kdiddy.org

At my graduation party about a month back, one of my professors stopped by with her husband. He and I were talking about Pittsburgh, and he asked me where I lived, specifically if I lived in a neighborhood.

I was happy to tell him that I do and even happier to tell him that my neighborhood has become more, well, neighborly since we moved in over four years ago.

We moved to Brookline for two main reasons: it was still near a grandparent (free babysitting is key) and we could buy a big house there at a ridiculously cheap price. The offset, especially for that latter reason, is that we were nowhere near the central “cool” areas of the city. Despite being only a block away from the main drag, there was virtually nothing within that short walking distance that was worth the effort of putting your shoes on…unless you needed to get drunk, get pizza, get a spray tan, or get your nails done. In which case, you could conceivably do all of those things at the same time. So, it sucks when you want to support your local businesses, but instead find yourself headed to another area of town or worse, the mall. (I’m not diametrically opposed to malls, but I like them to be a last resort. Like that time I needed both a VHS copy of American History X AND some Monistat at 1 a.m. on a Sunday night and good ol’ Wal-Mart was there for me.) (Don’t ask.)

But in the past year or so, my neighborhood has been slowly working its way out of whatever rut it had been in and we’ve really been taking advantage of it, which has been wonderful.

Last weekend, my sister-in-law was in town. After the baby’s afternoon baseball game, we went down to the main drag and stopped at Las Palmas, where we bought fresh, homemade tamales, tacos cooked on the grill right in front of us, and Mexican Coca-Cola, which is the kind made with cane sugar and is so much tastier than regular Coke, it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s the glass bottle and the inherent dose of nostalgia that I somehow manage to conjure up, even though cans were the norm by the time I was a pop-drinking American, but Mexican Coke is refreshing and filling without being too sweet or heavy. And when I’m done drinking it, I don’t fiendishly crave another, like I do with regular Coke. I’m satisfied by the treat and get on with my life.

After polishing off our lunch at home, the sister-in-law and I went back down to the Boulevard to get pedicures (nail shops in excess may be tacky and a sign of a suffering business district, but having one good one is essential). When our toes were dry, we went down to Geekadrome, a little comic book/nerd emporium, because the baby had stopped in a few weeks ago to ask about getting a beginner’s Dungeons & Dragons set. (No luck yet, much to my growing dork’s dismay.)

We made another stop at Cannon Coffee to caffeinate before deciding to go to the tiny, BYOB Italian restaurant, Mateo’s, for dinner.

All of this on one street, walking distance from my house. (And basically the perfect counter-argument to my farm longing.)

The husband joked that I am becoming the most Brookline person he knows, especially when I suggested that we go to Moonlite Cafe, also on Brookline Boulevard, to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary last week. Moonlite, if you’re at all familiar with Italian cuisine in Pittsburgh, is one of those restaurants that serves big, hearty “immigrant Italian” food. No Tuscan this or fancy cheese that. Spaghetti. Meatballs. Marinara sauce. Mancini’s bread. And lots of it, dammit. This is America! And that was exactly the kind of meal that I was in the mood for.

That? That is the platter of rigatoni that they placed in front of me. It had to have been close to a pound of pasta and I took that picture after I had been shoveling noodles into my mouth for twenty minutes. As you can see, I was only able to clear away one tiny corner of the plate. Obviously, we took the leftovers home which fed all three of us for dinner the next night. Seriously.

But all of these things are part of what make living in a city neighborhood so rad. People can mutter about how Pittsburgh is just a big small town, but there’s plenty to be said for having all of these things at your fingers.

As if I wasn’t already so chamber of commerce about it, the baby wrapped up his little league season last weekend. They came in second place overall, which bummed them out, but the coaches treated them to a big picnic afterward that was really cool.

That’s my kid, just prior to the pie-eating contest. After I successfully pushed all traumatic images of the blueberry pie eating contest from Stand By Me out of my head, I was able to enjoy their scaled down and less barfy contest. Also, this picture immediately makes me go all Holly Hunter-in-Raising Arizona: “I luhuhve him so muhuhuhuch!”

There are times, usually when I’m doing something domestic, like cooking or baking, or lamenting my perpetually messy and dusty house, when I get a twinge of wanting to devote myself to wifey things. This gets even more perverted when I think about how much I would like to micro-manage our food; have a garden, do all of our baking, try to do everything that I can to make sure that what we eat is the best that it can be for us and the earth. /hippie

But these are things that, when I’m honest with myself, I just don’t have the time or, more importantly, the energy to take on. I can’t just pack every second that I’m not at work with housework. I need to relax and sit sometimes.

Anyway, I told my friend Angela the other day that I was having a Diane-Keaton-in-Baby-Boom moment because I had some down time at work and found myself searching real estate websites for farms for sale.

Farms.

Turns out Angela sometimes has the same urges for a more scaled-down and self-sustaining existence, one in which we don’t rely on companies to do the right thing but instead grow our own food and whatnot, go to bed when it gets dark, wake up with the sun, work, retire to the porch, send the baby outside to play all day or do his chores.

One thing that I like about living in a city is that you are always coming face-to-face with the fact that being part of a society means relying on each other. From macro things like paying taxes so everyone can have roads and sidewalks and schools and fire departments, to more micro things like the bus driver coming on time so that I can get to work and help the people that I work with everyday.

But at the same time, I find myself longing to be away, quiet, and having some semblance of control over my environment. Plus, Pennsylvania has some really beautiful country.

However.

I realize that this is highly idealized vision of such a life, that it’s incredibly hard, physical work that I’m just not used to. And I know that, realistically, I would get so sick of living in the middle of nowhere after a short time.

There’s also the not insignificant matter that I’m somewhat terrified of the country, having seen too many horror movies where psychotic, mutant axe murders lurk in the trees, waiting to chop me into bits and bake me in a casserole to be served to their inbred, mutant family.

I told my mom about my farming idea the other day and she immediately reminded me of the time we went to a family friend’s farm outside of Conneaut Lake and I got thoroughly freaked out by a group of kids who went to play in the corn field. At night. And there was some flood light or something that bounced their shadows along the barn and it looked so creepy that I remarked to someone, “Ten children went in, but only five will come out.” I sought refuge in the farmhouse, the walls of which were covered in deer heads. I’m not in any way opposed to hunting, but when you’re trying to calm down, decapitated deer aren’t the most soothing sight.

Another obstacle to my rural fantasies is my incredibly sensitive skin, which achieved some kind of notoriety this past weekend by getting horrifically burnt while I was firmly in the shade of a wooden structure. It took a few hours to really develop, but on Saturday night, the husband came in late from a bachelor party (which did not include strippers but instead consisted of poker, cigars, domestic beer, firing guns, and watching Ultimate Fighting, aka The Most Dude Agenda Ever) to find me half naked in bed, an alarming shade of red, covered in damp rags and making some kind of, “Ehhhhhhhh,” sound. He couldn’t wrap his head around my ability to get burned under those circumstances and has since teased me at every opportunity. Last night, for example, on our way to the movies, he asked me if I had sunblock on. “That projector gets pretty bright, man.”

(Aside: the weekend before last I managed to get extremely drunk from three beers. I feel like all of my defenses are failing me.)

The final big obstacle to my farm-to-be is that the husband has absolutely no interest in moving out of the city. We either split up and I forge ahead on my own or I drag him out there and just let the axe murders behind my house know when he’s whining about the lack of sidewalks and public transit.

I sat down at my desk last Wednesday morning, tired, sore, and frazzled from sleeping through my alarm and having to rush out the door. The familiar sounds of my daily life made their way back into my brain and I became kind of sad. I was glad to be home, as I always am, particularly because my back could not sustain another night in our discount motel room bed. But having spent so many days in a row with some of my favorite people on the planet made settling back into the normal groove of things difficult.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we were in Detroit over Memorial Day weekend for the music festival and its related events that we attend every year.

Probably only the folks who have at least a passing interest in the music featured will care about my evaluation, but those of you who don’t might appreciate a glimpse into the subculture where I spend part of my time.

To sum it up: Nothing gold can stay. I don’t think anyone really believes that the accidental beauty of the first few years of the festival could ever last and I don’t think anyone is opposed to change, but there’s a difference between changing and blatantly going down the quickest path to the most possible money, all while spewing empty platitudes about “internationalism.” If the only way to have a festival every year is to churn out such nonsense, then it’s best to let it die gracefully before it’s too late.

People like me and my husband and many of our friends got into dance music in various ways. At the time that we all met, the best way to hear dance music in all of its genres was at raves, which at the time (the late 90s) were already past their prime. Occasionally, there was an all-ages night at a club, but those were never that great. Whatever half-hearted interest that I had in the culture of raving was pretty much gone after about a year and a half of going to them. I liked staying out all night, I liked dancing, I liked hanging out with my friends. I didn’t care for the pseudo-infantile behavior that began to dominate the culture. But, and I still maintain this viewpoint today, just because I think something is dumb, it’s not hurting anyone, so you go ahead and cuddle your teddy bear and suck on lollipops, even though I’m pretty sure I just saw a grey hair on your head.

Music and culture changes and out of the quintessentially 90s and neon versions of house and techno and the like, a new version emerged. One that was more grown-up, deeper. Baby-making music, if you will. Or perhaps just a mature and refined iteration of what came before it. There was no particular culture attached to it. Adults who still preferred to dress like Rainbow Brite were welcome to attend clubs where this kind of music was played, though the spectacle of, “Look at me! I’m shiny and glittery and dancing with glow sticks! LOOK AT ME!” had definitely been replaced by a feeling of letting only the music be the focal point, allowing listeners to truly lose themselves in it and dance and be free. Letting go of the ego and letting the id rule for a bit, if I may draw on my Psychology 101 class from 1999 (gulp).

Going to the festival for the first time was a revelation. Here we were, outside, in the daylight, surrounded not only by people from all over the country and the world who had emerged from rave culture into the same general moment in dance music, but by families and “regular joes” from Detroit, by raver kids whose devotion to moments of a technicolor existence was almost endearing, by musicians of various levels of fame and infamy. Through the awkward adolescence of raves, we had grown up and were comfortable listening to the weird, the deep, the soulful, the rambunctious, the political, the luscious beats of a generation of people, no matter what their age, who were finally comfortable in declaring, “This is the music that I like. This is the music that helps me to define who I am. This is the music that I hear at my most joyful and my most desperate. This is the music that will be played at my wedding, at the births of my children, at my funeral. This is the music that will be played in my next life.”

I had a transformative moment in 2005 when some of the Underground Resistance guys closed the festival on the main stage. They played “Transition,” while images of people like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Albert Einstein flashed behind them. The crowd of thousands around me melted away and I was alone when I heard the lyrics, “Point yourself in the direction of your dreams…and make your transition.” From that day on, I did, freed from the notion that I needed to worry about the uninformed and frightened opinions of people who would dismiss this music as silly and scoff at my inspiration.

Transition or not, my annual trek back has changed a bit each year. The cost of admission goes up, a necessary evil that we’re told is the only thing keeping the festival going year after year. A cost we’ve been happy to pay to support the work of the people from that city who have helped so many people figure out their lives through music. Something else changed, too, though. Artists from Detroit are bumped from better time slots and given lesser areas to play in favor of their more European counterparts, those who make and play the same music that got old 15 years ago, the music that is almost rhetorically composed for the Rainbow Brite crew who fork over $60 for the opportunity to feel like they’re getting away with something. They parade in front of each other, eager for reactions, armed with an arsenal of camera-ready poses, dying for that first moment when someone points and finally, finally notices them. In the background, the music could be Carl Craig or it could be Linda Ronstadt. They would scarcely notice the difference. They pay good money and lots of it for admission and shirts and blinky, shiny things that vendors sell because they know an opportunity when they see it.

This year, nearly all of the Detroit artists were shuffled unceremoniously to an underground stage that, despite the organizer’s best efforts, still sounded like listening to an off-balanced washing machine while nursing an earache. The glittering kids danced outside, in the sunlight, to tracks that they couldn’t name to save their lives, that could very well all be the same record or mp3 for all they know. They formed dance circles, breaking up whatever collective energy had been present on the dancefloor, so that they could stand and watch one person dance. If that isn’t the saddest goddamned thing ever, I don’t know what is.

Again, they are welcome to. I am happy to share that experience with anyone. But I didn’t feel like I was in a position of sharing this year. I felt like I was stuffed in a basement while the higher bidders enjoyed what used to be our moment in the sun.

I don’t want to focus entirely on the negative. We did hear some good music at the festival and even more at the after parties that we attended. The husband has a good round-up of the music that we saw/heard/got down to while we were there. Not surprisingly, his criticism of the unprofessional and/or just plain shitty aspects of the festival management are drawing ire. The organizers had previously agreed to sit down with him for an interview, but later recanted. I, however, as a professional writer, offer up my tape recorder for any statements that they want to make. If people like us, a numerical minority, who are genuinely passionate about the music and the experience of it, are no longer important, dropped in favor of the wealthy and serotonically tweaked, then just say so and we’ll stop bugging you with all of our demands for care and quality and respect.

Sigh.

Aside from the fact that, last Wednesday morning, I pried my eyes open and stared, confused, at the numbers on my alarm clock which read “7:55” aka The Time at Which We Should Be at the School Bus Stop Holy Crap You’re Late as Hell O’Clock, getting back into all of the aspects of life seems to be increasingly difficult every year. Only this past Monday did I cook a meal and pack my lunch. Over the weekend, I got most of the laundry done (but not all of it). There are still several bags of random travel things gathering dust in our entryway. And I still poke around my office, unsure of what I normally do during the hours of 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. I’ll figure it out eventually.

So, guess what we got last night?

Still can’t guess? Try this one:

Yep. Roller skates.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here too much, but the husband, the baby, and I have taken up roller skating as a pretty serious hobby.

I used to roller skate a lot when I was a kid. For most of elementary school, everyone had a roller skating party for their birthday and so most weekends I would spend an afternoon at the Ches-a-Rena in Cheswick, skating in between courses of that kind of gross but kind of delicious frozen pizza and way too sugary birthday cake. Then I just didn’t go skating for a long time until college. A group of us went back to Ches-a-Rena during spring break. And in case you weren’t aware, roller skating isn’t really like riding a bike. You do forget how to do it and I fell. A lot. Sore and embarrassed, I figured that was that for me and roller skating.

A few years ago, during our annual trip to Detroit, there was a roller skating party at one of the big rinks there. “Hmm. Roller skating. I guess I’ll give it another try.” However, the skaters there were seriously skilled. While I struggled to stay upright, people would fly past me, dancing or sometimes rolling backwards on two wheels on one foot.

It was really humbling. But it was also really inspiring.

Over the past year, the three of us have started going roller skating as often as we can, usually a few times a month, and we’ve become kind of obsessed with it. We’d been getting pretty good on rental skates, but the expert skaters that we talked to told us that if we really wanted to get serious about it, we’d be much better off investing in our own skates. Plus, they’re much more comfortable than rentals.

A few weeks ago, I called the owner of the rink that we’d been going to and asked him how much skates were, naively thinking that we would just go, try on a few pairs and be on our merry way. The owner told us, “About $50,” to which we said, “Great! We’ll be right over.” However, dude had not fully unpacked that answer. Skates are $50 for kids. For adults, they’re considerably more expensive and you don’t just plop a pair on your feet like you were at Payless. You pick out boots, bearings, plates, stoppers, and wheels and order them, then have someone assemble them for you.

So, we placed our order and waited anxiously for him to call us, letting us know that our skates were ready to be picked up.

Last night, we headed out there after the baby’s baseball game. Tuesday nights are the adult sessions, which not only means are there no kids present, there’s also no one under the age of 60 there.

I had never paid much attention to the culture of roller skating, but it’s definitely a lifestyle for some. The folks in attendance last night had been doing this for a long time. The ladies wore short, little skirts and shiny pantyhose and danced around smoothly and expertly with their partners to organ music. “What the hell is going on?” I muttered, but apparently there are people who do what is essentially ballroom dancing on skates. It’s weird but also kind of bad-ass.

We got our skates on and teetered around a little bit. They felt much different than the rentals. As I wobbled around the rink, a 90-year-old woman zoomed past me on one leg.

We’re taking our skates with us to Detroit this weekend and returning to another iteration of the party that got us hooked a few years ago. And though I know I won’t be on any kind of level with some of the skaters that we’ll see there, I’m a little bit closer than I was.

If you’re so inclined, I highly recommend roller skating as an activity. It’s a hell of a workout and it’s really satisfying to get better at it. And if you’re looking for some inspiration, I recommend checking out a documentary from a few years ago called 8 Wheels and Some Soul Brotha Music, which chronicles much of the history of roller skating in the U.S. and how it came to be an urban pastime. Some acknowledgments are given to roller derby and the couples skating that we saw last night, but the contemporary focus is on rinks in cities and how they become centers of communities. Very interesting stuff.

The quirky title of this post is a reference to the time when me and a bunch of friends went to see the laser Metallica show at the planetarium and thought it would be hilarious if “Master of Puppets” was sung with a lisp. Really, how can it be legal to have that much fun?

Anyway, I have a funny picture to show you.

That’s me, attempting to take a Photobooth picture of myself in my graduation cap, and my cat, photobombing me.

Yes, I participated in my department’s diploma ceremony on Saturday because I’m a sucker for some pomp and circumstance. It was pretty cool. The student speakers gave particularly good speeches and I got to officially receive my master’s degree from the department head.

We had a nice party at my mom’s house later that evening and my buddy Tracey flew up from Baltimore for a whirlwind visit, which meant a lot to me. Even though she was here for less than 24 hours, we got to hang out, dish, and giggle. Much needed.

That night, after everything was over and settled down, I came down with a cold. And then on Monday our water heater died. SIGH. But at least now I can mentally handle these things. A few weeks ago it would have just compounded my stress and pushed me over the edge.

I don’t yet have any pictures of me in my full regalia because the only people taking pictures at the ceremony were my mom and grandmother. And not only do they not have digital cameras, they use those grocery store disposal cameras. During the ceremony, I kept hearing that distinctive, “CLACK! VZZT VZZT VZZT VZZT VZZZZT VZZZZT VZZ V–” sound whenever they took pictures. So, as soon as those are used up and the next time they go to the Iggle to play their numbers, hopefully I’ll get some pictures back and will be able to scan them. Living in 1992 is awesome.

The Penguins lost last night, ending the season on a bit of a whimper and sending Montreal on further toward their 8 billionth Stanley Cup. We opted not to watch the game until the bitter end when the score flipped over to 5-2 in the middle of the third period. It was getting late and the baby needed to go to bed and I don’t deal well with the stress of games like that. While the practical side of my brain knows that it’s probably over, my black and gold heart still wants to believe in an unlikely miracle. Then I end up nauseated and palpitating, and who needs that on a school night?

As the baby was getting ready for bed, he said, “I can’t believe the Penguins aren’t going to win the Stanley Cup,” sounding genuinely offended. We reminded him that you can’t win them all. Then I realized that he’s a little spoiled. In nearly all of the years that he’s been aware enough to care, some Pittsburgh team was winning a championship or at least getting close enough to taste it. So, as far as he’s concerned, a year without a Super Bowl or Stanley Cup victory is just…wrong. I mean, it’s been almost a year since we last had to shield him from drunken hordes and angry police on Brookline Boulevard. This is no way to go into summer.

But now we have time to focus our sports energy into Little League. My son is not the most natural athlete, but we wanted him to play some sports for a few reasons.

1) Activity is a good thing.

2) It’s a concrete (and hopefully fun) way for him to learn about working hard and slowly improving at something, which we’ve been struggling with at school.

3) I didn’t play sports when I was a kid. I was doing ballet and I was way too shy. I kind of regret that now. So I want him to at least try a few out just for the experience. The husband gets together with friends every now and then for a casual game of basketball and it kind of bums me out that I can’t really do something like that. (Not that learning a sport now is just so impossible, but I would obviously have a lot of catching up to do and the muscle memory isn’t there and blah.)

Anyway, the baby hasn’t progressed in baseball like some of the other kids his age on his team. While they’re getting turns playing first base and whatnot, he’s still in the outfield. He gets bored out there and on the few occassions that a ball comes his way, he’s not reacting quickly enough to make a play. We explained to him that he needs to prove himself in the outfield before his coach will trust him enough to play infield.

Last Friday night, he finally got it. He played well enough in the outfield that the coach let him play second base. His team was also winning by a pretty wide margin, so I guess the coach figured that he couldn’t do too much harm.

He played pretty well, though most of the action was happening at first base.

But then, the last hitter came up to bat, swung, hit the ball, and sent it directly in the baby’s direction. His glove went up in the air, his eyes widened…and at that precise moment the dad who was acting as first base coach stepped right in the line of vision of the husband and me. Gah!

But I caught a glimpse of the baby catching the ball on the fly, pausing for a split second to marvel at the presence of the ball in his glove, then scurrying toward second base to tag out the boy heading for it.

And with that, his team won the game.

It was so exciting! Everyone jumped up and cheered and called out his name and afterward his coach declared him MVP.

I was so proud that he had tried hard enough to improve and could finally understand, at least a little, that wanting to do something isn’t enough. Adding hard work to desire will often lead to success. Not always, but often.

I hope that it’s one of the moments that he’s able to replay in his head, even when he’s an old man. I’ve already tucked it into my “Flash Before My Eyes on My Deathbed” file.

My poor kiddo was sick over the weekend. Indeed, his ailments on Mother’s Day got a little worse before they got better.

He doesn’t have asthma, but his lungs seem to be especially prone to congestion and nastiness whenever he gets a cold.

Saturday he seemed to be sniffling more than usual (we’re all kind of drippy this time of year) and that night he was wheezy and miserable. We sent him to bed and in the morning he didn’t seem to have improved much. He slept most of the day while I pushed fluids and Tylenol, which didn’t seem to help.

We made him eat some dinner and get a long, hot shower before putting him to bed.

Aside: a few weeks ago, he had a stomach virus that thankfully didn’t last too long. We picked him up from school and on the drive home instructed him to let us know if things were starting to go downhill. Close to our house, he suddenly announced, “Things are going downhill!” and then successfully barfed out of the window as we sped home. It was hilarious and cute and kind of pathetic all at the same time.

Anyway, Sunday night, things started going downhill again. From downstairs, I could hear him saying something like, “Mum!” I went up and asked him if he was okay and…well…he began speaking in tongues.

“Mum. Mum. Muuuuummmm. Murrrrmmmm. Maaaaa. Maaaaaaa.”

“I’m here, buddy. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Yeeeehhhh. Yeaaaahhhhhhhh. Ahhhhhh. Yeeeeeee,” he replied, in a growl.

“Buddy, wake up. What’s wrong?”

“Caaaaaa. Caaaaaa. Caaaaaa. Cuurrrrrrppp.”

Well, shit. That’s never a good sign, is it? I could tell that he was not fully awake but it still freaked me out, so I called for the husband, trying to figure out the best way to inform someone that their son is possessed.

The husband came upstairs, still chatting on his cell phone to a friend, but abruptly ended his conversation when he got to hear some of the baby’s demonic freestyling. “Uh, my son is…ill. I’ll talk to you later.”

We got him out of bed and he started to seem slightly more…of this realm, especially when he informed us that he had wet the bed. We peppered him with questions and he still seemed mostly out of it, saying stuff like, “I don’t like life,” and his breathing was still not great. I declared that we needed to go to the hospital, worried that perhaps he was having serious trouble breathing while laying down, which could have caused the Regan performance.

The husband wanted to cool him down first in the shower, since he seemed to be running a fever. I scurried off to get dressed. However, once the baby was in the shower, the cool water snapped him out of whatever half-sleep he had been in and he started making way more sense.

The husband told me that the baby seemed okay at that point, just a victim of fever-induced nightmares, and that we should just sit up with him for a little bit and then decide if we should continue on to the hospital. I stood in the baby’s room wearing nothing but a bra and some pajama pants and, in that get-up, had the audacity to peer at him cautiously and make decisions about his sanity and well-being.

We let him watch Treme with us and I pulled him into my lap so that I could pat his back. The husband watched us and laughed at the sight of our 8-year-old curled up on my shoulder. “He’s too big, Kel!” he chuckled. Never!

Despite making a dramatic improvement overnight, we took him to the doctor yesterday anyway. The doc commended me on my detailed chronology of his illness. I did not get a sticker. Harsh. However, I didn’t think my account was all that stellar. What must other people do? Plop their kid on the butcher paper, point, and say, “It’s broken?”

The baby politely asked the nurse, “Will there be shots involved?” He was relieved that there weren’t but became slightly alarmed when the doctor prescribed him a steroid for his condition, especially since we had just been talking about Barry Bonds a few nights prior.

“Steroids?” he asked, perhaps worried that he might get kicked out of Little League for juicing. And, besides, heads run big in our family. His small frame can’t support domes of the Bonds or McGwire variety

“Yes, but not the kind that make you…” the doc paused, and curled his arms to flex his muscles.

We were sent home with our prescriptions, which included breathing treatments. We had been through the nebulizer routine once before, a few years ago, when he had persistent congestion. We used to jokingly refer to it as huffing gas. “Okay, kiddo, time to huff gas!” I bet his teachers love all of the colorful phrases that he adds to the elementary school lexicon.

This morning he returned to school and I reported to the husband, “I gave him his steroids and he huffed gas. He’s all set for the day.”

When I was a kid, I had a Cabbage Patch Kids calendar. If I remember correctly, it was for 1987. The calendar had Cabbage Patch Kid dolls posed in situations appropriate for each month: a Kid in rain jacket, galoshes, and umbrella for April, two Kids exchanging valentines for February. My favorite was May’s picture: one Kid in the kitchen, flour splattered everywhere, working diligently on a Mother’s Day breakfast while around the corner his sibling tiptoed down the stairs in footie pajamas, early morning light pouring in from a window, looking cautiously (er, well, as cautiously as one can look when one’s head is made from molded vinyl) behind him in the direction of his Cabbage Patch Mom’s room.

I don’t know why I liked it so much and why it’s remained so perfectly preserved in my memory. Perhaps I was drawn to the intricate short story that the producers of the calendar created with just a couple of dolls and a miniature kitchen. Maybe something about the set reminded me of my home, with its sunny stairs and dated carpeting. Maybe I liked fantasizing about my future kids working hard on a special breakfast for me on Mother’s Day.

I can’t remember if I ever attempted any such grand gestures as the Cabbage Patch Kids for my own mom. In fact, I can’t clearly remember anything that I did for my mom, so I can only hope that at least some of those days made her feel special and loved, especially since I know most of our usual days did not, an unfortunate circumstance that continues to trouble her to this day.

My life as a mom is less tumultuous, though still difficult for different reasons, mostly due to the degree of uncertainty that we feel about life and the shape of our future. Something that I’ve been working on recently is being okay with the fact that things don’t always turn out the way that I had hoped or had pictured it, and that doesn’t necessarily spell failure.

When Mother’s Day comes around, I often indulge in fantasies inspired by those Cabbage Patch Kids and, I don’t know, Hallmark commercials or wherever the lore of picture perfect Mother’s Day mornings comes from. I sleep in and wake up to breakfast that the baby and the husband have made for me. Some nice gifts and sweet words about how swell I am.

This never, ever happens. I mean, sure, I get gifts sometimes and cards sometimes and heartfelt wishes of Happy Mother’s Day, all of which I love and cherished, but they’re never encased in a perfect, soft-focus, ready-made memory. They’re always tucked in between rushed drives to various mothers-in-law and grandmothers-in-law’s houses to wish them Happy Mother’s Day and errands that must be performed on weekends, because our need for groceries and clean clothes doesn’t keep track of holidays and whatnot.

This Mother’s Day, I write to you from the couch. The baby came down with something last night and didn’t sleep much, which means I didn’t sleep much, either. He made sure to give me my cards before collapsing in my lap so that I could thump on his back to break up the junk in his lungs. He’s resting beside me, not himself, and I’m waiting to see if he’s sick enough to warrant a call to the doctor. The husband is still asleep.

Not picture perfect. Not by a long shot. But not a failure. Just how life is sometimes.

That’s me at my desk. I’ve been in this position most of the day because I have this really annoying stomachache.

So what’s been going on with me? Eh, a lot and not much, know what I mean? I’ve been really busy at work, aside from being doubled over and groaning. The baby had his first Little League game last Saturday, which followed their annual parade down our main street to the ball field.
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This morning, I admitted something to myself: I’m neurotic about lunch.

And, like any good mother, I blame my son for this.

He’s a picky eater, though much MUCH better than he used to be. But at any given time, the list of things that he will eat for lunch is pretty short. So, I’m always trying to find some balance of actual calorie input and health for him. Currently, he will eat half of a sandwich, consisting of bread (wheat or rye) and lunch meat (we’re on a chicken breast kick right now), a cup of applesauce (no sugar added or high fructose corn syrup), sometimes a cheese stick (I go totally mainstream here and give him Kraft), sometimes a few baby carrots and/or some other fruit or veggie.

His old lunch box was one of those canvassy, zipper joints that was kind of small and useless. A few times, I let him use my Laptop Lunch and recently that company came out with some new bento lunch systems.
When our tax return came, I took a few bucks and ordered him one, along with some extra containers. Today was his second day using it. He had a sandwich, some carrots, some graham crackers, and some strawberries. He seemed a little indifferent about it yesterday. I hope he gets more enthusiastic about it.

I had a Laptop Lunch because I have been on a quest for the perfect lunch vessel for some years. I liked the Laptop Lunch, but I felt that it was just too small for me. I like to bring a pretty big salad, a “main” dish, dressing and croutons on the side, a snack, and my breakfast. And if I don’t have what I consider a good lunch, I get all anxious about it. I was explaining this to someone the other day as they eyed my tote bag of containers of various sizes. I needed a change.

Around the same time that I bought the baby his Laptop Lunch, I bought a tiffin from Happy Tiffin. I heard about tiffins last summer in my business class when we watched a movie about dabbawalas.

My tiffin arrived yesterday and I was so excited to pack it up today.

Here we have my salad and my bagel for breakfast…

This is my wrap sandwich that contains a layer of fresh spinach and a helping of my tweaked version this Curried Tofu Salad. (I need to take a little more time preparing that salad the next time that I make it. It’s too watery this time from the veggies and tofu. But very tasty.) The other container holds my croutons and dressing, plus a snack of sunflower seeds and dried cranberries in one of those silicone cupcake baking cups, which is a trick that I learned from watching blogs about bento-style lunches.

And here it is, all stacked up, latched, and ready to go. The only problem that I’ve had so far is finding a fork that will fit. Also, obviously, this isn’t microwave-safe, so I’m not sure what I’ll do if I ever want to bring leftovers to heat up. And if I were to bring something that was already warm, I would need to keep it away from things like my salad.

Like I said, I’m neurotic about lunch.

But so far, I’m pretty happy with it.

Speaking of food, I’m going to have some pretty big posts on the matter coming up in the next few days, so be sure to check back, especially if you’re in the Pittsburgh area.