"That's Not Food!"

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. ...