Pregnancy is a slog. For me, there was 4 p.m. nausea and 2 a.m. charlie horses. There were sore breasts, fat feet, and a humiliating resemblance to the Fantasia hippos when I slipped, foolishly, into sexy lingerie.

“Poor you,” my compassionate husband often said. “You’re going through so much.”

Each time, I told him the same thing: “It’s okay. You’re doing the swim lessons.”

Different people dread different points on the parenthood continuum. Some fear labor and delivery. Others cower from potty-training. Others cringe at the notion that someone will eventually hand their graceless offspring a driver’s license.

My personal Misery Milestone is the one that has me leaping from a soup-like public pool with a slippery toddler and plodding through cold puddles on slick cement in search of a restroom where I must wrestle with said toddler’s rubbery swimsuit and stand dripping and shivering while he uses the toilet, then looks up at me with chlorine-reddened eyes and chatters, “R-r-ready to g-go b-back in?”

Any mom who’s been baptized in the church of swim lessons, who’s donned her least revealing tankini and descended hesitantly into the wet world of “kickers” and “splashies” and other words one would never say in a board room, knows that swim lessons don’t improve as your child ages. They just shift.

Continue reading Pool Spawn

Parents can be so smug. We think we have life’s puzzles solved, and that our kids are callow dimwits desperate for our guidance. Admit it: We think of them as dense, doughy biscuits requiring the heat of our unparalleled wisdom to rise to their fluffy full potential.

Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if we’re wrong. If, in fact, our car seat-bound offspring are the ones who have the answers and we grown-ups are too culturally programmed, too set-in-our-ways, to see it.

The notion strikes when I ask my three-year-old to put on his shoes. Or clean up his toys. Or turn off his video, come upstairs and take a bath. That’s when he looks at me with utter impunity and says, “I won’t.”

There’s no willfulness in his voice. No shame. No guilt. “I won’t.”

He’s simply stating a fact, letting me know we’re going to have a problem here if I insist on pursuing this ridiculous mandate.

There’s a look of — is that peace? — that crosses his peanut butter-smeared face when he says it, and I’ll admit the whole situation stymies me. My linear adult thought process goes like this: How do I get the child clean if he won’t get in the tub? How “clean” does a person really need to be? What will his preschool teachers whisper when they notice the same dirt smudge that was on his knee yesterday…and the day before?

Continue reading My Son's Peaceful Defiance

It looked so much nicer in my head. The way I pictured it, we were going to spend a few days of bond-bolstering family togetherness at a Las Vegas resort that would cater to our every fickle whim. By day we would lounge poolside; by night we’d venture out to ooh and ahh over the city’s convenient cultural lessons: the Venetian’s canals, Luxor’s Sphinx, Caesar’s Trevi Fountain.

In my imagination — over-enterprising as it may be — we were going to find freedom in the clean light of the warm desert sun.

Instead, we got drenched in debauchery.

On reflection, yes. It was witless to seek a virtuous vacay in Sin City, the nation’s unapologetic adult playground. In the 1990s, Vegas’s tourism office made a marketing push to lure families there. But the campaign went bust and the tourism office did an about-face, adopting the decidedly grown-up (notice I didn’t say “mature”) motto, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

They no longer woo kids. In fact, the Bellagio hotel doesn’t even allow children inside unless they’re registered guests, and the new Encore and Wynn hotels have “no strollers” signs on their doors.

Continue reading Sin City

It’s not something I thought would ever come out of my mouth. Not something I’m proud of. But there it was: “Sweetheart, do you want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? I have one in my purse.”

Prior to their birth, I carried my kids in my uterus. Ever since, I’ve been schlepping their equivalent weight in snacks, tools, and toys in my handbag. I think of it as baby weight that I never lost.

Gum, sunscreen, Play-Doh.

Tissues, Tums, Chapstick.

Nail clippers, plastic fork, Matchbox helicopter.

I could survive a nuclear attack–or at least a blitz of playground injuries, restaurant meltdowns, and unforeseeable grooming emergencies–using only what’s rolling around at the bottom of my handbag.

Most of the junk in a mom’s purse falls into three categories: Things we can’t live without (Tide stain stick). Things we tossed in for a specific occasion but haven’t bothered to remove because they still might come in handy someday (foldable scissors). And things we plum forgot were in there (soy sauce packets).

“The weirdest thing I ever pulled out of my purse was an edible eyeball from Halloween,” confessed a friend. “And it was January.”

Continue reading Bag o' Tricks