, I could just let that laundry water collect and then mosey on outside at my leisure to do right by the flowers once breakfast was over. What a wonderful new old new idea.

Swearing and "Screaming Like a Girl": Welcome to Preschool

Son has a new swear word. It's, get ready for it....

ESTHER!

That's right. Esther. As in the name. As in lovely bathing beauty film star of the 1940s and 50s, which might be the last time Esther was used as a name for an actual living child. (Esther Williams Photo Credit)

Son exclaimed this when the wing fell off his new motorcycle (yes, you read that correctly; more on that another day), "Oh, Esther!" Of course, I had to jump on the swear and ask him what he'd just said. But mostly because his pronunciation is "eF-ter," and I was more than a little concerned about what he might be trying to say. Here's the conversation that ensued:

Me: What did you say, honey?

Son: Oh, eF-ter!

Me: Where did you hear that word?

Son: [nonchalantly] It's Ethan's new name. [note: he pronounces Ethan ee-Fan, so I began to relax over what eF-ter might mean]

Me: [moving on to the next area of concern] Why is that Ethan's new name?

Son: [matter-of-factly] Because he screams like a girl.

We go out to the car, me mulling this over--on the one hand, reassured that my son's swear word is simply an old-fashioned girl's name, and on the other hand, not at all liking the notion that the kids at school have switched Ethan's name to Esther on the grounds that he "screams like a girl." I buckle the kids into their seats, contemplating what sort of discussion we need to have about gender stereotyping and ridicule and...my reverie pulls up short as I think, "Where the heck did those kids even HEAR the name Esther, let alone think to use that as the female version of Ethan?" So I ask.

Me: Where did you hear that name?

Son: From Miss Classy and Miss Ridicule. [not their real names] Ethan was screaming, and they said, "Ethan if you don't stop screaming like a girl, we're going to have to change your name to Esther." And then Son giggled.

Me: [thinking: %*&@$%#$^&*)!] saying: Oh, your teachers said it. Well...

And then I was silent. Stunned silent. I know, we've come a long way from the days when teachers used rulers across the backs of little hands to retain order, when Dunce caps were de rigeur for instilling a stronger work ethic in kids who weren't getting their lessons properly, when ridicule of all sorts was considered character building and a necessary part of education. And I know some people would argue that we have gotten to the point in education where the kids are ruling the classrooms and helicopter parents are making it impossible for teachers to accomplish anything productive because every single kid must be made to feel special at every single moment of the day.

But, really, am I being annoyingly politically correct when I feel a sense of outrage that a teacher actually told a FOUR year old in a preschool class that he was "screaming like a girl" and that if he didn't stop, they would have to change his name to a girl's name? The feminist in me is outraged: at his preschool, Son is learning that boys must be tough, only girls scream, and to "scream like a girl" is a sign of weakness that must be further insulted by changing one's name to a girl's name. The teacher in me is horrified: a teachable moment about indoor/outdoor voices or good ways to express extreme emotions becomes a moment of mockery on the basis of gender stereotypes. The parent in me is mortified: my child thinks it is funny to insult another child, and thinks that acting "like a girl" is the biggest insult available.

I don't know what to do. I don't want to be one of those helicopter parents who tells teachers how to run their classrooms. On the other hand, I work every single day at home to fight gender stereotypes, and I find the work increasingly harder as Son begins to adopt the notion that colors, toy preferences, appropriate playmates, and even ideas should be categorized by gender. And then here are his teachers blatantly supporting such stereotypes with a remark that clearly did not go unnoticed in the playground pecking order. Not to mention supporting the more general principle that ridicule is an appropriate response to any behavior, a notion that I find repellent for so many reasons. Kids can be cruel enough as it is without the teachers adding to the "merry-making"at one child's expense.

I don't know if I should say something to them (and if so, what exactly?). I plan to sit down with Son and explain to him why we do not say such things, even if other people do. He already understands that in different houses, people have different rules, that some mommies allow what I do not, and the reverse, so I think that we can have this conversation productively. But as for Miss Classy and Miss Ridicule? What would you do?

How Far Would You Go for Your Children?

In Virginia Woolf's magnificent 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay is the mother of eight children, ranging in age from 17 to 6, and she spends her life thinking and working towards the happiness of others. She is a soothing, sociable, lovely mother, an indulgent wife, a thoughtful neighbor. She has aspirations to better the dairy system and improve the delivery of less expensive and more healthful milk -- but when she even alludes to these aloud, her whole family laughs at her over the dinner table. It is not intended (by them) to be the cruel laughter of derision, but rather the silvery tinkling laughter of those sharing a joke at no one's expense. But it nonetheless feels unbearably cruel to a reader who by this point in the novel understands Mrs. Ramsay's life of giving and giving and giving and sympathizes with her interest in doing something intellectually challenging. Of course, to the merry party gathered around her dinner table in 1927, there is nothing better she could possibly choose to do than manage such a glorious meal even on the wilds of the Scottish coast in their summer vacation home.

At one point, Mrs. Ramsay reflects on the value of the occasional moments she has to herself, which she characterizes as her time,

To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

I find this image incredibly powerful as a way to describe the life of a woman who lives almost exclusively for others: when she is alone, she shrinks to a small bit of darkness that no one else can see -- hiding, as it were, the very essence of her being from prying eyes by way of protecting that tiny scrap of self from being absorbed as well in the demands of "all the being and the doing."

Julie Pippert asks, in her query for the week, to what limits one would go for one's children. And I have to answer: apart from matters of life or death, I would stop well short of becoming Mrs. Ramsay. Although it may go without saying, I will say anyway that if life or health depended upon it, I would do anything for my children -- fight off a bear with my camera, travel halfway around the world to consult a doctor, sell all my stuff, donate a kidney, you name it.

On the other hand, when it comes to the day-to-day, to the wants as opposed to the needs, I draw the line of self-sacrifice somewhat closer. Because my children are still very young (4 and 2), and therefore prone to disaster, poor judgment, and all the harms that may befall children who cannot read or (in the case of Daughter) cannot even speak fluently, I do spend a tremendous amount of time watching out for them. I neglect working on my book to teach Son how to sew. (On Monday, he hand-stitched the seams on a cowboy vest for his teddy.) I neglect to put on make-up or dry my hair most mornings in favor of changing diapers or making breakfast. I choose dinner menus on the basis of least common denominators from whatever sliver of Venn diagram includes both their preschool tastes and my requirement that we all eat vegetables. I plan my daily schedule around naptimes and mealtimes and known melt-down triggers.

But I do not plan to do this forever.

I want my children to be independent, well-rounded, thinking creatures who can fend off their own looming boredom. I want them to be under-scheduled enough that they actually get bored occasionally. I want them to learn that intellectual curiosity is the key to a fascinating world -- and I want them to know how to look stuff up to find answers.

I understand that I will have to teach them these things. I take it as my job to guide them towards these skills, to foster their growth, to support them when they struggle. But, in fact, I do not think it is my job to keep them from failing at something. No one can be the fastest, smartest, mathest, writingest, buildingest, and coolest every single minute of the day. And that's an important lesson to learn too.

Even more, I think, it is important to learn that we are a family. And being a family means that we share many things -- laughter, vacations, a love of meatballs-and-macaroni-and-cheese, and responsibilities to each other. We owe each other a little private time every day. I must do the best I can to raise thoughtful, considerate, smart kids with reasonably good judgment, and then I must stand back and be willing to let them make some mistakes and learn something from them. They must let me help, guide and teach them, and they must let me stand back. As much as I have an obligation to help them learn, being part of a family means that as they get older and more capable of some independence, they will have an obligation to let me have some time for myself as well.

I think it is vitally important that they understand that Mama has needs too. Not that I will expect them to take over what are justifiably a parent's jobs at home, but that I will expect them to respect my own ambitions, my time, my dreams, just as I respect theirs. It will be a struggle, I can already see, to help them learn that they do not need me in the same room as them every single minute of the day, that I do not need to serve as a witness or bear affirmation to every successfully cooked air omelette. But I will stick to my feeling that they must learn this.

Because I see in Mrs. Ramsay's fate the net result of never teaching one's children the value of oneself as an individual. When, a hundred or so pages into the novel, after the summer is over and the house is boarded up, we learn the following (yes, the original is enclosed in [ ]), it is an incredible shock:

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

Her death is recorded as a dependent clause stuck in the middle of a parenthetic sentence whose subject is her husband. In short, Mrs. Ramsay has shrunk to such an infinitesimal wedge-shaped core of darkness that she has disappeared, and the only reason anyone even notices she is gone is that she is not there to catch them when they fall.

I do not need to be famous or wealthy, but I do need to be Somebody. A whole person. An individual. I need my children to need me, to love me, and to see the strength in standing next to me rather than attached to me. That will not happen for some years, I expect, as they slowly grow to a point where alone-time becomes valuable and important for them as well. But it is my hope that they will see through my example that while accolades may come and go, races may be won or lost, a Self is the one thing no one can take from you. Unless you allow that to happen. I do not want them ever to allow that to happen to themselves. And so I think I must show them how I can love them with my whole heart and at the same time not allow mothering to so consume me that I allow my own Self to disappear. I do not know exactly where I will draw the line in future, but I do know that wherever that line is, there will be a brightness, not a darkness, that demarcates it.

Back When Cartoons Were for Saturday Mornings (and vice versa)

I'd like to talk about cartoons. I'll have plenty to say in a moment about the hideously "zany" antics of the geometric-headed shout-talkers that pass for cartoon children on most channels these days. But I want to start with the cartoons of my youth. I remember as a child getting off the bus and racing home for what we all called our "three o'clock snack." Occasionally, it was warm peanut butter cookies spread out on grocery bags that had been cut open to lay flat on every horizontal surface in the kitchen. Most often, what I recall was cinnamon graham crackers spread with strawberry jam. Oh, how I loved them. (I don't know that you could pay me to savor that combination now, but that's neither here nor there.)

On weekdays, we would take our snacks and retire to the family room to watch TV, which was most often Mr. Ed (everybody now: "a horse is a horse, of course, of course, but no one can talk to a horse, of course, that is, of course, unless the horse, is the faa-aaa-aaamous Mr. Ed") and Scooby Doo. We loved the mysteries The Gang encountered. And for reasons I cannot quite understand, we were always mystified -- even though the answer is always the carnival owner dressed up as a ___ [fill in the blank] using glow-in-the-dark paint.

We weren't allowed to watch TV all afternoon on school days, though, and so after an hour, we would lose ourselves in books or other games. But on Saturdays, well... Saturday morning cartoons were a ritual. This was before cartoons were on 24/7 on multiple channels. This was back when a WHOLE morning of cartoons was a luxury one awaited all week with nearly the same anticipation as a birthday, only gratifyingly more often. We were up early, and we would run into the family room and turn on the giant console TV (really, the box was bigger than the screen), and throw ourselves into our favorites:

Baggy Pants and the Nitwits
Hong Kong Phooey
Super Friends
Loony Tunes

We did dances to their theme music. We knew all the lyrics. We reveled in their plot lines. And when cartoons were over for the morning, we rehashed what we had seen. I don't recall actually playing that we were these characters, though, and I think this point is important, as you'll see in a minute.

One thing that amazes me, as I think back to these cartoons, is their sheer inanity. You will find no "real world" problem solving here. No playground crises navigated successfully, no modeling of positive behaviors, certainly no moral dilemmas about homework or friendship, no resolutions about truth-telling or sharing, no messages about those less fortunate, no enriching lessons of any kind, least of all foreign languages (witness the "chicka chung chicka chung chicka chicka chicka chung" portion of Hong Kong Phooey's theme song; seriously, if you're too young to remember this: the lyrics actually said that).

Instead, we spent hours watching an anthropomorphic dog, who worked as a janitor in a police station, jump into a filing cabinet at the first sign of crisis and emerge as his alter-Super-ego, the kung fu master Hong Kong Phooey. We laughed and laughed and laughed as Wile E. Coyote dynamited, stabbed, and flattened with an anvil himself because the Road Runner was too smart for his traps. Ditto the "poor putty tat" Sylvester who could not outwit Tweety to save his life. We believed that Wonder Woman flew an invisible plane, and we wanted a magic ring that would enable the three of us to be the Wonder Twins so that our power could "ACTIVATE! form of..." anything we wanted.

I can recall absolutely nothing about Baggy Pants and the Nitwits except a scrap of the theme music, so I had to look this one up (everything else comes straight from my memory as if I'd watched it yesterday). Apparently Baggy Pants was a 10-15 minute silent cartoon -- no talking, no laugh track, nothing -- in which a cat appropriated Charlie Chaplin's clothes and gags. Bizarre, right? Then, get this: the Nitwits half of this 30-minute show was based on a sketch from Laugh In where some homely woman gets hit on every episode by a old guy and then bonks him on the head with her purse. Except in the Nitwits, they were crime fighters. Obviously. That's so much more kid appropriate.

And now we come to the point of this rambling animated roll down memory lane: has anyone else noticed how offensive kids' shows have become in the process of becoming more "kid friendly" these days? I don't mean offensive to one's politics or social standards. I think it's pretty clear nothing beats Hong Kong Phooey for racial insensitivity, for example. I mean offensive to one's sensibilities, aesthetic and otherwise, and basic human being-ness. The cartoons on Noggin generally aside, most cartoons for kids seem to me to be characterized by the three v's: volume, violence, and vigor. Everything happens loud, fast, and with a maximum of crashing and burning.

And unlike the stylized violence of Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester, and Marvin the Martian, things actually die fiery deaths in kids' cartoons these days. Transformers and other robots shoot to kill. And shows without death and fire still have a kind of manic violence to their movements that I find frightening: kids shriek past one another at warp speed cackling with evil laughter. Although no one can deny that Loony Tunes cartoons are incredibly violent, the violence in today's cartoons seems to me to be so much more insidious, in large part because it is glorified rather than ridiculed. Violence made Elmer Fudd ridiculous. It makes Transformers powerful. That is a substantial shift in message that should not be ignored.

Even in many shows with no death and violence, I find there is no time to process anything: it's just one electrified image after another. Nothing is beautiful. Precious little is slow. Not one iota is subtle. Can you imagine a cartoon succeeding these days with no sounds?! My nerves feel all jangly after just a moment of these shows, which happens only occasionally as we are channel surfing. What must it do to dull the senses if one watches even an hour of such programming a day?

Perhaps most importantly, kids are the protagonists in many of these shows. Granted, most of the kids look like a speeded up version of a Picasso painting -- all hard angles and blue hair -- but nonetheless, they are recognizably kids, in school, facing kid dilemmas. (Well, kid dilemmas on speed, most of the time.) In all the cartoons I grew up watching, I can't think of a single character who was an elementary school kid. The Scooby Doo gang drove their own van, you may recall. Bad Guys and rescuing heroes were either grown-ups or talking animals -- neither of which were much close to our states of life. Perhaps, had I grown up with two brothers instead of two sisters, we would have tried to drop anvils on each other's heads from high places. But somehow, I don't think so. Whereas my son, if he sees even five minutes of one of the cartoons that runs on the Cartoon Network or any of the other verboten channels in our house, is a violent mess for an hour afterwards. And I think it's because so much of what happens contains child characters who are easier to want to emulate than are crazy coyotes.

Even Dora is not immune to this criticism. Okay, she's cute and multicultural and has good manners and can read a map, but SHE. SHOUTS. EVERYTHING. And SO. DO. MY. KIDS. when they are done watching her show.

I'm not going to go all "TV is evil" on you here. Nor all "things were better back in my day when we had to walk to school everyday in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways." I just want to put it out there that I think there is much to be said for sensibility, aesthetics, and media that gives a brain a moment to think. Quiet every once in a while. Dialogue that one actually has to listen to in order to understand the plot line. Musical interludes, with no talking at all, that do not also contain the sound of gunfire.

The obvious solutions are not to watch TV, or to watch extremely selectively (again, Noggin gets high praise for most shows), which we do in our house. But I have to wax nostalgic a little for those supremely weird cartoons of my youth that contained not a single manic kid and never set my nerves a-jangling.

And now it's your turn. What do you remember about the cartoons you once watched? How would you compare them to the ones today?

Home on the Range

Cowboy Tuff Leader named himself. But no one was going to argue with his name. He was, after all, the toughest cowboy in the Lower Peninsula. His favorite color was "cowboy orange." And even though he was tough, if you didn't know that there was such a color, or exactly what shade of orange it was, he would explain patiently to you that it was "as orange as the color of a cowboy's letters." He was nothing if not a deep and philosophical tough cowboy.

One day, Cowboy Tuff decided that, like all good cowboys, he needed a slingshot. And, of course, he needed a container to hold his ammunition. So he appropriated his Little Sister's sippy cup (he was a broad-minded cowboy who didn't condescend to critiquing useful tools just because they might seem anachronistic), filled it with wads of paper, and took to the range to defeat the notorious Bad Guys. Within moments, he had the Bad Guys in his sights and the technique perfected.

Despite the lengthening shadows and glare of the setting sun, they didn't stand a chance against his mighty slingshot prowess.

READY...


AIM...


FIRE!

Celebratory dancing is of course a requisite part of any Cowboy's repertoire, especially after having defeated particularly BAD Bad guys. This is actually a tremendously tough skill to master, and not one that should be attempted lightly or by amateur cowboys. It involves coordination of many body parts, as well as facility with the nuances of music only discernible within one's own head. Cowboy Tuff wants you to know: You should not try this at home unless you have properly stowed both slingshot and ammunition first.

Fortunately for the less skilled on the range, Cowboy Tuff offers tutorials. They are free, and only require that you pay close attention to extensive monologues.

And stand back just a bit to make room for the talking hands. Which are, of course, the artistic side of tuff. Even cowboys need a little yin with their yang.

It's Official: I'm a Geek

Many many thanks to those of you who voted in the recent elections over at An Island Life, and to the lovely Kailani for dreaming up this little venture. Despite competition from many brains I would certainly characterize as bigger than mine, somehow Mommy's Martini has walked away with the prize for Brainiest! Whee! I probably should come up with something much more dignified to write than "Whee!" but right now I'm up to my eyeballs in kids with marbles and little toy crowns, so you'll have to bear with me.

I hope you all have great weekends with the fathers, grandfathers and significant others of your choice. As for me, I plan on spending a lot of time in the swimming pool. Wracking my brains trying to figure out how to post hilarious pictures of Son in a cowboy outfit in a way that seems even remotely intelligent. :) Happy Father's Day (tomorrow) -- and see you Monday!

Good Porches Make Good Neighbors

One of my most vivid childhood memories is sitting in the dark, on the screened-in porch of my next-door-neighbor's house, and listening to the grown-ups talking. In the moist, heavy heat of a Georgia summer, the little ceiling fan on the porch would force a breeze, and the crickets would begin to chirp as night fell. The puffs of wind beyond the screens carried the faint scent of magnolia blossoms, and the asphalt twinkled with embedded sparkles in the pools of golden streetlamp light where hard-shelled Junebugs gathered. There was no light on the porch, so as to avoid attracting insects, and as the darkness gathered closer and enclosed our little room, I felt cocooned in an almost magical place.

We lived in a house on a horseshoe shaped block of homes that had been built for returning GIs after WWII. Every single house on our street had the same front bathroom (what had once been the only bathroom), with the identical pattern of black-and-white tile on the floor and walls. You know the pattern; it's very like the "retro" one you can buy at big box home DIY stores now, except there is something different, a bit glossier, and better, about the original. We all had the original.

These were small houses -- two front rooms, a kitchen, bath, two bedrooms -- that had been added onto over time so that by the time we lived there in the early 1980s, they all had a slightly different footprint. Except for three things: that central black-and-white bathroom, the wide front stoop, and the porch. Some houses (like ours) had enclosed the porch. But not next door.

The people next door were about 10 years older than our grandparents. Although we were taught to call the parents of most of our school friends Mr. and Mrs. Lastname, these grandparently souls next door were known simply at Teta (pronounced tee-tuh) and John. "Teta" was the lisping toddler pronunciation of her real name, Teresa. And as so many of the children on the street had grown up thinking of her as their local grandmother, they had stuck to calling her Teta even when they could speak better.

I don't remember talking much myself on her porch. At least, not after the darkness settled in. On summer nights, between the ages of about 11 and 14, I had few options for how to spend my time once the dinner dishes were done: read, play kick-the-can with the kids on the block, babysit for $1 an hour, or go sit on Teta's porch. We tended to call our games over once it got really dark; sometimes we would stay out talking till our parents called us in; sometimes the party would break up earlier. On any night with nothing else pressing going on, I would go to Teta's house before it got quite dark -- strategically early enough to get my favorite chair, a low wooden rocker.

We would talk, and she would tell me stories of her childhood growing up in Greenwood, Mississippi in the early 1920s. She had 10 (or 7?) brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom was called Hattie. Poor little Hattie was always getting into scrapes -- dared to swing on the trapeze they'd rigged in the attic, then left hanging there, stuck half upside down, while the rest of them trooped on to the next activity. I don't actually recall many of the specific stories she told, though I do recall her voice, the soft slight accent on some words, the exclamation of surprise that stood for any occasion that one might need a swear word, "Well, GAR-den SEED!" And I recall that as it got darker, Teta's porch door would squeak slightly when a neighbor opened it, then bang smartly shut thanks to its spring, while someone new settled down into a chair for a chat. Sometimes it was gardening. Or children. Or I don't know what else. I would sit in my corner in the dark and listen, loving the stories, the ritual, the sound of the door welcoming each new visitor with a wooden smack that reassuringly promised to keep out the bugs. I know that the woodwork holding the screens taut was painted white. I know that we (for I was not the only girl hunkered down there on the porch, though in my mind's eye, I am the one there most frequently) were occasionally allowed, if we called our mothers to ask permission first, to drink an ice-cold "co-cola" from a little glass bottle. I know that most women brought their own large tumblers filled with iced tea as they sauntered over to Teta's for a chat.

In my memory, there were only ever women on her porch. John took the little terrier, Barney, for a walk every evening, and saluted the talking ladies with a wave and a nod as he exited the house, but otherwise, we never saw him. Or any other husband or father that I recall.

This screened porch was a woman's sanctuary. A place to relax, tell stories, laugh, reminisce, soothe heartache, talk about the neighbors, plan parties. A place to connect.

In retrospect, I see that the magic I felt when I sat in that rocker sipping my drink was the simple magic of being part of a community. I knew everyone on the street, knew my way to their fridges and bathrooms, knew the best hiding spots in their yards, knew the names of their parents and the teachers of their kids. I knew whose door had won the decorating contest at Christmas and whose had been kicked at by "The Prowler." I knew the names and ages of every single one of the 30 odd kids who lived "around the block."

And I knew, when I sat in my favorite rocker on Teta's porch, that I would hear something that I did not already know. Something that I would be glad to know. Whether it was useful or merely funny, a curiosity or a necessity, I would learn something new every single night on her porch, at the same time that I was learning something very very old--the power of community.

As it turns summer here in Michigan, I miss those days immensely. Don't get me wrong; I have some dear and lovely friends who live both near and far, and I am beginning to knit myself into a new community online too. I can call my friends, and make lunch dates, and email, and have an occasional girls' night out. What I am missing is not love or the intimacy of good friends. What I miss is neighborliness. Having lived in my house for five years this summer, I can only tell you the names of families in four houses on my street. No one has a screened-in porch, much less an open door policy where neighbors just wander over, drinks in hand, and pull up a chair without an invitation. For on Teta's porch, an invitation would have been extended only to a stranger. The guest of a neighbor, for example, would have been politely offered the best chair (the big wooden rocker) as well as some sweet tea. Everyone else just pulled open the door and sat on what was available. The rules were simple: if Teta wasn't home, the door was latched; if she was, you came in, and you didn't expect her to serve you anything except some delightful talk.

Perhaps there are still neighborhoods like this. I like to think there are. I like to think that somewhere adolescent girls are knitting themselves into the fabric of womanhood through the simple power of presence and talking. Perhaps I am over romanticizing. But I do wish that my own daughter could grow up secure in the sanctity of the screened-in porch, surrounded by stories of love and work, sun-tea making and gardening, childhood and milestones, until the nights wove themselves together into a tapestry of shared experience.

A Path Worth Taking

About a month ago, there appeared on a roadside near me, several dozen of those tall brown paper bags made for disposing of yard waste. They were located at the bottom of a steep hill on the side of an otherwise very busy road that is both thoroughfare and entrance to a number of subdivisions. I didn’t think much of the bags – except that there were an awful lot of them even given that it was Spring cleanup time. But then after bag pickup day, I noticed a wood chip path leading up the hill and into the trees. And a week or two after that, a simple, lovely sage green sign appeared at the bottom of the hill proclaiming…a cemetery.

Being a particularly nosy curious sort, I of course had to venture over there with my camera. After all, if you discovered that there was a cemetery just a few blocks from your house, and up a short steep path into the woods, wouldn’t you want to check it out? Especially if, as the quiet sign explained clearly, it was “Long-Lost Cemetery. Established 1826.”

I arrived just as a pickup truck was parking on the shoulder of the road, a pickup that contained the parents of the high school boy who had chosen this as his Eagle Scout project. Somehow, I know not how, he had learned of this long-abandoned cemetery, the first burying ground our town ever had, and had determined to clean up the overgrown hillside and reestablish some sense of respectful marking for the souls interred there. He got over 100 volunteers to help him clear dozens of scrub trees, weeds, dead underbrush, stumps, and even some construction trash; he got a local branch of a big box store to donate trucks and wood chips to create the lovely pathways they constructed. He and his team not only cleared away decades of debris; they created a veritable sanctuary.

In. One. Day.

There are very few of the original tombstones left here now. Some, apparently, were taken by teenage vandals; some have disappeared to erosion and time. Most of the remains of those once interred here were moved to the still-functioning large local cemetery in 1956. Of the 49 people originally buried here between 1826 and 1886, it is unknown to me how many actually remain. It is certainly obvious that the tombstones no longer rest in their original spots – as this nonsensical arrangement of headstone supports makes clear.


But out of respect for the spot and the dead who may remain, the boy who dreamed up this project was careful not to have moved any of the stones, which all lie, or lean, or stand precisely where they were found. He was also sensitive, as the footer for this stone shows, to the value of the plants that were here…retaining all the gorgeous lily of the valley that clusters in fragrant protection around the crumbling markers. In fact, the plants that you see stretching in enormous swaths around the paths and under the trees in the photo above are all lily of the valley. And throughout the grounds, I spotted astilbe, and vinca, and iris, and other reminders that once, this was a tended place.

He installed a bench for sitting and contemplating, and had I not been a little self-conscious about seeming to gawk in front of his parents, I would have sat there myself for a good long while. It is the sort of place that invites solitude and quiet thought.

There are a few partial stones still readable, and after taking pictures of the lovely spot, I came home and started doing some research to see what else I could learn. There are, in fact, multiple sources of a “complete” list of all the people once buried here, with all the known details of their causes of death, as well as the inscriptions on their tombstones. There are inconsistencies in some of the entries, from one source to the next, such that one cannot tell the ages of some of those buried -- 3 years or 10? 1 year or 11? There is one toddler whose father is listed but whose birthdate is recorded in two places with a difference of 60-odd years.

Even with these discrepancies, it is possible to see some family trees begin to emerge from these lists online, just as it is possible to trace, even at the distance of 180 years, the lines of grief that etched inscriptions such as this into the gravestone of little Hiram Jerome Tibbits, aged nine.

In fact, it was the discovery of this cemetery, and my desire to learn more about it, that led me to the interesting story of how my town officially got its name (and dodged the moniker Poduk for good). I learned that the early settlers in the area, needing a burial place, had chosen this spot – not far from the Tibbits’s barn, as an ideal location. And indeed, given the prospect that standing on this hill would no doubt have provided to the surrounding land before the current crop of relatively young trees covered it, I can imagine that this was indeed an ideal, if windswept, vista on which to say goodbye to a loved one.

This spot no longer looks like a cemetery per se, although the Scout has done an admirable job in creating a memorial here. It is not a spot for doing rubbings of fascinating old stones or scanning tidy rows of quaintly carved headstones for amusing or anachronistic quotations. Instead, it is a place to wander the few short paths and think about the first brave souls who came west (yes, Michigan was not even a State when people were first buried here) to make a new life. I like imagining the stories they could tell of a time when it was still possible to walk to the town center from where I stood. Now a 50-mile-per-hour road makes that impossible. As do so many other things about our current culture.

I admire immensely the thoughtful treatment of the spot by a group of high school kids. It is so easy, I think, to write off any young generation for its wild irreverence, its resistance to convention or authority for mere resistance’s sake. And yet, here is a boy with enough of a sense of history, enough of a perspective outside himself, to choose to restore a proper level of respect to a spot long forgotten but once sacred to the lives of those who came before us. I salute the power of his gesture, a quiet one undertaken with no fanfare, no press coverage, no “Grand Opening.” I imagine the pioneer families who first homesteaded here, resilient with what would become known as a midwestern diligence and modesty, would do the same.

A post begging for your vote

Kailani at An Island Life (great blog you should know) is hosting what she's calling the 2008 Bloggy Hoss Elections, giving out those superlative awards that yearbooks give out (Class Clown, Most Popular, and so on) -- and Mommy's Martini is in the running for Brainiest! Which proves beyond a doubt that I was not a cheerleader in high school. I'll bet you'll find lots of others of your faves in the running for other awards too. (Hi Foolery!) Though I'm sure someone much brainier will win (you will indeed find the word poo in my regular post for today, just below this notice), I would love it if I didn't come in dead last. Would you vote, please? To do so, you have to use the "Contact" tab on her page, and send her an email with your votes written in. You can see all the nominees and vote here. And even check out some new blogs in the process; she's got links to them all. Thanks.

And scroll on down for some real content for today. Including super-duper brainy photos of my refrigerator. Sweet.

What Passes for Newsworthy at My House

I went bananas last Monday and cleaned out the fridge. REALLY cleaned it. As in removed and scrubbed shelves, grouped and organized contents. I discovered that we had seven open jars of jam, and eight salad dressings. I located three mustards (all different from each other) and three jars of olives (all green). So in the last ten days, we've eaten a lot of marinated things -- since, honestly, no one needs seven jars of jam at once. (Try apricot + orange marmalade + chunky ginger jam + soy sauce. Seriously.) I find myself smiling uncontrollably every time I open the fridge and view its pristine state, and I finally couldn't restrain myself from taking a photo of its shiny shiny clean.

And then I looked more closely and found this.

Yes, it's a Little People zebra and a tube of lip gloss with the lid off. I could guess how it got there, though I had no proof and no explanation.

Until yesterday, when I heard Daughter rummaging around in the fridge. "Sweetie, what are you doing in there?" I called out. "I put my sunglasses in fridgerator," she replied matter-of-factly as she firmly shut the door and walked into the family room empty handed. At least she's not adding half-used bottles of salad dressing.

In more "real" news, I read an article in Wondertime magazine that mentions in passing that there are pictographs in a French cave "that anthropologists have translated as saying: "Cro-Magnon man sucks!"" (See the article, which is all about potty talk, here.) I have spent an inordinate amount of time researching online, trying to find a source for this little gem of history. The well-known coexistence of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, and the subsequent die-off of the latter, makes this a great little joke -- the first known example of graffiti. A 20,000 year old Neanderthal tag, if you will. The only information I can find (and I can find reams of it) is about the wonderful Lascaux Caves and the Cro-Magnon paintings of animals they contain. A little article in Time describes these paintings of bison, mammoths, horses, and deer as "fire shadows" for their lifelike fleeting depictions (Photo credit). They are indeed glorious. But they don't really seem to me to indicate any kind of Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal dust-up. And frankly they make the very idea, which delighted me at first, now seem a little tawdry.

If that conflict were in my house, on the other hand, it would look like this.

MONKEY SEE



MONKEY DO

I'm guessing kids have been doing this at each other for at least 20,000 years. Don't you think?

The incompetent gardener

No, this won't be a lovely, happy, blog like my sister, MommyTime, likes to write. This is about real life gardening. In my garden. Here's a couple of pictures of what my garden looks like right now.

This is a hosta plant. Well, it's the stalks of what would be lovely hosta leaves if only the deer didn't get to it every time a new juicy leaf sprouted.
And this is thistle. Lots of thistle. Thistle is a weed. I sprayed it a week ago with Round-Up to kill it. No, it's not dead yet. I'm thinking of just keeping it since it seems to be the only thing growing well in my garden this year.

For those that have never seen thistle, here's a close up of the leaf:- it's got spiky thorns all along every edge of the leaf. Makes for WAY fun when trying to pull it out of the ground - it's so thorny that leather gloves do almost nothing to protect your hands. Also, for those that have never seen thistle - tell me where you live so I can move there.


So, now for some advice. This is what happens when you garden and don't wear gloves:

What you don't see is the following raging infection that I had for a week afterwards. I thought I was going to have to amputate. Ok, well not really, but I really couldn't use my hand for about a week. It was my right hand. And I'm right handed. So my advice? Don't garden unless you have gloves. Oh, and wear them. That's the part I forgot here.

More advice? Check out this coloration:










This is what happens when you try to pull out a stump and forget to look behind you where you'll fall once that pesky root actually does give way. It took up most of my calf. It turned a bunch of impressive colors of brown, purple and green. You should be able to figure out the advice part on your own for this one. Oh, and here's the stump I was pulling up: (glove included for scale purposes) There were three stumps this size, along with two more bushes that need to be chopped down (and thus have unknown stump sizes at this time) for removal this month.

And here is a root that continued to taunt me from the ground, even after I'd pulled up the mamma stump. You can almost hear it laughing at me , can't you?

I would love to sit and pick plants that "would do well in a specific area" and "give me color all season". However, as you can see, my reality falls a bit short. I think the garden is winning this year, as it does most years. My best gardening advice to save you the bruises, infections and billions of prick-marks from angry thistles.... Just say no. I think next week I'm going to see how dynamite will work. For both the stumps and the thistle. I'll let you know. If anybody has any other ideas for how to make my "prep work" go more easily, I'm all ears. I have bushes and stumps to remove. Large areas to re-grade. Debris to remove - which is not just weeds and stuff like that, but also things like random plastic sports gear and trash. At one point, I thought I was going to have my own episode of "Bones" unfolding in my side yard. I dug up what looked like a triple reinforced (with a fiber core) trash bag. It would have been EXACTLY what I would have used to bury a body in just before planting those stupid bushes over it. Alas, no body. Just a random plastic bag.

If nothing else I can comfort myself with a lovely poem for my garden:
"MIQuilter, MIQuilter, how does your garden grow?
With thistles here, and mangled hostas there, and dead stumps and roots all in a row."

Eh, my poetry is about as good as my gardening skills. Perhaps I should leave both to the professionals.

Kangaroos Can Be Such Haters

Google thinks I know, "Why do kangaroos hate birthday parties?" But I don't know why those snitty kangaroos are haters and such party downers. It might have something to do with the requisite silly hats and their inability to blow out little candles, I suppose. Or maybe they're sick of trying to find something nice to wear that slims the pouch. Or perhaps they age in some incremental "Kangaroo Years" that are like 80-to-1 with Human Years, and they just don't want to be reminded that it's that time of year again, thank you very much. But, honestly, who worries about this?

And why does Google think I could answer this little animal psychology mystery? Am I a zoo veterinarian? Am I a psychologist? Do I play a lab-tester-of-animals on TV? No, no, and no. And yet, questions about kangaroos continue to plague this blog.

"Do kangaroos hibernate?" A simple yes-no question I cannot answer.

"How do kangaroos hibernate?" A more complex question with a premise that (a) they do hibernate in the first place; and (b) I live or work in such close proximity to kangaroos that even in a martini-laden state, I can recite facts about kangaroo lifecycles that would stun a marsupiologist. Or whatever those kangaroo scientists are called. Google couldn't tell me the name for a scientist who studies kangaroos. Which doesn't really explain why all the kangaroo questions are coming to me, only why they aren't going to anyone else in particular.

Someone landed here searching for kangaroo exercise boots. And since I don't even know if these are boots I could wear that would make me jump like a kangaroo, or boots a kangaroo would wear to work out at the gym (they do box, right?), I can't be of much help on this one. Except to say that if kangaroos don't like party hats, what makes you think they'll enjoy wearing boots?

And here's the thing: it's not only kangaroos I supposedly know a lot about. It's a veritable zoo here at Chez MommyTime.

Do giraffes dream? I certainly hope so. They sure don't make any kinds of noise. And if they don't talk, and they don't dream? Their lives must be the epitome of boring.

Can you help me locate a superhero giraffe? They can be elusive. My only advice is never to trust a superhero giraffe in a cape. What with the long long legs and the long long neck, that's just a recipe for disaster, not rescue.

how do giraffes respond -- an existential question that ended with no punctuation. I don't know what I'm supposed to theorize their response TO. I might answer: "ommmmmmm." That is, if they could talk. Or meditate.

Perhaps my favorite question, moving on to the next animal, is: Don’t you ever feel like a martini napkin dog? To which I can only respond: Yes. All the time. Even though I don't know whether this is a dog printed on a martini napkin (flattened, barkless, small and insignificant), or a martini one gives to a "napkin dog" (you know, like our Dog: one who comes through and cleans up whatever gets spilled). In either case, sometimes I am the one; other times I want the other. This is all very deep. And makes me want a martini.

Only to face steep competition from the vanilla stoli Chambord pineapple lucky cat. Who is, in fact, one seriously lucky cat.

And once we move on to alcoholic cats with top shelf liquor tastes, well, it all goes down hill quick. We have the inane: Furry friends to make but do not involve sitting -- who sitting? you sitting? friends sitting? do you want your friends never to sit? never to have to learn to sit? I feel drunk right along with Lucky Cat on this one.

And we have the naughty: me wanna play dog. Frankly, me wanna play grammarian. Or me wanna play something a whole heck of a lot hotter than DOG, I'll tell you that.

But that's not a post for a Monday morning on a nice little blog by a mother of a toddler and a preschooler. Even if that blog does get searched all the time for lovely thighs and perfect thighs and thighs that don't touch.

And once for Japanese teenie bopper tramp -- who certainly has thighs that don't touch. I know that without even seeing her.

All I can say to the many many many searchers desperately seeking perfect thighs who land here on a daily basis is: don't let your thighs get you down. And if they do, perhaps you'd like to invest in a grumpy kangaroo wearing a pair of exercise boots who would give you a run for your money? If nothing else, the exercise should thin your thighs. Because, sadly, that's about as close to knowing how to land perfect thighs that I'm ever going to get. But if you find that little formula on some other blog, would you come back here and share the wealth? Pretty please.

And if all else fails, buy boardshorts instead of a bikini for this summer. But whatever you do, protest bossy boardshorts. No one should have to put up with bossy boardshorts. A kangaroo sure wouldn't. So why should you?

Click here for more laughs today -- and, who knows, perhaps even animals that make sense.

This Week's Scorecard

* One full day of child bickering, inability to hear (waaay past refusal to listen to) any directions whatsoever, and maternal grumpiness, punctuated by the His-and-Her-icaine dashing out the door of a store and into the parking lot alone followed by shouts of disapproval and resulting in the removal of the swimming pool privilege for the following day.

Score
Kids: negative 10 for annoyance and naughtiness
Mom: negative 20 for snappishness out of proportion even to their terrible annoyingness

* Nearly unbearably hot afternoon mediated by a Mama's Bed Picnic Lunch involving finger foods and Shrek III watched under the cool breeze of the ceiling fan, and no one taking even one square inch of pillow or blanket that was "really" someone else's.

Score
Kids: 100 points for pleasantness
Mom: 50 points for creative solutions to boredom (picnic), minus 20 points for including drug-of-choice (TV)

* Cooperative basketball game involving sharing several mini balls, no bickering whatsoever, and a solid 15 minutes of real peace and quiet. If you have preschoolers, you know that peace lasting this long is never a good sign. The basketball hoop of choice? The toilet.

Score
Kids: 2 for creativity and cooperation
Mom: one gazillion for not even raising her voice while cleaning up toilet water from the whole room, the kids, and their clothes. Plus one bonus point for having a toilet so clean that the water splashed around at least appeared clean.

* A looooong afternoon nap courtesy of Daughter, plus the following creative self-expressions from Son, allowing Mama at least 45 minutes of uninterrupted sleep in the middle of the day.

Score
Kids: a billion kisses for kindness
Mom: a million happiness points, plus several great drawings

This is the one he came home from school with on Thursday. It's a "Trash Truck." See if you can locate, amongst the contents it is "carrying away," a tiger, a triangle TV, a regular TV, and a telescope.


This is one of several illustrations he produced on Friday, after I rhapsodized over "Trash Truck." Note how, in "Train," he carefully mimicked the color scheme of the one I'd loved the day before. Funny, huh?


What's the scorecard for your week?

And don't forget to scroll down and weigh in on the whole GUEST POST question in the post below.

An Experiment in Bloggy Exploration

So I have this little idea that I want to launch. I'm calling it:

Here's how it works: a few times a month (depending on interest level), I'll do a little blog switcheroo with someone else. She or He posts here on Tuesday, and I'll post at his/her place that same day. We'll link back to each other of course. I'm thinking of this as gardening meets blogging -- a cross-pollination of sorts. It occurred to me after I had such a fun time meeting a bunch of bloggers new to me when I guest posted over at 'Twas Brillig a week ago that perhaps we would all meet more cool new folks if we could "trade readers" occasionally. (Thanks, Brillig, for the inspiration!)

So the big question is: are you up for this? Would you have fun reading posts from guest voices something like two or three times a month here on Mommy's Martini? (I'm thinking of doing this every other Tuesday.) Would you want to trade blogs with me for a day sometime?

Let me know in the comments if this sounds like a fun project to you. And if you want in on the action, be sure to leave me your email address in your comment, so I can contact you directly. Who's up for a little experiment?

What the Redwings' Win Means to Me

I don't exactly follow sports. Here's what I know about competitive, professionals athletics:

* many players receive exorbitant salaries
* men who play soccer have the best bodies, on average
* followed by cyclists
* women athletes don't get enough credit or coverage (until they screw up, Marion Jones)
* watching competitive sports on TV when you don't care deeply about the team or the sport in question is about riveting as watching mediocre amateur theater when you don't know anyone in the cast

But here's the thing: The Detroit Redwings won the Stanley Cup on Wednesday night in Detroit Pittsburgh!*

For those of you who would like that in English: the Detroit hockey team just won this year's hockey version of the Superbowl.

But here's why this is much cooler than winning the Superbowl: the trophy.

Oh, yeah, sure, Superbowl trophies are all big and gleaming and shiny. And they come with Superbowl Rings for all the players. Yadda yadda yadda.

But the Stanley Cup? There is only ONE Stanley Cup. There's not a new cup every year for the winning team (or team owner) to take home and display. Nope. For 115 (yes, that's one hundred fifteen) years, the team that wins the Stanley Cup gets to take home THE Stanley Cup. And not only that, but there's a tradition that every single member of the team gets to take home the Stanley Cup for one day in that winning year. And "every member" means not only the players, but the coaches, and the owners, and the locker room cleaner-upper guys who travel with the team. Everyone. Because, as some guy on the radio (I think he was the team captain, who gets to take home the trophy on the very first day, but I missed the beginning of the interview, so I'm not sure), anyway, as the guy said, "They are all members of the team. We couldn't win without all of them."

How cool is that? Not only do they get to take it home for a day, priceless artifact that it is, but they get to take it wherever they want in that day. Like, say, to a bar. Or fishing. Or on a jet plane to an Asian country where the next exhibition game is going to be held. Or tent camping. Or to the hardware store, if they feel like it. Yeah. That's what I'd do. I'd be all, "hmmm... I think I need some geraniums; see you later honey, the Stanley Cup and I are going to Home Depot."

And even though the thing is priceless and filled with tremendous heritage, they're blase about what this hauling around of the trophy hither and yon will produce. So, as radio guy said (I'm kind of paraphrasing here), "sure, it will get some dings and scratches where somebody bangs it into their kitchen door or whatever," but, he implied, that's just a part of its charm. He did, literally, mention the banging into a kitchen door. Which is an image I love. Because the Stanley Cup is about four feet tall, so that would be a pretty easy mistake to make. (See the picture over there, which gives you some sense of what kind of undertaking it would be to trot this thing around on your errands to the Post Office, and Target, and picking up the kids at daycare. But you totally would, wouldn't you? If it were your day to have that trophy? Wouldn't you run every single errand you could think of, just to be out in public as much as possible, all nonchalant, with THAT tucked under your left arm?)

In the world of high stakes, multi-gazillion dollar professional sports, I can't think of any symbol that gets even remotely close to the Stanley Cup for representing the true reasons to play sports: not for the shiny trophies, not for the bigger-newer-every-year glamor, but for the love of the game, the reverence for its history and its legendary players, and the sense that the dings and scratches, the imperfections of real experience and real living -- that's what make things in life truly valuable.


*Many thanks to the ever-patient LatteMommy, whose correction of the location of the winning game six clearly proves how little I follow sports.

***My apologies to anyone who came here for a Green Up Your Thumb Friday. I'll resume that next week. Unless some other fabulously newsworthy tidbit strikes my fancy and distracts me again.***

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream...

I sailed away to China
in a little row boat to find ya'
You said you had to get your laundry clean
Didn't have no one to fold it...
What does that mean?


Two points for those of you who recognize and can hum the early 80s hit "Break my Stride." Two more points for those who caught the very mom-esque lyrics mishap. All my life I've been singing those lines "You said you had to get your laundry clean / Didn't have no one to hold ya' / What does that mean?" But just this morning, I thought, huh -- that makes no sense. I'll bet I misheard it. The line is probably "didn't have no one to fold it" -- which obviously goes with the whole laundry day thing. And then I Googled "Last night I had the strangest dream" lyrics to find out for sure. And I found out that there are songs called "Last night I had the strangest dream" by all of the following artists: The Kingston Trio, Garth Brooks, Simon & Garfunkle, Ed McCurdy, and the Flirtations. But that search does NOT turn up "Break my Stride," for which you must instead Google something about sailing rowboats to China. Who knew Google had an anti-1980s bias? (For the curious, the line is actually "Didn't want no one to hold ya'," but you can easily see how a teenager would mis-hear that, since a teenage girl basically spends 9/10 of her waking minutes wanting someone -- generally a particularly hunky someone in third period art class -- to hold her, so the notion that anyone would NOT want to be held is an incomprehensible as wearing bifocals.)

Anyway, all of this is a preamble to something marginally thinkier. Which is to ask: Do you ever have really truly nutty dreams? And wonder obsessively about what they mean?

I had two nutty dreams in a row the other night. In one, I was a student in college in a class with a substitute teacher. And the teacher made us sit there through the whole class and write an essay about how power lawnmowers had made a real change in the world. And we weren't to write any of that "obvious" stuff about the energy crisis or space exploration in the 1970s. So I wrote about how "we all assume" that the invention of the power lawnmower was all about saving the individual man time on the weekends, and how "we all know" how ironic it was that these gasoline-requiring inventions were simultaneous with the gas crisis of the 1970s -- but that what was REALLY important about them was the way in which they enabled us to have higher standards for public greenspaces. And I was just going to go on to write about how individual home's lawns are, in fact, public spaces, when Son bounded into the room and woke me up. The weirdest thing about this dream -- as if the topic weren't weird enough -- is that it was one of a constellation of dreams I have had in my life where I am writing something, and the whole dream consists of a vision of my hand holding a pen and moving across the paper, as I think through what I am writing, word for word. And in the first foggy moments of awakeness, I always ALWAYS think that whatever I was dream-writing was brilliant, and that I must get it down immediately before I forget it -- but by the time I'm awake enough to write, I've realized (a) I can no longer remember it verbatim; and (b) that doesn't matter because whatever I was writing was a load of junk anyway.

And I don't need to pay a therapist to tell me that these dreams all mean the same thing: I am a huge goody-two-shoes who will do anything that is asked of her if it is phrased as a school assignment. AND, I am confident in my ability to write my way out of pretty much anything.

The other dream I had, right before the scintillating lawnmower essay dream (and trust me, watching someone's hand write an essay on lawnmowers is about as interesting as watching grass grow), was much more sinister. It involved a Chinese baby, a tenement apartment in an otherwise abandoned building, a kidnapped man chained to a back staircase that went nowhere, and a bomb strapped to the man. I was not involved in the kidnapping or setting up of the human explosion, but I was aware that it had occurred. And I, as the mother of this baby, was most interested in packing up the groceries I'd just purchased at great cost -- a huge fraction of my otherwise meager salary -- and getting them out with the baby before the explosion occurred. But I wasn't too worried about the timing, since the man was listening to the coverage of the Sex and the City premier on his Walkman radio, and was sure not to trigger the bomb (over which he had control) until after he heard what Sarah Jessica Parker was wearing. Yeah, I know. Makes no freakin' sense at all.

Except for the over-priced groceries trivia. And the public obsession with Sarah Jessica Parker's fashion. But really, these are hardly major details important to the plot of this dream.

I do remember that while I was dreaming it, I was getting a little annoyed -- as one will when watching an "action" movie that is moving too slowly, for example -- that the grocery packing seemed to be the main event of the movie. Where was the explosion already? What about the escape from the dangerous building part? The bit about the crying, pregnant woman who wished the Chinese baby were her own was vaguely interesting, but a little maudlin for my tastes.

In case you're still reading, first, I must thank you for actually bothering to get through someone else's dreams. I know that for many people, listening to the endless recounting of a vivid dream is about as excruciating as a tooth extraction, except without the benefit of drugs after to make the pain go away. And second, I have some questions... [phew, finally, maybe this post might get a wee bit thinky after all...]

Do you have the power to control your dreams? To make them speed up, slow down, change plot -- and to be cognizant of the fact that you are doing this? In short, in your dreams, are you both protagonist and voyeur? I am. I don't know why or how. I don't know if this is normal or makes me borderline ________ (fill in the blank yourself: schizophrenic? delusional? deep and meditative? overly self-absorbed? etc.) But I do know that it's darn handy, while watching a dream unfold and thinking "good gravy this is BO-ring!" to be able to shake things up mid-stream. For instance, I finally abandoned the stupid pseudo 24 episode dream in favor of one in which I was writing an essay about lawnmowers and had no children -- Chinese or otherwise -- to worry about. At least in that one, I wasn't getting bored waiting for a bomb that was never going to go off. But I do really wonder: why would I have a dream I thought was dull? If I'm writing it, why bore myself with it?

Do you remember your dreams in the morning? Are they fabulously vivid? Do you, like me, have to restrain yourself from blurting them out to your (uninterested) spouse?

Do you have any recurring dreams? I have two. One is some version of "in college but never went to class and now desperately trying to figure out how to pass this science exam I'm about to take," which is my classic I'm feeling tortured and overworked and sure to forget something important dream. The other is a dream that I'm flying, which is the happiest, best dream on the planet. Once I even woke myself up humming during that dream, because in that particular iteration, humming was the propulsion for my flight. These dreams always always mean that my life is going along so swimmingly happily that I feel like I'm flying through it. They are rare but powerful. I don't know if that means I'm rarely happy, or powerfully happy, but I do love those dreams.

Tell me about your dreams. How do they work? And what do you think that says about you? I promise, I'm all ears, and I won't even roll over and fall asleep halfway through the tale. I really do want to know.

Weasling Out of Playing "Fox House" with the Kids

I don't know about you, but I'm a mom who is not very good at playing. I don't really enjoy being Mama Fox in the Fox House, and there are only so many air-ice-cream cones I can eat before I begin to feel sick to my stomach with boredom.

On the other hand, I am quite good at projects. Give me scissors, glue and cardboard; a list of foods that need to be used up from the fridge; some fabric scraps and a sewing machine; paint and plywood; a staple gun; or anything else you can dream up in the way of supplies, and I will come up with something FUN! TO! DO! for the preschool set. And I have to admit that we are actually transforming into a Project Family, so I can't take all the credit for what has happened at our house in the last week or so.

Let's start with: Hat with Sticks All Around, and a Scary Mask Attached

The name of this project, its inspiration, and its details all came from Son. He came indoors with a large handful of sticks and clear demands. I was simply the woman charged with executing his vision. He was quite pleased with the ferocity of the results. And he also was quick to demonstrate that this could be a very good yoga costume.

This is the "tree pose" he's doing here, which I find delightful given the large handful of tree he's sporting on his head.

This next is Daddy's creation with Son while I was putting Daughter down for the night. I particularly like the tiny pirate flag and the red plank, down which, apparently, many a Play-Doh pirate was forced to walk during the time it took me to read bedtime stories upstairs. I think the crumbles on the table are the remains of said unfortunate pirates.

It is a little sad that the creation of this pirate fleet required decimating the octopus and seahorses we'd made a few days before, but the great thing about this stuff is -- you can just make things all over again, and it gets to count as a brand. new. project. GENIUS.

Here is a canoe we created a few days ago. Again, this was Son's brainchild. "Mama, can we make a canoe?" isn't really a question of permission in his mind. It's a matter of "HOW can we?" An old diaper box, taped to an old present box whose lid was attached for the front of the canoe did the trick.

The best thing about this project? It took about half an hour to assemble, between Son doing much of the cutting and Daughter sticking her "helpful" fingers out for "more tape" every 45 seconds. And then he spent another good 45 minutes decorating it, while she got to ride in it. Just like his Mama, once the assembly was over, Son lost interest. I was like that even at his age (dollhouses were much more fun to build and decorate than to play with), so I get it.

Recently we've also fashioned a pirate's treasure chest ("It needs a lock and a key, Daddy") and a cowboy slingshot ("Some cowboys don't have horses, you know, mama." "Oh really? How do they get around?" "I don't know. Probably on their bicycles. Or scooters.").

I actually wish sometimes that I were better at playing. It's not like the kids don't have enough stuff lying around that we have to make canoes and racecars (yes, there is a box-racecar in his bedroom) and umpteen scary masks to add to the collections. But, honestly, I don't feel like I know how to play with preschoolers very well. Maybe I'm impatient, or just a bad mama, but I find the endless repetition and the rigid rigid (yet completely arbitrary) rules exhausting. "No, Mama, you have to sit like THIS, not like that, and then you have to hold your hand HERE before you throw the pretend rock for Rug Rock Toss." Seriously, he says stuff like that. And I just want to be all *eye roll* *eye roll* "Puh-leeze, this game is BO-ring." But I can't say that. So I smile weakly, play along for a few minutes, and then excuse myself to fold laundry.

But with a project, I can be 100% engaged for as long as it takes. Even if it's three hours. And so can he. And Daughter is already getting into the spirit too, even though her attention span is shorter. We garden. We cook. We paint. We build. We use lots of tape. We cut paper into snips to glue to other snips. And when we're tired of that, I read to them. But when it comes time to "play kitchen" with the pint-sized molded plastic version, I suddenly have chores to do and leave them to their own devices.

There are days when I beat myself up about this, thinking "And this is why I will never win a Mothering Tiara" and other self-deprecating stuff. There are other days where I think, "well, DUH; preschool games are a leetle boring because I am no longer a preschooler." Although rationally I know that the latter is just simply true, it is so hard to reconcile that with wanting to be a good, supportive, loving mother. I feel like I've failed some days when I realize that I would actually rather vacuum than play "we are both really really fierce tigers, only I'm fiercer than you cuz I have really long claws and sharp fangs and but you are fierce too, and you want to eat up Sister, but I won't let you cuz I am really really REALLY strong and I say NO! EATING! SISTERS! ... Okay? Let's play that."

I'm not looking for a bunch of platitude compliments here about "oh, no, really, MommyTime, you're an excellent mother." What I want to know is: do you ever struggle with this? And how do you walk that line? For me, I take some comfort in knowing that my interest in projects will mean that my Son will grow up knowing how to cook, and my Daughter will be able to wield a hammer, and both of them will (hopefully) come to value creative expression. That doesn't always erase the niggling feeling that if I could just be more excited about eating leaf soup on the "pirate ship" (deck bench), I might be a better mother. But sometimes it helps a little.

The Good, the Bad, and the Prom-y

It's finally arrived! Prom Night. I can't wait to hear your stories and see your dresses. As for me...

I had three proms, each of which had its Pure Prom Moment.

Prom #1: Innocence and Endless Hope
As a Junior, I desperately wanted to go to the Junior-Senior prom (you could only go as an underclassman if you were the date of an upperclassman). I had no boyfriend. Never had. Pining away over the tall hunky best friend of my neighbor across the street was getting me nowhere. I asked three different boys to go with me. All of them said no. To be honest, my neighbor across the street initially said yes. He and I had been friends for years. The kind of friends who hang out in each other's rooms, and listen to records, and make up absurd nicknames for each other. (I was "Shodderick." I have no idea why.) The kind of friends who occasionally have little crushes on each other but never at the same time. The kind of friends who ask each other dating advice. He said yes, and then he came over later that evening and said no. It was too much pressure. Too much romance. He didn't feel that way about me. I was sad but honestly not crushed. I was more than a little demoralized when two other friends of mine also declined, however.

I had a dress, you see. A pale pink concoction with off-the-shoulder sleeves and a big, wide sash, and a fluffy skirt. My mother had made me this gorgeous dress, and there I was -- all dressed up and no place to go. And then it turned out that the Cuban Club (of which my Cuban step-father was a member) was having a dance that very same evening of my prom. So while all my friends got dolled up and went out, so did I. The only difference was, I (who adored dancing) got to salsa dance all evening with boys who actually knew how to dance.

Also, I don't think the entryway to the Prom site was filled with old men in guayaberas smoking cigars and playing dominoes.

Prom #2: Pragmatism and Abandonment
My Senior year, there I was again, geeky, fun-loving, boyfriend-less. This time I had a good friend who'd made a deal with me that if we didn't have dates for our proms, we would go with each other. He went to a different school. He was smart, and wrote poetry, and rode skateboards. I figured he would be a fun date. Six of us got together, went out to dinner, gallivanted off to the Junior-Senior prom. In my pink fluffy dress (yes, the same one from the year before; I was determined that it was a Prom Dress, not just a party dress), and my side-ponytail, and my blue eyeshadow (yes, I have brown eyes), I was the very picture of 80s innocence. He had chosen a silvery grey tuxedo to match his grey cowboy boots, and a pink cummerbund to match my dress. We looked lovely. Where lovely = endearingly scrubbed and dressed to our eyeballs in 1987.

And then I lost my date. Seriously. For two hours he could not be found. My friends helped me look. Lots of us missed the dancing, the music, the merriment. We went from curious to annoyed to worried to enlisting the Principal because we were so concerned. Know where we found him? In the hotel bar. Watching basketball. Know what he said by way of explanation? It was too much pressure. Too much romance. He didn't feel that way about me. Story of my (prom) life, apparently.

We all went back to my best friend's house for the "after party" which consisted of marginally watching movies and majorly making out if you were my friends, and marginally watching movies and majorly falling asleep if you were me. I think my date actually watched the whole thing. Know what the movie of choice was? The Shining.

Don't ever say teenagers have no sense of irony.

Prom #3: A Boyfriend At Last
For my Senior Prom, which was held the night of graduation, I actually had a real honest-to-goodness boyfriend-shaped date. He was cute and funny, and he brought me a lovely yellow wrist corsage. In the photos, we look happy. (Sorry, can't bring myself to put him up here without his permission. That's his left arm; his hair was as curly as my bangs, he was tan and grinning and (like me) looked impossibly young; you extrapolate the rest.) I remember that I thought he was a great kisser. But honestly, I remember absolutely nothing about that night except for the very last dance of the evening. And here's why I remember that dance:

My best friend and I, who had been inseparable since 7th grade, had made a pact earlier in the spring. We were going to design and make our prom dresses, both all in white, and they were going to be dreamy and make us feel like princesses. And we typed up all the details of our little pact on a piece of square paper and signed it. And then we shopped for fabric, and her aunt and my mother made us those dresses. Gorgeous, innocent, tiered, princess-dresses. And we wore them.

I assume we danced all evening with our respective boyfriends for the slow dances, and in big groups of half-skipping Madonna wannabes for the faster dances, though I don't actually remember. I do know that our little group was the last group there.

And as the band (why do I think it was a band instead of a DJ? I don't know for sure) finished the last pop song, they swung into a rousing polka -- obviously to clear the dance floor.

The floor was empty, and I wanted to polka. But, of course, my boyfriend didn't know how. Didn't want to. But my best friend did. Oh, yes, she did.

So I led, and she followed, and the two of us in our giant, full white skirts, on the night of our high school graduation, had the entire huge dance floor to ourselves -- and we polkaed and laughed and spun and grinned and sashayed around that floor until the music was over.

I am pretty sure no one in the history of Prom has ever had a dance more filled with pure joy and loving friendship. And twenty-one years later, she is still my very closest friend.

Want proof? In order to post this picture, I had to open the back of a collage frame I sealed 21 years ago on my way to college -- a collage that I still display on the bookshelf in my office at home. Because a truly great friendship can fix anything (like a Prom Night Abandonment) or make anything good even better (like a Prom Night Polka).

Edited to add: PLEASE for the love of all that is Prom Night hilarity, scroll down below this post to read my sister's story of the Chicken Lady. You won't be sorry.

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So now, let's hear your story. I'm looking forward to hair bigger than mine, dates more oblivious, tales more racy...who knows? But it will be fun finding out. To add your story, just fill out the form below, and please be sure your post links back to this one, so that your readers can come find more fun prom stories (or add their own) too! Thanks. *air kisses* and *princess waves*

Prom Stories: The Chicken Lady & The Martyr

My mother is an excellent seamstress. She made all of our prom gowns, sometimes to wonderful results, others to, well, memorable results. My junior prom dress was a dream...



Seventeen (yes, that's 17) yards of raspberry colored chiffon made up into an elegant Vogue pattern that made me feel like a movie star. I didn't happen to have a boyfriend at prom time that year, so I went with my best guy friend. It wasn't particularly memorable as proms go. In fact, the only thing I really remember is the fabulous way I felt as I swished across the stage to make a few announcements with the other prom committee members, and the uncomfortable way my date and I slept in the car (separately!) as we waited to meet my friends for breakfast since we couldn't find the house that the after party was at. But boy, the dress was good. And a size 1.

My senior prom dress was one of those that started as a brilliant idea but was a disaster in reality. Here it is. Be sure to focus for a moment on the martyred look on my date's face, who clearly had not seen the dress before he agreed to escort me...

What?! You said you think the dress was pretty? Did you not SEE the head-to-feather ratio? Let me show you again...

I had seen a dress with feather sleeves the week my mother and I were fitting my gown. I thought they were wonderful. I wanted them. Badly. My dress was supposed to have sheer puff sleeves to the elbow. That would have been wonderful, but at 17, I clearly was too stupid to realize it. So my mother, in a moment of crazed inspiration, cut her old black feather boa in half and, voila!, feather sleeves were born. Then, of course, to balance the sheer volume of those sleeves, we had to extend the length of the fitted, knee-length dress to be floor length with the addition of a taffeta ruffle, a la mermaid style. Ahhhh. It was an unforgettable dress. Unfortunately. Boas, as you might imagine, are not meant to be cut. My sleeves shed--yes, I SHED--feathers on the dance floor all evening. My friends, my dear, close, friends, could not help calling my Chicken Lady through the whole prom.

My original date cancelled on me 2 days before the prom because his mom had left town on business and hadn't paid for his tux or left him any money. This was actually fine with me, because I didn't like the guy that much anyway, and it gave me the opportunity to ask the guy I really liked (who was a sophomore and couldn't have asked me anyway) to take me. The first part of the evening was great...well, except for my constant fear that I would set myself on fire at the fondue restaurant as my feathers swung precariously close to the flames...but by the end of the evening and all the Chicken Lady comments, he wasn't so interested in making out in the car. -sigh-

I still have that dress if anyone wants it for their daughter. I can guarantee that if she wears it, she won't be getting any action on prom night. Maybe that was Mom's nefarious plan...

Chocolate, Shoes, and Fantasy Men...Who Cares What the Movie Was About?

I was going to write a Event review for today, since I am one of the hordes of 30-somethings who actually washed and dried her hair and put on makeup, even though she has children, and wore shoes and a handbag that coordinated with her no-spitup-marring-the-pattern sundress to the Sex and the City movie premiere on Friday night. I figured that those of you who did the same would have fun reliving the cosmo-sipping girls' night out with me; and those of you who didn't go for one reason or another would relish the story in the way you read a good People Magazine article -- for the thrill of living vicariously through someone else's life. (Not that I'm famous or magazine worthy, or whatever, just that I know I take my thrills wherever I can get them, so I thought I'd pass along what I could in the spirit of mutual mama-dom.) And those of you who are all "meh, Sex and the City...I never got into it" might still like a fun story.

But then Friday night happened. I had a great time. But the ambiance was so not the festive party atmosphere I was expecting. Our group bought tickets online (didn't want to miss the sold-out show) at a theater that was halfway between our homes -- a theater to which we'd never been. We got there 40 minutes early so we could have five seats together, since we were worried about long lines of glamor gals in their strappy high heels and short summer dresses beating us back with their beaded bags. As it turned out, however, the theater was in a strip mall with a Target, and there were no lines at all. So we killed a little time in Target, contemplating whether we could manage to get a fruit platter, or a bottle of Pom and some champagne into the theater without anyone noticing. We thought not. Though I did smuggle in the 1 pound Toblerone bar (yes, it is a foot long) in my lovely green Hobo bag. (So what? Movie theater chocolate is not that good, and this bar was on sale for $2.99.)

A few ladies in waaaaay too much makeup and outfits inspired by Cindi Lauper joined us in line as we waited for the theater to be cleaned before our 7:55 showing. And then our little band sat in a half-empty theater -- I kid you not -- and laughed, and gasped, and sighed over some of the clothes, secure in the knowledge that even in our midwestern cotton finery, we were the most glamorous women in the theater. And as we were walking out, I saw amongst the rubbish in one of the aisles, the bones of a chicken wing. Dead serious about this one. Chicken wings! Someone was creative. And hungry, apparently. I am still wondering in what bag or pocket that person managed to sneak in those little gems.

And I'm a little bitter that I was too timid to bring my cocktail shaker. If I'd sat there drinking pomegranate martinis, that would have been something to tell, no?

But what about the movie? you want to know. I'm getting there. On Saturday (no this is not a diversion; this is a segue; bear with me), my dear, adorably pregnant at 20ish weeks, friend came over, and after a lovely grilled dinner, and bedtime for all the kiddos, the husbands hunkered down over video games while she and I rented 27 Dresses on OnDemand cable. And ate chocolate cupcakes in bed while watching it.

And so, the woman who never watches movies saw two this weekend. And for your edification, here is comparison, just in case you are trying to decide between High Fashion and Romantic Comedy on your next movie night.

The Shoe Factor
No contest. Of course. Sex and the City wins this one by a mile. Especially if you'd like to walk that mile in someone else's Manolo's. One thing that really hit home based on this movie was serendipitously confirmed for me by 27 Dresses: the only designers who can make satin look good on shoes are those who charge at least $400 per pair. Anything else in satin just looks like bridesmaid dyeables.

Sinfully sexy dresses
This one is a little trickier. If you'd like to place the emphasis on the "sinful" part, Sex and the City wins, hands down. As you know if you've ever watch the series, you've will never find, in one place, a bigger collection of short, sassy, backless, nearly see-through, and yet somehow not nearly as trampy as you'd expect, dresses. On the other hand, there is one dress in 27 Dresses (not one of the 27, though) that might win for shortest dress it's humanly possible to wear without cheerleading bloomers underneath. If you'd like to place the emphasis on "dresses" and suggest a kind of throw back to an early era of glamor that's actually wearable by mere mortals, then you just might choose, as I would, a little number worn by Katherine Hegel -- styled slightly 1930s, with a wide cummerbund waistband and a gored skirt, in cream with flat chocolate brown piping. She looked like a goddess -- but one with a real, human body. I want that dress. Still, I have to say, that for overall sexiness, Sex and the City wins.

Sinfully ugly dresses
Ah HA! And here we have a tie. Sure, the ones in 27 Dresses are supposed to be hideous, hence all the "and the best thing about it is that you can shorten it and wear it again" jokes. But there's something funny and endearing about the hideousness that brides choose thinking they're being kind to their friends. Whereas hideousness that takes itself seriously as Fashion? Well, it's just grim. Sex and the City has always been either spectacularly good or spectacularly bad in the clothes department. So it's nice to know that the movie is consistent in this regard. And the end of 27 Dresses will make you laugh out loud over the fate of the Bridesmaid Horrors.

Male hotties
Two words: James Marsden. All the men whom the women in Sex and the City love are real looking, complicated, nice (more or less), good guys (more or less). But James Marsden? I actually said aloud while watching 27 Dresses that I might be getting tired of my TVLand Boyfriend and ready to move on to something new. And that something new is most definitely James Marsden. Just because you will see full-on naked man-flesh (yes, I mean exactly what you think I mean) in Sex and the City doesn't make it hot. In this category, I must choose 27 Dresses. (Photo credit)

In summary
For fabulous clothes and nudity even HBO wouldn’t have allowed, definitely see Sex and the City. Our group's unanimous review on leaving the theater was, "Well, they didn't screw it up." And given what might happen to tv shows made into movies, that's a positive review. For bridal laughs, a plot better than most romantic comedies, and hottie hot cutie James Marsden, see 27 Dresses. And if you're looking for something thought-provoking, deep, poignant, or riveting, skip the movies and chocolate and pick up a book instead. Just don't discount the rejuvenating power of a little eye candy and night of laughter and chocolate with your friends.

How the West Was Won...

By Nights in Shining Armor (and short pants) working side-by-side with Sheriffs packing pirate swords and wearing track suits? Probably not. But they sure had a good time trying.

Check here for more laughs today.