"That's Not Food!"

The sound of ominous gobbling filled the skies, and I buried my face deeper into my jacket collar.  The school bus would drop my daughter off at any moment, but I was preoccupied. My stance at the corner was a cower, my nervous gaze darting left to right.  The wild turkeys were on the move.  The gobbles bounced off the trees and homes, off the eight broke down cars in the driveway of the corner yellow house.  I used to side eye that house anxiously, wondering about the comings and goings of the literally 16 people who lived inside of it, some of whom drove on the front lawn in order to access the garage. Today, my nosy ass didn't care.  Today, it was all about the gang of roaming birds that had recently descended unto our neighborhood, numbering no less than twenty. My hands tapped against my thighs.  I was agitated.  My eleven year old son had screamed a surprising fact at me a few days ago when the turkeys had abruptly lurched into our front yard whi...

A few years ago, well into my adulthood, my father said he had a gift for me.  He handed me a tiny pink box, and I immediately waged silent guesses as to what could be in it.  A golden pendant passed down six generations from the old country?  A key to a lockbox in the Swiss Alps or even the local Chase branch?  Maybe a check with a lot of commas, made out to me and folded up tightly as to fit in the tiny box.  I could use a check, as I'd recently lost track of a 401K and was beginning to believe I'd never find it.  Oops. I cracked open the box, and then rattled its contents around in bewilderment.  Were those...? "Your baby teeth," he proclaimed.  "Every last one of them." So much for the check, the lockbox key, or the old country pendant.  My sister and I exchanged glances, like we always did whenever our dad handed over something random that he'd come across in the deep, dark recesses of our childhood home.  Old progress reports from ...

Alex embraced a new hobby this past summer.  This one fits right into his overall 60 year old white man vibe of classic rock, bowling, and what appears to be moderate to severe psoriasis.  Actually, the doctor told us the disgusting rash he developed on both legs was most likely folliculitis aggravated by too much hot tubbing one weekend- yet another 60 year old white man pursuit. It's fishing.  His best friend Matthew got him into it because Matthew's grandma lives by a stocked lake in a bougier part of Lake County.  I've seen random kids fishing in the smaller ponds of our own non-bougie area, but all they ever seem to catch are Miller Lite bottles and the occasional patch of folliculitis.  Actually, it's nice where I live- we are minutes away from a plethora of beaches. I always tell my kids how lucky we are to live here.  When I was growing up, we went to the beach maybe once a summer, and it involved crossing over to the dark side (Indiana). ...

And in a flash, it's six years later.  I'm 44 years old, slathering enough retinol on my face each night to burn off the most amount of skin cell layers I can until I'm in danger of showing bone.  There's some hair dye involved, and my contact lenses are multi-focals.  That means that my eyes are more focalled than they were before, from near to intermediate to kind of far to way back in time to a less cruel decade.  Chris is doing fine, or at least that's what he likes to tell me in between back pain winces and handfuls of ibuprofen.  He's a reassuring sort, that Chris B.  Somebody has to be in a marriage. I'll flip out over the day to day snags and snarls along with the litany of things that could completely go wrong at any given moment and Chris, Chris will give a half shrug and go about his evening. What have we done in the six years since I've given up blogging?  Well let's see.  There was a pandemic; that was kind of awful.  Millions of...

I've lost the desire to blog.  I'm compelled to keep writing so that Emily has as many stories about herself to one day read as the boys do, but whenever I sit down to write, I just don't have it in me.  It's not that I've run out of material, per se, because children- all children- are endless fountains of humor and amusement.  It's just that it's started to feel repetitive.  This mommy blog thing is so played out.  The couple of mom bloggers I follow online generally follow the same sort of formula.  Kids are annoying, and we also drink wine.  I'm in the trenches with an army of beautiful morons.  Or it's a humble brag of winning at motherhood. That kind of thing. So what do people think when they read *my* blog?  I've become hyper aware of that question over the past year, which is partially why I haven't written.  What do they think about ME?  That question becomes more nuanced when you whittle down your audience.  To ...

Would you believe Alex broke his arm again?  It's six weeks later, and he just traded in his awkwardly angled cast for a spiffy new brace, the kind that bowlers wear.  I will not be taking Alex bowling any time soon, of course, for fear of resnapping his arm bones.  "That's the biggest complication we see with these type of breaks," Alex's doctor has said many times.  "It takes a year for the bones to fully strengthen and straighten.  Rebreaking is a major concern."  His doctor relayed the same story twice, giving me the uneasy impression that he's only had one other patient besides Alex.  Another young boy broke both his radius and ulna at the playground, same as Alex.  Six weeks after the cast coming off, he got smacked in the arm with a flying soccer ball.  Bam!  Forearm broken again!  Sucks to be that guy. What fun!  An ambulance ride. Everybody knows how Alex broke his arm.  Every stranger and semi-stranger who ...

"I'm going to win!  I'm going to win!"  Emily raced alongside me in the rain, giggling and threatening to beat me to the entrance of the library.  I was holding her backpack, my purse, the bag of library books, and her pink puppy.  We were neck and neck in our fake race, and then her feet tangled up in their unstrapped shoes.  Down she went, hitting her face on the concrete steps.  The howl was immediate and terrible, and I knew what I would see before even dropping to my knees and looking.  A mouthful of brilliant red blood.  Shattered, jagged front teeth.  A shaking little girl, in pain and scared. Oh my God.  Oh my God.  I juggled all of the things, including Emily, wiping blood from her face to the front of her jacket while digging through the backpack- no wait, my purse- looking for my phone, which would not turn on or work right, which did not contain the programmed number of the dentist, which did not have sufficient Wi-Fi ...

Emily was laying on the floor at my feet, body curled into a fetal ball, thumb dangling out of the corner of her lips like a half smoked, forgotten cigarette.  "Happy birthday to you," she crooned softly to herself.  "Happy birthday to you.  Happy birthday dear Emmy.  Happy birthday to you." "It is not your birthday, Emily," I stated above her as I scraped her entire, uneaten lunch into the trash. The sentence was barely out of my mouth before she protested.  "No, it IS my birthday!" We had been going back and forth for days.  Everyday was her birthday.  Everyday, she asked about her party, when her cousins and papas were coming over, and when she'd get her presents and cake.  When bedtime arrived and the day had closed without the spectacle of said cake, party, and presents, I believe she turned in her crib, hugged her stuffed puppy tight, and said, "Ok.  So TOMORROW must be my birthday."  In the morning, if she was asked h...

"Come on, Emily!"  I yelled from the stairs.  "Time to put your socky wocky ding dongs on your footsy wootsy bang bangs!" Perhaps these sound like words uttered by a complete lunatic.  Somebody who is playing with only half a deck- a stay at home mother who has been speaking nonstop baby talk for the past seven and a half years and has lost her ever-loving mind.  Or- at the very least- had every vital piece of adult information ever learned replaced surely and methodically with the entire screenplay of Moana, the names of all of Caillou's goofy friends, where to find a library story time at any given moment, and desperate parenting hacks that often fail. Desperate Parenting Hack #384 If your child won't take her liquid antibiotic, perhaps the prescribed 6 milliliters of it will dissolve into the chocolate Twinkie she's been begging for. How Desperate Parenting Hack #384 Actually Plays Out "NO!  NO!  There's MEDICINE on my CAKE! NOOOO!...

My dad took me to see Tom Petty in concert when I was 16.  He got the tickets well in advance, and when the night of the event rolled around, I was mildly surprised to learn we were still going.  Oh, yeah.  A night with my dad.  I have to do this- no driving around aimlessly with my friends tonight, no sleepover at Jane's house, no movie at the dollar show.  I have to go see Tom Petty with my dad, go dancing at the zombie zoo. It's what I'm seeing a lot on social media now, twenty years later, on the occasion of Petty's death.  The link between Tom and people's dads.  The dads of my childhood loved that guy.  And so did we, the good girls and Indiana boys.  I remember first discovering music and it started in my family room with the tapes and some shiny CDs that I would divide up between my mom's collection and my dad's.  My dad's collection was for sure a lot better.  Toni Braxton sucks. Chaka Kahn can only take you so far. ...

Before Andy was even born, I was relatively certain that he'd invented time travel.  We had picked out his name, and when I googled it just to make sure that there weren't any Andrew J. Berger serial killers or Fox News commentators, an image of my son popped up- or at least a pretty spot on predication of what my son would look like. He had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and seemed to awkwardly rock a kind of a skinny, dorky look.  He wore glasses-  clearly   myopic just like his mother . He was a professor in another state, and when I looked at the picture, I  had a tumbling feeling in my gut.  My son had invented time travel.  This was him.  And he had come back to the past to fix a wrong or to apply an academic solution to some future problem.  Who knew- his mission could be multi-faceted. Maybe he'd show up in my life just in time to push me out of the path of an oncoming bus.  Or into it, depending on what kind of mother I was about ...

After I put Alex on the bus to kindergarten yesterday, Emily and I hopped into the minivan and raced over to the school.  We were there to give him an encouraging wave as he entered the building, found his teacher, and sat among his classmates.  He was quiet and still, not chatting or crying, not fiddling around or getting up and switching seats.  He gave us a brave smile now and then, and my heart nearly broke in two when the teachers all led their classes away to their room.  Alex brought up the rear of his group, looking aimless yet tentatively stoic as he disappeared from me.  There it was.  My baby boy was gone to school. I didn't drive to the school like that when Andy started kindergarten.  I didn't really think that parents were supposed to do that, and so when I put him on the bus that morning, Alex, baby Emily, and I went on with our morning as planned, and Andy started his on his own, sans encouraging wave from a loving face in the crowd. ...

I lost my keys this morning.  Emily and Alex had finally just been buckled in after the usual fifteen minutes of frantic cajoling.  I never truly understood the idiom of herding cats until I became a mother, specifically Alex's mother, and just getting him into the car in the morning is a task in and of itself.  When I tell him to go upstairs and brush his teeth, he without fail wanders off towards his bed and simply climbs back into it, burrowing into the pile of blankets and animals he affectionately, and irritatingly, refers to as Comfy Town.  While I tackle Emily to put on her socks, he forgets what we're doing and heads off to check if his various dragon eggs have hatched yet on his iPad game.  When I tell him to put his shoes on, I hear him clear on the opposite side of the house singing Elton John's "I'm Still Standing," or at least that one line of it, over and over, ad nauseum, until I tell him it's time to go NOW and he blankly asks me, "Oh....

Andy's Iceless Hockey team won third place!  They won third out of fourth in their division.  If my team won third out of fourth, I would feel rather ho-hum about the whole thing.  That's because I'm a jaded adult who wouldn't bother to get out of bed for less than second place.  But Andy, who has the heart of a champion, cannot be more proud of himself and his team.  This is partly because he doesn't understand that the third place is within his given four team division only.  And partly because they gave him a trophy! Andy's thrilled to be a winner and to have a trophy. When we got home after the ceremony, he ran the trophy upstairs to his room and immediately dumped it into this big cardboard box he's started keeping on the foot of his mattress.  There's a bunch of stuff in that box.  His Captain Underpants books.  The basket he built at Home Depot.  His wallet.  His diary.  (Entry one is the poetic masterpiece: "Alex is a...

Did you know it's National Reading Month? I started an ill-conceived journey to document how many books I'm reading this year.  It's like when people with other, more adventurous hobbies chronicle how many countries they're visiting, miles they're running, or meals they're prepping.  It's like that movie "Julie and Julia," where the aforementioned Julie decides to work her whole way through Julia Child's cookbook.  Except I can't eat anything when I'm done.  I don't need to know how to make a roux.  And I'm not working my way through an entire anything.  Or am I? "How many books will I read in 2017?"  I wondered late 2016 as I finished Jodi Picoult's "Small Great Things" with a satisfied slam of cover.  I tried to do the math in my head.  Maybe two books a month?  Three?  Somewhere between 24 and 36?  Who knows!  But what better way to find out than to snap a picture of each book I finish in the year....